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Essay title: Desert, Consciousness, Life, Cognition
Name: Marina Velez Vago
Email: marina.velez@marinavelez.com marina.velez@anglia.ac.uk
Contact details:
landline +44(0) 1223 842 991
mobile +44(0)7816007721
Skype marinavelezvago
Website: www.marinavelez.com
Artist statement:
Marina Velez’s work is concerned with issues surrounding people's behaviour, how they
organise themselves and assign value to specific elements and how people influence their
environment and each other.
Biography:
Marina Velez is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Cambridge. UK. She is also a
visiting fellow at Anglia Ruskin University, an educator and researcher. Marina is the founder
and organiser of the yearly artist led project Cambridge Sustainability Residency and jury panel
member and curator of the Sustainability Art Prize for students. Marina has co-edited
publications about art and sustainability and regularly presents papers in her subject areas of
Contemporary Art and Sustainability. Marina’s research title is Value in the aesthetic field:
practice as a catalyst for translation, meaning and worth.
Abstract:
The world of the Anthropocene is an urban world increasingly dominated by globalisation of
markets and homogeneous views. As population in rural spaces dwindle in favour of mega
cities, natural areas become available for grabs by multinational corporations, bringing about a
mono-philia approach to nature and society.
We are faced with the challenges of the Anthropocene and the question of whether we will find
a way to prevent humanitarian and ecological crises. Mass migrations of peoples and climate
related catastrophes must be addressed. Critically, we ought to take the opportunity to question
how we do this if we are to preserve the diversity and plurality of both human and non-human
ecosystems.
Desert as Consciousness
The desert can present itself as an abstract thing; surrendering itself to space, it becomes a
state of mid. In a desert boundaries change constantly, landmarks mutate or disappear, limits
meet resistance. The idea of the desert as entity that constantly transforms itself resembles
theories of memory put forward by Rosi Braidotti: she suggests that the job of remembering is
in principle ‘whatever works to create sustainable lines and productive planes of transversal
interconnections among entities and subjects that are related by empathy and affective
affinity’ (Braidotti, 2011, p.33). Braidotti affirms that a different type of remembrance can be
possible, one that is not ego-bound but is more linked with the process of de-familiarisation
than that of the reaffirmation of an already familiar identity of the self. She calls this remembering
nomadically. In one single stroke, Braidotti opens up the possibility of a radical transformation in
which the self is forever becoming, like the desert, forever in a state of flux.
Memory is essential for the construction of the sense of self and one’s identity, kept together by
past experiences, thoughts and transformations. Memory inhabits consciousness, which gives
dwelling to this forever becoming construction of the self. The desert, as a state of mind,
simultaneously form-free and boundary-mutating, can be compared to that consciousness.
For both consciousness and desert alike the idea of emptiness constitutes a necessity, but, on
close inspection, they reveal themselves to be populated by a multitude of elements and layers;
and the most unexpected thing of all: life. In the desert a plant springs here, an animal appears
there. Living thinking springs like a well in consciousness.
Life as an Act of Cognition
Climate change has precipitated and intensified areas of desertification in many parts of the
globe. In rural Andalucía, Spain, desertification is neither regarded a geopolitical game nor an
abstract computer modelling simulation, but a stark reality. For farmers and shepherds in this
region, finding water is vital and the traditional method used for finding subterranean waters is
dowsing. Interestingly, the activity of dowsing is equally considered a transferable and a non-
transferrable skill, it sits somewhere outside scientific and religious realms and it is regarded by
both disciplines as superstitious.
In this region it is commonly assumed that many farmers themselves possess the gift of
dowsing, a practice that is conducted by means of a distinctive Y shaped twig (Figure 1). The
twigs used for dowsing are artefacts that carry value, enhance perception and activate cognition.
They are employed by the dowser as an antenna through which to sense the land and the
hidden waters. With this tool, the farmer engages his attentive consciousness and traces
invisible lines of knowledge between himself and the earth, cognising with every step he covers
the scorched soil beneath his feet.
F1
Maturana and Varela identify the process of cognition with the process of life (Maturana &
Varela, 1972). Through cognition, life reaffirms itself: pacing and listening to the dry soil,
dowsing for liquid memories of deep waters, walking the arid land in remembrance of promised
life. In this region seeds are kept and passed on from generation to generation. Memory is
encapsulated in every seed the farmer cultivates and in each tantalising blade of grass that the
sheep know where to find. The thoughts of connection and memory of the water must have
been inherently in the tree branches before they were turned into a dowsing stick by the farmer.
The land knows just as the farmer knows; the act of mutual cognition brings them together in a
gesture of compassionate connectedness.
The shape of the dowsing twig makes visible the way in which people are linked to their land
and each other. This shape also reminds us of the change in paradigm explained by Fritjof
Capra, a change that goes from objects to relationships, from quantities to qualities and from
measuring to mapping (Capra, 2014). This shape can be understood as the connector in
Capra’s System Thinking theory, offering the possibility to branch out and connect to more than
one, also offering the possibility to concentrate from multiple to one. The geometry of this
mapping replicates what is to be found in nature, in tree branches, in the veins of its leaves, in
courses of rivers and molecular arrangements.
Capra’s illustration (Figure 2) in which drawing A represents objects and B shows relationships,
the shift from one to the other reveals a multitude of bifurcations. In the mechanistic view of A
the world is a collection of objects which interact with one another, but these interactions,
represented by dotted lines, are secondary. In the systems view of B the objects themselves are
networks of relationships, embedded in larger networks. Capra explains that ‘for the systems
thinker the relationships are primary, whereas the boundaries of the discernible patterns (or the
so-called objects) are secondary.’ (Capra, 2014, p.80).
F2
Similarly to what happens in a desert, boundaries become secondary not because of their
constant permutability but because the relationships between land, flora, fauna and humans are
the central aspect in the creation of the system, not its boundaries.
In rural Andalucía, the connections between human agents and non-human agents map out a
Deleuzian rhizome of extraordinary presence and vitality. The system thinking of the rural could
be considered as the last anti-colonial bastion, its knowledge a form of resistance, not only
against desertification and climate change but also against the propagation of corporate ways of
food production. Desertification in this region is not simply a matter of global warming, it also
comes in the shape of migration to the cities, death of centuries old cultures and knowledges,
loss of values and meanings and destruction of ecosystems.
‘There is a direct relationship,’ writes scholar and activist Winona LaDuke, ‘between the loss of
cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity.’ (Ray, 2017). Climate change, loss of rural culture
and the pressure of a globalised market impact on the land and its people. Losing the ability to
connect to and understand the land are in themselves acts of desertification. Monocrops and
agro-industry intensive farming embody another kind of desertification: the drying out of other
ways of knowledge.
Boundary-resistant rural knowledge, embodied in seeds and people in equal measure and in
which cognition is not a strategy to obtain profit but a way of life, are a form of consciousness
where practices and politics of positivism can be created. Only with such consciousness will we
be able to look with discerning eyes into nature, protect pluralistic considerations of knowledge
and sense and find that which renders life in all its diversity possible.
Bibliography
Braidotti, R. (2014) This Deleuzian Century. Leiden: Brill
Capra, F. (2014) The Systems View of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Ingham, J. (1996) Psychological Anthropology Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press
Khulewind, G. (1984) Stages of Consciousness. Massachusetts: The Lindisfarne Press
Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1972) Autopoesis and Cognition. Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing
Company
Ray, G. (2016) Writing the Ecocide-Genocide Knot: Indigenous Knowledge and Critical Theory
in the Endgame, South Magazine.
Acknowledgements
Andres Galindo Pizarro (shepherd)
Eugenia Vigara
Antonio Molera (farmer)
The people of Belalcázar, Spain