Ivan Pecorari
PLAYFUL MATTERS - Research in transformative dialogues between humans and nonhumans
Summary
My research explores the transformative potential of relational embodied play practices to enhance receptivity and dialogue between humans and nonhumans actors in the design disciplines. The transdisciplinary and multifaceted concept of play allows experimenting with the possibility of dialogues with nonhumans beyond the traditional logocentric and representational epistemologies. Play as a performative open attitude is always in relation, in dialogue with the others. As an example of play practices, I design a game-like activity to foster dialogue and play using storytelling components, role play and live performance. Inspired by the tradition of live-action role-play games, the participants will explore by walking Richmond Park and its human and nonhumans habitants, physically portraying fictional characters with different mindsets and tools. The result will be a co-designed experimental embodied research method and play section generated by the distributed agency between humans and nonhumans. The embodied experience of the participants will be transformational in the journey to a new form of consciousness and knowledge that is collective, situated and partial.
INTRODUCTION
“The rays which stream through the shutter will be no longer remembered when the shutter is wholly removed. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity”
Henry David Thoreau (1854, Chapter 4)
The contemporary ecological and social crisis is a crisis of a specific civilisation model: the Western capitalist modernity. The origin of this culture, way of living and making can be traced to the Cartesian’s dualistic view that separates mind and body, nature and culture, positioning the rational man at the top of the chain of being. This position of command, once only guaranteed by a supposedly divine structure of the world, is now a reality. We have entered the Anthropocene, a period of radical transformations of the planet’s surface caused by humans. More than ever, our lives and responsibilities are intertwined with the planet’s future. Nonetheless, our relations with the exteriority are compromised and reduced to a narrow and utilitaristic interface. As Felix Guattari (2000, p.27) said, “Otherness (I’aterite’) tends to lose all its asperity.” We cannot see and be present to what is in front of us, before us. It is a crisis of attention. In the perennial search for objective truth, we do not recognise the beauty of ordinary life:
“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” (George Eliot, 1973, p.226)
In the face of this crisis, new ways of thinking are emerging. Contemporary to the ongoing expansion of the notion of humans from feminist, queer, decolonial and poststructuralist theorists, we are witnessing a renewed interest in nonhumans entities. Interdisciplinary, theoretical, and political fields of inquiry are focused on the immanent materiality of things and their relational vitality and agency. Knowledge and agency are no anymore exclusive to the human species. If the human is not an exceptional being at the centre of the world but an actor between actors in a flat ontology, what does it mean to be human in the 21st century? The world and its “otherness” is something to attend and pay attention. Tim Ingold (2017) highlighted that the verb to attend comes from the Latin ad- tendere, meaning ‘to stretch towards’. Reaching the other in a dynamic dialogue. The ability to be present in the world requires an open mindset:
“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945, pp. xvi-xvii).
