Resilient Weeds – a Botanic Archive
by Marwa Arsanios“Images can be used to capture the ineffable …. Some things just need to be shown, not merely stated. Artistic images can help us access those elusive hard-to-put-into-words aspects of knowledge that might otherwise remain hidden or ignored” 1
Biological illustrations have been used ever since for capturing ecological systems and categorizing living beings according to their anatomy and physical appearance. Once a researcher finds a species, a detailed observation allows to make an illustration as accurate and detailed as possible. These would be used as abstractions to identify species, to map flora and fauna and to notice local changes.
Marwa Arsanios depicted Resilent Weeds in Beirut – plants that survive the toxicity of garbage dumps. Since the 1990s Beirut has undergone rapidly urbanization and capitalization alongside with littering and accumulation of waste. Arsanios observes and documents the new emerging ecosystem on garbage dumps and finds a new species. Resilient Weeds. It is a botanic archive, a mapping device for the different dumps in Beirut and a forecast of future privatization.2
“Matter, like meaning, is not an individually articulated or static entity. matter is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface, or site passively awaiting signification; nor is it an uncontested ground for scientific, feminist, or marxist theories. matter is not a support, location, referent, or source of sustainability for discourse. matter is not immutable or passive. it does not require the mark of an external force like culture or history to complete it. matter is always already an ongoing historicity.” (Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter)
„Matter is not simply „a kind of citationality“ (Butler,1993,15) the surface effect of human bodies, or the end product of linguistic or discursive acts. Material constraints and exclusions and the material dimensions of regulatory practices are important factors in the process of materialization. The dynamics of intra-activity entails matter as an active „agent“ in is ongoing materialization.“ (Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter)
“Boundary-making practices, that is, discursive practices, are fully implicated in the dynamics of intra-activity through which phenomena come to matter. In other words, materiality is discursive (i.e., material phenomena are inseperable from the apparatuses of bodily production: matter emerges out of and includes as part of its being the ongoing reconfiguring of boundaries), just as discursive practices are always already material (i.e., they are ongoing material (re)configurings of the world. […]The relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither is articulated/articulable in the absences of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated.” (Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter)
Marwa Arsanios (1978) lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. She obtained the Master of Fine Arts from University of the Arts, London in 2007 and was a researcher in the Fine Arts Department at the Jan Van Eyck Academie until 2012. In 2007 Arsanios founded 98weeks with Mirene Arsanios, a research project, artists’ organization and project space. It is conceived as a research project that shifts its attention to a new topic every 98 weeks. Focusing on artistic research, combining both theoretical and practical forms of inquiry, 98weeks’ projects take multiple forms such as workshops, community projects, seminars, reading groups, publications and exhibitions. Arsanios exhibited her artistic work at NGBK, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, in Berlin and M HKA, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, in Antwerp. Furthermore her work was shown at Art Dubai in the Bidoun Lounge (Art Park 2009), at the Forum Expanded of the Berlinale (2010), at Tokyo Wonder Site, Institute of Contemporay Art and Cultural Exchange (2011), the 12th Istanbul Biennale (2011) and at the Venice Biennale (2013). Her videos were screened at several festivals such as the Rio de Janeiro film festival in 2010, the e-flux storefront in New York, and at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
an ethnographic archive of digital distribution
Often imagined as a pensive white man, wearing clothes in earthy colors, an odd hat and a rugged leather bag with an infamous notebook, Boris Malinowski fit the description of the ethnographer. Yet, his notebooks offer unexpected insights:
“Today, Monday, 9.20.14, I had a strange dream; homo-sex, with my own double as partner. Strangely autoeurotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side)” 3.
One week after his arrival at Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea in 1914, a day after Malinowski began writing his diaries, a lifelong struggle started: homophily, the radical love of the same. In the face of extreme segregation – being all by himself in the tropics, not speaking the language of the indigenous, overwhelmed by ‘insomnia, overtaxed heart and nervousness,’ – he starts to feel desire for himself. It is this specific form of love for the same enhanced by narcissism that emerges when facing the radically different.
After every ‘jungle’ has been conquered by global capitalism in the last century, referring to Malinowski’s experience of homophily appears unfitting. However, autoeroticism has only shifted in the face of technology: From self-love in the face of the other to self-love without the other. Reality is organized in discrete units – ”digital islands of isolation that are drifting further apart each day.“ In discriminating accurately through their binarity, digits surround us with comfort and uniformity. Malinowski’s feverous jungle of endless depth and extraneousness has turned into seamless surfaces comfortably excluding the unknown. Engaged in this cosy architecture we find ourselves in Gated Communities. Personalized interfaces endure into sameness – we are encircled by ourselves.
Malinowski’s diary is both a space for ethnographic exploration and a documentation of homophilic ‘friction’ in its attempt to overcome his autoerotic segregation. warehouse aims to elaborate on this in changed socio-technical conditions. warehouse explores autoerotic segregation ethnographically and archives practices countering homophilies. From June to October warehouse will publish essays, artists’ moving images, interviews and performances on a weekly basis. Malinowski attempted to regulate and organize his struggles through the means of observing and writing on paper – warehouse will do so in offering a diagram of strategies countering homophily through frictional insertions: [entropy], [pray], [home], [adobe], [soft-fiction], [stranded]. A geometry to map a new normal; a topography for overcoming autoeroticism.