Making the body and materials present in post-extractive urban terrains in response to issues of the Anthropocene through speculative and performative practices

Brigitta Stone-Johnson

The University of the Witwatersrand, school of architecture and planning

*2022.10.07 This is a paper in Progress, is posted here for comment only

As a city founded on Gold mining in the 1890s, as we move away from mining as a primary commodity, I suggest that Johannesburg is an Anthropocene city in a state of post-extractive change. As we address the questions that emerge around the human-altered planet within the context of Johannesburg, a series of critical issues emerge. Kathryn Yusoff,  raised the issue of the Anthropocene and the implication of white colonial attitudes in A billion black Anthropocene or non (Yusoff, 2018), suggesting that ‘Anthropocene’, implies that all humans are equally to blame when the ‘Anthropocene’ largely written, particularly in the South African context by White Colonial extractions, at the ongoing going expense of black bodies enlisted in its extraction. They now find themselves close to the harmful chemical aftermath of weathering in a post-extractive context,  as industrial wastelands and mine tailings erode and fracture. The term ‘Anthropocene’ Yussof argues, forwards a ‘White Geology’….. that creates atemporal materiality dislocated from place and time—a mythology of disassociation in the formation of matter independent of its languages of description and the historical constitution of its social relations.” (Yusoff, 2018, p. 16).

In architectural thinking that addresses associated climate change issues, existing literature has tended to continue the trend of global thinking, absenting the particular in favour of the general—speaking of society at large, rather than attempting to consider individual implications. Alternatively, addressing only energy consumption issues, to the neglect embodied carbon and water consumption. Alongside this, post-apartheid writing carries with it a trend to imagine – Urban terrains as existing only in a state of entropic decay. I suggest there are two interrelated absences within the current literature on city-making. The actant body and the vital materials from which our urban terrain are constructed. This requires a two-fold rethinking. A presencing of often erased material natives in the city. Along with a surfacing of extractive actions within apartheid areas and ongoing neo-colonial extraction that results from the turn to global liberal capitalism.

In my PhD research, Wayfaring stone, I aimed at contesting the ‘White Anthopocene’ by re-imagining the stony matter of the urban terrain as Vital and living – terrain. In which the human body is an active co-labourer in shaping the urban terrain, thinking beyond the particulate nature of matters of extraction to thinking of stony matter as a vibrant and social actant. By, you may argue, I am only one person, I am not responsible for the Anthropocene or the material and bodily consequences.

But am I implicated, you may ask?

Here I respond with Daniel Rotherburgs term ‘Implicated Subjects’. “Implicated subjects, Rothberg suggests ‘, occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes(Rothberg, 2019, p. 1)”. This to me, described both that we inherit implication and suggest that we enact material narrative through our everyday material actions. As such, the individual and the societal implication are deeply entangled with one another and should be addressed alongside one another in a creative practice response.

In her writing on the Posthuman, Donna Haraway suggests that in response to extractive attitudes within the Anthropocene, it requires us to Make Kin within the non-human world, becoming composites, rather than posthumanists, who think about and act within materials in Tentacualr ways. In creative practice, I suggest this requires us to come to know and think about materials through direct encounters with vital materials in living terrains. Thinking body and matter to be one, along a continuum. After Karen Barads, thinking on the matter, which forwards the understanding of bodies and ‘other matter’ to be one. Indistinguishable from one another, and thus interconnects to one another when understood from a quantum perspective of matter, which directly challenges Newtonian physics on which our material frameworks are predicated.

I allowed myself a period of unstructured learning during my PhD, which explored Stone as a vibrant material within the urban terrain formation. In I attempted to engage instinctively with the stony materials, to learn about the terrain’s stony materials outside of the ways my formal education in architecture had instructed me that I would come to know. I was guided here by my own memories of formative encounters with Stone within the terrains of my youth. As a child, I was given access to both formal written information and interesting ecological and geological terrain to learn to understand without much interference from the adult world, learning about stones’ materiality through touching, gathering, carrying, and shifting stones in the veld. In my early research, I employed a similar approach. Beyond walking and looking, my knowledge developed next through physical explorations of materials, such as going for a walk, gathering and looking as my material research developed beyond walking practices. The body remained a critical site of investigation within the work, but as in many material practices, it remained absent from the final work- its movements, relations and gestures – remembered only in the final form of the work.

Tim Ingold, the anthropologist, describes this way of coming to know materials as kin to weaving and growing. Practices in which the materials traverse the body in the process of becoming. Ingold suggests that we learn about the materials from which we make things by engaging with those materials within a material world that pushes back. Reminding us repeatedly that material knowledge is created through bodily experience, with materials, in a weathering world. Within his work, he examines the work of crafting, making and designing through the lens of art, architecture, anthropology and archaeology (Ingold, 2013). Ingold emphasises that making a thing from raw materials within this body of writing is coming to know through a haptic encounter. Be that through weaving, designing a house, making a handaxe, or forming a mound. He suggests that when we make things, the maker and material are in conversation through gesture. Physical acts of making incorporate the whole body and forge an entangled understanding of materials agencies, which labour to produce, the final emergent form. In an essay entitled techniques of the body (Mauss, 1973)   in discussing actions that generate material knowledge, Marcel Mauss describes these as ‘bodily habitus (Mauss, 1973)’; what was interesting to me in Mauss’s essay is that many of the techniques he describes are techniques in negotiating material as a medium; bodily techniques of walking, climbing, tramping, stomping, tiptoeing, sloshing are techniques to navigate the complexity of earthly terrain and air, as wind, Swimming – Water, Dancing, however, becomes not a mode of navigation, but the transcendence of it. And of course, still, other general techniques are employed in navigating matter, pulling, pushing, throwing, and holding, along with techniques of the hand, touching, rubbing, and squashing, which are bodily techniques for discovering things about the world and its material qualities. Materialising these extractive narratives is two-fold; firstly, making present Global material narratives through speculative practices. Additionally, Making the Body and Material present in direct material practice.

PART 1 . MATERIALISING WHITE GEOLOGY IN RECENT SOUTH AFRICAN MATERIAL HISTORY – THROUGH AN EXPLORATION OF IMPLICATION THROUGH FAMILIES’ HISTORY :

A week ago, I enacted a collaborative work with the Artist Chloe Shein, in which we attempted to make present the often erased materiality of extraction, and the related movement of white bodies, across the terrain of South Africa, from the 1940’s to the early 1980s, in the actions of extraction. Through the tracing and mapping of the trajectories of our respective grandfathers, her a mining engineer, and mine, a ‘driller’, who worked for several mineral prospecting, and mining companies throughout his adult life. Within this work, we trace the movement of bodies through the strings that map the trajectory of movement across the border landscape and stings, connecting the stones to the extractive actions listed on the surrounding walls. With the aim of making present the actions and consequences of the Anthropocene. My grandfather died in 1981. A full year before I came into the world, and yet as an architect,  one cannot help but felt the weight of these actions; if the body does not remember, the terrain certainly does, registering the passing of human activities, in both large ways, in the cutting scarification from mining and water developments, and from the cumulative, choices, movements, and marks we make as we move through terrains. As an architect, I find that in order to address the questions of materiality in the Anthropocene, one must think ‘tentecularly’, – as Donna Haraway suggests (Haraway, 2016), speculating on the interrelationship between extractions built form and the weathering urban. Between the everyday actions and decisions of you and I, and the traces, they will inevitably leave long after we have departed.  

As I have done, with every – instillation work over the course of my research practice, the recent instillation involved the move shifting of stones, collected over vast distances, in this case over several years, into the space for the installation. In each of these actions, the body traces its own movements, and the stones leave traces on the body, dust settles in the lungs and nose, and cuts, bruises, and abrasions mark the handling of Stone by the body.

PART 2. MAKING  THE BODY AND MATERIAL PRESENT THROUGH MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS:

In the second iteration of the work, I, enact the construction of a Cairn made from Stone extracted from the central Witwatersrand ridgeline. This work takes place as an embodied exploration of the presencing Stone through creative practice.

As you view the work, I ask you to reflect upon your bodily habitus and how you, as creative practitioners, are implicated in, The Anthropocene, both through material framing and thinking but also through the everyday Habitas, which informs these larger impacts.

Thankyou for your time.

REFERENCES

Haraway, D.J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press Books, Durham.

Ingold, T., 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, 1 edition. ed. Routledge, London ; New York.

Mauss, M., 1973. Techniques of the body. Economy and Society 2, 70–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147300000003

Rothberg, M., 2019. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Yusoff, K., 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocene’s or None. Univ Of Minnesota Press.