Black Gaia
A Narrative Mode of Living with Others
Lecture held on 18.11.2020
Architektour Series
University of Poland

Earthing with organic and inorganic beings that are no longer subordinated to the human, but attuned to a vast litany of species, this is the purpose of Black Gaia. In spite of its wide speculative vocation, the figure of Black Gaia is rooted in the immediacy of our here and now: the hole in the ozone layer, frozen seed banks, global pandemics, xenobots, ocean garbage patches or transgenic animals constitute some of those strange objects invading our planet while circumventing the epistemic categories characteristic of Modernity. Bastard creatures comprising a vast litany of multispecie entanglements, eclectic composites and hybrid processes resulting from intimate relations between strangers, between “others”, between xenos. Accelerated and accelerative hybrids; multispecie composites distanced in equal measure from the blind gears of Modernity and the lived flesh of Phenomenology. Symbiotic aggregates and narratives of bastardization; strange creatures deviating any pristine and ideal origine, impure and irregular bodies, algorithmic folds, bionic composites, saturated nestings, ecological miscegenations. Cartographical rather than classificatory, and, above all, anti-maternal, anti-natural and anti-humanist, Black Gaia is nothing but the radical earthing of our planet under the premise that the future is a better companion for the present than the past.