Postnatural ecologies

Akshita Nagloor, Undergraduate Student, Jindal School of Art and Architecture, Sonipat, in conversation with Gabriel Alonso, Yuri Tuma and Clara Benito, Institute for Postnatural Studies, Madrid.

‘POSTNATURAL’ is a term that demands curiosity. It is also plural in nature. How is it connected to the ‘natural’? And what is it before it deviated from it? Is it a conceptual deviation as the term suggests, or is it something else? To understand all the possibilities of the postnatural, we sat down with Gabriel Alonso, Yuri Tuma and Clara Benito from the Institute of Postnatural Studies, Madrid. Gabriel Alonso is a visual artist, practicing at the intersection of aesthetics, science,
and postnature. Yuri Tuma is a multidisciplinary artist who works with sound, art, installation, and performance to investigate contemporary narratives relating to economies. Clara Benito is a philosopher, with an interest in queer ecologies and carnivorism/cannibalism.

The Institute for Postnatural Studies started in 2020 as a centre for artistic experimentation to explore and problematize postnature as a framework for contemporary creation and thought. Gabriel, Yuri, and Clara are a part of the team that set this institute up. Our conversation with them traversed 7934 kilometres and time zones, pursuing their histories and associations with the postnatural, artistic expressions and a cross-cultural understanding of all that postnatural invokes. Here are excerpts from the same.

Akshita Nagloor: Let us start this off by tracing histories. When and where did the idea of the Institute for Postnatural Studies first take flight?

Gabriel Alonso: I like to think that after three years of thinking about this project, it somehow just happened, you know. It emerged because there was a local necessity for a space to connect different perspectives, views, and voices. These came from arts but also from philosophy, contemporary debates and conversations – that largely took place abroad.

I was first introduced to such debates when I had the luck to get a grant to go study at Columbia University in the United States of America. There I faced the kind of academia that I really enjoyed. It was the beginning of a learning-together because there was a seminar with people from 12 different countries and different disciplines. I did my master’s thesis on Postnatural Landscapes and Architectures of Containment, specifically on how toxicity and nuclear radiation create specific materialities for a postnatural condition or understanding. This somehow blurred the limits of modernity and other sciences of the western science system to construct distinct spaces for forms of knowledge.

When I came back to Madrid, I started a seminar called ‘Postnature and Contemporary Art Practices’ in a cultural space in Madrid called Circula de Bellas Artes, which worked pretty well. And, I did it again in Inland – Campo Adentro, where they were analysing the relationship of the rural and the urban, in Spain specifically, where they developed other kinds of situated knowledges. These gatherings were the start of thinking about the institute because, after the sessions, some of us stayed and continued speaking. We identified a necessity for a space where we could reflect together about the relations between ecological crisis, global warming and all these big problems from a specific situated perspective and our own artistic practices.

This became what is now the Institute of Postnatural Studies. It is a warehouse in the southern part of Madrid, in a very specific kind of neighbourhood with people from all over the world. This is kind of the outskirts but still related to the city centre. And, we were very lucky to already have a space where we could start these conversations. This was at the beginning of 2020.

Then, March 2020 happened to us all. And what was supposed to become a kind of local platform for relating artistic practice, specifically from Madrid, to the broader ecological debate suddenly had to be turned into an online platform. This was a new kind of emergence of the institute. We had to stay at home because of the pandemic, unable to leave. Very quickly, we had to adapt the model for these conversations to happen online and to host a platform where we could deliver the first two seminars.

Shifting to the online mode made it possible for people from all over the world to join these conversations. We started calling for applications from Latin America, Europe and elsewhere. There was also a moment when there were no tools to for understanding what was happening with the pandemic globally. And so, the institute became a space for asking as many questions as one might have, without focusing too much on finding definitive answers. This was a very important moment where anxieties about the future had us in a kind of paralysis and we needed platforms to talk about possible, desirable futures along with other languages we would embody. Even today, every format of our exploration positions itself as an experimental questioning.

After this conceptual beginning of the institute, we started coming together and organizing ourselves from the knowhow that each of us had. So one was designing the website, some were creating syllabi and so on. It was really organic, the way our different disciplines culminated into this space. We launched the institute online. It was interesting to stream the launch and see it emerge in the pandemic because while we were indulging in global conversations, we didn’t want to lose the locality and specificity of the space we had created through the institute.

Alongside this, it was also very important for us to stay connected to Caja Negra – an editorial platform from Argentina, that does translations of contemporary philosophy thinkers from English to Spanish – because we connected immensely with Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries. This was crucial for us because we were trying to bring voices to Spanish as a shared language with Latin America.

Akshita Nagloor: I wonder about chance encounters. How one seminar course in a land so far from yours, so different from yours could lead to the development of an ecology of its own. How beautiful is it to imagine the possibilities of a world through dialogues; a world that evolves and changes, doubts and provides solace? I see the institute as a (re)imagination of purpose, a sliver of hope; in times where the doomsday clock ticks on and we go on … how does one begin to understand careful interventions into our built environments? Is it through practice, art, literature, or through conversations?

Akshita Nagloor: What is and can be postnatural? Can you tell us about your first encounters with postnature in your individual practices?

Gabriel Alonso: Postnature, to me, is both an invitation but also a provocation. An invitation to really try to think beyond the romanticized way of looking at nature. But, in my own practice, this is always from a western perspective. I am always speaking from a European point of view. There exists an idealist, romantic way of looking at nature as a separate space in modernity; a space we can talk about from the side, ‘objectively’. I was once obsessed with thinking about the devices that produced this image.

So, I started investigating European paintings and literature that had contributed to create that flattened image of nature. There was a sublime idealization that became important in realising why, historically, we think of nature as separate from us; and we don’t take responsibility towards it. We have to know that nature is maybe one of the most important cultural constructs of a specific modernity in the West, but there are other cultures, other places where such a construct might not exist! Nature and culture are always interconnected; the postnatural is the tool to understand the multi-layered complexity between nature and culture. But it is also an invitation to concentrate on these other natures, other positionings that might be important for an ecological thinking.

What happens if we add the prefix of ‘post-’ with something we take for granted? It is strange. It becomes strange. It makes us pause and think, if there is a postnatural, then what is natural? What do we call nature? And where does that image come from?

Clara Benito: I see postnature as a way of understanding nature where we take a pause, step back, and look at it in a way with different eyes. And this gesture, this deterritorialization, can be applied to every culture – with different outcomes. I was the last one to become a part of the institute. I looked in the direction of postnature primarily from queer theory and animal studies. When the institute started, I was doing my research MA in Amsterdam, where the only thing that was clear was the political framework, which was constituted by queer theory, feminism, animal studies, decoloniality and ecology. These disciplines, for me, already blur the distinction of nature and culture entirely. So, I was thrilled to witness the emergence of the institute in my hometown.

Gabriel and I have a complementary vision of nature. He’s an architect and takes postnature in a more historical sense; for him, the interconnectedness between nature and culture has become increasingly obvious during the Anthropocene/Capitalocene, due to the intensification of our species’ agency over the Earth and the appearance of new anthropogenic materialities. I take it to be more abstract, way beyond the present; in other words, I believe that, philosophically, nature has never been natural, even if now it is so less than ever.

Yuri Tuma: Nature is not something separate from us and perhaps you may take this investigation forward through language or sound – like I am. We only know about humans. So, for everything out there that I never found a home for, I put it in this bubble.

I think that this for me, was the beginning – the seed of postnature – to start exploring other forms of ecologies. I, then, branched out into queer ecologies, xenofuturism, human-animal binomial and other branches of contemporary ecological thinking. It’s becoming more of a thinking territory for me.

Clara Benito: What all of us have said is that we could think of postnature in different ways but they end up complementing each other. It can be an attitude, it can be a framework, it can be a tool and also a moment the time. But it’s not only one of those individually. It is just everything between those different things and that’s why it is so difficult to pin it exactly; because there is no definitive or univocal definition of postnature – it just has various ways of working.

Gabriel Alonso: I think if you really understand this position of questioning, it becomes really hard to think of postnature as a static concept. I think it is living with the trouble of the unknown – and it is important to live with that.

At the institute, we are not thinking about the word only academically. We are embodying the word in our sessions. It is an attitude like Clara was saying. It is sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes slow, sometimes induces anxiety and that’s embodying the complexity of the real itself. Our practice and performances are ways of creating new contexts and meanings for the word, new ways of situating ourselves in relation to it.

I think it’s important to return the agency of art here. That’s where we can create all the different relationships. Art really makes you rethink what you take for granted. It creates other ways of seeing things from a different perspective and this is needed to keep the volume up of ecological thinking from dynamic perspectives.

Yuri Tuma: Art, in a way, has been transforming in the way that I’ve encountered postnature. I think art history was very self-centred. Arts were just speaking about the arts. Now, artists are creating relationships with the landscape and the people and the animals that live in it. That’s a new kind of practice that is emerging – a new way to move forward. Perhaps we can call this ecological art?

Art responds, in moments, to social activism. It is becoming a collective practice where people are connecting their experience and processes, rather than creating something for the sake of it. I think changing the focus of art helps us in achieving these results.

Clara Benito: I was thinking about what separates postnatural thinking from traditional ecological thinking – we have to reinvent the very terms of ecology. Because we can have all the terrible data, all the possibilities of what needs to be done – and still, nobody will do anything, That is why traditional ecology leads to such despair. On the contrary, arts and speculation provide a path to soften this sorrow and this pessimism, to readjust our affects so that we embrace these ecological changes with desire, joy and compassion.

Let’s see it this way; I’m all in for veganism and people not having their private cars. But not everybody is going to do it until we find ways to make it desirable and fun. It has to interest the crowd.

Akshita Nagloor: It is relieving to know that postnature has multiple lives it can live. It is also captivating to see how the three of them explore postnature in a way that invigorates all senses. Difference is key in enrichment and gaining a well-rounded understanding of a situated knowledge, especially a knowledge so situated and slippery as postnatural studies. Could postnature then be thought of as a chameleon? Or a chimera? Or a hydra?

Akshita Nagloor: How did the collective explorations of the postnatural expand on your work, or challenge it, through the institute?

Gabriel Alonso: This can be seen in two ways. The space we share is very connected to the relationships we form with each other. It is a space where we go with our doubts, anxieties and projects. We are equals with our ambitions and we play with them together. We deconstruct them, cook them together – literally. It is a very experiential way of sharing. And it is this embodied way of sharing that generates the institute as a kind of space where we have debates with respect.

We do face challenges with the ever-changing nature of the platform. Currently, we are modifying the structure so it can respond to commissioned projects and increase our social exposure. I like it when I’m struggling and somebody else can take the lead – and it happens the other way around too. It only happens because there are no hierarchies for us. A bunch of people came together and this organism created itself. Each of us becomes an integral part of the everyday processing of this organism.

Yuri Tuma: I also like to think of this as a vacant lot between buildings, you know? Where societies of plants grow. I feel like we had the luck of entering one of those lots, little by little. Sometimes when things don’t work, we move on and build from the ground up.

This organism was able to build itself from this vacant lot. And, it wasn’t like some of us reached the location and told the others to come meet us there. We have all risen together with our personal and collective questions.

It is amazing how we end up organizing as a tentacular being – thinking together but still retaining our individualities.

Gabriel Alonso: We can’t forget the tentacles that are in the online platform, as well. Every seminar becomes a need for a new seminar. We need to be aware of the conversations that happen because there are so many ideas coming from our participants. Actively listening also forms an ecology, you know? One that is shared on a wider scale.

We are grateful for how generous people have been with us. Their commitment and presence build the embodied experience of our seminars. All the thinkers and philosophers that have come to the institute – people like Karen Barad, who have been with us since the beginning – have helped in enriching this being.

Akshita Nagloor: A vacant lot, a haven, a tentacular being – being postnatural is an act of pluralization. It is, by now means, an act of hastened production – contrary to everything produced in this century of our existence. This kind of awareness, I think, develops as an act of rebellion. A rebellion that’s possible with a cohort – a rebellion built on alternate visions, tales and touches. What are the various forms that the institute takes place for its cohort? Where do its 800+ possibilities lie?

Akshita Nagloor: How does your personal practice, and the differences it has, work in tandem with the work that happens at the institute?

Gabriel Alonso We protect our tentacular being, our collective, by staying with our differences. Let me tell you more about it. I was trained as an architect and I have always tried to escape that discipline. I find it very masculine and competitive. Suddenly, I started playing around with materials and installations. It started off as a way to understand object-subject relations – I like how objects can create subjectivity. Thinking through shape and material raises this subjectivity.

My career, as an artist, started off with some exhibitions and naïve projects about aesthetics, photographs, and video installations. I, then, started incorporating them with what I was reading and thinking about ecology. And, here we are.

I think what is beautiful about my practice is that I have time to experience materiality, shapes with forms and light. They help me create a certain type of geography that helps me intuitively move in the studio. My sculptures are my companions; they grow with me and I grow with them. When it’s hard to find my focus in my studio, I know I have my workshop in the warehouse, too. That is a place where realities are being transformed together. It’s also a place where different artistic practices become more about material speculation and relation for me, and it makes me feel proud.

Yuri Tuma: I am not necessarily a studio artist – I prefer going to specific places to produce something. For me, it is very important to go to a place, record the landscape and everything that resides in it. I like to speak to people, spend time and deeply listen to the place. That is my methodology.

I saw my practice transform as a way to also respond to the institute. And, I really enjoy this because my practice makes me propose performative activities as a way to explore academic learning. I enjoy creating performances together with others – using the body, voice and corporeal sounds to compose the space together. Even with this methodology, I enjoy the conversations that come out of it and how the outcome always differs.

Different starting points intersect, bifurcate, expand, and contract. But, for a brief moment, they meet somewhere. It is in this brief intersections, perhaps even a mere passing, where it creates this (almost) intimate understanding of post/nature. What is the spatial code that an artist adheres to? How do entanglements affect the expressions produced by Yuri, Clara and Gabriel?

Akshita Nagloor: If postnatural is always a situated knowledge, then do cities (not merely as spatial infrastructures, but also as epistemic conditions) need to understand and envision the postnatural differently from rural communities?

Clara Benito: I would say yes. But, it is not limited to only urban and rural landscapes. Postnatural is a very situated knowledge and the feminist idea of the politics of location is at the core of it. So, each town and each city – each space, really – has its own form of embodied and embedded epistemology.

What’s really interesting about the Postnatural Independent Programme is that most participants bring their own understanding of postnature and postnatural to it – which has opened our understanding of postnature immensely. It’s that diversity of processes and understandings that makes postnature interesting and important because, if there was a way to stack it, then we could claim that everything is postnatural and stop there. But what is interesting is to see the specific ways in which the postnatural articulates itself through time/space.

Gabriel Alonso We had a beautiful experience, recently, where we were invited to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. It was a very specific case of climatic catastrophe but was also a situated problem. The bureaucrats really dried the sea and now 70% of the water is gone. It was one of the main seas of the planet, and it has been dry for 60-70 years and now it’s dying.

We were invited there to think from a postnatural perspective about what can be done, what is there to be done, and I have to admit that it was very challenging. We went to a specific place with a specific problem; we didn’t know anything about it. We encountered, I remember, a village which was at the edge of the sea – 40 years ago. This is a sailor’s village and their livelihoods were dependent on fishing and the water. Now, the sea is 300 kilometres away from there. That village, now, isn’t meeting the sea. You can see a huge embossing there. There were ships and boats lying there, like monsters of the apocalypse – it was very moving. I felt a sense of climatic sadness when we spoke to the people. They were telling us about their songs, their literature, and their recipes – related to fishing. This was a socio-cultural disaster where memory slowly lacked the space for identity.

Yuri Tuma: This reminded me of a project I had once done. I had the opportunity to do some work around Spain – where I would speak to the older generations and listen to their childhood memories. It’s crazy to think how much had changed in just one generation. It creates this feeling – this sense of loss and nostalgia. How do I deal with the memory of this other person that has stirred me, yet, is so far away from me? This was pivotal because it shifted something inside of me.

Akshita Nagloor: I’ve learnt that the politics of representation lies in erasure and difference. Capturing these tales – non/fictional – are important; not just to preserve, but also to honour and learn. I think about the Aral Sea and the village. I think about how decay exists as an extant form of life. I think about the emboss and the lives it entails. How did an emotion like sadness take on the nuanced position of being (culturally) climatic? How do we ensure that the future generations do not imagine nature as a condition of the past?

Ishita Jain: Do we need postnatural emotions to make sense of our relationship with current climatic landscapes?

Yuri Tuma: I think for me the idea of postnatural emotions is brilliant! I would love to keep thinking more about it and if I were to talk about one of them, it would be this feeling of interconnectedness that’s a part of the framework itself.

Clara Benito: To me, one of these [postnatural] feelings would be that of critical joy. So, trying to take a look at the situation with productive and imaginative concern. This joy can be our default to re-evaluate a new path of action that sadness might try to shut down. It is just a way to move away from despair and immobility.

Gabriel Alonso: I think this idea of postnatural emotions is beautiful. I also think it’s really important because sometimes it’s hard to talk both ways, no? From the theoretical or scientific perspective but also from an emotional perspective – to acknowledge all that we’re feeling and to connect them to specific situations. What would the emotions of the future look like?

Akshita Nagloor: Nostalgia is an emotion that breaks the linearity of time. It is post-existence and pre-existence, simultaneously. And I also think about all that lays to unravel in an emotion like critical joy, or climatic sadness. The emotions of the future are becoming complex. They’re becoming layered with vast contexts and experiences. The anxiety to know/feel it all can feel burdensome but it’s not one’s alone.

Ishita Jain: In 2017, India announced the river Ganga to have like a legal and moral personhood and we adopted this river. I was reading through some of the literature around that judgement and I was baffled. How do you adopt an ancient being? This question is interesting while we are talking about postnatural emotions because giving rights to an ancient being that is present in our civilization disguised as a river that takes a certain hubris. Is there a way postnatural as a tool can help confront this?

Yuri Tuma: I think just understanding a river as something else than just the river is already a way to connect with the postnatural. It becomes a holder of mythologies and lives that come through, in this case, legal rights. Claiming personhood for these entities is inputting this postnatural attitude. I think the way to deconstruct the laws and the politics that are around would help to digest this personhood, perhaps, logically - so that you can feel differently about it. Because, you know, legal personhood opens one up to all the different things this river can be. But once you see it this way, there is now the feeling of empathy or interconnectedness, right?

Gabriel Alonso: Myths or mythologies, as tools, have always been there to ontologically protect certain spaces. It allows for a connection between perspectives, spaces and political spheres. If we just look at rivers as material or geographic entities, we cannot really interact with them in the same way we do with humans. Mythologies create these avenues of connections and interactions, for me.

It also got me thinking that if we need postnatural emotions, do we need postnatural rituals and mythologies as well? They come together with respect for the past but the postnatural demands respect for the future. We need to think and maybe reverse the direction of mythologies – to look for respect for the future within them.

Ishita Jain: Yeah. In that sense, the minute we actually divorce the idea of myths from the past and open up the structure of myths, we realize that myths have always been postnatural. There is a certain historicity that only our study of myths has assigned to it. But, in themselves, and the kind of multiple relationalities that they offer with the world that we live in, they have always been postnatural.

Gabriel Alonso: I know this famous anthropologist, Marisol de la Cadena, and she would say that ‘A mountain is a mountain but not only; a river is a river but not only.’ There’s a lack of meaning when we try to grasp it but we need to create other mythologies, other narratives, and other tales to turn them postnatural.

Yuri Tuma: I love this idea of creating myths and rituals but there’s this ancestral knowledge to it, right? Everyone who is talking about cultural knowledge can be a great part in creating future mythologies. So, there’s this great hybrid of future and past that defines time conceptually for us all.

Akshita Nagloor: Myths bring comfort – is it their quality of being in the past, or their ability to linger in the present? They are a compelling way to begin understanding the culture-specific embodiments of postnature. It is the record of entities and their lives where ecologies show interconnectedness and worship in its primal sense.

Akshita Nagloor: How can we let the postnatural seep into everyday conversations and in places that can make a difference – for instance, in the domain of (existing) laws and policies?

Yuri Tuma: I think one way to achieve this is actually through children’s education. We have to get this conversation going from really early on because it’s super hard to infiltrate the mindset right now that has the power to make decisions for the future.

I think cultivating the future generation – that is going to come in and start dictating these laws and the order – to be a part of this discussion exposes them to different ways of thinking. Starting this from the early moments of their lives will change the perspectives with which most people see the world. If we start to think about postnatural feelings and perspectives, then this interconnectedness will become evident. From that moment on, hopefully, everything will be different.

Clara Benito: Exactly! I was going to say something similar. I wish I know how to make an attempt in that sense but I think that creating a different ecological culture – that is based now on this kind of reactive and negative Marxist ideologies – along with creating a period from these postnatural feelings that you were talking about is a way to make this ecology more desirable for everyone, you know? Postnatural emotions like interconnectedness, critical joy and climatic sadness might become the starting point to introduce these conversations to the world.

Akshita Nagloor: Fables are the perfect tools for understanding and propagating the postnatural to the ones who are younger to us – for the ones who have hope and curiosity for this world. The clocks are ticking and seas are drying. Forests are vanishing and everything that the human consciousness cannot relate to is begging to be understood. Postnature steps in as a translator for all that is more than human. It is our hope – unpacked through mysticism, fiction, experiences, and fears. It’s primal. It’s graphical. It is also reassuring and comforting. Listen to all that speaks in a language you are not too fluent in. Document all that is un/familiar. Be curious about all that the world around you has to offer. Then, perhaps, you will begin to understand the postnatural – like I am beginning to.

It is an ecology of conversation for those who are willing to listen.