Contribution short abstract:

Following mollusc-related practices via video, sound, ethnography, creative non-fiction, photography and drawing, this lecture performance inquires and sensuously evokes multispecies conviviality in the Sine-Saloum Delta, Senegal and critically reflects multimodality in more-than-human research.

Contribution long abstract:

In this lecture performance, I will take the audience on a patchy voyage through a day in and beyond the Sine-Saloum Delta in Senegal. I draw on my multimodal dissertation research on human-mollusc-spirit relations where I inquire the amphibious work of female mollusc seeking and the ways molluscs and their shells are engaged for a range of other practices, such as for nourishment and trade, infrastructuring, governance, or spirituality.

We will start by immersing into a video scene of mollusc seeking that employs collectively produced 'haptic cinema' and amphibious, more-than-human perspectives. It seeks to both evoke a speculative multispecies sensuality and a critical reflection on the constructiveness of mediation. I tie on to this with a creative non-fiction narration about diasporic belonging conveyed by the taste of molluscs from back home. Then I will read an ethnographic account accompanied by a soundscape that transport shell-infrastructuring in the face of sea level rise. Consequently, we move towards an experimental catalogue with glow-in-the-dark ink and photography. Created with artist-curators, it inquires the in/visibility of mollusc seeking and infrastructuring and invites for an interactive transgression of image-text conventions. Finally we will move towards a creative non-fiction narration on a deltaic encounter between humans, manatees, molluscs and spirits, combined with excerpts from a comic in development with the Senegalese visual artist Pamplumus. This brings together text with drawings and photos and mobilises the productive friction between the fictional and the documentary for postcolonial reflexivity and the imagination of deltaic futures marked by multispecies conviviality.

Contribution short abstract:

This multimodal ethnography of the soil focuses on eroded and toxic lands of southern Portugal, where innovative soil regeneration projects are taking place. By combining artistic and anthropological approaches, it unveils a complex assembly of past, present, and future worldmaking practices.

Contribution long abstract:

This paper presents the preliminary findings of an ongoing multimodal and transdisciplinary research project with a primary focus on soil. The study delves into the southern drylands of Portugal, specifically in Alentejo. Despite grappling with challenges such as drought, soil erosion, and toxicity resulting from both historical and contemporary monoculture practices, this region distinguishes itself by hosting innovative soil regeneration projects and pioneering agroforestry experiments in Mediterranean regions. These initiatives strive to rejuvenate and purify the soil through a complex assembly of worldmaking practices.

In line with the inseparability and intra-activity of geological, ecological, and cultural dimensions (Barad 2003), this research integrates artistic and anthropological approaches to unveil bio-social practices and onto-epistemologies surrounding the soil. It considers the soil's pasts, presents, and futures, as well as the intricate web of multispecies relationships it sustains and the potential spirits that may inhabit it. To accomplish this, the research draws inspiration from Verónica Gerber's concept of "Escritura Compostaje" (compost writing) and aspires to an “Etnografia-Compostaje” by blurring the boundaries between archive, testimony, fiction, language, and materiality. The current multimodal approach combines the retrieval (and reappropriation) of visual archives documenting local sociopolitical experiments in land collectivization during the 1970s (post-Carnation revolution) with hands-on ethnographic research involving agroforest human and non-human actors engaged in present-day transformative practices that nurture and regenerate soils that have been intoxicated and eroded.

Through the integration of artistic and ethnographic methodologies, this study aims to comprehend these intricate worlding practices, challenging conventional divisions within these realms of knowledge.

Contribution short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Iceland, this contribution shows how practices of literary writers involves being open towards the more-than-human. It is discussed how this writing work can be understood as a restoration of one’s lifeworld. The contribution opens with a poetic montage.

Contribution long abstract:

In European culture, images of the individual (male) writer genius have been persistent. Yet, recent ethnographic studies have supported that the single writer often emerges from an essential social infrastructure (Wulff 2017, Brandel 2023). My on-going ethnographic research with literary writers in Iceland has further undone the image of the individual writer, yet on a new dimension.

In describing their writing process, interlocutors pointed to a larger force they needed to submit to: the shadowy sea of the subconscious, a dharma, or an overpowering flow. Afterwards, texts were edited with calculated decisions, but the state of openness was a prerequisite for ‘good sentences’ or storylines to appear. To become open to this flow, writers went to the swimming pool (Sundlaug), went on walks in natural landscapes, or even moved to live in the countryside. These actions seemed to help shift attention to the body and a more kinesthetic mode of being (see also Petitmengin 2016: 33), and involve an attunement towards self-environment relations. Writing thus seemed to require an opening towards ‘something’ beyond the subjective, human consciousness and will. This contribution explores how this ‘something’ might be understood as more-than-human.

Seeing writing as not only an interpretation of an already existing reality, but also an act upon the world, I suggest that the work of my interlocutors could be understood as acts of restoration of their lifeworld.

The contribution opens with a short poetic montage to cast light on the ethnographic material through academic and artistic modes of expression.