Starting from the shared consensus that the climate crisis is a crisis of civilisation, Sin lo otro la Tierra no sería brings together research, practices and ideas that present provocations as ways to repair the systems that organise how we inhabit the planet. 

The fractures brought about by the development model imposed by Western modernity shattered not only the bonds between humans and other species but also the bonds between humans themselves.(1) These same orders are responsible for the distance taken by technologies, which were appropriated in order to pursue those objectives. There forms are sharpened, and we observe the alienation of their link to the medium from which they come and the people who articulated them, thus contributing to the deepening of those fractures. The proposal put forward here is to return technology to the people (2) and to the medium in order to remake the world through ecological articulations of repair and justice.

The practices that make up this programme propose moving towards different formulations of the assemblages that unite us, so that they can allow us to know ourselves again. Integrating ourselves in interdependence, plurality and complexity can help us to imagine systems that project fairer and more desirable futures. Perhaps the realignments caused by the migrations associated with the ecological crisis can be the context for new bonds and agreements for inhabiting the Earth. We have a lot of dismantling to do if we are to achieve that. The framework that articulates the systems that organise us often depends on and perpetuates the orders that drove them. Not only that, but it has become so sophisticated in its forms that the political protocols and apparatuses set up to mediate this framework are finding it increasingly difficult to intervene. It seems that we need new formulas that can cope with the enormous complexity condensed by these migratory flows.

In order to revise the ecology of the technologies, we propose opening them up to other cosmotechnics (3), some of which have been discriminated against, while others can be proposed from the new capabilities that have been achieved. Listening, recognition, renunciation. Putting the dominant reason on hold in order to integrate other types of bonds and information. Soft information, situated knowledge, ancestral wisdom. To integrate into its logics (4) other forms of cognition that have always been there but have never taken into consideration. Perhaps by decentralising the human we can at last see them and learn from relationships of interdependence, redistribution and plural coexistence. Technology can be the key to imagining emancipatory futures for the realignments associated with the climate crisis. Therefore, in order to achieve the fairest, most diverse and appropriate representations of the possible scenarios, we propose to provoke the logic that feeds the models in order to overcome the systemic inheritance and a metric and datafication that often distorts, flattens, simplifies and homogenises the realities it pretends to simulate.

The three research and creation projects that initiate the programme are cases that speculate on openings, infiltrations or shifts of perspective in systems that relate groups according to different types of bonds: algorithmic, legal and affective. The combination of these practices somehow weaves a fabric that intertwines voices, perspectives and mechanisms of different ways of challenging, provoking and reconfiguring the dominant models through the recovery of agency in the systems that articulate collectivities. This brings to mind an idea of weaving expressed by Laura Tripaldi in a narrative that discusses the inspiring complexity of the art of weaving as a technology, the forms of relationship it fosters, and the enormous influence it has had on human civilisation, despite the scant attention paid to it in mainstream narratives. It is a technology that makes it possible to articulate abstraction from a material substrate that produces sophisticated, adaptable, resilient and collaborative tapestries. The richness of the fabrics lies in “their cooperative and relational nature, which is expressed in a broad and decentralised structure that endows the material with properties that its constituent parts do not possess”. Their integrity depends on the synergy – the agreement – between the myriad fibres of which it is made. This mechanical resistance that allows them to adapt to an atmosphere, seems to resonate as a force in terms of the technology of cooperation and shared resistance. A relationship of interdependence and solidarity between elements.

During her residency, Júlia Nueno Guitart will continue her in-depth analysis of the platform model used by delivery drivers, known in Spain as riders, to offer their services through digital delivery platforms. Platformisation is a formula that has experienced a huge boom in recent years, particularly since 2008, and it is important to analyse it from the point where labour legislation intersects with migration legislation. The growing deregularisation of an increasingly liberalised labour market, together with increasingly strict and compartmentalised migration policies, leads to situations of unequal inclusion in national labour markets. Despite the fact that in August 2021 Spain enacted groundbreaking legislation in Europe in the form of its “Rider Law”, which deems delivery drivers to be employees, companies have developed strategies to get around the law. The permissive recruitment procedures used by these platforms attract a population that is initially excluded from the domestic labour market and is unable to enjoy all the rights guaranteed by labour legislation. These are temporary immigrants or people who are waiting for their papers to be processed - you don’t need to have full citizenship to work as a rider.

Júlia introduced me to the work of Dalia Gebrial, who explains how racialisation and its constituent processes such as migration, have become an organising principle of platform capitalism, which is reorganising urban labour. Júlia proposes that we “investigate the employment relationship between riders and platforms in order to open up new avenues and tactics to force them to respect riders’ rights”. To achieve this, and through her work with the RidersXDerechos (RxD) collective and the Work, Algorithm and Society Observatory (TAS), she proposes that we “develop a methodology that combines technological and legal interventions to determine what data the company extracts from the platforms and how they then use this data for the algorithmic management of their workers.”

Xiaoji Song intends concentrating on the “relationship between migration and the changing urbanity caused by environmental disasters”, and proposes working with fictional regulatory frameworks to integrate climate parameters into today’s migration and border systems. 

“The ever-changing conditions, the interference and the noise boil gently, murmuring and shouting, and collapse in the middle of the street onto a newly-built metro station, between two roads filled with police cards and self-driving taxis, and inside a newly-released e-commerce app.”

Xiaoji proposes that we take as our starting point his hometown of Wuhan, known as the region of a thousand lakes. The lakes and the Yangtze River mean that Wuhan has its fair share of flooding and subsidence. But in addition, neoliberal urban renewal developments in recent decades have increased the city’s vulnerability to such subsidence. “In 1949, there were 127 lakes in the city of Wuhan alone, but by 2016, although the city had grown drastically in size, only 38 were left”. In this context, he proposes taking the lakes as a metaphor for “a land brought to boiling point by global warming” to activate what in China they call ‘wet knowledge’ ― information that circulates in the background as noise or interference, information that lives with us in the form of texture, inheritance or intuition, that we carry in our bodies and that is often discarded due to the pragmatism and efficientism of “dry knowledge”, which refers to solid information, often in the form of data, dense, obvious and quantitative. He will experiment with this information to draw up a code that will then allow him to speculate on ways to restore the lakes’ agency. For Xiaoji, “sinkholes are the ghosts of the vanished lakes coming back to take their revenge”.

Benia Nsi Ngua, Emily Sun and Iren Márquez Dos Santos will work together to “help to build solidarities through transoceanic sound links”. To do so, as they themselves say, they intend to “provoke an assemblage that serves to generate collective action by weaving together affective networks, listening, orality and sound experimentation”. The form that this fabric will take, the materials and techniques that will be used, will depend on how the shared process unfolds, on its weaving, on what emerges from their exchanges and dialogues, on their different feelings and contexts following the transfer or transmission of knowledge arising from these sonorous expressions. 

To this end, they propose to “explore fractured ancestral knowledge in an act of critical re-imagination”. Drawing on their exploration of community histories of sound resistance, activating the memory of their different contexts will guide them in the construction of “sensory imaginaries with which to uncover the diverse encodings of embodied rhythms”. 

The exercise they present here is a proposal to decode and interpret the mandates that inform the boundaries between what is considered ‘suitable for the coexistence of different musicalities inside and outside the metropolis.’ To this end, they propose a process that is organised around “drawing connections to other ecosystems where the normalisation of certain sounds in relation to the plundering of resources prevents the sustenance of life”. After asking themselves “what forms of listening can help us to imagine other ways of relating to one another and negotiating our territorialities?”, their approach unfolds in the form of a “protest against the colonial strategies that condition the distribution of resources and the modes of habitability”.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          -  María Buey González  - 

This programme includes the following presentations: 

- Public conversation and presentation of the programme

Thursday 12 September 2024 at 6:30pm in the Auditorium of the Centre for Artistic Residencies - Nave 16
Free admission 

- Closure and opening of the research projects

Tuesday 17 September 2024 at 6:30pm in the Auditorium of the Centre for Artistic Residencies - Nave 16
Free admission until full

The programme ends with the "Observatory of Climate Migration" on 17 and 18 October 2024.
A space in which to meet and intertwine the processes developed during the research projects with other proposals from and the voices of specialists, activists, communities and guest creators. The intention of these seminars is to facilitate the gathering of cases and practices as diverse knowledge and multiple points of view that can provide inspiration for alternative forms of relationships, systems and actions.

Júlia Nueno Guitart is a researcher and computational designer. Her work explores the intersection between digital infrastructures and communities in a state of resistance, emergence or disappearance. She is a researcher at Forensic Architecture, where she develops methodologies for the study of systems of violence and counter-forensic techniques for information and surveillance systems. She is a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths (2023-2026), a recipient of a Critical Thinking and Visual Arts Scholarship from the Catalan Government (2022), and a Harvard Mellon Urban Fund Initiative Scholarship (2021). His work has been curated by the Model Festival of Architecture (Barcelona), the Santa Mònica Arts Centre (Barcelona) and the St. James Hatcham Gallery (London). 

Xiaoji Song is a creator and researcher in the field of Global Communication: Politics and Society, and a graduate in Gender and Diversity Studies specialising in urban sociology and migration studies.  Most of Xiaoji’s work has been in communication (multimedia) from art and research, in an interdisciplinary way, with communities, through text, games, podcasts and performance art pieces on topics such as techno-politics, infrastructure, borders, political memory and relevance as global phenomena. He participates in or belongs to various initiatives: Border? Border! A series of podcasts on migration and borders; EdiCitNet at Iri THESys, Humboldt University; LAS; Trust Support.
 In 2023, together with Yve Oh and Yumo Cheng, he founded the East Alien Company which explores interdisciplinary performance art and works collectively with artefacts based on games and theatrical languages.

Also known artistically as Benia Nsi and Yen Yo Nzen, Bernarda Antonia Nsi Ngua is a multidisciplinary creator who listens to her innermost depths and embodies what she encounters through song, poetry, performance art and visual art. As a cultural manager, she is particularly interested in community building and the centralisation of collective listening and storytelling spaces from a queer and transgenerational perspective. Her research weaves together the possibilities of archive as a narrative of ancestral resilience, soundscapes as routes in dialogue with care and the language of dreams. She has worked with collectives such as In The Wake Lab, the Espacio Afro Cultural Centre and Don't Hit a la Negra. Together with Emily Sun she curated the exhibition “I pressed you between the leaves” (Te prensé entre las hojas) at the Sala de Arte Joven and performed the dance and movement piece “Beyond the Skin” (Más allá de la piel) by the choreographer Marina Santo. She has a degree in Labour Relations and Human Resources from the URJC, and a master’s degree in Cultural Management from the UOC.

Emily Sun is a Chinese-American artist currently living in Madrid. Her research explores diasporic alliances and memories through sound languages and collaborative processes. She has a degree in Ethnic Studies from Brown University and is currently studying for her master’s degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture at the Autonomous University of Madrid, the Complutense University of Madrid and the Reina Sofía Museum. She has worked as a cultural programmer with La Parcería, Liwai Acción Intercultural, Espai Avinyó and the Metropolitan Museum of New York, among others. Since 2023 she has collaborated with the artist Xirou Xiao in the project Savia 天马行空 Tiān Mǎ Xíng Kōng, a mediation programme for Chinese families at the Reina Sofía Museum. She is a recipient of the 2024 Curator Wanted (Se busca comisaria) scholarship and co-curator of the exhibition “I pressed you between the leaves” (Te prensé entre las hojas) at the Sala de Arte Joven with Benia Nsi. As an artist she also produces music under the name Emily Sol. 

Iren Márquez Dos Santos is a trans, non-binary artist of African descent from Madrid who explores and embraces forms of resistance and healing of diasporic communities through sound, both as a music creator and producer. Combining music production, sound workshops and performance art, her research focuses on the sea and its political materiality, focusing on the potential of underwater sound to expose fractured and conflictive environmental realities that reverberate in colonial and neo-colonial historical narratives on the surface of the water.

María Buey González is an architect. Her field of interest is the study of the implications of our ways of inhabiting the environment and how this affects our socialisation. She is particularly interested in the analysis of technologies and the articulation of the artificial and the synthetic in the assemblages that organise us. This involves research processes in different formats and hybrid collaborations, as a way of exploring the potentials of forms of knowledge outside of the official codes. She has developed projects both independently and in alliance with related organisations or platforms such as the Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives (Cli-Fi TV series with Liam Young), La Casa Encendida (Inéditos, with Appunti and La Pista, or Collapse), CA2M (Susana) or PAPER Architectural Histamine (Revista Desierto). She received a scholarship from The Terraforming programme at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow, where she initiated the Peak Face project. She has taught with the elii studio [architecture office] at the Faculty of Architecture of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. She is currently working at TBA21 where she designs the independent study programme Organism.

Sin lo otro la Tierra no sería continues an Intermediae Matadero Madrid programme, which in recent years has promoted new discourses and practices related to ecology and the climate crisis.

1. Malcolm Ferdinand, in A Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World. I met Malcolm through Nerea Calvillo when she invited me to reflect on the differences between world and planet.
2. Saul Williams through a story the singer reposted from activist @jakegyllenhalal
3. Yuk Hui, in Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics in eflux Journal, among other articles and books.
4. Katherine Hayles, whose book Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious I discovered thanks to a conversation with part of the team at the Caja Negra publishing house.
* The parts in quotation marks in the project texts are either extracts from texts by the invited researchers respectively, or references to their comments in our conversations.