Exhibition Pamphlet
Implantations takes root in the memory of trees, engaging the arboreal as mnemonic, method, and mode of relation. Featuring video, paper-based, poetic, and performance works by Elena Victoria Pastor and ruïns collective (Elias Parvulesco and Teta Tsybulnyk) this project reflects upon the incorporation of trees into anthropocentric remembrance structures, while also engaging with the subjectivity of trees as deeply reciprocal entities that are not just in the world, but of it.
Within this engagement, touch becomes especially important. Trees lucidly demonstrate an innate hapticity with the world, actively responding to their immediate environment and atmosphere and acting as a convening site for various ecologies, as well as memories and significations. Luce Ingray, for instance, writes of the tree as “not only vegetal. It is a meeting place of the elements, vegetal forms, species, and biological kingdoms” (Irigaray, 2016, 151). The intimacy of contact and convening is reiterated throughout Implantations, from Elena Victoria Pastor’s poetic performance activations of frottage technique with trees the trees slated to be felled in the construction of the new Sternbrücke bridge, to the meditative engagements of trees as repositories of legend, memory, and national pride in ruïns collective’s video dendro dreams.
Rather than an interpretation or representation of the recollections of and by trees, the works in Implantations enact Donna Haraway’s definition of articulations. Haraway’s notion of articulation is founded on “situated knowledge” and “points of view” that allow a speaking with the other rather than a speaking on their behalf. As Haraway writes, “Nature may be speechless, without language, in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate. Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connections can be made” (Haraway, 1992, 309). In a similar vein, Karen Barad highlights how speaking with is an act that is grounded in a non-anthropocentric model of knowledge, one that is grounded on “a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation” (Barad, 2007, 379). Trees, among other plants, are indistinguishable from their environs, consistently reacting to and changing what surrounds them. They participate in what Emanuele Coccia calls a “mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium” (Coccia, 2019, 42). This compenetration extends to memory itself, which is shared by bark and brain, leaf and limb, bough and body. As the works in Implantations suggest, if we turn our attention to the arboreal and speak with its embodied articulations of the past, present, and future, we can become better rooted by modes of mutuality that acknowledge the dynamic and vibrant network of entities and forces that make up the world and all that is of it.
Endnotes:
Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
Emanuele Coccia and Dylan J Montanari. The Life of Plants : A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2019.
Images courtesy Elena Victoria Pastor, Janna Wieland
Poster Design: Lia DiBitonto
Implantations takes root in the memory of trees, engaging the arboreal as mnemonic, method, and mode of relation. Featuring video, paper-based, poetic, and performance works by Elena Victoria Pastor and ruïns collective (Elias Parvulesco and Teta Tsybulnyk) this project reflects upon the incorporation of trees into anthropocentric remembrance structures, while also engaging with the subjectivity of trees as deeply reciprocal entities that are not just in the world, but of it.
Within this engagement, touch becomes especially important. Trees lucidly demonstrate an innate hapticity with the world, actively responding to their immediate environment and atmosphere and acting as a convening site for various ecologies, as well as memories and significations. Luce Ingray, for instance, writes of the tree as “not only vegetal. It is a meeting place of the elements, vegetal forms, species, and biological kingdoms” (Irigaray, 2016, 151). The intimacy of contact and convening is reiterated throughout Implantations, from Elena Victoria Pastor’s poetic performance activations of frottage technique with trees the trees slated to be felled in the construction of the new Sternbrücke bridge, to the meditative engagements of trees as repositories of legend, memory, and national pride in ruïns collective’s video dendro dreams.
Rather than an interpretation or representation of the recollections of and by trees, the works in Implantations enact Donna Haraway’s definition of articulations. Haraway’s notion of articulation is founded on “situated knowledge” and “points of view” that allow a speaking with the other rather than a speaking on their behalf. As Haraway writes, “Nature may be speechless, without language, in the human sense; but nature is highly articulate. Discourse is only one process of articulation. An articulated world has an undecidable number of modes and sites where connections can be made” (Haraway, 1992, 309). In a similar vein, Karen Barad highlights how speaking with is an act that is grounded in a non-anthropocentric model of knowledge, one that is grounded on “a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation” (Barad, 2007, 379). Trees, among other plants, are indistinguishable from their environs, consistently reacting to and changing what surrounds them. They participate in what Emanuele Coccia calls a “mutual compenetration between subject and environment, body and space, life and medium” (Coccia, 2019, 42). This compenetration extends to memory itself, which is shared by bark and brain, leaf and limb, bough and body. As the works in Implantations suggest, if we turn our attention to the arboreal and speak with its embodied articulations of the past, present, and future, we can become better rooted by modes of mutuality that acknowledge the dynamic and vibrant network of entities and forces that make up the world and all that is of it.
Endnotes:
Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
Donna Haraway, “The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others.” In Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler, 295–337. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
Emanuele Coccia and Dylan J Montanari. The Life of Plants : A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2019.
Images courtesy Elena Victoria Pastor, Janna Wieland
Poster Design: Lia DiBitonto
Coro
Constanza Alarcón Tennen + Nicole L’HuillierExhibition
March 25 – April 16, 2023
PS122 Gallery, New York, NY
March 25 – April 16, 2023
PS122 Gallery, New York, NY
Coro proposes an attunement to a chorus of frequencies in the air and beneath our feet, vibrations that sound softly and deeply across matter, bodies, and terrains. Through video, audio, sculpture, and graphic works by artists Constanza Alarcón Tennen and Nicole L’Huillier, the exhibition heightens our attention to poetic resonances that are embodied and beyond the human, and that span underground and cosmic realms.
Resonance is activated as a poetic vehicle for imagining and enacting moments of intimacy, collectivity, and non-hegemonic narratives. In Coro, sounds and stories bleed into one another and across scales and entities, creating echoes, encounters, and collaborations between materials, disciplines, bodies, and spaces. Batimiento, a sonic phenomenon like a pulsing vibration where two slightly different sounds of the same amplitude are played simultaneously, yielding a sound of fluctuating periodic amplitude, is a central channel for these encounters. Batimientos appear sculpturally and sonically throughout the exhibition as whistles and as vibrating seeds; a risograph zine holds a guide for viewers to seek out and generate batimientos outside of the exhibition space. More than a physical phenomenon, batimiento functions in Coro as a poetic provocation for us to listen carefully to resonances which arise in the spaces above, in between, and below. The exhibition’s deployment of simultaneous utterances creates an environment where a practice of intimate listening, extending across membranes of the animate and inanimate, invites us to come close and to become a part of the chorus. Together, we can activate the potential of these vibrations in language, sound, and matter as forms of collectivity, care, and world-making.
Resonance is activated as a poetic vehicle for imagining and enacting moments of intimacy, collectivity, and non-hegemonic narratives. In Coro, sounds and stories bleed into one another and across scales and entities, creating echoes, encounters, and collaborations between materials, disciplines, bodies, and spaces. Batimiento, a sonic phenomenon like a pulsing vibration where two slightly different sounds of the same amplitude are played simultaneously, yielding a sound of fluctuating periodic amplitude, is a central channel for these encounters. Batimientos appear sculpturally and sonically throughout the exhibition as whistles and as vibrating seeds; a risograph zine holds a guide for viewers to seek out and generate batimientos outside of the exhibition space. More than a physical phenomenon, batimiento functions in Coro as a poetic provocation for us to listen carefully to resonances which arise in the spaces above, in between, and below. The exhibition’s deployment of simultaneous utterances creates an environment where a practice of intimate listening, extending across membranes of the animate and inanimate, invites us to come close and to become a part of the chorus. Together, we can activate the potential of these vibrations in language, sound, and matter as forms of collectivity, care, and world-making.
Closing performance audio documentation + opening performance video documentation
Images courtesy Cristobal Cea, Argenis Apolinario.