Fleshworks: 'Consent Not to be A Single Body'
Transcript
Borgo Mezzanone is an informal settlement inhabited by African refugees working in the agricultural fields in the Puglia region of southern Italy. The settlement consists of two parts: a migrant camp run by the Italian government and an informal settlement that runs, linearly, along the runway of a decommissioned airport, close to the city of Foggia.
Borgo Mezzanone is a part of the Global South, i.e. not a specific geography but an archipelago of places also nested in the territories of the Global North whose socio-spatial dynamics are the outcome of extractive phenomena, of racial conflict, of conditions of subalternity and exploitation [1].
The settlement is nestled within a rural space shaped by extractive rural economies (tomato cultivation) based on cheap migrant labor. The relationships between the settlement with the surrounding territory are defined by sequences of fields and roads that become, as you approach the settlement, more and more ‘residual’ and hard to cross. Spaces become increasingly uncanny, opaque, paved with the ‘rejection’ of the presence of the village by the local society, as well as with a lot of waste and debris. You proceed uncertainly, then suddenly, you are already inside something. You are already inside it. This space can be interpreted as a sequence of uncertain lines, superimposed on each other. As if it were the coast of an island. This coast is a threshold, a contact zone marked by incessant negotiations, a figure of proximity, divisions and endless movements: an opaque membrane where one can observe the possible relationships within the living and social and rural ecologies of this particular context in which different populations coexist.
The territory around Borgo Mezzanone is a flat space. Its agrarian landscape is marked by regular and repetitive extensive cultivation patterns, spotted by recent foundation rural settlements. Visually speaking, the landscape is very dilated, dazzling, but signed by the presence of uncanny and introverted spaces. In this particular ecology different social groups coexist: Italian farm owners, Italian rural laborers, city people who have moved to live in the countryside, and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa who speak in French or English.
I sound better since you cut my throat! Borgo Mezzanone, a place of collision between race and production processes in rural areas marked by the regime of fear, can be a place of reparation. If the struggle between races is what defines the ‘colony’, our question asks how to make the spaces of the racialised scene a place for the reassembly of broken ties, of wounded bodies and broken subjectivities? What if we detach not only from restoration but also from the very idea of the original, of open, transparent interactions between different social ecologies? Then, making (designing) and repair are inseparable, devoted to one another, and suspended between and besides themselves.
Our design proposal: the redefinition of the Borgo Mezzanone contact zones between the settlement and the surrounding agrarian spaces as ‘adversarial infrastructures’. The sense of the locution ‘adversarial infrastructures’ is partially borrowed by the reflections of Anna Hengelhardt (2020). She uses this term to subvert conventional understandings of infrastructures as connectors, as linkage devices functioning as counterpoints to walls or borders [2]. We do not look for traditional spatial strategies of reparation to extractivist violence that usually attempts to domesticate, to make bodies and places transparent, legible and well connected. In Borgo Mezzanone a ‘glitch’ has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, the revelation of an infrastructural ‘failure’. The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is necessary for any form of sociality, but our interest is in how that extension can be non-reproductive, generating new forms from within ‘brokenness’ and ‘opaqueness’ beyond the exigencies of transparency and legibility [3]. What we want to ask, then, is how we can define forms and modalities of coexistence from brokenness and failure. This is what with Fred Moten we would call a ‘non-original repair’, as I sound better since you cut my throat! [4] Thinking about adversarial infrastructures, means, then, how to conceive different fleshworks. The term ‘flesh’ is used by Kathryn Yussof (2018) to open up critical questions about the sense and meaning of flesh of the Anthropocene. What color is the flesh of geology? [5]
Look closely through the Borgo Mezzanone’s borders. Nobody’s there and everybody’s there. Here, different people interact, moving in the opacity among the trash and shrubs. Opacity is not a negative condition but, as the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant affirms, it is what protects the different: opacity offers conditions of resistance, aversion to exploitation, where new possibilities for life, new economies, can flourish. Economic activities that enable the strengthening of informal economies that foreshadow the exit from the exploitation of rural extractive economies such as small craft workshops, shared horticultural spaces, creation of community support networks.
Adversarial infrastructure: a forest. In the opaque, feral woods prompt new new feelings: protection, intimacy, absence. In the forest a new kind of sensation becomes common: a feeling through others - feeling oneself through others’ bodies.
We insist on the use of these terms: body and flesh. We talk about the body not as a ‘cosification’ or objectification of the human, in fact, we mean just the opposite! In Italian literature on the relationships between body and space, the body is often conceived as the channel of transit between the space and the project. We insist on a critical reading of space by looking at the way it touches the body, which in so doing acquires a dimension beyond the single, wounded, measured or emancipated body. Body and flesh have a public, political dimension [6].
‘Consent not to be a single being’ is a remark taken from Édouard Glissant. In our reflections the term ‘consent’ describes a specific condition [7]. It refers to the collective inheritance of passage of bodies across the Mediterranean sea and the necessity of understanding that experience as a spatial production phenomena and as a possible design topic. Glissant’s philosophical research focuses on issues such as relation, opacity, and difference (rather than transparency, and unity). Glissant is interested in the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. According to Glissant, socio-spatial practices must concern heterogeneous becoming and an opening onto multiplicity. There is little room for a traditional Western representative model based on transparency and consensus among a bunch of self-enclosed and supposedly rational subjects. It is then, precisely, the kind of entangled differences suggested by Glissant’s consent not to be a single being that are important in order to conceive, in spatial design terms, coexistence strategies in rural extractive contexts such as Borgo Mezzanone.
Opacity is noise.
And noise is a moving proposition, fundamentally a multiplicity. So our task is to listen to it without striving to reduce it to a singular, transparent and coherent phenomenon. Rather, we must remain with its opacity and fugitive movements.This entails listening also to what we cannot hear but might hear: vibrational movements, resonances and persistent echoes. We are looking for design strategies where listening to difference, to the opacity produced by the collective noise that crosses these places, alludes to new forms of action and intervention.The Foggia rural space is multiple, obscure and vague. It is a creole space. It is therefore necessary to think about this territory as an archipelagic space governed by systems of relations and partial connections, which takes the right to opacity seriously. The archipelago is a metaphor for a decentralised model of relationships between islands, as well as between ideas, imaginaries, spatial production practices and ecologies. Here, every constitutive aspect of reality is fragmented but interconnected, not subsumed into an absolute universal in which elements are put to value, made productive, consumable or interchangeable. Adopting such a perspective allows one to reason about what Marylin Strathern calls ‘partial connections’, through which different subjects, collectives, representations and spatial ecologies are placed in relationships that are never totally symmetrical or fully integrated. It is a condition marked by heterogeneous dynamism in which ambiguity, opacity and fiction make it possible to interweave different interests, forms of space use and values, according to provisional negotiations and adaptations [8].These relations or connections are uncertain, fragile, marked by a constant repositioning of actors and regulated by a series of interfaces corresponding to membranes, to spatial and epistemic ecologies in which discontinuities (disconnections) are managed through practices such as deferral, accommodation, negotiation, selective appropriation, distancing or absenteeism.
Noise is therefore a heterogeneous possibility.
Footnotes:
- See: Camilla Rondot. Abitare l’opacità. Gli spazi rurali di Borgo Mezzanone, LetteraVentidue, Siracusa, 2022; Elena Barbaro, Borgo Mezzanone, la baraccopoli che si autogoverna, in: Terre di frontiera, 2018, Ossopensante APS, Roma.
- A colonial regime, Hengelhardt affirms, is always defined by producing free movement for some subjects and containment of others. The concept of adversarial Infrastructure, then, aims to capture certain logics of contemporary mobility regimes where the mobility of any actor is not guaranteed. This kind of logistics tries to render certain social groups immobile while disguising political repression as a set of technical or economic limitations. The term ‘adversarial’, as we're using it, has a positive meaning: something antagonistic to dominant powers. Adversarial infrastructures can reduce the mobility of certain subjects but can also work as protection devices, as ‘opaque’ spatial devices fragmenting the homogeneity of extractive territories Identifying spaces of habitability and protection. See: Anna Hegelhardt, Adversarial Infrastructrures. The Crimean Bridge. Available in: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/adversarial-infrastructure-crimean-bridge. Accessed, 30 June 2021.
- According to Berlant (2016), ‘structure’ is what organizes transformation and ‘infrastructure’ is what binds us to the world. As spatial designers, our task, then, is to define new figure of transition that alter the harder and softer, tighter, and looser infrastructures of socio-spatial reproduction. Thinking about structures and infrastructures for coexistence, what we recast is the sense and meaning of terms such ‘transparence’ and ‘indipendence’ in social life and spatial design practices, searching for opaque, interrupted and dependant relationalities intended as new foundational qualities of coexistence. See: Lauren Berlant. On the Inconvenience of other people, Duke University Press, London, 2022.
- See: Fred Moten, “Nobody, Everybody (Prayer, Prepare, Repair),” Harold Mendez: but I sound better since you cut my throat, Three Walls, Chicago, 2014. Available in: https://haroldmendez.com/filter/but-I-sound-better-since-you-cut-my-throat/Fred-Moten-but-I-sound-better-since-you-cut-my-throat. Accessed 15 May 2021.
- If part of the project of the Anthropocene is, as Yusoff affirms, to geologize the social and to socialize the geologic, then she argues that the extractive desires and designs of Westerners supported the redefinition of blackness as an inhuman subject position. Geologic languages codes and logics move across territory, relation, and flesh These logics transformed bodies into flesh that could be literally mined for their productive properties. See: Kathryn Yusoff, A billion black anthropocenes or none, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2018. See also: Mark Rifkin, Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation, Duke University Press, London, 2020.
- Main reference is: Cristina Bianchetti, Corpi tra spazio e progetto. Mimesis, Milano, 2020.
- “Consent not to be a single being” is the s translation of Édouard Glissant’s locution consent à n’être plus un seul. The term consent is for Glissant an ecological disposition, a way of approaching what he calls the “poetics of relation.” See: Fred Moten in Harney & Moten 2013,154. See: Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Studies. Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe, 2013. See also: Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1997; Édouard Glissant, One World in Relation: Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara, in: Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art 28, 2022 (Spring), pp. 4–19.
- Marilyn Strathern, Partial Connections, Altamira Press, New York, 2005.