horizontal

sliding on the horizontal axis of the aquatic

in the first reading session, we invite you to follow nastia in her travel to the open sea. this travel is inspired by her experience of living on a landlocked territory and going to the sea very rarely, once a year or two. nastia will move from her terrestrial location towards the beach, stop by on the islands before she submerges into the aquatic.

while we will be following her, nastia proposes to observe how the surrounding environments change, how the experience(s) of space and time transform(s), and how visual and bodily responses adapt. we will look into some fiction and nonfiction writings (can we still draw a line between them today?) and use them as our compass to explore these changes, transformations, and adaptations.

the texts will also bring different approaches to thinking with and around water as a material, political and utopian body, and we will navigate through and with them too.

this session is covered by nastia volynova.

reading list:

Steinberg, Philip E. “Of Other Seas: Metaphors and Materialities in Maritime Regions”. Atlantic Studies. Vol. 10, no. 2 (2013), excerpts from pp. 159-160, 163.

Calvino, Italo. “The Aquatic Uncle”. In Cosmicomics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, pp. 71-77.

Taussig, Michael. “The Beach”. Critical Inquiry. Vol. 26, No. 2 (2000), pp. 254-257.

Brand, Dionne. “Water”. In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001.

Helmreich, Stefan. “Submarine Cyborgs. Transductive Ethnography at the Seafloor, Juan de Fuca Ridge”. In Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Oakland: University of California Press,2009, excerpts from pp. 212-214, 216-217.

Butler, Octavia E. “Chapter Five”. In Wild Seed. New York: Aspect, 1999, excerpts from pp. 79, 82-87.

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