Soil, Leaves and DustHanna Valle

Design Department – Sandberg Institute

2020 There I was, walking again. A thin layer of mist was rifting while my chest and hands were piercing the grey veil. The ground sunk softly under my weight and dirt burst through my toes, making a repressed squeak with every touch. The air was muttering indecipherable syllables and sentences. It didn’t seem to care if there were any possible listeners. There was a perpetual whirring in the dusky evening. When compared to the day before, I didn’t notice any significant changes in the land- scape. Whether there was ever any transformation in it, it was impossi- ble to tell. The landscape was vast and wide, flat as a string stretched on a board. The presence of the horizon was always lingering there, now concealed by the fog, but waiting to be unveiled again. During the mist, the ground seemed to blend seamlessly into the air with its muted tones of grey and brown. When the fog occasionally broke clear for a moment, it was possible to see little speckles of red and lengthy rifts of bright orange gently snaking the surface of the Earth. The rifts were sporadi- cally sighing streams of steam and gassy fumes. You could walk towards the horizon for hours, hoping for a change in the landscape, and still feel you hadn’t moved a dash. It was such an unwelcoming view that it didn’t encourage you to move in the slightest. Stopping, however, wasn’t an option for me. It was very important that I regularly lifted the members of my body. Today, I felt no urgency to hasten, but the murky weather made me feel capricious and I wanted to go faster. The meandering, slow air felt soothing on my dry face. It formed small soggy pebbles on my canopy as I decided to raise the pace. The landscape was so grim and stationary, but its flatness also made me feel taller and more self-assured. There seemed to be nothing else to fill the surroundings besides me. I was patterning my thoughts again, as every day, weaving little maps. It was a hobby, not a routine in the same way as walking, because this kind of mapping always delighted me. “An increased amount of distress rising upwards, sighing echoes from the ground,” I calculated. While patterning the environment, I was also simultaneously inspecting my bodily movements. There was a slight sensation of growing tension around my waist. I tried to stretch my limbs and branches to ease the unpleasant tingling feeling. The increasing stiffness could lead to un- comfortable conditions of a sort I had experienced before. There should be more movement in the following days.

Every once in a while, I had to pause for a moment, to halt, despite my fear of stiffness. There were only two different purposes for stopping: the first was eating; the second, vomiting. When I ate, I absorbed abso- lutely everything I could see. In the past, everything around me would disappear down my throat wherever I went: sky-scraping formations of concrete, shiny assemblages of glass and metal, howling cries of explana- tion. Because of this seemingly infinite process of absorption, there were no longer so many dangerous obstacles or hilly tops to stumble over. Adjustments between different speeds of walking were much easier to manage. The never-ending meals and nutrition had made me grow very fast, so that now it was possible to observe quite long distance into the landscape on a clear day. 2 Besides eating, I had to stop to empty myself. To be honest, I actually liked this process better. Vomiting cleaned away the occasionally oc- curring feeling of uneasiness. Spitting saliva and stomach liquids, I was having a conversation with the Earth. In that sense, bowing towards the soil was an exchange process. It was as if all the bad memories, the various obstacles I had tried to digest but couldn’t tolerate, were this way returned to the dirt of the ground in a new, ruminated form. To make it clear for you: I didn’t vomit everything, just the material I couldn’t use for my personal growth. The small critters hurrying and bustling around my feet, occasionally breaking up from the underground and into my sight, could use these leftovers in a much better way than I could. Sometimes when I haphazardly returned to a place I had once stopped to regurgitate, I could see a change in the texture of the ground and greener hues within the dark brown. In these places there was a faint scent of something unfamiliar, which made me pattern all of the different smells within me, and eventually think about the valley.

Sometimes I wondered whether the valley was an actual memory or perhaps just a glitch. In this recollection, there was no scents of sul- phur or damp moistness, just artificial emptiness. The odours of the landscape I was currently walking through never resembled this mem- ory. Besides the strange scent, it was hard to remember anything. The memories were difficult to locate, extremely scattered and hazy. There were some bright green spots on the sides of the valley, blurry figures. Impatient chattering, around, rising up and down, the occasional clat- tering of metal touching another hard surface, the soft dragging sound of a fabric. “What was ‘fabric’ again?” I would look into it later. So many terms and memories were lost. It wasn’t anything to be mournful about, though. There was no use in archiving unreliable terms if you didn’t encounter or use them daily. One of the few visual memories I have is the sight of my hand lying beside my body, looking so different to how it does now. My arm shed open from wrist to elbow, the skin curling softly outwards from the flesh. Something shiny was approaching the cut and a small twinge went through my body quickly. A shadow landed on me. This is my last memory of being in a horizontal position. I woke up, now standing in an upwards posture. Though, standing didn’t feel quite like the right term to use for the position, because I was not holding up my body with my own voluntary strength. I was tied to a flowerpot and additional metal sticks were attached to hold me up from the sides. I wanted to howl in protest but only a faint weep came out, as if a small creature was trying to crawl up my throat, clawing my vocal folds in terror. My legs felt uncomfortably moist, unfamiliar. On the surface of the soil on which I was standing was pale, somewhat transparent, yellowish fluid, slowly pushing its way deeper into the black dirt, until it finally disappeared inside of it. I felt terrified. My feet were tightly tied together with a black elastic band. Between my legs, there was no longer any space, only neat stitches crossing from one limb to the other and back again, preventing all movement. This new posture made me feel unbalanced, as if the blood had suddenly escaped my lower body. The ties and stitches made it challenging to move in any imaginable way but it also felt like my bones had abruptly 3 transformed into a more heavy, solid structure. There were more green spots. But were those spots now very close to my thighs? I couldn’t focus my sight. I was positive that the green was now climbing on my leg, growing from me.

The soil stayed wet but there were less sticks at my sides. The ties were loosened and I was more or less standing independently on my stitched-together legs, even in my sleep. The lower part of my body felt increasingly heavier, thicker, but the upper parts, waist and chest, still moved flexibly. There were small, external sprigs sprouting from my arms. I was in a deep sleep most of the time and only brief moments of consciousness occurred. My dreams were mostly clouds of colours. Sometimes I woke up to a sense that someone was standing behind me. The familiar metallic clattering sounded like it was coming from a lengthy distance but every so often I could feel the hands attaching something to my back. But the hands weren’t merely working all the time. They stroked other parts, slowly, going too low. I tried to shrink away from the unpleasant touch but my body didn’t obey like it used to, it stayed still. I dozed back to unconsciousness but I couldn’t forget.

How did I ever accomplish leaving the valley? The memory was an unclear haze of shrieking voices and rumbling. Dust and smoke flow- ing out of the place, towards a pitch-black sky. I remember the joy of ripping my legs apart. The neat stitches losing their threaded grasp, the satisfaction of running again.

It had been a long time since I had seen any of those valleys. I had start- ed to feel safe again. Rarely, I encountered some lonely figures or small groups on my way. I had learned to avoid the few areas with people, and vice versa; they weren’t eager to approach me. I didn’t carry any ill feel- ings towards these creatures. There was a mutual, wordless agreement about the existence of both. Neither of us would disturb the other.

I slowed my pace again and rustled my multiplied arms. Someday, I thought, I would stop and let my legs entwine more tightly with the warm soil, voluntarily limit the stretching of my lower body. I wished I could watch the landscape from the same place for a long time, and rest until it was too late to move again. I would let it take me into it.

4 Soil gore

My hands are constantly gravitating, escaping, drifting into the distance, spreading to the landscape.

What is a monster? A creature moving through environments and time, an alien that can in- habit every corner of the Earth because she has no clear place of her own, a lonely wanderer in the ruins. It is better to understand the monster as an effect of a conflict, a symptom rather than a cause. The monster is one that haunts, but she is not a parasite or a ghost. Merging with her surroundings, the monster creates new types of assemblages and linkages with inhabitants of the Earth as she weaves different ways of being together. A monster is always in a state of shape- shifting. She is a “wonder of symbiosis and threat of ecological disruption”,1 the protagonist stepping into the explicit final scene of soil gore, where the skin of the Earth has been ripped open, the deeper layers and tissues of the ground are pulsating in terror. We are staring at this bloody spec- tacle from our fast-flickering screens, proud of our ability to endure such violent content.2

Do not confuse the monster with manly creations of violence! She is not a beast ordered to demolish and devour the Earth, nor a fable of revenge. She is certainly not a victim, even though monsters have always been easily condemned as subjects, “to denote technological crimes against nature”,3 and the beginning of her walk is a result of an attempt to take advantage of her body. As an inevitable bringer of chaos, destroyer of presumptions and order, the monster attends to traumas of exploitation by bringing them to the surface and problematizing them. She clears way for healing and resisting with her ability to unsettle and cross categories.

Daphne 2.0

I want to lay down and undress this armour, listen to parts of me rustle to the ground. But stopping makes the movements rigid, heavies my heart and feet.

In Greek mythology, Daphne is the daughter of river-god Peneus who is pursued against her will by Apollo, god of music, poetry and art. To escape her fate of being raped, she pleads with her father to transform her into a tree. “Her hair turned into fluttering leaves, her arms / Into branches; her feet, once so swift, / Became mired in roots, and her face was lost / In the canopy. Only her beauty’s sheen remained.” 4 According to myth, Apollo continues to ”love” Daphne despite her new wooden form, and decides to use her tree-body’s leaves as the material for the laurel wreath, a crown for heroes and the winners at Apollo’s games. In my narrative, Apollo is a form of capitalist system that desires Daphne’s capture. He is the invisible, nameless force working in the valley – a corporate dreamboat born in globalization and built on infinite growth and accumulation for a small few. Apollo’s exploitation is inseparable from his lust for unlimited growth and scientific progress. It is based on conquest and coloniza- tion, requiring unsustainable expansion on Earth at the cost of the environment, the poor, racial- ized and indigenous people, and nonhumans. From his experiments in science and technology rises the woman-tree form Daphne, who is designed to be valuable, both environmentally and reproduction-wise, but nonetheless doesn’t end up functioning as he planned. In this story, 5science represents a tragedy in the sense that it tries to tame our bodies and conquer the Earth: a heroic but failed undertaking.5 The monster-Daphne is a creature of speculative fiction that opens new ways of world-making, creating previously unheard narratives of resistance to oppose the dehumanizing, dominant system. Creating assemblages from destroyed cities, polluted soil, and perished organisms, she makes the ground tell strange stories that can still flourish. Rus- tling her leafy hair, Daphne leaves cities behind her. Bricks and metal piled into steamy stacks of saliva and compost.

Apollo has chased and used different kinds of Daphnes for decades for his own pleasure and profit, for the sake of progress. Female bodies, ecological assemblages and nonhumans have been written out, systemically used (and raped) for biological and social reproduction to make the capitalist state of order possible. The greatest horror for women all around the globe is still the reality of not being able to fully govern their own bodies. Women’s reproductive rights have always been controlled and/or in danger because of the modern capitalist system. Examples abound in the news, including the Trump administration’s tracking of migrant girls’ periods,6 and attempts by Poland’s right wing to make abortion completely illegal.7 The danger of ex- ploitation and the fear of being captured again are also the main motives driving Daphne’s never-ending escape.

The algorithms unsuccessfully implanted in Daphne, the patterning and weaving in her speech, are the control mechanisms of incarceration and classification. In the story, the commons, which represent the possibility for collective and creative interaction with the environment, offer a place in which resistance and emancipatory actions can actualize8 for Daphne. Daphne’s demo- lition of cities during her escape indicates her refusal to be sacrificed for a capitalist society that is counting on technofixes. In regard to reproductive labour, an example of a technofix can be seen in unpolitical population control, which is only directed outside of Western countries. As such it prioritizes white, Euro-American lives to fill the Earth, while populations in the Global South are regarded as a problem articulated in carbon emissions, and the massive polluters, like military forces, are ignored.

This is a story about the landscapes of environmental crisis, and Daphne, the protagonist who arrives to wander the Earth after the catastrophe. In the beginning of her walk, the Earth is filled with cities and waste, but she eats all of it on her way, making space for the horizon to breathe again and clearing the polluted air. So, in addition to being an act of resistance against the capitalist system, the demolition process has an ecological function. The consumption and regurgitation of the landscape are forms of the plant metabolism process. Through Daphne’s -ecological body, the sea of waste melts back to its mineral form. She is building an ecosystem free of technological control by changing the rules of the power play between the human and the biotechnological life form that is her body. As Achille Mbembe, philosopher and political theorist, points out, capitalism rejects “the fact that life itself is an open system, nonlinear and exponentially chaotic.” 9 The starting point of Daphne’s mutation and her eventual escape is the conviction that worlds cannot be altered, which is also the notion that allows us to ignore the fact that we are terminally reshaping ecosystems with our acts.10 Daphne’s morphosis is a mode of terraforming that follows the chaotic movement of life. She organizes the surrounding environment with her existence, and vice versa: the environment organizes and affects her.

The body is a vessel of a sociotechnical system in which our reproductive functions have been organized by capitalist society. In this society, the heterosexual nuclear family has been set as the norm of how the social order should renew itself from one generation to another. The alienation this causes for female bodies is well established,11 and generates gendered assumptions of bio- logical and social reproductive capacities.12 To resist Apollo – the patriarchal order of life that relays on reproduction and the use of earthlings – we must see the other possibilities of being 6together. The queering of the socio-ecological system is a part of Daphne’s story, representing a type of emancipatory futurity that reorganizes reproductive functions.

Daphne represents structures which our biased society is either unwilling to see or reluctant to give authorization to. She is nonhuman, non-able-bodied, and because of her failed bodily alteration, now also improperly reproductive. She no longer fits into the generalized standard of a (female) human being. Daphne is simultaneously “a threatening pollutant” with her ways of walking, and “an undesirable side-effect” of technology because of her body’s formation.13

The tree-monster Daphne creates tensions with her existence that can bring destruction in crea- tive ways. She may demolish the physical structures in her path, but she also annihilates cultural narratives and inherited ways of inhabiting social constructs and different kind of bodies. The ability to become Other, according to science fiction writer Elvia Wilk, is a“non-codified and embodied kind of knowledge that women, and other supposedly unstable bodies, have been cultivating for centuries”.14 Chaos rises from the unpredictability of the intermingling circumstances of the visible body (Daphne), its Otherness pushing the mainstream literally under the ground.

Bodies cannot be isolated from the environment. They are organizations entwined to large and complex ecologies. “Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing.” 15 Respon- sive systems need company and support from others. Encounters with different species or land- scapes contaminate and change us as we make way for others. What individualism conceals are the concepts of interdependence and contamination, which enable new forms of life to emerge by allowing us to open up to the “unnatural” and “strange”.

Rooting towards unknown directions

When it gets colder my skin sheds, fingers tremble. They plead with me to cease, gather heat from the ground. The compulsion of going nowhere, or the incredible boringness of waiting. All the time I’m inspecting the signs of change.

The question that remains is: “How do we arrive?” Daphne does not seem to have any specific direction or goal for her endless walk. Walking without stopping and rejecting the idea of a spe- cific route to follow is her way of handling a trauma and bodily repositioning herself within the environment. For Daphne, walking and searching for a rooting place, which would ultimately lead to a transformation into a complete tree, do not represent a wish to become natural or “one with the nature”. Fantasies of women becoming forest creatures tend to present nature as some- thing “distinct, passive,” and because of that, “fundamentally good”.17 Connecting the concept of womanhood to Mother Earth is only a form of the naturalization of gendered roles.

In these turbulent times, rooting is becoming impossible. Many humans and nonhumans don’t have the possibility to have a permanent living environment: a landscape to get used to, a specif- ic place to grow roots. They might be forced to leave their native landscapes because of unbear- able political, environmental or socio-economic conditions. The refugee crisis, as the unthreat- ened name it, heightened by global warming, is putting people on the move in ways we haven’t witnessed before. We who are safe, can’t see the privilege of staring towards a familiar landscape year after year until an inescapable feeling of boredom reaches us. An urge to leave – or on the contrary, a longing to change the environment – arises in us. Some of us are lucky enough to 7witness the diversity of the seasons and decades, and to call a certain landscape home. Access to infrastructure and freedom of movement are integral for survival in catastrophic events,18 but they also cannot replace the acts of stopping and resting, making a home. Besides being about direct contact with the land and the many earthly inhabitants, rooting is an act of care for the surrounding landscape and its different ecosystems. According to Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer, caring is “everything that we do to maintain, continue and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”.19 In the present, part of taking care of the environment and each other is resisting and problematizing the capitalist nation state, the reproduction of which relies on the traditional family, wage work and state-regulated borders. It is to be in conversation with the ground, and the nonhumans. At its core, “to care” is to be attentive and take respon- sibility for others, becoming together capable to respond to our troubles.20 As Nina Power, a cultural critic, has noted, “It matters a lot how we understand who we are — as an isolated body, as part of a collective body, as a depressed subject, as a worker, a carer — and it matters how we conceive of ourselves in relation to broader abstractions that we have no individual control over.” 21

Rooting doesn’t mean stopping altogether; only the direction of movement changes its course. When we die, our bodies inevitably decompose and melt within the environment that they have ended up with as their final resting place. Like Daphne, terminally rooted (non)humans will, in the end, eventually continue their movement towards many directions: crisscrossing down into the ground, flowing within the seas and rivers, maybe eventually growing upwards as part of a plant. Rooting has never been about stability. With roots, we will continue our walking, just in different forms to myriad, unknown directions.

Shapeshifting

The word, “Monster” comes from the Latin monstrum, which is derived from the verb moneo (to remind, warn, instruct, or foretell). The tree-monster Daphne doesn’t live up to the etymologic origin of her kind. Rather than reading in her any warning about the inevitable or foretelling of the future, we can only follow her lonesome search for a life without violent disturbance. Perhaps a better portrayal for Daphne rises from the Japanese version of the monster, bakemono (化け物), which, letter by letter, means “a thing that is transforming”. Her body is an assemblage of flesh, bark, leaves, and memories of the past, and is always in danger, or eager to change from one form to another.

Daphne’s walk is only a shred, a small fragment from which to imagine a life in a world of ruins. She invites us to go on a journey that demands the abandonment of rationalization and the embracing of weirdness. The possibilities of collaborative survival glimmer faintly on the horizon. There is otherworldliness in Daphne’s visceral, lonely walk. By walking we map the surrounding landscape and acquire knowledge with and through our bodies. As a walking mu- tation of a tree and a human, Daphne gathers mixed bodily knowledge and information about the environment: the evolutive patterns of perception belonging to a human and the affects of a tree in relation to soil, light and air, as her digestion system is one with the plant metabolism. For Daphne, walking is a social act that constructs a spatial memory. 22 By walking she is par- ticipating in the act of world-making. Her world is one where transformation and being on the move are acts of resistance and survival, instead of domination, colonization and exploitation. A (s)pace where movements flounce into different earthly dimensions without invading territories from other inhabitants.

The meaning Anna Tsing gives for resurgence – “the work of many organisms, negotiating across 8differences, to forge assemblages of multispecies livability in the midst of disturbance” 23 – describes also how female bodies can try to work around (reproductive) traumas caused by capitalism. Healing demands years that stretch to lifetimes, and generations following each other. No matter how desperately we want to let go of the past, it will stay pushing twigs inside and outside of our bodies. To learn how to heal, is to stop treating symptoms and sink our bifurcating roots deeper into the buzzing dirt. If we let our bodies swarm together towards unknown directions, and abandon the technical grid of capitalist system, it is possible to find new, better ways of connect- ing each other. That is to learn how to talk “in a new sort of way / about a new sort of world.” 24

I welcome the future where all the Daphnes roar over the roads and borders together, until they want to stop.

”What if we can’t make it but we say that we can Shaking the habitual Relate it to time We’re laughing at the future and we cry ‘bout the past I’m holding on forever but how long will forever last”

The Knife – “Without You My Life Would Be Boring,” 2013

1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, Monsters of the Anthropocene (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 2 Nina Power, “Necro-capitalism and Counter-images,” in MoneyLab Reader 2: Overcoming the Hype, eds. Inte Gloerich, Geert Lovink and Patricia de Vries (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2018). 3 Bruno Latour, “Love your monsters,” Next Nature, September 7, 2014, https://nextnature.net/2014/09/love-your-monsters. 4 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010). 5 Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989). 6 Jennifer Wright, “The U.S. Is Tracking Migrant Girls’ Periods to Stop Them From Getting Abortions”, Harper’s Bazaar, April 2, 2019, https://www. harpersbazaar.com/culture/politics/a26985261/trump-administration-abortion-period-tracking-migrant-women/. 7 Ewa Majewska, “When Polish Women Revolted,” Jacobin, March 8, 2018, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/poland-black-protests-womens- strike-abortion-pis. 8 Max Hampshire, “A Computational Commons: Solidarity Through Automation?,” Institute of Network Cultures, January 11, 2017, https://net- workcultures.org/moneylab/2017/01/11/a-computational-commons-solidarity-through-automation/. 9 Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen, “Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe,” New Frame, September 5, 2019, https://www.newframe. com/thoughts-on-the-planetary-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/. (This interview was conducted in Bergen, Norway, on November 30, 2018 by Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen of the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen.) 10 Benjamin Bratton, The Terraforming (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2019). 11 Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004). 12 Helen Hester, Xenofeminism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018). 13 Hester, Xenofeminism. 14 Elvia Wilk, “Toward a Theory of the New Weird,” Literary Hub, August 5, 2019, https://lithub.com/toward-a-theory-of-the-new-weird/. 15 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 16 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 17 Wilk, “Toward a Theory of the New Weird.” 18 Angela Mitropoulos, “Lifeboat Capitalism, Catastrophism, Borders”, Dispatches Journal, 2018, http://dispatchesjournal.org/articles/162. 19 Bernice Fischer and Joan C. Tronto, “Toward a of Care,” in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women’s Lives, eds. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990). 20 Haraway, Staying with the Trouble. 21 Power, “Necro-capitalism and Counter-images”. 22 Tim Ingold, Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2008). 23 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability,” in The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress, eds. Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 51–65. 24 Stafford Beer, Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer (London and New York: Wiley, 1975). 25 9 “Without You My Life Would Be Boring”, track 4 on , Shaking the Habitual, , 2013.