Landscapes of material engagement, power(s) and zones of reach in activism

Landscapes in-here, out-there. Left: as near as my camera can get, is infrastructure in-here, as encountered in the teeming street market in Ballaró, Palermo. Not the heart-mind, but perhaps once the material habitations of heart-mind in some of our fellow mammalian beings. As we normally would say: guts and lights. Right:  infrastructure out-there. Again, an approximation: because infrastructures per se are huge and ultimately unknown, tacitly and practically defined by whatever connects with-and-within them, evolutionary, over horizons and beyond intentions. This image shows tokens of intentional infrastructures in Granada: saneamiento, abastacimiento de agua, bomberos. One of our modernist delusions – most notably in the field of digital materials – has been to kid ourselves that infrastructures, even if made from steel and concrete (let alone instantly re-writeable algorithmic infrastructures of software code and so-called artificial intelligence), can be made thus and made to operate thus. They are wild, self-assembling, wilful, secretive, mycelial, tentacular, bottomless.

This is part 2 of Melancholy territory, activism in deep time and life in the collective – Dancing a living economy. In that title I name melancholy territory, deep time, and life in the collective, and I present them as three kinds of landscape in which living – thus, activist living – can be conducted. Fleshing out these notions now in this paper . . . I understand these three kinds of landscape to be, respectively aesthetic, material and cultural. Sometimes I refer to them, for brevity, as §1 (material)/§2 (cultural)/§3 (aesthetic).