TILTING (2) Issue 07 The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge May 2020
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Proposition 1: Hands, 2020. Single-channel video, 4:33. Performed by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Eric Dong Ho You. Modified from 16:9 aspect ratio. COURTESY THE ARTIST.
tilt (n.1) "a joust, a combat," 1510s, perhaps from tilt (v.1) on the notion of "to lean" into an attack, but the word originally seems to have been the name of the barrier which separated the combatants, which suggests connection with tilt in an earlier mean- ing "covering of coarse cloth, an awning" (mid-15c.). This is perhaps from tilt (v.1), or related to or influenced by tent. Watkins derives it from Old English teld "awning, tent," related to beteldan "to cover," from Proto-Germanic teldam "thing spread out." Hence, also full tilt (c. 1600). Pinball machine sense is from 1934. tilt (n.2) "condition of being tilted," 1837, from tilt (v.1). The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge is a serial broadsheet publication pro- Issues duced by the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. Initiated in conjunc- 01 GRAFTING June 2018 tion with The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea in 2018–19 to expand perspectives on envi- 02 COMMUTING August 2018 ronmental violence through artistic practices, cultural inquiry, and political mobilization, 03 BEARING March 2019 tl;dr part 2 the SDUK is becoming a signature Blackwood publishing initiative in 2020. 04 SHORING May 2019 05 ACCOUNTING July 2019 As an organization addressing the challenges of the 21st century through artistic-led 06 FORGING September 2019 research, the Blackwood’s ambition is to convene, enable, and amplify the transdisci- 07 TILTING (1) April 2020 Editorial plinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment 07 TILTING (2) May 2020 and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. Such a commitment re- Publisher quires a lithe methodology that is rooted in the arts, inspired and informed by emergent Blackwood Gallery methods of curatorial research, and shaped by transdisciplinary engagements with col- University of Toronto Mississauga How is it that the only ones responsible for making this mess laborators from a host of other disciplines and partners working outside the university, whether in industry, business, government, or civil society. This methodology is neces- Print Designer got their sorry asses stapled to a goddamn desk? sary for contemporary research-based practices because the so-called “wicked prob- Matthew Hoffman —Tom Waits, “Hell Broke Luce”31 lems” that challenge the stability of contemporary societies can no longer be addressed from a single disciplinary perspective. Web Designer Alan Woo THE SOCIETY FOR THE DIFFUSION OF USEFUL KNOWLEDGE (SDUK) Copy Editor … continued from SDUK 07: TILTING (1). The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK) composes and circulates an Rosie Prata ecology of knowledge based on the relationship and antagonism of “useful” ideas. The name of this innovative platform is borrowed from a non-profit society founded in London Contributors In the first half of this editorial, we described some of the motivations for TILTING and developed a in 1826, focused on publishing inexpensive texts such as the widely read Penny Maga- shaina sarah isles evero fedelin agbayani, series of conceptual, biological, and political points of departure for our current thinking and action; zine and The Library of Useful Knowledge, and aimed at spreading important world knowl- Ali Ahadi, Mitchell Akiyama, Beverly edge to anyone seeking to self-educate. Both continuing and troubling the origins of Bain, Emily Cadotte, Alex Cameron, Gian we’re grateful for the warm reception of our new platform and the generous circulation of SDUK the society, the Blackwood’s SDUK platform asks: what constitutes useful knowledge? Cruz, Kara Ditte Hansen & cheyanne contributions from part one.32 As we continue to follow the vicissitudes of the situation—maintain- For whom? And who decides? turions, Mark Dudiak, Lynn Hutchinson Lee, Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Olivia ing our social distancing even as the egregious realities of economic distancing led us to FFS mur- TILTING Klevorn, Jesse LeCavalier, Min Sook murs and exclamations of RUFK—at times the imbecility of certain political leaders left us shout- Lee, Jayda Marley, Nicola Privato, Jarrett On March 23, the Blackwood put forward a call for submissions, in response to the ir- Robert Rose, Imre Szeman, Laura Tibi, ing STFU at the pixels on our screens; at other moments, we were buoyed by #GADFE memes refutably global provocation of COVID-19 currently reconfiguring nearly every aspect Mirusha Yogarajah shared by our grandparents, each a pointed reminder of the indefatigable humour conjured by of life on Earth. The call recognized that these uncertain socio-political circumstances demand agile, dynamic, and multifaceted responses. In their recent book Now, the agents Staff our elders, and the need to both fight back and laugh back.33 Now, we’re back in part two to take of The Invisible Committee call for us to generate desirable social and political worlds Christine Shaw, Director/Curator up a number of additional matters of care and concern at stake in the increasingly kaleidoscopic through an improvisatory tilt: strategic action that cuts transversally across vertical Alison Cooley, Assistant Curator hierarchies and horizontal networks—privileging neither, in favour of an “intelligence of Fraser McCallum, Project Coordinator crisis and its many ricochets reverberating across mental, material, and social sites and scales. the situation.”1 With decisive actions implemented by individuals, organizations, busi- Saša Rajšić, Exhibition Coordinator nesses, and governments, the Blackwood, as a public gallery within a university, asked: Michael DiRisio, Curatorial Assistant how to acknowledge this pandemic as a “matter of concern,” while responding to its and Collections Archivist Among the many observations that have preoccupied the last weeks in collective self-isolation, broad-ranging effects across our networks of artists, writers, and cultural workers as Laura Tibi, Community Engagement one is especially revealing as we do the work of a public art gallery from home. In 2013, Anthony a “matter of care"?2 An urgent and provisional response comes in the form of TILTING, Assistant Townsend noted that the most common message over internet-connected mobile phones was: a special digital issue of the SDUK. D.T. Cochrane, Postdoctoral Fellow “Where are you?”34 As billions of people across the planet lock down, we’ve been wondering if TILTING (1) (April 20) and TILTING (2) (May 8) bring together selected contributions the most frequent question asked online these days might now be: “Can you hear me?” As we from this call, in an attempt to support those who have been unmoored from their sources of financial resources. These contributions, alongside a few conceptual prov- solicit from our digitized interlocutors this simple prefatory confirmation, there is a deeper mean- ocations from supporters of the Blackwood, are gathered in the pages that follow and ing that we must also bear in mind: Who is being heard in this crisis? Who is de facto muted? on a new SDUK publishing microsite at blackwoodgallery.ca. Who is eligible for these conversations, however stuttering and glitched out, as we learn to col- The Blackwood Gallery gratefully acknowledges the operating support of the Canada laborate otherwise? In “The Masked Philosopher,” Michel Foucault remarks: “One is in single file Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the University of Toronto Mississauga. because of the extreme meagreness of places where one can listen and make oneself heard.”35 As lineups proliferate online and on the street, we ask: Where and when are we able to speak of our suffering, sorrow, pain, and anxiety if social communication now relies on access to bandwidth as a prerequisite to participation?
After winning the Palme d’Or in 2019, director Bong Joon-ho be- ‘exception’ on behalf of familiar norms, but against the return to trayed the Cannes media scrum with the following delocalization: those dysfunctional norms after the coast is declared clear. We “When I made Parasite, it was like trying to witness our world must keep the focus trained on the pathologies revealed and in through a microscope. The film talks about two opposing fami- doing so willfully inhabit the difficult ramifications of change.”37 lies, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, As the number of deaths from COVID-19 passes 260,000, we do Blackwood Gallery because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism.”36 well to remember that many of the inequalities described as “pre- University of Toronto Mississauga Capitalism: the definitive, global pre-existing condition that has existing conditions” are, in fact, the result of structural patriarchy 3359 Mississauga Road (again), through this crisis, self-explicated its complete and utter and racism.38 When even air pollution was described recently as a Mississauga, ON L5L 1C6 1 The Invisible Committee, failure as a logic for social organization. There is no going back possible vector for transmission, this scientific confirmation only Now (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 905-828-3789 from such an unnerving planetary unveiling. As Benjamin Bratton reaffirmed our sense that racialized capitalism and gender inequal- 2017), 158. [email protected] contends, “The sense of emergency is palpable and real. But in- ities are the causes of the crisis and not accidental side effects.39 blackwoodgallery.ca 2 María Puig de la Bellacasa, stead of naming this moment a ‘state of exception,’ we see it more Matters of Care: Speculative as revealing ‘pre-existing conditions.’ The consequences of poor According to Elizabeth Grosz, “The biological body, if it exists at Ethics in More than Human Please note: the Blackwood Gallery and offices are closed Worlds (Minneapolis: University throughout spring 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. planning (or no planning), broken social systems, and isolationist all, exists for the subject only through the mediation of an image of Minnesota Press, 2017). During this time, staff are reachable by email only. reflexes are explicit. Vigilance should be held not against the or a series of (social/cultural) images of the body and its capacity
3 for movement and action.”40 Among the images of the body ren- to take account of what is truly valuable (and invaluable), what tinues, “Forms dreamt up and thought out by a solitary man seek- tude—is receiving unfamiliar attention as the pandemic continues. dered through forms of speech, the conditional tense conveys metrics and indices should we look to, or create, as measures of ing communion: a solitary solidarity. His philosophical and political In contrast to the excruciating platitudes about sacrifice in news what might have been. The conditional tense is the otherwise of social health or financial well-being?53 In an interview with Zoe ideas well up from a vision that combines modern desperation media, we believe there is an especially valuable heuristic that en- language, its inherently political power. As Achille Mbembe sug- Williams for the London Review of Books, Danny Dorling asks, with with ancient stoicism. Much of what he said about revolt, solidar- livens the generosity of solitude in the Borgesian tale about the gests, “Community—or rather the in-common—is not based sole- reference to his prescient thesis that further economic acceler- ity, the continuous struggle of man faced with his absurdity, re- lottery of inheritance, wherein a wealthy Babylonian cartographer ly on the possibility of saying goodbye, that is, of having a unique ation is impossible, “The question is: what kind of a stable world mains alive and actual. Those ideas still move us because they bequeaths to his three daughters a set of invaluable maps. Before encounter with others and honouring this meeting time and again. do you want to live in? [...] When there was growth, you could were not born from speculation but from a hunger that the spirit he dies, he instructs them as follows: I give half of these treasured The in-common is based also on the possibility of sharing un- always promise people that it might be a bit crap now, but don’t sometimes suffers when it seeks to become embodied in the maps to my eldest daughter, a quarter to my second, and, to my conditionally, each time drawing from it something absolutely worry, your children or grandchildren will do better. But as soon world.”67 The hunger—or hungers (plural), to acknowledge both youngest, I give one sixth. After his death, the daughters were un- intrinsic, a thing uncountable, incalculable, priceless.”41 What as you begin to look at stability, people aren’t going to settle for material and conceptual—of this solitary solidarity lead to suffer- sure how to proceed, for their father had left them only eleven values enable and sustain unconditional worlds? Where will we that kind of hope.”54 As the crisis reveals the cracks in an indefen- ing, and thus to desire, and, as a matter of course, to revolt. Paz maps. Contentious propositions and acrimonious disputes ensued. rediscover them? sible system of violence and inequality, demanding the impossi- continues, tipping over any reading of Camus from a singular, The controversies would not abate, so they travelled to a remote ble must become the new normal.55 Indeed, Mark Fisher already spontaneous revolt to forms of collective, militant moderation: village to solicit the advice of an elder renowned for her ability to In Potential History, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay develops a political taught us how: “emancipatory politics must always destroy the justly adjudicate quarrels about distribution. The old woman lis- analysis of “differential citizenship,” which confers on some sub- appearance of a ‘natural order,’ must reveal what is presented as Revolt, like summer storms, quickly dissipates: the very ex- tened, reviewed the maps, and shook her head: I cannot solve your jects exclusive rights, access, or privileges at the expense of other necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it cess of its avenging fury makes it explode and dissolve into problem. The daughters gasped, for they believed she would finally groups of subjects within the same polity. Azoulay contends that must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem air. In the final pages of The Rebel, Camus defends modera- put their disagreements to rest. Then the woman left the meagre the interpellation of citizen-perpetrators is a necessary feature of attainable.”56 tion. In a world like ours, that has made of excess its rule room and returned with a small scroll. The parchment revealed an imperialism and settler colonialism.42 How can these differential and ideal, to dare to propose moderation as an answer to incomplete map of lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, processes be contested? In her essay “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, And yet, as we noted in tl;dr part 1, the shadows of imperialism our evils demonstrated a great independence of mind. A beautifully drawn but with no practical value for surveyors or scribes. and Gender,” Françoise Vergès argues that “capitalism is a global and colonialism haunt both the present and the future.57 While great touch was to unite moderation with revolt: modera- She gave it to the daughters then sent them home. Now—with the regime of vulnerability to death.”43 This is a radically asymmetri- populist manias are unbecoming-civil as they metastasize around tion or measure gives a shape to revolt, informs it and makes addition of this fragmentary drawing to their father’s lot—they cal vulnerability. According to Vergès, “The time for decolonial the globe, the so-called leader of the so-called free world insisted it permanent. To glimpse the meaning of this moderation is divided their inheritance: the first took six, the second three, and caring/cleaning (for reparation), for caring and cleaning what has that “the horror of the Invisible Enemy [...] must be quickly for- to begin to recover physical and political health. [...] I would the last two; this left unclaimed the old woman’s map, which they been laid to waste in the past, clashes with the accelerated time gotten.”58 How quickly, though, should we forget this crisis? Will it add: moderation consists in accepting the relativity of val- graciously returned. We share this concluding parable not as some of neoliberalism. As we try to clean/repair the wounds of the past, not haunt our best efforts to forget it? “If we want a future,” writes ues and political and historical acts, on condition that this moral tale, but instead as an ethical provocation: what maps, how- we must also clean/repair the wounds that are being inflicted Frédéric Neyrat, “we need the help of ghosts.”59 For Neyrat, rath- relativity is inserted into a vision of the whole of human ever incomplete (or drawn in solitude), can we create and share today [...] As we repair the past we must simultaneously be re- er than forgetting, we need to intensify the transient legitimacy destiny on earth.”68 today to help others navigate the inheritance of worlds coming un- pairing the current damage that increases the vulnerability to of vengeance in order to “conjure up right now, without a delay, done? Which is also to ask, with Arundhati Roy, how is the pan- death of millions of people. The past is our present, and it is with- a communism of revenants, urging us ‘to act as a spectre by re- How, then—whether in isolated or collective acts—can we initi- demic a portal?69 Can we invent and proliferate other values as a in this mixed temporality that futurity can be imagined.”44 To grasp fusing to follow capitalism’s emphasis on rational development.’ ate the permanent revolt of moderation, tilting the measures of means of undermining and rerouting both the economic fractions the consequences of Vergès’s analysis, we must connect the [...] Without a communism of revenants, fear and anger will be value otherwise, toward many tomorrows? and political factions that we inherit today? What modes of arti- disproportionate number of deaths from COVID-19 in Black and captured, capitalized, and exploited by neo-nationalisms and eco- fice and sharing are possible and necessary in this untimely mo- brown communities, as well as on Indigenous reservations, to the logically-blind populisms.”60 How can we tilt our practices toward Of course, the socially essential practice of self-isolation—soli- ment of confounding abeyance? preceding five hundred years of structural racism and settler a revenant hospitality? According to Vijay Prashad, “We are at a colonialism.45 As Eryn Wise explains: “What’s happening right moment of transition, where openness to experiment and willing- 31 Tom Waits, “Hell Broke Luce,” is a Battlefield: Towards a Political 50 Isabelle Stengers, Vinciane Despret, 58 Accessed at: https://twitter.com/ now, what I feel, is a continuation of genocide that’s existed ness to learn from and to teach each other is paramount. [...] In accessed at: https://youtu.be/ Ecology (London: Wiley, 2016). et. al., Women Who Make a Fuss: realDonaldTrump/status/ 0Fju9o8BVJ8. The Unfaithful Daughters of 1247900240155295745; on the manias against Indigenous peoples in this country since its inception.”46 the explosion of creative activity against neoliberalism, there is 40 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Virginia Woolf, trans. April Knutson of the populist right during the always the possibility of a breakthrough to something different.”61 32 tl;dr part 1 (April 2020), Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2014), 43. pandemic, see “Coronavirus and the Such claims are necessary because, as Michel Serres insists in Are we seeing the beginnings of a breakthrough to another world https://www.blackwoodgallery.ca/ (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Radical Religious Right’s Bumbling sduk/tilting/editorial. Indiana University Press, 1994), 41. 51 Isabelle Stengers, “Relaying a War Messiah,” Intercepted 127 (April 22, The Natural Contract, “There’s nothing weaker than a global sys- of many tomorrows, or the reification of hierarchies and asym- Machine?”, in Eric Alliez and Andrew 2020), https://theintercept.com/2020/ tem that becomes a single unit. A single law corresponds to sud- metries by other means? How will our collective observations and 33 FFS = For Fuck’s Sake; RUFK = Are 41 Achille Mbembe, “The Universal Right Goffy, eds., The Guattari Effect (London 04/22/coronavirus-and-the-radical- You Fucking Kidding Me?; STFU = Shut to Breathe,” Critical Inquiry, April 13, and New York: Continuum, 2011), 152. religious-rights-bumbling-messiah/. den death. [...] Here, then, is the form of contemporary society, narrations of these trajectories alter their outcomes? In the words The Fuck Up; GADFE = Grandparents 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/ which can be called doubly worldwide: occupying all the Earth, of Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, Against Dying for the Economy; thanks 2020/04/13/the-universal-right-to- 52 On numeracy, see Achille Mbembe, 59 Frédéric Neyrat, “Ghosts of Extinction: to John Paul Ricco for the reference breathe/. “The Universal Right to Breathe,” an Essay in Spectral Ecopolitics,” in solid as a block through its tightly woven interrelations, it has “My list of theories of change: haunting, visitations, Maroon so- to economic distancing; see, among Critical Inquiry, April 13, 2020, Oxford Literary Review 41.1 (2019), 100. nothing left in reserve, no external place of withdrawal or re- cieties, decolonization, revenge, mattering.”62 Perhaps alongside many other sources, Chuck Collins, 42 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/ course on which to pitch its tent. [...] Crises tear contracts.”47 these vagaries, we are also now witnessing—and participants “Let’s stop pretending billionaires are Unlearning Imperialism (New York 04/13/the-universal-right-to-breathe/, 60 Ibid., 102. in the same boat as us during this pan- and London: Verso, 2019). and Shiv Visvanathan, “Between As both imagined and unfulfilled social contracts are torn asun- in—a global theory of solitude. demic,” The Guardian, April 24, 2020. Cosmology and System: The Heuristics 61 Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: der, improvisation—which we noted in part one as the gallery’s 43 Françoise Vergès, “Capitalocene, of a Dissenting Imagination,” in A Possible History of the Global South 34 Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Waste, Race, and Gender,” e-flux 100 Bonaventura de Sousa Santos, ed., (London and New York: Verso, 2014), new watchword—also requires rethinking. What modalities of It is precisely for this reason that, as Catherine Malabou suggests, Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and (May 2019), https://www.e-flux.com/ Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond 235. experimentation are possible and which are becoming foreclosed “quarantine is only tolerable if you quarantine from it—if you quar- the Quest For a New Utopia journal/100/269165/capitalocene- Northern Epistemologies (London and (New York: Norton, 2013). waste-race-and-gender/. New York: Verso, 2007), 182–218. 62 Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super within the framework of emergency and the narrative of crisis?48 antine within the quarantine and from it at the same time, so to Futures Haunt Qollective, “Before How can improvisationality engender careful forms of redistribu- speak.”63 She adds a profound reading of isolation and COVID-19: 35 Michel Foucault, “The Masked 44 Vergès, “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, 53 Vandana Shiva, “How economic Dispossession, or Surviving It,” in Philosopher,” in Foucault Live: and Gender.” growth has become anti-life,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance tion, eligibility, and networks of solidarity, not as a representation “I think it is necessary to know how to find society within oneself Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, The Guardian, November 1, 2013, Studies Vol. 12, No. 1 (2016), 3. of participation but as lived, embodied repertoires of common- in order to understand what politics means. Personally, at the mo- ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa 45 Robert Booth and Caelainn Barr, https://www.theguardian.com/ ing? As Gilles Deleuze remarks in an interview with Foucault, ment, I am on the contrary trying to be an ‘individual.’ This, once Hochroth and John Johnston Black people four times more likely commentisfree/2013/nov/01/how- 63 Catherine Malabou, “To Quarantine (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 304. to die from Covid-19, ONS finds, economic-growth-has-become-anti-life. from Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson “Representation no longer exists; there’s only action—theoretical again, is not out of any individualism but because I think on the The Guardian, May 7, 2020, Crusoe, and “I”,” Critical Inquiry, March action and practical action which serve as relays and form net- contrary that an epoché, a suspension, a bracketing of sociality, 36 As quoted by Jordan Mintzer in “Bong https://gu.com/p/dz56h/sbl. 54 Danny Dorling, interview with Zoe 23, 2020, https://critinq.wordpress.com/ Joon-ho Talks True Crime, Steve Buscemi, Williams, London Review of Books, 2020/03/23/to-quarantine-from- works.”49 To rebel in a crisis: relay and reactivate. In Women Who is sometimes the only access to alterity, a way to feel close to all Unlikely Success of ‘Parasite’,” The 46 Eryn Wise, “In Her Own Words: podcast audio, April 22, 2020, quarantine-rousseau-robinson-crusoe- Make a Fuss, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret contend: the isolated people on Earth. Such is the reason why I am trying Hollywood Reporter, October 18, 2019, Fiona Apple on New Album ‘Fetch https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and- and-i. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ the Bolt Cutters’ & Acknowledging videos/podcasts/at-the-bookshop/ “There are stories that need to be ceaselessly reactivated in order to be as solitary as possible in my loneliness.”64 How does solitary news/bong-joon-ho-parasite-success- Indigenous Lands,” interview by danny-dorling-and-zoe-williams- 64 Malabou, “To Quarantine from to be relayed with new givens and new unknowns.”50 Stengers life engender solidarity and being-in-common? And, can solitarity true-crime-steve-buscemi-1248655. Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, slowdown. Quarantine.” suggests, in another text on the legacy of Félix Guattari, that one help us participate in an unbecoming-community, especially as a April 28, 2020, audio, 30:48, 37 Benjamin Bratton, “18 Lessons of https://www.democracynow.org/ 55 For an especially clear example, 65 On unbecoming-community, see of the relays that can help address current political aporias is means to become social and ethical otherwise, by other criteria?65 Quarantine Urbanism,” Strelka Mag, 2020/4/28/fiona_apple_fetch_the_ see Lois Beckett, “After outrage over John Paul Ricco, The Decision Between cartographic imagination. She writes, “the operative constructs April 3, 2020, https://strelkamag.com/ bolt_cutters. homeless sleeping in parking lot, Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes en/article/18-lessons-from- Vegas now touts tented Covid-19 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Guattari crafted [...] are meant to work and produce, to activate a In the first half of the editorial, we concluded with an anecdote quarantine-urbanism. 47 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, center,” The Guardian, April 16, 2020, 2014). machinic freedom of cartography. [...] The point (again and again) about reading Camus’ The Plague. In his incredible memoir, “How trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ 38 These statistics are taken from the Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of 2020/apr/16/l`as-vegas-homeless- 66 Octavio Paz, Itinerary: An Intellectual is not to feel guilty, unworthy, or ashamed. The point is—as it is and Why I Wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude,” Mexican poet Octavio Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Michigan Press, 1995), 105. coronavirus-parking-lot-center. Journey, trans. Jason Wilson (New everywhere—not to fake but to reclaim.”51 Can these cartograph- Paz describes his first meeting with Camus, who was about to Centre: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ York: Harcourt, Inc., 1999), 61. ic reclamations also shape the contours of a recovery? publish The Rebel, noting their respective visions of solitude: “He map.html. 48 AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives: 56 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban Is There No Alternative? (Winchester 67 Ibid., 61–62. was a true writer, an admirable artist and, because of this, en- 39 Damian Karrington, “Coronavirus South (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). and Washington: Zero Books, 2009). With a massive global economic contraction as the horizon of amoured of form. He loved ideas in an almost Platonic sense: as detected on particles of air pollution,” 68 Ibid., 62–63. The Guardian, April 24, 2020, 49 Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, 57 See Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an capitalist progress, the question now is clearly: Recover to what? forms. But living forms, inhabited by blood and passions, by the https://www.theguardian.com/ “Intellectuals and Power,” in Foucault Empire: A Short History of the Greater 69 Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Or, more precisely: How will we know we’ve recovered? What desire to embrace further forms. Ideas made from flesh and men environment/2020/apr/24/coronavirus- Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, United States (New York: Vintage, 2019), Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020, detected-particles-air-pollution; and, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa and William Blum, Killing Hope: US https://www.ft.com/content/ numeracy will be required to quantify our understanding?52 If, as and women’s souls.”66 As we remain at home, the embrace of form on racialized environmental violence, Hochroth and John Johnston Military and CIA Interventions Since World 10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe- Vandana Shiva has noted, GDP is a deceptive measure that fails is one of the few modes of sensuous contact we are left. Paz con- see also Razmig Keucheyan, Nature (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 75. War II (London: Zed Books, 2014). fcd274e920ca.
4 5 Exercise Steps Proposition 1: Hands 1. Sit comfortably on the floor. Look at the other person’s eyes. Warming Hand Exercise Open one of your palms with trust.
2. Grasp his or her right wrist with Ivetta Sunyoung Kang your hand. Realize that the other person’s hands are cold. For The Anxious Mind
3. Slap their palm six times until it awakens. 1. 11.
4. Admit that you cannot help those hands get warmer. However, you can wake up the depression of their palms.
5. To comfort the depression, 2. 10. concentrate the blood flow of the arm from the top to the bottom.
6. Encourage the person to grip and release the grasped hand. This action should be repeated as many times as her or his age.
7. Do not overlook any area on the designated palm where present concerns could invade. 12.
8. Seize an understanding that every finger has unspoken present concerns. Rub the palm and each of 3. 9. the fingers until any trace of blood flow disappears.
9. Rub your saliva onto your index finger.
10. Coat the saliva on your finger onto the centre of the other’s palm. Make sure the wrist is firmly being seized. 13.
11. Slowly rotate the finger above the palm's centre in the direction of the Earth’s rotation. It is important to imagine the Earth’s rotation while 4. 8. releasing the wrist at the same speed.
12. The other person will feel warmth spreading on their palm.
13. Take a turn, and entrust your palms to the other person’s hold.
Left: Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Proposition 1: Hands, 2020. Single- channel video, 4:33. Performed by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang and Eric Dong Ho You. COURTESY THE ARTIST.
Facing page: Ivetta Sunyoung Kang, Warming Hand Exercise, 2020. 5. 6. 7. Inkjet print. COURTESY THE ARTIST.
Ivetta Sunyoung Kang is an inter- disciplinary visual/video artist and writer based in Montreal since 2012. She obtained her MFA at Concordia University. She makes work across moving-image based media, text, and performance and also writes Proposition 1: Hands imagines warmth spreading through a hand exercise called “Make poetry and fiction. She has presented films and videos at numerous film Electricity on Hands,” a children’s game played in South Korea. This project was ini- festivals and galleries, including tially created as a participatory video installation, but given the circumstances as a JeonJu International Film Festival, result of COVID-19 (including social distancing as a fundamental practice to limit the South Korea; Chennai International Women Film Festival, India; Leonard virus’s spread), this project’s hope to encourage touch among participants has be- and Bina Ellen Art Gallery and MAI, come unadvisable. Yet, the images and instructions still evoke the imagined sensations Canada; and SomoS Art House, Germany. She is a co-founding of touching hands and enjoying bodily experiences of physical intimacy, while at once member of an artist collective called confronting fears around viral transmission through saliva (even that of those we love). Quite Ourselves. A Social Interaction Using Your Hands To Tolerate The Uncertainty Ahead of Your Future 6 On Solar Futures Breaking with the Past: Imre Szeman The Radical Possibilities of Collective Vulnerability
Will solar energy…save us? And does worrying about accumulation and pos- COVID-19 increase the likelihood we will session because each of us will become Jarrett Robert Rose be saved by it? I’ll provide answers to these Sun Kings, energy “prosumers” living in questions below. But before I do so, I can’t households able to generate their own help but begin with some cautionary re- energy and so able to do whatever we marks about questions and answers in the want when we want? Infinite energy pro- midst of our current situation. mises pure freedom, the dream of liberal- ism and socialism alike, and a freedom With the natural rhythm of daily life inter- Wendy Brown argues that in our current tial, tidal and conversational foun- from a sense of shared interest in one The advent of COVID-19 has induced some that is for the first time without environ- rupted as a result of COVID-19, many milieu of precisely crafted scarcity and dations of our identity.4 another, in mutual belonging, and in commentators and theorists to make bold mental consequences. It’s why solar energy struggle to find direction as the future has struggle, virtually every sphere of human active involvement in public affairs. It prognostications about the future of so- generates excitement beyond its poten- suddenly become less predictable. While possibility, public or private, has been The reality of trauma evoked by the pan- is, in other words, the only way toward ciality, climate change, and, of course, tial to reduce atmospheric concentra- some heed the call to practice social dis- “economized.”3 Not only are we pitted demic symbolizes the presence, and fear, true democracy.7 capitalism. Besides the problem of read- tions of carbon dioxide. Solar contains tancing—an act of solidarity—others glee- against one another, justifying inequality of the unknown. Yet we seem to forget ing tea leaves before they are dry (and they within itself potentially revolutionary pos- fully meander through crowded public through a fetishism of competition and that it is the unknown that is intrinsic to The lessons of COVID-19 force us to are hard to read even then), this rush to sibilities, a transformation of infrastructure space—an act of dissent. The virus—seem- hierarchy, but collective politics has in our being. In Giving an Account of Oneself, take seriously the claims of the socio- judge a still-unfolding event troubles me. that underwrites deep social and political ingly so far away for many, yet too close many parts of the world—particularly in feminist philosopher and queer theorist logist C. Wright Mills, who in The So- Critical theory, as I understand it, isn’t change as well. in reality—is all the more eerie in that its the United States, now the epicentre of Judith Butler argues that we neither com- ciological Imagination wrote that “per- about forecasting a future still to come, existence is often invisible to its hosts, a the crisis—also become unimaginable, pletely choose the social relations that sonal troubles” are “public issues.”8 In a task that assigns the critic the role of Energy without fuel; energy as infinite ener- fact that can ignite profound feelings of leaving democracy itself unattainable. shape us, nor the language we use to de- this moment of united vulnerability, let prophet or clairvoyant. Nor is it about tak- gy. However we might make sense of the panic, confusion, and distrust. scribe those experiences. In other words, us seize the radical possibilities entailed ing on the role of Cassandra, sounding an social and political ramifications of this While COVID-19 makes its way across our we are collectively vulnerable to the limits in envisioning a new collective nature alarm that no one takes up (and employ- possibility, we have to begin from a star- When the clear path is lost, a tension be- globe, invading our social and political of self-knowledge. Never being able to for humanity. ing this very failure to affirm the import of tling realization. We have always used tween self and society sets in. On one veins and disrupting the global economy, provide a full “account” of ourselves—a a critical viewpoint). Theory works best energy as energy and not as fuel; and we hand, the global upheaval that is COVID-19 the urge to emphasize the personal over description of who we are and why— as a tool for critical analysis rather than have also always treated energy as if it elicits a feeling of camaraderie amid what the collective, selfishness over altruism, means that we can never achieve full as a crystal ball that endlessly repeats the were infinite. This is as true of history is a collective tragedy—the shared sense is beckoning. Quarantine, isolation, social transparency with regard to the nuances same message: the current moment is a before the discovery of fossil fuels as it of despair felt when encountering stories distancing—those of us sitting at home, of lived experience and nor should we ex- moment unlike any other. has been in the aftermath of their appear- from around the world of lives lost and lives on pause, feeling lonely and discon- pect this from others. Because of this, ance. A graph of energy use after the hearts broken. On the other hand, lack of nected, peer out the window and wonder, Butler posits the need for a universal eth- In the field of energy studies, the most Second World War mirrors the hockey resources and disrupted supply chains can “When will this end?” Yet in each corner ics based on the human condition: our in- prominent pronouncements of this kind stick–shaped spikes in COVID-19 cases evoke the driving force of survival, a loom- of the globe we are all, as a species, ex- herent inability to be held responsible for have concluded that this is the moment experienced by every country in the world. ing individual tragedy—the fear for one- posed to the same crisis, and the collec- what has been imposed upon us. In this when fossil fuels will at last be seen to have Global warming has caused us to think self and one’s family. In a single day, one tive nature of our human struggles is be- line of thinking, we are already in solidar- passed the torch to solar (taking “solar” more seriously about the implications of may vacillate between wanting to help ing brought out by the pandemic. The time ity, for you didn’t choose this life, and 1 Paul Verhaeghe, What about Me?: here as a shorthand for renewable ener- using fuels as if they were infinite. Yet no- those most at risk and wondering if they has come to recognize our shared inter- neither did I.5 The Struggle for Identity in gies of all kinds). This may be the case; it where have we come close to flattening a Market-based Society, trans. also may not. I am less interested in pon- the energy curve—or even having a real can afford next month’s rent. Is it “normal” ests and forge a new world order. Jane Hedley-Prole (Melbourne and to feel so conflicted? We have a responsibility to realize our col- London: Scribe, 2014). dering the implications of COVID-19 for interest in doing so; an energy quarantine As Verhaeghe shows, when the symbolic lective humanity through our collective the future of energy than in assessing what seems unimaginable to politicians and 2 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan In What about Me?: The Struggle for Identity order is disrupted, our connection to the vulnerability, the latter of which has be- (London: Printed for Andrew Crooke, isn’t being considered in these pronounce- publics alike. When we think about the in a Market-based Society, psychologist past becomes severed, and we are no come all too salient in the fight against at the Green Dragon in St. Pauls ments. To all those eager to announce the possibilities of solar, we need to be alert and psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe discuss- longer our same selves. The virus, in dis- COVID-19. Underscoring common wel- Church-yard, 1651). coming age of solar, a mechanism that will to its ideological function. By promising es the tension between sovereignty and rupting that order, has unveiled a new real- fare means setting aside social relations 3 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: save us from our own worst tendencies, I infinite, clean energy, solar energy allows solidarity—the self and the collective— ity, one that thrusts the interconnected steeped in market rationality—like short- Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution can’t help but ask: Why would we want or us to continue to think of energy as we (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, that shapes our character. Identity, writes nature of the human condition back into term profits and just-in-time production 2015). expect an energy technology to rescue always have, while conveniently pushing Verhaeghe, is the balancing act between collective consciousness—the same na- of medical equipment—for a humanism us from anything? aside the environmental worries troubling 4 David Whyte, Consolations: these two poles—the harmonizing between ture that Western individualism and the that promotes the well-being of all, espe- The Solace, Nourishment, and the us about the use of fossil fuels. wanting to unite with, yet distance our- ideology of capitalism mask so well. Yet cially those who have been marginalized Underlying Meaning of Everyday Just what is solar energy? At its core, it Words (Langley, WA: Many Rivers selves from, the group.1 However, it is the it is through this unfortunate experience in various ways. The recognition of unity Press, 2015). contains a double promise: energy without Solar permits fossil-fuelled modernity and structure of society that shapes our social that we are forced to reflect on the fleet- across the board can pave the way for a fuel (that is, without matter) and access the social and political presumptions fu- ontology, and largely dictates where on ing, vulnerable state we all share. As the new, representative politics. 5 Judith Butler, Giving an Account to an infinite amount of energy. Getting elling it to get away scot-free; by erasing of Oneself, 1st ed. (New York: the spectrum our personal and collective poet and philosopher David Whyte writes, Fordham University Press, 2005). past the need for fuel opens up the pos- fuel and finitude from the picture of energy psyches fall. There is a foundation upon which to build sibility of using energy without environ- use, it powerfully reaffirms our current di- 6 Lynne Segal, Radical Happiness: Vulnerability is not a weakness, a this new representative politics—and it is Moments of Collective Joy mental consequences. No fuel means: no sastrous assumptions about what ener- Capitalism functions on a theory of the passing indisposition, or something one that recognizes joy alongside the need (London; New York: Verso, 2017). spent fuel rods to bury; no carbon dioxide gy is for and to what ends we use it. Solar human as homo economicus, a being nat- we can arrange to do without, vul- to disrupt the prevailing order. In Radical 7 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution to manage; no poisoned land to recondi- is a quick techno-utopian fix that side- urally inclined to pursue personal welfare nerability is not a choice, vulnera- Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, Lynne (New York: Viking Press, 1963). tion. In the drama of sustainability, solar steps the difficult work that will need to at the expense of the universal good. It was bility is the underlying, ever present Segal explores the project of leaving aside is the hero that appears in the nick of time accompany the creation of any solar fu- 8 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Thomas Hobbes, celebrated theorist of and abiding undercurrent of our nat- individualistic pursuits of contentment for Imagination (New York: Oxford to save us from ourselves—much like, I tures worthy of this title. When it comes liberalism, who opined that if not for an ural state. To run from vulnerability a shared sense of enjoyment with others, University Press, 1959). have to say, COVID-19, which has been to energy transition, COVID-19 is a dis- overbearing government, human life would is to run from the essence of our nat- and the radical possibility contained within Jarrett Robert Rose is an American treated by some as a substitute for what traction, a force too-quickly imagined as be “nasty, brutish, and short.”2 Today, the ure, the attempt to be invulnerable such moments. Segal says that even in un- international student and doctoral politics couldn’t manage to achieve on shaping history for us so that we don’t candidate in the department of tenets of neoliberalism have accelerated is the vain attempt to be something fortunate moments like these, we can re- sociology at York University. its own. need to do it ourselves. the notion of the atomized self, facilitating we are not and most especially, to claim the prospect of delighting in others His intellectual and pedagogical the rise of a strict market rationality with close off our understanding of the while, and for the purpose of, making a orientations are located at the nexus The infinite energy promised by solar can’t of power, psychosomatic health, entrepreneurialism and personal respon- grief of others. More seriously, in change.6 This line of thinking extends from identity, and social theory. Currently, help but lead one to speculate about how Imre Szeman teaches at the sibility being the hallmarks of our social refusing our vulnerability we refuse the political theorist Hannah Arendt, who Rose studies the normative social, we might live without energetic limits. University of Waterloo. He political, and therapeutic implications volunteered this text in solidarity ethos. In Undoing the Demos: Neoliberal- the help needed at every turn of our writes in On Revolution that happiness of the revival of psychedelic healing Will we imagine different ways of being with TILTING contributors and ism’s Stealth Revolution, political theorist existence and immobilize the essen- itself is not a private matter, but comes and counterculture. in relation to one another? Will we stop the Blackwood.
8 9 Nanthini Yogendran
10 11 COVID-19 AR Mitchell Akiyama
I’m imagining a dream I didn’t have: the Canadian banks after the 2008 financial novel coronavirus has enveloped me, and crisis. But an important feature of COVID-19 while it hasn’t made me sick yet, it has AR is its History Browser, which without thoroughly infected my perception. The too much complicated navigation, shows virus has hijacked every bit of sensation that “COVID-19 is not unprecedented nor that passes through the bubble made of unpredictable.” Modern societies have COVID-19 that surrounds me. That dog weathered pandemics and economic col- over there is or isn’t a carrier of the co- lapses of similar or greater magnitudes, ronavirus; my most recent breath has or and COVID-19 AR allows quick, random hasn’t welcomed the virus into my system; access to precedent capitalist strategies every number is an index of COVID-19 that governments and institutions will em- before it’s the number of apples in the ploy to reboot a world that is as similar as bowl on my counter. I can still discern a possible to the disenfranchising, pipeline- world outside of COVID-19, but there’s a bisected, trickle-up operating system that persistent virus-skinned overlay that I can’t is currently experiencing a fatal error. disable. I’m not actually dreaming, so I don’t need to wake up to realize that life But there is a bug in COVID-19 AR, a glitch is now an Augmented Reality interface: that is its greatest feature: in Simulation COVID-19 AR. Mode, the platform models possibilities (however limited and incomplete) for care, COVID-19 AR isn’t unlike Google Lens or for action, for the redistribution of capital, IKEA Place—apps that display information that are desperately needed. In surreal- on top of a live feed from one’s phone cam- time, I’m witnessing developments that era. While phone-based AR provides the were previously thinkable but seemingly option of looking away or closing the app; impossible: inmates are being released COVID-19 AR’s operating system is thought from prisons in Canada and the United itself and can’t be shut off, not even in States, even if rates of release aren’t near- sleep. The interface has an extraordinarily ly dramatic enough to protect prisoners efficient capacity to reveal things to us or guards from infection. The ACLU is work- that we already know. Or, more accurate- ing with Republicans to free inmates— ly, it superimposes what we already should what if the COVID-19 AR decarceration have known over what we now know. The simulation is actually modeling a future pandemic, apparently, has exposed the that was only ever a dream? I’ve felt cyn- many faults in the foundation of Western, icism towards government aid packages Nicola Privato, W.E.I.R.D.: Emergency (video still), 2020. COURTESY THE ARTIST. capitalist society. The crisis has exposed that will probably do little more than bail “global frailties and inequalities”; it has ex- out corporations, resuscitate the oil sector, posed “shameful treatment” of our elders; and perpetuate the never-ending shell it has exposed the “holes in our social game of working-poor debt. But I’m watch- safety net.” COVID-19 AR gives us a rep- ing in credulous disbelief as Spain is poised resentation of what was already there to to implement Universal Basic Income as begin with—the uneven distribution of a “permanent instrument.” COVID-19 AR W.E.I.R.D.: Emergency resources, environmental collapse, sys- is performing some sort of real-time ren- temic violence against marginalized peo- dering of the naïvely-held possible impos- ples—draping an overlay of those very sibility of affordable rent in major urban same things across our field of experience. centres as Airbnb-driven real estate spec- Nicola Privato Since the real and the virtual have now, ulation starts to crash, as tenant-orga- for many of us, fully traded places, I sup- nized rent strikes gather momentum, and pose it makes sense that COVID-19 AR as governments temporarily ban evictions. clarifies what was already clear. COVID-19 AR suggests that, in some ju- risdictions, artists and freelancers should The Exposure Engine that powers COVID- be protected from the precarities of the W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industri- “Emergency,” the second movement in tive sentiment of emergency is indexed in Click the image above to see the 19 AR also both detects and amplifies gig economy as in Germany where the alized, Rich, Democratic) reflects the inher- this three-part composition, follows the this second movement, which is driven by full video. cliché—an unprecedented technology government has allocated €50 billion to ent bias in knowledge production, where publication of “Uncertainty” in TILTING tweets gathered in twenty-second inter- 1 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity that, in a perversely circular fashion, re- support its cultural sector. a small fraction of the global population— (1), and will be followed by “Identity,” to vals. “Emergency” proceeds at a frenetic (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). veals just how unprecedented the effects roughly 15 per cent, the W.E.I.R.D. demo- be published online by the artist in the pace as Twitter users employ the word Please note: this video contains of COVID-19 really are. “COVID-19 is an Maybe none of this is really real. But it graphic—speaks on behalf of the whole. coming weeks. with increasing frequency, its usage peak- flashing lights. unprecedented crisis,” even though “it would be a mistake to believe that any of This musical composition is necessarily ing as a correlate to the waking hours of didn’t come out of the blue”; patients are this isn’t unreal either—to bleakly assume Nicola Privato is a Venice-based (and deliberately) affected by that bias. Privato’s keywords derive from the influ- the W.E.I.R.D. demographic. The disso- musician and digital artist. Privato presenting with “‘unprecedented’ blood that exploitation and decimation are the ence of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, nant, flashing, and blinking result aptly studied jazz guitar at Trieste clots,” even though, prior to the pandem- only predictable outcomes. I’m fumbling Conservatory, graduating in 2010. W.E.I.R.D. is a generative score for a solo- whose writings on late modernity high- documents collective anxieties. He has played national and inter- ic, 100,000–180,000 Americans and 10,000 for a pause button or shutdown sequence ist, unwittingly created by Twitter users, light a deep-seated sense of ambivalence national festivals (Veneto Jazz, JAM, Canadians were dying from embolisms in COVID-19 AR that I know doesn’t exist JEFF, Ubi Jazz, Treviso Jazz, Palermo whose tweets are used in real-time for live and unease, where ambitions for order Privato’s work builds a dynamic between Jazz, Mediterraneo Jazz, and every year; in Canada, the pandemic trig- as I recall that Brian Massumi says that performance. Privato’s program down- and rationality are always haunted by up- score and improvisation, notation and many others) while experimenting gered an “unprecedented 500,000 jobless Gilles Deleuze says that the virtual is loads and displays tweets containing a heavals to traditional notions of economy, performance. Centred on the chaotic dy- with electronics and programming claims” in one week in March 2020, and always real. languages, and developing inter- keyword—in this case: “emergency.” That culture, and society.1 namics of globalized modernity, Privato active audiovisual installations the national government answered with a keyword affects the score and its visual- draws on his traditional jazz training to for musicians exploring the ways financial aid package of unprecedented“ Mitchell Akiyama teaches at the technology, social media, and infor- University of Toronto. He volunteered ization, which is projected live when the Whereas the first movement in this com- consider how musical practice and per- mation can be integrated in music billions,” which topped the precedent of this text in solidarity with TILTING work is performed. position used individual tweets, a collec- formance can respond to turbulent change. performances. the unprecedented $114 billion bailout of contributors and the Blackwood.
12 13 Recovery as Patience
The temporal proposition of patience seems at odds with recovery: patience is rooted in a present-tense practice that moves with a belief in an afterward, while recovery weaves connective tissue that reaches from the now to somewhere else, backward in time.
If patience is configured as beingness in a state of delay, then can it also be a silent expression of belief that holds between a small speck of light, far away, and the surrounding void of unknowing that calls itself the unspooling hours of days?
Life seems to unfold only in this moment of pivot, impossibly extended, an interstitial space that has become all things. The proportions are off.
Patience, perhaps obviously, is the only way to reach any kind of afterward, and patience will come, either invited or imposed. I would do well to orient myself to its gestures. Conversely, cruelly, recovery cannot be promised or enforced. The least I can do is orient myself to its possibility, a practice that tends to social life as much as it does to personal well-being. X Recovery as Lagging Kara Ditte Hansen and cheyanne turions
Reaching in the ways that reaching has been possible, this back-and-forth exchange is born from an investment in the burgeoning and embodied knowledges that arise as we move through this time of physical distance, self-isolation, and fear. We want to capture something of the beingness of our days and the means we avail in order to cope, believing that repercussions cascade, yoking how we move now to the worlds that await us.
Recovery as Fragility
The proposition of recovery risks connotations of “conquest” and that is not the concern here. Rather, here, recovery is what is made in the ashes; it is what can be taken from collapse and used as tinder to light new fires. Oriented in this way, recovery is a practice of setting the stage for what comes after.
In these days of plague, recovery is not to be well (or not only), but to be fragile with bald-faced humility. It is to reveal what is already present, and to inculcate a consequential care beyond its usual limits.
This kind of recovery, if it is to be recovery at all, follows the contours of a body to where its limits break, which is to say that those limits were never solid to begin with. The passage of this new illness, invisible as it often is, relies on the permeability of flesh. And so we inculcate new choreographies. The making of a meaningful life, albeit different for all, relies upon the structure of a day. And so we find ourselves struggling to give shape to these days and weeks, hoping this is only passage, leading to an elsewhere, otherwise. Recovery is also to give credence to what has always been, which is to accept the savvy of our systems to conceal themselves to all but those who suffer by them—easier to imagine than to enact for those who stand as beneficiaries. This, then, is now the labour of fragility, to invest in making these kinds of recognitions possible, knowing anew that these systems structure us all, unevenly, and that what has been an easy ignorance will no longer do.
Recovery as Disorientation Kara Ditte Hansen, Recovery as Lagging, 2020. Single-channel video, 02:01 min. COURTESY THE ARTIST.
Recovery as Memory
There are different languages in which to offer an explanation of recovery: the scientific and its offer of careful measures; the social and its obligations of mutual assuredness; the political and its promises of security and aid. In the tongue of poetry, con- sider (as others have before) that it is by keeping a memory of a virus that a body becomes immune.1
Memory is the mutated and calcified remains of encounter. The imperfect memory, the distorted memory—these become metaphors for the question of whether or not exposure will confer immunity as it has sometimes done so before, in other times, for other illnesses. The metaphors available for perfect recall are less obvious, foremost because it is understood that every history, as a collection of memories either personal or collective, is necessarily insufficient to the events it intends to describe. But there are interventions and alignments to be made that, in making a history more complex, get closer to the spirits of en- counter that make up its mattering. It might be that these recalibrations that look back critically can stand in relation to some future moment when vaccine circulates among us, a kind of knowledge that has welcomed all cracks in its logic for the strength that an address confers.
These days, in this interstitial space where the scientific, social, and political contours of recovery are not yet fully understood, where it still might be possible to bear upon their practice and shape, perhaps poetry can afford an exceptional space to tend to memories that have yet to come, to conjure momentum that will accept nothing less than to recall a future otherwise than the past we’ve left behind.
Kara Ditte Hansen is a visual artist and has been supporting emerging artists organizer based in Vancouver. Her work through exhibitions, talks, performances, combines film, video installation, sculpture, and readings since 2015. Now she is in social practice, and performance. She the process of completing her first film, Click each image to view videos. received a BFA from Emily Carr University An Event So Fast (2020). of Art and Design in 2013. Thereafter, 1 Claire Fontaine, “Letters against she participated in the thematic residency cheyanne turions is the curator at Separation: Claire Fontaine in Italy,” Confuse the Cat led by Michael Portnoy SFU Galleries (Burnaby and Vancouver). e-flux conversations, March 26, 2020, and Kira Nova at the Banff Centre. She is She volunteered this text in solidarity https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/ a founding member of the collective with her collaborator, Kara Ditte Hansen, letters-against-separation-claire- non-profit organization Duplex Artists’ as well as TILTING contributors and the Kara Ditte Hansen, Recovery as Disorientation, 2020. Single-channel video, 01:45 min. COURTESY THE ARTIST. fontaine-in-italy/9701. Society, a gallery and studio space that Blackwood.
14 15 The Ill-fated Class of 2020
Alex Cameron
The isolation of performers is what most personally breaks me about this pandemic.
The generation most affected is mine: The generation that is just now graduating from university Following years of education, Following years of building professional experience and practice, We are now scrambling.
On the outside I am calm. Perhaps the pandemic is a chance for me to breathe. But uncertainty surrounds my calm like icy winds.
Do I even have to tell you I set this year up to be a big one? We followed forged paths—precious advice for springboarding ourselves into the professional sphere lining up opportunities living as creatives We followed forged paths—to a creative world that no longer exists. We must forge our own, somehow.
Audiences to play to, dissipated in an instant. Friends and colleagues to perform for, alongside, together—isolated.
Conventional artistic wisdom says we are independent by nature. But the craft of performance is twined among endless moving parts. Writers. Directors. Agents. Unions. Peers. Audiences. Bodies. Closeness. Attention. Without them, who are we? Who am I?
These parts exist in systems. Artistic work participates in many machines of labour Machines we expect to function, in the name of betterment, But the system is not designed for this: Machines, separate from their fuel, grind themselves to stop. If the system’s design has not conceived this, we must redraw the blueprints. Do we have a choice otherwise?
We will be only the first generation of many to be shaken.
No one is “non-essential.” Yet while people turn to the comfort of art We see news of funding and response benefits Promises of relief for some Exclusions for others that spiral them further into isolation. Right: Poetry performance by Alex How can you compete—how can you emerge—in an oppressive system? Cameron during Global Climate Strike week at the University of Groomed and governed by the system ofeducation Toronto Mississauga, September That serves as a trial run for the labour system. 19, 2019. PHOTO: BLACKWOOD GALLERY. A labour system we are watching leave artists behind. Alex Cameron is a theatre, visual, and performance artist based The generation most affected is mine: in the Greater Toronto Area, and a graduate of the ill-fated 2019–20 For us to sustain ourselves, we must reject. school year at University of Toronto Mississauga. Cameron has performed in Tarragon Theatre’s We must rebuild. Young Playwrights Acting Unit and the Toronto Fringe Festival, and Our education is not ending. It is beginning. creates digital video remixes using pre-existing and original footage. Cameron explores and is interested We will set the stage. in artwork that is contemporary and post-modern—work that can only exist and have been created with The isolation of performers is what most personally steels me about this pandemic. the tools and perspective of today. This Text is a Monument
Mark Dudiak
“Someone has just created a smart con- out the need for third-party validation by doctor, his work, and his death. Dr. Li might tract on Ethereum with source codes in a financial institution. Ethereum’s collab- never have received a public memorial had the shape of a monument in memory of Dr. orative infrastructure guarantees the vi- two anonymous users not written all of Li Wenliang, the whistleblower of China’s ability of smart contracts, ensuring that this information into the unique Ethereum coronavirus outbreak, who died of the no centralized authority can unilaterally smart contract that now serves as his disease.”1 suppress, delete, or alter data held therein. virtual tombstone. Information found in an Ethereum smart Visit his memorial here: contract cannot be censored unless ac- The purpose of a memorial is to bind an https://etherscan.io/address/0x6e46d3ab cess to the entire network is restricted. event, identity, or ideology to a specific 7335fffb0d14927e0b418cc08fe60505# geographic site indefinitely. It is important code Dr. Li Wenliang was one of the first medi- in most cultures that people should reside cal professionals to publicly warn Chinese somewhere after they have passed—we Ethereum2 is an open-source, blockchain- citizens that Wuhan was facing a very se- want our ancestors to be in a place we can based, distributed computing platform. It rious outbreak of a new infectious disease. go to remember them. People often talk is the underlying framework for Ether, an Shortly after he spoke out, his comments about their need to lay loved ones to rest emerging publicly traded global crypto- were removed from online platforms and in order to find closure for their grief. It is currency. What makes Ethereum different he was reprimanded by government offi- not unusual for families to engage in ex- from other blockchain protocols such as cials for speaking out in a manner critical traordinary, sometimes risky efforts to re- Memorial to Dr. Li Wenliang on Ethereum. COURTESY THE ARTIST. Bitcoin is that it allows users to generate of the state. After he died from COVID-19 trieve the remains of a relative so that they cryptographically secure “smart contracts,” on February 7, 2020, Chinese authorities can be “properly” interred in a knowable Facing page: Funeral plot inscription, Carrowanty Cemetery, Ireland. which verify and enforce credible trans- attempted to suppress the incident and place. A memorial locates the deceased in COURTESY THE ARTIST. actions between one or more entities with- moved to restrict information about the time; it stops them from being completely
19 (1986–2020), , lost. Whether survivors visit the grave is to share about themselves and they are 李文亮 男 辽宁省锦州市人 not as important as knowing that there publicly viewable—but the question is, for , is a place where the dead can be found. how long? The existence of these sites is Li Wenliang武汉大学临床医学专业毕业 (1986–2020), male, native武汉市中心医院眼科医生 of Jinzhou, Liaoning Province wholly predicated on whether Facebook Graduated in clinical medicine from Wuhan University, It seems inevitable that our survival will be- continues to maintain them and whether come more fraught as the negative effects the platform itself will survive in the long ophthalmologist of Wuhan Central Hospital of climate change and population growth term. Anyone who has lost content to a intensify. As we adapt to the future, me- system update or technical glitch knows morial traditions will also have to evolve. that all of the information saved to the 2019 12 30 1 Wolfie Zhao, “China’s Coronavirus 李文亮最早于 年 月 日向外界发出 network remains there solely at the dis- Whistleblower Is Now Memorialized (2019-nCov) , “ ” One can imagine a scenario where urban cretion of Facebook. on Ethereum,” Coindesk, February 新型冠状病毒 防护预警 是疫情 吹哨人 7, 2020, https://www.coindesk.com/ “ ” — cemeteries would be pressured to close chinas-coronavirus-whistleblower- Li Wenliang同时也是被公安机关以造谣之由训诫的 issued warning of the novel coronavirus武汉八君子 to the outside之 world as and redevelop due to a logic of “produc- This is what makes the monument to Dr. is-now-memorialized-on-ethereum. tive” or “optimized” use of scarce city space. Li so interesting. His tombstone was cre- 2 See Ethereum white paper: early as December 30, 2019. He is the “whistleblower” of the epidemic. In such a scenario, how could ritual situ- ated on a specific date, at a specific time, https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/ Meanwhile he is one of the “Eight Gentlemen of Wuhan” accused by the public ate the memory of an individual at an in- and has been situated in a unique virtual wiki/White-Paper Last accessed 14 April 2020. security bureau of spreading rumours. dexical virtual “place” online? As the cur- “place.” Barring server failure or techno- rent state of lockdown persists globally, logical obsolescence, it cannot be lost, al- Special thanks to Lily Chen, Ho Ki Pang, and Josephine Li who helped to projections suggest that our lives will in- tered, or deleted without the consent of its translate the monument’s inscription. 2020 2 7 creasingly be lived within a digital public creators. Just like real tombs situate an 年 月 日凌晨 sphere. Can we bind identity, memory, or individual within the landscape, this me- Below: Blank gravestone, , , 34 Cimetière Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, 李文亮医生因感染新型冠状病毒 病重经抢救无效去世 享年 岁 ideology to a specific location within a vir- morial is sited within a network whose Montreal. COURTESY THE ARTIST. Early morning, February 7, 2020 tual space? Social media platforms such design makes it as stable and unchanging Mark Dudiak is a Toronto artist who Dr. Wenliang Li died of the coronavirus after failed resuscitation at the age of 34. as Facebook have attempted to do some- as possible. If we are moving into a future creates videos, installations, and thing like this by allowing a deceased user’s where the majority of our public lives un- paintings about invisible forces and their influence on the built environ- profile to be converted into a “memorial- fold in dynamic virtual environments, can ment. His work explores contem- 2020 2 7 9 49 ized account.” This means that Facebook we rely on these kinds of strategies to cre- porary existential concerns such as 截至 年 月 日 点 分 loneliness, collective anxiety, trans- prevents data from being removed or added ate islands of certainty within the digital humanism, and artificial intelligence. 31211全国新型冠状病毒感染者 , 26359 , 637 to the timeline of the deceased while still stream? Though it consists of fewer than He holds a BFA from Emily Carr reminding their friends to wish them a 150 lines of text, this monument does what University of Art and Design and an 确诊As of 9:49人 疑似 on February人 7,死亡 2020 人 MFA from Concordia University. happy birthday or anniversary. These its physical antecedents do: it situates the Dudiak has exhibited across Canada The number of people diagnosed with coronavirus amounts to “death pages” do serve as a kind of living memory of Dr. Li in an unchanging pub- and internationally at venues including ZK/U, Berlin; Projet Pangée, 31,211. Suspected cases total 26,359. 637 deaths. memorial in the short term: they preserve lic context where he can be mourned by Montréal; Access Gallery, Vancouver; all of the things that an individual chose anyone who chooses to visit. and Nuit Blanche, Toronto. , 为众人抱薪者 , 不可使其冻毙于风雪 Don’t let those who为自由开道者 collect firewood不可令其困厄于荆棘 for others die from the frost. Don’t let those who clear the path to freedom suffer from thorns and prickles.
“ 训诫部分内容如下 , 我们希望你冷静下来好好反思 , , 并郑重告诫你 如果你固执己见 不思悔改 ! 继续进行违法活动?” , 你将会受到法律的制裁 你听明白了吗 , 彼时之言 恰是李文亮医生用生命的代价对在位之人He was reprimanded as follows: 对整个社会的训诫 “We hope you could calm down and reflect. You are being warned seriously. If you still insist on your opinion without repentance and continue the illegal activities, you will be punished by law! Do you understand?” What they said at the time was exactly what Dr. Li Wenliang said to the incumbent and to society.
, 秦人不暇自哀 , 而后人哀之 后人哀之而不鉴之The Rulers of Ch’in亦使后人而复哀后人也 had not a moment To lament their fate, Those who came after Lamented it. When those who come after Lament but do not learn, Then they too will merely provide Fresh cause for lamentation From those who come after them.
2020 2 7 February年 7,月 2020日
21 I am writing in the context of capitalism and America. Endurance is Not Resistance We have been taught that assigning metrics is not infliction. It is naturalized to consider life in relation to quantities. My grandfather died at fifty-one. The cancer was aggressive, a sprinter. It killed him in less than six months. The speed was related to stress. He worked thirty years for the same company. My grandmother lives on his unused vacation days.
Olivia Klevorn My father retired. When I call, his voice is reedy and unfocused. I ask if he’s just been on a run. He says no. We get to talking about the economy. His new voice, pallid, passive, exhausted, wastes itself on a victory lap. “It will keep going. It will be back where it was.”
If there is one overarching principle of endurance-building, this is it. Call it gradual adaptation. That is, be consistent, be patient, and build up slowly. The gradual-adaptation principle is deeply rooted in human physiology and has worked for about a billion runners since Paleolithic man started stalking wild animals in East Africa 150,000 years ago. It still works today. —Boost Your Endurance, runnersworld.com An eleven-year-old runs 100 times or more around the track and imagination is lost in numbers.
The meaning of capitalism will be subject to precapitalistic meanings, and the conflict expressed in such a She did not know she could stand on the edge of a lake as sun rose over imaginary kingdoms, and rankled republics. confrontation will be one in which man is seen as the aim of production, and not production as the aim of man. —Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America1 She did not know, in quiet streets, her ragged breath could leave winter air in tatters, rip, smear, and drag, flag after violent flag.
She did not know she was angry. Can you imagine? She just kept going. Can you imagine?
I could not tell you why I began running as an adult.
It was a possession, or I was becoming the person my habits amounted to, spirit dripping out of mouth in sweat. Running injuries are often progressive. Ruptures result from hundreds of miles and hours of impact accreting. Lives can be changed for months or years due to such grave injuries.
One morning I woke up and my ankle was swollen purple. Applying pressure felt like stepping on lines of live wire electrified with pain. I hopped to see a friend who lived across the hall. Her father was a doctor. She picked up my foot. She moved it back and forth. “You should probably go to the hospital.” As an American, I asked, “Are you sure?” And as an American she sighed and said A girl I follow on Instagram says, “I’m a runner now.” “Yes.” It was a grave injury. I understood.
Running is an identity and then, as modernity demands, a productive obsession, easy to commend. There are books, shows, podcasts, chats, magazines, and Facebook pages dedicated to runners’ precautions. There are symp- toms that progress from chronic to constant to malignant. There are rules of decency, of pace, of empathy, of gait and kindness. A runner maintains their mileage, their bankrolls, their pace, their injury, and debt. A runner seeks gold to quench the industri- But to endure is the runner’s greatest gift, to act nobly, to supersede being human and finish the race. alist’s tastes. A runner seizes opportunity without cost. A runner sees the horizon line. A runner uses all available resources. A runner knows what they deserve. A runner keeps going no matter what.
Running is a conquest and then, as modernity demands, an act of destiny, made manifest.
A runner makes progress. A runner thinks it feels good to “get out.” But a runner is no “runaway.” A runner comes by choice. How often do you become indebted to a twisted intent and its unending demands? A runner is possessive of place. A runner eschews violence and needs the police. A runner picks all names. A runner speaks “in general.” A runner reconciles history. A runner finds total comfort in total control. A runner has a good sense of direction. A How many conquerors were rebels made miniscule by calculations of selfishness? runner does not feel chains as long as most movement is free. A runner keeps going no matter what. How much pain are you willing to accept before everything must change? Running is an endurance exercise and then, as modernity demands, work.
A runner believes suffering is inevitable and recursive. A runner believes they are suffering. A runner believes oppression is in- evitable and recursive. A runner believes they are oppressed. A runner believes struggling is inevitable and recursive. A runner believes they are struggling. Imagine waking to disaster. Imagine you cannot move from privacy for six to twelve weeks. Imagine you can believe it is boring. Imagine terror visits your kitchen at night. Imagine you try to bake it with lemon and turmeric. Imagine it refuses. Imagine it is a maelstrom. Imagine it is relentless. Imagine it shadows the walls and shivers the lights. Imagine you are sad. Imagine you miss horizons you’ve never seen. Imagine you are considering hysteria. Imagine pressing your finger on a button for disaster like a morphine drip you mainline while watching the news. Imagine no one you know is sick. Imagine memory is A runner keeps going no matter what. a rainbow you watch fading down the wall. Imagine waking to disaster. Imagine it is a maelstrom. Imagine it tears the roof off your house. Imagine you are drenched in myth and fact. Stocks are sold. Cops are out. No one can breathe. Inhale once on each pose. Imagine waking to disaster. Imagine relief is the wreckage of the past. Imagine you cannot go forward. Imagine you cannot go back. Imagine your pockets are empty. Imagine your neighbours do not offer. Imagine your home is stolen land. Imagine waking to disaster. Imagine vowing to put on “real pants.” Imagine going to the park. Imagine the first sun in weeks. Imagine counting on the commons. Imagine you stop counting them. Imagine waking to disaster. I begin to see the need for everything I mock. I run more than 300 miles and buy a pair of shoes with soles so thick I want to gnaw through them just to “get my money’s worth.” I begin to consider wind and humidity, and their relation to sweat. I monitor the rain. I time meals. I time sleep. I time the distance from one castle to another. I learn about degenerative conditions and chronic conditions, conditions of muscle and conditions of bone. I learn how to pre-wrap. I learn how to ice. I am introduced as 1 Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and “a runner.” I plan to stay with a girl for the weekend and bring my running shoes in a plastic bag. I learn the paths. I learn the trails. Commodity Fetishism in South I make playlists. I sign up for a traditional man-versus-horse relay. I shower in warm water tempered by cold sweat. I take naps. Do not endure. Resist. America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 11.
Olivia Klevorn is a queer mixed-race writer and performer born in Chicago. She and her partner recently moved to Toronto from London, UK. Her work examines a wide range of cultural topics concerning injustice and in- I become ignorant. equality in our time. She has a masters degree in visual anthropology from the University of Oxford and is chaotic good. taking place within the entrepreneurial, disrupt some of the notions that play a 1 Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left educational, and even cultural sectors key role in the constitution of capitalist Books, 1975). Pandemic, Time for a Transversal as they transition to online and remote time, including the crucial notion of the 2 Alain Badiou, “Two Days After work. These sectors are proud of how Other. the Election of Trump,” in Trump quickly they absorbed the transition, (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). given that these creative tactics prevent By now, it’s been an essential and long- Political Imagination 3 For a comprehensive elaboration disruption of the provision of “public ser- standing characteristic of the neolib- on state reluctance to enforce vice.” Yet beneath the surface, what is eral economy to assign the Other a on time sever strategies, see Tomas Pueyo, “Coronavirus: The Hammer happening could also be thought of as central role in the production of sub- and the Dance,” Medium, March 19, a manoeuvre to exercise the economic jectivities that accelerate both the dis- 2020, https://medium.com/ @tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the- Ali Ahadi efficacy of this online transition, and -ex tribution of the global workforce and hammer-and-the-dance- amine the subjective capacity for both the construction of a specific notion of be9337092b56. employees and consumers to sustain futurity for those within it. This notion 4 David Harvey recently elaborated this paradigm. of futurity involves the production of on some of these systemic a desire for the subjects (members of contradictions: “Capital modifies the environmental conditions of its I: Symptoms something that is not always with us but From the point of view of the corpo- Another instance of this transforma- the workforce) by which they become own reproduction but does so in a may only contingently befall us. If we rate-driven global economy, this lan- tion engages the public dissemination attuned with the working condition. context of unintended consequences of art. Many exhibitions are postponed, This desire is dispensed through a dis- [...] Forty years of neoliberalism With the omnipresence of the term consider all that we encounter (through guage-use has to absolutely refuse to across North and South America “symptom” these days, it seems that a our hearing and seeing) relating to the represent the underlying paradoxes of while many others consider online plat- course that advertises the notion of and Europe had left the public total- plausible escape from the deep horror pandemic as what constitutes the doxa the market-driven system (the true driv- forms to present their products. On the “progress” and the possibility of “job ly exposed and ill-prepared to face a public health crisis of this sort [...] of this pandemic would be to conduct of this situation (that is, public opinion er behind the crisis).4 Given the wither- commercial level, Art Basel Hong Kong promotion.” In many parts of the supposed a symptomatic reading of it. Attributed and common belief), thinking would ing away of state-owned businesses and launched their fair online, and many oth- ‘civilized’ world, local governments and regional/state authorities, to Louis Althusser, this method of read- therefore only be possible in our search the financial precarity imposed through ers may follow. Digitally produced, dig- What is it that we actually desire when which invariably form the front ing literary and historical texts focuses for the paradoxes of our situation. Para- neoliberal hegemony, a massive pre- itally seen, digitally sold artworks may we desire to make progress or to get line of defense in public health and not on what a text evidently expresses, dox comes from the Greek roots para (a carious workforce (including migrant see greater market demand, for they are promoted? Desire must correspond to safety emergencies of this kind, had been starved of funding thanks but on what it is unable to. For Althuss- modifying prefix meaning beside, beyond workers, retail employees, sessional in- more compatible with the online mode an object that exists for that desire, an to a policy of austerity designed to er, fundamental ideological presuppo- and contrary) and doxa (accepted opin- structors, artists, and others) that can- of cultural merchandising—that is, turn- object that constantly exacts full recog- fund tax cuts and subsidies to the ↓corporations and the rich.” See sitions in the socio-historical context in ion, from dokein, “to seem, appear and not afford to “stay home” is actually the ing cultural capital into monetary value nition from the subject. Our masters are David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics which a text is realized repress certain accept”). We can then consider a para- group to whom the state directs its call through digital vectors.8 exemplary instances of such objects: in the Time of Covid-19,” Jacobin, March 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/ facts from representation. To make dox as that which confronts public opin- to “get back to work.” This is despite the boss, the promoted colleague, the 2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus- these repressed facts explicit, symp- ion, insofar as it counters and goes be- their return being tantamount to their Similar speculative questions could be tenured faculty member, the interna- political-economy-disruptions. tomatic reading identifies “the invisible yond a situation’s doxa. In other words, subjection to contamination. Trump’s posed to educational services. Is online tionally acknowledged artist, and in one 5 Libby Cathey, “Coronavirus problematic contained in the paradox of a real paradox is a break in the chain of voice echoes here: “Our people want teaching here to stay, or will it at least word, the Other. We must therefore un- government response updates: an answer which does not correspond significations governing a situation. to work. They want to go back. They contribute strongly to the educational derstand that desiring the Other in this Trump envisions county-by-county risk assessments in new guidelines,” to any question posed.”1 have to go back.”5 So too do comments economy in the near future? What might sense—that is, wanting to become the ABC News, March 26, 2020, II: Mutations from Texas lieutenant governor Dan be the economic repercussions associ- Other—means desiring a possibility for https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ coronavirus-government-response- Reading our situation in a symptomat- Patrick, who, in an embodiment of the ated with this transition? Can we think the self in the “future” and the reality of updates-mnuchin-jobless-claims- ic mode requires conceiving of all pan- Since the global outbreak of COVID-19, Freudian slip of the system, proclaimed, of it in terms of a devaluation of the my Other in their “present.” It is at the report/story?id=69811625. demic-related news as a whole, and as a we have witnessed a radical manifes- “Older people would rather die than workforce and the elimination of many intersection of these present and future 6 Lois Beckett, “Older people would text—albeit a hysterical one—and then tation of a particular form of unilateral let COVID-19 harm the US economy.”6 side jobs that were once needed for a temporalities that the capitalist notion rather die than let Covid-19 harm attempting to identify what this text does state-citizen relationship. This relation- This infantilizing language-use is a de- single class to take place offline? Or can of futurity is produced. US economy – Texas official,” The Guardian, March 24, 2020, not say. Before anything else, a symp- ship is being built on a very specific form termined tactic to keep this precarious we consider it in terms of the growth of https://www.theguardian.com/ tomatic reading of the pandemic de- of language-use and rhetoric, an assem- workforce acquiescent to the emerg- consumption and increasing of surplus With the pandemic time unsettling such world/2020/mar/24/older-people- would-rather-die-than-let-covid-19- mands the isolation of affects produced blage whose determination is to pro- ing increase in the surveillance of citi- value through the scaling-up of online a notion of futurity, and with its impo- lockdown-harm-us-economy-texas- by the multiplicity of news sources (me- duce an affect and a doxa. On the one zens and control of “the social.” States classrooms, while the sessional instruc- sition of uncertainty on people, this official-dan-patrick. dia reports, state addresses, medical hand, the products of this assemblage will also take advantage of the declared tor’s wage remains unraised? dialectic of desiring of the Other and 7 Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction advice, and economic analyses), so that aim to build trust in people who are “state of emergency” to elevate this struggling for recognition seems to have of Capitalism: Ideology and something at the level of thought, and dependent—now more than ever—on tactic to the level of strategy—that is, We don’t know how long these exercis- been adjourned. With both the material Ideological State Apparatuses not fear and panic, can emerge. In a lec- the voice of the state; and, on the other to subdue any potential organizing ac- es for reproduction of the relations of and mental circumstances ushered in by (New York: Verso Books, 2014). ture given two days after Donald Trump hand, they repress the representation of tivity (such as a general strike) by this production will last. We may not have the pandemic, can we seize on this situ- 8 With such potential transformations, was elected president, Alain Badiou re- the absolute contradictions within the group. The sovereigns employ such definitive answers for these questions. ation as a singular chance to reflect on we can also think of McKenzie Wark’s theory of “digital provenance minded us of the detriment of affects: system. State orders to stay at home rhetoric with the cognizance that a co- But it is imperative to not allow the affect the Other through the existence of the and the artwork as derivative” as much as possible—producing affects lossal workforce with a disrupted social of the pandemic to prevent us from our same (a precarious “lack of infection”), coming to full realization. One would even argue that such theory Philosophy teaches us that none of such as “feeling safe,” and rhetoric such consciousness and understanding of critical speculations. rather than through the economy of dif- can even fall short of encapsulating these affects is in any way a good as “things are in our control” and “now, work-concept are an immediate threat ferences so upheld by neoliberalism and a potential paradigm shift in artistic production, wherein the market response... We must therefore time to get back to work”—are all indic- to the global work-subjectivity govern- III: Disruptions cloaked in the rhetoric of multicultural- demands artworks whose provenance think beyond these inevitable af- ative of the state’s desire to maintain the ing them. ism? and derivative are digital. See fects, beyond fear, disappointment, subjugation of social life and the preser- This pandemic does seem to offer some McKenzie Wark, “Digital Provenance and the Artwork as Derivative,” and depression—what we must do vation of work conditions. I propose we can, through a symptom- promising traits. It is clear that “capi- Is the pandemic not a time to think of the e-flux 77 (November 2016). that would not be subject to the atic approach, begin to see a metabolic talist time” has been disrupted—albe- Other, otherwise? Through relinquish- Ali Ahadi is a Vancouver-based artist negative affects but that would Other instances of such language-use relationship between COVID-19 and the it temporarily. Governments’ anxious ing the discourse of “difference,” can and writer. His interdisciplinary prac- take place on the level of thought, fall within the activities of the media hegemonic global neoliberal economy. If use of rhetoric promising the return to we grasp what we are all being made to tice spans from site-specific ephemeral installations to sculpture, photo-, action, and political resoluteness.2 vector within the ideological state ap- it is true that the genome of COVID-19 “normal” can be understood as an ef- serve, and discover methods for orga- and video-based works, writing and paratus: spanning from reports of states has the chance of undergoing a muta- fort to restore this very capitalist time. nizing ourselves to disrupt this service? translation. His work is constituted Under “normal” circumstances, we ambivalently assuring bailout packages tion with every body it interacts with, We know that such a disruption not only through addressing the problems of presentation and representation, might tend to attribute negative affect to the obscure-yet-charming analyses why not speculate the same is the case engages the human/labour time—nec- I think we can do this by avoiding the monsteration and demonstration, to individual inadequacies. In the time of excusing states for prioritizing the mar- with the vertical genome of the neolib- essary for on-time production and cir- voice of our masters, by evading the and, finally, the relationships between aesthetics and contingent forms of collective horror, however, it should be ket. Demonstrating this obfuscation is eral socio-economic apparatus? Can we culation so that value will be safeguard- true virus that is language, by aban- abstractions. Ahadi has participated much less difficult (yet more urgent) to the poor media coverage of science speculate that, on an economic level, ed—but it also consists of engaging the doning our habitual online “drifting” on in a body of solo and group exhibitions internationally, including his recent remember that “thinking” would be im- papers. Many of these papers reproach this pandemic is suggesting a transfor- capitalist notion of “futurity.” the products of the media assemblage, solo exhibition at the Ag Galerie of possible without conceiving of affect as the prioritization of the market by states, mation in “reproduction of the relations and, instead, by thinking of the under- Tehran, entitled Shit Yes Academy (Goh the concealment of the true reason be- which has resulted in slower responses of production”?7 What could be more threatening and lying paradoxes of this situation infect- Ballet Academy). In 2012 he received his MFA in visual arts from the Uni- hind the horror. and inefficient mitigation strategies in- devaluating to capital than a different ing us in the same way. We can do this versity of British Columbia, where stead of more severe policies such as We can perhaps think of instances of notion of time, which the pandemic because there are so many of us sitting he is currently a visual art instructor and a PhD candidate in interdisci- From this vantage point, we can regard on-time lockdown, and thus increased such reproduction of the relations of might now enable us to imagine? In this inside and imagining the possibility of a plinary studies with central focus on “thought” as something like a break— the potential of future crises.3 production through the rapid shifts now imagining, we have an opportunity to different time and action. continental philosophy and visual arts.
24 25 1 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: Wake Work and the Coronavirus Pandemic On Blackness and Being (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 11. Beverly Bain 2 Ibid, 13. When your people are sick
3 Reis Thebault, Andrew Ba Tran, and Vanessa Williams, “The coronavirus is infecting and killing black Americans Black people everywhere and anywhere tensified policing that has led to Black at an alarmingly high rate,” Washington Post, April 7, 2020, Jayda Marley we are, still produce in, into, and through people being carded, beaten, arrested, and https://www.washingtonpost.com/ the wake an insistence on existing: we in- fined. Black people living in the afterlife nation/2020/04/07/coronavirus-is- sist Black being into the wake. of slavery and Indigenous people under infecting-killing-black-americans-an- alarmingly-high-rate-post-analysis- —Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Black- white settler colonialism are “constituted shows/?arc404=true. ness and Being1 through and by a continued vulnerability”8 4 “Statement from Black Health Leaders to interminable violence and death. Recent- on COVID-19’s impact on Black Christina Sharpe, in her seminal text, In the ly, the Canadian government confirmed Communities in Ontario,” Alliance for Healthier Communities, April 2, 2020, Wake: On Blackness and Being, engages 164 people on First Nations reserves https://www.allianceon.org/ I am forced to see this pandemic through an Afro-Indigenous lens wake work—which she describes as a mode were infected with the coronavirus, with news/Statement-Black-Health- of inhabiting and imagining life in the wake seventeen hospitalized and two dead.9 Leaders-COVID-19s-impact-Black- We fight for our land, they ignore us Communities-Ontario. of slavery—as a form of consciousness. Sharpe wants us to be fully aware of Black These stories and statistics approach a Sheila Block and Simran Dhunna, Middle class people spread sickness, they send us all home & drown us in news of death, 5 “Face to face with COVID-19: How life as liveable and breathable, even as it representation of contemporary condi- do we care for care workers?,” They give names and heartfelt stories to their loved ones lost is bound up with Black death. She wants tions for Black and racialized people under Behind the Numbers, April 16, 2020, http://behindthenumbers. us to track the “phenomena that dispro- COVID-19—but they only begin to reveal ca/2020/04/06/face-to-face-with- Everyone forgets the missing and murdered women who never made the news stories portionately and devastatingly affect Black the historical contours of Black life against covid-19-how-do-we-care-for-care- Everyone forgets Wet’suwet’en and their people peoples” and reveal, in the face of Black Black death. Tiffany Lethabo King tells us workers/. immanent and imminent death, “the ways that while genocide and slavery have “dis- 6 Shree Paradkar, “Unlike Cana- Everyone is suddenly happy to be “inconvenienced” we resist, rupture and disrupt that im- tinct feelings at the stress points and in- dians, Americans at least know Everyone says “it is for the health of the people” how Black people are faring with manence and imminence aesthetically stantiations of Black fungibility and Native COVID-19 (very badly),” April 8, Everyone says “stay home, take care of each other” and materially.”2 genocide, the violence moves as one.”10 2020, https://www.thestar.com/ Everyone says “we are in this together” opinion/2020/04/08/unlike-canadi- Achille Mbembe, in his work on necro- ans-americans-at-least-know-how- The coronavirus pandemic lays bare the politics, argues that what we have wit- black-people-are-faring-with-covid- Everyone says “government funding, we all deserve it” corrosive effects of the racist, gendered nessed over the course of history is how 19-very-badly.html. neoliberal capitalist state on Black, racial- particular nation states have exercised 7 “Harassing behaviour from landlords We fight for our land, they call us: ized, and Indigenous bodies. In majority- their ultimate will over who shall live and reported as May 1 approaches,” Toronto CityNews, April 25, 2020, Black US counties, the Washington Post who shall die. He argues that racism facil- https://toronto.citynews.ca/ “People who don’t know forgiveness” reported in April, Blacks have three times itates the expansion of necropolitics and video/2020/04/25/harassing- “A disease,” the rate of infection and almost six times a necroeconomy, both of which precise- behaviour-from-landlords-reported- as-may-1-approaches/. “Leftovers of a rotting history,” the rate of death, compared to majority- ly manage and subjugate bodies through “Ungrateful.” white counties.3 exposure to deadly dangers and risks.11 8 Sharpe, In the Wake, 14. 9 “Coronavirus (COVID-19) and Surviving off of “government funding, they do not deserve it.” In Canada—a nation that bolsters white- In this time when the nation chooses to Indigenous Communities,” Government of Canada ness in times of crises—Black workers refer to the pandemic as the “great equal- Indigenous Services, May 7, 2020, They post their Amazon sage on day 5 of Social Distancing (especially Black women), make up a dis- izer,” vast populations of Black, Indige- https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/ They post their selfies on day 6 with an Amazon dreamcatcher in the background proportionate number of those in low- nous, and racialized people globally have 1581964230816/1581964277298. They call this “healing” paying, frontline, and now-deemed essen- already been managed through death 10 Tiffany Lethabo King,The Black Shoals: tial jobs.4 These include roles as personal across decades of racist, white, settler- Offshore Formations of Black and When our people are sick they send body bags to the reserves Native Studies (Durham and London: support workers (PSWs), registered prac- colonial, and neoliberal capitalist policies Duke University Press, 2019), x. They call this reparations tical nurses (RPNs), nursing assistants, or- and practices. 11 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” derlies, janitorial staff, and grocery clerks. trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture When your people are sick they rush to find a cure In nursing homes and long term care fa- Those who have been witnessing, account- 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. They call this a good use of medical funding cilities (workplaces where COVID-19 in- ing, and writing of Black lives in peril here 12 See Bryann Aguilar, “Dozens of TTC fection and death rates have been extreme- in Canada during this pandemic are per- bus operators refuse to work due Doug Ford says no school, praise him ly high) Black and racialized women make forming a form of wake work, care for to lack of PPE,” CP24, April 15, 2020, Justin Trudeau says no rent, praise him https://www.cp24.com/news/ up a significant percentage of population those on the frontlines, at risk and/or left dozens-of-ttc-bus-operators-refuse- Government officials find sympathy only in things that can affect the ones they love directly working in these jobs—25% of workers to die. This form of care insists on reveal- to-work-due-to-lack-of-ppe- 1.4898133, and Tom Blackwell, in nursing and residential care facilities ing Black and racialized resistance to this “Canadian nurses treating COVID-19 Forget clean water and 27% of home healthcare workers.5 enforced death as well. This resistance patients cite unsafe-work laws to de- Forget green land Visit the SDUK microsite to hear a takes form in Black and racialized women mand N95 masks,” National Post, March Forget human rights spoken word recording of this poem. 31, 2020, https://nationalpost.com/ Black health and feminist advocates, re- refusing to work without Personal Pro- health/canadian-nurses-working- Forget Indigenous communities Jayda Marley is a nineteen-year-old searchers, and frontline workers have tective Equipment (PPE);12 racialized PSWs with-covid-19-patients-demand- Forget it all nationally acclaimed Queer Afro- legal-right-to-wear-n95-masks. Indigenous spoken word poet, youth been “keeping watch” since the onset of publicly demanding that they not be activist, and community healer the pandemic, taking notes, and listening scapegoated for staffing shortages in long- 13 "Personal support worker speaks out Indigenous youth block railroad tracks on their own Land: from Tkaronto. She works with the to Black and racialized people on the front- term care;13 Black men in immigration after deadly outbreak," Community Healing Project and is a CityNews Toronto, April 16, 2020, youth facilitator and event organizer line who are forced to work without ad- detention centres and prisons initiating https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/ “Jail them,” with One Mic Educators and Develop equate protection from the virus. They hunger strikes to call attention to lack of 2020/04/16/personal-support-worker- “Burn them,” Me Youth Centre. As a former com- speaks-out-after-deadly-outbreak. peting poet, Jayda holds the first place have heard from Black families who have safety conditions.14 All of them insist on “Kill them,” national championship title of Voices been told to pay $500 to receive care in visible, liveable, and breathable lives. 14 Brittany Henriques, “Coronavirus: “End them like you tried to end their Ancestors,” of Today 2018. She is also the founder Four men continue hunger strike and creative director of the new open Ontario emergency departments6 and at immigration detention centre in “Run the trains straight through” mic series For the Queer Coloured they have documented daily threats of So living in and through this disaster that Laval,” Global News, March 28, 2020, Girls After Me. Whether you catch eviction and harassment by landlords.7 is COVID-19 there is the possibility of life https://globalnews.ca/news/ Jayda at an open mic around the city, 6746367/coronavirus-immigrants- You ignore the Indigenous youth who protect the Land we all benefit from or on bigger platforms such as Pride even as death may be imminent for many hunger-strike-laval. But flip society upside down when your people are becoming ill Toronto, Nuit Blanche, and even Defenders of Black life have also noted the Black, Indigenous, and racialized people. Parliament Hill, she is sure to captivate 15 Sharpe, In the Wake, 134. every crowd she touches with her effects of ongoing cuts to health care and In as much as we remain vulnerable to If our Land is sick we will never truly heal words. When she isn’t performing, she affordable housing; rising incarceration that overwhelming force which is death, Beverly Bain teaches at the Univer- There is no healing without clean water is waist-deep in a book or teaching sity of Toronto. She volunteered youth across Turtle Island how to rates; high unemployment; poverty, rac- “we are not only known to ourselves and this text in solidarity with TILTING There is no healing without clean air use their voices using spoken word ism, and gender discrimination; and in- each other by that force.”15 contributors and the Blackwood. There is no healing without Indigenous youth. and activism.
26 Lynn Hutchinson Lee, slaughter/ drown/ serve/ eat, 2015. Acrylic on wood panel. COURTESY THE ARTIST. Lynn Hutchinson Lee, precarious labour: cook/ harvest/ balance, 2015. Acrylic on wood panel. COURTESY THE ARTIST.
On Representing the Crisis: fitting considering the biblical proportion in service of permanent and automated cabbage and a rat garnished with lettuce. A Response to Metanoia of the events unfolding. (While moralizing control.1 In the central panel, we see the Equally grotesque are the anthropomor- Metanoia Laura Tibi narratives around the virus run rampant, figure of a woman of colour balancing phic dogs crawling in the far-left corner. we must remember it is a non-living being on a rope suspended above the sublime By injecting such surreal, repulsive imag- As the COVID-19 crisis lays bare capital- with no religious convictions or ethical backdrop of waterfalls—the artist’s per- es into a portrait of wealth and privilege, ism’s innate injustices and reliance on the commitments.) Formally and thematical- sonification of the precarious conditions Hutchinson Lee emphasizes the obsceni- Lynn Hutchinson Lee exploitation of enslaved peoples, immi- ly, Hutchinson Lee’s paintings are more of migrant workers throughout the Ni- ty of social inequality. When viewed next grants, prisoners, and undervalued work- reminiscent of the social realist style found agara region, and the disproportionate to precarious labour, it becomes clear that ers, I cannot help but wonder: What will in early- to mid- twentieth century Mex- effects of the current crisis on migrant the current crisis is part of a longstand- become of our society? Will our apathy ican murals—those of Diego Rivera and workers from across the Global South. ing economic, social, political, and envi- persist, or will the virus finally push us to José Clemente Orozco—than of religious ronmental problem that is endemic to take responsibility, acknowledge our role painting. Precarious labour: cook/ harvest/ If precarious labour represents the dan- capitalism. The subtle incorporation of as passive perpetrators, and become balance notably picks up on the motif of gers of working amid a pandemic, then pause and play buttons evokes questions critical, accountable citizens? Despite the the factory worker, much like Rivera’s slaughter/ drown/ serve/ eat points to its of historicity, temporality, and duration. nauseating bouts of performative activ- Detroit Industry mural, who toils at a never- political correlative: the longue durée of And while we all want to know when this ism and empty gestures of gratitude that ending assembly line to barely make ends overproduction and mass consumption. nightmare will end, what we really need the virus has unleashed, there seems to meet. But unlike the industrious, collab- In the latter tableau, the precarity of in- to consider is: How will we otherwise Lynn Hutchinson Lee is a Toronto- based multimedia artist. Her spoken be a resurgent commitment to issues of orative mood of Rivera’s rugged labour- dustrial work is framed as a distant, Oth- move forward? This may not be the last word Five Songs for Daddy was in class and solidarity gaining traction. Lynn ers, Hutchinson Lee’s workers are isolated ered place: always elsewhere and never pandemic we experience in our lifetimes, chirikli collective’s sound installation Hutchinson Lee’s paintings evocatively and detached, signifying what Karl Marx that which immediately concerns us. We but if we ever want to undo a system Canada Without Shadows at the Roma Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale, capture the shifting moral impulse of our referred to in Economic and Philosophical are instead supplied with an abstraction premised on centuries of violence and Italy; BAK, Utrecht, Netherlands; era by mobilizing a historical visual idiom Manuscripts of 1844 as Entfremdung or of labour through intentionally irrational injustice, we need, at the very least, to Romania’s National Museum of Contemporary Art; and Art Gallery to represent a contemporary problem. In capitalist alienation. The menacing pres- spaces and dizzying perspectival logics. implement more critical, tactical, and ac- of York University’s Audio Out. Her doing so, she reminds us that the crisis ence of overhead video surveillance re- The visual legibility and utopian promise tive approaches. We can begin this lengthy installation metanoia was exhibited at Hamilton’s Workers’ Arts and is not an empirically new phenomenon, minds us that, despite the isolation of of social realism is now supplanted by a but necessary process of unlearning, un- Heritage Centre. Selected writing but rather an explosive accumulation of Hutchinson Lee’s workers, they are not hellish Boschian dystopia complete with becoming, and undoing by representing 1 Michel Foucault, Discipline and appears in The Food of My People centuries of violence, dependency, and completely alone, but in observed seclu- flooded streets, floating pigs, and a dis- and understanding the crisis through and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. and CLI-FI: Canadian Tales of Climate Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Change (Exile Editions); Romani exploitation. sion. On the one hand, the cameras act turbing display of glut. What I find most against history. Books), 201–2. Women in Canada: Spectrum of the as a stand-in for supervision; on the oth- unsettling is the untouched feast in the Blue Water (Inanna); and Romani Laura Tibi is an art historian and Folio (Drunken Boat International The triptych composition she adopts, er, they represent a more generalized, central panel. Upon closer inspection, Community Engagement Assistant Journal of Literature and the Arts). typically found in altarpieces, is especially now exacerbated, panoptic surveillance we see a scorpion served on a bed of red at the Blackwood.
28 29 “the future is ritual”
shaina sarah isles evero fedelin agbayani
I suggest this as a revision to “the future herently harmonious and perfect ways During our time in Palawan, we visited epidemiology forgotten and systemically erased. With is vegan,” a sign I spotted in a café in in relation to one another, why do we mountain forests that have been signifi- the branch of medicine that deals with the COVID-19, it is being made evident how Puerto Princesa, Palawan, with my soul get sick? cantly impacted by palm tree extraction; incidence, distribution, and possible con- mass-industrialized and colonized food sister Andrea in mid-February just be- connected with a katutubo (Indigenous) trol of diseases and other factors relating systems enable habitat destruction and fore the COVID-19 crisis emerges in the As an immunocompromised pilipinx wom- Palaw’an community in the south; and to health. erase Indigenous knowledges and rela- Philippines. an of working-class upbringing navigating had the honour of experiencing rituals tions with traditional foods in the race to political science at McGill University, of connection to the spirits of the land, When I began reflecting more holistically prioritize profit over respect for biodiver- For five weeks, I journey with five pilipinx through seven years of both thriving and waters, and elements that were still on my autoimmune disorder, it dawned on sity, health, and well-being. sisters under divinely appointed numer- almost dropping out, there became no being maintained, allowing for humans me that my body was gifting me with teach- ological exactitudes with Ate J, a ritual- question for me that the imbalances, sick- to honour our covenants to the spirit ings about what was happening on mama ~ seven ~ ist-healer. What initially brought me to nesses, and inequities woven into our in- world, and to embody gratitude and Earth. Within biomedical understandings Reflecting on my own temporalities during her a month before was my own “sick- stitutions and systems—whether political, reciprocity in the way we harvest, hunt, of autoimmune disorders, immune cells this COVID-19 isolation, I am awed by the ness,” an autoimmune disorder that I had academic, socio-political, racial, hetero- live, and connect with medicines when attack the very tissues they are meant to reminders of sacred cycles of seven. Usher- been diagnosed with in my late teens patriarchal, governmental, or spiritual— we are sick. protect. They are unable to discern be- ing in my twenty-eighth year on this earth, and which, over the past several years, will surface in our bodies if we do not tween healthy cells and foreign invaders I have been gifted with teachings by my has blessed me with the enlightenment address them. As Taj Vitales, a member of the Facebook such as pathogens, bacteria, or viruses, sister Krysta and elder Nati on seven-year that can sometimes only come from suf- group “Anito: The Precolonial, Polytheis- creating a reactionary coping response life cycles of the spirit. Many of us have fering and the divinely ordained task of What crystallized for me while in Pala- tic Beliefs & Practices of the Philippines,” that treats all cells as invaders. received Indigenous teachings from the healing ourselves by remembering our wan is how many—or perhaps most— describes: Haudenosaunee on honouring seven gen- inner medicines. I met her after asking of us not born into Indigenous commu- The traumas enfolded in my flesh surfac- erations. Of particular salience to my heal- my dear friend Maria to connect me to nities have forgotten the rituals that pre- “Pag-anito/pagdiwata against illness- ing as autoimmune disorder were birthed ing journey are teachings gifted in relation a healer working with herbs and cosmol- serve divine harmony in all our relations. es are among the most common in the racialized, working-class, industrial- to our seven bodies, some of whom we ogies indigenous to our ancestral archi- Rituals—in planting, harvesting, or sac- rituals practiced by Pre-Hispanic in- ized conditions of food access that colo- can lose under certain conditions that pelago. rificing animals for nourishment, for digenous communities in the Philip- nialism and capitalism thrive on—that is, cause the weakening of our immune sys- example—create the time and space re- pines. The purpose of these is always access to food without connection to the tems. I had the honour of partaking in a Ate J is ordained to be of service through quired to consummate the divine cove- to appease the spirits or anitos/di- food’s rituals, stories, and lands. As I began ritual held by Ate J to call back my whole- embodying teachings received from a lin- nants we have made with creator and watas who are capable of bringing to understand how traumatized my body ness and alignment with all my selves and eage of Indigenous teachers in Pilipinas spirit worlds to honour balance and reci- illnesses to the community. For me was from ingesting foods carrying soul ancestors in a good way, thus strengthen- and directly from her diwatas, or spirit procity with all our relations on the earth- it’s always a reminder of remember- wounds from dispirited growing and har- ing the body’s immunity and capacity to 1 Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent guides. The baylan is one Visayan name for ly and other dimensional planes. They ing their presence, their role, and vesting practices, I also began to under- be protected against illness and harm. Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico, California: AK Press), this role, which also has many other names are the vessels through which harmony, their place in the society. In short, stand why, at times, almost anything I put This ritual has and continues to support 2017. within the more than 171 languages that balance, and reciprocity are embodied. don’t forget them.”2 in my body was causing me inflammation. my healing journey. exist across the several thousand islands Rituals not only ensure harmony and bal- I was experiencing even the most “clean” 2 Anito: The Precolonial, Polytheistic Beliefs & Practices of the Philippines, of the Philippines, bordered and named ance between creation and consump- Currently, Indigenous groups in the Cor- foods as triggering foreign invaders. As we move forward with our hearts open Facebook group, accessed March after King Philip of Spain. It happened to tion, but also serve as a placeholder for dillera region of northern Luzon alongside toward the next seven generations and the 2020, https://www.facebook.com/ be that at the time I met Ate J, she was relationships to the creative sources that other groups across the archipelago are All life carries sacred genealogies encoded countless sevens of generations whose groups/130806320595058/. guided to share teachings in particular nourish us. invoking traditional rituals to protect their with memories of ritual and reciprocity shoulders we stand on, I hope we can en- 3 Karlston Lapniten, “In a Philippine indigenous stronghold, traditions keep astrological and arithmetical conditions— communities against COVID-19.3 governed by systems of natural law. In In- vision a cosmology of care rooted in the COVID-19 at bay,” Mongabay, April 21, five women, five weeks, starting on the Institutionalizing the forgetting of these digenous traditions, foods such as dairy original instructions that honour spiritual 2020, https://news.mongabay.com/ new moon. rituals, through demonizing them and Levi Sucre Romero, a BriBri Indigenous and corn are harvested with specific rituals integrity through remembrance of all our 2020/04/in-a-philippine-indigenous- stronghold-traditions-keep-covid-19- dispossessing peoples from the land and person from Costa Rica and co-coordi- to honour the spirits of the food and the covenants with the spirit world. Remem- at-bay/. In my own journey of recognizing my Indigeneity, is necessary for capitalist- nator of the Mesoamerican Alliance of land. This nurtures their inherent medi- bering these covenants will be absolutely 4 Emilee Gilpin, “COVID-19 crisis tells body’s biodynamic relations as a micro- colonialist systems of accumulation to Peoples and Forests, notes, “In our com- cine. Cows are sacred in Ayurveda, where- vital as we continue to experience pan- world what Indigenous Peoples cosm of earthly and cosmological cycles, thrive. These systems of extractivism, munities, we have respected a certain in rituals of care in preparing ghee and demics and the inequitable biopolitical have been saying for thousands of years,” National Observer, March 25, a teaching continues to surface: healing where the Earth is treated as a labora- biodiversity that protects us today. We milk can make them medicinal. Mayan and distribution of power, life, and death that 2020. https://www.nationalobserver. individually and collectively inevitably tory for the purpose of endless accumu- plant what we eat, and we have the re- Haudenosaunee traditions and relations they reveal so rawly within “the broader com/2020/03/24/news/covid-19-crisis- entails returning to and respecting natu- lation, depend on industrializing ritual- sources and knowledge needed to get with corn are rooted in ancestral wisdoms virus of empire,” as named by pilipinx tells-world-what-indigenous-peoples- have-been-saying-thousands-years. ral law, the “original instructions” still less consumption. The rituals of baylans, through times like this, and this is what and processes of stewardship that are in- sister JL Umipig. articulated in Indigenous epistemologies and many other Indigenous ritualists we are trying to tell the rest of the herently intertwined with spirit. Tobacco sha(ina) sarah isles evero fedelin agbayani is a queer pilipinx co-creator (ways of knowing) that honour divinely throughout time and space, have been world.” is a sacred medicine in numerous Indige- May we be good death doulas to this era & steward of the greenhouse theatre perfect patterns—constellation systems— castigated as demonic savagery in order nous traditions. Yet these sacred beings of genocide and masculine colonial dom- of living arts. born in scarborough, siya is continually humbled by our of balance. Adrienne Maree Brown ar- to justify stealing land from uncivilized Says Romero, “The coronavirus reminds are often inflammatory for the immuno- ination. As these paradigms rot and col- responsibility to peaceably share and ticulates these divine patterns of self- peoples who need to be brought into us that the balance of the Earth is in dan- compromised after generations of their lapse, I pray that we revitalize the rituals to care for the lands around the Great organization in Emergent Strategy.1 Ob- modernity. As ritual-centred land tradi- ger, and we need to maintain our delicate preparation and usage shifting away from call our whole selves back to reciprocal Lakes as per the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Treaty. She is grateful to serving these patterns in our natural world, tions are threatened under capitalist- balance of diversity.” He adds, “More than original instructions of reciprocity, thus relations with the Earth, creator, and one be birthed on traditional territory of we devise strategies to survive and thrive colonialist industrialization, so become 25 per cent of medicine comes from for- creating the conditions for them to become another. May we remember all our rela- many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the in relation to our natural ecosystems. If locality, intimacy, equity, vitality, and ests. If we lose our forests, we lose our sources of sickness and addiction. In in tions in all directions of time and space Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and every cell and organism operates in in- reciprocity within our food systems. medicines, too.”4 dustrialized food systems, ritualistic care is in divine ritual. the Wendat peoples.
30 31 Video still from Migrant Dreams (Director: Min Sook Lee), 2016. COURTESY THE DIRECTOR. first campaign against recruitment fees New Heuristics back in 2008 was won—first for care Essential Work = Essential Worker: workers, then for migrant farm work- ers—through the radical merging of Jesse LeCavalier Will COVID-19 Force a Revaluation of Migrant Labour? two underrepresented workforce pop- ulations that shared a common goal. This highly collaborative ethos is stan- dard among many migrant-rights or- In 2018, the Maersk Venta was the first monocultural horizon as the outcome. ganizations and has proven to be a container ship to navigate the Northern Amazon relies on publicly funded infra- Emily Cadotte useful strategy in the past. In this mo- Sea Route. Receding ice driven by global structure as a way of externalizing many ment, the MWAC and the MRN are warming allowed the vessel to make the of its expenses, and yet it is benefiting mired in unknowns as they continue journey in almost half the time it would tremendously from governmental guide- to work with their communities in un- otherwise take. Supply chain managers lines that restrict the public from using Canada consistently relies on migrant la- ment of family members to Canada. are the bare minimum in order to rem- precedented circumstances. Through and shipping conglomerates rejoiced. that same infrastructure. bour for two vital employment sectors: edy this unjust treatment. The recent shared resources and networked ap- care work and food production. Accord- In the absence of these measures, alter- COVID-19 outbreak in a Kelowna, British proaches, they remain hopeful that all In 2020, supply chain managers and ship- How can we find ways to hold Amazon ing to the federal government, migrant native recommendations include open or Columbia, nursery, where sixty-three non-residents will emerge from this ping conglomerates braced themselves and related companies accountable in sit- work is considered temporary. In practice, occupation-specific work permits that temporary foreign workers and twelve crisis with stronger protections for their for the consequences of a global demand uations like these? Advocating for neces- however, it is a permanent fixture of the would allow workers the freedom to seek local workers were exposed to the virus, dignity and safety, using this critical shock as images of empty shelves trig- sary protection and support of their work- labour market. Canada’s Seasonal Agri- work from another employer should they will likely not be the last agricultural work- moment as a flashpoint to reimagine a gered panicked hoarding. The general ers is a crucial starting point, and I think it culture Worker Program (SAWP) has been need to leave a hostile or abusive work en- place to be infected due to substandard future where those providing essential public, suddenly and jarringly, was con- can extend into larger measures that con- partnering with Mexico and several Ca- vironment (currently workers must seek living quarters.3 Migrant workers are al- work are themselves deemed essential. fronted with the realities of the actual sider the conditions that allowed Amazon ribbean countries for more than fifty years, permission from their current employer ready at greater health risks due to sys- existing supply chain and the brittle work- to exist in the first place. In other words, with the farming season lasting up to eight to leave their post and find work else- temic racism, precarious immigration ings of the logistics industry. Significantly, the logistics industry in its current situa- months and most workers returning to where, which MWAC likens to indentured status, and limited access to healthcare. as has been said in other parts of this pub- tion will not rescue us, because it is a di- the same farm year after year. Care work- labour). Many of these recommendations In some of the federal migrant labour pro- lication and elsewhere, precarious forms rect outcome of the same world-system ers, usually arriving from Southeast Asian would ensure proper healthcare for mi- grams, temporary seasonal workers are of logistical labor are at last getting more as COVID-19. Furthermore, averting the countries such as the Philippines, often grant workers, and thus mitigate the larger ineligible for healthcare until having worked recognition—both as heroic forms of es- crisis of a global pandemic does little to work weeks without days off and dedicate public health emergency.1 in the country for three months. These sential service and as an increasingly vis- address the crisis of climate change— years of physical and emotional labour to risks are further exacerbated during a Min Sook Lee (previous spread) is ible and powerful bloc. Such coverage one that the logistics industry is actively the families they care for. This labour is The COVID-19 crisis is fundamentally af- global pandemic—granting permanent an Assistant Professor at OCAD Uni- has also drawn attention to the physical, accelerating. One of our tasks ought to essential, not only to the Canadian econ- fecting both major migrant-driven work resident status upon arrival could allevi- versity, with a research and practice spatial, and environmental aspects of lo- be a search for heuristic tools that help focus on the critical intersections omy, but also to Canadian public health. sectors (agriculture and child/elder care). ate many of them. of art and social change in labour, gistics—how and where logistics takes us develop models of territoriality, affili- Many care workers, due to bureaucratic border politics, migration and social place. The logistics industry has a general ation, and determination outside of the justice movements. Lee’s most The Migrant Workers Alliance for Change challenges around acquiring proper doc- The MWAC also acts as the secretariat recent feature, Migrant Dreams tells allergy to the modern city of congestion, epistemological conditions responsible (MWAC) acknowledges migrant work as umentation, work under the table—as and coordinating body to the Migrant the under-told story of migrant adjacency, and collectivity, and instead for our current crises. workers in Canada. In 2017, Migrant essential and seeks fair treatment for the such they have no labour protections and Rights Network (MRN; established in 2018) Dreams was awarded Best Labour privileges control, predictability, measure- essential workers who provide it. The are ineligible for government supports whose expanded scope includes all non- Documentary by the Canadian ment, and division. Corporate logistics MWAC was established in 2008 in a joint such as Employment Insurance (EI) and permanent residents. The MRN’s mem- Journalists Association, and garnered produces an over-specified version of the the prestigious Canadian Hillman campaign to end recruitment fees for care the Canada Emergency Response Benefit, bership is now approaching fifty groups Prize which honours journalists world that dreams of isolated consumers workers and migrant farm workers, who but are nonetheless being asked to leave nationwide, and it has collectively released whose work identifies important and leaves as little room for chance as pos- were seen at the time as disparate groups. their positions unpaid as employers are new priorities in light of the current ep- social and economic issues in Canada. sible. In other words, logistics has been The alliance is a democratic coalition of mandated to work from home. These are idemic: healthcare for all, regardless of 1 At time of writing, the Government priming large portions of the population of Canada has suggested temporary self-organized migrants and has grown workers who provide essential care to immigration status; worker protection foreign workers should receive for quarantine conditions for years. to be associated with more than twenty Canadians every day, but now find they from reprisal of taking time off, and access medical coverage equivalent to activist agencies and service providers are unable to care for their financial— to government emergency benefits; an residents of Canada. See item #8 The exposure of the logistics industry dur- in “Frequently asked questions: working in and across the Greater Toronto and therefore mental and physical—well- immediate moratorium on detentions and Changes to the Temporary Foreign ing the current global pandemic triggers Area and Ontario. Their team of five staff being. The irony here is palpable, as the deportations; support for the community Worker program regarding an urgent reckoning with governmental- COVID-19,” https://www.canada.ca/ each specialize in the needs of different essentialness of the work is not made via unfettered access to social supports en/employment-social-development/ ity and the spatial dimensions that under- migrant-driven sectors, including care commensurate with the essentialness of like food banks; and the belief that “those services/foreign-workers/employer- pin it. Approaches to security, territory, workers, seasonal farm workers, and the worker, who continues to face severe who know, lead”: migrant-led organiza- compliance/covid-faq.html and population—concepts central to lo- migrant students. policing and is denied the prospect of tions and communities know what is best 2 Sara Mojtehedzadeh, “Migrant gistics–demand to be reconsidered in citizenship. for them, and policy makers should look farm workers from Jamaica are light of the current failures of the nation as being forced to sign COVID-19 The MWAC prioritizes two branches of to these groups in legislating. Their net- waivers,” Toronto Star, April 13, 2020, political and geographic concept. Main- collective organizing: first, the coordina- Seasonal farm workers make contribu- worked approach to organizing empow- https://www.thestar.com/business/ stream media coverage of government 2020/04/13/migrant-farm-workers- tion of policy proposals and campaign tions to EI but are often ineligible for it. ers each group to be autonomous in its fear-exposure-to-covid-19.html response to logistics-industry pressures development; and second, training and This season, migrant farm workers are decision-making and informed by local tends to frame the issue as a matter of resources, including “know your rights” asked by the Canadian government to communities, while also allowing for a 3 Nick Eagland, “COVID-19: Kelowna economic recovery (“when can we re- nursery outbreak likely won't be materials and legal supports that advo- self-isolate upon arrival for a paid period united front in efforts to lobby Canadian last for migrant workers, advocates open?”) versus public health (“how long cate self-organizing among migrant work- of fourteen days, measures that farmers legislators. Hussan explains that central warn,” Vancouver Sun, April 2, 2020, can we stay closed?”). Only rarely are the https://vancouversun.com/news/ ers. In spring 2019 the group led the pro- will receive a government benefit for. to MWAC’s structure is the democratic local-news/covid-19-kelowna- underpinning assumptions of this binary duction of a comprehensive policy pro- However, many of the accommodations participation of the workers the group nursery-outbreak-likely-wont-be- questioned. When public health and eco- last-for-migrant-workers-advocates- posal, co-signed by several Canadian ad- workers are put up in do not allow for represents.4 He likens the organization warn/. nomic well-being are seen as mutually vocacy groups from Prince Edward Island’s suitable social distancing. While some to a union, where each local can deter- exclusive, one might be prompted to ques- FCJ Refugee Centre to Okanagan’s Sanc- employers are explicitly heeding the gov- mine effective strategies for their own 4 Syed Hussan, Email conversation tion the conditions that gave rise to and with author, April 21, 2020. tuary Health. The proposal’s recommen- ernment’s calls for isolation, others are workplaces—structures that he says are perpetuate such a situation. The logistics dations are ambitious but grounded in the expecting workers to begin the season prevalent in the Global South. Emily Cadotte has worked as an industry, one hand, has been waiting for arts administrator at C Magazine, knowledge and experience of the work- immediately upon arrival, informing their Blackwood Gallery, and the Thames this moment. Amazon’s stock value has ers the agency supports. MWAC seeks employees that they will owe for this pe- Migrant work touches many facets of the Art Gallery. She is a masters increased almost thirty percent, partly as candidate at OCAD University and permanent resident status for all migrant riod later on.2 Canadian economy, from the fruit belts completed her BFA at Concordia a reflection of the company’s infrastruc- workers upon arrival, citing the classist of the Okanagan Valley and Niagara to University. Emily’s current research tural disposition and its ability to operate National Occupation Classification (NOC) In the Toronto Star, MWAC executive di- affluent homes in Calgary, Montreal, or investigates the internal bureaucra- under social-distancing regulations. Any cies of art institutions and their system, which grants such status to high- rector Syed Hussan reacted to these un- Toronto. In spite of its ubiquity, most mi- impact on cultural production within number of predatory ventures of the gig ly educated migrants. Permanent resi- fair expectations and illegal practices by grant workers face tiered notions of resi- the Canadian context. She has economy are also thriving in this context Jesse LeCavalier teaches at the presented at conferences at OCAD University of Toronto. He volunteered dency upon arrival allows for immediate employers, stating that permanent resi- dency, with possibilities for citizenship be- University, and published reviews but, like Amazon, they succeed at the ex- this text in solidarity with TILTING access to healthcare and the accompani- dences and a national housing standard coming increasingly scarce. The MWAC’s in Canadian Art. pense of economic diversity and with a contributors and the Blackwood.
34 35 Gian Cruz, (séro)TROPICAL(e)_n°4, 2018. Inkjet print on cotton paper. COURTESY THE ARTIST. Gian Cruz, (séro)TROPICAL(e)_n°9, 2018. Inkjet print on cotton paper. COURTESY THE ARTIST. (séro)TROPICAL(e)
Gian Cruz
Gian Cruz’s (séro)TROPICAL(e) series ne- to waves of disease. At once, coloniza- lates, “By comparing COVID-19 to AIDS, gotiates the tropics as a potent site of tion uprooted pre-colonial social sys- people are finding a way to work out their resistance: against colonial exploitation tems—where societies were governed emerging fears regarding the present of land and bodies, and the naturalization by babaylans or shamans that could be health scare as well as to deal with on- of cissexism and heterosexuality. Cruz’s male, female, gay, or trans—overwriting going HIV-related trauma.”2 While many images, imagined as atypical and perfor- traditional understandings of gender and comparisons between COVID-19 and the 1 Following the work of Colombian mative self-portraits of the artist in rela- sexuality with Western ones. In the con- HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s are be- transgender biologist Brigitte L. G. tion to surpassing AIDS-related health text of both contemporary and histori- ing made today, these narratives often Baptiste. complications in early 2015, picture the cal pandemics and rising anti-Asian rac- ignore the persistence of the AIDS crisis 2 Theodore Kerr, “How to Live With intersections of the bodily, the viral, and ism, Cruz reflects on the viral disease’s beyond a Euro-American context—in- a Virus: The COVID-19 pandemic becomes a part of our ongoing the ecological. In so doing, they render lack of inherent meaning or intention. cluding its emergence as a pandemic in understanding of HIV,” POZ, March HIV/AIDS narratives visible in the context Rather, a virus’s human contexts and their the Philippines. Cruz asks: How might 23, 2020, https://www.poz.com/ of contemporary Southeast Asian art conditions of social inclusion and exclu- we confront unresolved traumas from article/live-virus. (specifically in the Philippines), while con- sion ascribe meaning to it and advance ever-multiplying pandemics that farcically Gian Cruz, born in Manila, the tending with the emergence of pandem- its dangerous potential. alter the quotidian? (séro)TROPICAL(e) Philippines, is an emerging artist whose artistic practice is heavily ics as colonial phenomena driven by nat- begins to find an answer by attending to rooted in photography and integrates ural resource extraction and the erasure How might the tropics then emerge not the peripheries of queer identity and his institutional work and back- ground in art theory and criticism. of Indigenous traditions. Cruz’s work only in resistance to colonial sexual ide- queer struggle. In doing so, Cruz visual- Cruz’s work is central to the volatility evokes the reverberating and persistent ologies, but also as alternatives to Occi- izes tropicality as an elsewhere—not a of the image in contemporary culture and the multiple discourses ecologies of infectious disease in the dental terminologies and lexicons of queer- romantic escape or a search for a univer- that come along with it. He often Philippines throughout the Spanish co- ness? (séro)TROPICAL(e) offers decolonial salizing redefinition of queerness, but a extends his photographic work lonial era, where increased maritime trade, queer ecologies1 as a way to both carve site for situated knowledges about fluid toward a more complex, multidis- ciplinary orientation integrating destruction and disruption of vital eco- out regionally specific queer imaginaries, and non-binary perceptions of gender. performance, translation, history, systems via colonial agricultural policies, and to face the non-linear trauma of the More than this, (séro)TROPICAL(e) imag- literature, ecology, cinema, HIV/AIDS activism, and several other fields and military intervention in food systems HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 pandemics. As ines a site for future elsewheres beyond and contexts that engage with his rendered Filipinx populations vulnerable artist and writer Theodore Kerr articu- Capitalocene ideologies. current preoccupations as an artist.
36 37 Gian Cruz, (séro)TROPICAL(e)_n°5, 2018. Inkjet print on cotton paper. COURTESY THE ARTIST.