Tracing the watery self - A conversation with Marc Delalonde

Welcome to the Onassis AiR Conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others, Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens, initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of the Critical Practices Program in Fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open-ended process of relationing, which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

In this conversation, I'll be speaking with Marc Delalonde. Marc is a curator, cultural worker and researcher working at the intersections of arts, community building, environmental philosophy and political ecology and is currently based in Athens. Marc is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement III, which revolves around a collective research on issues of ecologies as well as human and more-than-human interactions. Today, we will talk together about art and ecology by discussing his research into the scientific concept of symbiosis and its application in the socio-cultural framework through the notion of "SumbioArt". Marc, welcome to Pali-Room!

Thank you for having me!

Marc, it's a pleasure to have you here today. I will start with your background. You have a background in classical studies with a focus on how ancient cultures were used to shape social representations and then you continued your studies in cultural management in order to research further our contemporary cultures by examining the intersection of art and ecology. I'm very interested to know what instigated this turn and how your decision to move to Athens is perhaps linked to that?

Right! Yes, indeed, I have a background in history and more specifically in ancient history and ancient cultures, which I was studying in a Master in Toulouse in France in 2014 and that is what led me to Athens in 2015. It was an international Master so we could choose one of our partner universities and I chose Athens because it made sense for me. It was closer to the subject I was studying in my thesis and I had been doing ancient Greek for six years. I was very curious to know how modern Greek sounds and I was very attracted to Greece. So, I chose to come to Greece and wrote my thesis here, while taking classes at EKPA University. Then, I went back to France and presented it. It went really well. They offered me a PhD, but I felt like I was done with history, because throughout my year in Athens and even a bit before I was going through, you could say an ecological awakening or awareness and I was feeling that I was done with studying the past and wanted to do something for the present. Which is not to say that history is useless, of course, but I needed to do something more impactful maybe. And why in Athens? Well, for multiple reasons. But after a year here, I felt that my experience here was not done, that I was feeling at home here and that I had way more to learn. So, I came back to Athens and started doing an irrelevant job just to take time to think of what's next for me and how I could deal with ecology.

How did this awakening, as you mentioned, started for you? Were there any specific texts that you came across that were inspiring for you?

I think it was in 2014. My friends being vegetarians or also mostly watching 'Cowspiracy' and this kind of documentaries that are made to awake you in a way that is maybe a bit too much, but at least then you do research and you understand things. So, I would say it started from there and then slowly you read everything and you go further and further in the subject. I would say that's how it happened for me. I was thinking, how can I engage with that? I don't want to work for Greenpeace and collect money in the streets. That's not something I feel like I can do and at some point I remember here in Athens visiting a festival of arts and for the first time seeing artworks that were tackling climate change issues. I remember that it clicked in my mind because when I was doing ancient history, I was studying how culture can shape cultural representations, how it can change them in a way and articulate new ones. And I was seeing that happening through arts in our contemporary world. So, I thought this is something I can contribute to, not as an artist, but as the person organizing this kind of events and that's how I turned to cultural and artistic management, which I went back to France to study as a Master. I started researching the intersections of art and ecology in a thesis, which I did in Athens, talking with a lot of artists here, institutions, curators, and trying to understand what was going on and to kind of put it in dialogue with all the books and research I had read on the subject. When I finished that, I started to work on projects that involved art and ecology and to slowly develop a curatorial thinking and approach. This is when I slowly turned to environmental philosophy, because I had this idea of what can I do to work on the representations of our society. What I was doing was interesting, but it was not tackling the root cause of the problem, in my opinion. I remember it all started with reading "Staying with the Trouble" by Donna Haraway, because I understood a lot of things in her thinking of the Anthropocene as not an era, but a rupture, which is up to us how long this rupture is going to be. She proposes a new narrative, the Chthulucene, and I thought it was really interesting and it was also my first encounter with the word "symbiosis", which was very interesting to me. And I started to research it, to read Lynn Margulis's work. Lynn Margulis is a scientist. Her thesis was rejected at the time by the scientific community and now it's widely accepted. She basically showed that Darwin was wrong, that competition is not the key to survival, and that cooperation is actually the key to evolution. That was really mind blowing for me to read. So, I wanted to continue in this direction and that's how I came across Glenn Albrecht's work. Glenn Albrecht is an Australian philosopher and for the past 15 years he's been working on what he calls "Earth emotions" and that all started with his concept of "solastalgia", that you may know. Ten years ago he developed the idea of the "Symbiocene", much like the Chthulucene of Haraway, as a new meme for society to envision an era of symbiosis, of companionship between the human and the non-human, of living together, an era where life on Earth isn't destroyed by humans, but nurtured. I found this narrative beautiful. I wanted to promote it.

Are there specific Earth emotions in his theory, because I'm not familiar with his writings?

Yes, they're all gathered in a book he published in 2019, which is called "Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World". After solastalgia basically he understood that it's a whole field, which he calls "psychoterratics", all the emotions that describe your relationship with the Earth and its current state. Solastalgia is one. It is the nostalgia of the solace that a place was bringing to you. It is the lived experience of negative environmental change. Obviously, we know others like "eco-anxiety", for example, "eco-paralysis". So, he coins a lot of new negative ones, but also positive ones, such as "soliphilia", the love and responsibility for a place, the will to care for it and to act, "ecophilia". There are at least 10 or 15 of them. I don't remember them all, but I think it's a very interesting work.

I think, being interested in language myself, if we manage to change language and create new words to describe what we are going through or what we wish to achieve, language is a tool that we can use towards this change.

Yes. I remember the text "Poetry is not a luxury" by afro-feminist Audre Lorde. She says that poetry is a way to put into words what doesn't exist so that what doesn't exist can be thought. I hope I'm faithful to her sentence, but it's the idea that language helps articulate ideas so you can actually think about those ideas and ideas lead to action.

In your practice, I understand that care, interconnectedness and solidarity play a huge role and that you're interested in developing ways to reconnect humans with the Earth through art as a key to initiate societal change. In fact, and please correct me if the date is wrong, in 2018, together with a group of young people, you initiated "Generation Symbiocene", which is a community of young citizens experimenting with artistic tools to cultivate a symbiotic relationship between humans and nature and generate a renewed narrative that places care and "response-ability" in the forefront.

In 2019. Yes, "response-ability", which is a term I got from Haraway. The ability to respond, as well as responsibility.

While reading about this initiative, I was particularly striked by the term "SumbioArt", which to my understanding attempts to introduce a more affective approach to the practice of art making and I'm very curious to know what is the story behind "Generation Symbiocene" and what are the main methodologies you've used so far to explore how art can contribute to ecology?

That's a big question. Thanks! Maybe I'll start briefly with the story behind "Generation Symbiocene". It springs from my reading of Albrecht's book. Short after I came across an open call for socio-cultural project ideas in the frame of a program called START. I had this idea of putting the "Symbiocene" into action somehow. So, I articulated quite badly, if I remember well, a project around the Symbiocene, which was selected. So, I went off to Germany for two months and this is where I really shaped the framework of this project. It all started with contacting Glenn Albrecht and telling him that I've been reading him for a while and that I want to translate his ideas and his concepts into a curatorial project, into a socio-cultural project. So, we talked about the name, some linguistic details also. It was very interesting. In his book, he talks about Generation Symbiocene, "Generation S", which he thinks of as not defined by your age. It's not an age group like Gen X, Y or Z. Gen S is basically everyone that loves the Earth and wants to care for it and wants to usher in the Symbiocene. And yes, it's led by the young, mostly Gen Z. We've seen that in Fridays for future, the Extinction Rebellion. But it's open. And so that's how I had the idea of, what if we gathered Generation S in Athens and that's the basis of the project. That's how "Generation Symbiocene" came to exist in Athens.

What exactly did you do here? What kind of actions did you do?

There were two pillars, if I could say. One was to gather this community. That was the most important. So we went out there and we did open meetings to build this community. Young people mostly would come to these open meetings and we would talk about what does the Symbiocene mean? What is symbiosis? But also and mostly, what do we want to do together? What would make sense and how could we use art or creativity to raise awareness, to reconnect with "nature" and to others. This is mostly what we were doing as a community. But, a big part of the project were also the workshops, which for me was very interesting, because this is where I could develop this curatorial thinking of the "SumbioArt", which I coined from Glenn Albrecht's thinking. For me "SumbioArt" is, as you say, a more affective approach to art making, but, quite literally, it's the art of living together-with -"symbio"-, of making together-with life, others in harmony and with care for otherness. It's for me an art of fostering emotional symbiosis between the human and the non-human world, between humans and their communities, their places and other communities that live there, be them human or not. So, I see it, in Haraway's words, as the art of actively seeking kinship with the world. In this frame we did a few workshops and maybe I can talk about one or two. I want to talk about "Sumbiography", because this is actually the word that inspired me to coin "SumbioArt". "Sumbiography" was coined by Albrecht in his book. It's the first chapter. Basically he describes what has influenced his relationship with the Earth. That's what "sumbiography" means. It's not an autobiography. It's not about yourself only. It's about the togetherness of your life. So, how he coins the word it's the cumulative influences that have shaped one's view of human's relationship with the living. This for me was very inspiring and I could see the workshop behind this. So, I did a first experiment of this in Hamburg and then we did it twice in Athens. Basically, it's ten people, because we want to keep it intimate, who don't know each other though. We gather, we start engaging with the world around through our senses, with others here, we share memories through different kind of exercises and we start writing excerpts of our sumbiographies. Obviously not the full one because it would be too long. Basically it's about remembering people, nonhuman animals, even plants, experiences, places that have shaped the way you relate to the world, the living world, what we call "nature". And that was really beautiful. We gathered a lot of texts, we made a small book out of it and I think we had a really interesting and great time doing this. Another example that I could give you of methodologies, because that's interesting when you asked me how art contributes to ecology and in a lot of ways art for me is essential because it can make visible, it can create dialogue, it can make ideas accessible, it can develop new pedagogies, it can be a space for experimenting, it can empower. But what I wanted to do through SumbioArt is use art to unveil, identify and also affect and change the way we feel about the world, how we can connect with the rest of the living. One other example, then, is "Sumbiokinesis", which I coined with the idea of moving together-with. For me, it was how can we use our body to understand the concept of ecological self, "eco self" instead of "ego-self", because as a body we are both a community of microorganisms living together i.e. microbes, bacteria, fungi, viruses, but also as a body we are a member of a wider biological community. We interact with other bodies all the time. We need them. And so, how through moving your body into space with, guided exercises and storytelling, how can you articulate better those two levels. It was really interesting because my idea at the beginning was that we are 20 people and we basically dance in a park, but due to COVID-19, it changed and it became even more interesting to me. What we did was that we created an audio with the artist Aria Boumpaki and people would register and receive the audio and on the same day, at the same hour, everyone would go to his favorite or her favorite natural space, put their headphones on and start the experience. And so, you would have people in Athens like in Lycabettus, Philopappou, but also in Piraeus, in Tinos, in Rhodes, in Crete, in Kavala and in Canada, dancing together to the same exercises at the same time, but in a different space and following the lines of the environment with their own body lines, for example, I'm doing a mountain or whatever. You know, you kind of try to find harmony and interact. For me, it was really powerful as an experience.

While you're talking, I'm thinking how challenging it must have been -I'm sure this is something that you've thought through- to engage people that aren't already aware or conscious about all these issues that you've been talking about. I find it interesting going through the different workshops that you did while researching about this project, that you're using a wide range of methodologies that perhaps activate different senses and are not strictly art, which could be a way to reach people that are not particularly aware of the discourse that we've been talking about.

Exactly! We had, for example, people that came to a workshop because it was about birdwatching. But in fact, we were talking about identifying with birds and trying to de-anthropocentrize the perspective and that was not something that you usually do when you do birdwatching. Or people who came to the music workshop because it's fun. You learn to use a new instrument, but you do that in a park with others and in ways that are a lot about also listening to the symbiosis.

And you're starting new conversations with people that you don't know. I mean, this relational aspect, I find it very, very interesting. I remember that you also did a sumbiography workshop for us during your Curate-a-Day.

Very small, yes.

A short version. I think I have mentioned this before, but the use of storytelling as a tool reminded me of Joseph Campbell's theory of the archetype of the hero, which basically refers to a common pattern found in all "great stories" where we observe the universal journey of a hero who enters a life adventure and through suffering, he manages to reach a state of knowledge that allows him or her to return to a state of bliss. I think this is one problematic aspect of our "story", as a species, because we tend to live usually in a future tense, while the story continues to develop in the present.

That's right and this is dangerous, because this time we are not the hero in the sense that we have to stop believing that we'll be victorious in the story, as we always are without bringing real change collectively.

I would like to go back to The School of Infinite Rehearsals, which you're part of, and which had a specific focus on the notion of ecologies. I was wondering, since you were already involved and active in the community through Generation Symbiocene, what prompted you to apply for this program?

I applied a year ago in the first lockdown, while in the heat of organizing Gen S as a project, the workshops. I remember thinking that in a year from now maybe it would be nice to refresh a little bit my practice and my thinking, because I was feeling I was going deep into symbiosis and this kind of ideas. But "ecologies" is such a wider idea, you know. Even, it doesn't mean anything anymore, you know. We use it as "environment", which also doesn't mean anything. So, I was thinking that it would be nice to confront my vision, my practice, my readings with other people that also work on those subjects on a daily basis with other tools. Do they read the same things as me? Do they think about what's relevant and what's not in the same way as I do? I was reading the open call and it was manipulating ideas that I was feeling attracted to and so it just made sense for me.

During this six-week period that just ended, actually, how did you see in the end your individual practice merging with the collective practice of the group?

Well, as a curator I feel more like a researcher. Most of my practice is actually reading and digesting books and complicated theories and actually before the residency, the last book I read was "Bodies of Water" by Astrida Neimanis, which she published in 2017. It was a very interesting reading. It opened a new path in my mind, which is what I love about reading, but I kind of forgot about it after that and I started the residency. And I remember observing the dynamics of the group, the talks that were happening in our first brainstorming, in our first workshops. We went to Aigina, we shared our practices and when we finally sat down and said "so, what is our research focus?", I remember thinking about water immediately, because it was something that on the very first days emerged as a binder in our group. I was seeing different ecologies of water unfolding in our collective practice. First, there was a kind of a social ecology of water with water as an element of community, life and care. You know, we had this ritual from the very beginning of offering glasses of water to everyone all the time.

And tea!

And tea. Tea making was a huge thing like cooking and cleaning. A lot of collective doing was revolving around the water. We had also a political ecology of water flowing in our discussion. It started with Aigina as well, with the scarcity of water there for the irrigation of the pistachios, but also with our convener, James Bridle, and his building of a DIY desalinization system of sea water. And so, water as an economic resource, water as a political value. When we talked about where to go next, Stagiates was a lot in our minds, because their water is privatized, its chemicalized. Prespa was on our mind, too, and that's where we went eventually because there water is a border, which is not an easy thing to understand, for me at least. There was also something about an emotional or mental ecology of water, because we started the residency with "Medea", this huge snowstorm in Athens, that we had not seen in years. So, that means we started with being super happy and joyful, going outside in the snow. Then, we went to Aigina. We actually swam in the sea. And so there was also this thing about water as a source of joy and pleasure. And lastly, we talked about some kind of philosophical ecology of water. I remember that very early on we were always saying "we", "we, "we", and at some point we stopped and we asked ourselves, and that lasted for the whole residency, but who is this "we"? And that reminds me of a feminist, Adrienne Rich's word, which I don't remember in what text, but she said "the problem is we didn't know who we meant, when we said 'we'". And so that also connected to water, water as hydrocommons, water as a shared property, water as the constituent of our body. When I was thinking about all that, I connected it obviously to "Bodies of Water" that I had just read and brought it to the table and then from this idea of water as something that we were very much involved in this residency, it became, through brainstorming, how can we develop a research based on water as a medium?

And then, if I remember correctly, you made this huge list with different properties of water to try to understand what things attracted each one of you the most and what resonated with you and what kind of research path you wanted to take in the end. Which water quality resonates with you the most?

I'm trying to find the right word. It's hard to tell only one, but I would say water as a connector. You know, this idea of permeability and this relates a lot to the idea of transcorporeality, which is a concept coined by feminist Stacy Alaimo. It's the idea that water goes "trans" (across)-"corporeality" (bodies), water crosses over bodies, it moves between bodies. The water that is, right now as we are talking, in our bodies, comes from somewhere. I'm drinking a glass of water and then it will go elsewhere. This idea that it is everywhere the same, but it is different because embodied. You asked for one, but the second one would be also the primal, maybe it's not the right word, but water as an emotion trigger.

How do you think about that?

Well, if you are in contact with a body of water, you feel something, generally. Think about when it rains, how it makes you feel,when you see the sea, when you bathe in the sea, when you hear a river flow, when it snows and you are walking in the snow. You feel things. And that was really interesting to me also because of my practice that revolved around Earth emotions. I started to think, what about water emotions? What about this wateriness of the self? And this is what I'm writing about for the publication of this residency.

And so, you decided to go to Prespes, which is a rather contested site from many perspectives, political, ecological. You did this field trip as a group to further expand your research into water and I would like to ask you what bodies of water were you able to trace there?

Prespes was definitely a really good choice for a non-anthropocentric research, which is what we wanted to do with the notion of "bodies of water", we go beyond the human. And so, in Prespes, I would say, we've seen them all, even on the way. We've seen thermal springs and we saw giant bodies of water -and I mean, obviously the lakes, the wetlands; we've seen running bodies of water -rivers, streams-; we've seen condensated bodies of water in suspension -clouds, fog, mist-; we've seen living bodies of waters, some of them animals, humans, lots of dogs, cats, pigs, endemic cows, pelicans, cormorans, many more; we've seen plants, weeds, lots of weeds, lichens in symbiosis with their trees, moss; we've seen fungi, a lot of mushrooms. We actually went on mushroom picking. A huge variety of bodies of water. Prespes for me looks a lot like a hotspot of symbiodiversity. There were a lot of symbiotic relationships going on there. Interestingly, though, I have seen no fish in this trip, which was kind of what I was primarily expecting.

What stays with you? What stayed with you when you came back?

We went there with some ideas and hypotheses, which a lot of them proved right, but some also proved wrong. I think one important finding that I keep or maybe two is that this is a place where I was expecting to see a lot and hear a lot of anxiety and solastalgia, because I'm thinking about climate change. Probably the lake is decreasing. Probably biodiversity is crushing. And actually, what I've seen there was a very beautiful soliphilia. Basically, people there -scientists, citizens, fishermen- collaborate to maintain the biotope of the lake. They decide together whether the level of the lake should be up or a bit further down. There's a lot of conflict of interest, obviously, but it's this community of people that have succeeded basically in saving a species, because the wild pelicans were disappearing and now in Prespes it's the biggest colony of the planet.

I didn't know that!

Yes, that was really interesting to me and maybe I would say that's the biggest thing that stays with me. And then obviously this thing with the border was really interesting. What does it mean and what's the difference between the watery part of the border and the land part? There's a lot of difference because you can differentiate the lands, you can plant different things and stuff, but the water -I mean, the Albanian water is the Greek water is the North Macedonian water.

Yes, how can you put a divider in the water?

You cannot and it's invisible. Obviously it's invisible. We've looked at the tripoint, but basically you see the Golem Grad islands and you know it's somewhere over there. But it makes no sense, you know. I mean, I cannot understand. You know, it's very fluid. It's not the way we think of a border usually.

Marc, we are reaching the end of our discussion, but before we say goodbye, I'm very curious to know what's next for you now?

I'm in a bit of a transitory phase, I would say. I think this research and writing that I'm doing for the publication revolving around this concept of watery self, watery emotions is really interesting to me and I might want to dig further into that in the future and to think about ways to intersect this with SumbioArt practices. That could be interesting. Formats and experiences. So, yeah, we'll see.

Well, it's been a great pleasure talking with you today and thank you so much for all the reflections and the energy that you brought in this room. I'm ready to go downstairs and pour you a glass of water.

Thanks a lot Myrto. It was lovely!

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of the series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.