On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.[1]

Welcome to the second issue of Errant Journal. For this issue we decided to set off from an existing term that we feel cuts to the heart of environmental politics, while at the same time opening up a space for further learning together. We use the term slow violence because we believe that the relation with violence should be front and centre in the discussions of the ‘climate crisis’ as it makes clear the uneven distribution of effects and causes. Coined by Rob Nixon, the term is generally defined by the often used quote from his book that reads: ‘By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’[2] It therefore is a term that aims to expand our idea of what violence is and perhaps brings the rather abstract and universal concept of ´climate change´ back in relation to the underlying necropolitics that can be understood ‘not just as an unfortunate coincidence or accident, but rather as a deliberate extension of colonial logic.’[3] This perspective also makes evident slow violence’s relation to other forms of violence, such as those that are structural, epistemic, etc., and that similarly go largely unnoticed to those it doesn’t affect. Moving away from a universal narrative and addressing the different roles people, companies, and nation states play also opens up the possibility to pose a response to the mounting call for climate justice. This is a topic addressed in the special section of this issue edited by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal that simultaneously functions as an expanded platform for the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes to take place at Framer Framed in Amsterdam from September 2021 onwards.

As a continuation of Errant’s first issue on the politics of time and time’s claim to universality, this issue also asks the question to whom this violence is slow. Because while (Western) scientists are busy making projections of how much time we have left before the ‘tipping point’, for many people in this world, the violence inflicted upon them through the destruction of ecosystems has been ongoing for hundreds of years. Therefore, being able to accept the current moment on the doomsday clock as a crisis waiting to happen rather than one already here, is an example of what could be called ‘climate privilege’. Dating, naming, and categorizing are deeply political acts, and the discussion on the start and speed of climate change is no different. That we live in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene is generally accepted now, but when this epoch begins is still under debate. Placing the start in the 1950s, as is being proposed by some scientists, is essentially a Eurocentric way of interpreting geological data. Conversely, there are those who place the start of this new epoch in 1610 – coinciding with the Orbis Spike: the geologically measurable global drop in carbon dioxide levels caused by the murder of between 48 and 55 million peoples in the Americas.[4]

It is a daunting task to take on this subject in such a modest and young publication. There is certainly a healthy fear of contributing to the masses of publications, exhibitions, and symposia on the subject. But defying the neoliberal tendency to only value the new and different, we want to point out again that there’s nothing new (or slow) about these issues, on the contrary they have been continuously addressed by non-western thinkers for many decades.[5] Still, Errant values amplifying voices that are not listened to enough and offer an alternative tone and attitude with the ability – as an infinitely small part of a much larger decolonial project – to seep through general and universalizing ways of thinking. Important in this endeavor is to centre ‘other’ forms of knowledge that are generally left out of (academic) discussions, such as those knowledges that are informal, lived and embodied, or those gained by poetic gestures.

We start this issue with an article on Tuvalu; one of several small island nations in the Pacific where climate change is an imminent and visible threat as portions of land and whole islands are lost due the rising sea levels.[6] People from Tuvalu have been trying to call attention to their situation for decades, but being only the fourth smallest nation in the world, with a total land area of less than 26 sq km and just 11,000 people, who is listening to them? But what is being lost is more than just land. As Maina Talia shows in his article, the loss of land also means the loss of culture and community, and threatens to turn entire nations of people not just into climate refugees but make them truly homeless. Not just losing life, but identity too.

In a very different way, curator Inga Lāce discusses in her article the relationship between nature and nation in the countries surrounding the highly polluted Baltic Sea. While environmental activism played an important role in the early nation-building processes both at the end of the 19th century, as well as during the struggle for independence from the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the same narrative has turned less progressive in attitude and politics today. Her article shows the entanglement of environmentalism with the concept of the nation state, and the military’s role in the pollution of the Baltics. But what if we could change the view and representation of nature and our climate policies towards it, she asks, would we be also able to change our nationhoods?

Besides oil spills and rising sea levels, most forms of slow violence are only visible through their effects long after the damage is done; because they literally cannot be seen, such as the case of radioactive waste poetically addressed in this issue by Inas Halabi, or because they belong to another form of knowing that is hard to truly understand from the perspective of Western epistemology. For the people of the Amazon for instance, the plant yagé, also known ayahuasca, is not just a mind-altering plant, but a technology that is essential for the connection with ecological networks that ensure balance within their environment. From this point of view, severing the relations of the plant by commodifying it as a tourist attraction erases its deep, relational meaning and importance. For this reason, we are very grateful for the permission we received from Hernando Chindoy Chindoy, AWAI Legal Representative of the Inga People of Colombia, to republish and translate the manifesto written to address this topic. Additionally, we publish an interview with Inga leader and activist Rosa Elena Jacanamijoy Jacanamijoy in which she explains how the ‘bad management of plants (by thinking they are an object) can also make us sick, can kill.’ In a similar vein, Aldo Ramos reminds us in his creative text that in order to plant a tree, you cannot sever it from its location. It needs ‘other plants, animals and people, Interwoven with a whole community, rooted in a living world’.

The logic of extraction that is at the root of much of the slow violence people face, is woven throughout this issue. Extractivist thinking not only plays a part in the cause, but also – perhaps even more disturbingly – in the envisioned ‘solution’ of climate change in projects of renewable energy. As Ivet Reyes Maturano describes, bolstered by the voices of the local people she spoke with, people of Yucatán are continuously ignored and threatened by large companies that are destroying land for the production of ‘renewable energy’. It is clear that the objective is not finding a solution to climate change at all, but to make more profit by any means necessary. It is unnerving that decades after the hegemonic powers of this world have (also) come to be aware of the inability of the Earth to sustain our destructive ways, we have learned absolutely nothing and our ‘solutions’ are still based on the same modern/colonial ways of thinking that got us here in the first place.

In order not to repeat certain set ways of addressing climate change, we have been very careful in our use of images for this issue, so as not to inadvertently frame slow violence as something beautiful or sublime. Something that happens all too often in the visualization of this topic through aerial photography or images that show the immense scale of destruction, deforestation, and industrialization of areas which previously held rich biodiversity. Connie Zheng addresses this topic specifically in her essay on the work Becoming Alluvium by Thao-Nguyen Phan that examines possible alternatives to ‘the emotional gut-punch and slick yet generic pop-apocalyptic visuality that we are all too familiar with.’

As already mentioned at the beginning of this text, the gesture this issue makes of indicating that climate change is not a global phenomenon, but one caused by certain peoples, companies, and nation states, allows for climate justice to take place. We are very happy to be able to include in this issue a section edited by activist lawyer and writer Radha D’Souza and artist Jonas Staal in which they give space to the judges of their Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes to be hosted by Framer Framed later this year. This ‘more-than-human’ tribunal for the prosecution of intergenerational climate crimes is based on the idea of a mutually dependent and intergenerational climate justice that requires not only equality between human and non-human actors, but also close interdependence between different time scales, between the past, the present and the future.

In our opinion, slow violence is not (just) a problem of making the effects of pollution and climate change visible and comprehensible, because it is not something that has not been addressed before. It has. Many times, and by many different people all over the world. Addressing slow violence is therefore a process of listening and accepting that there is also knowledge outside of what is considered as knowledge by the ruling hegemony, or outside that which we can even comprehend. Listen. Listen to the people who inhabit the geographies at stake, but also listen to the land itself, and to the birds that are growing more silent with every passing spring. It is this listening that can be at the basis of an ‘anthropological shift’, which as Rolando Vázquez phrases it: ‘has to do with moving away from the mode of consuming, of disposing of Earth and worlds, to becoming or being in disposition for Earth and others and their worlds. […] It is about becoming open to the radical diversity of Earth-worlds, as an enriching experience that remains always in excess of the self, and that should not be subsumed and reduced through forms of appropriation and representation.’[7]

Perhaps this spring/summer issue of Errant is ideally read outside, in a park or a forest, where the words and images can be supported by the sounds of your surroundings. In any case, and wherever you are, we hope you enjoy reading it.

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[1] Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994: p. 2.

[2] Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2013: p. 2.

[3] Davis, Heather, Zoe Todd. ‘On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.’ ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, Vol. 16, No. 4 (2017): p. 771.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Todd, Zoe. ‘An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another

Word For Colonialism.’ Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 29, No. 1 (March 2016): p. 14.

[6] Some of the other island nations facing the same threat and featured by the drawings on the cover and throughout this issue are: Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Kiribati, Fiji, Solomon Islands and Nauru.

[7] Vázquez, Rolando. Vistas of Modernity. Decolonial aesthesis and the end of the Contemporary. Amsterdam: Mondriaan Fund, 2020: p. 157.

Image: Melanie Bonajo, Progress vs. Regress (Progress), 2013. C-print framed, 75×50 cm, ed. 2/5+ap. Courtesy the artist & AKINCI

In a museum dedicated to the state of Paraná in the southern Brazilian city Curitiba, I was struck by one of the displays in the chronologically-organized exhibition about the history of the region. Wedged between the part on ancient history showing arrowheads and flora and fauna and the part of the museum that chronicles the arrival of the Europeans from the 17^th century onwards, a modest corner was allocated to represent the local indigenous people. There, behind glass stood a display of baskets made by the Guaraní and Kaingang. What struck me was the combination of older baskets yellowed with age with those that are brand new and can be bought from the indigenous people making and selling them in the streets today. In fact, during my visit to Brazil it was hard not to notice the casual omnipresence of these artefacts in every household, used as planters, hampers, a place to keep your keys. Omnipresent and yet not there. What became so apparent through the display in the museum, had in fact been there all along: the way in which we have internalised the idea of the present, of what is modern, contemporary and now, is riddled with contradictions.

At the time, the idea of starting a new magazine had not yet come to mind. But the display in the museum and the contradictions it represented lingered. Specifically, the thought of what it would mean to exhibit such objects within the context of contemporary art in the Netherlands. Would this bring these objects to the present? Establish their right of being? Perhaps, but this gesture would then only reaffirm the way the Western exhibition machine acts as a gatekeeper of validity, as the one being able to establish the relevance for our present, elevating the objects out of oblivion.

Admittedly, this is not a new observation, and yet the issue remains. As cultural institutions and universities are trying to grapple with a present that is much more diverse than the myth they are based on, the problem with the underlying structure stays comfortably in place. The idea of the modern (and equally the contemporary) is a monster that is able to eat all nonconforming voices and spit them out into a seemingly homogeneous discourse that is based on patriarchal, colonial and capitalist ideology. It is a kind of violence that is at the very root of the modern/colonial order, and of what Édouard Glissant pointed at when he observed that ‘the dominant Western conception of universality as a mechanism of ideological conformity turns difference into sameness in order to dominate it.’[1] Without the illusion that this predicament can in any way be overcome within a single project, but rather in an attempt to at least expose or open up the ongoing discourse, the ambitious project that is Errant Journal represents an attempt to address topics from multiple vantage points that do not necessarily come together into a single narrative. In this way Errant aims to share knowledges that are ‘ruled by partial sight and limited voice […] for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible.’ Or, as Donna Haraway also notes, ‘the only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular.’[2]

As the title of this publication might have hinted those familiar with his work, Errant is motivated by Glissant´s notion of ‘errantry’ that is at the base of his philosophy of the Poetics of Relation in which ‘every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.’[3] For him, errantry – alluding to both deviance and wandering – is a way of breaking free from the idea of identity based on rootedness and claims of being able to either sum up or possess a totality of knowledge. It is never the goal to know everything, to see something in its totality, rather, a person who is errant ‘challenges and discards the universal – this generalizing edict that summarized the world as something obvious and transparent.’[4] In Errant’s attempt at taking apart the ways in which knowledge is produced, art and other visual forms play an important part in questioning the transparencies and hierarchies that are at the base of the Western epistemological paradigm. The interplay of text and image, of cultural theory and practice, that makes up Errant’s visual form aims to critically investigate the status of the official and standard, of what is knowledge and what is not, and the hierarchies and values by which this is judged. It is for this reason that I am happy to have found a partner in Framer Framed, an Amsterdam-based platform for contemporary art, visual culture, and critical theory & practice. Not only does this collaboration provide exceptionally valuable content through their extended international network and equal investment in emphasizing situated knowledge, but it keeps Errant grounded in a diverse field of cultural practices that informs and conveys theoretical frameworks.

If Errant aims to locate itself in place in order to realize the limitations of its situated knowledge, this first issue wants to start with acknowledging the importance of locating oneself in time, and subsequently question time´s claim to universality. As the example of the representation of the Guaraní and Kaingang clearly illustrates, our notion of what is contemporary is in fact based on a mechanism of exclusion. This mechanism has been analyzed in depth by Johannes Fabian in his now canonical book Time & The Other in which he aptly ascertains that ‘[t]ime, much like language or money, is a carrier of significance, a form through which we define the content of relations between the Self and the Other.’[5] By putting the Other in a different timeframe, the anthropologist, according to Fabian, places herself in a privileged position while diminishing the Other to an inferior status. In other words, to paraphrase George Orwell, we are all contemporary, but some are more contemporary than others.

With this in mind, we can appreciate Rolando Vázquez’s call for the end of the contemporary. Not in an attempt to define yet another ‘post’, another extension disguised as an alternative that does nothing to subvert the modern/colonial order, but as a way ‘to challenge the very constitution of the “contemporary” and its notion of the present as the field of legibility and recognition.’[6] In his article on the politics of time, republished and setting the tone for this issue of Errant, Vázquez establishes the importance of looking at modern notions of time and the role it plays in injustice and violence that keeps being repeated.

Claiming one’s own history and narrative is an important countermeasure, but as A.K. Kaiza found in his research of the manuscripts of the Ugandan historian Ham Mukasa, this narrative can still get lost through unethical translations and transformations by generations of interlocutors. How then can a history be defined apart from its relation to the hegemony of the West, ask Vera Mey and Shona Mei Findlay in their text on the ambiguity of terms such as ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ in the context of Southeast Asia. It is why Black Quantum Futurism aims to overcome ‘oppressive linear time constructs’ by combining indigenous African concepts of time with quantum physics, concepts that turn out to be very similar. Other contributors find resistance to modern politics of time by considering the temporality of the body, as Season Butler does in her short story related to women’s rights, or Sophie Hoyle by recounting their personal experiences of time as someone suffering from PTSD. The excerpt from the book Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History by Mark M. Smith about the introduction of the clock in South Africa also focuses our attention on how modernity’s obsession with efficiency and progress constitutes an oppressive measure of control. What does it mean then to literally turn the clock around, as local politicians have done with the clock on the main square of La Paz in Bolivia? For Narda Alvarado this action represents a form of historical and political vindication, as well as a way to question Western dominance.

Throughout this first issue of Errant there are artworks pointing to the contradictions inherent to the denial of coevalness, demonstrated by the work of Remy Jungerman and discussed with Rajkamal Kahlon in relation to her residency at the Weltmuseum in Vienna. Yazan Khalili’s work Landscape of Darkness reminds us what it means if one’s continuity of place and being are constantly disrupted. Perhaps then, as Lara Khaldi offers us in her text on the museum in resistance in relation to Palestine, if time is always controlled by the hegemonic power, the only way to resist this is to rid ourselves of any material construct or archive so we can be without time altogether.

I want to thank all the authors for putting their trust in a project that still needs to take shape, and consequently shaping it with me. Errant is not, nor meant to be, a one-size-fits-all format and with every contribution there is a necessary exchange regarding the different ways of writing and thinking. It is inherent to the challenge of Errant’s intention to contribute to the decolonisation of the ways knowledge is produced through language, art and other disciplines that there will be moments of miscommunication and misunderstanding. I deeply appreciate the patience that was sometimes required in this process, as in this respect there is still much to learn, but so much more to gain.

To conclude, I must state the obvious: starting a magazine is not an easy feat, not least because we live in a time that craves fast entertainment and spectacle, and sometimes only seems to have space for activities that are commercially viable. I am therefore even more thankful to all those who have been supportive of the idea, motivating me in moments when I lost confidence and offering valuable new insights and advice. In these last several months, during which the launch of this first issue had to be postponed, much has changed in the world as the coronavirus has exposed the extreme inequality at the foundation of our societies and has led us into a global outcry for social justice. And although we must resist the urge to frame our current reality as something entirely new, inadvertently denying the long history of resistance that precedes it, I do sincerely hope that the time has come for some long overdue structural changes. Perhaps then, as we have entered a time of reflection on how things are done and could be done differently, Errant can find its own little space to grow.

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[1] Eloff, Aragorn. ‘Wandering the shoreline with Édouard Glissant’ New Frame. 7 May 2019. <https://www.newframe.com/wandering-shoreline-edouard-glissant/>.

[2] Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’ Feminist Studies, Vol. 14, no 13 (Autumn, 1988): p. 590.

[3] Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Transl. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2010: p. 11. 

[4] Ibid.: p. 20.

[5] Fabian, Johannes. Time & the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006: p. xxxvii.

[6] See also: Contemporary&. ‘Decolonial Thinking with Rolando Vázquez. The End of the Contemporary?’ Contemporary&. <https://www.contemporaryand.com/magazines/the-end-of-the-contemporary/>.