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Abstract
In January 2010 I deployed an ethico-aesthetic technique to address urgent issues in the area where I live. This began within Houghton Bay, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand and later spilled over to two other suburbs.I came to call the whole area of the project, the “Valley of the Wild”.
Issues that are common the world over, such as climate change and environmental degradation are also issues affecting the Valley, but there it is also the question of community, of community’s human and non-human relations, and the ways these unfold at local and micro levels. The ethico-aesthetic technique I began to deploy is similar to Felix Guattari's notion of "ecosophy" that operates across the three registers of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity. Within the Valley of the Wild, processual ethico-aesthetic techniques and modes of expression demand a rethinking of relations between humans and the environment, without preference to either. Instead, they are thought and enacted ecologically, or what Guattari terms "ecosophically".
Such practices involving aesthetic, social and political dimensions are sometimes described in the art world as relational aesthetics or dialogical aesthetics, but this project has become a lot more diffuse and more perhaps more pragmatic. It became so because the project urgently needed to address the question of how to produce systems or relations of care that would traverse all three ecological registers of social/community, environment, including the natural and built/degraded one of the Valley, and subjectivities, including the collectivity of the community and of “the artist”. This research project and process began to be one that considered how it might be possible to collectively generate or create a community of care or ethics for the three registers. In other eco-art projects, the question of stewardship is present. But I suggest, through this process-based art research, that what is needed is durational stewardship. Durational stewardship refers to ecologies of care that operate over long time scales and that consider relations, without prioritizing people, the environment or particular institutions (councils, planning authorities, museums and so on). It is a durational stewardship that will fully implement the worlding experience of ecosophy. A durational stewardship also challenges the notion of the realations between artists and community as it may require artists to situate themselves within the project indefinitely.
Deploying Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic paradignm demands exploration of the ecological condition; relations active between human and non-human entities, followed on by a reformation of subjectivity that operate across the three registers. Durational stewardship is an ethico-aesthetic project because it requires this reformation, in order to activate systems of long term care.
Aesthetic machines of the type emerging in the Valley of the Wild are generating heterogenous events toward the resingularization of subjectivity and the aestheticization of the everyday. This project addresses processes that occur in the everyday but that can become resingularised: listening, noticing and waiting. Through this resingularisation such processes that create the conditions for events to emerge collectively.
The techniques, processes, conditions and events that have occurred over the last four years will continue to become. It is from such becoming that more sustained evental conditions emerge that provide a sense of collectivity across the community, our suburb and our subjectivations. Via such evental conditions, systems of durational stewardship become possible. This dissertation is at once a narrative, investigation and tale of what is yet to come in the Valley of the Wild.