Abstract
Building Conversation is a collective of artists that creates dialogical art. In September 2019, I invited the Flemish philosopher and theatre maker Peter Aers, also a member of Building Conversation, at the Summer School on Climate at Ghent University. This essay looks into the alternative modes of knowledge production at work during the workshop. First, the tentacular thinking expands scientific language, providing an ally for what Kimmerer called “a grammar of animacy”. Second, the art-science-activist worlding challenges the scientific model of the laboratory. The conversational performance Parliament of Things, inspired by Latour, allows things to emerge as mediators, hence activating a tentacular thinking-with-things. Third, I observe the pedagogical activation at work in the art-science-activist worldings facilitated by Building Conversation in a university context.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-then-Human-World. New York: Pantheon Books.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.
Argyrou, Aikaterini, and Harry Hummels. 2019 “Legal Personality and Economic Livelihood of the Whanganui River: A Call for Community Entrepreneurship.” Water International 44, nos. 6–7: 752–768.
Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J. May. 2012. “Introduction.” In Readings in Performance and Ecology, edited by Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, 1–10. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Atwood, Margaret, et al. 2015. “Authors’ Letter to the Oxford University Press.” Caught by the River, 15 January. Accessed February 18, 2020. https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2015/01/letter-oxford-university-press-atwood-macfarlane/
Bohm, David. 1996. On Dialogue. London: Routledge.
Code, Lorraine. 2006. Ecological Thinking. The Politics of Epistemic Location. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
“Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador.” 2008. Political Database of the Americas, October 20. Accessed February 18, 2020. https://pdba.georgetown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/english08.html.
Ferdinand, Malcolm. 2019. Pour une écologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Forde, Patricia. 2018. The Wordsmith. Dublin: Little Island.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement. Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines. A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2016.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass. Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.
Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature. How To Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2007. Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macfarlane, Robert, and Jackie Morris. 2017. The Lost Words. London: Penguin Books.
Macfarlane, Robert. 2019. Underland. A Deep Time Journey. London: Penguin Random House.
Margulis, Lynn,ed. 1991. Symbiosis as a Source of Evolutionary Innovation. Speciation and Morphogenesis. Boston: MIT Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects. Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minneapolis, MN: The University of Minnesota Press.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the Political. London: Routledge.
Mouffe, Chantal. 2013. Agonistics. Thinking the World Politically. New York: Verso.
Rose, Deborah Bird. 2004. Reports from a Wild Country. Ethics for Decolonisation. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press.
Schiebinger, Londa L., and Claudia Swan. 2005. Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sheldrake, Merlin. 2020. Entangled Life. How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. London: Penguin Random House.
Stalpaert, Christel. 2018. “Cultivating Survival with Maria Lucia Cruz Correia: Towards an Ecology of Agential Realism”. Performance Research 23, no. 3: 48–55.
Stalpaert, Christel. 2019a. “Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s Urban Action Clinic GARDEN. A Political Ecology with Diplomats of Dissensus and Composite Bodies Engaged in Intra-Actions.” In The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Politics, edited by Peter Eckersall and Helena Grehan, 203–206. London: Routledge.
Stalpaert, Christel. 2019b. “This Body is in Danger! On Ecology, Protest, and Artistic Activism in Benjamin Verdonck’s Bara/Ke (2000)”. In Emerging Affinities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts, edited byMalgorzata Sugiera, Mateusz Borowski, and Mateusz Chaberski. Transcript Verlag, 211–236.
Students Arts Studies and Theatre, Ghent University. 2019. “Schone Week. VIJF DAGEN TINGELN EN DAN - ” Documenta: tijdschrift voor theater 37, no. 1: 236–271.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Van Dooren, Thom. 2014. Flight Ways. Life at the Edge of Extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Stalpaert, C. (2021). Tentacular Thinking-With-Things in Storied Places. Parliament of Things (2019) by Building Conversation. In: Stalpaert, C., van Baarle, K., Karreman, L. (eds) Performance and Posthumanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74745-9_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74745-9_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-74744-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-74745-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)