The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish
The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
When the word for world is soil. Notes on the troubles of ecological belonging
How can thinking with contemporary transformations in human-soil relations nurture the imagination of caring earthly futures amidst ongoing eco-social catastrophes? Rewording Ursula Le Guin’s title, The Word for World is Forest, is an invitation to immerse in the material, aesthetic and ethico-political more than human evocativeness of soil-centred worlds, without losing sight of the multi-layered, conflictive, and ambivalent significances that mark human-soil ecological belonging on this troubled Earth, while exploring possibilities for insurgent and hopeful ecological futures.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa works at the University of Warwick and is an AHRC Leadership Fellow. She authored Matters of care. Speculative ethics in more than human worlds (2017), connecting feminist critical thinking on care with more than human ontologies. She currently researches transformations in ecological cultures through human-soil relations.
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