Questions for Documenta
Best scenario we secure the funds - 7 of us there
Can we bring our own projector etc
Can you provide free entry for everyone for our activities (or a guest list for invited local communities - how will it be ticked - can it be on an non extractive platform (i.e not eventbrite)
Documenta tickets and accomodation for DB group 7 people for whole event?
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(Section that Mami can take to Artistic Team)
Decolonising Botany Constellations
9th/10th July 6-8pm, Immigrated Garden at the W22
7 artists/researchers from the Decolonising Botany - Tuan Mami, Ayesha Keshani, Laura Burns, Helen Pritchard, Youngsook Choi, Taey Iohe and Cian Dayrit
Decolonising Botany is a working group of artists/researchers with a focus on challenging and complicating the colonial systems of knowledge production around nature science, ecology and migration. The group's research and art practices explore alternative methodologies, counter-perspectives and experimental collaboration with other-than-human relations.
The DB group will host a constellation of performative interventions in response to Tuan Mami's Immigrated Garden installation. Taking place in the garden itself, this weekend programme will assume various forms such as shared conversations, meals, meditation,energy experiments, reading, performance and screenings, to test new modes of partial relation, hospitality and collaboration with and within a living garden ecology. Experimenting with temporalities and slowing, Decolonising Botany Constellations will embrace site-specific and evolving practices that respond to the colonial legacies of what we understand as the Anthropocene - Plantationocene - Capitalocene. - or could be.. colonial legacies of what we understand as gardens (< prefer this)
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Decolonising Botany is part of the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary arts practice and interdependent research rethinking the fundamental structures of Western knowledge in response to the challenges of climate change, loss of species diversity, racism, and economic inequity. It is part of a wave of new art practices integrating queer, feminist and anti-racist thought, moving beyond critiques to envision new practices. It has been thoughtfully curated and structured as a decolonising practice. This project tests new modes of relating, collaboration and partial collaboration with evolving methodologies that respond to the colonial legacies of what we understand as the Anthropocene."
Any logistics info & questions
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Being a guest - being together - occupying? gardens are ways to occupy or reclaim contested lands - liberative way ... parasite, seeds - and ...
we had this from the liverpool talk
Decolonising Botany is a working group of artist/researchers with a focus on challenging and complicating the colonial system of knowledge production around nature, science, ecology and migration. Its unconventional research and art practices explore alternative methodologies, counter-perspectives and experimental collaboration with the other-than-human.
Title
Decolonising Botany Constellations
9th and 10th July
Site Specific practices, garden collaborations that take place over the two days.
7 participants - Confirmed: Mami, Laura, Helen, YC, TI in person, CD in paralell
Dinner table - long table/round table -
two dinners or a cooking kitchen -
Format - public talk? lecture performance? and how long
Participants - how many
3/4 sentence to explain about talk - brief
Confirm for second weekend of july -
Feb 2 21
Mami proposes to bring DB into their work Immigrating Garden -
Group fits into the garden team> transformation between east and west, looking at the histories of colonisination, power
Mami invited another artists who is working on traditional oil painting in vietnam - and plans to go to Kassel next month to start to work on the garden
Working with the locations of documenta and transforming them
Transforming the abadoned garden into the immigration garden - collecting stories, emails, developing work during research time from now till June,
There is a small room on the garden Quynh Dong - will work with collective to on a video work - "Painted Garden"
also there is another Garden Lab - working with queer arts group - building community, sharing art works
the works form iiG LAB (Mami's Lab)- cultural food and kitchen .immigrated seed and plant library
food drink , public talks, and the projects
Nha San Collective (20 people)
Timeline and full details - on slides
Need to discuss what is possible and what is extedable - to make a suggestion to the Documenta team
what kind of detail
what kind of context
Need:
Title
Decolonising Botany Constellations
9th and 10th July
Site Specific practices, garden collaborations that take place over the two days.
7 participants -
Dinner table - long table/round table -
two dinners or a cooking kitchen -
Format - public talk? lecture performance? and how long
Participants - how many
3/4 sentence to explain about talk - brief
Confirm for second weekend of july -
a lot of prog, book launch, day 2 prog will be the book launch and the db prog -
imagining keeping title as DB
and write down the format
not sure if presentation needs to be in certain place - but prefer the presentation in the garden - but maybe difficult without equipment
if we go with their prog - they may propose a location to have speakers etc
maybe propose something and then see what can become real
- subject? garden as the platform - public platform for thinking - as a group connected somehow
- documenta have a hotel that has 25/euro a night rooms
- laura will be driving from berlin and could for sure find a projector and speakers to borrow
- the different ways of sharing practices - edging out of the institutional format and ways of sharing knowledge - and makes it so much more possible if responding to the garden - guiding plant meditations - have different modes of sharing that could be taking the lead from the garden ...
- in the garden we can create more time and different works, performance, meditations,
- garden quite central - next to train station - area wine making, bar, maing building will be other groups from documenta who will make a bar as their project, and their is also a beer garden - quite big area
- Cian suggesting - perhaps participating from a farm setting if funding doesn't come in - as the plan b.
- Taey who are we talking to in the garden and first important reason why we are doing this, having a joyful moment in Mami's garden, the second though documenta audience is quite art audience and from the local comfortable audience coming to the site - and becuase of our context would be nice to exclusively invite the local asian community, students, people havng a garden regardless of immigration status, a space that is of benefit for people who are livign there, because of the limits of the budget - mami coming all this way to make the space beautoufl - the space shifter for the community in Kassel -
- Mami focusing on vietnamese community, - going there to live and work and develop the work together, like the idea for certain community, from last presentation in taiwan - map of seeds (which is not for all the audience), ways to create specific audience
- could be a site of resistance - imagine we are going to interact before then - more contextualise what we are doing together -
loose story telling - in a thread, how to flow, communicating work to humans, the other than humans there - interacting with, talking with other life forms
imagine documenta might be quite crazed - so might attract a different type of audience
Sat and Sun
In the Garden
workshop - talk /lecture performance - cian on parallel garden, Laura could do a meditation course, open opp - open plan
camping the garden, cooking, eating, drinking,
sounds joyful - how can we create space for the garden to speak for itself, how could we be hosting but so that people experience the bigger host - being together and being there - is somehow enough - give rise to different formats
treating the garden as a collaborator - we don't want to use it as a stage, finding the rhythm of the garden and bring our selves - spending a long time with the space,
laura - will most likely be in berlin - so very available to help in the garden if you need help in the garden - diy made bed in the van - practically available
Sat
Sun
<img rsc="https://freight.cargo.site/w/640/q/94/i/2b57af8d955c8a7a170a3a4de67aac303e99cce59385b71295c9190260567c50/110830406_198188044981619_4443804999209309036_n.jpg">
Doodle poll for mentoring sessions dates for September and October:
https://doodle.com/poll/5yswxq2vfa7w8fwu
1st session could be about collaboration - what could be the codes of practice in collaborative decolonising research and development, how we build and share the alternative knowledge and methodolgies together, how to shape our practices individually/collectively and what to envision/imagine to get out of this...
2nd session could be about finding resources - what are available resources and institutional supports we can appraoch, what caveat and considerations in this process...
* possible outcome: honest desires, intention, aspiration / interconnectivity of those desires /
short term, long term /
Aug - Sep
* Dialogue #1: Sending Belly Gifts
(Duration: Now - 30 Sept)
Participating in belly gift exchanges is an affectionate way to explore what decolonising means to us. It can be (re)defined in many different ways, based on our lived expriences and subjectivities. A belly gift can be curious prompts as provacation (i.e. story as a cure), scores or instructions (i.e. dance around this object and record your movement in a way you wish), small gift (i.e. seeds, a piece of fabric to expand stories).. It can be anything that leads to a good question or imagination around the idea of decolonisation/decolonising practices. Make sure what you are sending allows a good open space of interpreation, twist, subversion, speculation and even disobedience for the receiver.
1. You can design personalised score/instuctions to different indivisuals. Have a think about who you are addressing to, how much of distance in between.
2. You can send the same score/instructions to everyone.
3. You can also design how your belly gift travels. For example, Taey can write to Helen, asking Helen to response to Cian, then Cian to response to Laura. Or just response to the sender.
4. Try to avoid too dense language or being prescriptive.
5. Keep a simple documentation of exchange to share with all.
6. Enjoy the process!
* Please send score/instructions to Mami digitally due to current postal instability in Vietnam.
fri 16 july 2021
feeling the tail long tail energy into the underground led by Laura
welcoming Cian
Cian is smelling onto and into the tensions and frictions. As the ground unsteady never still but still with some depths densities and fagilities. Holding the grief and contradictions, Cian pauses for a moment to rest under the olive canopy and consider how the stretch of branches would approach the struggle.
Cian struggles with so much grief and contradiction in this world. His way of dealing with the pain from it is sitting on the ground, smelling the atmosphere and dreaming of a hundreds years old olive tree.
Cian, a contradiction. Shades of olive diffuse, in grief in struggle, molecules disperse. An inhalation. Particles of earth of ground of grass of soil travel, dance around him. Smelling the ground, an exhalation. Ravel, unravel, retangles all new.
The dog, Cian went through alot. He usually travelling with his family and friends. He lets his elders walk first, small one next, then him and his healthy mates walk last. They dig in the ground at chilly night next to big olive trees, and let vulnerable ones to sleep tight, smelling of fatique, and freedom. Sometimes his pack lost someone, Cian let them grief and anger together but doesn’t give up walking. In contradiction, he needs solitary time, to console his inner child, does not let her emotional struggle rules his walking. He walks together.
Cian is smelling the ground, a tender struggle in olive-grief and contradiction. The ground struggle is contradiction and grief, it can sense Cian, tasting and smelling and listening for the between-ground…
Cian smells the ground of life of struggling. He sees things growing underneath a mysterious circle. He awakes and sees olive under the sun.
“Beyond the keywords”
Cian
Small platter of keeping up in the collective conditions at large
haven't had the time to step back. read through patterns and formulate trails of thought
constant response to whats happening now/near future - and memories of the past and future
framing power
"brewing in the struggles of others on my own" - away from collectives, groups, friends
what does safe at home really mean?
despite dealing with maps never felt so lost - the contradiction of representing space control memory
space and memory
the invention of the inhabitants and resources - subverting these images
remaking the map - in place of place names showing indigenous solidarities and the movements that are threatening.. solidarity within their struggles - visualizing the trauma and threats, and expressing solidarity and strength
immersing in militarism a reverse ethnography
experiencing miliarism from the silence of our isolation as the lockdown is miliatirsed feeling other peoples despair as they fight too have their stories listenend too
works as repository for other peoples story - striving to be a conduit
to map is to give a broad reading adjusting lenses and frames in how too represent the contraditcions between power struggle solidarity trauma
maps map out different traumas, human rights, agressive development proj
also expresses unified struggle between different sectors of societies
roadmap, outline for fighting back
firefighting always in a hurry to find different ways to articulate to conditions and the dilema of what to do with the visualizations
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militarism an dinstitutions
the battle of individual against institutions is impossible, the importance of working as a collective
on the liverpool event
the disuption of reclaiming space - through the reframing, not violence, resetting the tone of what was expected.. letting a different freq come through
a tide a river flow of fighting back like a dam felt like nature taking its own shape
the feeling not sure if disruptive strong but not violent, but sometimes violence is beautiufl too but in a diff context
the charm - connection from one presenter to another - one story - mama d's reflection a choreography almost as one piece
not visual making communication flow invisible ..
how to value that labor and invisible process
in terms of decolonising work - its how rather than what - journey and diff perspectives
our platform is for cherishing that journey of research and discover of alternative perspectives
the work of a working group - the work of the working group doesn't need to stay within the working group collaboatively formulate collecing compiling methodlogies.. adapted by differen audiences and communities open ideas questsions comparing notes on what we are doing take what we learn from each other into different context, works involve oon their own beyond us...
interested to listen to discussions, can share with cian what we are doing now why we are doing now already the question opression appears more often deconstruct myself and what should i do what are doing here now what we are doing more serious on the actions
keep it growing slowly and smoothly organically structure of progress making art and doing things how we can bring art to touch life more than just touching the institution create more organic institution is this aspect of art, is it important? go beyond art form beyond normal social activity orientation going towards that we don't forumalte outselves in relation to institutional desire
reframing social activity
commons space to share and do
collaborators into the process
forming orientation maybe thinking about certain topic to think together
or invite some people to talk together with us
to create our community to be more lively touched
question our own practice - the references - is it only white established refs
how to honor diff knowledges - referncing each other constantly - as Ayesha said, as tae said
really listen, repeating who said it and applying to chain of thinkging
people who might give a talk, mentor, open structure, making it as a community
as a faciliator who is going to do the work and how we can afford our time to do the work
so our time is not constantly draining so its valued and recognised - so inevitable to find an institution to work with
how to work with annie
how to make a list/frame working conditions
the term decoloniisng - at least define what we mean by that -
charged word highly expoloited
manifestoish ethical issues of art practice and research under this term
postal exchange - creative media to provoke the idea of decolonilization prompt residue of action doesn't need to be english alphabet... manifest the idea in a decolonizing way.. how to shaare the head space and belly space.. 7 provocation from each of us
its your personal - what is the challenging
seed smuggling
textile smuggling
display and distribute
move past the postal system - pass it to someone we know
what are the channels - private channels to send somethign sensitive that wouldn't be accepted by a company
fax machine
the collective work
the resources
after we reflect on the postal exchange we start to reflect on the decolonial work
botany - botanical science --taxonomic violence
sharing any ideas for the session.. by the end of august
Aeysha has the seeds to share of kalam
DB Launch event: Rewilding Knowledge: Cosmopolitics, Stone Womxn, Bluecarbon and Illegal Seeds
Tuesday 15 June 11:00 - 13:00 Zoom Webinar (PLEASE JOIN AT 10AM for prep)
11:00 - 11:10 Introduction from Abi Mitchell (House keeping etc)
11:10 - 11:22 Taey & Youngsook (10 min + 2 min buffer)
(giving Laura's introduction for Ayesha: Ayesha in slowness is putting one foot in front of the other. She feels the conversation happening between the sole of the foot and the wood of the floor. This is how she works towards the blue; each step opens up a closeness to the ocean, or the sky. she gathers the blues into a museum, not to trap the blue but to multiply it, tracing connections and letting the space between things resonate and unfold in slowness.
11:22 - 11:34 Ayesha (10 min + 2 min buffer)
(giving Youngsook's introduction for Laura: Nervous Laura transforms herself into a turquoise body in the listening practice of indigo river. In that way, her body and the river becomes the one, the inseparable symbiont Hller Hller.
https://othermuseums.org/
11:34 - 11:46 Laura (10 min + 2 min buffer)
(giving Ayesha's introduction for Helen: Helen, exhausted, surrounded by baskets. A queer weaving and re-weaving, backwards, forwards, to the sides, above below. Patching and twisting re-making de-thinking. Glitter holds all the colours, reflects the spectrum.
http://www.lauraburns.co.uk/
http://www.lauraburns.co.uk/performance#/page/
11:46 - 11:58 Helen (10 min + 2 min buffer)
after (giving Helen's introduction for Tuan Mami: Strange Mami is falling through time across the depth of silent. Through this life, bodies coming together in green in pink in silence. Meeting together in the soil and the quietness of a time that breaks through space and the taxonomic dysphorias. Hold up what is this time?
11:58 - 12:10 Mami (10 min + 2 min buffer)
(giving introduction for Mama D: This is the end of our working group's sharing. For the next, we have our guest speaker Mama D. Mama D is a Community Researcher and Facilitator whose background is in Food and Nourishment Practice and artistic advocacy around Food Justice. She currently curates, within Community Centred Knowledge, Learning Journeys, exploring the interfaces of community, modernity and systemic justice through the routes of art, culture and the more than human. Mama D will give us a brief reflection and present her action research 'Food Jounrey'. Welcome Mama D!
12:10 - 12:40 Mama D (30 mins)
12:40 - 12:55 Abi Q&A (15 mins)
12:55 - 13:00 Abi Closing
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Next meeting: 25th May Tuesday, 10:30 BST, 4:30 in Vietnam
ayesha - palm oil - colonial inheritance of museums - limiting of knowledge to a monocultural point of view and squishing
project about connection
dioramas - natural history
minor anticolonlism within colonial histories
rainforest is gone palm oil is present
strange moments in archives
sometimes involves workign with people, sometimes with institutions itself,
push back against a colonialism
people who intersect with the musem in differnet ways, overlapping yet going in different diections
turtle workign together
time/space colonial histories, social histories,
alam malay word on nature something singular/something plural
map the worlds of what we understand as nature
layer and opacities and fragments of encounters and where the decolonial sits in relation to nature
women's labour on the coast - magroves being dug up - sustainable argi - mangroves dug up for the large corporate and then needing to work with in concrete crab farms
layers of whats happeing to the land and the different
and with the spirit and nonhuman animals
palm oil and museum practice - bearded pigs, put more pressure on forest species modes of resistance in nonhuman culture - little things thrive in the gaps.. trying to renegade native trees inbetween palm oil - small acts of resistance to try to claim back
collab with fisherman - taken place on whatasapp - voice messages videos being sent back and forth -
https://www.morethanhumanworlds.com/
Laura - being in a place where yo don't know where you are
practice coming somewhere between bodies and movement
how states of the body change perception
series of visions - different texture of knowing - arriving in image, -absorb
women as stones, ancient and from this place
judges, priests, violences,
mythic entity,
becoming , stone and women, non human and human
time of the grandmothers
no sound in the vision - 2d future feeling - taking the stones from the river.. where and how to place them - and as a cermony
is the place in 1612 where there was a big witch hunt.. on no grounds
two women, involved in healing and herbalism, place as a nexus of coloniality --cotton industry -- an an enabler of the slave trade and triangulation of relationship between ownrershop of land bodies, practices. the land is with the violence, river is dammed and forms a victorian landscape
the violence of the history and uncanny events in and around this river
coal fields in lancaster threshold event that massively changes and has impact on the climate, and resistance against fracking,
the river
a practice of non refusal
not going to refuse anything
witnessing the violence and whatever else wanted to come in - ancestral spirits, the river, as a serpent, had a completely otherwise trajectory to this violence, wittnessing the violence, propelling a complete otherwise, invisible to the human eye, tension - spirit labour, asking the land, first and foremost, and refusing to document it as 5d squashed down different ways of witnessing and including the complexity - victims of femicide and perpatrators, also part of my history
spirit labour
understorey of the story
white coloniality divides itself not only from nature but across other differences, "sane" and "insane"
trusting land as teacher, practices of belief
how to not depend on language, knowledge systems, through making witnessing and creatign decolonial moments..
making space for future carrots / river becomes shaping
overlapping of bodies
slipping out of size
learning boundaries with the invisible
the responsibility of not recievign the history of the violence - and being open to it
whats the point of making it in visual or language form
colonial powers - killing so many people who were trying to form their own power - women, men, included -- why women were more crushed in this way and spiritual connection.. witch and wizard,
vulnerability - decolonial practice - maybe the reason why its so protected,
how vulnerability comes in in these practices .. collaborator who aligns with ignorance
Helen -
start / link with damage
passive political actions - generative of political potential (crying, feeling, sadness, damages, being in enduring states with capitalism, colonialism)
liveliness and abundance despite being held in enduring states
ethics that start from considering shared damages
what partial remediations might be, while also holding the damages these might cause
practices of measurement and categorisation - technologies
other ways of telling stories that don't rely on these types of measurements
what thinking from Black feminist theory can bring to computation - Oracles
anti-enlightenment understanding of learning - not shedding light on things
resonance, nonlinearity, association
anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-oppressive
The Witnesses, the Wayward, the Waiting
queering damage
The Underground Division -
subterranean space, thick and deep complexity
collective software critique - software that renders earth in particular way / figures environment
imperial infrastructures, frame earth as set of resources
liveliness in excess of these technologies
presences, latencies, absences that we need to account for
collective resistances, lively forces of rocks
Rock Repo - studying together with others, making interventions with people to understand spaces where technology used to model rocks, geologic, subterranean spaces
Thames estuary - blue carbon
separate carbon volumes from everything else in the river
collective storage of carbon in rivers and mangroves - reduced to national / boundaries / trade
colonial collecting in thames estuary - using plants to differentiate racist regimes around differences of environments - difference between mangroves and salt marshes, american tropics and europe
the way salt marshes become national identity
algorithms from carbon trading
monoculture of remoteness, longterm capture
below the surface resource captured and made into volume for trade
what does it mean to not have your foot in the mud?
rethinking what justice is in these spaces, different questions around technologies suggest closeness/remoteness
conservation problematics, linked to placemaking
Launch: 15th June Tuesday, 11-1pm BST (confirmed)
ref digital solidarity https://vvvvvvaria.org/etherpump/p/digital-solidarity-networks.raw.html
11 May 2021
Speculative Introduction
Questions:
Name one emotion you are feeling in this moment right now.
What is your primary tool in your practice?
What is your favourite colour?
What is your favourite word?
What is your approach in your practice?
From Helen to Mami: Strange Mami is falling through time across the depth of silent. Through this life, bodies coming together in green in pink in silence. Meeting together in the soil and the quietness of a time that breaks through space and the taxonomic dysphorias. Hold up what is this time?
From Laura to Ayesha: Ayesha in slowness is putting one foot in front of the other. She feels the conversation happening between the sole of the foot and the wood of the floor. This is how she works towards the blue; each step opens up a closeness to the ocean, or the sky. she gathers the blues into a museum, not to trap the blue but to multiply it, tracing connections and letting the space between things resonate and unfold in slowness.
Taey to Youngsook: Heavy Youngsook loves stories about oranges. She puts her thumb into the bottom of the orange and press hard. The thick skin comes out as her finger moves gradually but forcefully. One of flresh bleeds into her finger - she sucks on it. Orange is a hybrid between pomelo and mandarin. She thinks of her mum, who would have said to her, ‘why don’t you use your knife instead?’ Youngsook never listens, she rather get her hands dirty. She’s asking, ‘who’s with me?’ - she loves this participatory ritual for big fat orange eating. She is generous creasure to share her oranges with - but you have to get dirty with her.
From Ayesha to Helen: Helen, exhausted, surrounded by baskets. A queer weaving and re-weaving, backwards, forwards, to the sides, above below. Patching and twisting re-making de-thinking. Glitter holds all the colours, reflects the spectrum.
From Tuan Mami to Taey: Taey is in state of letting go! at a moment, She think that she is a leaf floating on a strange river. In her mind, the thought travels from fear, angry, to surprising and enjoying. She found something!
From Youngsook to Laura: Nervous Laura transforms herself into a turquoise body in the listening practice of indigo river. In that way, her body and the river becomes the one, the inseparable symbiont Hller Hller.