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Short abstract:

A workshop/s using a decolonial, BIPOC-centred, community-oriented tarot deck designed to help groups explore the role(s) they have to play in challenging the climate crisis and deepening interpersonal relationships with the more-than-human universe.

Long abstract:

In collaboration with a team of Guatemalan, Brazilian, Chilean, Congolese, Zambian, German, Irish & English artists, I’ve developed a deck of tarot cards - called the Taiao Tarot (Maori for earth or environment) - designed to help groups explore the role(s) they have to play in fighting the climate crisis and deepening their own relationships with the natural world.

The 22 Major Arcana cards in the deck each depict a specific responsibility within the climate movement/our communities: for example, teacher, mediator, healer, storyteller or organiser. In contrast to the traditional tarot deck, the cards' imagery and language is BIPOC-centred and non-gendered. We may each embody a different role or roles at different stages of our lives; uncovering which roles we are currently inhabiting, and which we want to inhabit - or, importantly, may be avoiding - can help us move towards building more aligned, climate-resilient communities and understanding how we are meant to live together.

I seek to host a series of workshops helping attendees intuitively connect to their own roles and explore these in a group context, with the aim of understanding how individual talents and skills can best intersect to create more climate-conscious, more-than-human-friendly generations, universities and workforces. These workshops will explore how analogue technologies can offer solutions to the climate crisis that focus on interpersonal connection, and how these can be used to challenge existing social hierarchies and Western-centric perspectives on environmentalism by highlighting the work of indigenous, queer, and Black community organisers.

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Short abstract:

Emphasising the resistance to colonial power and the Plantationocene, this paper illustrates how the survival of indigo practices (production and dyeing) can provide new ways of conceptualising planetary health.

Long abstract:

There is an increased awareness of the ecological damage and social inequalities associated with the garment industry. This extends not just to manufacturing but also to raw materials and processes. Textile dyes have received increased attention due to their toxicity to people, ecosystems, and colonial plantation histories. These narratives are highly linked to the Anthropocene, prioritising the Industrial Revolution/Great Acceleration as their starting point. With the concept of the Plantationocene, efforts have been made to complicate the narratives of planetary health by foregrounding the role of colonial plantations in shaping human relationships with nature. While the Plantationocene has been important in discussing planetary health in South Asia, it remains totalizing. It lacks in capturing the contextuality and the resistance (historic and ongoing) to colonial power within plantations.

In exploring the aspects of planetary health in the textile industry, this paper emphasises the understanding of the 'Plantationocene' by foregrounding practices of resistance to explore the dye ‘indigo’. As an important natural dye central to India's economy in pre-colonial and colonial periods, this paper synthesises historical, conceptual, and archival sources to explore how colonial plantation logic organised modern economies, indigenous knowledge, environments, bodies, and social relations. Drawing on case studies of artisanal textile production and indigo dyeing in India, I illustrate how the survival of the indigo practice provides new pathways for conceptualising the role of resistance in securing planetary health. Here, I argue for a collaborative framework bringing together activists, artisans, peasants, historians, and ethnographers to offer more situated Plantationocene narratives.

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Short abstract:

If the link between human and planetary health becomes unavoidable in the field of heart disease, the gap between heroic life-saving strategies and inequalities and difficulties in managing them in terms of public health only seems to deepen.

Long abstract:

Starting from ethnographic research that led me to the issue of the limits of the binary understanding between life and death via life-prolonging medical technologies in the field of cardiology, I now reflect on the recent evidence surrounding climate intrusion on the incidence of heart disease, and the participation of microorganisms in cardiac/human health and its possibilities for reviewing understandings of health, disease, administration of life and death.

This project aims to compose new imaginaries and possibilities of understanding that goes beyond anthropocentric conceptions, non-emancipatory and colonized by the imaginary instituted by the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnologies of death as failure. To this end, among the empirical cases contemplated here are studies on: the human microbiota and its roles; the impoverishment of the microbiota in certain geographies and situations; imbalance of the microbiota in patients with advanced heart failure, transplanted and with implants of circulatory assistance devices; evidence of the increase in the incidence of heart disease and mortality due to climate change. We suggest that the binary understanding between life and death is at the root of the salvationist solutions proposed to address health and ecological problems. Supported by ethnographic research and grounded in approaches from the Anthropology of Science and Technology, the proposal aims to establish interlocutions and collaborations with emerging fields of research, such as: queer studies on death, which shed light on the limits of understanding life and death in binary terms; medical and ecological humanities, which articulate critical ecological studies and medical humanities

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Short abstract:

“The Impossibility of a Planet”, by artists and researchers Jeremy Bolen and Jamie Allen, is an ongoing research and media project that seeks out dialogues with people who compose planetary images, thought, narratives, and models.

Long abstract:

As earthlings, we must understand ourselves as part of a planetary commons. There are modes of thought, experience, and media that provide registers of access to the material fact of kinds of planetarity (Spivak). Prime examples include those much-discussed photographs of Earth—1968's “Earthrise” and 1972’s “Blue Marble” images—that were thought to have the potential to precipitate a worldwide, common planetary consciousness.

Some practitioners and institutions of science and otherwise are acutely aware of the common planet on which we all live; they are compelled to choose planetary magnitudes as their main frame of reference. In the natural sciences, researchers sample and interpolate data from all over the globe and those who derive large-scale models of planet-wide systems. In macroeconomics and geopolitics, there are those who template and influence things like currencies and markets, international conflict and policies. In the humanities and social sciences, studies of transnational cultures, globalisation, and migration hold perspectives that include the entirety of planet Earth as a research subject or context. “The Anthropocene,” “technosphere,” and “planetarity” are characterisations attempting to name such global knowledge practices and orientations. “The Impossibility of a Planet” is a textual and multimedia artistic research project that socialises the active processes that are now helping to reform the imaginaries and realities that come along with the continually resurgent idea of planetary health. We propose a brief presentation of the ongoing critical media and artistic project, as well as interviews and an activated discussion session with media prompts for EASST/4S in Amsterdam.

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Short abstract:

Holoparasite is an interactive audiovisual performance piece that speculates on future plastic ecologies through the fictional discovery of a new parasitic flower morphospecies that has evolved to adapt to the infiltrating amounts of microplastics found in the earth’s layers.

Long abstract:

Holoparasite is an interactive audiovisual performance piece (20 min) that speculates on future plastic ecologies. Paraphrasing elements from ‘Plastic Matter’ by Heather Davis and ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination‘ by Ann Laura Stoler, the performer guides the audience through a performative lecture. The narrative touches upon queer kin with plastic, plastic pollution in our bodies and environments, the parasitic quality of the Rafflesia flower and colonial aspects of waste circulations.

The work follows the fictional discovery of a new parasitic flower morphospecies that has evolved to adapt to the infiltrating amounts of microplastics found in the earth’s layers. The story occurs in the Cacupangan cave system in Pangasinan, the Philippines, a subterranean kilometres-long labyrinth of tunnels and underground rivers. Taking its color from the acidic green plastics of Mountain Dew soda bottles which are commonly upcycled and repurposed across rural provinces, the emergence of the flower reveals a history and future far beyond its isolated habitat.

The work resulted from the artist’s ongoing field research on climate adaptation strategies between the Philippines and the Netherlands, uncovering how local environmental, spiritual, and cultural conditions shape adaptation in times of planetary crisis.