Connectedness

Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene

Edited by Marianne Krogh
Strandberg 2020

In reading Connectedness: An Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene edited by Marianne Krogh to accompany the exhibition of the same name in the Danish Pavilion in the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale with contributions from Sune Oleander Rasmussen, Dehlia Hannah, Tatjana Schneider, Sofie Isager Ahl, Aerocene, Gaia Vince, Elke Krasny, Line Marie Thorsen, Gernot Böhme, Tredje Natur / Flemming Rafn Thomsen, Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, Polina Chebotareva & Rasmus Hjortshøj, Salla Sariola, Minik Rosing, Mwenza Blell, Tiffany Chung, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Joanna Latimer, Donna Haraway, David Gissen, James Thorton, Bill McKibben, Anders Blok, Sidselv Kjærulff Rasmussen, Rosi Braidotti, Josefine Klougart, Nils Ole Bubandt, Liv Sejrbo Lidegaardw, Simo Køppe, Phillip & April Vannini, Gregers Andersen, Lois Lowry, Jesper Just, John Baird Callicott, Jeff VanderMeer, Timothy Morton, Kirsten Halsnæs, Cary Wolfe, Norrøn, Peter Weibel, Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé, Lars Skinnebach, Superflex, Alice Waters, Andri Magnason, Hu Fang, Minik Rosing, Nikolaj Schultz, Jesper Theilgaard, Saskia Sassen, Martin Stendel, Jim Reed, Ben Dibley, Lenschow & Pihlmann, Bjørk, Rune Bosse, Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, Paul Roquet, Thomas Gammeltoft- Hansen, Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen, Bruno Latour & Nikolaj Schultz, Tredje Natur / Flemming Rafn Thomsen, Diana Coole, Greta Thunberg, Peter Adolphsen, Graham Harman, Betsy Hartmann, Julius von Bismarck, Anders Lendager, Zachary Caple, Heather Davis, Frederick Davis, Tomas Saraceno, Lars Tønder, Antke Engel, Aditya Bahadur, Jaime Stapleton, Rikke Luther, Darren Sharp, Vandana Shiva, SPACE10 + Sachs & Nottveit, Connie Hedegaard, Emmy Laura Perez Fjalland, Barbara Adam, Jessika Trancik, Niels Albertsen, Amanda Boetzkes, Astrida Neimanis, Astrida Neimanis & Jennifer Hamilton, Jason Mark, Mike Hulme, Georg Metz, and Olga Tokarczuk, I’m struck by how different my relationship to books has become. I read most things cooperatively with a computer, taking off on multimedia flights of algorithmic and hyperlinked inquiry. This kind of book-as-relational-element in a multi-authored, multi-venued, and deterritorialized epistemological ecology is characteristic of much of the contemporary media I engage with. It proceeds alphabetically from Abrupt Climate Change to Xenophobia.

The scope of Connectedness, released in conjunction with one of the pavilions in a biennial titled How will we live together? with 112 participants from 46 countries alongside a 61 national participations with 17 collateral events, a conversation series called Meetings on Architecture with live and live streamed symposia, workshops and screenings and an collaboration with the 15th Biennale Danza to create choreographic fragments relating to the themes of the Biennale, is beyond the meaningful apprehension of a textual review. While writing that last sentence I stopped to visit the microsite of the inaugural Uzbekistan pavilion to learn a little bit about the potential of high density, low rise networks of urban dwellings built around courtyards in Tashkent Mahallas, while listening to field recordings and looking at a sweeping drone’s eye fly-through. A few moments later I was attempting to unpack the implications of speculative AI futures as determined by a consort of German academics operating in the emerging field of Neurourbanism in the collateral Mutualities event. Connectedness seems to challenge our neuroplastic capacity and the so-called “intelligences” that are being developed to help us apprehend these new scopes are turning out not to really be our allies.

This kind of biennial is a paragon of cultural consumption at the global scale in experience economies. The largest in an unending parade of over 300—and counting—current biennials and similarly scaled events. The axis tilts towards the West, setting the parameters of participation and developing the standards by which certain forms of culture are made legible and transactional. The legacy of the biennial form is inextricably bound up with the legacy of colonialism and putting aside its complicity in reprehensible market machinations (for a moment), it also seems like a generative and potentially useful form for cultivating planetary scale exchange and knowledge production. As I chart the flows of biennial themes, largely through e-flux, it occurs to me that a nascent global consciousness is developing through contemporary art vectors.

Necessarily schematic, Connectedness reads like a bibliography and is likely intended as a tool for further multimedia exploration. Salla Sariola, in the entry on Bacteria, builds on Margulis and Haraway to consider the excesses of antibiotics and the distribution of microbial collaboration along a transversal of immunological spectrums; pathogenic to kimchi. A short google leads me to a recent talk she participated in as part of the Coronavirus Multispecies Reading Group ‘hosted by Associate Professor Eben Kirksey (Deakin) and coordinated by Dr. Rachel Vaughn (UCLA), after spontaneously forming on Facebook early in the pandemic. ‘Together the group is delving into the primary literature—reading papers from journals like Science and Nature—alongside classic essays from the field of multispecies ethnography. It has become a forum where established coronavirus researchers, veterinarians, and molecular biologists have entered into conversation with leading social scientists, artists, historians, philosophers, and cultural theorists.’ There are 50 videos in the Coronavirus Multispecies Reading Group series at the time of writing this, notable for their inclusive Zoom moderation and open comments. Sariola suggests we ‘stay with the multiplicity,’ as a productive way not to fall into the traps of dualism. In City, David Gissen takes a welcome ‘dark’ turn through urbanization in order to remediate the excesses of enlightened architecture, while exploring subnatures as material externalities of urbanization and how we might design for vulnerable groups.

About a quarter way through the encyclopedia, after Capitolocene and Care and just before the Cthulucene, I’m interrupted by an email announcing an archive of 20-something—and growing—Palestinian films made by women as part of the durational For a Free Palestine: Films by Palestinian Women streaming series organized by Daniella Shreir and Another Gaze. This agile and time-sensitive response to the latest tragedies in the ongoing crisis in Palestine animates that which tends to disappear behind reportage and statistics—the textures, spirit, and unnamed and unbounded remainders. A theme of music runs through the program, and is poignantly felt in Jumana Manna’s A Magical Substance Flows Through Me, a transgenerational kinship of diasporic lyrical ethnography. This irruption of sudden existential violence from within the slower ongoing structural violence takes precedence over my Anthropocene reading. I console myself with relevant art, try to amplify its reach, and sit with the feeling of its inadequacy.

It's hard to overstate the influence of Donna Haraway in this milieu. She is cited more than any other scholar in this collection and her idiosyncratic, sympoetic language recurs throughout. In some ways, I feel a little resistant towards this trend. Or rather that it's her spirit, more than the literalness of her concepts and texts that should be reproduced. A winsome playfulness and experimentation with thinking beyond the Cartesian that seems most helpful as a disposition. The spectres of ecofascism and ecocapitalism haunt Connectedness. A Malthusian inclination towards population control and greenwashed capitalism are chilling prospects that loom over the discourse, borrowing selectively towards their respective agendas. Betsy Hartmann’s capsule cautionary on the reductive, misdirecting and obfuscatory applications of the overpopulation thesis that can lead to ‘prejudice, poor policy prescriptions, dangerous politics and human rights violations’ is a helpful contribution to historically ground the conversation. I wish Krogh had invited someone like Jason Moore, Raj Patel or T.J. Demos to explicitly address the centrality of capitalism as a driver in anthropogenic mass extinction and its capacity to distort and recuperate nearly any event or condition into a market. In the Resource section of Connectedness Jamie Stapleton offers that the solutions are simple. ‘Regulation, regulation, regulation.’ What remains difficult is imagining and creating transnational alliances to oversee and regulate the transnational capital flows that externalize the eco-social.

The multiplicity of perspectives in Connectedness offers many avenues for exploration. Likely each reader will take their own meandering path. One can anticipate moments of profound resonance and revelation. Anders Blok's contribution, building on the prescient cosmo ‘climate risk communities’ of Ulrich Beck, was very much one of those moments for me. The question of cosmopolitics and how to develop them towards meaningfully addressing socioecological urgencies, is at the front of my mind and recurrent in this collection. It segues into the Co-existence contribution by Rosi Braidotti—herself a generative pollinator of polyphonic ecological discourse—where she casts us into a posthuman, postanthropocentric paradox to consider how to we produce knowledge with our interdependent more-than-human planetary collaborators, and develop remediating zoe-geo-techno systems.

Connectedness belongs to a moment of rupture, Self among variegated Self-conceptions, with the advent of mass internet-enabled visual-textual culture, that, in the thinking of J. Baird Callicott, contracts spatial and temporal distance to overcome our limited inherited moral capacities. I suppose in my reading, locating an ethical position is interchangeable with organizing a conception of Self and I find myself apprenticing fluctuating valences of philosophy, science, technology, psychology, politics, law and art; a suite of loosely shared epistemological filters applied in different combinatory concentrations.

It’s possible that we’re living through a scientistic turn towards algorithmic governance as conceived by the preexisting and emerging power hegemonies. Or perhaps inversely, hegemonic power structures are instrumentalizing science and technology to further consolidate their power. Regarding this trend, many contributors in Connectedness insist on more inclusive codetermination of epistemologies and infrastructures with marginalized, suppressed, and nonhuman actors. And on this, the existence of our biodiversity depends. Throughout Connectedness we are invited to try on different perspectives and orientations. Some are easier than others, and most are easier than what Ben Dibley, after De Landa, asks of us when he suggests we replace our ‘organic chauvinism’ with a futural geologic disposition in posthuman zones littered with technofossils.

There is more diagnosis in this volume than applicable tools and approaches and when Dr. Aditya Bahadur shares the seven principles of resilience from the Stockholm Resilience Center; it's a satisfying, though contingent, model to be applied in diverse settings. It's hard to think about an organization that wouldn't benefit from the ongoing consideration of principles like; maintain diversity and redundancy; manage connectivity; manage slow variables and feedbacks; foster complex adaptive systems thinking; encourage learning; broaden participation; and promote polycentric governance systems.

Narrative remains a useful human scaled device for understanding extrahuman time and geological flows. Peter Adolphsen’s story of an Eocene mare that drowns in a lake and then over many poetic and scientifically enumerated processes across deep time, finds itself formed, extracted, refined, combusted and inhaled by a horrified Anthro in the Anthropocene, stays with me beyond the dizzying and shifting strands of extinction rates and drifting eco-semiotics.

There are conspicuously less co-authored pieces that one might imagine and it’s not until Moving Earth that we get to a dialogue, between Bruno Latour and Nikolaj Schultz. The conversation plays like a memetic intergenerational transfer of knowledge speculation. Charting Galileo and the cartographic turn into a modern cosmology that’s disrupted by Margulis and Lovelock's Gaia concept, stripped here of its new age connotations and signaling the dawn of Anthropocene awareness. The vertiginous sensation attending these epochal cosmological shifts puts us, through the mind of Latour, in a position of ‘lost in space.’ This spatial confusion, taken up in Pierre Charbonnier’s habilitation thesis, foregrounds the disconnect between the modern notion of where people think they live and the territories they actually live off and from.

Latour’s general practice involves taking the theoretical gains of socialism and expanding them to include the ‘geo-social’ more-than-human classes configured by arbitrary geopolitical and territorialized flows. His challenge to ‘describe the territory from which you exist’ forces an ecological consideration and potentially a corresponding ecological politics. He offers a grounded materialism more modestly scaled to the earth's critical zone, as defined as the ‘heterogeneous, near surface environment in which complex interactions involving rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources’ (National Research Council, 2001). The unenviable task of defining and instituting class solidarity along the global flows of production is a challenge that plausibly moves us towards greater accountability. Latour extends a bridge to his exhibition-making which takes up many of the issues raised in Connectedness. His contemporaneous Critical Zones: Landing on Earth feels largely addressed to a runaway modernism high on green capital and space colonization.

Somewhat tellingly, Zac Efron simultaneously released a Netflix series with the same name as Latour’s last book, Down to Earth, that is regrettably more concerned with wellness, ecotourism and entertainment. This highlights the rapaciousness of a culture industry that co-opts, dilutes and distracts alongside what we might call the Thunbergification of ecological discourse, that infantilizes its audience and foregrounds affect, celebrity and media attention. What seems more pressing is sustained structural change and actually listening to people who spend their life rigorously studying and practicing in their chosen field. Be that as it may, the impact of a still-forming figure like Thunberg and the proliferation and mutations of ecological memetics through culturespheres are difficult things to measure. I’m also not entirely convinced the biennial spectacle and its costly diffusion of energies is all that different from Zac Efron’s show. That is, they both seem to be a form of consumption, marketed with eco-virtue, designed to please a certain class. I suppose if I’m being totally honest, I would like a world with less destructive transportation and open borders so I can travel from biennial to biennial with everyone else who would like to, learning about our shared world and its remaining diversity.

The case study on Enghaveparken in Copenhagen is a curious experiment in large scale public ecological aesthetics. It’s built to respond to ‘monster rain’ weather events. A hybrid preventative, remediating and utilitarian water management infrastructure as contemplative, educational, recreational and aesthetic public resource. Although I anemically experience the park through its ecological claims and Lilliputian JPGs it seems this kind of climate responsive, socially effective aesthetics is worth exploring and emulating.

It bears mentioning that the format of institutionally-validated experts from mostly Europe and North America providing reductive conceptualizations of signifiers like Power and Queer seems retrograde and decidedly of the system that produced the models that led to the anthropocene. What individual can speak definitively on what Power or Queer might mean in ~ 2000 words? Likely not Antke Engel, though it deeply resonates when they point out a ‘failing in solidarity with those who are in need of justice but lack similarity.’

There is something startlingly effective in the kind of hyper-concentrated distillation of a lifetime of study that happens when, say, Vandana Shiva gives us a couple page overview of Soil. This skillful précis orients a reader quickly in a matrix of devastating practices in need of remediation, even though a corresponding range of agential possibilities is not forthcoming.

The entry for Sun features a jejune wooden model of a city called SolarVille with solar panels on the roofs, created by some Danish architects that work for IKEA. They offer this comparably facile description, ‘With SolarVilles design, what could be complicated is now playful, and what could have been cold, abstract or removed is made warm, immediate and tangible.’ This seems like a missed opportunity to discuss more consequential developments in solar. Happening coterminously and perhaps too late for inclusion in Connectedness was the announcement of Xi Jinping’s renewable energy and carbon goals: 1200 GW of solar and wind capacity by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060. Though perhaps its’s better to put these two events into a collaborative multiplicity of approaches, as questionable as they each might be.

Consultant and urban researcher Darren Sharp offers a concise overview of the Sharing Economy with a balance of criticism and reproducible models, that tilts more towards the socioeconomic than the socioecological for my taste but nonetheless will likely function as a useful primer for most. He draws a distinction between ‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ sharing, and points us toward some frameworks, often involving municipalities, that have made services and resources more equitably available in places like Seoul, Amsterdam and Bologna.

I certainly have my criticisms. Eurocentrism, elitism, the unfolding colonial context, ‘the unbearable whiteness of green’, disciplinary determinisms, naive scientism, obfuscatory theory, hackneyed poetics, a chorus of Scandinavian postdocs tediously rehashing Harawayian tropes, and the sense that there’s an almost industrial level production of the kind of formulaic eco-statements that can be adapted to nearly any company, product, artwork, or occasion. Some variation of mass extinction statistics, unexpected entanglements, multi hyphenate neologisms, familiar affective devices and ‘your brand or product here.’ A Jevons paradox of eco signaling. That said, please don’t take these misgivings for anything more than an indication of my predilections and positionality. I don’t want to discourage anyone from exploring this rich offering. Though while doing so, it may be good to keep in mind Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen’s observation, in Migration Flows, that it's cheaper for him to fly first class to Venice for the biennale while reading this book than it is for an Eritrean refugee to buy a spot in an inflatable boat from Al-Zawiya on the Libyan coast to the islands of Lampedusa.

As I approached the end of the book there was a ‘found poem’ by Astrida Neimanis composed of language fragments addressing Water, each containing a footnote. A shudder came over me as I anticipated the conceptual contours of the gesture. I wrongly assumed the remaining 30 or so pages of the book would be given over to a cascading bibliography of ecoaqualogical poetics flowing downstream from at least Heraclitus. A dissolution of the neoliberal subject and a blossoming of interrelated works. Regrettably, they all belonged to the author's previous book. A sharp reminder I was reading a collection of mostly individual professionals from the West compiled for a national pavilion at a European biennale. And it may surprise you less that it wasn’t Christina Sharpe who was invited to define the next entry on the Weather. The following day I was scanning the homepage of a popular shadow library of radical texts that was started by a mostly anonymous group in Ljubljana when I encountered an essay from Neimanis about Representation. It was compelling and profusely citational and I include this here because I don’t want to fault Neimanis in any way for my projections. A little further exploration into their work was illuminating and connected. I believe this kind of survey is one that benefits more from further connections and critical coalition-building, rather than cynical dismissal.

With each contribution, I experience a range of affirmative and agonistic responses and a broad horizon of related material to explore. The scope of which is overwhelming, and difficult to track meaningfully in the media deluge. To sit with this cacophony of voices calling out against our anthropogenic, unevenly distributed ecocide, outmoded frameworks, compounding paradox, neoliberal recuperations, eco-opportunism, and glaring and unknowable omissions, is to begin to apprehend the moment, and expand our scope of address and coalitions commensurate with the planetary challenges we face.