Exposition

Just a mere Spring to take: Embedding in Capitalocenic Atmospheres (2019)

Christoph Solstreif-Pirker

About this exposition

30 years after the publication of Félix Guattari’s “The Three Ecologies,” we are facing a turning point in the way we are encountering our environment. Established concepts of “nature” have proved to be considerably part of a grand homocentric design whose spatiality Peter Sloterdijk poignantly defined as the “World Interior of Capital.” To investigate these capitalocenic strata, it becomes necessary to re-territorialize institutionalized debates, conceptions and practices, and perceive contemporary landscapes as manifold, unknown and peripheral alterities. This research exposition aims to encounter the capitalocenic field, its actors and inherent specificities, and to propose a peripheral methodology for its investigation. According to its etymological roots, periphery not only implies a field or site at “the outer surface”, but also refers to the Greek verb periphérō, meaning “to carry around.” This adds a proto-ethical component, as we become part of a carrying and compassionate interplay with virtual forces of capitalocenic dominance, violence, and destruction. In this intimate moment of becoming peripheral, we are striving from the grand institutional narrative towards the fragility of an uncertain world interior. To Félix Guattari, this is an act of empathy, of an affective affinity and imaginary re-construction that unfolds new practices, grounds, and epistemologies of how to encounter our manmade planet. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of peripheral discourse on the edge of the planetary crisis, and unfolds a vibrant and democratic borderspace within the all-encompassing ecological trauma. Departing from Victor Turner’s “social drama” and the unpredictability of a global monetary system, the research exposition focuses on the specific context of Iceland as a knot geographically located within the global fabric of the Capitalocene. Being the site of a massive banking crisis between 2008 and 2011, the island-state is seen as an artificial environment of capitalist warfare, based on an ecosystem of virtual forces that actualize themselves on a social, economic, cultural or ecological level. Applying a situated performative research praxis, the research exposition affirmatively investigates this manifold and monetary-driven spatiality. As the research exposition suggests, performative research allows to confront the unpredictability of the capitalocenic field in all its complexity and to pave the way for “vanquishing [...] or even befriending“ the dominant forms of global financial market capitalism” (Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sensation). “Just a mere Spring to take” is a discursive assemblage of various investigative highlights on a virtual, global and elusive phenomenon, aiming at peripherically unfolding horizons of performative thinking, and enabling a fragile intra-active confrontation with our vertiginous, traumatized but still living cosmos.
typeresearch exposition
keywordscapitalism, capitalocene, Iceland, landscape, ecological trauma, borderspace, Performance-as-research, ethics, social drama, subjectivity, cultural ecology, autoethnography, fiction-based research, peripheral practices, psychoanalysis
date25/02/2019
published31/12/2019
last modified31/12/2019
statuspublished
share statusprivate
affiliationInstitute for Architecture and Landscape, Graz University of Technology
copyrightChristoph Solstreif-Pirker
licenseAll rights reserved
urlhttps://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/573767/573768
doihttps://doi.org/10.22501/ruu.573767
published inRUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
portal issue12. Peripheries
external linkhttps://www.solstreif.at/


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