People / Things: Are public spaces only for humans?

A public is always thought of as a group of people, but public spaces are non-human, and they include not simply inanimate materials with their specific histories, but also many non-human forms of life. Bruno Latour has argued that this split between people and things is the foundational ruse of modernity, and is responsible for many of our current social and environmental problems. What would happen if we included non-human actors in our understanding of politics, and in our public spaces?

Furnishing Positions is a serial publication that focuses on the paradoxical nature of public space. Its standard form is an 18”x18” broadsheet, consisting of an artist’s project on one side and a text on the other. It will be published once every two weeks for three months, starting September 15, 2014, with each issue focusing on a specific paradox. As a serial, each issue builds on earlier editions. As each issue is published, it will be hung and made available for free in the Blackwood Gallery, posted to the gallery’s website, postered in public sites, and circulated electronically. As the exhibition progresses these broadsheets will accumulate, generating and animating conversations in the space.

Shadowy Participants in the Jus Publicum Europaeum11“European Public Law.” Editors’ translation.

Paradox:

Stagger-start Boeing 747s
Westward over the Japan Sea
To China, Russia, & then the European Union–

Jet contrails knit a nest above the shipping channel.
Aluminum wing-shadow passes over a thousand Lego-sized container ships.
Propellers. Froth: I am nursing a child in the air with body temperature human milk.
Thin cold rivets keep us from fall-through-empty sky.
Weightlessness, calming down: absurd…

…but in reality expresses a possible truth.

As do those whale-shaped shadows below the boats below.
Glimpsed. Momentarily visible masses: Following or leading or chasing or
being chased out of contested waters?

Whales in-and-of themselves vs. steamships (oil or wood)?
Sea Shepard vs. blood-red blubber chews? (bait or fertilizer22“Sturgeon,” Upper French River Cottagers Association, http://ufrca.com/index.php?page=sturgeon.)?
Dutch East India Co. (Hirado Station, 1609) + Hiroshima (1945) +
Fukushima (2011) and-or: Indonesia vs. Occupied Japan, and then the West =

Bones of mammals occupy every wet, dry or empty square inch

Unfathomable.

00, Six Paradoxes, 15/09/2014
Adrian Blackwell

01, Affinity / Disagreement, 15/09/2014
Abbas Akhavan | Kanishka Goonewardena

02, Representation / Presentation, 29/09/2014
Dylan Miner | cheyanne turions

03, Materiality / Immateriality, 14/10/2014
Greig de Peuter | Paige Sarlin

04, People / Things, 27/10/2014
Karen Houle | Kika Thorne

05, Privacy / Publicity, 10/11/2014
Eric Cazdyn | Charles Stankievech

The Furnishing Positions broadsheets are all available for free download. To order free printed copies of any or all of them, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: blackwood.gallery[at]utoronto.ca.