BOOK OF FINDINGS

2018

The October residency of the artist-led residency program ’Mapping the Affective Landscape’ ended with a collaborative work:

A book on how we, urbanized humans that we are/have become, negotiate and reflect on the cognitive load that comes from trying to keep track of activities in Jixiang Village.

Here where our bodies and minds are dealing with the uncanny effect of entering surroundings from which they evolved but have become detached, where apples and peaches are just an arm’s reach away, where doors are not locked and generosity is at large, we encounter none of the physical boundaries to which we have become habituated in urban settings. Immersed in cognitive overload, understandings of sharing and privacy begin to re-orientate.

We, Tika, Shuyin, Jixing, Witold, Qingwa, Adrian and myself, who participated in the October session realised quickly, that whatever it is we can do, it will only do justice to the abundance of growth and emergence around us, if we pool our skills. By the close of the residency we had compiled a ’Book of Findings’. By giving the location four weeks of concentrated attention, we ’found’ approaches, that tentatively explore the space between surveying and auscultation. Each contribution addresses a question raised by Erik Mueggler in The Paper Road, here somewhat condensed:

In what ways might the earth, as it emerges as a social being, serve as a resource for experiences that circumvent established ways of thinking and living the divides we make between the social and the natural? (see p.48)

-Petra Johnson