Public - Current Issue

Reflecting on the epistemological history of the microscope alongside theories of pluriversality and Anishinaabe mnidoo ontology, “Thinking Across Worlds” addresses the microscope as an instrument of decolonial worlding through two artworks created by the authors. We ask, “How can we think across worlds—microscopic and macroscopic, western and Indigenous, scientific and creative—to transform the present and the future, from ecological devastation and colonial violence to sustainability and decolonial justice?” The art works, titled Gathering and Resonance, are experiments in political ontology, through immersion in other worlds, other versions of reality. In these microscopic hydrospheres, Anishinaabe mnidoo reality prevails. Human viewers are dwarfed by the microscopic mnidoo that surround them. The place of humans is revealed to be a mere part within a multiplicity of relations. Our own interests are eclipsed by the dramas that play out among these minute forms of consciousness.

The ever-expanding accessibility and integration of digital technologies in everyday life offers artists the chance to forge new paths of creativity, expression, and engagement between themselves and participants. Digital artists Stephanie Dinkins, Morehshin Allahyari, Adrian Aguilera, and Skawennati demonstrate these affordances by reclaiming forgotten, untold, and silenced identities, stories, spaces, and cultures toward the design and creation of mutable, participatory, archival art projects focused on indigenous, marginalized, and non-western worldviews. Through design principles that foster collective teaching, learning, and creating, their work reflects the world as relational, unfixed, and multiple, wherein many perspectives and knowledges converge and materialize. This essay analyzes these artists’ works to illustrate the possibility for the existence of multiple worlds, the value of participatory design, and the sociopolitical significance of the archive to argue that digital technologies and networks can be creatively and thoughtfully deployed to decenter the dominant worldview of modernity by re-imagining ways of uncovering, preserving, organizing, and accessing cultural knowledge. By doing this, the institutional logics derived from colonial ideologies are disrupted and reflect a new ontology of knowledge acquisition in the form of collaboration, participation, and distributed agency, enabling the co-creation and engagement with multiple realities toward the making of a digital pluriverse.

These are select transcripts from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.

This is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.

Survivors of genocide living in diaspora face a discontinuity of history and memory that is forced upon them. Theirs is a history that hardly registers in the dominant discourses of history, trauma, and migration in the countries at either end of their journeys. It is not registered in their countries of origin because they left and it fails to make a mark in their countries of arrival because it is a past that is not shared by others. For women survivors of war living in diaspora, the politics of marginalization and an absence of representation of their losses complicate their ability to mourn. This paper offers a brief meditation on representations and framing of the trauma of women survivors of war living in diaspora, and the utility of academic and creative methods, namely Research-Creation, that allow us a re-framing of the narrative by creating a space for feminist solidarity and remembering.

This is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.

Belle Park was established in 1973 in Kingston, Ontario, on a former landfill built on a wetland. Over the past three years, the SSHRC-funded Belle Park Project has been employing Research-Creation and community and interdisciplinary collaboration to engage with this small but highly complex space, whose most prominent feature is a totem pole carved by incarcerated Indigenous men in a local prison. The land is contaminated, but despite this the park is a rich natural habitat, and it is also the location of an encampment of unhoused people. Many existing models of harm and resistance do not capture the frictions and possibilities we experience in this site. “Belle Park Pluriverses” offers poetry and found poetry, along with photographs, to reveal and trouble binaries such as wild v. domestic, dry v. wet, beautiful v. ugly, care v. neglect, garbage v. means of life.

Photos by Dorit Naaman and Laura J. Murray.

This article explores the sensory and experimental practice of three recent eco-films, Geographies of Solitude, vulture, and Lichen, all of whose formal strategies are oriented around a desire to recalibrate perception of the natural world and to attune spectators to the diversity and proliferating life of “other-than-human relatives.”

This hybrid environmental creative nonfiction invites the reader to consider a small, contaminated patch of land tucked inside an industrial neighborhood in Montréal (Tiohtià:ke). By exploring the multiscalar geographies and histories of this site—now a municipal phytoremediation testbed—I seek to reframe the notion of remediation against the extractive and colonial logics that underpin Western technoscientific imaginaries and practices of healing. Thus, I will address the “pluriverse” as a coalescing of multiple and incommensurable scales of living and non-living, political and affective, and social and economic processes that define a seemingly desolate urban wasteland (Povinelli 2016). Through photography and repeated visits, I consider ancient Carboniferous worlds and persistent toxicants (Hird 2013); Suncor refineries and a neighborhood; soil (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015), trees, bacteria (Hird and Yusoff 2019), and those who inhabit and continue to care for this place.

The Odeimin Runners art collective seek paths to create work outside of colonial institutions and systems and instead think about what it would mean to mutually nurture communities and relationships. In our practice, we think through and weave together Indigenous and Black/Caribbean philosophies such as the teachings of the odeimin (strawberry) plant, Dolleen Manning’s Mnidoo—worlding, and the relational thinking of Glissant. Through community engagement and the development of an online story map incorporating process cinema methods, Odeimin Runners reflect an Indigenous worldview of All Our Relations which intuits a pluriversal world. Bringing together stories from different cultures and ways of being and experiencing the world, we make connections across time and dimensions. The hope in this “acolonial” work, on the outskirts of colonial frameworks, lies in producing nourishment that contributes to the flourishing of the multiple, interconnected worlds.

These are select transcripts from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.

This hybrid article offers a glimpse into a plurality of Indigenous worldviews in the context of the contemporary art exhibition Arctic/ Amazon that took place at the Power Plant in Toronto, Canada in 2022. The article highlights the important connections between knowledge and culture in artworks by artists who translate practice, materiality, and knowledgeways into contemporary interventions.

This is a select transcript from a moderated panel titled “Making Worlds in the Pluriverse” held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2023 at York University in Toronto.

The concept of practice frequently occupies a central explanatory role in pluriversal theorists’ accounts of what constitutes a world or reality. Often, the many worlds that populate the pluriverse are described as immanent creations of practice, the pluriverse’s multiple realities as products of interrelated social and material practices. Although liberating in many ways, pluralizing reality through the concept of practice also risks perpetuating certain limitations on reality’s expansibility. As a result, the theme of practice in pluriversal theory risks obscuring the potential and the urgency of the pluriverse’s inclusion of worlds that would benefit greatly from its redistribution of the real and yet are not best understood strictly in terms of practice. This article considers the world of prison abolition in this light, connecting not only the importance of, but also the reality and ontological weight attributed to, imagination in prison abolitionist work with the ontological expansiveness of pluriversal theory.

Called Walls of Welcome, Philip Cote—an Anishinaabe-Algonquin artist and spiritual elder—created a large-scale panorama inside the interior walls of the Roncesvalles United Church’s sanctuary in late 2021. Located in the west end of Tkaronto/Toronto—and believed to be the first Indigenous art mural inside a church in Turtle Island/North America (if not globally)—the wall painting visually narrates the Ojibway creation story and alludes to “The Eighth Fire.” The latter stems from an Anishinaabe prophecy that we (human beings) can unite in our shared humanity. Walls of Welcome gives us all a message from the pluriverse and a spiritually fluid lens for seeing our foundational stories. My paper explores how this mural brings communities together through the power of art and builds a new world for trust-building and healing that epitomizes truth and reconciliation.

Today, the internet is often understood as a monolithic entity. This depiction is increasingly inaccurate and needs to be radically re-examined. The pluriverse concept of the internet examines local and international models of community building in interdependent but separated digital contexts. Drawing on Indigenous knowledge systems some articulations of the pluriverse describe a universe of separate, but connected and interdependent worlds, understood with reference to the concept of communities. Unlike today’s internet-based communities, organized in specific siloed venues and forums where users with specific interests rarely face opposition or differences of opinion and where these interests are constantly reinforced by recirculated data and opinions, the pluriverse offers an imaginative frame where we can imagine a series of ‘internets’, made up of localized networks, community-driven social spaces, open source data sharing, and truly collaborative production at a replicable scale. This paper presents an exploration of the potential for pluriversal “internets.”

In this article we share stories that are still developing out of our design studio.

By designing for the pluriverse we were inspired to create alternative and future imaginaries to counter the humancentric one-world notion. Learning that there was not just one story, but instead the stories were infinite and eternal, we sought to counter the frictions of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism that have shaped the world we now reside in. We explored this by examining how Indigenous ways of knowing, land connectivity, and decoloniality empower the poetics of experimentation and design. As instructors we share our journey with our students. Three stories by students highlight this journey into the pluriverse.

Underbelly, by Iz Öztat, is an exhibition that ran from February to May at Zilberman Istanbul, and featured themes from across the artist’s oeuvre musing on queer sculpture and art history through a variety of media, including video, installation, drawing and writing. This review examines and critiques the role of the artist’s biography and identity in the production and archiving of their work, foregrounding issues of cultural heritage and personal intimacy despite divisions of nationality, gender, and other limitations to the canonization of non-Western perspectives on the fringes of Europe. Öztat’s alter ego, ghost and muse, the character Zisan, parallels her own narratives of exile, as the fictive daughter of an Armenian photographer who flees Istanbul in 1915 and whose presence embodies forgotten victims of genocide, patriarchy and nationalism.

Linet Sanchez creates miniature buildings and rooms she then documents through photography. These fictitious spaces are photographed to appear realistic and monumental in scale. Before knowing this, though, viewers can project their memories and lived experiences onto these constructed environments, influenced by Sanchez’s use of materials, lighting, and perspective. However, the illusion is not perfect, and the longer one engages with the art, hints emerge about its artifice. The way viewers interact with these photos emulates how information and memories can be misconstrued and re-presented as real.