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laboratoire écologie et art pour une société en transition

GLOSSARY OF TRANSITION (T — T) by Ritó Natálio

Context
People in transition are the sensors of an earth in transition.
Trans people are the radars of Earth’s transition.
Might water be a conductor of contamination?

RADARS OF TRANSITION

They say that “transition is work” and that it should be paid. Reading these words by Harry Josephine Giles (Wages for Transition, 2019), the Immigrant Writer from Southern Europe hopes to make sense of the veiled connection between human bodies thirsting for transformation (and involved in intimate processes of transitioning their assigned gender at birth) and the wider processes of apocalyptic transition of the Earth System (also known as the Anthropocene, or simply “climate collapse”). If transition is work, who would be the bio-proletariat common to these processes? The synthetic hormones administered in hormone therapies, or the hormones released into water sources from the mass use of the morning-after pill? Human bodies or non-human bodies occupied by transitions of all kinds?

And what would be the difference between transition and contamination? What would be the difference between transition as transformation into a new form of life, or transition as degeneration of an existing body? And is this question not a reflection of conservative thinking about a cis-planet or a cis-body, which must be maintained or preserved over time, and to which a transition process would add a good dose of confusion?
On the other hand, is the current process of reducing the socio-biodiversity of the Earth System not a form of protest by the bio-proletariat that highlights the violent conditions of unpaid transition work?
The Immigrant Writer from Southern Europe arrives in Geneva with no common language in which to conduct his research, but he comes with the determination to organise a gathering of young people who could decipher the inaudible and invisible signals of planetary transition, thus helping develop what we have here temporarily called the Glossary of Transition (or simply T — T).
Assisted by somatic specialists – choreographers, visual artists, scientists, and psychotherapists – he sees the signs clearly: pollution is a form of political manifestation of biochemical agents.

The Writer writes in his journal:

5 June 2024: Every time I write in the first person, a ray of light changes or a cloud dissolves. My body is the earth because the earth is my body, and as I scratch my arm, I feel the artery of the Rhône contracting under my fingers. Ever since I started writing about this world, I’ve had the impression of coming from another, a world where levitating and protesting are part of the same reality. So, as I breathe, I show Geneva’s teeth and its monsters: gold ingots from the mines of South America rise from the vaults and fly into the skies above the Jet d’eau. My mouth is made of gold, but I have cavities like all the territories that transit through accumulation. Coloniality is my own body.

Image: Because the Spanish thirst for gold, the Indians poured liquid gold into them, illustration by Theodore de Bry, circa XVI century.

Beware, families, because “endocrine disruptors” attract and deceive your body!
These substances, which disrupt your body’s chemical messages, bind to the receptor and generate an undesirable response!

This was the type of message that appeared in Council of State leaflets in 2004 :

Ladies and Gentlemen,,

On 21 October 2004, the Grand Council referred an urgent written question to the Council of State:
Recent studies and discoveries show that we may be on the threshold of a new and serious water pollution problem.
Abnormally high levels of hormones have been measured in the water, resulting from the discharge into the water of “contaminated” urine and products used that contain hormones, which current treatment plants are unable to neutralise.
The increasingly frequent use of chemical oestrogens for human and animal consumption, pesticides and insecticides, released into the environment, find their way into drinking water, potentially leading to an increase in oestrogen production and hormonal disturbances in humans.

Menstruation at the age of 8, for example, or the infertility of “cis men” have turned out to be frightening consequences that needed to be dealt with as quickly as possible, e.g. by throwing out water contaminated with bisphenol and quaternary ammonium salts, getting rid of all the toys in the house, or burning all your furniture in the public square with the other families affected! So the Immigrant Writer has sought to bear witness in a poem of an experiment in other ways of understanding hormonal chemical messages, in the hope that transition might be embraced as a great experiment in language. Let’s take a look at his journal:

10 Juin 2024: I went to the chemist to buy some testosterone gel and applied it to Geneva’s arm. The water from the melting Alps mixes with the gel, allowing the city’s musculature to transition more smoothly. As if in an embrace, me and G. exchange hormones and dive into a pool of hormonal pollution.

LABELS SHOULD EXIST AND THEY SHOULD HAVE MEANING

Following on from the therolinguistic studies initiated by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Author of the Acacia Seeds (2011) and promoted by Vinciane Despret in Autobiographie d’un Poulpe (2021), the “Peau-Pierre” research team is convinced that language is a haptic, sonic, and also tele-empathic extension between bodies of different shapes. The ability to feel with, and from a distance, enables the Earth body – the T-body – to be mobilised by the empathic transition of other T-bodies and, with them, to communicate through chemical messages of belonging.
In our workshops, many experiments have been carried out to understand the human body as a territory, creating fables and slogans around the idea of the body as a “crumb of time” (Ulysse, workshop Peau Pierre, May 2024, L’Abri) , a “wound” or a “crystal” (Jonas Van, workshop Peau Pierre, May 2024, L’Abri). During one of these experiments, the sensor bodies reported curious episodes such as:

The sensation of transferring hormones through water

The sensation of two spinal columns connected by a zip fastener

The certainty that a shinbone was a tree trunk

Fingers moving like leaves

Hands with a thousand fingers

Little sand creatures revolving limply in the belly of a leg

Flesh goggles where you stick your forehead on a colleague’s forearm

(Contribution from the participants of the Soft Borders Atelier, with Clém, Stella, Ritó and Aurore, July 2023, Theatre Saint Gervais.)

Often, this transfer of qualities between one body and another occurred after a long period of contact with movements, e.g. after caressing a stone for a long time. Crossing and exploring these surfaces, stone and skin would come into contact with each other until their qualities were exchanged.

[To be continued…]

Image: print “Wages for Transition” by Harry Josephine Giles, 2019.

GLOSSARY (possibilities)

HORMONE (Denise Médico)
I’ve forgotten my ritual again, to be done two nights a week, according to the label on the white and pink packaging, a flawless Swiss pharmaceutical design, simple, too straightforward, confident, and almost trivial. I open the bottom drawer and look for the two little plastic tubes that fit together to make a piston-dispenser. I screw it onto the metal tube and pull back the small side to fill the large one with [x] mg oestradiol cream. I put it deep inside my vagina, imagining that it will be more effective, that it will have more time and space to penetrate the tissue and then spread into my bloodstream. I imagine these little animals colonising me and transforming me, sticking to my cells, kissing them with their full mouths, deliberately contaminating them and making them believe that there is still time. Loaded up with my stock of biocompatible synthetic hormones, I slip back into my teacher/psychotherapist envelope.

(Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia: a HORMONE is a class of signalling molecules in multicellular organisms that are sent to distant organs or tissues by complex biological processes to regulate physiology and behaviour).

Image: Hormonal feedback loop in an adult female. Follicle-stimulating hormone, luteinising hormone, progesterone, oestradiol. Right: Auxin transport from leaves to roots in Arabidopsis thaliana.

TRAVELLING BODY (Jonas Van)
In a room in the heart of Geneva, in the middle of the afternoon, our group of artists is meeting. A large quantity of water has flooded the floor. Collectively, we try to move the water with our bodies. But it flows at a speed we don’t understand; we can’t physically move it.
The human body has around 100,000 kilometres of blood vessels, enough to go around the planet Earth two and a half times. Blood vessels are made up of arteries and veins. “Vein” comes from the Latin vena: a small natural underground water channel. In fact, by taking the water in our hands, we are imitating the body’s basic circulatory movement, but outside it.
This water on the ground catalyses our memories. And when our skins finally touch, water is the intermediary in this encounter. This is how a temporal crack has opened up in the room at the heart of Geneva. Our skins, imitating the movement of the circulatory system, have gradually warmed up to produce enough friction for the water to take the body on a journey through space and time. The next exercise was to talk about where we had travelled. These journeys took the form of a sound capsule.

GLACIER-BODY (Stella Succi)
If I could think the way I should think, I’d find it hard to think: the amount of internal and external stimuli I receive is staggering. To make a comparison, it’s like being in a room where lots of people are talking out loud, all in different languages. In the background there’s loud music, someone’s tapping their foot on the floor above, and on top of that it’s very hot – you’re sweating profusely! How is it possible to do calculations with all this noise? You just can’t! And besides, is it really worth it? So I start listening. That’s my way of thinking. Following the biochemical discourse of the mammoth whose decomposition has stopped between my molecules; or the fallen glove of the distracted mountaineer, dissolving in slow motion like an old cassette in a Walkman with exhausted batteries; and letting myself be lulled by the murmurs of CO2: some come from my most secret depths, almost unconscious, others are young and raging. Recently, a colourful veil of desert sand has also settled over me, with its phosphates, ammonium, and iron… You’ve guessed it: I use the first person singular to make myself understood, but the only pronoun that makes sense to me is they/them.

MOUNTAINEERING (Stella Succi)
Mountaineering was born in the 18th century with the noble aim of mastering the wilderness, even at the most extreme altitudes; of illuminating dark valleys with knowledge; of deflowering the untouched virginity of the mountains (and let’s face it, the mountains enjoyed it too). Moreover, the verticality of the mountains, resembling huge stone erections, seems purposely designed to challenge the most vigorous and powerful men, worthy of looking down on the entire planet. While the first high-mountain expeditions were also guided by scientific interest, modern mountaineering has finally freed itself from this tedious burden to devote itself to simply conquering the summits, at any cost and by any means necessary. As a result, mountaineering has come to incorporate cultural values that define a relationship of domination over a hostile – dare we say hysterical – environment. However, with the glorious advent of the Anthropocene, some mysterious phenomena have been observed, with world-famous climbers coming down the slopes with the strangest symptoms – bouts of coughing, nausea, dizziness, or peeling skin. The effects seem to mimic those of severe intoxication or poisoning: a fact that is inexplicable given the notoriously pure alpine air, always a source of strength and good health. Cases of auditory hallucinations have also been reported: it would seem that some climbers, before experiencing the first troubles, heard a particular noise in the valleys, described by some as an “evil snicker” or a “smug laugh”.

HUMAN WATER-CHAIN (Cyrus Khalatbari)

Extraction
The (geological and computational) human water-chain starts within the labouring bodies and conditions of miners. Take for example the extraction of cobalt – a precious metal used in batteries, hard drives, and printed-circuit boards (PCBs) – in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC): from blood pumping hearts and lungs to sweat and water sachets brought by men and children to sustain their work in open pits or underground mines, the state of our IT culture unravels first in liquid and metabolic ways. In parallel to water as a core element for the survival of labouring bodies, the geological and computational human-water chain also extends to purification and refining processes, with cobalt transformed from ore into “clean” metal. Here, the dual dependence on water is revealed: it is key to extracting labour from miners and for their bodies to function, and it is crucial to craft and transform metal – “polishing” substrates from their raw form to the one that is used in the technological industry and for saving and manipulating data in our daily life.

Optimisation
Love emojis we add to pictures of cute cats or frothy matcha lattes have extensive ramifications. They connect to the tentacular optimisation and cooling infrastructure of data centres. Behind these digital streams which are sorted and organised in visually appealing ways, content is stored, curated, and modelled thanks to a network of water pipelines and thermal control systems. Although the exact location of these facilities is unknown, data is made public about the states in which the computation occurs. For Meta, this is in Arizona, Utah, or New Mexico (USA), where electricity costs rank amongst the cheapest in the country. Despite the aridity of these places, large quantities of water are used. Powering seamless aesthetics that hook us to our social media profiles, natural resources are diverted and exploited. From rivers to lakes, reservoirs and groundwater, technology is liquid on both sides: it liquifies for data control and obfuscation as well as in more literal ways, expanding its infrastructure to water streams and resources to cool down servers.

Waste
In discarded electronics processing sites such as Agbogbloshie (Accra, Ghana), fluids also leak and permute between nature, bodies, and technology. Within the plethora of indigenous techniques which dismantlers, scrap-dealers, or independent smelters use on a daily basis for cleaning, transforming, or recovering these discarded components, water is key. When shredding and crushing devices, water helps, first, by preventing dust and providing “fresh” scavenged metals for buyers. In processes that involve gold and copper, water is also mixed with chemicals and solvents. Workers use wet separating methods to separate the various components: thanks to their density, the metal components sink while plastic and other materials float. Due to the lack of recycling facilities however, water is then discarded into the soil, the groundwater, or nearby rivers. In addition to polluting nature, toxic substances such as lead, mercury, or cadmium leach into nearby water streams. The water is then ingested by animals and cattle before these are butchered and sold in local markets.

COMPUTATIONAL THERMOLABOUR (Cyrus Khalatbari)

Computex 2023, Taiwan
Walking through COMPUTEX, one sees how “the work of computation is the work of managing heat” (Brunton, 2015: 159). Across the different booths that constitute the fair lies a common ground: an accumulation of computer tubes, fans, and other cooling artifacts designed with dynamic lighting systems that gamers can activate remotely. These artefacts, beyond their aesthetic functions, which are characterised by the extensive use of red, green, and blue (RGB) colours, are geared towards one function: circling back to the words of Brunton, they are made to enable chips to compute to their maximum, while dissipating heat in the fastest way, either using air, water, or ice. On the surface, these objects seem merely technical, limited to the realm of computing and the operation of computers. Expanding here from the use of water which is crucial for AI systems and data in our daily lives (see human-water chain), I argue that these objects are also sociotechnical. Put differently, they enact through their needs and characteristics new cartographies of labour, radiating from tech corporations to smaller actors. Fed by our algorithmic desires and needs for ever more powerful and accurate recommendation systems that we assume should “simply work” (Starosieslky, 2016), cooling becomes a core component of the computing economy. With the mastery of thermal optimisation comes algorithmic control, more seamlessness, more dopamine shots, more time spent connecting and consuming. It is at COMPUTEX that liquid nitrogen (ln2) overclocking competitions take place. These consist in pouring ln2 onto the computer’s “boiling hot” silicon chips in order to produce the most powerful gaming setup, in a race against the clock or in a team competition format. Although at first trivial, these competitions are crucial for the industry, since they provide an opportunity to “test” the chips, pushing them to their hot and cold limits under the expertise of liquid nitrogen “overclockers”. With the free labour produced, a transfer of knowledge occurs and is embedded into the next generation of chips: less hackable, more private and “blackboxed”.
Here, I define computational thermolabour as a form of asymmetrical power dynamics at play between tech corporations and individuals. Merging three words (computational, thermal, and labour), the term refers to a situation where powerful corporations of our computational culture exploit and exercise control over users or independent communities based on the thermal characteristics that structure our computational culture.

Agbogbloshie (Accra, Ghana)
This computational thermolabour also determines other parts of our computer’s lifecycles, as in Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. This district, depicted by mainstream Western news channels as the place where “computers go to die” (Wired, 2015), is in fact a vibrant milieu of circularity and transformation. Nuancing these reductive tropes and discourses, places such as Agbogbloshie shed light on local communities working together in extracting value from waste. Here, dismantlers form the first community to activate this chain. Roaming the site’s surroundings, they locate broken-down computers that they buy at minimal prices from vendors. These computers are then scavenged, with their metals sorted (see human-water chain). From copper to aluminium, brass, or steel, the materiality of our sociotechnical culture is then narrowed to the elements that power it. It is then at the level of these metals that the computational thermolabour occurs, mirroring the power dynamics at play at COMPUTEX in Taiwan. More specifically, it arises from temperatures in which these metals melt and transform, enacting in turn different needs for industry and labour. Aluminium, for example, melts at 660.3°C (1,221°F). This enables the metal to be processed by local actors working with indigenous techniques to reach the temperature threshold, generally using air fans to blow oxygens in fire pits. For steel melting at 1,400°C (2,550°F), local dismantling communities depend on facilities owned by Indian corporations. These powerful industry actors operate on larger scales to transform metal scraps into iron rods which are then sold internationally. As the exclusive players in the market of steel processing in Western Africa, they maintain control over pricing, impacting in turn the growth and independence of local communities.

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