This talk departs from a simple question: What is planetary space? The hypothesis is that if we are to posit “the planetary” as an index for paradigmatic socio-historical transformation (and not merely a new nomenclature), we require commensurate spatiotemporal figurations to embed and relocalize ourselves as well as our relations with reality. The hypothesis derives from the historical triangulation between the emergence of Euromodernity and the reinvention of its corresponding space (conceptually, representationally/artistically, and operationally), as well as how this reinvention of space provided a representational ‘site’ (an aestheteme) to embed the coemergent philosophical figure of humanist “Man”. It is this reinvented space that afforded the localization of such a humanist concept “Man”, rendering the once abstract concept, practicable and realizable—especially its space of reasoning. We’ll then work through how the planetary entanglement troubles what is commonly understood as “local” within the ongoing legacies of Eurohumanist spaces of representation and reason, and begin speculating on how to reimagine our own embedding within higher dimensional (material, conceptual and real) conditions.
Patricia Reed is an artist, writer and designer based in Berlin. Recent writings have been published in Pages Magazine, Glass Bead Journal, The New Normal, Construction Site for Possible Worlds, e-flux Journal, Making & Breaking, Para-Platforms, and e-flux Architecture. She also co-wrote the Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) as Laboria Cuboniks, which was republished by Verso Books in 2018. A compilation volume of Reed’s essays will be released by Holobionte ediciones (Spanish) in late 2022.
Reading: We will be reading Massimo Scolari, Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 2012. Reading Chapter 10: “The Jesuit Perspective in China”