Mangroves
~ a collaboratory for surging life ~
Mangroves: a do-think tank. We are small, but dreaming - though never alone. We are concerned with l o n g planetary lifewebs and how they might resprout and thrive. As a collaboratory, we stage coworking in-house with staff and annual Fellows, with folks all over, and non-human coactants - always.
Truly radical doing seethes with radical thought, and that thought speaks a new tongue. This may take midnight calm to digest. At Mangroves we think and do interaffectivity: the ceaseless swirl of affecting and being affected through diverse relations, scales, and worldings. This goes beyond interdependence or interbeing, which still accord primacy to being(s). For us, reality dances metabolic, evincing the sheer weave of interaffect.
Since this interaffecting goes on everywhere, no issue or reality is self-contained - not climate change, not bio-collapse, not inequity... The traditional problem-solution model is at best an easy fiction, at worst a crippling mirage. We chase after problems as volumetric things to be batted under control, yet they outrun us and, through their solutions, spawn new "problems" left unthought. So instead of the "problem," we think the periblem: reality as ever immersive and porous all around. In place of solutions, we spur inflections that play with the giddy thickness of reality through many directions. This transgresses a merely human optic, much less a commercial or statist frame. So, we don't solve anything (so as to monetize or walk away from it), because the periblem never closes or stops but keeps on churning.
With a periblematic approach, we start rethinking how to engage the vast - and deeply tied - waves of life earthwide, though never as one block. While traversing various worldings, we burrow at what's already been in the long flex of time, even prehuman and pre-Earth, and what is likely to come. Then we (help) forge a theoretical framing fit to matters at hand. Amidst these deep, roaming views, we find the spinning particularities of any locale/theater where certain (meta)praxes may be seeded, prototyped, grown. Throughout, we embrace distinct cultural and geobiotic factors to respect conditions on the ground, so as to urge a synergy of local forces for common life, in turn spurring other tailored interventions translocally. In this sense we are also after a sharable - not imposed - common.
Julia Kane
In October 2021, we set sail on our inaugural Pilot Fellowship in hybrid mode. With twelve around a café table in Durham, NC (USA) or piping in from Uganda to Utah (Italy and Canada in between), we worked weekly on the theme of "the common and the commonable." Pursuing a multilingual, pluriversal approach (ubuntu a leitmotif) and freed from "resources" as the grounding of any common, we probed what it would mean to regard the whole interaffective web of reality beyond the tired technohuman grid. Along the way, we waded through notions of (Janian) care, festivity, pluriverse, "transverse," buen vivir, measures of happiness, migration, the biotic, placemaking, arcology and habitat. What's common or commonable is no longer just a question demanding answers, but also one parrying them...
The second year, 2022-23, we worked, again hybrid, on "growth," joined by remote Fellows ranging from Italy and Nigeria to India/Canada and South Africa/NY. Pushing off a conventional scientific framework (Smil), we dove into Daoist emergence and Nagarjuna's mutual co-arising (pratityasamutpada) via A. v. Humboldt's Wechselwirkung (exchange-effect), cycled through temporal processes in Qohelet and Ibn Khaldun, and sensed growth in Hildegardian and Potawatomi life. Then we got into the wilds of Moche sex pots, thermodynamics, Marxian labor-growth inversions, rhizomatic mycopunks, mutual aid hip hop, Illichian conviviality, housing/dwelling, and urban growth with its illusions. Capping the year, we had lively visits with D. da Cunha on "ubiquitous wetness," A. Escobar and M. Osterweil on designing relationality, D. Richter on critical zone science, and A. Tamburrino on his Carless Rome plan. In all this, we kept prodding, poking Mangroves' own ideas of affectivity, periblem and counterdesign - protocols of seedings to come.
With Rome our desired haunt as a live laboratory, we have also been drawn to g(r)azing at a plan by Eng. Antonio Tamburrino to transmobilize the whopping Eternal City. Though a hub of comprehensive transport since Antiquity, Rome is now victim to the double choke of cars and mass tourism, with dispiriting slides in eco/nomic and cultural vibes. This plan aims to revive, recast the Urbs by unclogging mobility throughout, removing rubber traffic from the historic city, and connecting all parts with foot motion and free electric people-movers. The time-space saved could then spur new forms of life, work, and habitat-making for a richer lifeweb. Is this scheme well conceived or viable? What is it likely - or risking - to generate? Is it ignoring or suppressing something? Follow us as we learn and think more!
In 1972, the Club of Rome blew a planetary whistle with its report The Limits to Growth: Earth can't keep carrying the globalized economic train. Half a century later, even as the Club has felt a muffled response to its own Cassandra cries, we re-ask: What does or can growth mean beyond its usual Anglophone, economic cage and patois? We intend to stage this query between late 2024 and early 2025 in Rome with a conference-carnival (= Connival), roving per urbem with thinking-doing, and plotting escape from the econometric prism/prison of growth. All are welcome in person or online.
Even as we plot the Connival on Growth, we're also putting our hands to a critico-creative play with more-than-human intelligence and its artificial modes - just as they explode. This project will begin with our third Pilot Fellowship, and may then spawn workshops, a film or collected volume down the road. Meanwhile, we will also continue to stage a number of intimate encounters on- or offline here or there. So stay tuned...
Board Members Frances Halsband, Ralf Michaels; Advisors Bruce Lawrence, Deborah Bew Liu; Instigator David U B Liu, Adjutant Julia Kane.
Many thanks for considering! We are a nonprofit registered and now operating in North Carolina, USA, scheming one day to be sited in Rome, a persistent node across many ways. For now we're working from Durham, NC, and applying for the 501(3)(c) tax exemption with the US Internal Revenue Service. Until we snag the approval of the IRS, you may donate any amount through our Fiscal Sponsor. Ping us - tidings@mangroves.life.
As a porous collaboratory, we are ever reaching around to cowork and put folks together - and nudge you to do the same. For queries or hints for collaboration, write to tidings@mangroves.life. As our work wheels on, we'll also keep nodding toward other doings we've found to pique, so we can all evolve abreast!
