Unfold 2 is available

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Vision Forum is thrilled to announce the launch of Unfold#2, : A Physis is being organized…, guest-curated by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin.

Interweaving modern scientific essays with post-structuralist philosophy, sci-fi literature and feminist rewritings of the body, The Lesson of Zoology unfolds an ignited corpus of what, in the introduction to the project, Anna-Sophie and Etienne call “the colonial scientific will to knowledge”, while insisting that “this knowledge is not exhausted by these imperial folds. A physis is being organized … again and otherwise”.

As a commission within the commission, The Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh, co-directed by Rich Pell and Lauren Allen, has contributed a selection of archival material from its collection which was digitized especially on the occasion of Unfold#2: The Lesson of Zoology.

The Literal Intimacies of Zoology:
Reading Through the Folders of Colonial-Science

Sara Giannini in conversation with Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin

[Excerpt]

SG Unfold is primarily concerned with modes of sharing and thinking across disciplines and “habitats,” responding to the reformulation of modern institutions of knowledge such as the library or the encyclopedia. Your current research and curatorial interest in natural history and scientific knowledge within colonial apparatuses has informed your selection for Unfold#2, which deals with the modern taxonomy of knowledge and bodies. How would you describe this aspect of your work?

AS & ET All of our work deals with taxonomy because knowledge requires, by definition, organization. Whether that organization is emancipatory or colonial has been a matter for the librarians of Empire to decide through the order of their stacks and the structure of their folders. What is a file? It is an index of the structure of knowledge in a given order. So, what can we unfold from the files of zoology? The Lesson of Zoology is a lesson in the ordering of nature toward the end that we now inhabit, called the Anthropocene. Total chaos and total control, simultaneously. Does the scientific will to knowledge afford us any vestige of emancipation? This is a question worthy of intense inquiry, as we cannot simply dismiss this history as colonial, because it constitutes our present; at the same time, we cannot accept this colonial inheritence without an anxious trepidation given the violence it has enacted and enabled. So we must work through it, that is, we must unfold it to find what we can use.

SG I was wondering whether you see a relationship between Benjamin’s writings in the Arcades Project and your method of selection.

AS & ET We think the best answer we could give is our introduction to Unfold#2, as the text attempts to appropriate Benjamin’s provocation in One-way Street, titled “To the Planetarium.” Are we not, now, in the planetarium? Benjamin’s interest in the vestigial aspect of history was influential on our structure, but we also wanted to experiment with the idea of the “ordering of physis [nature]” which he describes so well in that text. What is The Lesson of Zoology if not an image of the ordering of nature? It is an image meant to circulate and profilerate the correct ordering of “Man” and “Nature.” Anna Tsing’s “Earth Stalked by Man,” included in our introduction folder, denaturalizes this Man, and we take that process of denaturalizing the colonial relationship between Man and His Nature as a point of departure from which we intend to unfold another logic and other possibilities. In our contribution to Unfold, we aren’t trying to make a new structure, or to introduce some aleatory position, but, within the ruin of natural history and its colonial ambitions, we want to reconsider what can be reappropriated. We remain in an Enlightenment heritage as we continue to recycle our files. We are still in the folders of modernity, so to speak. But, in reorganizing their relations, there are many affinities and assemblies that suggest other trajectories for knowledge, collaboration, and emancipation. They are to be discovered, or discredited, in the folds and folders themselves.

[Read the complete interview here]

Anne-Sophie Springer is an editor, curator, and the co-director of K. Verlag, a Berlin-based independent press exploring the book as a site for exhibition making. Her practice stimulates fluid relations among images, artifacts, and texts in order to produce new geographical, physical, and cognitive proximities, often in relation to historical archives. As a member of the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, she is the co-founder and co-editor of intercalations: paginated exhibition series published as part of Das Anthropozän-Projekt. Sophie has written widely on exhibition histories and curatorial practices. Her most recent exhibition, 125,660 Specimens of Natural History (2015), was co-curated with Etienne Turpin at Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta, Indonesia, in collaboration with the Indonesian Institute of Science. She is currently conducting research for her Ph.D., which examines the financialization of tropical nature, at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Etienne Turpin is a philosopher studying, designing, curating, and writing about complex urban systems, political economies of data and infrastructure, visual culture, art, and aesthetics, and Southeast Asian colonial-scientific history. Etienne is the founding director of anexact office, his design research practice based in Jakarta, Indonesia. As a member of the SYNAPSE International Curators’ Network of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Etienne is the is co-founder and co-editor of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series as a part of Das Anthropozän-Projekt. He is the editor of Architecture in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2013) and co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and Jakarta: Architecture + Adaptation (Universitas Indonesia Press, 2013).

Unfold is a curatorial experimentation on the digital folder to trigger anti-authorial agency, movement of thoughts, untimely collaborations. It is the final outcome of the VOLUME project, a research and artistic project on the concept and agency of the library curated by Sara Giannini in collaboration with 98weeks Research Project (Beirut) and Vision Forum (Stockholm). Different guest curators will reshuffle and expand the library according to a specific theme.

Upcoming: Unfold#3 by CAMP, Mumba