The New Library of Un-documentend Life and Knowledge

Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

The New Library of Un-documented Life and Knowledge

The New Library of Un-documented Life and Knowledge

by Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

Instructions to read this article

1 We don’t speak from an individual perspective, we bet on collective experience to speak as a crowd, as a polyphony of human and non-human voices;

2 In order to think about the future of libraries, it is necessary to trace their genealogy and make a clear difference. There are no set solutions or answers to decolonial practices, it takes a life’s work to face the doubts and dwell on the problems;

3 In order to establish new practices it is necessary to deal with the problems as a walk in the forest, where many threads and paths present themselves simultaneously and chaotically; some threads are pursued and others are not. We must get lost in it.

This essay begins in a far away land; as if a fugitive choreography could be materialized when reading a book. An ontology of fugitivity that operates at the intersection of black studies and feminist science and technology studies as a performance of resistance to dominant systems of knowledge.

(not so) far away

We imagined a journey to a world that is about to disappear, but where the spirits and ghosts can not be captured in documents. The attempt here is to acknowledge that there is life and history beyond the document.

A journey to refuse this statement and to open portals to dismantle old structures, to a place of refuge, of encounter, of displacements, of exchange, that amplifies dissident experiences of living. A journey to (not so) far away to imagine what a library can actually become nowadays. How can a library enable an ontological turn to become a collective space that produces a cosmology of the encounter? What is the role of the librarian in this choreographic movement?

We must be in a wake towards languages, cosmologies and technologies of remembering and learning subscribed under another ontological foundation. We could invite the book Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States is a 2017 book by James C. Scott, to help us fight against this “standard civilizational narrative” that places

Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

language through writing as an advanced and superior technology of human development1. But we could also invite David Kopenawa, in the book A Queda do Céu: Palavras de um xamã Yanomami [The falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami shaman] from 2010 to strengthen our argument against the white supremacy of knowledge of the book itself2.

But should we abandon the library and the books? Or could we recreate it? How can one find a library today and not operate in it the lines of necessary and transversal revolutions in relation to gender, raciality, class, ethnicity, means of production? In this text we will try to address some ideas around other possibilities of choreographic composition with a multiplicity of knowledge to propose the library as a place to encounter the difference and to invent a common, in a radical way repositing the librarian an their dances.

1 Scott, James C. Against the grain. A deep history of earliest states.

Yale: Yale University Press, 2017.

2 Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. 2013.

3 Deleuze, Gilles. Derrames II: aparatos de estado y axiomática capitalista. 1a Ed. Ciudad Autonoma de Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2017.

falling sky and death expression of power

David Kopenawa in the The falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami shaman, show us a system of hegemonic power that insists on annihilating other ontologies. Kopenawa narrates the moment when the outsiders (westerns) come to their forest and the first thing they did was to give new names to the ones in the community. To name something! Western people love to give names, the Status Apparatus operates through codification-recodification to capture the indocil flow of life.3 In Kopenawa’s narrative we can grasp how these unequal forces of power (the power to name something) operate as a destruction of another’s world, by ignoring names that are already there. Through the categorization and nomen-

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4 Briet, Suzanne. Qu’est-ce que la documentation?

Paris: Éditions documentaires, industrielles et techniques, 1951.P.3

5 Mbembe, Achille. Necropolítica. in Revista Arte & Ensaios, n. 32, 2016. Saw at https:// revistas.ufrj.br/index. php/ae/article/ view/8993/7169 (consulted at 03/05/2022)

clature of things and subjects the epistemological separation of the west to the “rest of the world“ takes place. In this grammar of exclusion the documents play a key role in the construction and creation of history as we know it.

Suzanne Briet, a French librarian, historian and a significant pioneer of documentation, starts her treaty with the postulate: “The document as a proof in support of a fact” to reaffirm something that is immutable and permanent, that can be saved, preserved and classified. She explains to us how the idea of memory and archive has to do with a technology of death of other peoples and narratives4. She presents the document as a proof of life in the western world. We can invite Achille Mbembe to address the concept of necropolitical power to observe this phenomenon, this choreography of terror5. Power, the author explains, is materialized by the “expression of death”. What would be the relation between the captivity and colonialism with the documents and the collections in the libraries as the way knowledge is produced and established in the western world. A library is mainly constituted by documents, but definitely is not only that.

Can that lead to the perpetuation of a systemic violence that continuously destroys some “in vivo” conditions by naming, describing, presenting, commenting and cataloging life? Kopenawa says that he did not learn about the things of the forest by setting his eyes on books; but by drinking the elders breath. This gesture can explore more porous boundaries in relation to memory, delving into a singular documentation that opens a place for others’

Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

histories. That can dig into this grammar of exclusion another system of existence, that operates as a regime of the invisible, of the unknown. The absence of documents most of the time deals with the invisibility of ontologies that can highlight other codes, systems, languages, practices and ecologies.

The white people’s way of thinking is different. Their memory is clever but entangled in smoky and obscure words. They do not truly know the things of the forest. They contemplate paper skins on which they have drawn their own word for hours. If they do not follow their lines, their thoughts get lost. Our elders did not have image skins and did not write laws on them…So their word never went far away from them… (KOPENAWA, 2013, p. 23)

The ongoing social, political and ecological catastrophe that we are immersed in, that is ruled by imperialism and the (neo-pos) colonialism, must be stopped. we are not trying to argue towards the book as only a colonial storage. Although we believe there is something that could be learnt with the wise words of the shaman that

6 L’Ordre du discours, Leçon inaugurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1971.

we would like to bring to foreground, about the knowledge being embodied in the absent-presence of perception, affection, ancestors and spirits through the elements of the forest. Could a library host a place for the living? Would it be possible to imagine knowledge as a dance in which the flow and the pace are addressed and articulated by its participants and their narratives?

art library and decolonization

The distinction between Western and non-Western collections is problematic in itself. The library as a materialization of a colonial heritage accomplishes the extermination of existences and condemns them to vanish away by taking an important part in an ancient technology of exploitation and assault. It is a captivity statement of the in vivo condition that annihilates the knowledge transmission embodied in experiences of living. Many universities spend a large part of their institutional budgets on acquiring new library books, paying for high online journal subscription fees and recruiting library staff. Expanding the collection to make it more diverse usually operates, and just in a few moments, as a neo-liberal practice of capital accumulation.

The expansion of the library’s collection already addresses the deficit in relation to minorities. Foucault warned us, in his initial lecture at the College de France, that the writing system founded on the hegemony of the author leads us to the repetition and strengthening of the power poles of a time, of an epistemology - in this case, a western-centered one6.

Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

The solution of most libraries to expand their collection and to achieve a strategy of integrating non-western knowledge needs a broader reflection on the book as a medium or as a gatekeeper of knowledge. A book should be read as a place of encounter, an effective constellation of times, an opening for spaces and voices, a multiplicity and never a one person object.

A book is not the result of a solitary writing, just the opposite, it mingles nomadic distribution of singularities, tangles of encounters, thoughts, delirious practices and dreams together entangled with humans and non-humans. It is an attempt of raising awareness and thinking about the networks that libraries can make possible if they are occupied with non-books archives (with practices, encounters, groups, etc).

The aim is to create movement; a tension in those polarities and dismantle them. The library that could be built concerning perspectives of disruption by learning with radical propositions. As a desire machine to inspire discussion and encourage debate around the library as a shared public good. And, also, as a pedagogical platform for creative practices to challenge the norms established. How can art libraries be generative resources and sites of action for all who identify as queer, as women, as black, as Indigenous, as people of color?

not so far non-documented libraries

We would like to propose a broader discussion of art libraries as sites of intersubjective communion, spanning practices that range from personal assemblage to

those of spontaneous collectives and the ones associated with community centers and public libraries. How could the library be a place to host embodied experiences in a radical turn? How could it be the crossroad of worlds that do not cancel each other out but make space for impossible choreographies?

We invite you to think of the library as a portal which can make visible conflicts and dissonances. We would like to speculate about ways in which knowledge spread and its hegemonic technology of avoiding contamination. We would imagine discentring ways of organization (without a central control or top down structure), to tangle overlapping connections, constantly being created without a specific focus where the book is only a part of it but not the core.

Diffraction, splicing dispersal migrants in a complex dance taking the example of the Zapatistas, a social movement of indigenous Mexicans seeking to catalyze civil society’s full democratic power where schooling and learning is treated as fluid, supported by freely constructed social relationships, and the maintenance of the spaces including the library is collective. Learning is an immersion. To think about emergencies and political imaginaries like this it urges us to understand the legitimation of science comes from the institutionalization that entangles capitalism-imperialism, racism and its form of violence and exploitation.

We invite you to think of the library as a portal which can make visible conflicts and dissonances.

librarian-choreographer

If we try to move away from the library as an institution, but bring our analysis closer to the people who occupy it, such as the librarian and their role as an agent of innovative practices. Since the librarian, by institutional power, already occupies this facilitating position of practices between knowledge and access to knowledge in the library. Thy are the gatekeeper. The librarian could produce a sensorial reorientation of the library; a peculiar dance of being together in homelessness. A librarian that makes it possible to host the placeless and outsider voices of the sovereign power, including practices of dreaming, escaping, screaming, flying, sliding, spelling, diving and dancing.

The librarian can articulate in the space of the library a multiplicity of experiences that bring diverse public, ages, social and cultural backgrounds, a volcanic eruption, a flock of birds or antilopes on the run. That addreess the book not as an object to be consumed but to recognise all the emancipatory possibilities that comes along that. A place for sharing technologies of listening, telling stories, remembering, naming the unknown, seeing the invisible, voicing the undercommons and experiencing migration realities.

The librarian an become the choreographer by producing a sensorial reorientation of the library

Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

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The librarian that can transform the hegemonic practices and bring to life (inside the institution) forgotten wisdoms. A choreographer who activates the documents to friction the normativity and the reality to (re)invent an immaterial collection instead of consuming, buying, expanding and conquering. Together, we can think of practices that invite social exchanges, expansion of community knowledge, contact with other knowledge beyond (and alongside) books and people.

Bibliography

Briet, Suzanne.(1951). Qu’est-ce que la documentation? Paris: Éditions documentaires, industrielles et techniques.

Deleuze, Gilles. Derrames II: aparatos de estado y axiomática capitalista. 1a Ed. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2017.

Kopenawa, Davi, and Bruce Albert. The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman. 2013.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolítica. in Revista Arte & Ensaios, n. 32, 2016. Saw at https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/ae/article/ view/8993/7169 (consulted at 03/05/2022)

Scott, James C. Against the grain. A deep history of earliest states. Yale: Yale University Press, 2017.

Flavia Pinheiro

Opleiding DAS Choreography Lichting 2022

Flavia Pinheiro is a choreographer and performer from Recife, Brazil currently based in Amsterdam. Her research foregrounds networks of resilience and resistance to systems of knowledge by fabulative speculations around Science and Technologies. Her artistic practice in an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions; in an unstoppable dance she creates improbable exchanges with the nonhumans such as bacterias, plants, birds, antelopes and ghosts. She focuses in states of survival and a refusal of captivity by proposing a radical ontological turn. She navigates in different medias (photography, video, performance, installation, sound, writing) to underline how diversity

and transversality can contribute to (un) learning colonial pedagogies. She built the platform South Boom Boom together with Tom Oliver, Mario Lopes and many others; a publication and a series of conferences which aims to function as an anticolonial statement expressed from that absurd position of studying and living in Amsterdam coming from the Global South. It aims to discuss the importance of dissident invisibility in art and education to contribute to the knowledge about how institutions can articulate and enact an anti-racist and anti-colonial agenda engaging with a broader and diverse community.

flavia-pinheiro-site.webflow.io

Flavia Pinheiro & Rafael Limongelli

Rafael Limongelli

Opleiding

University of Campinas, Brazil

(orcid 0000-0001-9911-0936) is an anarchist, PhD candidate in education (UNICAMP), master in education (UNIFESP), bachelor in social sciences (PUCSP) and technician in performing arts (INDAC). He published the books Cretino (2013) and Duna (2018) by Editora Patuá. Since 2018 is the director of Flipei - Festa Literária Pirata das Editoras Independentes (www.flipei.net.br); is the curator and producer of Rizoma Livros (www. rizomalivros.com.br), since 2017, a nomadic bookstore setup inside a 1980s school bus, specializing in independent publishers; and production coordinator of Salão do Livro Político (http://salaodolivropolitico. com.br/). Develops research and practices in integrated arts, transiting

between education, dance, theater, performance, literature and visual arts. Was curator of the multi-artistic space Capital 35, where he developed the Programa de Formação Autônoma (PFA) and the program Para Ficar Juntxs (PFJ). He has developed several collective initiatives in anarchist and anti-capitalist education with social housing movements in São Paulo, through spaces such as Casa Mafalda, Favela do Moinho; with quilombola movements in Aracati, Ceará, where he organized Casa da Maré, collective and self-managed cultural space of Cumbe, the quilombola territory. Composes the collective LIMA - Insurgent Laboratory of Anarchist Machineries (https://linktr. ee/lima_a) and the collective Cara de Cavalo with Carolina Bianchi.