Cycle I
Editorial
There is no normal on a ground of difference.
— Dilip da Cunha, personal communication, 14 January 2016
It extends in all directions, swelling, shaking, still. The stacking of its myriad motions makes it appear fixed and fleeting at once. For the most part, it stays disguised, or entirely hidden. It contains the code for timeless scripts, and holds the keys to yet unrealized forms. Burrowing within it are a legion unseen things as likely to come to rescue, as they are to bring ruin.
The inaugural cycle of CHTHONIC takes ground as its point of departure. ‘Ground’ as a particular configuration of material agents, forces, and dynamics that may or may not be readily available to human perception or even our most sophisticated technologies, yet act together in generative, often unforeseeable ways. A repository of potentialities that resists depletion; an assemblage of affordances; an absolute condition. But also: 'ground' as the sum of precise commitments one makes in relation to a territory; a framework synthesized through careful observation, heretical thinking, and consistent practice.
Underneath the calls currently cried everywhere for spatial justice, for claiming, taking, or giving “land back,” lies the fundamental riddle of the ground: it stands for all that which ‘land’ conceivably contains; what it hides, enables, and activates; not merely a horizontal expanse but a multidimensional substrate for action. 'Ground' re-weaves the holistic web torn apart by science; it invokes the multitudes that 'land' has ever been and is yet to become. The concept of ‘ground’ has the capacity to anchor our most abstract thinking and render it concrete, and at the same time, to migrate our abstractions beyond realities constrained by the social imaginary, push against the membrane of the thinkable.
Philosophers would have us believe that "the world, like play, lacks ground." [1] Yet countless examples of earth systems structuring and animating systems of cultural practice anchored in place, Indigenous environmental designs and cosmologies constituting perhaps the most comprehensive and potent among them, suggest the opposite: grounds beget worlds. If material practices weave the present together with the past, and have the power to hold together bodies scattered across geographies and time, then grounds from which they have sprung have the capacity to project us into unforeseen futures.
And is it not precisely the principle of play that presents us with profound entryways into the chthonic? We all know individuals and collectives who are particularly skilled in the navigation of the chthonic-corporeal continuum. Is it not in the condition of play that 'the world,' now reconstituted, appears entirely regrounded?
Can ground, coming into focus as an assembly of things and therefore a necessarily composite agent, be redeemed from those voices who keep invoking it in the pursuit of a homogenized society and territorial exclusion? Can the concept instead be mobilized to unlock pathways—pathways buried and forgotten, immanent but overlooked, or those only emerging—to environmentally better attuned, diversifying, liberatory futures?
A 'ground of difference' is a riddle-like expression that alludes to a productively destabilized terrain, a territory pregnant with immanence. Across many different cultures of the world, the immanent is believed to be inhabiting a diffuse material configuration, a body of a reconfigured nature. Can practicing this type of imagination help us recognize and cultivate the seeds and roots of more promising beginnings, help us reconstruct the modes of release of the forms of the land, with the land?
The Call for Perceptions for CHTHONIC Cycle I went out on December 30, 2021 as a direct commission to five contributors, each of whom was asked to invite an additional contributor from their own local context or frame of action. The ten resulting submissions are listed in pairings: dialoguing in couples, while collectively forming an expansive and coherent landscape of symptoms and shadows, strategies and signs.
[brief intro of each contribution to follow]
Editor: Namik Mackic
Los Angeles, California. April X, 2022
[1] Federico Campagna, in the podcast Overmorrow’s Library, episode #6: ”Stefano Gualeni, 'Virtual Worlds as Philosophical Tools'," December 10, 2020