Dennis Dizon: to tap, to lean, to twist, to warp

to tap, to lean, to twist, to warp

In August 2021, the Greek island of Evia was destroyed.

Fires broke out during an intense heatwave, burning approximately 50,000 hectares of (pine) forests in the northern region alone – the island’s resin-based economy shattered; the communities, devastated. And this – according to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) – is one of many other “extreme weather events” generated from increasingly warming temperatures.

Exploring other ways of approaching and articulating entanglements in planetary thinking, “to tap, to lean, to twist, to warp” followed several resin workers in Evia, documenting methods of resin extraction from the Aleppo pine, in the aftermath of the wildfires.

to tap

The field work in Evia extends my initial research on “tapping” in Central Spain. Also known colloquially as “bleeding”, pine trees ooze resin as a form of repair. For humans, pine resin is a natural antiseptic for cuts and wounds, and serves as a homoeopathic relief for anxiety when burned as incense. In commercial use, pine resin is an eco-alternative to products made with petroleum, such as inks, paints, and plastics, and in some cases can function as biofuel when extracted from a specific pine species. In Spain, market-driven “sustainability” has renewed interest in resin-tapping, offering a potential solution to the country’s rural exodus.

Despite its characteristic relief and presumed economic repair, however, the research examines an ecological paradox: pine resin is highly flammable, which can intensify the destructive spread of fires in forests and plots. The ongoing research looks at the paradoxes in climate change discourse at scale: how can humans nurture intimate relationships with the more-than-human under economic pressures and climate urgencies?

to lean

There are (semantic) tensions – in “relief” and “repair”, in “curing” and “healing” – when the act of tapping itself is a mode of (economic) extraction. Experimenting with dissonance as a methodology, the entry point to the research follows “the practice of cruising as an unexpected model for a new… ecological ethic more deeply attuned to our impersonal intimacies with the human, nonhuman, and elemental strangers that constitute both our environment and ourselves” (Ensor, 2017).

Shaping a “formation of new alliances… [from] unforeseen lines of force” through queer relationality (Foucault, 1984), the research points to the “impersonal intimacies” between resin worker and pine tree (Bersani, 2008). What, for example, is the potential of the erotic – or, perhaps, of play and pleasure – in planetary thinking? How do these lean in localized encounters of catastrophe?

Challenging human exceptionalism, the pines and surrounding flora would “tap” right back with blisters, cuts, and scratches on skins – tactile and casual reciprocities that speak quietly of feeling and contact. While in Evia, not knowing the Greek language, my encounters with both resin workers and pine trees relied heavily on non-verbal and multi-sensorial gestures, forcing communication beyond words: the scent of the pine’s “blood” and textures of its ultra-slow trickling, fingers pointing and heads nodding between subtle stares, and slight echoes of rustling from indeterminate distances. The potential became less the need to know and more the desire to share a condition – an inconspicuous relationality bound in suspicion yet tied in deep curiosity.

to twist

Beyond failures of governance or the absence of policy, the research assesses the multi-scalarity of planetary crisis. The fieldwork tests “nonlinear urgencies” – a tactical reconfiguration of linear progressivist time (as a structure of coloniality). Counter-constructing “urgency”, the research engages with the presence of resin workers in the forest as a system of alert for wildfires. Here, urgency is not imminence but, instead, an omnipresence: extractive labor intertwined with guardianship and care as strategies for survival.

Tracing movement(s) along slippery terrains, thorny flora, and imperceptible paths, the autonomous workers traverse in choreographies with the Aleppo, relying heavily on memory, rhythm, and pace. Time spent “tapping” each tree would be no more than a minute, swapping nonhuman partners in quick turns. Moving ahead with the camera, I played with chance, measurement, and uncertainty, in an attempt to predict their next steps from clues on the forest floor: peeling scabs and scars, and hanging plastic bags, as each tree waited patiently.

to warp

The research intends to return to both Greece and Spain, reconnecting with resin workers for an entire harvest season from prepping to collecting. Following through with place-based practices in the European Mediterranean, I plan to continue my immersion in rural climate conditions, in the conditions of work and working, in resin-based communities – all while under pressure from global heating. These practices will include further transdisciplinary investigations on wildfire prevention and forest management, and disaster risk and crisis response.

Using video and sound to document and annotate, the research aims to be a multi-channel moving image installation that plays with elements from close observations. In form, the work creates a “contra-landscape”, evoking the quiet death of modernist landscape art. Contra-landscapes blur representation; while seemingly soft and appearing romantic, the moving images rather assert a hard decentralization of knowledge – to map the contradictions, conflicts, and paralyses in environmentalism, and seek the unseen, hidden or disguised that permeate governance and policy, economy and infrastructure, techno-solutionism and -utopianism.

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“to tap, to lean, to twist, to warp” is part of “too cool to burn”, a long-term research project that reimagines climate sensitivity. In climate science, “climate sensitivity” is a modelling equation that measures how much the earth will warm based on increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Poetically (and paradoxically), climate sensitivity gives certainty to uncertainty.

Threading art with techno-science, “too cool to burn” surfaces dissonance through “tactical delusions”, articulating deep feelings on the peripheries of environmentalism between the Global North (US/Europe) and South (Southeast Asia). To date, the project encompasses a series of works and collaborations that delve into crisis poetics and nonlinear urgencies, including “Weather Stress Index” (2022), “hotboxx” (2023), “sumpong*” (2023), “Heat (Stress)” (2022), and “Scores for the Sensitive” (2021) to-be-published in “Flora Fantastic: From Orchidelirium to Eco-Critical Contemporary Botanical Art” (eds. Apostol and Thomas; Routledge, TBC). The research received an honorary mention as part of Collide International residency award of Arts at CERN (2020).