Krater Field Visit

Amelie Aranguren
Graham Bell Tornado 
Liliana Zeic 

During the afternoon session, we will move to Krater Park where the seminar will continue to weave together its propositions and pose new epistemological challenges based on the exercise of political imagination. First, Amelie Aranguren will presenet the outcomes of the workshop creating a space to get to know some of the cases of peri-urban producers and self-organised groups of consumption, stemming from direct sales based in Ljubljana. Afterwards, Graham Bell Tornado will perform the ritual of founding Krater Park as a Post Industrial Natural Queer (P.I.N.Q.) Park, in an eco-queer re-appropriation of national parks’ founding culture. Instead of giving rise to dynamics of domination over nature, they will inaugurate a space where sexual, biological, and cultural diversity can be protected. The session will close with Liliana Zeic’s workshop in which participants will be invited to engage in a state of collective interspecies sisterhood and deep connection with the plant environment, in which some of the fundamental ideas addressed during the previous sessions will be brought together.

Amelie Aranguren (Paisanaje collective): 78.6%: The Cities We Want

Presentation of the workshop 

The presentation will also serve as a presentation of the workshop, which took place in the city of Ljubljana, the surface of which is 78.6% rural areas, mainly characterised by agricultural and forest surfaces. It covered identifying groups of peri-urban producers and forms of consumption, ranging from direct sales, markets, or self-organised groups.  In short, it will be about detecting initiatives and projects that in one way or another strive for a living countryside, away from intensive industrialization models, defending a social and sustainable agriculture that is conscious of ecological limits. 

This workshop takes place at a time when agriculture has returned to the headlines, raising questions such as: What is the value of food? Who determines it? Where is the farmer’s profit? These questions will be answered through small actions into which imagination and creation will be incorporated.

Graham Bell Tornado: Ljubljana P.I.N.Q. Park Opening Ceremony

Performance

The network of Post Industrial Natural Queer (P.I.N.Q.) nature reserves has been created to protect sexual, biological, and cultural diversity, and to recognize the hysterical value of abandoned lots, warehouses, and other spaces that are like open wounds in the landscape, showing the remains of our industrial past, which is slowly being erased by the processes of colonisation of nature. The P.I.N.Q. Park ceremonies are participatory and activist events: ecoqueer celebrations which appropriate public space and satirise the pomp of official opening ceremonies.

Historically, the creation of national parks has often been related to politics whereby local peoples have been displaced to “clear the land” for hunting, fishing, or, in more recent times “green”’ holiday pursuits. To subvert this practise, post industrial sites are designated as safe spaces for those excluded from “official” histories – indigenous people, women, queer people, and animals. These sites are protected – not for the value of their industrial ruins, testimony to the processes of globalisation whereby production has moved to countries that offer an unprotected labour force – but because they harbour ecosystems made up of pioneer species of plants, insects, birds, etc., which have adapted to survive under somewhat toxic conditions.                                     

Liliana Zeic:  There are Many of Us and We Move in the World by Growing Rhizomes

Workshop

This workshop is based on the practice of deep mindfulness, which will be an invitation to imagine yourself as part of the ecosystem. It will include imagining yourself in a relationship with plants and thinking about what such a human and non-human community could look like. Our starting point will be synanthropic plants, weed plants, plants that survive unfavourable conditions, and our urban companions. The meeting will be an opportunity for a break, to ground yourself in your body and consolidate all the knowledge acquired during the seminar.