DISPATCH

Beyond Borders: Territory Is a Meeting Place explored an entwined understanding of home and habitat.

Originally planned as a site-specific project in Lebanon, the project pivoted in response to the war and the displacement and dispersal of participants. As previously conceived, we focused on cohabitation in ways that are propositional and speculative. During our pilot study in Lebanon (2023), several of our interlocutors speculated that Lebanon is a laboratory—a site offering opportunities for experimental study and observation, a place to practice, to diagnose, to conduct tests and trials, a workshop where people collaborate in addressing vexing social, political, and ecological issues. This improvisational spirit and dedication to imaginative practice guided this project.

When faced with perpetual crises and the breakdown of systems, how can we imagine new ways of living together? Fields ranging from social work to humanitarianism to design, call for resilience in the face of precarity. Counter to this rhetoric, Collective Effervescence—the organizers of this project—propose collaborative forms of creativity that deeply engage and transform the political imagination.

At the summer laboratory, we explored how rising fascism, xenophobia, chronic crises, and violence invoke division and fear, weaponizing difference and fostering discord. We emphasized responses to current geopolitical shifts with special attention given to the Mediterranean—a region whose historical encounters have established the area as a zone of conflict. Through investigating the links between Lebanon and Spain, we unsettled narratives of East-West, North-South, Muslim-Christian, Arab-European, and other taken-for-granted myths and stories that make it difficult to center human, planetary, and multispecies justice.

In moving beyond tropes of damage, resilience, and heroism that often characterize understandings of territory, Beyond Borders explored the capacities of stories to propose alternate and more regenerative ways of living in the world. Along with policy, statecraft, and legislation, the future of migration, mobility, and living together will originate with stories—those exiled, those forgotten, and those not yet imagined. Seeing the tales we tell and the narratives we construct as consequential, this work argued that unless we radically shift the stories we live by, we are destined for annihilation. During this week-long field laboratory, we were guided by a series of questions, drawing on the diverse and robust work of participants:

We gathered in Barcelona and the northern region of Empordà bordering France to investigate how habitat and home are conceived in the region and the Mediterranean more broadly, how migration is formulated in the imaginary of Southern Europe, and how farming and knowledge of the land has the potential to provoke different relations and forms of cohabitation. The week was dedicated to studying how correspondences between the socio-ecological context of an urban area like Barcelona can connect to rural practices of hospitality and regeneration, illuminating different perspectives on how we understand migration, invasive species, border infrastructure, mass tourism, drought and vulnerabilities of the climate emergency, among other regional concerns.

This project was organized by COLLECTIVE EFFERVESCENCE, an ongoing project and collaborative effort led by Hala Abdel Malak, Barbara Adams, and Jane Pirone. Our research and creative practice focus on the necessity and delight of interdependence and a desire for connection and interspecies commoning. Through speculative storytelling and the creation of generative spaces, we experiment with ways to adjust our thinking and initiate action.

HALA ABDEL MALAK, Assistant Professor of Strategic Design and Management at Parsons School of Design, is a curator, educator, researcher, and activist whose work explores global dynamics, power, organizational development, leadership, and societal impact.

BARBARA ADAMS, Assistant Professor of Art, Design, and Social Justice at Parsons, is a sociologist whose interdisciplinary research looks at how knowledge is produced and political action is initiated through art and design projects.

JANE PIRONE, Associate Professor of Design Ecologies at Parsons, is an artist, creative technologist, and naturalist whose work explores living systems and synthetic biology through mixed-media speculative fabulations.

LABORATORY PARTICIPANTS

MEL FRIEDLING, Director of Graduate Program and Associate Professor of Filmmaking at The New School, is a media artist, writer, and educator interested in the jumbled layers of media histories.

RADHIKA SUBRAMANIAM, Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons, is a curator and writer with an interdisciplinary practice that deploys such platforms as exhibitions, texts and public art interventions as conscious forms of knowledge-making.

YASMINA RAFFOUL is an organic farmer who makes and markets olive oil, herbs, vegetables, and other natural products from her farm Bassatin Baanoub in a remote valley south of Beirut.

LIAM HEALY, Lecturer in Architecture, University of Sheffield, is a researcher and designer whose research interests focus on situated critical, speculative design practice and research, DIY design, care, the Anthropocene, and more-than human entanglements with design.

PETRA SERHAL is a multidisciplinary artist and performer based in Beirut whose work is based on the audience-artist relationship and focuses on themes of fragmentation, body, self as subject and absence

AMIR HUSAK is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Combining film, video, sound, interactive media, essay and experimental techniques, his work explores documentary as social practice and investigates representations of history, migration and memory.

MADELINE BRUBAKER is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice ritualizes the habitual through food, performance, and intimacy, with a focus on ecological connection, care, and everyday activism.

CLAUDIA DELSO, researcher and cultural project manager at Institute Recerca Urbana de Barcelona, where she is currently coordinating the project “Doing Comensality,” focusing on landscape, culture, food, and institutionality. The project imagines food systems and their cultures adapted to the challenges of a just eco-social transition in urban contexts.

ALEXANDRA WIX is a psychologist, cultural creator, and head of the Malavidamusic agency. She is the promoter of the Tagungshaus iG “Villa Antonia,” a future center for discussions and seminars currently under construction. She also works with Alarm Phone and Las Cimas.

NICOLAS BAIRD, Institute of Queer Ecology, is a paleobiologist, artist, and writer whose work frames the world as a network of strange kin. Through performance, photography, poetry, they explore mutability and adaptation while their science looks back in time to understand how bodies, landscapes, and climate influence each other.

RACHEL DANA is a Brooklyn-based textile artist with over 20 years of experience working with plants in various fields. This includes roles in nurseries, farms, and working as a botanical illustrator at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden and Inhotim Institute in Brazil.

MARIA KHATCHADOURIAN is a scenographer, food artist, and visual dramaturgist whose practice deals with notions of home, displacement, and loss, in which sculptural compositions overlap with digital imaginaries and fragmented narratives.

TIAGO DA CRUZ BARTHOLO is a practice-oriented politologist and critical geographer whose research explores alternative institutional models, policy fields, and scales of government. He works with the self-managed grassroots initiatives Active at Ecologistas en Acción, Alarm Phone, and From the Sea to the City.

ERICK BELTRÁN AND TIM RUDOLPH run Lumbung Press, a collective printing practice based on the Indonesian tradition of lumbung—the deposit of common resources to be redistributed for the long-term benefit of the members of a community The collaborative offset press was part of the last edition of documenta and is now in residence at Hangar.

ERNESTO COLLADO, a self-taught botanist, perfumer, and founder of Bravanariz and farmer at Mas Flaquer, creates natural scents inspired by the landscape as a way to help people reconnect with their environment and with nature through their sense of smell.

MICHAEL HART is the founder and organizer of the Free Music School in Barcelona—”a song in art as a medium for transformation, knowledge, and transgenerational friendship.” The FMS is a meeting point for artists to create and share social, political, and revolutionary experiences.

Special thanks to our generous hosts and collaborators from EINA School of Design and Art: Pilar Cortada, Director of Eina Obra; Tània Costa, Director of Eina University; Lara García, Director of Research; Ignasi Ayats, Design and Program Coordinator at Eina Obra; Carla Cánovas, Editorial and Program Coordinator at Eina Obra; Manuel Ciruaqui, Director of Eina Idea; Ana Vivero, Colectivo Tornen les Esquelles; and to local participating artists: Max Azemar; Maria Roy; Euàlia Rovira and Adrian Schindler.

This project was supported by the Faculty Research Fund (FRF) at The New School University and by a grant from the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School for Social Research.