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Project short description

This is a multimodal, material semiotic experiment in interweaving 3 storylines. The ethnographic footage draws from fieldwork in the Netherlands and Bhutan about interventions in personal, planetary, and pluriversal health. If agency is distributed, how to intervene in systems that generate harm?

Project long description

Over the last fifteen years, I've been interested in reimagining how health and development are done in settings that have not been directly colonized. In contrast to a growthist logic of intervention that targets individual bodies to increase productivity, the logic of tendrel (interdependent origination in Dzongkha) emphasizes that bodies emerge in an ecology of relations. But through this Vajrayana Buddhist cosmology, not all relations are liberatory. Some require delinking. And humans are not the only sentient beings wandering the planet. For example - disruptions in the flow of rainfall signal disrupted relations with land beings.

This multimodal experiment seeks to embody the relational cosmology of tendrel - to make it sensible and relatable. I experiment with this in the research process itself by working with colleagues and former students in Bhutan. In the storytelling, I weave between a personal account of menstrual disruption due to the covid-19 pandemic, the tale of a planetary movement seeking climate justice in the face of floods and uncertain futures in the Netherlands, and pluriversal approaches to treating a dry spell that threatens humans and multiple species in Bhutan.

These stories share a preoccupation with uneven flows, though they convey different symptoms, causal models, and intervention technologies. What might intervening in future health and development sound like, look like, taste like, if animated by the logic of tendrel? Who to hold accountable for uneven flows in an interdependent pluriverse? The project seeks to stimulate this line of speculation and sensation among heterogeneous audiences.