Coordinating Practice: Introduction
With Patricia Reed
Coordinating Practice: Scale 1
With Spółdzielnia „Krzak“, Gilly Karjevsky & Rosario Talevi, and Monique Verdin
Coordinating Practice: Scale 2
With Nikiwe Solomon and Fernando Silva e Silva
Coordinating Practice: Between Scales
With Ela Spalding, Raphaël Grisey & Bouba Touré, and Simon Turner
(with French and simultaneous translation into English)
Coordinating Practice
With all participants
(with French and simultaneous translation into English)

The Anthropocene has a coordination problem. With its many scale effects and asymmetrical local contestations, it is a time riddled with challenges to coordinate action and research. With that in mind, this series of conversations during The Shape of a Practice highlighted the many challenges of coordinating Anthropocene related projects at different scales, both spatially and temporally. Conversations aimed to share and mitigate the collective challenges of coordination by negotiating how context, power, and communication all factor into realizing a project or knowledge community while, at the same time, synthesizing how strategies can be translated into specific effects in the world.

For this series of talks, participants are grouped according to projects at similar spatial or temporal scales and invited to share insights into how they meet the challenges of context, power, and communication. The session begins with a short framing by philosopher Patricia Reed, followed by three discussions approaching different scales of coordination. Dealing with a singular site, the Warsaw based collective Spółdzielnia „Krzak“ spoke with Gilly Karjevsky and Rosario Talevi about the complexities of working on their respective sites, both of which were repurposed for their activities. Following this site specific focus, Cape Town based anthropologist Nikiwe Solomon and Porto Alegre based philosopher Fernando Silva e Silva discuss the challenges of coordinating research projects that encompass entire regions. The final conversation focuses on projects that move between multiple sites and continents with artist Ela Spalding from Estudio Nuboso, geologist Simon Turner from the Anthropocene Working Group, and artist/activists Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré who document and participate in the Somankidi Coura project.