October 11, 2019

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Event 🎫 | Multispecies 🐝 | Permanently Moved 🔊

just got back from Unsound Festival in Poland yesterday. I talk about the panel and talk I did, and some of the artists I saw live. Also being inspired by hanging out with inspiring people.

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Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Back From Krakow

Since we last spoke I’ve flown to and from Poland, and boy are my arms tired.

As mentioned last week I was there to moderate a panel discussion on interspecies solidarity between cultural geographer and filmmaker, Amy Cutler and the writer Luke Turner. It was a really good discussion. We couldn’t just jump into the conversation on solidarity as the topic is ultimately to many people’s ears in the current landscape of 2019 a ‘weird idea’ to say the least. 

So instead we felt our way there. Via Tim Ingold’s comments on the difference between moving through space and being on landscape from Against Space: Place, Movement, Knowledge. Though Kenith Olwigs reframing of our relationship to the land from a landscape to Landship. The discussion then felt its way through Anna Tsing’s mushroom at the end of the world and Donna Harrayway’s concept of making Kin by encouraging others to foster and recognise a sense of quote unquote Entanglement with the more than human world. We used the words Multispecies entanglement a great deal. 

For my part it was great to have a conversation with other people in a public setting where you could roll through the material on this space with others that know well. From Eduardo Kohn to Monica Gagliarno without needing to pause and explain a concept from scratch. Or mentioning things like landscapes are haunted by the past in very real and impactful ways. I got the sense from conversations in the audience that this was a good move, as they grasped the concepts at some intuitive level due to the nature of the conversation, but not necessarily understanding them fully. 

Amy brought up that there is emergence in emergency and there must also be solidarity in the world’s extinction. I thought later that the adage “an injury to one is an injury to all” is of even more importance when talking about multispecies entanglement than when it’s just applied to humans. 

A key notion that came up around how the human is ultimately a human construction and therefore subject to all our fallacies and foibles seemed to resonate with the audience too. 

Luke spoke about coppicing and pollarding of the forest. How the forest is not necessarily the wild space of one’s imagination. That a forest like Epping is a collaborative space between humans doing human things in the landscape that humans do and the trees themselves. After all a coppiced tree will live far far longer than one that was left to grow and die on its own natural timeline.

An audience member said that it was the best discussion they’d seen in the 4 years they’d been coming to the festival, which was cool. Hopefully the talk will be published to the festival archive sometime soon and I’ll let you all know when that happens.

My Solarpunk talk was at midday the next day, a tricky time for the talk audience wise considering that it was Unsound karaoke the night before. Big thanks to those that showed up on 3 hours sleep to hear me talk about cultural fracking of futures in mainstream media, Solarpunk, unfolding and polyphony. It went well and folks thought it was interesting. Obviously I’ll link to that too if/when it gets posted.

The whole festival was great, I got in early in the week so it was more of the experimental artists. Lingua Ignota performed basically the whole of Caligula from start to finish on my first night. It was an incredible performance, there was a moment when she sang the Kyrie, and it was awesome to see that for the first time in a nominally catholic country. The atmosphere from the audience turned the room inside out and you could have felt a pin drop let alone heard one. Came away really impressed by the one person live set too. I was also really pleased to have seen Dreamcrusher, it was HEAVY and I loved every second of it.

Of course as ever, it was a real privilege to be at Unsound, I’m always amazed when anyone invites me to anything to be honest i really do appreciate it.

I wanted to talk a little bit about my experiences at events like unsound or sonar as a speaker. Of course being a speaker is different from being an artist at the music venue, but you wear the same wristband and get to go to the same places not always afforded to the attendees. 

I’ve been incredibly lucky that people have always been generous with their time and attention at events like this. Either I’ve known other people either performing or speaking at the festival, or known friends of friends who I have been able to hang out with. This year I need to give a big shout out to Lisa, Lyra, Jacob, Luke, and Debi. 

Because the reality is, when folks you know go do something without you or with others you are in a foreign country, in a foreign city. And you are completely on your own. It happened to me in the Hague this year and it’s a bit bleak. So the atmosphere to combat this is very much. Dinner at 7.30 bring anyone you want. And that’s really nice. 

These festivals for me are periods of intense inspiration. Being around other creative people, executing on the thing that they love. Whether it’s writing, music, journalism etc. Speaking to people about the things that they love doing and are getting to do is obviously inspiring. It naturally makes you fired up and want to explore your own creative life and want to lean into it harder. It’s mainly because the conversation isn’t one big back slapping session either. But also there’s moments that can cut really deep into dealing with ones self doubt, creative struggles with their practice and the like. Which of course I’ve been talking about on here myself. 

Everytime I’m exposed to an environment like this, i’m inspired to do more, create more. Be more me.