Jacket image: Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas, Futurity Island, 2018. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.
The opening of Futurity Island at MIT will be marked by two days of discursive programming, including performances, talks, and panel discussions. Invited speakers and performers will engage the work’s ecological themes, bringing perspectives informed by Indigenous environmental movements and cosmologies, studies of logistics and infrastructure, design, urbanism, multispecies ecology, and the environmental humanities.
On Sympoietics
Inspired by discussions on radical imagination, Indigenous thought, collective intelligence, and plural ecology, Futurity Island invites participants to develop new habits of thought in this era of environmental crisis. It is a space to speculate on the usefulness of the concept of “sympoiesis” for imaging and working together in radical interdisciplinarity toward desirable futures.
In the utopian regime, the moment of future is transformed into a representable topography of space. Future is a place—an island—a defined location that is better than ours. It is characterized both by separation and distanciation. The geography of a utopian island is manipulatable, as well as conceivable at a glance; it is contained within its limits and is almost transportable as an architectural model or pavilion.
The whole systematicity of the swamp rejects utopian logic, as it cannot be modelled properly within the complexity of symbiotic relationships. Tracing back the dialectics of island and swamp reveals the genesis of radical creativity, creatio ex nihilio, which was described by Cornelius Castoriadis. He conceptualized this process by offering the idea of radical imagination and conceiving it as a generative power, which, preceding every reality, grants a primordial access to materiality.
A swamp is an environment that questions imaginary separation; it is a milieu without solid ground and clear limits. Its lack of complete determination is the source of its power, signalling an urgent need for interdependency. It is an opposite to the geometrical space of a utopian island, which can be dissembled into its constituent parts. Fragmentation, the removal of one element, runs the risk of unbalancing the whole system. Thus, all types of wetlands cannot be thought of as collections of ontogenetic individualities; they exist as constant surplus productions by means of mediation among them.
The radical imaginary of the swamp stems from a critical procedure to question its representations and roles. How can we co-live with the swamp? How can the figure of the swamp dissolve the boundaries of our islands of individuality? How can its sympoietic potential be expanded?
—Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas, The Swamp School Manual(s)
How to Order
This publication is available for free download. To order any of our publications, please send an email including title(s), number of copies, and your mailing address to: blackwood.gallery[at]utoronto.ca.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems as “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.”
Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering and include her book The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. In it, she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories (Duke University Press, 2017). She is also author of Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, August 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. Her first book Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009) traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. She shows how memorials, painting, and documentary film production are central to enlivening potential in the ruins of necro-capital. Her co-edited volume with Herman Gray of Toward a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) addresses global sites of deep cultural imprint, and the invisible work of tethering lives of sustenance after catastrophe. Macarena is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers the fluidity of colonial transits and the generative space between land and sea.
Macarena is Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor, and Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, as well as faculty member in the Brown Arts Institute.
Lorena Bello is an architect and Visiting Lecturer at the Department of Architecture at MIT where she teaches students the fundamentals of the design of the built environment, ranging from the scale of the object and buildings to that of the city and larger territories. Lorena’s research focuses on large-scale territorial implications of infrastructure and urbanization as catalysts for design. She is also the founder of TERRALAB, in association with MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism.
Glorianna Davenport is a trustee of Tidmarsh Farms, founder of Living Observatory, and former faculty member, Principal Investigator, and co-founder of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, Davenport’s research focused on evolving new digital platforms for documentary media. As trustee of Tidmarsh Farms, Davenport led the Schulman family effort to restore and conserve a 600-acre former cranberry farm in Plymouth, a property which today houses the largest freshwater restoration project in Massachusetts. In parallel, Davenport established Living Observatory, a non-profit collaborative organization focused on documenting, interpreting, and inviting scientists and the public to explore the long-term story of ecological change across restored wetlands.
Erin Genia is a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate and descended from the Little River Band of Odawa. As a graduate researcher in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at MIT, she has focused on creating a powerful presence of Indigenous epistemologies in the arts, science, and technology with a goal of fostering an evolution of thought and practice in societal instruments that are aligned with the cycles of the natural world and the potential of humanity. She has also worked as a community organizer and cultural worker in her communities. Her work has received attention from diverse audiences, and been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Northwest Art. Genia was awarded the AAF/Seebacher Prize for Fine Arts in 2018 and received her first public art commission for Resilience: Anpa O Wicahnpi from the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture.
Nicole L’Huillier is a sound artist, musician, and architect from Santiago, Chile. Currently she is based in Boston as a PhD researcher at the MIT Media Lab, Opera of the Future group. Her work explores spatial experience, perception, and the relationship between sound and space, based on the idea of sound as a construction material. She works at the intersection of art, music, architecture, science, and technology in order to open questions about possible futures, redefine how we perceive our environments, and most importantly, trigger connection and empathy between human and non-human agents. Nicole is also part of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative, where she explores possible experimental forms and implications of art, expression, and culture as humans migrate to outer space. She is also an experimental musician, drummer, synth-lover, and one half of the space-pop duo Breaking Forms.
Sadada Jackson, MTS, MEd, RYT, is a student of practice who lives in her body and vacations in her mind. She is as a freelance educator who works with leaders and decision-makers in education and the healing arts/practices to embody and curate ethical practices, structures, and relationships in their work. She holds a BA in Theatre with a minor in English, an MEd in Secondary Education from UMass Boston, and an MTS in Indigenous traditions from Harvard University. She is a certified 200-hour yoga teacher and a teacher trainer at 4 Corners Yoga and Wellness Yoga Teacher Certification program. She is Natick Nipmuc.
Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, Criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with sciences such as physics and biology. Jones has also worked as a curator, notably at MIT’s List Visual Art Center: Sensorium (2006), Video Trajectories (2007), and Hans Haacke 1967 (2011). Her publications include Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (1996/98, winner of the Charles Eldredge prize), Picturing Science, Producing Art (co-edited, 1998), Sensorium: embodied experience, technology, and contemporary art (as editor, 2006), Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (2005/08), Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense (co-edited, 2016), and The Global Work of Art (2016). Her current research collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison examines patterns of occlusion and political contestation in seeing and unseeing the Anthropocene.
Eben Kirksey is an American anthropologist who is perhaps best known for his work in multispecies ethnography—a field that situates contemporary scholarship on animals, microbes, plants, and fungi within deeply rooted traditions of environmental anthropology, continental philosophy, and the sociology of science. Duke University Press has published his two books—Freedom in Entangled Worlds (2012) and Emergent Ecologies (2015)— as well as one edited collection: The Multispecies Salon (2014). Currently he is finishing a new book for St. Martins Press about the scientists, lobbyists, entrepreneurs, and activists remaking the human race with the gene editing tool called CRISPR. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, hosted Kirksey in the 2019-2020 academic year, where he conducted research on gene editing, the innovation economy, and social inequality.
Tobias Putrih engages 20th century avant-gardes, particularly utopian and visionary concepts of architecture and design, through a range of conceptual and materially ephemeral projects. He designs makeshift architectural modifications of public spaces—cinemas, a library, galleries, and a university commons. Putrih deals with artworks as proposals, maquettes, or models—exploratory assertions of radical possibilities, the idea of the monument reconceptualized as something momentary and experimental. Putrih’s solo projects (with MOS architects) have been presented at Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen, BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art, Wexner Center, and MIT List Center. Other installations include exhibitions at Espace315 at Centre Pompidou, and at Capella MACBA; and collaborations with filmmaker Runa Islam at Galeria Civica in Modena and Kunsthaus, Zurich. Group exhibitions include TRACK, S.M.A.K., Ghent; Forms of Resistance, VanAbbe Museum, Eindhoven; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt, and 29th Sao Paulo Biennale.
Brent D. Ryan is an urbanist, Head of the City Design and Development Group, and Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His research focuses on the aesthetics and policies of contemporary urban design, particularly with respect to current and pressing issues like deindustrialization and climate change. Ryan’s current research projects in China examine coastal landmaking, the threat to urban villages, and a case study in the transfer of development rights.
Indrė Umbrasaitė is a Lithuanian-Austrian architect and educator. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Architecture, University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria (die Angewandte), in the Studio Kazuyo Sejima. Umbrasaitė studied architecture in Vilnius and Vienna, graduating from the master class of Zaha Hadid. Prior to that, she studied the history of culture and anthropology and interior design. While she gained her professional experience collaborating with offices in Vilnius, Salzburg, and Vienna on a broad range of projects, her individual work explores creative subjective mapping methods within the architectural discipline, aiming to rethink the relationships of body-space, global-local, socio-cultural, and environmental heterogeneity.
Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas are artists, MIT-based researchers and educators, and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. They have exhibited internationally including at the São Paulo, Berlin, Moscow, Lyon, Venice, and Gwangju Biennales, Folkestone Triennial, and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions (among others). They are the recipients of numerous grants and awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and the Prize for the national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007). They were also nominated for the Nam June Paik Award in 2012. Urbonas Studio curated Swamp School, a learning environment at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2018.
Christine Shaw is Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery and Associate Professor of Curatorial Studies in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, a Research Fellow & Visiting Scholar in Art, Culture Technology (ACT) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Curatorial Research Fellow, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts (2021–2023).
Shaw’s work convenes, enables, and amplifies the transdisciplinary thinking necessary for understanding our current multi-scalar historical moment and co-creating the literacies, skills, and sensibilities required to adapt to the various socio-technical transformations of our contemporary society. She has applied her commitment to compositional strategies, epistemic disobedience, and social ecologies to multi-year curatorial projects including Take Care (2016–2019), an exhibition-led inquiry into care, exploring its heterogeneous and contested meanings, practices, and sites, as well as the political, economic, and technological forces currently shaping care; The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea (2015–2023), a variegated series of curatorial and editorial instantiations of the Beaufort Scale of Wind Force exploring the relentless legacies of colonialism and capital excess that undergird contemporary politics of sustainability and climate justice; and OPERA-19: An Assembly Sustaining Dreams of the Otherwise (2021–2029), a decentralized polyvocal drama in four acts taking up asymmetrical planetary crisis, differential citizenship, affective planetary attention disorder, and a strategic composition of worlds. She is the founding editor of The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (Blackwood, 2018–ongoing), and co-editor of The Work of Wind: Land (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2018) and The Work of Wind: Sea (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023).
Design
Matthew Hoffman
Printing
Thistle Printing Ltd.
Presented by MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology and the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, and sponsored by Musket Transport.
Funded in part through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program. With this $35M investment, the Council supports the creation and sharing of the arts in communities across Canada.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology, the Center for Art, Science & Technology, the School of Architecture and Planning, and IPEX.
Futurity Island
Macarena Gómez-Barris, Lorena Bello, Glorianna Davenport, Erin Genia, Nicole L’Huillier, Sadada Jackson, Caroline A. Jones, Eben Kirksey, Tobias Putrih, Brent D. Ryan, Indrė Umbrasaitė, Gediminas & Nomeda Urbonas
Micropublication produced for the presentation of Futurity Island at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 6–26, 2019. Curated by Christine Shaw.
Co-presented by Blackwood Gallery and MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology
