Representation

From H&D Publishing Wiki

representation

Feral Atlas (Lili Carr & Feifei Zhou)

Feral Atlas sometimes uses the term ‘stories’ to refer to how we tell things and so form knowledge. Our use of the term is to open up a discussion of genre. What kind of storytelling is most appropriate for the Anthropocene?

Feral Atlas is designed as an exploratory and open journey through an assembled polyphony of materials. Hand-painted watercolours, hydrophone recordings, molecular diagrams, scientific charts, sketches, sound art, and maps made from satellite data and calculated projections sit alongside scientific writing, autoethnography, memoir, poetry, biological modelling, music, video poems, and song. Each element provides an account of the Anthropocene in its own right. Yet when they come together, these diverse elements perform an iterative, multisensuous, and multiperspectival account of how imperial and industrial infrastructures make Anthropocene worlds.

Feral Atlas tries to forge an aesthetic that asks readers to linger over the gathered materials; to tell stories so beautifully that people stop to pay attention to what is going on, and to hold their attention to the scenes of action in which feral ecologies play out. Presenting materials with such absorbing detail, passion, and care that readers might become curious to know more, and in doing so become attuned, able to navigate and orientate themselves within a multidisciplinary array of representational modes.

 

During the symposium Making Matters: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times, we (Feral Atlas members Feifei Zhou and Lili Carr) conducted a workshop in noticing feral effects in the area where you live. A screenshot of our collective online map of collated observations is reproduced overleaf.


Feral Atlas is curated and edited by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou. It can be accessed online at Stanford University Press: www.feralatlas.org.
A collective work by the participants of Feral Atlas as a Verb at Making Matters Symposium: Collective Material Practices in Critical Times (Het Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, 21 Nov 2020) and at Driving the Human Opening Festival (ZKM Karlsruhe, 22 Nov 2020).