Your cart is currently empty!
What to do when the world falls apart?
I go for a walk, and if I’m very lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms bring me back to my senses, not simply—like flowers—with their vibrant colors and fragrances, but because they spring up so unexpectedly, reminding me of the joy of simply being. Then I know that there are still delights amidst the terrors of uncertainty.1
Thematically, the series engages with more or less living entities. The title adopts the neologism „Kritter“ from Karin Harrasser translation for the English „critter,“ as used by Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: “Critter is a term commonly used in American English for all sorts of creatures. Lab scientists talk about their critters all the time; many other people across the U.S. do as well, perhaps especially in the South. The stain of creature and creation [the association with the creation story] does not attach to critter. Such semiotic barnacles should be eliminated. In this text, I use critter generously: for microbes, plants, animals, humans, non-humans, and sometimes even machines.”2
Thus, microbes, plants, animals, humans, non-humans, and perhaps sometimes machines are positioned in relation to one another. Or better yet, they are related in a way that generates a semantic network of (visual) information, a model of terms and their interrelations. And again, Haraway states: “No species acts alone, not even our own arrogant one, which, based on so-called modern Western scripts, pretends to consist of polite individuals. It is assemblages of organic and abiotic actors that make history, evolutionary and otherwise.”3
These assemblages, this relational positioning, leads us to the relational modes of Bini Adamczak and the cited passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: society does not consist of individuals, but rather expresses the sum of the relationships among those individuals. And because we know nearly two hundred years later that society cannot only be viewed as the sum of human relationships, but rather must encompass the relationships of all human and non-human entities, we return to the relational modes of critters defined by Haraway.