A point of departure for the author is thesis proposed by T.J. LeCain, who studied anthropocentrism hidden in a very nucleus of debate about antropocene. One should, in his view, comprehend and analyse culture and technology as the part or the product of a matter. The “human age” initiated in the age of the industrial revolution driven with fossil fuels turns out to be an effect of transformations, of which coal is a chief perpetrator. The turn from anthropo- to carbocene let us examine factors which are the underlying reason for development of industrial-information society. The very material factors (retaining wide understanding of the term “matter”, which can also include the temperature or the gravity) are called to the scene, and then embodied or set in motion by choreographers — Mette Ingvartsen, Agata Siniarska and Aleksandra Borys — who try to problematize in their works the issue of dispersed, material agency. In her text the author examines how the problems essential for anthropocene and carbocene debates are being choreographed.
What curatorial gesture would make it possible to give rise to a temporary museum in situ where anthropogenic inscriptions could be presented by the living exhibits themselves? In this article the past of the Anthropocene is defined as a time of intensified activity of Homo sapiens in the early Holocene, before our impact on the hydrosphere, geosphere and atmosphere became irreversible. The author ponders whether the current definition of a natural history museum can incorporate a project of a living, embodied, post-anthropocentric and post-institutional museum. She suggests plants as essential partners in the human becoming across the biosphere. Chlorophyll organisms initiated the Great Oxidation Event, or Oxygen Catastrophe, which led not only to the extinction of anaerobic organisms but also to the proliferation of oxygen-dependent life, including humans. The human-plant co-existence is studied through the consequences of the ‘desire for sunlight’ of the former and the ‘desire for mobility’ of the latter. Synanthropic plants, which thrive growing next to people, emerge as the protagonists of this story, with the shared interspecies history and anthropogenic mutations inscribed in their bodies. This is a story of the human–plant co-evolution where contemporary, ‘spontaneous’ synanthropic plants are depicted as agents. In this context the author describes the artistic practices of Andrea Haenggi, analysing them as curatorial gestures for an interspecies dialogue within the framework of a ‘museum setting’.
A choreographer and dancer Adam Weinert in the frameworks of the MoMA’s programme 20 Dancers for the XX Century (2013) reconstructed and re-enacted Ted Shawn’s choreographic compositions of the thirties. In the course of preparations and examinations for the project, he discovered that MoMA, abandoning own policy of the treatment of living artists’ works, handed over Shawn’s works — offered by himself — to other institutions. Therefore in the second phase Weinert’s project assumed the form of a technologically assisted intervention. The artist, using a mobile application, created and made available to spectators a virtual installation. According to Weinert, the visitors gained the possibility of seeing Shawn’s dance performances exactly where they should be presented. In my paper, I discuss the meaning of the project. Was the aim of the artist’s action aesthetic, political or cognitive? Did Weinert present the site-specific screendance, choreograph the movement of the visitors, or create an interactive guide to the museum space?
The aim of the article is to track the contemporary theoretical practices that serve to re-establish the ‘plant contract’ and to situate these threads within the field of critical plant studies. The genealogy of this subject area, which has developed rapidly over the last two decades, should be sought in the paradigm of feminist studies. In this approach, critical reflection revealing semiotic and material forms of oppression towards plants is accompanied by attempts to develop reparative practices. The author traces the historical forms of depreciation of plant beings, both in theory and philosophy and in political, social and economic practices. Key to her decisions are: defining the specific plant ‘subjectivity’, recognizing the material agency of plants, incorporating the principle of vegetation into biopolitical considerations, as well as considering the intersectional entanglements of plants in the context of colonial botany and seed politics. The author points out that in each of the discussed cases, the specificity of feminist plant studies is based on the recognition of the ontological and political status of the plant, which results in attentiveness and care. This care is focused on the visibility and well-being of specific, material and embodied plant beings that are distant relatives of the human species.
PL
Celem artykułu jest prześledzenie współczesnych praktyk teoretycznych, które służą ponownemu zawiązaniu „kontraktu z roślinami”, oraz wskazanie tych wątków w obrębie intensywnie rozwijających się w dwóch ostatnich dekadach krytycznych studiów nad roślinami, których genealogii należy szukać w paradygmacie studiów feministycznych. W tym podejściu namysłowi krytycznemu ujawniającemu semiotyczne i materialne formy opresji w stosunku do roślin towarzyszą próby wypracowania praktyk reparacyjnych. Autorka śledzi historyczne formy deprecjonowania istot roślinnych, zarówno w polu teorii i filozofii, jak i w praktykach politycznych, społecznych i ekonomicznych. Kluczowe dla jej rozstrzygnięć są: zdefiniowanie specyficznej „podmiotowości” roślinnej, uznanie materialnej sprawczości roślin, włączenie do rozważań biopolitycznych zasady wegetalnej, a także rozważenie intersekcjonalnych uwikłań roślin w kontekście botaniki kolonialnej i polityki nasiennej. Autorka wskazuje, że w każdym z omawianych przypadków specyfika feministycznych studiów nad roślinami opiera się na rozpoznaniu ontologicznego i politycznego statusu rośliny, czego konsekwencją są uważność i troska, dbałość o widzialność i dobrostan konkretnych, materialnych i ucieleśnionych istot roślinnych będących dalekimi krewnymi gatunku ludzkiego.
Today representatives of the humanities take part in various kinds of performances with different or even mutually exclusive meanings and goals. In some cases they perform willingly and deliberately, but in others they become a catalyst of new strategies of resistance. A mutative performance (i.e. one the objective of which is change) is usually the goal and sense of research which is to enrich, transform and often criticise the existing rules of describing and understanding cultural phenomena. On the other hand, researchers’ environment is often provided by the reality of organisational normative performances: institutional and market-related. An additional challenge is posed by the high performance of advanced technologies because of which the humanities began to lose their monopoly on the knowledge of the cultural functioning of humans. Drawing on Jon McKenzie’s general performance theory, I will focus on potentially successful — usually bottom-up — autostrategies of managing one’s own scholarly performance, strategies that enable representatives of the humanities to loosen the grip of the hierarchical, linear and closed disciplinary paradigm in order to fully participate in the modern networked performance of science based on relations and openness.
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