WALKING WITH THE VERTICALITY OF BJÖRKÖ
The question of how one is to walk with the verticality of Björkö, Väddö can be reframed as to what are the environmental affordances that the verticality of the island extends. At a temporal threshold, at the margins of a sinking world, mapping the verticality of Väddö is to trace another cartography of the Anthropocene.
To walk with the verticality of Björkö, Väddö is not to reproduce its verticality and preoccupy oneself with the movement of the body, but to investigate and attune to embodied knowledge(s) that stem from the land moving constantly, slowly, almost imperceptibly. At the same time, to walk with the verticality of its rising bedrock is not to ignore the changes brought forth by climate change as if the place could escape the rest of the world, but to attune to the present moment and pay attention to ask what does this emergence want.
Find out more about my research and thinking process here.
The theme of the Residency, Anticipation, was one I anticipated on not engaging with as I wanted to attune to place, think-with and embody the knowledges that Björkö, Väddö afforded. However, one way or the other I found myself engaging exactly with the affectivities of anticipated futures, - and more exactly, future rising waters due to climate change.
The Baltic bedrock rises each year from 1 millimeter to several centimeters. However, due to climate change and rising waters the south of Sweden is getting slightly submerged. This was not the case in Björkö. Older generations could pinpoint where the sea levels used to be on rocks, they inhabit each year during the summers. Thus, through conversations with locals, online information and my own embodied walking experience in the area to try and think with the verticality of a rising bedrock, I encountered the affectivities of anticipating climate change. As I focus on the rising bedrock and the receding waters – in the area, as well as in the majority of Sweden – I encounter the inhabitants pointing at global warming and rising waters and the occasional study on when the level of rising waters due to global warming will render invisible the rise of the shield. It feels like an impossibility to live in the moment. My walking practice focuses on inhabiting hopeful futures by attuning to environment, but during the Residency I only encountered strong emotions anticipating climate chaos. Therefore, I had to pay attention to anticipation as “ha[ving] epistemic value, a virtue emerging through actuarial saturation as sciences of the actual are displaced by speculative forecast (Adams, Murphy and Clarke 2009).”
In The Future as Cultural Fact, Appadurai lists imagination, anticipation and aspiration as the triad informing the cultural organization of the future. The global discourse on climate change and rising waters makes one feel like part of a larger world, a wider network of agents, through a firmer call to action to safeguard landscapes and related im/material cultures. Given this framework, I wonder how to approach making space for the investigation I want to carry. Do I walk with the verticality of Björkö via Appadurai’s ethics of possibility, which he defines as ways of doing and being that call for hope and that add to creative citizenship and politics of hope? Or do I actively listen to and make space for the preoccupations that surrounding artists and island inhabitants maintain and think through mainstream discourses on climate change? The latter might mean adopting what an ethics of probability, “tied to the growth of a casino capitalism which profits from catastrophe and tends to bet on disaster (295).”
Thinking in these terms, takes me back to reframing this engagement/affective exercise as a bifurcation of nature. Is it delusional to hope for a miraculous/maybe eventual climate cooling, either via new undiscovered technologies or Gaia’s intelligence? My question becomes: can we rethink and differently approach anticipation to meet new hopeful futures? How do we create value for and engage with future landscapes by queering nature, all through walking?
Although the forest in Björkö is privatized in large parts and natural phenomena, such as waterways, stand as signifiers of property borders, attuning to pockets of nature one can sense how supportive, generous, giving, inclusive and cleansing it is. Thinking with writings on queering nature and queer ecologies (Barad 2011) and hydrofeminist posthuman phenomenology (Neimanis 2017), I was able to hold on to the sense of awe I felt the first time I heard about the bedrock, - I found myself walking, - rising. To walk with the verticality of a place is to accept you are falling constantly into place.
“Finally, the perspective of free fall teaches us to consider a social and political dreamscape of radicalized class war from above, one that throws jawdropping social inequalities into sharp focus. But falling does not only mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place. Grappling with crumbling futures that propel us backward onto an agonizing present, we may realize that the place we are falling toward is no longer grounded, nor is it stable. It promises no community, but a shifting formation (Steyerl 2013).”
As an artist walking with the upward verticality of the island, mapping this land movement allows for the possibility to map nostalgic impossibilities.
References:
Adams, Vincanne, et al. “Anticipation: Technoscience, life, affect, temporality.” Subjectivity, vol. 28, no. 1, Sept. 2009, pp. 246–265, https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.18.
Appadurai, Arjun. The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition. Verso Books, 2013.
Barad, Karen. (2011). Nature's Queer Performativity. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences. 19. 121-158. 10.1353/qui.2011.0002.
Neimanis, Astrida. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017.
Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press, 2013.