Becoming Geological: Imagining an affirmative otherwise

The exhibition Becoming Geological (25 November 2022 – 8 January 2023), curated by Martin Howse and Florian Weigl, maps several earthly trajectories by which the technologically destabilised Anthropocene is offered alternative futures, affirmatively. Situated in V2_ Lab for Unstable Media, a location which was founded as an artists’ initiative in 1981, and which has become one of Europe’s leading platforms of research on the transformative agency of technology (in art and in the world), Becoming Geological provided a refreshing reflection on, and addition to, the Lab’s mission to grapple with technology as that which renders everything unstable. That instability, understood as ‘a creative force that is essential to the continuous re-ordering of the social/cultural, political and economic relations in society’, has become a guiding force within the context of the exhibition.^[1] The Lab’s attentiveness to both beneficial as well as disastrous agencies of technology was given a twist, and different senses of what it means to be technological permeated the exhibition space. Through Becoming Geological, the Lab continued its exploration of worldviews that are not ‘orderly, homogenous’, but rather ‘inconsistent, heterogenous, complex and variable’^[2] in response to painful aspects of the technological ubiquity.^[3]

Credits for the images: Photo © Lana Mesic Becoming Geological, exhibition at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, 25-11-2022 until 8-01-2023

The exhibition assembled works developed by six contemporary artists, all of them noticing that humankind has entered a new planetary geological cycle, that consider it their responsibility to explore this cycle and that demand us to think along. They take as a starting point the notion that humankind has always been geological, a term that of course can be read in many ways. Or rather, ‘through intentional incorporation of earthly and thus cosmic elements’ as well as through human-provoked technological processes that cause the earth and the cosmos to gradually change – the works were to ‘mark, trace, invoke and unfold’ multiple ways of connecting that which is technological, earthly, and cosmic.^[4] The works embraced the notion that technology is that which destabilises – how we think, act, feel, smell, dig, live and die. And ‘we’ refers to every possible individuality (a la Spinoza) a part of nature, or the earth.

The Anthropocene is then assumed to have brought us new ways of connecting that have already been naturalised. Earthly and cosmic particles that humans ingest – now not only intentionally – are in fact ‘our own anthropogenic indicators’.^[5]Gregory Bateson taught us long ago (in his 1972 masterpiece Steps to an Ecology of Mind^[6]) that the eco-mental system called Lake Erie (a heavily polluted Great Lake back then) cannot be excluded from our own eco-mental system. Yet it seems that only now we begin to understand that we breathe in forests dying in fires, particles of nuclear testing, or metallic molecules that escape extraction processes, making all the ecological crises of our times part of ourselves. Coping with these new ways of ingesting the environment, the exhibition proposes three ‘active philosophies of the earth’: becoming metal, becoming earth, and becoming cosmic.^[7] Exhibited works created a space for invoking those potential ways of relating to the earth and the cosmos that, after all, ‘author us’.^[8]

Becoming geological thus invites us to imagine our life on earth otherwise. At the same time, it is a process within which new ideas on sustainability within unsustainability can surface. It negotiates what it means to be an earthly participant today, and how this participation has changed alongside the technological and its destabilising agency. Deleuze and Guattari, after Bergson, worked with the term ‘becomings’ to analyse the trajectories in which we could explore an entanglement with the world otherwise, and along these lines Howse and Weigl ask us to think with the earth rather than about it. Together with the book (published by V2_) that accompanied the exhibition, we propose to explore the transformative power of the exhibited works once again, mapping the various geological becomings as they were arranged within the exhibition space, be them olfactory, auditory, or corporeal. We join Howse and Weigl and contemplate how Becoming Geological can still be thought conceptually, meaning affirmatively. Therefore, rather than attempting to provide an overview of the exhibited works, we choose to unearth some traces of geological becomings and prompt our readers to continue this exploration.

Becoming cosmic

Upon entering the exhibition space, the visitor notices that the inside smell is different. It perhaps reminds one of rotten eggs, somehow known and familiar and yet clearly noticeable. Pollution Allures by Rosa Whiteley makes us acknowledge that our noses are no longer communicating with that which the technology has transformed. Our noses need respite to notice once again ‘industries entering our lungs’, to once again discern the information that the earthly and cosmic, smog-filled air tries to communicate.^[9] The fact that we notice the smell within the space of Becoming Geological reminds us that today we rarely smell ‘warnings […] and danger’ that the chemicals that man-made technology emits.^[10]

Plants that grow as part of Pollution Allures thrive within the environment that the Anthropos has created. Forced to function within the destabilised world, those plants that create a new olfactory experience prove that they have learned to live differently. They have welcomed the molecules of pollutants into their bodies as there was no other possibility to do otherwise. Their becoming more-than-plant is not based on collaborating with humans though, but with the ‘technological apparatus and chemical residues of human-made systems’; for them there is no distinction between the living and artificial, as they embody both.^[11]

Pollution Allures assembles plants that manage to thrive based on an ongoing responsiveness to the environment. They respond to smells that communicate chemical alteration that we are no longer responsive to as it has already settled in our bodies. Smog, for instance, ‘(to us) is more invisible than it ever was’ and our noses are weakened as a result.^[12]Pollution Allures makes us ‘stop and notice the smell’, allowing us to regain sensitivity to inhalable dangers of the Anthropocene by making us notice that the exhibited plants have embraced becoming.^[13] As Rosi Braidotti writes, becoming ‘is the affirmation of the positivity of difference, meant as a multiple and constant process of transformation’.^[14] Plants that thrive in environments within which they – supposedly – should not, affirm the agents so radically different from them. They smell of death,^[15] they smell of the technological and of ‘the environmental glitch’,^[16] and still they thrive.

Particles that we breathe in – that the plants in Pollution Allures ingest – are already within us, in their earthly and cosmic presence. With every inhalation we are becoming cosmic – even though we do not notice (smell) it anymore. The polluted plants allow us to regain sensibility – to smells but, most importantly, to all that our technological endeavors are emitting to the atmosphere. Through smell, we reconnect with the earth and notice that it is, in fact, an ‘expression both of and for them [humans]’, as Patricia MacCormack states.^[17]

Becoming earth

Once we lower our heads from breathing in the cosmos, another becoming takes place. This time though we look down into ‘the bowels of one of the oldest silver mines in the world’, now empty as a result of extractivism.^[18] Ideologies permeating capitalism and anthropocentrism have resulted in the death of the earth we once knew: one deemed to provide ‘infinite resources’, to care for the Anthropos placed at the top of the hierarchy rather than on the same level of a stratum.^[19]

The notion of entering the mine’s bowels is remarkably realised by Mourning the Infinite (Anaïs Tondeur). The video showing the artist walking through the mine, placed on the floor, causes our heads to bend. One is also allowed to walk on the video projection – not many decide to do that though. Overwhelmed by the emptiness of the mine, one notices a photograph placed right next to the video projection. Its noticeably porous structure has been born out of mourning the earth once believed as ‘infinitely available and malleable’, according to the tastes of the Anthropos.^[20] This supposedly stable notion of the earth has turned out to lose its stability because of the technological undertakings leading to extractivism. The mourning of this earth is an actual, corporeal mourning. We might imagine ourselves that, when looking into the dead bowels of the mine, it is our own tears that have been collected to produce the salt print that mixes the salt present in tears with leftover silver particles from the mine.^[21]

Becoming earth through Mourning the Infinite is a process that makes us notice the transformation that the earth has already gone through. Here, becoming is most of all about affirming that what we have believed in – by continuing the logic of the Anthropos – works differently; the earth is not merely the other, the resource. The work gives us the courage to mourn, to cry, and therefore merges our bodily particles with those of the once-filled-with-silver earth. Mourning, in this case though, is about holding oneself accountable; it is about resonating with that which has been silenced by organisation into that which is to be extracted.^[22]

Credits for the images: Photo © Lana Mesic Becoming Geological, exhibition at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, 25-11-2022 until 8-01-2023

Crying and bending are crucial as they are corporeal markers of a ‘bare, exposed vulnerability’, that is a form of opening up to that which has been technologically transformed, as well as a process of becoming earth.^[23] Here we carry this becoming further and think with Sissel Marie Tonn’s Sphagnum Time and its bog bodies.

Engulfed in the sound of three singing voices, we bend to make sense of a small table on which 3D-printed forms lie, all inspired by actual bog bodies. We can start our meditation on what being a bog body means and might mean for us. Once we bend, we bring ourselves closer to the – supposed – other, to the bog body. We are taking a step down, both corporeally to make sense, as well as symbolically within the hierarchy that perseveres. We are bringing ourselves lower, but not at all as a marker of shame. On the contrary, this humble gesture allows us to notice that the bog bodies are not at all other – meaning, alien – to us. They are us as much as we are them. We are all becomings, alongside the destabilising technological processes of extraction.

Sphagnum Time prompts us to notice and embrace the earth and its damage that has resulted from what Braidotti calls ‘authoritarian anthropocentric injunctions’.^[24] By bringing the bog bodies to the table, the work allows for a new way of addressing the technological unstable. It advocates cooperation and collaboration and makes us think of what Donna Haraway calls ‘staying with the trouble’ as a way of coping with all the destabilisations that the egotistical logic of the Anthropos has resulted in.^[25] The bog bodies’ ways of living (and dying), as we notice, are attuned to the earth in ways quite radically different from those we – or rather, the Anthropos – know(s). They are layered, and within this layering they flourish. They are alert, responsive, affirmative, accountable; they are teachers of thinking not about the earth but with it.

As we listen to the song of the bog bodies visible on three screens placed on the eye level, we learn:

Read my braided hair like a map of a basement rock, stretching out beneath the landscape […]. My body registers everything.^[26]

Read my age by counting the layers of the tree rings of my body, absorbing and leaking minerals, chemicals, isotopes. Building up across thousands of years.^[27]

The three bog bodies of Sphagnum Time share with us their notion of subjectivity, one that is very much non-anthropocentric though entangled with fragments of it, occasionally. Having spent hundreds (thousands even) years in peace, lucky to avoid excavations, those bog bodies have rendered themselves fully open to ‘processes, dynamic interaction and fluid boundaries’, to various geological becomings.^[28] They register everything, are attentive to everything, as well as live different temporalities. They contain both ‘the past and the future, as they continue to exist in an intimate relation with those environments that we, the living, continually shape and reshape to fit our needs’.^[29]

The bog bodies beautifully show us what it might mean to become earth, to become geological. Their bodies act as archives as much as ours becomes a ‘bog of our techno-exuberant age’; we are already absorbing and archiving that which marks the Anthropocene.^[30] They are living within the dirt of the earth: whatever happens to the earth, the same happens to them. They register the earth as much as the earth registers them. Whatever the trouble – whatever the destabilisation – they are ‘becoming […] a target for the outside’ as Reza Negarestani puts it.^[31] The important aspect here is that the bog bodies form their subjectivities precisely upon that which they absorb. They prompt us to do the same by noticing that we are not on the earth but rather we are the earth.

Becoming metal

The last becoming we address is perhaps the most intimate. As Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere’.^[32] The Iron Ring by Cecilia Jonsson deals with this notion of a constant absorbing of metal by creating a ring out of 24 kilograms of grass ‘harvested from the acidic river banks in an area where the landscape was severely transformed by iron ore mining’.^[33] The work brings to focus the notion of benefiting the devastated ground, a result of technological processes of excavation run by the Anthropos. It engages ‘iron hyper-accumulating plants’ and their tolerance to iron and ability to grow on devastated soil.^[34]

Those plants thrive within the environment characterised by death, they form their life based on death. They allow their bodies to be ‘taken over by’ iron particles, they become more-than-plant.^[35] The plant through which body iron runs has become a target to the outside particles, its body was ‘opened up by’ iron particles as well as it rendered itself as capable of affording that which is external.^[36] As a result, the iron-seducing plant becomes a force that re-nourishes the earth.

To see the ring, we bend once again. We pay homage to the plant that responds so intimately to the environment so radically altered by the Anthropos. We notice that we, after all, are always already larded with iron, ‘it runs within our veins and allows us to breathe’.^[37] We are always already metallic. Perhaps, together with the iron-plant as well as with our iron-filled bodies, we can imagine a new sustainability through affirmation of what is already there?

The Iron Ring allows us to affirmatively notice that the notion of the Anthropos as a ‘single geological stratum’ is indeed suffocating – as we are already, after all, breathing with and through iron.^[38] The work allows us to notice the ‘chimeric materiality of our thought’, as bodies that have already rendered themselves a target for many other bodies.^[39] We see the process of becoming geological as ethics; is it so as it is, more than anything else, a prompt to ask ourselves how we can turn the ‘use of the Earth into care for the Earth’.^[40] It is a prompt to surrender to the notion that we are one of many bodies which are nourishing each other – or should do so. As the Anthropos has brought about technological instability, we can consider ourselves lucky to notice that we are already becoming geological – which is quite a liberating thought. We need to explore and keep exploring these different becomings though.

Learning with Becoming Geological, or how to live exo-Darwinism

Becoming Geological showed us that it is possible to beautifully – meaning, affirmatively – cope with the (quite disastrous) planetary age that we are now finding ourselves in. As humankind ‘has always been dirty and harshly geological’, as we have learned upon entering the space, the exhibited works prove their courage to embrace this dirtiness.^[41] The dirtiness, the garbage, the techno-earthly pollution that we have evolved with/that has become us. Michel Serres calls this ‘exo-Darwinism’, Peter Weibel explored this term in his artworks and in his exhibitions at the ZKM,^[42] linking it to exo-evolution, exo-biology, exo-pregnancy.

Becoming Geological also works with that which is already there, and prompts us to look for an otherwise, to show us that imagining otherwise is possible – and can be more than fruitful. Works that we have focused on (by Rosa Whiteley, Anaïs Tondeur, Sissel Marie Tonn and Cecilia Jonsson) as well as others that we have not been able to write more about (Halito, Alhayas/Rockskin, and Denture by Alfonso Borragán, as well as Absorption, Saturation, Toxicity, Elimination by Rosemary Lee) are all teaching us how ‘geological becomings-and-us’ take place, happen, and are to be foreseen. They do that both materially as well as conceptually –  by reminding us that becoming geological is, above all, about attentiveness, acceptance, noticing, and holding oneself accountable for all the dirt that is around us and that is us. Serres reminds us that appropriation takes place through dirt, one’s own dirt.^[43] We must all reappropriate the organs of our bodies. Because of the earth, all of its inhabitants, and because of ourselves.

Rick Dolphijn and Justyna Jakubiec (Utrecht University)

References

Altena, A. 40 years of V2_: Exploring infinite possibilities and breaking technology open. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022. https://v2.nl/files/2022/pdf/40-years-of-v2_-english-pdf (accessed on 9 March 2023).

Bateson, G. Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000.

Braidotti, R. ‘Discontinuous Becomings. Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman of Philosophy’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1993: 44-55.

_____. ‘“We” Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Vol. 17, 2020: 465-469.

Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020 (original in 1987 by Les Editions de Minuit, Paris).

Dolphijn, R. The philosophy of matter: A meditation. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.

Haraway, D. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016.

Jonsson, C. ‘Petrified’ in Becoming geological, edited by M. Howse. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022: 212-215.

MacCormack, P. ‘From (immoral) Anthropos to ethical geo-stratum’ in Becoming geological, edited by M. Howse. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022: 132-146.

Negarestani, R. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anonymous materials. Melbourne: Re.press, 2008.

Tondeur, A. and Legrand, M. ‘Mourning the Infinite’ in Becoming geological, edited by M. Howse. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022: 160-173.

Tondeur, A. ‘Mourning the Infinite’, Anaïs Tondeur, 2022: https://anaistondeur.com/a-dream-to-space-lenvol-du-rve-copie (accessed on 10 March 2023).

Tonn, S. ‘Sphagnum Time’, Sissel Marie Tonn: https://sisselmarietonn.com/project/sphagnum-time (accessed on 10 March 2023).

_____. ‘We are all bog bodies’ in Becoming geological, edited by M. Howse. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022: 174-185.

Serres, M. Malfeasance – Appropriation through pollution? Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

V2_. ‘Becoming Geological: The Exhibition’. V2_: https://v2.nl/events/exhibition-becoming-geological (accessed on 25 February 2023).

V2_. ‘Mission’. V2_: https://v2.nl/organization/mission (accessed on 9 March 2023).

V2_. ‘Pollution Allures’. V2_. https://v2.nl/archive/works/pollution-allures (accessed on 7 March 2023).

V2_. ‘The Iron Ring project’. V2_. https://v2.nl/archive/works/the-ring-1 (accessed on 10 March 2023).

Whiteley, R. ‘Pollution Allures’, Rosa Whiteley. https://rosawhiteley.com/Pollution-Allures (accessed on 7 March 2023).

_____. ‘Pollution-altered allures’ in Becoming geological, edited by M. Howse. Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022: 186-197.

[1] V2_, ‘Mission’, https://v2.nl/organization/mission (accessed on 9 March 2023).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Arie Altena, 40 years of V2_: Exploring infinite possibilities and breaking technology open (Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022), 6, https://v2.nl/files/2022/pdf/40-years-of-v2_-english-pdf (accessed on 9 March 2023).

[4] V2_, ‘Becoming Geological: The Exhibition’, V2_, https://v2.nl/events/exhibition-becoming-geological (accessed on 25 February 2023).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 491-492.

[7] V2_, ‘Becoming Geological: The Exhibition’.

[8] Ibid.

[9] V2_, “Pollution Allures,” V2_, https://v2.nl/archive/works/pollution-allures (accessed March 7, 2023).

[10] Rosa Whiteley, “Pollution Allures,” Rosa Whiteley, https://rosawhiteley.com/Pollution-Allures (accessed March 7, 2023).

[11] V2_, “Pollution Allures.”

[12] Rosa Whiteley, “Pollution-altered allures,” in Becoming Geological, ed. Martin Howse (Rotterdam: V2_ Publishing, 2022), p. 192.

[13] Whiteley, “Pollution-altered allures,” p. 192.

[14] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Discontinuous Becomings. Deleuze on the Becoming-Woman of Philosophy’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1993: 44.

[15] V2_, ‘Pollution Allures’.

[16] Whiteley, ‘Pollution-altered allures’, p. 187.

[17] Patricia MacCormack, ‘From (immoral) Anthropos to ethical geo-stratum’ in Becoming Geological, p. 133.

[18] Anaïs Tondeur, ‘Mourning the Infinite’, Anaïs Tondeur, 2022, https://anaistondeur.com/a-dream-to-space-lenvol-du-rve-copie (accessed on 10 March 2023).

[19] Ibid.

[20] Anaïs Tondeur and Marine Legrand, ‘Mourning the Infinite’ in Becoming Geological, 2022, p. 161.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020 [orig. in 1987]), p. 46.

[23] Tondeur and Legrand, ‘Mourning the Infinite’, p. 165.

[24] Rosi Braidotti, ‘“We” Are In This Together, But We Are Not One and the Same’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Vol. 17, 2020: 466.

[25] Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 4.

[26] Sissel Marie Tonn, ‘Sphagnum Time’, Sissel Marie Tonn, https://sisselmarietonn.com/project/sphagnum-time (accessed on 10 March 2023).

[27] Ibid.

[28] Braidotti, ‘Discontinuous Becomings’, p. 44.

[29] Sissel Marie Tonn, ‘We are all bog bodies’ in Becoming Geological, p. 181.

[30] Ibid., p. 176.

[31] Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008), p. 199.

[32] Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 479.

[33] V2_, ‘The Iron Ring project’, V2_, https://v2.nl/archive/works/the-ring-1 (accessed on 10 March 2023).

[34] Ibid.

[35] Rick Dolphijn, The Philosophy of Matter: A Meditation (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), p. 54.

[36] Dolphijn, The Philosophy of Matter, p. 56.

[37] Cecilia Jonsson, ‘Petrified’ in Becoming Geological, 2022, p. 212.

[38] MacCormack, ‘From (immoral) Anthropos to ethical geo-stratum’, p. 133.

[39] Ibid., p. 134.

[40] Ibid., p. 143.

[41] V2_, ‘Becoming Geological: The Exhibition’.

[42] See for instance: https://zkm.de/en/peter-weibel-introduction-to-the-exhibition (accessed on 4 April 2023).

[43] Michel Serres, Malfeasance – Appropriation through Pollution? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), p. 3.