On wordings and worldings - A conversation with Tristan Bera

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 Tristan Bera. Tristan is an artist and writer whose practice includes curating, critical writings, film making, and performances. He studied fine arts, aesthetics, history of contemporary art and political science. He is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement III, which has a collective research focus on the notion of ecologies. Today, we will talk about the intersection of art, ecology and technology taking as a starting point his research interest and practice in experimental philosophy, intertextuality and cinematography. Tristan, welcome to Pali-Room!

Hello Myrto and thank you very much for hosting. I am more than happy to be in the palimpsest room for this conversation. You just mentioned my interest in intertextuality. I would say that in my case, intertextuality is even more a critical practice than an interest, and even more an obsessive state of mind than a practice. I have the impression that somehow, I am part of an ecosystem of texts and films with which I am in an ongoing conversation. It can be thought as a mental prison from which you can't escape, if you have a modernistic or monadic approach of the creative process, but it can also be accepted, as a matter of fact, a matter of interconnectedness, if you apprehend the creative process ecologically as a living organism responding to other living organisms.

Well, thank you Tristan for being part of this conversation and I'm looking forward to hear more. In your work you employ different genres and formats that range from site-specific, immersive, intimate environments to participative events through political pamphlets, public readings, dinners, parties, an open-air festival, fanzines, critical and fictional writings. Through your writing practice, I can see a clear interest in language and of course its politics, but I also sense your interest in semiotics and in a meta-language, especially in the way that you treat images. What is the thread that weaves all of these different forms together?

Throughout the years, since 2010, indeed I have been experimenting with various formats. If I look backwards onto these artistic experiments, I feel that, first, they were all very context-based –my practice has never been studio-based–, they have always been anchored in a specific cultural context that offered them a meaning of some sort. This context-based approach of my practice is probably one of its political aspects –to be rooted in a situation and grounded in a larger ecology. I also feel that they were attempts to give form to a certain reflection on knowledge itself. How does knowledge cross disciplines, going from literature to cinema, from politics to the visual arts? How do concepts and ideas embody themselves into cultural fields and visual or textual representations? In fact, I am truly interested in the specificity of these languages and how they can be translated from one field to another. When books intervene within films, when political signs are displayed into fictional writings, when a script for a film scene is given in a novel... Finding the cinematic dimension of literature or the literary dimension of cinema is a way to bridge cultural phenomena. It is an apparently playful game, but it is also a way to display the multidimensional aspect of a text. Representations offered by literature and cinema have always been primarily my access to the comprehension of the world and, for example, but mainly, the ecological crisis.

I understand that you're talking about all the entanglements that characterize our life and the ecological crisis is an entangled phenomenon. It is a political, economic as much as a social crisis and looking through your previous work I stumbled upon one of your statements, which I found rather intriguing, where you mentioned that the ecologic crisis is also cinematographic as cinema coincides historically and in a critical and descriptive way with the development of the Anthropocene. Can you elaborate on that?

You are referring to the synopsis of a film-conversation I co-made with Brazilian filmmaker Ana Vaz, which is for me –if we're going biographical–, the first concrete outcome of a reflection about how the ecological crisis is narrated and represented and, at the same time, that is also directly addressing the issues inherent to this world transition. This film, 'A Film, Reclaimed', was commissioned in 2015 by the Experimental School of Art and Politics, founded by philosopher Bruno Latour in Sciences Po Paris, which Ana and I were both members of, in preparation for the Paris climate conference. So, on the occasion of our degree, Bruno Latour proposed to organize a pre-enactment of the Conference of the Parties, before it happened in Paris, to implement and stage some of his signature ideas on a theatrical scale and to give a positive answer, somehow, to the crisis of representation and representativity, which these international conferences are confronted with. These kinds of conferences are traditionally preceded, introduced, or promoted beforehand by an opening film that stages the challenges to solve in a very naive and optimistic fashion. We –Ana and I– decided to make a film according to this genre, but a film that presents alternative narratives and decolonizes representations sustained by the world organizations. So, for example, the use of diplomatic languages (French and English) was a formal strategy to address the restrictions of the conference rules. In this light, how not to think that this sort of international conference is already doomed to fail as the majority of the parties are submitted to the linguistic rules of the major polluters? However, in the film, as an infiltrating strategy, other languages emerge, parasite or disturb the diplomatic French/English storytelling, like Brazilian, Thai and even other forms of communication such as the drums, the buzzing of bees, the cry of crows, the growl of a gorilla, and finally even cinema as a foreign language itself and a dystopian system of images, words and representations.

This film is a highly artificial collage of images as concepts, texts as images... It is also a meta-film by being a critique of the medium in itself. Hollywood films are the ultimate medium of the 20th century Anthropocene propaganda by promoting the social, political and economic values of the capitalistic system. The film suggests capitalism as an alien system, a system that is not “natural” as it seems to make “us” believe, a system that consistently ruptures and ravages “our” relationship to Earth. The use of found footage was the very foundation of the film from the beginning. We didn't want to produce any images, but only work with existing ones and caption or comment upon them or talk over them in an effort to recycle, –in the sense of giving them a new cycle, a new meaning–, and hence reclaim the meaning of these images as critical images.

After this experience in Sciences Po, Ana and I formed the collective COYOTE with three other members of the school, coming from different backgrounds and having different practices, Elida Høeg, Nuno da Luz and Clemence Seurat, to continue and expand this research on languages and representations by developing a lexicon based on ideograms and pictograms. Without offering univocal schemes, but, on the contrary, by offering a monstrous, a chthonian –to use the term cherished by philosopher Donna Haraway–, ambiguous, estranged, humorous suggestion for co-habitation, that is not simple at all. A cohabitation that resists the global or any pre-established scales used by Western modernity. The figure of the Coyote as opposed to the gaze of the white Western male artist Joseph Beuys has been a key model for us to rethink our approach to artistic practice in a perspectivist way, as developed by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

Little by little, with the help of anthropologists, my works have been focused on the question of becoming rather than on the question of production. Ecology has become a topic in the course of my work, but also a format in my practice. That is to say, that it seems to me too much of a paradox to develop a discourse on ecology by using means of production. There's a fatal equation unsolved in my work, which is how to produce forms and contents without producing anything. But is it possible to create without harming? Maybe the response is situated in worlding, creating kinships within the frame of collaboration and in the course of conversations. Maybe it's the most fertile way to make our soul, our consciousness, our awareness grow in a more and more devastated world.

That was a long answer!

Sorry!

I understand that you're experimenting with different forms and languages. Actually, language is a form of representation per se and by invading and mixing these different languages, you're trying to find other languages to represent the problem. Let's talk a bit about The School of Infinite Rehearsals and how you came to that. Your practice is very much rooted in collaborations and conversations with others and in these dire times we are all living in the urgency of intersectionality and inclusivity that collective practice put forth is an undeniable fact. However, I'd still like to ask you what prompted you to apply for The School of Infinite Rehearsals and what kind of new languages did you hope for or actually saw emerging from this six-week collective research program?

Undeniably, collaborations and conversations, collective practices in general are the very medium to create and implement intersectionality and inclusivity. I remember this phrase from 1976 by feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray. "If we continue to speak the same language to each other, we will reproduce the same story." In this working group, in the working group of The School of Infinite Rehearsals, I once again experienced the necessity for the practices to be mixed and cross-bred, if you allow me to use a botanical term. I may be from a certain background, visual arts and philosophy, I may speak a certain vocabulary, but being in contact with another realm, another language, another constellation of references helps to expand the comprehension of the world. For example, Lito Skopeliti, who is a trained facilitator in affective listening, nonviolent communication and people's assemblies, offered to our group an incredible set of tools to exchange ideas and make decisions collectively. Her presence really improved my way of being with and to others and this ephemeral collaboration with her had a strong effect on me. In my application one year ago, I had written that there are no native species, but at the same time they are only native species, as we/"the plants" can grow everywhere. I meant that I may be from somewhere, but a new context can transport me somewhere else. Is it resilience or transformation? I believe more into transformation than into resilience, because I'm not afraid of questioning all my prejudices, of starting everything from scratch and of entering a process of self-transformation.

I think this also ties very much to the idea behind The School of Infinite Rehearsals and how we can constantly become together and experiment and be comfortable to live in uncertainty. Talking about the ecologic crisis, which is a phenomenon that disrupts us all, in your group you collectively decided to focus your research specifically on water and in many instances you also adopted the metaphor of water bodies to refer to each other. Water is so fluid and borderless that I think serves as a great metaphor for how one's individual practice merges with a collective one and I would be interested to know what water quality resonates with you the most.

As a very heterogeneous group of practitioners from diverse backgrounds, we needed to find a common fieldwork that could be at the intersection of our individual interests and research. I have always been drawn to the notion of commons in itself and particularly the loss of commons. Water management is one of the hottest collective issues of our times, but at the same time it's a daily and individual problem as well. I remember an interview of writer Anaïs Nin in the 1960s or 1970s, really at the end of her life, in which she recollects an encounter with Marcel Duchamp and says that she, along with him, prefers to focus on small things because big things are like precipices. That could be for me an interesting definition of ecology. If some major problems must be addressed or articulated on a molecular level, our actions should focus on immediate daily issues with which we can have an immediate physical and mental relationship. Water is around us, but it is also within us. It appeared to us like an incredible field to explore on many levels, from macro to micro, from a political level to an intimate one, through sciences, lifestyle, etc. So, our collective research coalesced around water, bodies of water, water systems, qualities and sparked by researcher on environmental humanities Astrida Neimanis and her amazing book "Bodies of Water". We were also inspired by Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiotics. Our research group identified watery ecologies as a medium, a model, a guide for finding ways in which individual practices can come together into collective formats. Within this framework, my personal interest focused more precisely on borders, non-borders and infiltration, using the stream of consciousness as a format and the reflecting milieu of the lake as a reflecting backdrop.

On this topic, I will read you a short quote by Marcel Proust from "In search of lost time", that refers to the lake as a metaphor for what is not yet –because it was not conceptualized at the time– the Freudian unconscious. Let me read this quote. Marcel Proust is "speaking". "I saw a perfect example of that portentous language, so unlike the language we habitually speak, in which emotion deflects what we had intended to say and causes to emerge in its place an entirely different phrase, issued from an unknown lake wherein dwell these expressions alien to our thoughts which by virtue of that very fact, reveal them." So, I was really particularly thrilled when we collectively decided to go to Prespa to experience a lake-form body of water and all its related components.

I heard that you had a very sensual and affective experience in Prespa.

What did you hear?

You tasted the water and I would like to know how does the Prespa water taste like?

Yes, I dipped my hand into the lake and I tasted the water. Frankly, to be really honest, Prespa tastes very wishy washy.

What does that mean?

It means like it's nothing, like it has really no taste. But, as Grace Jones says, "you don't have to be sweet to be good". Our experience was situated beyond the taste of the lake. All jokes aside, I won't recommend anyone to follow my example. One of our conversation partners, Stefanos Levidis, a legal researcher collaborating with Forensic Architecture and who is very familiar to this region having studied many different aspects of its ecosystem, was quite bewildered by my try. So, it's not a thing to do, because of the chemicals and so on.

Tell us a bit more about the trip to Prespes. You departed from Athens to conduct onsite research on Prespes. What did you find there?

In these times of lockdown, police is everywhere, not only to check your passport, but your health records and your authorizations. So firstly, I felt overly privileged to be able to travel at this moment and to interact in a totally different and remote environment. Secondly, and consequently, I felt like an absolute alien to this region. We were the only "transplants" in the region, which is normally affected by, even overwhelmed with tourism at this time of the year –we were during the "Kathara Deftera", the Clean Monday. We were in direct interaction with the "locals" and I put this term in brackets, for I don't really appreciate using it. As the sole foreigners in the surroundings, we were actually very visible to them and we were probably representing a disturbing presence coming from the city, bringing germs from the city. So far, there were no cases of COVID-19 in the region. Thirdly and finally, the question of the liquid border seems absolutely striking to me there: the Great Prespa lake is shared by Greece, North Macedonia and Albania. This lake is one of the oldest in the world. It's like two million years old, but the borders, as they are now, have been established around one hundred years ago. So, we realized in front of this "lakescape" how the history of humanity is on a totally different scale than the history of Earth –by the way what a bad name for a planet that is made of 80 percent of water. So, yes, in front of the lake, you can realize that borders are a construct totally produced by nations. Of course, this construct created visible socio-historical results that are totally tangible on the land and we can't be indifferent to these realities. But, maybe acknowledging both constructs and results would be a way to overpass the fatalistic issue of the nation-state.

To wrap it up on our collective experience, I wanted to read a poem that we worked on collectively with James Bridle.

I haven't heard this poem.

We worked on it on the last day of the residency, so I hoped that none of us had already read it to you. This poem sums up the whole six weeks, including our field trip to Prespa and our transformation into "bodies of water", which is not a transformation per se, but in reality, a rephrasing, a liquid storytelling, so to speak. So, the poem.

Who we are.

A group of seven bodies of water

From different reservoirs and aquifers

Filtered and released into an aquarium in a Mediterranean port city.

For a moon and a half, we floated together.

Navigating an ocean, a notion, the same everywhere and all the time.

We sought a common horizon porous to one another, not a coherent mass,

But an infinity of forms.

What we did.

We took to the waters and we took the waters

We talked, tasted, touched and tuned-turned into water

Water led us to Prespa

precipitating our ideas and transpiring our encounters.

In the stream we encountered Medea,

We bathed in the sea, we drove through snow, fog and rain.

We became wet.We became buoyant.

The lakes were divided, but uniform,

still and disturbed, blue and green and gray, clear and muddy, deep and shallow,

reflectors of the changing sky and everything around.

Human and non-human animals drifted along with us

flushed with firewater, we danced and sang.

What we learned

We found new confluences and ways of flowing.

Our thinking has become watery through absorbing and sharing thoughts and emotions.

From solid to liquid

the qualities of water leaked into our movement.

We learned to apprehend the place through its waters.

Water taught us to understand symbiosis.

Water attuned our senses in new ways.

Now, close your eyes and feel the multiple hands, the multiple eyes, the multiple I's

like…

That's a great, great way to summarize your experience, I think.

It's very hard to write collectively. Lots of decisions were made. You can imagine.

I can imagine, but going back to the issue of language that I introduced in the beginning, you found a common language that encapsulates your tangible and intangible experiences together.

Probably.

I'm also very glad that you mentioned the context around the trip. First of all, the privileges and the difficulties you found along the way, but also the way that you managed to handle the situation and be there together and go forward with your research focus and hearing from you it's been a real pleasure. We are reaching the end of our discussion today and I have a last question for you. I want to know what's next for you.

Before joining The School of Infinite Rehearsals, I was in residency at La Becque in Switzerland, actually also by the shores of a lake, lake Geneva, with the collective COYOTE. We were invited there to work on our anthology, which will hopefully gather the sum of six years of research and browse some of our major themes, such as CONTAMINATION AS COLLABORATION, FICTIONING IS A WORLDING, TOWARDS A WARM COMMON. So, I will keep on working on this book that will be made of new and pre-existing texts, as well as a visual iconography. I'm also part of an ensemble that prepares a stage direction at the Achilleion of Corfu, but the global situation is still uncertain and I guess we should all go with this uncertain flow. I could finish this nice interview with a quote of Virginia Woolf –also cited by James Bridle in "New Dark Age"– "The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be."

Thank you, Tristan!

Thank you very much!

It's been a real pleasure talking with you and although we used the same language today to speak, I hope we managed to plant some seeds for new languages to come out of this. Thank you so much!

Thank you!

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. The 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.