By Amy Gowen

“It matters what stories we use to tell other stories with…it matters what stories make worlds and what worlds make stories.”[1] (Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble)

As long as there have been humans on this living planet, storytelling in all its forms has existed as a way of imagining, disseminating and producing information, which, in turn, has successfully aided in creating our perceptions of the world picture. Brian Boyd has argued that storytelling serves evolutionary purposes, as life itself is made of stories through which meanings are differentially enacted, and over thousands of years, humans have transformed their experiences, hopes, and fears into such storytelling.[2] Given this, it is important now, more than ever, to investigate the ways in which we currently tell stories about global environmental change.

The mediums of visual, written and sonic storytelling have been consistently used to frame and investigate the Anthropocene, yet humans still suffer from reductionist viewpoints of homo-centrism and a “crisis of imagination.”[3] Donna Haraway acknowledges this crisis and emphasizes the importance of intertwined worldings of Natures, cultures, subjects and objects. This implies that as crucial as storytelling is to understanding our planet and existence in this world, it also runs the risk of relentless contingency if limited to purely human-centric narratives.[4] In agreement with Haraway’s emphasis on intertwined worldings, William Connolly believes that the preciousness of classical humanism must be challenged through entangled humanism, adopting a “we” instead of “I” stance that includes humans, non-humans, organic and non-organic matters in the stories we tell.[5]

In terms of curating, the detailed mapping of story/ies that are played out within exhibition planning, alongside the collection of relevant artefacts to present, illustrate particular and specific stories. This said, using our current forms of storytelling as a curatorial approach runs the risk of neglecting narratives that can aid in evolving our perspective of the living planet. A thorough rethink is required, which has the courage to question even our most basic cultural narratives. Planetary Storytangling is my devised strategy of rethinking narrative transfer that I see as moving away from the human-focused to instead incorporate layered, multidimensional storytelling that includes all life upon this Earth. By interweaving Worlds, Natures and Cultures as part of a diverse species narrative, Planetary Storytangling encourages active voices and domains of agency that are other-than-human. Such a strategy has emerged already through a range of narrative transfers. Examples in literature include Richard Powers’ The Overstory which places trees as protagonists beside humans, and contemplates not only the perspective of nature but what it means to consider such an alternative viewpoint. Another illustration is Sasha Litvintseva’s visual narrative, The Stability of System which is based on the volcanic natural landscapes of Lanzarote that assumes the agency of storyteller throughout the film. By involving Planetary Storytangling in art, alternative existences, identities and voices can be explored to encourage out-of-the-box thinking and new approaches to understand our living planet, in an attempt to formulate what Bruno Latour calls “our common geostory.”[6]

With the emergence of Planetary Storytangling also comes a responsibility of language choice and dissemination. It is crucial to base our stories upon active and responsible discourse with an understanding of how knowledge is situated and words are framed within the contemporary environment. This is in line with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon’s belief that, “we fail to attempt to understand if we simply condemn and deprecate the occurrence of familiar words without making efforts to track the shifting meanings.”[7] For example, the Anthropocene as a term has been criticized as evolving to become synonymous with human consumption and destruction, straying away from its geological foundations and meaning. This, in turn, adds to reductionist viewpoints and the “crisis of imagination.” By choosing terms such as “ecocide” and “planetary annihilation” we can instead begin to acknowledge the planet as living, breathing and organic, reducing the distance between human and other species of the Earth. From this understanding, the language we choose is just as important as the tangling of diverse species narratives in order to achieve Planetary Storytangling. Planetary Storytangling can play an integral role in curating and framing our upcoming exhibition The Plantery Awareness Project. By using various art-forms that entangle voices, agencies, fictions and non-fictions through written, visual and sonic narratives, and by incorporating a diverse range of species, we can aid in encouraging a stepping away from the homo-centric as part of a conscious unlearning process, to instead embody the planet-wary. As Haraway states, “it matters what worlds make stories.”[8] By entangling and intertwining worlds, narratives and species stories within our exhibition through the strategy of Planetary Storytangling we can help disseminate and facilitate knowledge and experience that draws less from humans and more from others who reside on the living planet. In doing so we can re-imagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to find ourselves in dialogue with other species’ needs and other kinds of minds.

References

[1] Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press 2016, p.12

[2] Emmet, Robert. Whose Anthropocene?: Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses”. 2016 p.83

[3] Emmet, Robert. Whose Anthropocene?: Revisiting Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “Four Theses”. 2016 p.83

[4] Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press 2016, p.13

[5] Connolly, William E. Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. 2017, p.33

[6] Latour, Bruno. “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied.” The Anthropology of Sustainability, 2017, 35-49

[7] Simon, Zoltán B. “The limits of Anthropocene narratives.” European Journal of Social Theory, 2018

[8] Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press 2016, p.12

Further Reading

-Plumwood, Val. "Nature in the Active Voice." Australian Humanities Review, no. 46 (2009) 

-Latour, Bruno. "Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied." The Anthropology of Sustainability, 2017, 35-49.

-Kerrigan, Dylan. "Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival Fabrizio     

-Terranova, dir. 81 min. English. Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2017." American Anthropologist 120, no. 4 (2018)

Bibliography

-Bonneuil, Christophe. "The Geological Turn." The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis, 2015, 17-31

-Connolly, William E. "Facing the Planetary." 2017. 

-Boscov-Ellen, Dan. "Whose Universalism? Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Anthropocene." Capitalism Nature Socialism, 2018, 1-14. 

-Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press 2016

-Latour, Bruno. “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene: A Personal View of What Is to Be Studied.” The Anthropology of Sustainability, 2017, 35-49