Sparks from the Pluriverse #3: Affirming LifeSparks from the Pluriverse #3: Affirming Life

Words by Sophie Krier & Erik Wong

It’s fall in the West and time to stock up for winter. Besides Aslı and Pascale, we contacted more pluriversal makers who co-work with other beings. Erik spent a day in the field with Cynthia Hathaway, shepherd Marly Gommans, dog Dex and their flock of sheep. What is on this wool activist’s agenda? Sophie placed herself on a virtual couch with Reiko Goto to talk about their shared love for horses and what we as humans can learn with them. We also met with Nina van Hartskamp in the middle of the textile dye garden she set up in Amsterdam West with the help of locals: how a garden can grow new connections. For Tom Morton and Becky Little, who dug up stories from the clay subsoils of the Orkney archipelago over the past months, earth became living matter. Happy listening!

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In this 40 min conversation, Aslı Hatipoğlu and Pascale Gatzen talk about the value of teaming up with other living beings.

When we say ‘life affirming’, which lives are we talking about? For Pascale, the intimacy that can be found in the connexion with other living beings and materials has become more important, maybe even essential in her life. Cook and textile artist, Aslı Hatipoğlu, recently immersed herself into the world of silk and the living being that produces this valuable material: Bombyx Mori (domesticated silkworm). How do we relate as humans to this genetically modified moth and equally important: how does this metamorphosing creature relate to us? As a result of its modifications, it cannot hear, see, or defend itself. Capitalist systems of production and medicine reflect back to us in our clothes, bodies, behaviour and relationships. Hatipoglu’s embodied research builds on her earlier projects around sourdough cultures and kombucha. Is baking a sourdough bread an act of intimacy?

More Aslı.

More Bombyx Mori: Sēres (2024), Dance Film Essay.

More Pascale.

Makers on Materials, Textiel Museum Tilburg.

Two years ago, Erik and Cynthia Hathaway drove their rental car up a very steep path and parked just outside the fence of PACA Proyectos Artísticos Casa Antonino in Asturias, Spain. For car-lover and event designer Hathaway, this seemed the perfect gesture to start a conversation about her fun- and search-driven practice. Last week, they met again in the middle of a munching flock of sheep in the South of the Netherlands. Hathaway is a wool activist and advocates for sheep, shepherds and their dogs to freely roam in the country side (this roaming is called transhumance: literally crossing the land; humance refers to humus, soil). We as post-industrial humans lost our connection to sheep and wool as a valuable material. Cynthia tries to repair these links by organising the Wool March. What is on this wool activist’s agenda? Listen and find out.

More Cynthia.

Sophie catches up with Reiko Goto, who runs Collins & Goto Studio with her partner Tim. Their long term field work connects nature, culture and community and is rooted in empathy (between species). With the help of sensors, technology, and sound, they attempt to reveal “the life signs of living systems, such as trees and peat bogs, making them more tangible and relatable to us humans”.

Each living being lives in their own version of the pluriverse, has their own perspective on the world it surrounds. Estonian naturalist Jacob von Uexküll linked the word Umwelt to this notion. Goto keeps a diary about the life she shares with her horse Darkness. In this short talk, Sophie and Reiko talk about this ‘horse love’ they share and how sensoring pain in another being is perhaps the most direct form of knowing.

More Reiko.

Nina van Hartskamp is a textile artist who sees herself as a ‘facilitator of life’ – someone who can create fertile connexions. “5 months ago, after returning from Colombia, I started growing dye seeds in my living room, planning to plant them in the garden at my studio @lolaluid. The project grew from the ground up; people from the ‘hood’ joined in, hands and feet got dirty, insects joined the party, new connections were made.” In this compact conversation, Erik and Nina talk about the impact this garden had on Hartskamp’s practice and what could follow from this. As Nina says it: “All projects end. But you can take their learnings with you into the next one.”

More Nina.

For a while now, Tom Morton (Arc Architects) and Becky Little (Rebearth) have been spending time with the clay subsoils of the Orkney archipelago. In doing so, they worked with the local community to learn everything about the 5,000 year culture of earth building. Initially, they pondered how this heritage can offer a gateway to our future. In the process, they moved beyond seeing earth as a construction material, to being in conversation with earth as living matter. In this short catching-up talk, Sophie asks them how this shift happened. For Tom, encountering the times of earth, from its atoms to tectonic plate shifts, was an eye opener – and a consolation from deeply felt climate anxiety. For Becky, working with subsoil substrates made her realise how porous – and therefore alive – she is.

More about Earthbound Orkney Project.

More Tom Morton.

Curious what’s next? So are we. Here’s a taster. Stay tuned, we’ll be back in the heart of the winter.

Our next & last spark in this series, Sparks #4: Where to from Here: The horizon as a common land will bring together river activist Li An Phoa (Drinkable Rivers) and Casablanca-based cultural mediator/urban visionaire Maria Daïf around the question of how to make sense of a messed up world through community building. Which dots on the horizon can we see?

• Last September, artist Roberto Uribe Castro was selected by a jury composed of Virginia Lopez, Sophie & Erik for a research residency at PACA Art Projects in Asturias, made possible by the Dutch Embassy in Spain. Roberto set to work with this legacy of Asturian artist Eduardo Chillida: "All men are brothers. Doesn’t that make the horizon our common homeland? Isn’t the present in which we live another boundary, another limit, another place without dimension, like the horizon?” Can we project a future on post-industrial horizon of Asturias?
• For those of you who are nearby, the historical overview exhibition Garden Futures will be on show at Nieuwe Instituut this fall/winter.
• Winter reading tip: Lets’ become Fungal. Mycellium Teaching in the Arts by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez (Valiz, 2023). This book/manual draws on the fungal world and on conversations with indigenous artists, curators, feminists and mycologists. Every chapter is shaped as a question, and sketches the contours of decentralised, collaborative practices rooted in interspecies exchange. Very timely, especially now the governments of Chile and the UK have co-launched a pledge calling for fungi to be included within the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity! Follow this pledge on Instagram @fungifoundation.

Sparks from the Pluriverse is a quarterly update that celebrates the ever growing pluriversal network and its dynamics. Building from the Nieuwe Instituut's In Search of the Pluriverse podcast series and exhibition, itself part of the Travelling Academy, curators Erik Wong and Sophie Krier keep their ear to the ground and report in videos, stories, sounds, letters and other 'signs' from the pluriverse: “In the podcast series and exhibition, we brought together many practices, topics and locations: concrete manifestations of living pluriversally by embracing otherness, making kin, daring to say no, or letting go. This year, we revisit, reflect, tie new knots. How is everyone in the network doing? What is going on at the different ends of the pluriverse? There are many ways of knowing. We attempt to surface some of these ways, curious and unknowing as we are. The pluriverse explained in eight words: A world in which many worlds can thrive.”

This network grew out of the project In Search of the Pluriverse and includes persons and collectives that curators Erik Wong & Sophie Krier met in person. They see the network as never-ending and ever-growing, including all makers and listeners who feel affinity with the pluriverse.

Subscribe here if you want to be notified of new Sparks from the Pluriverse by email. Follow In Search of the Pluriverse on Instagram: @insearchofthepluriverse. If you feel the urge to respond, please do via pluriverse@nieuweinstituut.nl.

Editors: Sophie Krier & Erik Wong
Audio editing: Nina van Hartskamp
Audio post production: Rick Haring