Shared by Alex Berry
How might the openings proposed by an event be sustained as a way of inhabiting possibility for difference?
Plastic-wrapped in the basement, food-waste-resin encounters live long after first encounter. I taste them now, over a year since the decaying food chandelier hung as part of a collaborative installation by the Climate Action Network for the Colloquium’s exhibit, ‘Disorientating the early childhood sensorium: Micro-interruptions for alternative climate futures’. Small chain-links move with unease – lethargic in the pull as syrupy insides drizzle through and across metal loops. Extending them long, small flakes of white, acrylic paint fall, sticking to fingertips and clinging under nails.
The chandelier is slippery, sluggish as its accordion layers are pulled to expand out – sticky to what comes near. Still inside but leaking through, Ecuadorian food-waste bodies are dissolving with each other and beyond the boundaries of resin skin, it is difficult to mark their forms. The view is blurry, rotting juice crystals tacked with mix-matched pieces of paper and plastic. Coming from the inside out. Residue lingers in mouth. The aftertaste is tarte, a flavour that irritates.
In their microblog, Nicole, Meagan and Lisa enliven archiving as a recollection that activates an ethical intentionality to ‘notice or resist the ways an event lingers’. Touching sticky presences of the CAN colloquium exhibit, I am thinking more about how the exhibit continues to decompose as an event in (and as) a particular way.
Pignarre and Stengers (2011) tell me that an event is itself, a way – a manner of doing in the public space. This way is inhabited by the questions the event is obliged to, and creates an ongoing force that makes these questions “exist for those who respond to it” (p. 4). Archiving ripples of the exhibit now, in viral worlds marked by distance and intensifying borders, how do we sustain the questions that energised collective labours, virtual and material relations of the exhibit? What are the 6 installations, or micro-interruptions, still asking of us, of pedagogy and our responses for cultivating otherwise child-climate relations?
The exhibit archive struggles, with those who engage it, to hold open the installations as small portals to 14 international research sites that provoke attention to differential vulnerabilities in encounters with weather, land, plastics, water and food. Following Pignarre and Stengers (2011), if vulnerability is a condition for those called into the event, and in pandemic temporalities of rapid closures, how might the openings proposed by the exhibit be sustained as a way of inhabiting possibility for difference?
This micro-blog emerges from ongoing dialogues with the CAN archive and exhibit committees. Some pieces of this micro-blog can also be found in an upcoming paper by the exhibit committee (Berry, Pollitt, Wintoneak, Nelson, Hodgins, in press).
Photo by Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Pignarre, P., & Stengers, I. (2011). Capitalist sorcery: breaking the spell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.