The complexity of current ecological crises, such as climate change, calls for new modes of knowledge production. Common Dreams — Flotation School (2017) by the Portuguese, Brussels-based artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia is a construction site and a pedagogical prototype that challenges the linear transfer of knowledge in scientific research. In this long-term performance project, the participant-spectator is invited to engage in what I call “hyphenated thinking” in an art-science-activist worlding, as conceived by Donna Haraway (Reference Haraway2016), a thinking in between art, science, and activism. Correia’s Flotation School produces a particular modulating kind of knowledge, expanding the transfer of knowledge to a relational imparting of knowledge (Raunig Reference Raunig2013). Activating climate change awareness with the participant-spectator in a very embodied and implicated way, this long-term performance project also moves beyond the moralist practice of ecology movements that are still burdened by an ideal image of “Nature,” cultivating instead practices of “ethical differentiation” (Raunig Reference Raunig2013:59).
Figure 1. Students from the MEDS Network building the raft for the first edition of the Common Dreams–Flotation School in Ghent (2017). (Photo © Maria Lucia Cruz Correia)
Impossible Climate Change Whodunit
To write a climate change whodunit is an impossible assignment. The ecological disaster of climate change does not follow a neat logic of crime and punishment. The producers of the climate disaster are not as easily and unambiguously traced and categorized as was the case with, for example, the ocean incineration in the 1980s. In the summer of 1987, Greenpeace could locate the pollution activities on the incinerator ships and could blame specific entities for burning large amounts of waste at sea. Militant activists chained themselves to the chimneys of the furnaces and successfully prevented what they call the “polluting, nature-unfriendly entities” from proceeding with their activities. In the end, and under public pressure of what these same activists refer to as the “caring, nature-friendly entities,” the Spanish government revoked a permit allowing the ship to burn its cargo off the northern coast of Spain. The activist protest was considered a huge success.
But where to start when dealing with the ecological disaster of climate change? It is impossible to delineate a polluting “they” from a climate-friendly “us,” the ecologically aware trying to save the planet. The “we” of climate activists also belong to “them,” those who are to blame. There are numerous, interconnected producers of the disaster. In the Climate Science Special Report (CSSR) of November 2017, the whole species of Homo sapiens is considered the dominant cause of climate change.
Performance scholar Una Chaudhuri similarly observed that the logic of climate change is a very complex one, having no clear spatial boundaries and not even a spatial logic. It is dependent on numerous choices in many different parts of the world simultaneously (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri2013). Those who are “to blame” therefore take on the condition of “tangled beings, forming rhizomes and networks” (Latour Reference Latour2004:24). Identifying the producers of the ecological disaster and formulating solutions via causal deduction is no longer possible, as all human beings are in a way implicated. Solutions are hence undecidable from one perspective. Pushing the logic of crime and punishment to its extreme limits, Bruce McConachie puts it rather cynically when he writes that “probably the best way to save nature would be to kill off humanity” (2012:92). How can art activate climate change awareness, one wonders then, beyond the logic of crime and punishment, without ending up in a nihilist deadlock?
Correia’s Common Dreams — Flotation School is a pedagogical construction site where new modes of knowledge production tackle the complexity of the current ecological crisis of climate change. This means reinventing the ethos of mastery at work in positivist and observational-empirical knowledge production.
Flotation School as Continuous Construction Site
Elsewhere, I have written about Latour’s understanding of nature as discursively constructed and fabricated by the “Modern Constitution” (Stalpaert Reference Stalpaert2018). In her study on the politics of epistemic location in ecological thinking, philosopher Lorraine Code similarly observes the obsessive need for control and the “ethos of mastery” in positivist-empiricist epistemologies (2006:48). Positivist knowledge, she says, is gathered along a “narrow path of linear connections” (48). In my view, this linear transfer of knowledge is incompatible with the rhizomatic constellation and the transgenerational time scales of climate change. Besides, it generates very anthropocentric thinking, as monologic knowledge claims universal validity to secure “a rationalist determination over nature by humans” (Code Reference Code2006:104).
Figure 2. MEDS Network students develop the raft for the first edition of the Common Dreams–Flotation School in Ghent (2017). (Photo © Maria Lucia Cruz Correia)
In Flotation School Correia cultivates another kind of knowledge production. Since 2017, several survival climate schools have been erected in the context of her long-term performance project, which she herself prefers to call “a fabulation of an environmental social service” (Correia Reference Correia2022). Several “islands” have been constructed with different partners and on different territories, housing “a mobile prototype” of a survival climate school (Correia n.d.). It is mobile, as the school is swiftly adaptable. It can travel to other cities and can easily adjust to other collaborative alliances with local universities, art institutions, and sustainable organizations. It is a prototype, as the survival climate school deliberately remains an early sample and its productivity is rather limited — as far as measurable output and impact is concerned. Flotation School is too situative, too delicate, and too speculative to ever be considered for mass production.
One could say that Flotation School is a continuous construction site and has no intention or desire to become a pedagogical institution. The performance project is an ongoing, traveling survival climate school, but the participant-spectators start from scratch in every new location where Correia is residing. In fact, the island is literally constructed from material found in the neighborhood, with local collaborators, and together with the participant-spectators. In every edition of the school, the construction site evolves differently, depending on the particular location and collaboration. It can take the form of a floating raft in a harbor, or on a river (Ghent, 2017), or on a lake (Geneva, 2020); in a tent in the forest (Geneva, 2020); or it simply can take the form of interventions in a public space (Brussels, 2020).
Elise Mensaert designed the island for the first edition in Ghent, while the raft was built by young students of the MEDS Network (Meeting of Design Students). Mensaert’s knowledge and skills as a designer were aligned with the experience and design practices of the MEDS Network, a nonprofit organization and international network where young professionals and students from diverse design backgrounds promote interdisciplinary and cross-border collaboration in design.
Figure 3. The raft as a social object and meeting place at the first edition of the Common Dreams–Flotation School in Ghent (2017). (Photo © Maria Lucia Cruz Correia)
The Design Workshop of MEDS that took place in Ghent in 2017 focused on the concept of urban haven for the design of the Ghent Flotation School. This particular starting point attracted Ghent local collaborators such as DOK (a creative space), Jonge Dokken (representing the community of boat inhabitants), Buurderij (a local network of farmers and consumers), Thuishaven (a local service center), Noah (an event space on the water), BOOOT and DOKano (two recreational boating companies) — each having their particular stake in the neighborhood of the river Lys, the river Scheldt, and the harbor of Ghent. Considering the history of shipping, the harbor, and textiles, the stakeholders’ interests range from heritage matters, to gentrification and local housing. DOKano, for example, developed their Clean Water Project: they lend out free canoes in exchange for a bucket of floating garbage. Jonge Dokken, on the other hand, represents the interests of the boat inhabitants in the area. Eventually, the raft became a meeting place for the boat community, who were never given a space by the city of Ghent. It became a shared “social object” (Correia Reference Correia2022).
Collaborating with the different stakeholders in the area, Flotation School fostered what Code would call an ongoing and “attentive concentration” on “local particulars” (2006:223). Being infused with the situative knowledge of the particular area, Flotation School is also a construction site in a figurative sense, in a way that it attributes qualities of undecidedness to a particular rendering of space:
When you are guided to any construction site you are experiencing the troubling and exhilarating feeling that things could be different, or at least that they could still fail — a feeling never so deep when faced with the final product, no matter how beautiful or impressive it may be. (Latour Reference Latour2005:89)
Flotation School does not consider space as something that is given, but as something that is negotiated and permanently contested. Obviously, the involved local collaborators all had different stakes in the continuously evolving gentrification area. Structuring templates existed in this construction site, but “movements and displacements come first” (204).
Translating this notion of space as a construction site to the realm of site-specific performance also reshuffles the function of interactive theatre as “a complex entanglement of interactions” (Latour Reference Latour2005:65). Correia does not present herself as the director or main performer interacting with the participant-spectators; she calls herself the founder and artistic coordinator of Common Dreams — Flotation School, but the bulk of the credits go to the collaborators and activators.
Flotation School as Pedagogical Prototype
Flotation School is a collaborative project — with local institutions of higher education, art institutions, and sustainable organizations — that exceeds the workshop format. For example: the first edition took shape over the course of the academic year 2017/18 and was developed in collaboration with University College Ghent (HoGent) and KASK & Conservatorium, Kunstencentrum VIERNULVIER vzw, the city of Ghent, and MEDS Network; the third version of Flotation School (2020) was developed in collaboration with the Head School of Arts (Haute École d’Art et de Design) in Geneva, Switzerland, in the context of the far° festival des arts vivants Nyon; and the sixth edition was developed with LEAST and the College Sismondi in Geneva (2022).
In all editions, Flotation School is “an attempt to rethink our notions of survival in relation to geopolitical earthly resources” (Correia n.d.). It offers performance workshops to the participant-spectators, with a focus on strategies of survival, addressing climate change in the Anthropocene era. The workshops entail general issues such as Climate Grief, Building an Island, and Crafting at Dusk. All questions tackled are problem-driven and situative or specific to the context.
The Flotation School in Ghent sought to cocreate and (re)collect strategies for survival in a floating society. Due to climate challenges such as rising sea levels, heavy rainfall, and extreme flooding, the global population living in coastal areas are at risk. In Bangladesh, homes and livelihoods are destroyed frequently because of cyclones, but an extreme flooding disaster also took place in Belgium in the summer of 2021. Currently, several institutions of higher education are investigating the potential of resilient floating homes that would enable families to survive in the aftermath of extreme flooding while producing food, water, and energy, and also provide sustainable ways to make a living during a flood.
The participant-spectators camp on the floating island for 12 hours to tackle related research questions. They are asked to bring food that would last on an island for a long time and that they can share with others. They can bring along water for one day, and one item that they would take from their home if there were a catastrophe, and present it during the workshop as survival gear equipment: a fishing gear, a knife, a mug, pen and notebook, a raincoat… During the Crafting at Dusk workshop led by curator and (performing) artist Ingrid Vranken, the participant-spectators survive during the course of time spent on the water and have an experience close to what life could be as a floating society.
If the time is now, are you ready? How will you build your home? What would be the economic, social and political outcomes of a floating society? What would be the values for the community? What would bring people together? A fire, a story, a source of drinkable water, a fish, a way to produce energy […]? How to recover archaic knowledge? Who would you have on your island? What would be the necessary skills, props and devises? How do we experience time? What stories will we leave for the future generations? How to create a shared intergenerational knowledge? (Common Dreams: Flotation School 2017)
The Flotation School — continuously under construction — is in that sense also a pedagogical prototype that challenges any utilitarian use of knowledge production. The survival kit, the skills and the knowledge gathered during the 12-hour workshop, is only speculative, an idea for that particular group in that particular setting. The inherent undecidedness of the thought exercise prevents situative knowledge from being turned into an exemplum, into a model to be traded for more efficient use. Footnote 1 To call Flotation School a prototype for that matter is also a statement with regard to the neoliberal ghost that haunts institutions of higher education. It fosters “a critical reflection on what ‘pedagogy in arts’ means today and can do for us” (Correia n.d.).
Figure 4. Example of a survival kit at a Common Dreams–Flotation School (2019), founded by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia. (Photo © Wieneke van Muiswinkel and Maria Lucia Cruz Correia)
In his appraisal of current fields of knowledge, philosopher and art theorist Gerald Raunig observes: “There is no doubt that the General Intellect has been increasingly seized by capitalist valorization” (2013:17). Indeed, in Western neoliberal society, the General Intellect refers to specific mental skills, to merely cognitive abilities, allowing people to acquire knowledge and solve problems. Raunig calls for a kind of university that does not simply function as a site of knowledge transfer, where students are subordinated to “passive components of the knowledge factory, as formatted knowledge reproducers” (42). He prefers a “modulating university” as an alternative site where knowledge production is re-invented (26). This modulating university functions as “a complex space” where “the most diverse forms of cognitive, affective, subservient labor” overlap (24). Correia’s mobile prototype of a survival climate school precisely produces this modulating kind of knowledge, expanding the practice of the transfer of knowledge to a more relational imparting of knowledge. Following Code’s observations on the politics of ecological thinking, one could say that the Flotation School cultivates an “interpretative negotiation” during the workshop, with “knowledge claims” that are “always provisional and approximate” (2006:225).
The collaborative alliance at work in Correia’s Flotation School creates a modulating university, first in the sense that it develops a precarious form of autonomy within the institution of HoGent and KASK – School of Arts in Ghent and HEAD in Geneva. It develops pedagogical activities that “thwart the structures and institutional antagonisms through their obstinacy” (Raunig Reference Raunig2013:27). The 12-hour workshop exceeds the usual three-hour seminar format, slowing down time against the grain of clock-time, parting time, portioning time differently, distributing and dividing it up differently. Also, performance and hence workshop-time is extended over several sessions throughout the academic year, blurring even further private and public school-time. This timescale differs from the capitalist valorization of “hurry is the normality” in the General Intellect (Raunig Reference Raunig2013:84). The island becomes the university’s free space for nonconformist thinking and action. Micropolitical strategies like the open-source DIY book that evolves from the Crafting at Dusk workshop refuses to implement the institutional pressure on output in peer-reviewed journals with a high impact factor. Its impact factor lies elsewhere and beyond established and hierarchically ranked journals: it contains compelling survival exercises and publicly shares all gathered intergenerational knowledge that might be of future use. Raunig calls this practice “a desertion as instituent practice” (27). Desertion here does not refer to military desertion, or to inner withdrawal and retreat from the world, but to a defection from the dead-end situation of the institutional practice of productive knowledge transfer.
Second, the collaborative alliance at work in Flotation School creates a modulating university in the sense that knowledge production outside the university college is reinvented, “founding alternative formations of knowledge production” (Raunig Reference Raunig2013:28). There is a “complicity between the inside and the outside of an institution” (53). The collaboration of university institutions with sustainable organizations, local stakeholders, and the city of Ghent generates “local and situative knowledge” (28), but also knowledge that primarily concerns matters of self-formation and self-control in times of crisis. It is “a desertion as instituent practice” that creates a (little) more future-proof world by means of an interdisciplinary gathering. After all, as Raunig claims, “Desertion does not mean praise for fleeing from the world, but rather creating worlds” (53).
Interdisciplinary Art-Science-Activist Worlding
Several philosophers developed alternatives for the production of knowledge in scientific research. Haraway, for example, proposes the vital model of “science art worldings” (2016:64). Footnote 2 This demands a scientific inquiry into our becoming with the world rather than our being in and in control of the world. It is an attitude that defies any form of human exceptionalism and entitlement. Building on Haraway’s vital model of art-science-activist worlding, I propose my own concept of hyphenated thinking. In this hyphenated thinking, knowledge is not situated in one individual or in one privileged center, but resurges from the hyphens in-between thinking entities, with thoughts evolving in perpetual modulation. A relational imparting of knowledge is at stake, “moving along a relationship (or multiple posited relationship) without fixing the production of knowledge in a firm center” (Raunig Reference Raunig2013:58). Not moral conduct, but “ethical differentiation” is at stake here “as a movement between various positions. These positions […] are not at all the same, but […] they are in the same boat with all their differentness, in the same situation, sharing specific preconditions” (59). It is “insinuating a mode of investigation, which leads people to take care of themselves” (59).
Here knowledge is no longer embodied in a static center, captive, brought to a standstill. Knowledge production lies precisely in the movement from the inquirer to those who are guided by the inquiry to exercise self-care, to give account of the coherence between rational discourse and manner of living. (59)
In his Politics of Nature, Latour argues that the idea of “Nature” as a comprehensive unity that is part of reality, lying in a dual relation with culture, is “but one idea about nature, an idea that is fabricated by the Modern Constitution” (2005:254). He rejects the dependence on matters of fact in “mononaturalism” because this kind of ecological thinking exhausts “the diversity of opinions, thanks to the unified certainty of the facts of nature” (2004:130). He prefers operationalizing “matters of concern” above consolidating matters of fact (2005:114). Latour suggests a “progressive composition of one common world” (254). In his terms, political ecology must negotiate with the ever-ongoing constitution or composition of the world as nature-culture.
This is exactly what the first part of the title of Correia’s performance promises to do: to progressively compose Common Dreams for the (precarious) future on a shared island, negotiating strategies of survival, sustainability, climate adaptation, climate grief, and loss of landscapes. The approach is a transdisciplinary collaborative process in dialogue with art students and/or with experts from the fields of political ecology, sustainability, economy, agriculture, holism, activism, science, and architecture (Correia n.d.). Rather than finding solutions to climate change problems, the workshop performances in Common Dreams — Flotation School truly became what Haraway coined “art science activist worldings.” Haraway introduces this term in different ways throughout her book Staying with the Trouble. Occasionally, she uses the concept “art-science-activist worldings” with hyphens (79).
I particularly prefer the hyphened term, as it indicates that these worldings do not refer to an interdisciplinary scientific methodology. It requires a resurgence of knowledge in relationality, in tentacular thinking. Knowledge is no longer produced in one of the fields of the arts, or science, or activism, with the other field functioning as an auxiliary science. It is in the hyphens that knowledge resurges, activating climate change awareness and entangled self-care.
