Featured Contributors to date

Ying Liang – Filmmaker |Abracadabra (2020, HD video, sound, 4:29)

Kerry Tribe – Artist | Title To Be Announced

Introduction

Mariana Pestana – Curator

Every day, we are drowned by data-as-proof of the irrevocable climate crisis in which we find ourselves in. We may have been numbed by the data, paralyzed by the statistics, immune to the proving numbers. But aren’t we starving for emotional attachment?

More than 100 years ago, Violet Paget wrote about empathy as the lending of one’s life to a thing. The thing could be an object or a landscape. And empathy was the process through which feelings transferred across that thing and her own body. She wrote down those feelings. Symptoms worth recording were, for example, breathing and heartbeat rhythm variations. Things worth feeling were a chair, a painting, a sculpture, a mountain. All observations required deep attunement: to the moment, to the place, to the self. The term empathy was translated from the German einfühlung, and it literally means “feeling into”. Empathy sought to capture the transference of feelings from one body to another. The symptoms that Paget noticed in her body, and recorded in her notebook, were provoked by a third body – that of the thing being looked at. Empathy has since gained new meanings, and nowadays it is generally understood as the capacity to understand, grasp or simulate the feelings of other people, not objects or the natural world. 

Biologically, we were affective before we were rational, cooperative before we were individual. The standard histories of human evolution and culture focus on rational achievements, problem solving intelligence, invention. They disregard the role of affect and feelings. But as neuroscientist António Damásio puts it: reason and intelligence’s purpose is care. Caring is a fundamental aspect of survival. Feelings are what guide homeostasis - the necessary equilibrium between any entity or species and their environment, in order for it to thrive into the future. A stability between body and environment, a negotiation between self and other. I like how the beginning of empathy resonates today, in a time when we broadly recognise the agency and the rights of more-than-human entities - be them plants, animals, microbes, fungi, minerals or bodies of water - but struggle how to care for them. And how it echoes in the precise now, when we have been deprived of sociality between humans.

The current state of social isolation, globally motivated by a virus, accelerated the already rising atomization of society. We now see the world from a new perspective, split as we are into as smaller as possible units of people. It shows how irremediably social, interdependent we were, after all. The psychological effects of social isolation are yet to be fully written, coined, and proved. But we already feel what the deprivation of care and affect to which we have been subjected to produces. And we also suspect that the cause of the spread, in the first place, was a larger crisis of ecological affect.  This 2020 disconnection has forced us to diagnose a lack of connection, which is a necessary principle of homeostasis. Human and more, how do we navigate the social from here? What does a more-than-human form of sociality look like? What empathies towards objects and nature are being restored, rehearsed or invented out there?