Cultural Studies Program

"The Land Is In Our Bodies"

Concrete and iron, sanitization, privatization, and a logics of accumulation and nonrenewable expansion characterize the colonial projects of urbanity that have long fragmented our bodies from the body of the planet. In response, Indigenous writer and activist of the Amazon, Ailton Krenak, calls for an epistemological rebellion in the form of florestania (combining “forest” with “belonging”), a collaboration with and defense of forests and the production of life itself. What we can learn from the concept of florestania as people born and living in capitalist urbanity is that there is still a forest living within us, rights to be extended to non-human life, and an ancestral knowledge to create our futures. Using the permeability of the body as a somatic technology for knowledge and relation-making, we can reconnect to our planetary wounds, producing love and life from our own wounds of alienation. As the body of the Amazon undergoes a constant transformation, we too have no other choice but to transform.

MaryMaggic is an artist and researcher, whose practice revolves around workshopology as critical sites of care and knowledge production that can move us beyond toxicity narratives and ecological ruins. These workshops frame the molecular semiosphere and its invisible process of co-mattering as the necessary starting point for embodying our porosity, alienation, and stickiness. Before cross-contaminating with the global community of biohackers and bioartists, Maggic spent their summers in the tropical jungles of Costa Rica and Honduras for biodiversity and conservation research. After completing their Masters at MIT Media Lab (Design Fiction research group), their project “Open Source Estrogen” was awarded Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica '17 in Hybrid Arts. In 2019, they completed a 10-month Fulbright residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia investigating the relationship between Javanese mysticism and the plastic pollution crisis. Later, Maggic received the 2022 Knight Arts + Tech Fellowship for their continued dedication to public workshopology and site-specific world-making practices. Based in Vienna since 2017, they are a current member of the global network Hackteria: Open Source Biological Art and the Asian feminist collective Mai Ling. 

In August of 2022, Scientific American magazine opined that “This Hot Summer is One of the Coolest of the Rest of Our Lives.” This attitude also animated a popular meme. In the original scenes from The Simpsons, Bart laments that he is having the worst day of his life and Homer comforts him by reminding him that it is merely the worst day yet. The meme turns Bart’s complaint into an apt quip about the Anthropocene. “This is the hottest summer of my life,” says Bart. “This is the hottest summer of your life so far,” Homer replies. And indeed, as predicted, the summer of 2023 was hotter than the year before.

The Simpson meme’s despairing pessimism would seem to mark the end of the longstanding attitude that has motivated so much environmental activism: the future of life on Earth must be saved and we have only narrow window of time to save it. In this drama of rescue, the future is already known. If we succeed in implementing policy changes to stop the production of fossil fuel emissions, then the future is this, but better. Realistically, and increasingly commonly, it is this, but worse. Neither option admits of a future that is not yet known or is radically discontinuous from the present. 

For speakers in this lecture series, current practices and their effects on the future are far stranger than such a scenario allows. From hormone dispersion in the waterways to de-extinction technologies, the speakers in the Planetary Futures series tell stories of the weird critters that might emerge from the strange chemical soups of the present, they consider the odd feelings that come from such uncertain futures, and they interrogate the colonial histories, neoimperial presents, and sexual and racial metaphysics that underpin, distort, reject, and reimagine the notion of futurity as such. Drawing on theories of queer temporality, Black studies, postnatural aesthetics, and feminist science, our speakers consider the planet from the speculative vantage of its potential future inhabitants, rather than from the abstraction life, to highlight the tangle of relations at stake in every imagining of the planet.