In our call out for the twelfth chapter of Something Other, we invoked the ‘disturbance’ of protest alongside the many destructive disturbances that occur in the name of power. This has been a slow chapter – moving when moments and gaps arose across the year.
In November 2023, we collaborated with the Feminist Duration Reading Group to gather in anticipation of its publishing; we collectively sat with a selection of works from this chapter and extracts of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s book The Mushroom At the End of the World. We listened to the new resonances of protest, as many of us marched across the UK in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza; and witnessed state incursion and settler colonial powers on many fronts, in so many places. We noted Tsing’s evenhandedness in witnessing disturbance, her respect for all life forms:
‘Deciding what counts as disturbance is always a matter of point of view. From a human’s vantage, the disturbance that destroys an anthill is vastly different from that obliterating a human city. From an ant’s perspective, the stakes are different.’
In Tsing’s view when she names the obliteration of a human city is the destruction of Hiroshima by an atomic bomb in 1945. By the start of November, the Euro Med Monitor of Human Rights reported, Israel had, in tonnes of explosives, dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs over Gaza. Tsing offers no easy hope, no honey-coated vision of the future. The best humans can do, she suggests, is to notice, respect and increasingly give space to the way in which: ‘Each living thing remakes the world through seasonal pulses of growth, lifetime reproductive patterns, and geographies of expansion.’
At the event, we shared five works created for this chapter that, in their different ways, respond to Tsing’s provocations, her despair and her offers to humanity. Caridad Svich’s In This World scans the protest march, seeking deeper truths, care for the fragile human body, an antidote to fear. While JR Carpenter’s poem confused as ever occupies a very different temporality: that of fossils and moss, rivers and rainfall, the human in between attempting to make sense of quiet forces silently and brilliantly beyond their control.
In her meditative text We never panicked, we were always afraid, Karen Christopher considers the act of collaboration: whether between artists making together, or between the self and the inchoate, pulsing towards the unknown. Sabrina Fuller’s film The Power of Fragility brings together multiple voices, across myriad languages, in a collective act of imagination, bringing forth a new social order, communal and rooted in care. As one of the attendees at the Feminist Duration Reading Group event noted, this joy in difference is exactly the difference between a world in which humans compete and destroy each other, and one in which all life forms cohabit spectrums of mutual aid.
At the end of the event, we read Diana Damian Martin’s spell, shifting attention to disturbances between the body and its atmospheres – inviting a multi-lingual embodiment.
The rest of the works in the chapter similarly span time and scales of existence as they place their attention with specificity and care. Alice-Anne Psaltis takes a walk with a photograph by Australian artist Rosemary Laing, looking beyond its bucolic surface to the colonial thinking from which it was created – and beyond that to the generative visions of science fiction that might provide an antidote.
Lisa Alexander reflects on the multiple disturbances interrupting social relations on an individual and a systemic level. Maddy Costa navigates a domestic landscape disordered by unhappiness. Finally, Mary Paterson glimpses a future at once bleak and yet pulsing with fierce possibility.
Something Other 