Riga, Latvia and the Baltics were a central inspiration where, having undergone occupations, wars and economical flux, “worlds have ended” many times. Reflecting on our entanglement with one another, with history, and with other species, the program explored how words make worlds and proposed perspectives for assembling possible futures.
Unfolding across the duration of the Biennial, the weekly programme also encompassed workshops and activities on-site, expanding on a glossary of words that inspired RIBOCA2: Endings, Nature, Love, Ruins, Healing, Magic, Cosmos, Underground, Care, Dreams, Dance, Imagination, Human, Wildness, Ghosts, Language, Metamorphosis, Voices, Fictions and Futures.
The Glossary
For McKenzie Wark, radical new critical theory sprouts from the alternative worlds imagined by fiction, autofiction, fictocriticism, and writing practices that can discover forms of life outside existing accounts of gender and global capitalism. Her work exceeds academic territory, with narratives that take into account twentieth-century political and media landscapes as well as class and labour struggles. The proliferation of fictions might be one of the big problems in the world today. Entire societies seem to function based on deeply held delusions. And indeed we do need facts to counter such fictions, although they never seem to be very effective in changing anyone's mind. Perhaps we could look further into how both facts and fictions are produced and even produced together. Rather than things, we could see them as practices: ficting and facting. Perhaps what we need are more interesting and reliable practices for doing both.
McKenzie Wark, Ficting and Facting
For Jack Halberstam, wild things escape control and can provide a useful political category to declassify and decolonize the patriarchal civilizational narrative that order the contemporary world. Halberstam is widely recognised for his unique ability to shuttle back and forth between high and low theory / high culture and low culture, foregrounding an unexpected and subversive understanding of popular culture, gender variance, and queer art.
Jack Halberstam, Wild Things
For Marisol de la Cadena, the accelerated consumption of minerals, oil and energy as well as the development of infrastructure to make them available for consumption, has led to an unprecedented destruction of other-than-human entities. Joining indigenous collectives’ protests in defense of the environment, de la Cadena works on the markers that seperate life and death in conditions of dramatic ecological and political change, specifically in countries that strive to transition from the violence of war to a delicate and fraught condition of peace.
Marisol de la Cadena, Human but not Only
For Emanuele Coccia, all living bodies, present, past and future, are the same life that is transmitted from body to body, from species to species, from era to era. Coccia argues that metamorphosis is the relationship that unites all living beings with the planet, and that from this viewpoint, life is a metaphysics of mixture perpetuating itself through the very circle of mutation, nutrition and sexuality.In the talk, One World, One Life, Emanuele Coccia argues that all individuals at the same time share and build one flesh. Being born means each time inheriting a flesh that has already lived at least two lives. Eating means inheriting a flesh that has lived in another species and transforming it into our flesh. This flesh-life that circulates and transforms is nothing more than the matter of our planet.
Emanuele Coccia, One World, One Life
For CAConrad poetry and ritual are two ancient technologies that investigate the space between body and spirit. Somewhere between fable and confession, their “(Soma)tic poetry rituals” and their resulting poems are acts of attention and devotion to the present in response to trying conditions of personal and ecological violence. In the live reading and talk (Soma)tic poetry rituals, CA discusses how to make and maintain creative space in our lives. When Albert Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” he was asking us to understand how bringing new ideas for the world is always more important than stagnating under templates of previous paradigms.
CA Conrad, (Soma)tic poetry rituals
For Federico Campagna, reality varies with each era, civilization and new world, in turn shaping what is possible to do, think and imagine. In his philosophical work, Campagna investigates the operating principles of reality and proposes forms of reconstructing the world that are expressed through bewilderment and amazement.
Federico Campagna, The End of World(s)
Watch