Events / The Pirate Academy #11
2022-11-15 - / , Bergen
On Savage Thought
November 15 & 16 / 19:00 – 22:00
The Art Academy – Møllendalsveien 61, Bergen / readings into Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Cormac Cullinan, and the work of Juan Downey
For this Pirate session we are focusing on the topic of Savage Thought, which will bring us into contact with Indigenous culture and questions of ecology. Approaches to ecological thinking and environmental attunement might be said to overlook how natural systems are bound to the dynamics of predation – that is, how ecologies find their balance through interactions between prey and predator. This finds elaboration in the writings of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro whose work on Amerindian / Amazonian communities captures how enemy relations operate as the basis for natural worlds. What does it mean to be an enemy? In what ways does the “perspective of the enemy” function as the Otherness to which we must turn? By following the figure of the shaman, and Amerindian practices of “eating the enemy”, Viveiros de Castro indicates how enemy relations are integral to planetary thinking or “savage thought”. In this special session of The Pirate Academy, we’ll focus on Viveiros de Castro and savage thought, questioning how the capacity to see the world through the eyes of the enemy-the Other grounds us in a holistic view that may support new forms of global respect.This will include some reflections on the concept of “wild law” posed by Cormac Cullinan, which seeks to align systems of human law with the greater Earth community. What does wild law consist of and how does it impact onto our forms of life? What might a “practice of the wild” be and how might this shape ecological relations, as well as influence our own creative work?
Tuesday, November 15 / 19:00 – 22:00: starting with introductory thoughts and perspectives by Brandon LaBelle on the topic of Savage Thought – reading into the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the Brazilian anthropologist whose writings have become key references within the contemporary art scene: what is Savage Thought, and how might it contribute to planetary practice? We’ll complement our reading into Viveiros de Castro with the screening of the very special artist film by Juan Downey, The Laughing Alligator (1979), which documents Downey’s time spent living amongst a Yanomami tribe in Venezuela; Downey’s film is a unique attempt at shifting the ethnographic-documentarian gaze by handing the camera over to the Yanomami and embarking on a disorienting journey.
Wednesday, November 16 / 19:00 – 22:00: continuing our considerations of Savage Thought, we’ll focus on the notion of Wild Law posed by Cormac Cullinan, whose legal theories and ecological understandings aim at defining a more pronounced form of Planetary Governance: here, practices of the wild become the basis for human-nonhuman interactions. What can a practice of the wild be, and in what ways can artistic making relate itself to current environmental urgencies? If humans are essentially the current enemy of the Earth, in what ways might we creatively work at this relation? We’ll find some guidance through the film Wild Plants (2016), which captures a group of urban gardeners and earth guardians – here, putting the hands into the dirt becomes the ultimate artistic gesture.