ORGANIZING & COLLECTIVES
MESHWORKING IN PLANTHROPOSCENE
I work with placemaking, commoning, and organizing across various projects connecting art with social engagement. My practice reflects on work culture from an animist and phyto-somatic perspective. I’m interested in dance and choreography as forms of alternative social reproduction, enhancing glocal solidarities and operating across both institutional and bottom-up contexts.
I use MESHWORK as a metaphor that invites an animist vision into organizing and work culture. It resonates with perspectives such as place-thought, which Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe scholar Vanessa Watts describes as “a theoretical understanding of the world via a physical embodiment.”
“Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.”
In her curatorial text for the “Fiddlesticks” exhibition, Katarzyna Różniak-Szabelska notes (quoting Kacper Pobłocki) that in the Polish countryside, echoes of times when people believed that “even the stone was not regarded as a mute, passive, impersonal thing” persisted into the 20th century - as in the saying: “when stones grew, they were soft.”
Within my practice, following the meshwork metaphor and listening to plants supports the creation of new imaginaries and the unlearning of “disciplined” models of work. This aligns with what Valeria Graziano calls prefigurative practice - addressing the “basic” phantasies that solidify “institutional objects that are never questioned (roles, aims, modalities, economies, temporalities, etc.)”
Such a practice sensitizes to the value of co-inciding, invisible efforts and soft skills of co-creating atmosphere, the flow, health and efficiency of collective metabolism. It invites to consider artistic work within its broader ecology, attentive to its political, situational, material, relational, and affective dimensions, while questioning capitalist schemes of production. It acknowledges infrastructure, systemic entanglements, and sensorium as integral to the process.
This approach calls for respecting and recognizing embodied, situated knowledges, and for insisting on dialogue between diverse knowledge-holding entities. It is a work of hosting and generating spaces for encounters and exchanges - becoming sensitive and critical together through creative communal involvement.
“To co-incide suggests how different things happen at the same moment, a happening that bring things near to other things, whereby the nearness shapes the shape of each thing”.
additional references:
SenseLab - Laboratory for Thought in Motion // action turn and expanded understanding of a field(work) // folk perspectives on authorship and schemes of artistic production // an invitation of Natasha Myers to vegetalize our sensorium and collaborate with plants // invitation of Valeria Graziano to think about artistic practices as elements of partisan social reproduction, rooted in a pre-figurative approach transplanted from the social justice movements to cultural/artistic sector // reflections about Meshwork Choreography by Daisuke Muto, who uses the idea of meshwork after Tim Ingold looking at different strategies of (intercultural) collaboration in the field of choreography // shift from network & inclusion to decolonial politics of matter discussed i.a. by Dimitris Papadopoulos:
“This decolonial politics of matter attempts to restore justice step by step through everyday practice (…). In politics of matter, justice becomes ingrained in the materiality of being: in the soil, in the water, in our bodily tissues, limbs, organs, cells, genes, and molecules. Decolonizing settler land is one thing; decolonizing matter is another (even if they are tightly connected).”