Contribution short abstract:

The contribution aims to present the perspectives that an interdisciplinary approach and a microanalytic scale can offer in terms of rethinking the approach to historical sources, and the relationship between archival research, fieldwork, and the use of field (material, “natural”) sources.

Contribution long abstract:

Which is the relationship between written records and archives, but also local living memories, which constantly contain and return to us environmental biographies, and (non-human / more than human) objects they describe? In which way place, its very material history (human or more than human) could be related to the cultural restitution that historical sources produced? The contribution aims to present the perspectives that an interdisciplinary approach and a microanalytic scale can offer in terms of rethinking the approach to historical sources, and the relationship between archival research, fieldwork, and the use of field (material, “natural”) sources, that not only brings together the skills of the historian, the historical ecologist, the archaeologist, and the anthropologist, but also allows us to re-discuss the very epistemological status of the sources used.

Through the presentation of a multidisciplinary work on the history of a centuries-long conflict on a mountain side in northern Italy, it will be shown how the written sources, the living communities and their memories, the places that preserve it, the spaces that surround them, and the environmental artifacts subjects and objects of the dispute, are in dialogue and reconfigure each other over time, up to the present. Analyzed with a regressive approach, the human and more than human histories of a place intersect and explain themselves, and archives, local and green memories give us back dense environmental histories that otherwise cannot be drawn upon.

During the presentations will be provide different form of restitutions of this intersection.

Contribution short abstract:

A deeper archival understanding of Palestinian agroecological life and the effect of nature reserves will enable a new understanding of more-than-human landscapes in the occupied West Bank to (re)produce agroecological local knowledge.

Contribution long abstract:

This contribution will give me an opportunity to present my research interests in studying more- than- human landscape in Occupied Palestine, especially since my research interests focus on archives, surveys and documenting the existing vegetation and built environment via fieldwork and aerial photography to understand how the nature reserves affected the relationship and the plant species before 1967 and after. In addition, this contribution will allow me to exchange knowledge on how to conduct field visits and oral history interviews to document the disappearing environmental history, especially from marginalised communities and the history of their relations with their landscape and the transformations that have affected them. Seeing other experiences conducting research about more-than-human landscapes and archives to elucidate the agroecological transformation of the landscape will allow me to use more tools and ways of research that may work for my research interests.

Instead of relying only on official archival sources and a dominant national and ideological lens in perceiving and analysing agroecological transformations and adaptation, I am interested in concentrating on analysing non-official archival documents that Palestinians might hold about the research area.

Contribution short abstract:

As a historian of the Mughal Empire, I often encounter bugs in Indian archives, both live and in the form of historical records. What are the ethics of encountering insects in manuscript archives? What possibilities open up if we allow ourselves to tolerate worms in our precious archives?

Contribution long abstract:

I am a Ph.D. student interested in tracing agrarian environments over the course of the Mughal Empire (1520-1760). With a keen interest in botanical and faunal encounters in early-modern agrarian fields of South Asia, I now spotlight another regular encounter. Researchers in South Asia regularly meet insects in the archive. Often these nits feature in catalog entries as historical actors responsible for rendering manuscripts "badly worm-eaten", or as booklice demonstratively gnawing at the spines of entire rare collections, or a little more conventionally, as entomological entries in encyclopedias of natural history. Clearly, our archives are ecological gatherings marked by competition for space. Can historians rethink their relationship with the manuscripts archives they visit, especially in the more generally humid and under-resourced South Asia? Should my positionality as a meat-eating South Asian affect my questions? These are some of the ponderings I'd like to bring up in this workshop.

Contribution short abstract:

This contribution considers wetland restoration in Lake Erie as an archival praxis. It details how the connectivity of a given wetland to its wider watershed does not exist as a fixed property, but is rather something actively negotiated through varying systems of value and more-than-human memory.

Contribution long abstract:

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are toxic growth events that have long-plagued Lake Erie waters and are historically associated with the leaching of nutrient fertilizers applied to farm fields as well as the loss of wetlands throughout the region. This workshop contribution details recent efforts by the state to develop a comprehensive nutrient budget of Lake Erie’s watershed that policy makers argue is necessary for assessing various HAB mitigation strategies, notably wetland restoration. While “restoring” wetland ecosystems in watersheds has been proven to mitigate nutrient loads in downstream water bodies like Lake Erie, there is little agreement about how wetlands should be restored or, more specifically, what qualities in space and time they should be restored to. Through discussion of how wetland ecologists practically and epistemically account for such unknowns within a specific restored wetland site, this contribution details how the connectivity of a given wetland to its wider watershed does not exist as a fixed property of the landscape, but is rather something actively negotiated through varying systems of value and more-than-human processes. In this way, it argues that state-authorized modes of political memory and data-hungry algorithms mutually condition Lake Erie’s watershed as an archive of increasing political significance. Through discussion of seemingly mundane matters such as scientific protocol, state bureaucracy, and 19th century artifacts of settler-colonial wetland destruction, I show how memory within Lake Erie’s watershed is saturated with legacies of settler-colonial terraforming and more-than-human processes to inspire a wider political imagination of harm in Lake Erie to cohere.

Contribution short abstract:

This contribution explores how milk fermentation and more-than-human knowledge systems relate through the study of lactic ferments and their use and proliferation in Mongolian and Kyrgyz pastoral society.

Contribution long abstract:

In Central Asian pastoralism, milk fermentation happens through the work of animals, humans, material culture, and, most importantly, microbial starter cultures as communities of lactic acid bacteria that enable the transformation of perishable fresh milk into storable, consumable dairy products. In turn, by making fermented dairy products humans support unique microbial ecosystems. However, pastoralists rarely refer to microbes in the context of dairy production. In fact, given that milk is considered pure, the herders I worked with in Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan even considered microbial activity in milk sometimes as pollution, echoing the pathogenic paradigms of both socialist and capitalist biopolitics. Nevertheless, local dairying knowledge offers insight into unique interactions between humans and microbial communities. In the Mongolian language, the word for starter culture is khöröngö, a polysemic term that translates as ferment, wealth, capital, and heirloom. As a ferment, it is shared across maternal generations, or between households, to initiate new dairying cycles. In Kyrgyzstan, the word used for describing ferments is göröñgö, a notion significantly resembling its Mongolian counterpart in that it also refers to sociocultural wealth. For instance, göröñgö is used to describe the upbringing of a child with diligence and in a healthy environment. Sharing portions of khöröngö/göröñgö is a future-oriented practice of growth that builds on past knowledge. Khöröngö/göröñgö, I suggest, bundles environmental knowledge as well as time and multispecies relationships of value and heritage. It is a living archive in-the-making.

Contribution short abstract:

My interest in more-than-human archives stems from my research amid lively and elemental 'riverscape archives'.

Contribution long abstract:

My work has focused on cultures and knowledges around dynamic waterscapes in the Anthropocene. My PhD problematised Western academic ways of knowing rivers; Focusing on riverscapes across the Scottish Highlands and Northern Finland, I explored the rationales and sensibilities of light-animated environmental sensing technologies, and produced perspectives on how luminous modes of wit(h)nessing riverscapes permit particular riverine knowledges and archives to emerge and do work in the world, and for the ‘voice of the river’ (Brierley 2020) to be heard. Here, the notion of an elemental 'riverscape archive' (informed both by geoscience and feminist new materialism) emerged as a key mode for enquiry. I approached the riverscape archive as a contested and lively space, a constellation of past and present made through complex ecologies of light. I explored how our practices of knowing take place within it, articulating and configuring it in particular ways. My entanglement within the riverine archive invited reflection on the ways in which ‘knowing’ emerges as a broader cognitive function, distributed between the participating elements - and how riverine knowledges are relational and partial utterances of the elemental riverscape archive.

I understand the more-than-human archive as an elemental and lively space that encompasses both worldly matter in motion and knowledge-making practices within. I would be keen explore the topic further through this collaborative workshop. As an archival object, I will bring a solargraph image produced during my PhD research, which itself acts as an archive of cosmic and riverine radiations.

Contribution short abstract:

My contribution to this workshop is a focus on planetary geology as more-than-human archives, inspired by the works of American artist Robert Smithson and Australian artist Bianca Hester. Both artists engage in speculative art practices that build new archival forms from geological matter.

Contribution long abstract:

My research centres on the role of contemporary art in understanding the more-than-human geological world. In examining the geology of the planet itself as an archive — one that stores and stories the narrative of the Anthropocene — I propose a speculative art historical approach to the question of the more-than-human archive. As part of the workshop I offer a contribution that focuses on geology as a more-than-human archive inspired by the works of American artist Robert Smithson and Australian artist Bianca Hester. Both artists engage in speculative art practices that build new archival forms from geological matter and unsettle previous relationships with the environment. My approach employs environmental art histories to unpack critical artworks within the context of the more-than-human.

Contribution short abstract:

New soft robots mimic benthic bodies to rectify gaps in marine archives. We consider the epistemological practices of collection and classification within new technological mediations and amidst the material agencies of pressure and flesh as subjects that evade entry into specimen archives.

Contribution long abstract:

Over 500 new lifeforms have been discovered while prospecting for deep sea minerals. While the seabed has largely been represented as a resource awaiting exploitation, still little is known about the ecosystems and lifeworlds of the benthic realm. Collection methods in the deep are confounded by the soft materiality of deep sea animal bodies, who promptly slough their tissues at reduced, near-surface pressures and are easily crushed by traditional ROV mechanical arms. Samples are required in order to taxonimize species and legalize their protection. New soft robots mimic benthic soft bodies to rectify this gap in the ‘pickled archive’ of shelved jars in natural history museums and marine institutes. We consider the epistemological practices of ocean species collection and classification within shifting technological mediations, emerging desires for deep sea extraction and oceanic species protection, and amidst the material agencies of differential elemental pressures and fleshy soft-bodied animal subjects that evade capture and entry into the specimen archive of Linnean objects.

While we have previously conducted and published research creatively exploring earth as archive, the focus was on sand and minerals. We are seeking the chance for collective thinking in considering more-than-human archives through bodies and textures as mediated by lived physics of the deep and emerging mimicry technologies of capture, such as soft bots.

Contribution short abstract:

In the nineteenth-century, carte-de-visite photo-albums elicited a collective experience. In sharing my own album and collection of handmade carte-de-visite albumen prints depicting damaged obsolete museum taxidermy specimens, I hope to evoke a tactile and haptic remembrance for the lost animal.

Contribution long abstract:

I have been exploring the relationship between the photograph and museum taxidermy specimen collections for fifteen years. I am interested in their ambiguity and complexity as material and metaphorical expressions of death, preservation, remembrance and defiance.

My project, On Transience: Memento Mori, studied damaged taxidermy specimens in storage at the Natural History Museum, London. The objective in creating a collection of photographic prints from this museum collection was to elicit a greater tactility as a form of haptic remembrance.

Using the nineteenth-century albumen print process I made small carte-de-visite portrait prints of the taxidermied specimens - the intimate fragility of the prints became a metaphor for the damaged status of these obsolete specimens.

The prints are experienced in a nineteenth-century carte-de-visite photo-album to emulate a haptic reverie of the time - an attempt to offer some recognition of the individual specimen as an embodied representation of the animal that once was. These nineteenth-century albums and prints were made, collected, circulated, shared and touched as a form of remembrance and emotional connection to that which was untouchable or lost. Through “an entanglement of touch and sight,” (Batchen, 2009, p86), this portrait album became an archive offering an individualised remembrance for these lost taxidermy specimens.

My contribution to this workshop is to share the carte-de-visite album with fellow participants to enable a discursive tactile and haptic visuality of these prints and encourage remembrance of these lost animals.

The project can be viewed here: https://acm-photo.com/portfolio/mori.

Contribution short abstract:

I propose to bring a propaganda poster featuring a mallard duck with a red bandanna, from a campaign against the construction of an airport in Mexico City on the partially-drained Lake Texcoco. The mallards acted as a repository of “nature’s memory,” and human archives were constructed around them.

Contribution long abstract:

I propose to bring a propaganda poster featuring a mallard duck with a red bandanna, which was part of a grassroots campaign to halt the construction of a new international airport for Mexico City on the site of the partially-drained Lake Texcoco. Activists argued that the presence of a large community of migratory birds indicated the unsuitability of the site, both because of the danger of birdstrikes and because their presence—despite centuries of infrastructure projects aimed at draining the lake and developing the land under it—indicated the inescapable “natural vocation” of the lakebed and its potential for regeneration. Multiple human archives—scientific studies to identify the birds and their migratory patterns, historical archives dating back to the Conquest about the ecosystem of the lake, and popular memory regarding duck hunting—were all deployed in fierce debates about the airport project’s fate. But beyond these, the mallards themselves came to be viewed as a repository of “nature’s memory,” evidence that Texcoco will and should remain a lake, despite human pretensions. The addition of the bandana also depicted them as a repository of more than human alliances in social struggle, as it alluded to earlier conflicts over development projects in the same wetland territories. I propose to think through the complexity of the mallard here as archive, as symbol, and as actant.

Contribution short abstract:

We will bring ideas about an oral history collection of agroecological farmers which should record not only the farmer but also the non-human surroundings. It is intended as a digital collection, a kind of virtual compost heap, offering new ways to shape the present and future of farming.

Contribution long abstract:

Given common points of research on agroecology and influenced by anthropological, geographical, historical, and psychological perspectives, we will bring ideas about an oral history collection of agroecological farmers. The ideas, practices, and experiences of these farmers are embodied and preserved in themselves - in many cases they are the only medium to tell their story to posterity, as often no written legacy of these agroecological activities remains available.

This oral history collection would not be written but spoken. It should ideally be recorded by video rather than only in audio format and, if possible, include the cultivated land. Thereby, not only the farmer but also the non-human surroundings can be captured which is a factor often missing in traditional oral history archives.

We have an interest in seeing how such an effort can link farmers, researchers, policy advisors, and a public that wishes to have greater access to histories of agrarian transformation and often resistance. This collection may serve as a living memory, functioning as a type of “Erinnerungs-agri-kultur” to support the objectives of a political agroecology. As a digital collection, it resembles a virtual compost heap, offering new ways to shape the present and future through a mix of human and non-human experiences of the past.

Contribution short abstract:

What does it mean to know? How is knowledge attained? Where is it stored until we find it and decide to record it in another format? Following in the footsteps of Māori experts and scientists studying the disease threatening the kauri forests of Aotearoa changed my understanding of these questions.

Contribution long abstract:

Everything that has happened has left a mark on the earth. In 2019, I began walking through the forest accompanying pathologists and Māori elders trying to understand and halt the microscopic serial killers decimating kauri trees. I was soon able to read human interventions in the presence of some species and in the absence of many others. Walking under different weather conditions and at different times, I also became sensitive to multispecies events. The historical texts and photographs that informed my doctoral research, the stories Māori elders shared with me, and the scientific measurement of disease progression, everything found an equivalence in the landscape. As I kept walking, I discovered myself inside an archive where nothing was linear or organised but everything was logical and connected. Each piece of mobile information spoke directly to another era, anticipating it, warning about it, or, retrospectively, making it intelligible.

My PhD dissertation explored the production of knowledge at the interface of scientific biosecurity and mātauranga Māori. I suspected that the forests, the space where this knowledge would be reached, and, above all, the intimate and prolonged contact with the trees, were going to be decisive in the study and understanding of the microorganism-induced disease. I was in no way prepared for what walking into that living landscape -where each kauri, artifact, or patch of forest acts as a repository of information- was going to do to me and to my understanding of what knowing means.