The body-as fungible-unit or production – clock-able and separated from ecology to operate as a movable part in the machine of capital was birthed at the end of the feudal era in Europe – a moment which laid to waste the promise of the feudal uprising by enforcing a more ruthless system of expanded capitalism. It is a moment that entrenched the gender binary through systems of land enclosures (privatisation), widespread persecution, terror, and witch burnings that criminalised self-sufficient women, queerness, those practicing traditional healing arts, and homeless. Alongside the separation of body from ecology was organ from system – anatomy became the new fascination of a now exclusively male ‘healing class’, and the womb became the function of women who were now relegated to the domestic in the service of producing offspring towards an expanding workforce. It is a moment that set up the moral and economic paradigms that would endorse colonialism and make it possible. Caliban, the archetype of the dark man, the proletariat body, the body of the ecology, along with the witch as the sovereign female counterpart, held the shadow that the system suppressed so successfully – that of the untamable ecological and embedded shamanic body.
Today we live in the spoils of this system – in the deepening environmental crisis that marks the late anthropocene As the roar of the eco-shadow deepens in objection – object-subject collapse more vividly to once again heighten our awareness of shamanic potential of our embeddedness. We can no longer talk about the weather as ‘out there’, but must speak of the climate. Hyperobjects such a ‘pollution’, ‘population’, ‘radiation’ transgresses imagined barriers of impeccability, delivering us back to magical paradigms where an old woman showing her vulva to the sky could bring on the rain – We ARE the climate, we ARE the population, we ARE the pollution, AND they exist beyond and outside of us.
The body-as fungible-unit or production – clock-able and separated from ecology to operate as a movable part in the machine of capital was birthed at the end of the feudal era in Europe – a moment which laid to waste the promise of the feudal uprising by enforcing a more ruthless system of expanded capitalism. It is a moment that entrenched the gender binary through systems of land enclosures (privatisation), widespread persecution, terror, and witch burnings that criminalised self-sufficient women, queerness, those practicing traditional healing arts, and homeless. Alongside the separation of body from ecology was organ from system – anatomy became the new fascination of a now exclusively male ‘healing class’, and the womb became the function of women who were now relegated to the domestic in the service of producing offspring towards an expanding workforce. It is a moment that set up the moral and economic paradigms that would endorse colonialism and make it possible. Caliban, the archetype of the dark man, the proletariat body, the body of the ecology, along with the witch as the sovereign female counterpart, held the shadow that the system suppressed so successfully – that of the untamable ecological and embedded shamanic body.
Today we live in the spoils of this system – in the deepening environmental crisis that marks the late anthropocene As the roar of the eco-shadow deepens in objection – object-subject collapse more vividly to once again heighten our awareness of shamanic potential of our embeddedness. We can no longer talk about the weather as ‘out there’, but must speak of the climate. Hyperobjects such a ‘pollution’, ‘population’, ‘radiation’ transgresses imagined barriers of impeccability, delivering us back to magical paradigms where an old woman showing her vulva to the sky could bring on the rain – We ARE the climate, we ARE the population, we ARE the pollution, AND they exist beyond and outside of us.
Silvia Federici
Caliban and the Witch
Timothy Morton
Imperial Weights and Measures
Sinazo Chiya
An art of refusal: A reading of decolonial visual practices
Thomas Moore
Alchemy and Elemental Processes
Haidee Swanby
The living world under the machine: sacred places and wild gardens
Silvia Federici
Re-enchanting the world
Erin Manning
The Minor Gesture (ablism, whiteness, and the capital body)
Bayo Akomalafe
Animism
Silvia Federici
Caliban and the Witch
Timothy Morton
Imperial Weights and Measures
Sinazo Chiya
An art of refusal: A reading of decolonial visual practices
Thomas Moore
Alchemy and Elemental Processes
Haidee Swanby
The living world under the machine: sacred places and wild gardens
Silvia Federici
Re-enchanting the world
Erin Manning
The Minor Gesture (ablism, whiteness, and the capital body)
Bayo Akomalafe
Animism
EMBODIED ECOLOGIES
Six embodiment sessions presented by Nico Athene
The body-mind as community (of bacteria, breath, imagery), a twisted tree, a dying prayer. The body-mind as enmeshed. Skin that thickens into environment. Self becomes divination rod, alchemical process, a moment of sovereign sensuousness, an extension of ‘the weather’. That the communal dream extends beyond recognition of a preconceived image of ‘human’ is our point of departure in this work. Every second week we will meet to explore the possibility of encountering the ecological and rebel body. Sessions are designed to loosely track the lecture series and disrupt Cartesian notions of knowledge practice by extending the field of pre/post-human research.
EMBODIED ECOLOGIES
Six embodiment sessions presented by Nico Athene
The body-mind as community (of bacteria, breath, imagery), a twisted tree, a dying prayer. The body-mind as enmeshed. Skin that thickens into environment. Self becomes divination rod, alchemical process, a moment of sovereign sensuousness, an extension of ‘the weather’. That the communal dream extends beyond recognition of a preconceived image of ‘human’ is our point of departure in this work. Every second week we will meet to explore the possibility of encountering the ecological and rebel body. Sessions are designed to loosely track the lecture series and disrupt Cartesian notions of knowledge practice by extending the field of pre/post-human research.
Live presentations will happen each Saturday of the programme (details below). These will alternate each week between lectures and the Embodied
Ecologies praxis, i.e., one week a lecture and the next praxis alternating throughout the 12-weeks. An additional two (pre-recorded) bonus lectures that will be shared during the programme.<./p>
All live sessions are recorded for later access!
All learning material remains available for 12-months after the programme ends.
Start date: Saturday the 30th of September 2023
Presentation times: Live sessions are on Saturdays at 5.00 PM London/ 12-midday New York, (lectures are 90-minutes including Q&A, embodiment sessions are 2 ½ hours). Everything is recorded for anyone unable to attend live.
Registration closes: Thursday the 28th of September 2023
Programme duration: 12-weeks
Programme fee: Subscriber Offer $195! (normal price is $390)
Live presentations will happen each Saturday of the programme (details below). These will alternate each week between lectures and the Embodied
Ecologies praxis, i.e., one week a lecture and the next praxis alternating throughout the 12-weeks. An additional two (pre-recorded) bonus lectures that will be shared during the programme.<./p>
All live sessions are recorded for later access!
All learning material remains available for 12-months after the programme ends.
Start date: Saturday the 30th of September 2023
Presentation times: Live sessions are on Saturdays at 5.00 PM London/ 12-midday New York, (lectures are 90-minutes including Q&A, embodiment sessions are 2 ½ hours). Everything is recorded for anyone unable to attend live.
Registration now closed: Email anja@appliedjung.com for more information.
Programme duration: 12-weeks
Programme fee: Subscriber Offer $195! (normal price is $390)
Nico Athene is a multimedia artist working through embodiment as her primary medium. She facilitates workshops in embodiment and consent, and in dance, studying and teaching butoh and contact improvisation. Athene has degrees in Social Anthropology (BA UCT), Public Health (MPH, Edinburgh University) and Fine Art (MFA University of Witswatersrand), and has also trained as a family constellations facilitator, yoga teacher and birth doula. Athene is a student of archetypes old and new, and is moved by the power of witnessing, exaggerating and deconstructing or retrieving them as a means to open space to access the ecological body-mind – working at the edge of the human and the known to reveal new archetypes for unprecedented times. This course was developed from her Fine Arts masters thesis ‘We Need New Archetypes’, which she researched over two years of intensive study, and completed 2022 with support of a post graduate grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She has researched and taught it in various forms and workshops to mixed discipline students, including in Johannesburg to students at the University of Witwatersrand supported by the Centre for Human Rights and the Arts at Baard Colledge in the USA. Athene has exhibited and performed in various locations, including Kalashikovv Gallery (Johannesburg), Pretoria Art Museum (Pretoria), the Institute for Creative Arts and the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) (Cape Town), the Stevenson Gallery (Online), and the National Arts Festival (Makhanda).
Sylvia Federici is a feminist activist and a renowned political theorist. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the campaign Wages for Housework internationally. Her previous books include Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004); Revolution at Point Zero (2012); Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (forthcoming 2018); and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Common (forthcoming 2018). She is professor emerita at Hofstra University, previously worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years, and co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom for Africa. Her work has demonstrated the oversight in Marxian theory of one of the fundamental features of capitalist accumulation: namely, the subjugation of women and women’s productive and reproductive labour. Federici is known for her focus on the struggle against capitalist globalization and, more recently, on developing a feminist theory of the commons.
Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab, laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, forthcoming), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014)
Sinazo Chiya is a writer and associate director at Stevenson, based in Cape Town. She is among the 2019 writing fellows at the Institute of Creative Arts at UCT. She is the editor of Mawande Ka Zenzile’s monograph, Uhambo luyazilawula and has contributed texts to publications by Penny Siopis and Dada Khanyisa. Chiya published 9 More Weeks, a book of artist interviews in 2018 and has written for platforms including Bubblegum Club, Contemporary And, Art Africa, Artthrob, Adjective and the Center for Curating the Archive.
Thomas Moore is the author of the bestselling book Care of the Soul and thirty other books on deepening spirituality and cultivating soul in every aspect of life. He has been a monk, a musician, a university professor, and a psychotherapist. He has Ph. D. in religion from Syracuse University and has won several awards, including an honorary doctorate from Lesley University and the Humanitarian Award from Einstein Medical School. He also writes fiction and music and often works with his wife, artist Joan Hanley. He has a background in music composition and plays the piano daily as a kind of meditation. He writes and lectures in the fields of archetypal psychology, mythology, and imagination. His work is influenced by the writings of Carl Jung and James Hillman. His publications include, The Planets Within: Ficino’s Astrological Psychology, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, and Soul Therapy: The Art and Craft of Caring Conversations, among many others.
Haidee Swanby has worked for the past 25 years as an activist and researcher in what is now emerging as the African Food Sovereignty movement. Food is visceral, spiritual, cultural and political and engaged with on all scales – from mothers breast feeding their new borns to family celebrations and your grandmothers special dish, to farmers in their fields, artisanal fishers fighting for quotas while corporate giants like I&J trawl our oceans, and global agribusiness pushing for the criminalisation of farmers’ seeds. The complexity of food and agriculture and the way it touches every aspect of our lives provides a perennial and complex space for research and advocacy and plenty of collaboration with individuals and movements from across the continent. Key focus areas for Haidee include the promotion of agroecology, valorisation of indigenous ontologies, and the struggle against corporate control of the food system, especially seed.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. He is the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014, Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.
Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’. www.bayoakomolafe.net www.emergencenetwork.org.
Nico Athene is a multimedia artist working through embodiment as her primary medium. She facilitates workshops in embodiment and consent, and in dance, studying and teaching butoh and contact improvisation. Athene has degrees in Social Anthropology (BA UCT), Public Health (MPH, Edinburgh University) and Fine Art (MFA University of Witswatersrand), and has also trained as a family constellations facilitator, yoga teacher and birth doula. Athene is a student of archetypes old and new, and is moved by the power of witnessing, exaggerating and deconstructing or retrieving them as a means to open space to access the ecological body-mind – working at the edge of the human and the known to reveal new archetypes for unprecedented times. This course was developed from her Fine Arts masters thesis ‘We Need New Archetypes’, which she researched over two years of intensive study, and completed 2022 with support of a post graduate grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She has researched and taught it in various forms and workshops to mixed discipline students, including in Johannesburg to students at the University of Witwatersrand supported by the Centre for Human Rights and the Arts at Baard Colledge in the USA. Athene has exhibited and performed in various locations, including Kalashikovv Gallery (Johannesburg), Pretoria Art Museum (Pretoria), the Institute for Creative Arts and the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) (Cape Town), the Stevenson Gallery (Online), and the National Arts Festival (Makhanda).
Sylvia Federici is a feminist activist and a renowned political theorist. In 1972, she co-founded the International Feminist Collective, which launched the campaign Wages for Housework internationally. Her previous books include Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004); Revolution at Point Zero (2012); Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (forthcoming 2018); and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Common (forthcoming 2018). She is professor emerita at Hofstra University, previously worked as a teacher in Nigeria for many years, and co-founded the Committee for Academic Freedom for Africa. Her work has demonstrated the oversight in Marxian theory of one of the fundamental features of capitalist accumulation: namely, the subjugation of women and women’s productive and reproductive labour. Federici is known for her focus on the struggle against capitalist globalization and, more recently, on developing a feminist theory of the commons.
Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab, laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, forthcoming), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014)
Sinazo Chiya is a writer and associate director at Stevenson, based in Cape Town. She is among the 2019 writing fellows at the Institute of Creative Arts at UCT. She is the editor of Mawande Ka Zenzile’s monograph, Uhambo luyazilawula and has contributed texts to publications by Penny Siopis and Dada Khanyisa. Chiya published 9 More Weeks, a book of artist interviews in 2018 and has written for platforms including Bubblegum Club, Contemporary And, Art Africa, Artthrob, Adjective and the Center for Curating the Archive.
Thomas Moore is the author of the bestselling book Care of the Soul and thirty other books on deepening spirituality and cultivating soul in every aspect of life. He has been a monk, a musician, a university professor, and a psychotherapist. He has Ph. D. in religion from Syracuse University and has won several awards, including an honorary doctorate from Lesley University and the Humanitarian Award from Einstein Medical School. He also writes fiction and music and often works with his wife, artist Joan Hanley. He has a background in music composition and plays the piano daily as a kind of meditation. He writes and lectures in the fields of archetypal psychology, mythology, and imagination. His work is influenced by the writings of Carl Jung and James Hillman. His publications include, The Planets Within: Ficino’s Astrological Psychology, Care of the Soul: Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, and Soul Therapy: The Art and Craft of Caring Conversations, among many others.
Haidee Swanby has worked for the past 25 years as an activist and researcher in what is now emerging as the African Food Sovereignty movement. Food is visceral, spiritual, cultural and political and engaged with on all scales – from mothers breast feeding their new borns to family celebrations and your grandmothers special dish, to farmers in their fields, artisanal fishers fighting for quotas while corporate giants like I&J trawl our oceans, and global agribusiness pushing for the criminalisation of farmers’ seeds. The complexity of food and agriculture and the way it touches every aspect of our lives provides a perennial and complex space for research and advocacy and plenty of collaboration with individuals and movements from across the continent. Key focus areas for Haidee include the promotion of agroecology, valorisation of indigenous ontologies, and the struggle against corporate control of the food system, especially seed.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He has collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appears in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges. He is the author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. He is the author of Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010), Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007), eight other books and 250 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. Morton’s work has been translated into 10 languages. In 2014, Morton gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.
Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. Bayo has been Visiting Professor at Middlebury College, where he taught on his own formulated concepts of ‘transraciality’ and postactivism. He has also taught at Sonoma State University (CA, USA), Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada), and Schumacher College (Totnes, England) – among other universities around the world. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California and University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’. www.bayoakomolafe.net www.emergencenetwork.org.
