Terrestrial University: Observing-Participating-Commoning | Sam Skinner and Mirko Nikolić

Critical Zones | Terrestrial University


[09.09.2021]


What could artist-led observatory/observation be in the 21st
century, which might begin to see through and beyond our
intersecting planetary crises?


How do the activities of measurement, sense, and observation
change when enacted through, and with, experimental modes of
(collectivized) noticing, (community) building, (communal)
imagination, and (collaborative) activism? How might ideas such
as »participant observation« in anthropology, »observing systems«
in cybernetics, and the »observer effect« in quantum physics,
speak with radically different, but kindred discourses and
processes, such as embodied perception and feminist »situated
knowledges«?


This Terrestrial University session will sketch and prefigure
alternative visions for observing and caring for what Sam Skinner
and Mirko Nikolić call »material communities«. Based on their
interdependent and collaborative research and praxis it will
connect an artist-led horticulture project in Oxford with the
river basins of Korenita and Jadar in the Balkans. The river
sites are under threat of old and new large-scale extractivist
operations. The above drawn-out questions and sites are
unravelled and entangled from the positions of regenerative
practices of horticulture and de-extractivist poetry.