Relating to the Living

an inquiry into the living and liveable worlds

INTRO

The smallest unit of being is a relation. In fact, reality is made up of relational entanglements - we are because others are (and were). The understanding that what makes us possible needs care sounds almost too obvious. But if it is, why are relations so often sites of injury? Why is the condition of life also a site of violence? And how do we inhabit a world where what is life-sustaining is often inherited as damaged, broken, extractive or confused?

This inquiry leads into the labyrinths of questions around how do we actually relate to Earth beings, including rivers, plants, humans, other animals, air, insects, microbes, mountains, everyone? And if we are not as separate and impermeable as we think ourselves to be, does it even make sense (in our specific context) to think of the living in terms of categories of the divide? Not as a way of abandoning historical accountability and responsibility, not as a way of erasing difference, but as an attempt to let go of the structures that frame dichotomy and turn difference into hierarchy, the ‘other’ into object, opacity into something that must be mastered or explained.

The complexity of this inquiry into relational fields unfolds within the multilayered now-time that does not necessarily cut between past, present and future, but tries to reconnect to what came before us, has made us possible and continues to act through us, as well as to what asks something of us, the not-yetness, the possible, the becomings. What pulls us onto this path of inquiry is an unstoppable desire for discernment, for new alliances, unexpected hybridities, and surprising solidarities.

CONTEXT

Our thinking is influenced and nourished by a worldview of symbiosis, by how 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.

Tightly embraced 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. But what if, 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?

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 complexifyed 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.

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. But are we really capable of inhabiting relational ontologies as fully as our linguistic architectures suggest? And, if we listen beyond the wishful thinking, what may be moving underneath the language and around our daily gestures?

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 relations and guide our sensitivities towards a more attentive, respectful and balanced togetherness.

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.

It unfurls in 4 episodes with the following working titles: Chapter 1. Enduring interconnectedness, Chapter 2. A search for grammar, Chapter 3. Nearness and the labyrinths of choice, Chapter 4. Listening to the eternal now. We thank all the participants, thinkers and practitioners, artists and scientists, farmers and curators, authors and doctors, death doulas and gardeners, who join us in this collective reflection.

GATHERING

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

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
― T.S. Eliot

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