Katja Aglert, artistic leader and co-director of the Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory writes in relation to her artistic research with lecture performance, more-than-human storytelling, Glissant’s archipelagic thinking, exploration of the potential of the footnote, and more.
The article is based on a lecture performance titled “Archipelagic Rehearsals – Abstract as Score” that was presented at the RGS-IBG conference, held jointly by the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, in Cardiff in 2018. The presentation was an exploration of a possibility to practice, in Édouard Glissant’s terms, “archipelagic thinking” by presenting a lecture with interaction from the audience, as a lecture performance. That “archipelagic experiment” is continued in the article through an attempt to format the performance as an academic text. In turn, the text is an attempt to create new imaginaries and storytelling with Spanish slugs through participatory artistic experimental practice.
The writing as artistic practice offers the potential for becoming and as such it is unpredictable in its outcome. The article starts with the author’s framing of Glissant’s poetics and attempts a feminist and more-than-human approach to present the event – the performance of the lecture and the story of the slug in footnotes that were an integral part of the lecture.
The article is part of the Special Collection: Poetics of Space – Archipelagos and Wanderings Open access at Karib: Nordic Journal for Caribbean Studies.