MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS
Creating Counter-Environments for Regenerative Re-Imagination in the Capitalocene by Celebrating Embodiment, Intra-Agency,
and Multi-Species Entanglement
since 2024 and ongoing
The works created under the umbrella of MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS are responses to and challenges of my feelings of intimidation and helplessness in the face of accelerating climate change and environmental degradation on the one hand and the progressive estrangement from each other and the world of which we are a part through expanding digitization and increasingly invasive AI on the other. The project takes inspiration from the interdisciplinary edited collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, and is further informed by the posthumanist approach to "spacetimematter" developed in Meeting the Universe Halfway, as well as the intermedia research project Spectacular Data: Fascism and the Coded Present. In stepping beyond my comfort zone, I create visual counter-environments that open space for regenerative re-imagination amid the multiple toxic symptoms of capitalism.
The works presented here reflect the different approaches I am following in a non-linear mode of creation. They are prototypes of a growing body of work. (Read more further below.)
For the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, "monsters" point to multi-species assemblages that foreground our embeddedness in the webs of life. "Ghosts" in turn, evoke the lingering presences that haunt landscapes marked by past destruction and today’s debris. Together, these "creatures of ambivalent entanglement" expose and unravel the phantasmal twin myths of human progress and individuality. In addition, for me, actively acknowledging creatures that commonly qualify as monstrous or ghostly implies transcending entrenched conceptions and tapping into unbiasedness, flexibility, and unconditional empathy instead. Moreover, I think of phenomena that evade the human eye or common sense (or both) − such as quantum effects or molecular biotic processes and principles − as "ghostly" without meaning to suggest that there is anything unreal or otherworldly about them. Finally, I invoke the figures of monsters and ghosts to capture the elusive omnipresence of digital applications and the dangers they impose on practices of coexistence and relationality.
To become intimate with monsters and ghosts, I strive for a deeper understanding of − and sensitivity to − the diverse forms of physical and ecological embeddedness, and interspecies connectedness. To this end, I sharpen my actual and metaphorical senses for reading and responding to the signs and narratives of human-made environmental devastation as well as the enduring miracles of life. To confront − or approach − the monsters and ghosts of the digital, I propose a diffractive exploration of its analog components and explore strategies of embodiment and platform deflection.
The anxiety and frustration I feel, paired with the desire to honour and celebrate the natural-material world of which we are a part, is changing the pattern of my artistic practice: distanced rationality, and personal invisibility give way to informed spontaneity and playfulness, and the involvement of my physical self. Leaving beaten paths of reasoning by entering affective terrain and exposing myself convey our shared vulnerability and limits of power. At the same time, they point to the potentialities inherent to shedding detachment and passivity by embracing insecurity and taking risks to advocate for resilience, commitment, and care.
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