metamoderncreatives

What if a River Wants to Sing? 

Jillian Sullivan

 

This presentation allows the audience to be with the Manuherekia River from the high mountain valley near the Hawkdun Mountains to the confluence with the great Clutha/Mata-Au.  Four years ago, I walked the length of the Manuherekia River in Central Otago, to enter into a place of respect for the river.

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I have seen the river at its beginnings; at the tributaries falling silver from the mountains – the Ida Burn, Rocks Creek, the Dunstan. I have seen the wild shags on rock cliffs, the dart of young fish in clear pools over clean stones, and felt the surge and thrust of the stream through stretches of tussock and rock, over boulders that glisten golden, or white pierced through with green.

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And I have seen how humans stand apart from the natural world and say this is not us, but for us. To say the river has rights and needs, to say the river deserves our responsibility to further generations, to say the river is one being from mountain torrent to the wide, luminous stretch between shingled banks, is to go against those who have the voice of power.

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My hope is if we see and understand what we’re doing to the life force of our streams and rivers, this will lead us to humility, gratefulness, and respect for our natural world.

 

SESSION 1

 

Lines and grains: the terrain and narrative of the Samoan Cosmogony, Solo o le Vā 

Dr Albert Refiti

 

The paper discusses the Samoan cosmogony as having a consistent direction of how matter unfolds in the universe. The expression of life unfolds between two states, mavae, the divaricating process of creation, and tōfiga, folding and ordering. 

 

A spatial exposition and diagrammatic outline of the cosmogony will be presented to highlight the cosmic emplacement of the human, the emanation and spatial qualities of mana, and the genealogy of matter connected to Papa leading to the creation of the fale.

 

This paper draws out the spatial characteristics of Papa and the creation of tagata relating to the creation of matter. A spatial exposition of these concepts in which mana, tapu, and noa become important concepts that structure the spaces of rituals and the construction of important places within settlements. They are explored as places of tūlaga fale and nofoaga for matai and the extended clan, marked by the mounding of earth and stones to form a paepae (platform) over which a fale (house) provides shelter.

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Acknowledging Indigenous leadership in the 21st century

Pasha Clothier

 

In 2006 Intercreate launched Solar Circuit Aotearoa New Zealand (SCANZ) with a powhiri at the historic Owae Marae and concluded the event with a poroporoaki at the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki, the venue for residency. At the time, within a framework of ‘art, science, technology, and culture’ Intercreate’s aim was to promote the notion that Indigenous should have a voice at the table where discussion of the environment was concerned. Increasing guidance from tangata whenua over thematics for the hui and residency prevailed over further SCANZ events and international exhibitions,  leading to the location of the entire hui and residency at Parihaka in 2018.

 

In 2022 the SCANZ panel at Balance-Unbalance in Bogota, acknowledged “and endorses indigenous leadership in regard to environmental practice and systems of knowledge.” Personal development, governance, the inner dimensions of life, political systems and the eco-system need to be addressed as one integrated entity rather than a suite of trajectories. As Hui, Yuk argued, the separation of meta from physics in the lead-up to the Industrial revolution created an ideological ground where the environment, humans and nonhuman species could be subjected to exploitation, mainly in the name of wealth accumulation. To resurrect ethics into science and industry involves more than simple pledges and changing practices, and the key part of the solution follows that outlined by Dame Anne Salmond citing His Highness Tui Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi, head of state of Samoa.

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Pre/non/meta/modern: shifts, tensions, pluralities in landscape relationality

Hannah Hopewell and Daniel Coombes

 

This paper observes a shift in how landscape is contemporaneously interpreted. Such a shift bears upon how relationships between humanity and nature are expressed. We trace theoretical and practice-based momentums to indicate a departure from the idea of landscape as pre-given and enclosed by euro-centric modern and post-modern contexts. In acknowledging the tensions and complicities of the (modern) landscape idea in settler colonialism and its ushering of ontological and epistemological hegemonies, we critically examine mounting tendencies to align landscape on the one hand with new materialist ontologies, and on the other with indigenous knowledges. Whilst it is well established by landscape and geography scholars of the 1990s that the euro-western idea of landscape is multifarious—the implication of alignments with new materialist and/or indigenous forms of knowledge is less critically understood.

 

New materialist ontologies and indigenous knowledge are increasingly seen as containing opportunities for enacting pre/non/meta/modern relations between nonhuman and human ecologies. In this paper, we focus on deploying the non as a heuristic device for responding to ideas one wants to resist, yet resist without perpetuating the violence of supersession, displacement or overcoming. Invocating the non, vis-à-vis modern, is an attempt to open a door for the co-existence and co-contemplation of difference without the jostle for epistemology authority. Through creative and critical practice-based research, our inquiry asks how nonmodern modes of existence within and between lifeworlds might emerge without slipping into well-worn modern/post-modern positions.

 

SESSION 2

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Listening-Telling and Telling-Listening; Considering Stories of Earthly Matter

Shelley Simpson

 

In this paper I consider the concept of storied matter as a linchpin to explore the relationship between the metamodern and posthumanism. The posthuman concept of storied matter considers matter (matter as earthly materials) not only lively, agential and generative, but densely storied. All matter is “storied subjects of an ever unfolding onto-tale.”[1]  Rather than a narrative, storied matter is a “dynamic process of material expressions.”[2] Stories emerge in relation, with humans and other-than-humans creating stories together in a distributed event. By recognising that there is a distributed agency at work in the expression of stories, a decentring of human exceptionalism occurs. Each engagement with a material opens up a realm of story, always being co-composed and spatio-temporally shifting. In my visual art practice, I hope to foster a re-enchantment with matter, specifically extracted material resources  ̶  a re-enchantment that can create empathy. Empathy can translate into more respectful, more considered approaches to how we interact with both each other and the other-than-human; how we live here and now. How do ideas such as re-enchantment and empathy with others relate to a key idea of metamodernism  ̶  that we are at a bend in history, that there is a shift in the ‘structure of feeling’?[3]

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Is It a Rock? Is It a Mirror?

Natalie Tozer

 

In the opaque and deformed capitalist societies that we struggle to make sense of,

corporate elites constrain the idea of the non-hierarchical collective. Seen as weak

and depleted from capital and without a continually expanding bubble, the aims of

the collective are not understood by the current and reigning economic system.

 

To counter political and economic restraints and the broad species-thinking of the

grand narrative of the Anthropocene, collectives engage in imaginative narratives

that explore the geologic. With its underworld, dirt, and ancient matter, the geologic offers alternative modes of perception for communities living precariously.

 

Protagonists and participants seeking geologic knowledge acknowledge there is

no grand narrative, no single species, and no single solution. Grand narratives with normative structures  ̶   such as the beginning, punchline, moral judgment and end  ̶   are reductive and alienate, and critically — prevent both debt payback and debt refusal.

 

Digging through hostile surfaces into the underland enacts a process to counteract

the ever-expanding structures of economic debt — a type of debt that can be

refused or forgiven. However, debt to deep time and non-life is a debt that requires

payback.

 

Sense-based narratives allow for a more complex, derailed approach with messy,

unresolved, damaged, and contaminated stories with multiple and open-ended

speculation. These stories explore relationships with the nonhuman and primordial.

 

Through imaginative, sense-based, and belief-based narratives in the geologic,

another time or matter may coexist, a geological time/space that can’t be known but

that may be sensed… and in this way the uncanny totems of sentient geologies, or

perhaps, the small, curious, anthropocentric marvels of community and collective,

can be acknowledged.

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Politics of Becoming

Lucy Boermans

 

“…to defamiliarize understanding through language games, and to throw the mind sufficiently off balance that room is opened for an understanding that transcends the categories that held it captive.”  Arthur C Danto

 

There is value in extracting lines of text from their source  - not as a sign of the fragmentism of the postmodern, but as a gesture towards the metamodern as a paradigm of integration that is non- and de-colonising. There is a resonance between (word) parts when abstracted from the constructed whole; they appear like reconfigured shorthand, messaged to the self, and to others. I could explain their root source to you. Instead, I would like to present them as a deformative prompt, after Jerome McGann’s notion of deformance that asks us to disrupt or re-organize a text’s original order,  to bring our attention to possibilities of meaning that “were there all along, though perhaps obscured, in the original. Deformance merely brings them out. It does this by putting us in a new relation to the work's form (in this case a paper presentation).

 

Just as art critic and writer Wystan Curnow experimented with writing styles that sought “to develop new forms of art writing to meet the ambitions of new forms of art”. In a metamodern vein that opens avenues of communication between often divergent realms, such as politics and art, I consider reconfigurations of writing art in-the-now of today, in a post-postmodern age, to respond to the following question:

 

How can politics be adjusted to an increasingly complex world through such acts of reconfiguration in art and writing? 

 

To act, you must first notice. This paper seeks answers through the sharing of noticed resonances, after Anna Tsing’s Arts of Noticing, in the form of excerpts of writing, reflection and examples of interdisciplinary practice. Such noticings are deeply metamodern in so much as they shed light on a process that all people use, but few are aware of: we make sense of the world by bringing together fragments of perception, knowledge or insights, which we organise around or allow to take over our own self-perception, thus creating new meaning. In Emily Dickinson’s words, “a Something overtakes the mind.”

 

SESSION 3

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Redemptive Literary ‘CPR’

Tasha Haines

A hybrid prose work for remote/online presentation. (a pre-recorded performative reading).

 

In 1993 David Foster Wallace said, the writer’s job is to “give CPR to those elements of

what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” While I hope ‘the writer’ will never have a ‘job description’, my auto-theoretical prose poem explores and exemplifies a testimonial poetics of literary hybridity for a post-postmodern era.

 

The poetic hybridity I employ entails generative tendencies that aim to not only perform the “CPR” Wallace speaks of but also testify to a kind of ‘duty of care’ for the self-and-other in textual art towards an unfinished exemplification of how best to redeem the “time’s darkness.”

 

Through a postmodern lens, redemption is anachronistic with its suggestion of vulnerability / error / remorse / accountability, and up surges the problem of metanarratology. However, in an anthropogenic age, modes of redemption may be necessary, speaking of solutions to the climate and other crises, and becoming progressively post-postmodern. I use the concept of redemption, to underpin my hybrid forms and flag the shift away from postmodern nihilism into something that ‘breathes life’.  

 

Working from a personal-particular point of view in a stream-of-consciousness style (because of a preference for ‘honesty’), I explore Wallace’s phrase about CPR and make an exemplification of the qualities and inclusions of a ‘life-saving’ textual art. My hybrid work will interweave with a simple and similarly testimonial video footage.   

 

... a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny. (Wallace, McCaffery interview, 1993)

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Affective Geographies: A MetaModern sympoietic painting practice of slow walking,

looking, thinking, and making situated in a series of abstracted topographical landscape artworks.

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Janet Mazenier

 

Janet Mazenier’s artistic practice engages with a visual language of tension in contemporary painting between realism and abstraction. This language contributes to what is inherently an experimental approach to each stage of every artwork creation, each mark, daub, and surface acting as a portal into the cognitive site of the encounter responsible for its existence. 

 

Theorist Donna Haraway (1944-), in her book Staying with the Trouble, states that “we relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinking yearnings.  So do all the other critters of Terra…other words for this might be…sympoiesis…” (Haraway, 2016).  Through this presentation, Mazenier relates Haraway’s concept of sympoiesis i.e. “making-with” to MetaModern ideas, applying this thinking and practice to the notions of interconnectivity, agency, and matter as an empathetic nexus between landscape, human agency and the observed and imaginary worlds of human and non-human.  Nature’s materiality is a duality of the visible and invisible. 

 

Mazenier’s supporting research encompasses input from, for example, theorists, historians, experts in geology and geography, tangata whenua, political and soil systems.  Enlisting the memory of experiential encounters from which to derive a visual vocabulary, her research traverses unconscious and conscious processes as observed and imagined relationships that are re-envisioned into artworks, echoing elements of process art, automatism, environmental art, world-making and conceptual art. 

 

Artist’s talk

 

Disrupting time, space and matter through a process-based installation 

Michelle Mayn

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A reflective discourse on the process-based installation method of breathing space / space breathing* exhibition held in ST PAUL Street Gallery, Auckland (2023).  Utilising a response driven methodology, the exhibition materialises through a reciprocal affect and a resonating response by each artist.  This relational curatorial and installation approach, rather than a collaborative method, allows each individual work to be subtly informed by nuances within newly situated works.  Through this gradual evolution, works further absorb subtle cues offered by site, material, environment and architectural space.  This discourse focuses on relational ontologies and agential realism theories within the field of a textile installation practice that explores the life force of material.

 

* Lucy Boermans, Shelley Simpson, Yana Dombrowsky-M’Baye and Michelle Mayn

 

SESSION 1

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Cultural identity and race in multicultural societies

Ema Hasmatuchi

 

In times of migration, people experience a continuous search of a cultural identity, of a self. The migration process means the loss of the original home, of cultural traditions, and the need to reconstruct a new self, a new identity in order to achieve the feeling of belonging. The idea of this essay came from my personal experience, as, since I moved from my hometown, I constantly had the feeling of compromise due to my relocation, missing home, my traditions. The process of adaption, assimilation, and integration will never be completed, so I constantly have the impression of being in-between, a concept defined and analysed by Indian English scholar and critical theorist Homi Bhabha. He is one of the most important figures in contemporary postcolonial studies due to his key concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, the Third Space. This paper focuses on the representation of race, identity, and home in postcolonial literature, especially in Hanif Kureishi`s The Buddha of the Suburbia, V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, and David Dabydeen`s The Intended.

 

Key words: cultural identity; race; mimicry; home; self, the Third Space; hybridity; postcolonialism.

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Rethinking doctoral education – could it be better aligned with metamodernist principles?

Rachel Spronken-Smith

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My musings about the future of doctoral education are well aligned with the key tenets of metamodernism. We know our doctoral graduates are entering an uncertain, complex, and fragile world. We know many feel unprepared for the career pathways they enter. If we want our graduates to be caring global citizens who are able to contribute to solving wicked problems, how can we best prepare them? Is it enough for doctoral education to continue to focus on typical outcomes that define ‘doctorateness’, such as the ability to produce original and significant research, and to demonstrate high levels of critical thinking and communication ability? Or should we be broadening their education to include a focus on more affective attributes such as global citizenship, characterised by cultural literacy, socio-communicative literacy, digital literacy and environmental literacy? In this session I will outline how the doctoral curriculum can foster more holistic attributes to enable our doctoral graduates to be well positioned to make a positive impact in this volatile world.

 

SESSION 2

 

Growing Seeds of the Metamodern in Individual Awareness

Maria Ross

 

The past few decades saw the emergence of a new paradigm in several spheres of social life from literature to politics. It goes a step further than the modernist challenge of rationalism and postmodernist inclusiveness of “the other” to a new set of values surpassing all divisions, be they racial, gender, social, national, religious or otherwise, and herald an era of unity, compassion, and motherly care, not only of other people but also the environment that supports our very existence.

These metamodern values are often accepted by societies and individuals in theory but even among the most liberal parts of society, cases of conscious and unconscious bias, materialism, greed, and self-centredness clearly demonstrate that there are powerful barriers in our mind preventing these values from becoming the reality of everyday life.

Such limitations of the mind can be overcome through  experience of mental silence (thoughtless awareness). It takes the awareness to a higher level, above our mental projections harbouring all those barriers. This state can be achieved through the technique called  Sahaja Yoga meditation introduced by Nirmala Shrivastava in the 1970s. It is based on awakening of the subtle energy which is dormant in every individual which is able to take the practitioner into the state of mental stillness, or thoughtless awareness. The centres responsible for compassion, creativity, innocence, forgiveness and self-mastery are awakened, nourished and start manifesting their qualities effortlessly.

The benefits of Sahaja Yoga meditation have been shown in a large body of academic studies and can be experienced by every person irrespective of their age, gender, religion, nationality, education, social position or any other differences.

The participants will have a chance to experience a short meditation during this presentation.

 

Rewilded Learning: Ecological Ways of Knowing and Learning

Matthew Stevens

 

Rewilded learning is learning beyond the boundaries of schools and qualifications  – out in the wilds of the community and domains of practice. As a natural organic process, learning emerges through, and as, experience. Following the radical empiricism of William James (Bernstein, 2010), the empirical naturalism of John Dewey (1929), the ecological psychology of James Gibson (1971), and the radical enactivism of Shaun Gallagher (2017), the organism and the environment co-define each other in their dynamical interaction. Within these ‘situations’, knowing and learning emerge as dynamical processes of integrated body-mind attunement, adjustment and adaptation. In this way, living, as a journey through a continuum of unfolding situations, is synonymous with learning (Stevens, 2020). The implication is that all situations, throughout life, are potentially affordances for learning and knowing. Taken as a whole, these living-learning situations form an ecosystem of learning affordances in which both the subject and the situation learn (Bateson, 2015). Ecological ways of knowing and learning have parallels and convergences with Mātauranga Māori (Māori ways of knowing) and Māori pedagogy.

 

The workshop begins with a brief overview and introduction to ecological ways of knowing and learning. This is followed by a group discussions and ideation about the possible forms that rewilded learning situations and ecosystems – out in the community – might take. The  workshop finishes with groups presenting their ideas back to the wider group. The ideas and concepts will be collated after the workshop and be made available. Participants will also be invited to participate in an ongoing research project as co-researchers and co-designers of a community learning ecosystem.

 

References

 

Bateson, N. (2015). Symmathesy: A word in progress; Proposing a new word that refers to living systems. https://internationalbatesoninstitute.wdfiles.com/local--files/pub%3Anbateson-symmathesy2015/BatesonN2015-IBIarchive-Symmathesy.pdf

 

Bernstein, R. J. (2010). The pragmatic turn. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Polity.

 

Dewey, J. (1929). Experience & nature. London, United Kingdom: George Allen & Unwin.

 

Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

 

Gibson, J. J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw and J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, acting and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

 

Stevens, M. (2020). Dissolving the walls: An inquiry into nomadic agile learning (PhD thesis). Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. https://openrepository.aut.ac.nz/handle/10292/13461

 

 

SESSION 3

 

Reading (creative nonfiction)

Siobhan Harvey

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A sample of ‘Living in the Haunted House of the Past: or Renovation, Writing and How to Construct a Living Room While Searching for a Home’ from Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021).

 

I C U: Intrinsic Creative Universality

Susan Nelson

 

This research started from a broad interest in how ontology (the nature of being and metaphysical relationships) and epistemology (theories of knowledge and truth) relate to current-day pedagogy: or essentially how we embody and impart knowledge, learn, and expand our individual and collective understanding of being in the world. As an investigation into how inner meets and shapes outer in reciprocal relationship, it was distilled down to three key areas: intrinsicality, authentic individuation, and the importance of creative potential within a wider ecosystem.

 

Metamodern master: 101 lessons from Heaney the poet-translator 

Marco Sonzogni

 

In the year Mas’ud Zavarzade coined the term metamodernism, 1975, one of the most epoque-making collection of poems was published: North, by Seamus Heaney (SH). This book contains SH’s first published and collected translation, from the French of Baudelaire. Using his translations as a case study (The Translations of Seamus Heaney, Faber, 2022), I will argue that SH the poet-translator is a metamodern master – if it true, and I think it is, that metamodernism mediates aspects of modernism and postmodernism and integrates them indigenous and traditional cultural matrices.

 

[1]Oppermann, Serpil, “Storied Matter”, Posthuman Glossary. Edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018, p 413.

[2] Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann, eds. Material Ecocriticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014, p 8.

[3] Vermeulen, Timotheus, https://vimeo.com/317049540, accessed October 12, 2022.