(Non)Depleted – a new perspective or deplition of a new source?

The Parasitic Reading Room "(Non)Depleted – a new perspective or deplition of a new source?"

Guided meditation in the courtyard of Palazzo Abatellis during Making Future’s mobile workshop in Palermo, Image: Ignacio Fanti, October 2019.

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Books as spaces of encounters

“Everything starts from this intuition: that what I define as support structures can release potential, and that support is not to be reduced to a reactive, symptomatic, and redeeming gesture, but that through its uttering we may be able to hear the unspoken, unsatisfied, the late and the latent, the in-process, the pre-thought, the not-yet-manifest, the undeveloped, unrecognised, the delayed, the unanswered, the unavailable, the not-deliverable, the discarded, the overlooked, the neglected, the hidden, the forgotten, the unnamed, the un-paid, the missing, the longing, the invisible, the unseen, the behind-the-scene, the disappeared, the concealed, the unwanted, the dormant.”

—Céline Condorelli Support Structures, 2009

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Everywhere is a learning environment

Screenshot of the 1st virtual installment of the Parasitic Reading Room during the How to Live/Work Festival.

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(Non)Depleted/ A Parasitic Reading Room A Parasitic Reading Room is an open format gathering a multitude of voices. It is a spontaneous set of reading spaces. It is also a traveling school.

Conformed by a group of people reading aloud a selection of texts, they require proximity, empathy and willingness to be affected by other voices and ideas. A Parasitic Reading Room intends to ‘parasite’ readers, passers-by, contents and places, and to provoke a contagion of knowledge.

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The first Parasitic Reading Room on the streest of Istanbul.- an urban dĂŠrive across the irregular streets of the city in companion of a mobile radio (radioee. net), through a live broadcast of the public readings.

September 2018

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By reading aloud we share a space of intimacy, a time and place of learning not only from the contents, but from the nuances, the accents, the cadence of the reading. Abigail Williams called this ‘the social life of books,’ “How books are read is as important as what’s in them,” she pointed—we call it ‘the book as a space of encounters.’ This means spaces where different books coexist and enrich each other; books as the necessary space where the author can have a dialogue with the reader, where different readers can read between the lines and find a place of exchange, where to debate, and discuss ideas. Books and encounters as an open school.

Within the 2020 Dutch Design Week, the exhibition (Non)Depleted explores diverse meanings of depletion—from resource extraction to critical thinking about social, political and ecological exhaustion. Presenting a broad spectrum of directions of how we might creatively envision an alternative to the ongoing system from an ideological, material, aesthetical and renewable perspective.

Selected works include different media and approaches, with unclear boundaries between design, contemporary art, science and technology.

These works are the result of actively experimenting with post-industrial waste, biomaterials, living

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organisms and digital tools. Engaging with self-modified production processes, to the transformation of their own spaces into autonomous factories.

This edition of the Parasitic Reading Room follows material, aesthetics, political and social realities by re-enacting words, phrases, fragments, incomplete texts and occasional sentences selected by the artists, designers and curators of the exhibiton. This selection outlines what resonated with the group’s understanding of the the term "depletion".

How can we re-envision our methods, infrastructures and the meanings of materials?

—The Parasitic Reading Room is an on-going project by Ethel Baraona Pohl and Cesar Reyes Najera (dpr-Barcelona) and Rosario Talevi (s-o-f-t.agency, Making Futures). It was initiated as a contribution to the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (September 2018). It has continued with installments all over the world.

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Curator's Letter –Oliverio Segura Source: (Non)Depleted.

Instagram (2020).

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INHALE, EXHALE Here you stand… on the only planet in the solar system where atmosphere sustains life.

SELF BREATHING KIT

an imaginary line… karman, 100 kilometres from outer space, reaches the surface… a tender and gentle blanket of gas, penetrates your body, makes you breathe… like a shaman… protects you from blasts, heat, radiation, emanating from the sun. from extreme cold of poles to tropical heat of the equator, warms our body and planet by day… cools it at night. intense pressure… decreases with altitude, tenderly touching the soil, your skin… ocean levels. the same ocean that gently floats inside you. it protects and sustains life water… air… your essence. yet… you forget to breathe.

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gas increases, while you trap the heat into the atmosphere. from water, from oxygen… all living forms where able to grow, survive, procreate and colonise this planet… transform it. yet… you forget to breathe… your human privilege, dancing through biosphere as a divinity in an ecological orgy that makes you stay alive, you forget to breathe, to stop, to nurture… as vapour… your soul dances with technological atoms transforming itself into a place of no memory, no past, eternal… becoming immortal data, until… electricity disappears. water, oxygen inside… penetrates you through every breath open pores… yet… you ignore it you simply pretend to forget that *below the asphalt, lies the beach… inhale, exhale forward, back living, dying: arrows, left flown each to each meet midway and slice the void in aimless flight thus I, return to the source.

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INHALE, EXHALE (Self Breathing Kit) –Paulo Arriano Source: INHALE, EXHALE (Self Breathing Kit). Paulo Arraiano (video text)

Everywhere is a learning environment

MAP I: Model Soil –Alexandra Arènes, Axelle Grégoire & Frédérique Aït- Touati Source: Terra Forma, Manual of Potential Mapping. EDITIONS B42 (2019)

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“In comparison to modern environmental destruction, however, it is possible to think of the Holocene as an epoch in which human farming managed to co-exist with a wide variety of other living beings. If there is any meaning to the term sustainability, we must look for it in Holocene ecologies-including those that have managed to hang on in the contemporary world.

How did farming maintain its longue-duree viability during the Holocene? Holocene farming privileged the same resurgence processes and forest species assemblages as the multispecies expansion that followed the Ice Age, including both local succession and the long-distance travel of plants. Plants had to travel to survive: The cold and drought of Ice Age glaciation pushed out many species. Spaces where those species wiped out elsewhere continued to thrive became refugia. When the glaciers retreated and the world became warmer and wetter, living things spread out from refugia, remaking forests, wetlands, and meadows. In temperate lands, after the first wave of ruderal (or weedy) plants, forest-forming trees came to occupy once frozen places. Trees are mobile-and thus they can respond to farming. In their spread from refugia, plants showed the lively initiative that has helped them survive human disturbances.

[Disturbance is a comparatively quick change in ecosystems conditions; it is not necessarily bad

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and not necessarily human. Unfortunately, humanists often misunderstand the term as a way of criticizing humans; without this (mistaken) implication, it could be a useful term for an anthropology of a world always in motion.] Holocene farmers cut back forests, but every time farms were abandoned, forests took back the land. Mimicking their post- Ice Age spread, forests kept returning. Meanwhile, both crops and domestic animals depended on nutrients gained from forests. Farming not only cut but also impoverished forests, and yet forests bounced back.�

A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability –Anna L. Tsing Source: PDF link (2017).

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Vincent Snijders Inspiration Image "Altered Landscape" Source: Google Image

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“Perhaps the outrage meriting a name like Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for people and other critters. I along with others think the Anthropocene is more a boundary event than an epoch, like the K-Pg boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene. The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.“

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As Always, Just a Matter of Perspective –Paulo Arriano Source: Video Installation "As Always, Just a Matter of Perspective" (2016).

← Staying with the Trouble –Donna J. Haraway Source: Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press (2016).

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METAMORPHOSIS Episode 02: Liquidation –Queer Ecology

Source: METAMORPHOSIS. https://dis.art/ series/ (2020).

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OTHER Editorial: Other Biological Futures – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Natsai Chieza

BIOLOGICAL FUTURES

Source: Journal of Design and Science.

MIT Media Lab and the MIT Press (2018).

However, biodesign fans are today repackaging biodesign, describing it as an ecological remedy, atechnological breakthrough, an economic opportunity, and a manufacturing and industrial revolution. For this issue, we question whether biodesign can deliver the accompanying social transformation that those dreams imply, and explore how it might otherwise begin to challenge modern industrial, social, and economic paradigms.

Adopting this more social rather than technological perspective on biodesign allows us to include within it a wide range of activities and people, from traditional to contemporary processes that use lowtech or high-tech methods, practiced by scientists to farmers in labs, factories, studios, and homes. Two questions unite their work: “Can biology do this better?” And, “How will using biology change things for the good?”

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This approach provokes thinking about what “good” biodesign might look like, and what other kinds of potential biological futures could exist, which we hope this issue begins to sketch out.

The growing interest in biodesign is driven by a range of factors. One is rising concern about the ecological and social effects of the Anthropocene, humanity’s ever-more-visible impact on Earth, alongside the equally visible failure of earlier green movements to mobilise change. This paradox is increasingly complicating for the contemporary industrial design profession, since capitalism requires a continuous cycle of production and consumption to keep designers in work. ...

Our imagination today is limited by today’s imaginaries. While biodesign could better some production methods, we think it’s more interesting to use biodesign to help us identify new, diverse, biological, ecological, social models that are more equitable for all biology, not just select humans and a few monoculture crops. The spaces we create may eventually be cannibalised by capital; nothing may change.

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A GREATER

Introduction: A Greater Mirical Perception –Miracle Workers Collective Source: A Greater Mirical Perception.

Archive Books, Berlin (2019).

MIRACLALE OF PERCEPTION 26

Books as spaces of encounters

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OIL AND GAS POLLUTION IN VACA MUERTA –Forensic Architecture Source: Forensic Architecture, The Guardian, link (2019)

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Guided meditation in the courtyard of Palazzo Abatellis during Making Future’s mobile workshop in Palermo, Image: Ignacio Fanti, October 2019.

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Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano Source: Open Veins of Latin America.

Monthly Review (1971).

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→ Open Veins of Latin America –Eduardo Galeano Source: Open Veins of Latin America. Monthly Review (1971).

Books as spaces of encounters

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�

Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle – Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos Source: Zapatista Army of National Liberation (1996).

Subcomandante Marcos is a Mexican insurgent, the former military leader and spokesman for the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in the ongoing Chiapas conflict, and an anti-capitalist and anti-neoliberal globalization icon.

Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos Source: Zapatista Army of National Liberation (1996).

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← GRAHM CAIN'S DIRTY PHYSIOLOGIES Lydia Kallipoliti Source: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, Lars Müller Publishers (2016).

A non-Eudlidean view of California as a cold place to be Ursula K. Le Guin Source: Dancing at the Edge of the World. Grove Press (1989).

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What about Activism? –Steven Henry Madoff Source: What about Activism? Sternberg Press (2019).

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The Empacipated Specator –Jaques Ranchiére Source: The Empacipated Specator. VERSO (2009).

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DISCLAIMER: A parasite does not ask permission to interact, it nourishes itself from its host, and causes changes for good and for bad... it depends on who tells the story.

The parasitized texts in these readers are reproduced without asking permission, the only reason is its nutritional value for the survival of a non-mercantilized form of school.

As if a genetic trail the source is cited the result is uncertain and it only depends on who reads it.

Contributors to this edition: Claudia Bumb, Davide Piscitelli, Nina Blume, Oliverio Segura, Paulo Arriano, Rosario Talevi, Sebatian Guzman Olmos

Nina Blume, Sebastian Guzman Olmos & Oliverio Segura are a newly formed curatorial team; their practice combines diverse fields like design, art, materials, science and technology. They provide a platform to bring designers and artist together and collectively explore radical approaches, practical applications, relevant aesthetics, and critical thinking.

Their first exhibition (Non)Depleted is part of the virtual Dutch Design Week 2020. https://ddw.nl/en/programme/3732/ nondepleted @non.depleted

To know more about the Parasitic Reading Room visit dpr-Barcelona

Rosario Talevi is a Berlin-based architect interested in critical spatial practice, transformative pedagogies and feminist futures, which she explores through various spatial, editorial and curatorial formats. Her work advances architecture as a form of agency -in its transformative sense and in its capacity of acting otherwise and as a form of care - one that provides the political stakes to repair our broken world. Currently, she is acting as research curator at the Berlin University of the Arts for the practicebased research project Making Futures Bauhaus+. She is executive board of the Floating University Berlin and a founding member of s-o-f-t.agency. rosariotalevi.com s-o-f-t.agency

Find all Parasitic Reading Room Readers here.

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The Parasitic Reading Room (Non)Depleted Exhibition virtual Dutch Design Week 17.–25.10.2020