Nature Theatre: reimagining socio-natural assemblages

by Iryna Zamuruieva

We mark off a small patch of a park with a red and white hazard tape. Not to say that there is any hazard inside, really, on the contrary to invite people into the space. We’ve got chairs in rows and theatre posters (introducing the cast: the grass, the bugs, the cars, people and seagulls).

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Once the usher has accompanied all the audience members to their seats, I make a few technical remarks: performance lasts 5 minutes, phones off please, hope you enjoy the show. The bell rings, the performance starts, ‘nothing’ is happening. Or everything is happening? What is happening? Look at the drama unfolding between the two ducks! Listen into the howling wind for the eerie soundtrack. How, already? The time flew by. Everyone, welcome into the lobby, what did you think of the show?

This was a Nature Theatre performance. An intervention I created as a way to experiment with how art can change how we think about ‘nature’.

As a cultural geographer, trying her artist hat on, I was looking for ways to respond to the 6th mass extinction/anthropocene/capitalocene/biodiversity and ecosystem losses. All of the above really. This was an exercise in response-ability.

Practising response-ability, for me, was — and is — a part of a wider process of socio-ecological transformation towards more-collaborative-with-more-than-human ways of living on this planet. Producing this kind of response has been carried out by activists, artists, public intellectuals, academics and many others, who imagine and propose new, exciting possibilities for more-than-human societies. In collectively unfolding these types of futures (and not others), telling these kinds of stories (and not others), the spirit and the practice of an experiment seems to be a golden thread, which I fully subscribe to.

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I came up with the idea of turning the everyday scene of the city street into a Nature Theatre through the combined effect of a particular moment I just woke up (a dream fragment that stuck) and numerous walks I was taking at the time through Aotearoa New Zealand’s hills and valleys. The kind of walking I did had an intimate connection with paying attention — to where I walked, to what was along the path, to the landscape around me, to my companion. It took me some time to reach a point where I knew I wanted to capture this sense of the careful act of paying attention and use this quasi-meditative experience to create space for others to engage deeply and attentively with the surroundings.

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After returning from my walks in the southern hemisphere back to Northern Germany, I distilled the idea of Nature Theatre, which a fellow cultural geographer friend and colleague-turned-to-be-usher Sebastian Ehret helped me facilitate on streets and parks of the fjord city Kiel. In the process of this distillation, I’ve engaged with a number of people — in real life conversations and through books, articles, essays. With them I was thinking this intervention through on a conceptual level.

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Prompted by the works of geographers Noel Castree and Matthew Gandy, I wanted Nature Theatre to complexify the definitions of ‘nature’, ‘city’, ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ — echoing social constructivist thinkers’ views on the entanglement of nature and culture and pointing out the oddity of our misguided ontological separation of ‘human’ and ‘nature’. Maria Kaika and Eric Swyngedouw help me articulate and handle this discrepancy by lending an adjective socio-natural that I adopt (very enthusiastically). Wanting to attend to the agency of more-than-human in my process, I root myself in works of yet more geographers — Steve Hinchliffe, Jamie Lorimer and Sarah Whatmore.

The crystalizing what exactly was it that I wanted to change, where, and how, I am indebted to the thinking of a radical political geographer Alex Loftus. It is his proposition of political change being bound up in reworking the socio-natural relations through which everyday environments are produced and experienced, I unfold throughout the Nature Theatre. I am also building on sociologist’s Ervin Goffman studies of the everyday and its political possibilities.

Cultural geographer Harriet Hawkins helps me draw lines between art practice and geography and to think how both combined foster socioecological transformations. Together with Hillary Angelo, they help me understand — both practically and conceptually, the assembling of new types of collectives that participate in the making of our socioecological futures. Nature Theatre was designed with the aspiration to be exactly this new type of collective. It is with another geographer, Kim Kullman, that I think through being with the more-than-human others by not only seeking to cope with the unpredictabilities of the world, but encouraging others to learn from such unknowns and to live and blossom with them.

Unavoidably, the giants whose shoulders I precariously balance on include Bruno Latour with his learning to be affected; Donna Haraway, who offers feminist calls for exercising response-ability to engage with unexpected others; Anna Tsing with her proliferating ways of paying attention to more-than-human and Susan Lacy, contributing her new genre public art analysis.

Weaving together cultural, radical, human and more-than-human geographic scholarship, socially engaged and new genre public art practices, seemed like a big task. Luckily, I found a rug that tied them all together. I didn’t really just stumble upon it. It was another cultural geographer, Florian Dünckmann that I had the incredible luck of working with at the time, who — after my numerous nature-theatre-related musings — wondered: “have you ever heard of the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari?” I shook my head. I still have a square post-it sized piece of paper with his handwritten names of these two philosophers who, little did I know, would become my main companions in planning, doing and making sense of the Nature Theatre. But more on these assemblages later — let’s return to the theatre.

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A few performances in, my fellow usher shared his take on what was happening: “It really works!” Both of us by that point shared that vague, yet strangely certain feeling: there was something, that was *really, truly* happening in that process, something was emerging and something was changing. So what and how exactly was happening , emerging and changing?

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For one, people were paying attention. This seems trivial, but is very important. Looking into the frame (where nothing, but also each of the performance’s plots, was unfolding itself as it pleased), sitting throughout the performance in silence, listening — were all enablers of the reimaginings that took place. This is to say, that for reimaginings to occur, people have to be paying attention. There is no way around this, not at least in the Nature Theatre, or any other intervention that aspires to change something — a change in thinking and practices, in my opinion, doesn’t just magically happen overnight. It’s rather a result of continuous effort of a number of people that might start with paying attention to what’s really going on.

Paying attention in the Nature Theatre led to different levels of engagement with the place itself, each other and ideas about nature, distributed agency and many more. People were clapping at the end of the performance, hushing some of the noisier audience members, whispering when wanting to share something with their neighbour. A playful assemblage was emerging, by people attentively participating in the intervention and thereby reinforcing the rules of the game.

People were also starting to speculate on what was natural:

• “This park? Not quite because it’s urban nature”;
• “Humans themselves?” — when other people entered ‘the stage,’ some thought they were a distraction from ‘nature’ in our Nature Theatre, but for other spectators, the passersby blissfully unaware of being on this very stage, made perfect sense, because, “We are all nature.”

An assemblage where an exploration of the imaginary boundaries between us (whoever this us might be) and ‘nature’ was becoming possible.

Thirdly, people were questioning things: why certain objects on the street were there, who put them there, who made the decision they should be there, whose ‘nature’ is this, where are the voices of more-than-human in the decisions, how do we hear, understand and act upon these voices?? “We are the only people who have a word in this world. It’s a pity but we can’t hear other systems, like ecosystems and we think we are the best.” — someone shared in the lobby discussion. In a number of lobby discussions we spoke about how and who makes the cities we share.

An assemblage where people were wondering why things are the way they are, questioning if it can be otherwise, was emerging.

The socio-natural assemblages I refer to above, are comprised of ourselves, the surrounding environments with all its components, plus the abstract ideas we hold and negotiate with each other and that translate into the way we make places. Thinking with assemblage theory allowed me to understand the mesh of these objects, processes and concepts as existing both in the space of actuality (here, now, the experienced present) and the space of virtuality (the possibilities with an ever-present potential to become actual). This distinction between the actual and virtual becomes quite important to both planning and analysing changes within the Nature Theatre.

So, to now put it in assemblage terms, the Nature Theatre was rendering the possible into the current. This process of rendering something current was ultimately the actualising of virtual ties that connect all (or some?) assemblage components, both in actuality and in virtuality. For me, it, obviously, wasn’t about actualizing any random possibilities though. This was about finding more attentive ways of being in the city, ways that encourage and provoke thinking and reflection.

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To delve deeper into the actualisation of virtual ties / rendering the virtual possible, I had to understand what were the assemblage processes and properties that enabled this to take place. The two axes I used for this sense-making were territorialization and coding, relying on Manuel Delanda’s work on applying the concept of assemblage to analyse real life situations and relations. I will explain what they are and why they mattered for understanding how change takes place below.

Territorialization means making or unmaking spaces by an assemblage, but also a degree to which assemblage homogenises its components. One can understand assemblages as having a high or low (or everything in between) degree of territorialization. An assemblage that’s highly territorialized implies a more ‘stable’ entity with less space for change. In my interpretation I took the practices of walking on the city street and hence certain (brief) moments of paying attention and engagement with concepts of nature as a highly territorialized assemblage. Through my intervention I deterritorialized/destabilized the ‘everyday urban walking assemblage’, eliminating (and changing) some practices that came with the change of the meaning in the territory (city space as a place to walk through as opposed to city space as a place to attentively engage with and pay attention). I argue that the core characteristics of the assemblage — people being in and with the city — have remained, but the nature of how they were doing it changed, bringing along other changes with it.

The second concept that I was creating and making sense of the changes with was coding. Coding refers to the roles played by assemblage components in (temporarily) fixing the identity of its whole. In this way coding goes hand in hand with (and, in my understanding, determines) the territorialization. What this means is, the assemblage with a high degree of coding will be the one, where the norms, relationships, rituals become more consolidated and rigidified. Low degree of coding, in turn implies more freedom and flexibility, like informal conversation with friends, for example, where assemblage components do not necessarily exercise coding. The way the Nature Theatre assemblage components were interacting with each other decoded some ways of being in the city and, for the brief duration of the intervention, codes a different assemblage through the use of language and playful new rules that emerged in the process.

In this process of recoding and reterritorializing the ‘everyday’ ways of being in the city, I saw myself as a part of those assemblages in question, attempting to alter the ties between the different components with the hope that by changing those relations, something different can emerge.

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And something different did emerge — the three layers of reimagining I refer to above:

• reimagining the way we were interacting with each other, the place and everything (or at least some things) in it;
• reimagining the abstract and often taken for granted entities of ‘human’ and ‘nature’; and, finally,
• reimagining our everyday spaces as sites for paying attention to their very materiality and, as a consequence, engaging with, reflecting on and trying to imagine different, healthier, fairer ways of co-existing in those spaces.

As I now look back at my assumption — of us, collectively, being capable of doing better — I see it as a deeply hopeful position from which to be engaging with art, research and social change work. This hope is of a particular kind. It is the kind of hope that’s rooted in a radical honesty — that the current socio-economic-political system is fundamentally broken beyond repair. This kind of hope, for me, goes hand in hand with the belief that we can (and many of us actively already do) invent and enact better, just and healthier systems of human and more-than-human interrelations.

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