Meet Me in a Pleasant Place: On Time, Ruins, and Ghosts
Sessions meet on select Wednesdays at 5:30pm
Pierre Huyghe, 'Variants', 2021
This reading group will investigate the generative potential of worldbuilding as an artistic and conceptual strategy for re-imagining our relationships with the animate Earth.
We will start by establishing a problem: how a society so intellectually advanced, with so much ‘knowledge’ can treat the Earth so poorly (a question raised by David Abram, and taken up by Isabelle Stengers in Reclaiming Animism). Worldbuilding then emerges as a strategy for engaging with alternative modes of knowing the world–ones that inform both a revision of the ontological position of the human, and a new sense of the web of relations that we exist within.
We will discuss storytelling and escapism as methods for imagining worlds. We will break down the structure of a world according to its fundamental systems + elements (like time), the sites and places that emerge from these structures (like ruins), and finally the beings past and present that inhabit these places (ghosts). We will consider non-western and queer notions of time, the ruin as a site of potential for ecological enlivening, the ontology of the vampire squid, and queer ecology as a practice of relating differently to those around us.
S1. ANIMATE EARTH
1.29.24
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. "Learning the Grammar of Animacy." Braiding Sweetgrass : Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Second hardcover edition, Milkweed Editions, 2020.
Isabelle Stengers, Reclaiming Animism, e-flux Journal, Issue #36, July 2012
S2. FUTURE WORLDS
2.19.25
LeGuin, Ursula. “ The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” K. Dancing at the Edge of the World : Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central.
*Book Will Be Provided. or PDF Here
Rao, Venkatesh. “On The Design of Escaped Realities.” Ribbonfarm Constructions in Magical Thinking, Thinkability Series, January 2015
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/01/16/on-the-design-of-escaped-realities/
S3. TIME
3.12.25
Phillips, Rasheedah. “Black Quantum Futurism.” Journal of Architectural Education 77, no. 1 (2023): 9–19.
PDF HERE
Listen: Chasing Cicadas, Emergence Podcast
Extra Reading:
Mpofu, Vongai. “Time : An African Cultural Perspective.” African Indigenous Knowledge and the Sciences : Journeys into the Past and Present, 2016
S4. RUINS
4.9.25
Butler, Octavia E., and Gloria Steinem. Parable of the Sower. Seven Stories Press, 1993. Chs 1-3.
*Book will be provided.
Bubant, Nils."Haunted Geologies: Spirits, Stones, and the Necropolitics of the Anthropocene." Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing et al., University of Minnesota Press, 2017
*Book Provided, but there is also a PDF Here
S5 GHOSTS
4.30.25
Chisholm, Dianne. 'Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire.' Queer Ecologies : Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 2010.
PDF Here
Dillon, Grace L., ed. 2012. Walking the Clouds : An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. PDF Here
Flusser, Vilém, et al. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis : A Treatise : With a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
*Book Will Be Provided.
Listen: Back to Earth - Queer Currents, Future Ecologies
Extra Reading:
Barad, Karen. “No Small Matter: Mushroom Clouds, Ecologies of Nothingness, and Strange Topologies Of Spacetimemattering.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing et al., University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 103–20.*Book will be provided.
Extra Reading:
Cheng, Ian, "Chapter 1: Worlds and Worlding," Emissaries Guide To Worlding.
Extra Reading:
Schlanger, Zoe. 'Plant Futures.' The Light Eaters. Harper Collins, 2024.
Tolfo, Davide, and Zolin, Nicola. 'How To Create a World #1.' koozArch. 2022
Morgan, Eleanor. "The Death Swamps (Or a Pond Within an Ocean)" OCEANS Documents of Contemporary Art. Whitechapel Gallery. 2023
Muchenje, Francis. "Interrogating the Concept of Time Among the Shona: A Postcolonial Discourse" African Indigenous Knowledge and the Sciences : Journeys into the Past and Present. Sense Publishers, 2016
PDF Here
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES FROM GROUP PARTICIPANTS
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. 1st Harvard University Press paperback ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. . Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Leacock, Eleanor Burke. Myths of Male Dominance: Collected Articles on Women Cross-Culturally. New York: Monthly Review Pr, 1981.
Lindisfarne, Nancy, and Jonathan Neale. Why Men? A Human History of Violence and Inequality. London: Hurst, 2023.
Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–59.
Saini, Angela. The Patriarchs: The Origins of Inequality. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2024.
Flannery, Kent V., and Joyce Marcus. The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire. First paperback edition. Cambridge London: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Graeber, David, and D. Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. First paperback edition. New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.
Prechtel, Martín. The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic: The Parallel Lives of People as Plants, Keeping the Seeds Alive. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2012.
Estes, Nick. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London New York: Verso, 2019.