PhD Defense at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Incantations of Inhuman Language

The PhD in Practice program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna kindly invites you to the defense of Caitlin Berrigan‘s dissertation project “Incantations of Inhuman Language”.

The Examination Panel is made up of: Christina Jauernik (chair), Anette Baldauf and Renate Lorenz (supervisors), and Alena Williams (external appraiser, Academy of Fine Arts).

This cosmology of artistic research is a prompt to question, expand, and make shimmer the contours of ontological categories. At the indistinct slit between life and nonlife and my body and yours and the body of the planet are two existents: the viral and the mineral. They are the costars of this cosmology that seeks to practice forms of relationality across an ecology of selves, matters, and others—both living and undead. The works that follow tend to our material-semiotic relationships in being-with them, and indeed how they co-constitute our subjectivation into human holarchies that make us of them. How can we understand, interpret, and be in relation to the inhuman world? How can we practice other ways of being a body? The practices within this cosmology bring the forces of the unseen, the micropolitical, the mineral, and the inhuman into the realm of the sensible. Unfolding in relation and praxis, these autotheoretical writings and artworks employ methods in technopoetics, queer phenomenologies, and counterinfrastructures.

My speculative creative work is grounded within the dominant logics of the present, in which the lithic matter of the earth is exploited as a seemingly inexhaustible resource for capital gain and technogovernance. Geological formations are widely conceived as inert, material substrata rather than as a complex, sympoietic system that sustains life and regulates the climate. There is a crisis in this logic that fails to recognize systems and scales of planetary interdependence. To depart from this closed loop and speculate otherwise, Incantations of Inhuman Language offers a world one in which the inhuman agencies of the planet are in communication with each other and with a human alliance who works in service of the desires of the mineral earth. Recognizing cosmological worldbuilding as both a craft and a philosophical framework, my work engages with the embodied forms and substantive politics of creating a world in which the human is no longer at the center. The insurgency of volcanoes and viruses vibrate throughout.

Speculative worldmaking is a critical, imaginative practice towards emancipatory politics. These works’ protagonists collectively attune to “affective geologies” towards a cocreation of subjectivity with inhuman forces that is always in excess of the self: being multiple, being-with, being unbounded. This work asks: What could it look like to create alliances across different metabolic forms?