I’m really out of the habit of publishing week notes, partly because Friday’s have tended to be fieldwork days, and when I get back I’m too tired to write anything. But this week I’m at home ill.
- Late to the party but I’ve been enjoying(?… I think enjoying, but also having nightmares and feeling super anxious after reading) Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series over the last few weeks, and was thinking about her ‘missing’ endings (the Parable of the Trickster that was never finished) when I came across this 10 year old piece in the LA review of books exploring some of the fragments that were never published. I was thinking about how this missing series of novels could be a good start for a new design brief.
- Yesterday I some pretty brief notes from the Architectural and Environmental Humanities event setup by some colleagues that was to do with (in my reading) exploring the capacity of stories and storytelling (notes pasted below, not necessarily legible, but some ideas I’d like to come back to).
- I wrote the last line (and title) ‘Storytelling is not dead, it has gone to war’ (an adaption of a Tony Cokes piece) at the end of the day, when we were discussing how stories not only invoke possibles, but might also be dangerous. We talked about how it is that stories are delivered, how they are published, how they might become weapons in protest, justice etc. But we also talked about they might be slow, require patience, how they might be healing.
Helene — infrastructural love in the plantationocene
https://birkhauser.com/books/9783035625202
Storying and environmental storytelling — demanding a close attention to situating the researcher
Field philosophy as a method that approaches philosophy humbly, remaining open to what unfolds in an encounter rather than imposing pre-existing/determined frames/ways of understanding
^^ so it’s building on Stenger’s requirements and obligations? Ecology of practice.
What is it that stories can do, what do they have the capacity of/for?
Does story-telling, re-making/re-telling stories seem like the low-hanging fruit of decolonisation?
The carrier bag metaphor contains the stories of the colonised, not the colonisers…
Stengers: Decisions should take place in the presence of those who will bear the consequences — so this isn’t only about story-telling, but about politics, reparations?
Angela Kyriakou
Connecting to Land, making oneself at home
Auto-storying of home-making, micro-stories of the home is connecting objects left behind.
stories allow for emotional ‘management’?
Emma: minor architectures that provides a view point
- Le Guin makes the case that the knot is not negative (I’m not sure it was ever?) It is to do with possibilities, ecologies,
- Field/frames – Master/minor narratives — where does the story go?
What would the presentation look like if the story wasn’t there? What if we only read the ‘facts’?
Emre: How can the story and the ‘technical’ be woven together? (perhaps STS would argue that they always are though?)
Luis — Toxic (un)commons
The billowing cloud of dust does away with the line of the border.
Emotional response to the rocket launch — from the engineers, onlookers, birds.
Boca Chica in US/Mexico borderlands.
Borders: Mexico || US ——- Silicon Valley || Boca Chica,
Commisioned photo surveys of the impact on the landscape, lovely method.
Notion of an ’empty’ site. A tech-pilgrimage to the launch sites.
The dust settling on the old town to become the new space base
Re-writing the story of settler colonialism, and how it gets mirrored in sci-fi
So is this to do with alternative stories, and their compelling-ness?
Hannah — annotated sections: NE51 typology
NE=Non-european (does this refer to designer, design, or inhabitants?)
Inequalities baked into design of the construction, certain labour for corners and doorways (this is fascinating and bleak)
Ongoing toxicities, slow violence of living in NE housing
Doina: each presentation provides a viewpoint, images of both former and ongoing forms of colonialism
The ‘colonial continuum’ (Helene)
What does the (un)commons concept do for this work?
Naina Gupta
Warm Spring in Georgia — created by FDR as polio rehab.
Re-designing the hospital as a country club
The ‘able-bodied’ didnt want the ‘Polios’ around — is this another (un)commons?
A kind of uncomfortable relationship with accessibility history
‘The other eyes’ — how to find the stories that we otherwise might not see
All bad // all good — but
Resist reducing the density of that which is difficult/unfomfortable.
Yasmina
What can AH tell us about times like these?
Rick Allen’s questioning of Columbia’s Dean Simultaneously hilarious and terrifying video of Rick Allen at the Columbia University hearing.
Move from a metaphor to an actual land-grab
The use of ‘scientific knowledge’ in legitimising, enacting, producing this work.
Discussion
Stories can be dangerous
It matters what stories tell other stories, knots tie knots etc.
But also the ways of delivering stories? (thinking Duncombe and progressive politics in an age of fantasy [or post-truth?])
There are moments when stories might not cut it?
So what is it that the uncommons can do for this? Does it suggest ruptures, other kinds of politics?
Does story-telling, re-making/re-telling stories seem like the low-hanging fruit of decolonisation?
Again Stengers: Decisions should take place in the presence of those who will bear the consequences — so this isn’t only about story-telling, but about ontological politics, perhaps reparations, practices of decolonisation.
The limit of the critical — perhaps Latour’s point that critique has run out of steam?
A constructivist story-ing
The idiot + ADHD
Where do the stories go now? Is there an element to do with re-writing presents?
Storytelling is not dead, it has gone to war
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