News_______________________________________
September 2022
Event!
Workshop 4: Designing for Co-habitation @ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
Friday, September 23, 2015, 10am-5pm
"With workshop 4 we are eager to highlight the importance of institutions that offer interpretative tools to the publics about socio-environmental and political formations shaping our worlds. The workshop proposes to think through the Montréal Insectarium on the issue of architectural design for humans and non-humans, teaching architecture under the current climate crisis, and museology and public education of natural history; issues which provide complexity for designing and professionalization. The CD team (Anousheh Kehar, Wilfried Kuehn, Gili Merin, Dubravka Sekulić) will be joined at the table by Ross Exo Adams, Joyce Hwang, Maxim Larrivée, Steve Lyons, and Malkit Shoshan."
May 2022
New two-part essay series on "Red Natural History" in Society & Space!
"Towards a Theory of Red Natural History," Society & Space (May 11, 2022, online).
Not An Alternative is working with Indigenous and non-Indigenous theorists, historians, ethnobotanists, geographers, landscape architects, artists, and activists to define and organize around a counter-tradition of natural history, a Red Natural History, which sees the world not as a wealth of natural resources available for possession or profit, but as a world in common that cannot be enclosed. The first text, "Coming Out the Other Side: Notes on an Eight-Year Expedition into Natural History," situates this inquiry within NAA’s history of practice, telling the story of how we came to believe it is necessary to name and organize around an alternate tradition of natural history. The second, "Towards a Theory of Red Natural History," delves into the question at hand, sketching out our collective’s provisional definition of Red Natural History.
April 2022
New Website - Words Are Monuments, a project by The Natural History Museum, featuring new texts and blog posts on renaming campaigns, monuments, and anticolonial struggle.
"The renaming campaigns taking shape across the country serve to unsettle long-naturalized settler-colonial claims on the land. They are part of a broader struggle to break from the system of relations that colonial place-names reinforce. As renaming campaigns struggle to undo the colonial map, they point toward another map of the world—a world in common, beyond and beneath the colonial enclosures. Like the resurgent efforts to topple and replace colonial and confederate statues, renaming campaigns activate the settler-colonial world as a terrain of struggle, demonstrating how oppressive monuments, including word-monuments, can be replaced and reclaimed as life-affirming sites for cultural resurgence and decolonial power-building."
April 2021
Upcoming event:
NO WORK, NO SHOP: Socio-Environmental Imagination and Pedagogies of Action
Friday, April 23, 11am–1pm EDT
"In celebration of Earth Day, this lab brings together leading environmental thinkers, artists, collectives, and activists who counter prevalent models of transnational, resource extractivist industries. Instead, they offer Buen Vivir, or “Good Living,” as an alternative approach to these developmental ideologies, rejecting the dynamics of extractivism in favor of ecological and communal principles.
Over the course of two days, the lab presents itself as an exchange of socio-environmental knowledge, strategies, and actions, developed in response to neo-extractivist models—a combination of neo-colonial, global exploitation of natural resources; the export of raw materials; and the devastating impact on both communities and the environment."
In conversation with Etcétera (Loreto Garín Guzmán and Federico Zukerfeld, Buenos Aires, Argentina) are artists Eduardo Molinari and Azul Blaseotto (La Dársena, Buenos Aires, Argentina); Steve Lyons, Director of Research, The Natural History Museum (Not an Alternative, Vashon, WA); and philosopher Brian Holmes and the artist Claire Pentecost (Environmental Laboratory, Chicago, IL).
February 2021
New book chapter:
"While museums monumentalize and objectify the historical violence of capitalism and settler colonialism, they are not only keepers of the dead. They are haunted by a spectre—the spectre of primitive communism, a collective mode of life that neither capitalism nor settler colonialism could fully manage, contain, or eradicate. This mode of life sustains a relation to the land that is fundamentally incompatible with the capitalist world."
November 2020
New essay in e-flux journal!
"Instead of spending our time proving the existence of fascism or the flourishing of capitalism, we would be better off promoting conspiracies about our own power. This does not mean exaggerating how many people show up to our rallies, but it does mean training ourselves to see the signs of our collective power in every site, symbol, and institution. The language in common is not a thing. It cannot be measured or verified as real or fake, true or false. Nor is it constructed through the democratic decision-making process, where we are meant to accept the lowest common denominator, to which the least number of people disagree. Rather, the language in common nominates language as a site of struggle. We struggle for our language by believing in it, committing to it, working with it, iterating on it, and insisting on the collective power expressed in it. When we become conspiracists of our own power, we see the power of our language. We see our negations as affirmations, our acts of disobedience as obedient to another law."
March 2020
Video now online: "Museum as Movement Infrastructure," a lecture for Not An Alternative at Barricading the Ice Sheets, Camera Austria, Graz on February 29, 2020.
"When the museum recognizes that its future is entirely dependent on the outcome of community-led struggles, it takes a side, affirming, supporting, and producing reciprocal relations between humans, animals, and the land. This museum does not simply “include” or give voice to frontline or impacted communities. Rather, it draws both a line of division—not just against the fossil fuel industry, but more broadly, against the extractive relation to the land that has governed the twin projects of capitalism and settler-colonialism for centuries—and a line of relation—mobilizing its resources to build solidarity between communities facing similar threats."
