Relating to the Living

an inquiry into the living and liveable worlds

INTRO

This video book is a way of making sanctuary for slow conversations, wondering out loud about and with the unfurling mystery we casually call life and the forces we are moved by, acknowledging that human exceptionalism, extractivism and mastery over the ecologies and bodies that support us to live and die was a posture that never felt right, and confessing our longing for relating differently, indescribable beyond banalities but unstoppable in its determination to become real. This video book is our commitment to letting the more-than-human worlds think in us, through us, as us.

CONTEXT

Life is a connected phenomena, a living system on the surface of the earth, to say it with the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. Yet, the mechanistic view of the Earth, that is still predominant within the currently prevailing thought collective, continues to separate humans and nature, where a human is a subject acting on the dead matter of objects (classified as resources) or using more ‘inferior’ beings (again, in a self-proclaimed classification) for the benefit of some humans. Such worldview of separation (assuming that there are separate individual agencies that precede their relating rather than emerge through their interconnected existence) has justified the exploitation of the living world, including within the human community at large, and mistreatment of each other.

Deeply influenced by the predominant social imaginary and narratives we believe to be true about what is the world and who we are in it, often we do not notice the patterns of interdependencies and ecosystems within ecosystems we are part of, because of what some have called trained incapacities. Scholar and writer Donna Haraway speaks of sympoiesis as a cosmology of “making-with”, speaking of how cells, bacteria, mammals, plants, mushrooms, everyone, are multispecies contributors of one co-becoming process. Sympoiesis is potentially infinite. We know very little of the boundless creativity of the Earth. Those bacteria that got together hundreds millions of years ago, gave birth to this incredible diversity that we are also part of, to all the plants, animals, insects, mushrooms, all the existing and extinct species, all Earth beings. Trust in this infinite Earthly creativity is what keeps us going through these times of polycrisis, and what moves us to inquire together.

INQUIRIES

Relating to the Living expresses our wish to engage into an ongoing collective process of reframing potentialities for planetary imaginaries and how we relate to the diverse communities of life, inner and outer. The need for new dynamics between the living, for care as discernment to become the base of all relating, for making space for nonhuman agencies and for the potential for earthly flourishing to be mutual, is imperative in the current conditions, both within human communities as well as on the planetary level.

We are inviting other thinkers and practitioners to reflect together on how, contesting to historically imposed hierarchies, we could deconstruct reductionist ideologies that are projected onto human and other-than-human communities, soften the hard borders of and within our minds and worlds, and change our understanding of what it might mean to be human at this stage of our being on Earth. It is our hope that when living creatures connect, join forces, interact and complexify together, hopeful practice for possible futures may begin, or rather, continue.

Who makes the planet habitable and in what ways? How can we practice care within relations that are unequal, already damaged, inherited as broken or extractive? What deepens our respect for the families of plants, rivers, mountains, animals, humans, and others who live with us in this exuberant, life-generating, planetary tangle of relations? How do we deal with being interdependent creatures within living systems that include predation, decay, competition, disturbance, grief, and loss? What may we be learning from the growing presence of AI? What may other creatures be telling us about the potentialities for more reciprocal relationships, and how do we develop a more attuned sensitivity towards them? What worlds can we then make possible together? And what may that have to do with recuperating relationship with our bodies, not as something that we have but as someone(s) that we are, gently inviting our embodied subjectivities back into our spaces of attention?

Inquiries into collective cultivation of planetary imaginaries attending to our systemic entanglements with all our contemporaries — the many societies of Earth beings — these inquiries lead us towards wondering what are the material, relational and invisible conditions through which a liveable world comes into being. And also, if our roots have been broken, what kind of belonging may still be possible?

Material

These inquiries concern the conditions of bodily continuation and explore how livability is materially produced and maintained. We follow the logic of symbiosis here, as a view of life on Earth that asserts interconnectedness of all living organisms, who together make living systems possible in complex patterns and feedback loops, rather than in direct cause-effect lines. Symbiotic view of existence is focusing on emergent properties that are born in relationships, in which all the living beings interact with each other and the surroundings to form synergetic, self-regulating, complex systems that maintain and perpetuate the conditions for complex life, and that make planet habitable. So could we contemplate the entanglement within and between species as a single relational field without erasing difference?

Relational

These concern how beings are held in relation. Excessively and rather inattentively interfering within outer and inner environments, it may have escaped us how intertwined they are, how we are composed by the soil, the air, the water, how we take the outside in each time we breath, eat, drink, and just walk around, our porous skins touched by the wind, how our bodies have inner organs and outer organs (to resonate with the artist’s Joseph Beuys’ mythological connections), how our words and deeds impact others and vice versa, how the dead are not disappearances, and how everything exists together, with each other and for each other.

Symbolic

It also matters how we hold each other innerly, which cosmologies orient our perception. “Nature” is never merely a physical phenomenon, the ecosphere is not a mute physical background to human action, to say it with the philosopher Bruno Latour. Nature is inner and outer, objective and subjective, visible and invisible, personal and collective, and far beyond the binaries. It is who we were, who we are and who we are becoming. What could then be ways to think and practice an earthly ethics that honours Nature within, without and in-between?

VIDEO BOOK

Relating to the Living will be released as the fourth season of our video book Woods in the Sound. This season is a poem that thinks through encounters. Since it may only be poetry that can do justice to our understanding of the living and guide our sensitivities towards a more attentive, respectful and balanced togetherness. We thank all the participants, thinkers and practitioners, artists and experimenters, scientists and farmers, gardeners and curators, authors and doctors, death doulas and initiators, who join us in this collective reflection.

GATHERING

Relating to the Living will also unfurl as an in-person gathering. More on that soon.

Images: Foresta Collective (from the upcoming video book Woods in the Sound)