This bonus exercise, recorded by Jay and Isa themselves, is all about choosing a ‘sit-spot’ and building up a relation with it over time. Thank you: Starhawk for inspiration and guidance and Jack Jordan for sound production.

Share your special spot findings via [email protected].

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

Warming Up to the Pluriverse #8: On making the yes and the no

In this last – but much more to come, stay tuned! – Warming Up talk we meet Jay Jordan and Isa Frémeaux, co-founders of Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (Labofii). This lab brings artists and activists together to design tools and acts of disobedience and resistance. Unhappy with the world of performance and art (Jay) and institutional education (Isa), they created their own practice and approach in which there is always a ‘no’ and a ‘yes’ present, after the zapatista movement. Since 2015 Jay and Isa are residents of the zad (zone à défendre, zone to defend) in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, close to Nantes. From a reserved area for an airport, these 4000 acres evolved over the last 50 years in a beautiful life experiment. A place where the gaps between art, politics and daily life are dissolved. Listen to an electric talk about ‘a world that exists today, because it wasn’t allowed to exist to start with’. And if it is up to us, this is only part 1…

References

• Paths Through Utopias (112 min)
  

More digging material:

• Two small documentaries on the ZAD
  

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

A pluriversal homework task by Arturo Escobar.

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

In this talk we meet Arturo Escobar himself, author of ‘Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds’ (2018, Duke University Press), the book we use as a guide for our pluriversal search. Escobar is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Political Ecology at the University of North Carolina. As early as 1987, he criticised the downside of ‘development’ from a Western perspective. His search for plural ways to co-inhabit this planet is inspired by Afro-Colombian social movements, and their plea to realise ‘a world in which many worlds fit’. In this personal conversation design is approached both as a system, and as a language and praxis to activate the notions of radical interdependence and – communal – autonomy.

References

• Kothari Ashish, Salleh Ariel, Escobar Arturo, Demaria Federico and Acosta Alberto Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary, Delhi: Tulika/AuthorsUpfront (AUF), 2019. License: Creative Commons. Accessible online.

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

The main conversation ends with the notion of a child-like sexual/sensual energy that we tend to disconnect with while growing up. In the bonus track Camila dives into ‘that beautiful thing that we feel in our whole body’. It is linked to the vagus nerve that connects the brain to our sexual organs. How can we (re)activate this nerve? Listen!

References

• “ The vagus nerve is a wonderful channel of sexual energy.”
  

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

In this sixth Warming Up talk, we meet Camila Marambio – a being as plural as the worlds she inhabits, falls in love with, and seeks to protect. Camila is the founder/director of Ensayos, a nomadic interdisciplinary research program that has been collectively unraveling the eco politics of the archipelago of Karokynka a.k.a. Tierra del Fuego for about a decade now. Camila completed her Phd in Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne with both a TV web series “DISTANCIA" and an exegesis (a critical explanation or interpretation of a text) with the title: ‘DISTANCIA: A measure of intimacy.’ Besides all this, Camila identifies and plays with the roles of private investigator, eco-sexual, permaculture enthusiast, and flautón chino player/dancer. Her home base is in Papudo, a coastal town two hours north of Santiago de Chile.

A mesmerising talk about cosmic changes, circular stories, a pluriversal owl and the notion of with-with.

References

• Ensayos
  

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

In addition to our main conversation with architect/researcher Sean Leonard, co-founder of Alice Yard, we added a short audio clip about Stones have Laws, a film made by Lonnie van Brummelen, Siebren de Haan en Tolin Erwin Alexander, in close cooperation with Saamaka and Okanisi communities along the Surinam River. We all enjoyed this ‘visual experience’. 

Reference

• “Dee Sitonu a Weti / Stone have Laws” (2018) trailer
  

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

In the fifth talk we meet up online with architect/researcher Sean Leonard, part of Co-RD Limited, and co-founder of Alice Yard, a contemporary art space located in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, which hosts and facilitates an ongoing programme of artists and artists’ projects, where networking, collaboration, improvisation and play are key. In 2020 Leonard was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Tilting Axis Fellowship made possible among others by Het Nieuwe Instituut. This position includes collaborations with the Amsterdam Museum, De Appel, The Black Archives and FKA Witte de With / Melly. This is also how ‘In Search of the Pluriverse’ and Leonard crossed paths. A vivid talk about heritage, the yard as a space of play and negotiation, swamp lodges and stilt walkers.

References

• Tilting Axis Fellowship 2020 Jury Report
  

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

In this fourth talk, Wong & Krier speak with architectural researcher Kornelia Dimitrova and social designer Bernhard Lenger, co-founders of Foundation We are, a collective of nine creative minds and makers that functions both as a playground for their different individual practices, and as a joint design consulting agency aiming to transform social and legal systems. How to keep your design practice close to the ground? Can we still have hope for Europe? And what is the similarity between a personal burn-out and climate change? Tune in to find out.

References

• Foundation We Are
  

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.

Reference

DD BNO magazine

For more information about In Search of the Pluriverse visit hnix.nl/pluriverse and follow @insearchofthepluriverse on Instagram.