Casa do Povo – Lecture and Workshop

27 Nov. & 5 Dec., 2021

For participants of the study program at Casa do Povo (São Paulo, BR), I’ll be delivering a lecture and diagrammatic workshop on envisioning planetary entanglement (a perspectival question). Nov. 27 and Dec. 5, 2021 | 11am to 1pm BRT.

Lecture on Planetary Space
Nov. 27 | 1 Hour Lecture + Q&A | Discussion and Outline of Workshop

Drawing and Discussion Workshop: Envisioning Entangled Place
Dec. 5 | 2 Hours discussion and presentation of drawings / diagrams

As an ensemble, the lecture and workshop take up the problem of navigating a planetary condition, a genre of spatiality qualified by entanglement. “Entanglement” is not an innocent premise, there are countless ways in which entanglement is entirely involuntary, or even punitive, so how are we to think the qualities of relations it denotes, over the sheer fact of structural interconnectedness? The lecture will trace long Modernity to the spatial/representational ideals of the Renaissance, in order to understand how the planetary condition evolved (conceptually/materially), as well as the role of representational encodings of perspective that set the frameworks of how to “think”. As philosophers like Sylvia Wynter have argued, this understanding of “proper” or “higher-order” human-thought helped lubricate the justification for European colonialism, and by linking this back to the domain of pictorial representation, the consequences of such ways of envisioning become apparent, outside purely art historical concerns.

The general premise is if we agree that the planetary is no longer the same space as that of the Modern/Global, how are we to envision it, in order to better understand our place within it? If we cannot be localized in the same way, how does this transform our pictures of agency/accountability at planetary dimensions? The workshop will focus on these complex question through the medium of drawing/mapping/diagramming – to open a conceptual play-space to experiment with the possible geometries of planetary coexistence.