Laboratory of Experiments to Co-Imagine Possible Worlds: Commonism, Anarchic Composting and other Seedings.

• Grant number: 25/01865-2
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: August 01, 2025
• End date: July 31, 2028
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts
• Principal Investigator: Christine Greiner
• Grantee: Christine Greiner
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Claudio Pereira Bueno ; Erin Claire Manning ; Fernanda Raquel ; Pascal Gielen ; Yara dos Santos Costa Passos ; Zairong Xiang

Abstract

The question that mobilizes this project is how to establish relationships between very different contexts, in order to activate co-imaginative processes and shared knowledge.There is a difference between imagining the other from one's own point of view; and dealing with alterities through experiences that convert individual points of view into collective points of life (Coccia, 2018:4). In this process, as Antonio Bispo dos Santos (2023) said, it is important to sow words to see which of them could germinate more in the sense of generating confluences.As a methodology, the project will test a seeding of terminologies based on experiences that open up to a plurality of lives and knowledges, betting on the exchange of neoliberal egocentrism for a cosmopolitical ecocentrism (Estok and Kim 2013, Stengers 2007 and 2023, Xiang 2023).Three work fronts will be opened: pedagogical, epistemological and research-creation, all of which will always be happening in a related and, at times, indistinct way.The initial problem refers to the inefficiency of discourses that merely replicate vocabularies to exhaustion, compromising the emergence of new paths and movements. It is necessary to take a step back and rethink the guiding assumptions of cognitive habits that merely replicate colonial traps. Therefore, instead of the usual subterfuges (banning differences, adhering to parameters given a priori, and ignoring opacities); the proposal is to destabilize some logics that have survived in a spectral manner. These are: (1) the dichotomies between nature and culture; (2) the compartmentalization of knowledge and (3) the hierarchies between humans and other living beings. Through two seminars and a final meeting, organized in São Paulo and the Amazon; some composting will be proposed, combining art, science and philosophy to start studies and debates. In common sense, composting is defined as a biological process to recycle organic matter into natural fertilizer. However, for some authors who make up the reference framework of this project (João Paulo Barreto, Antonio Bispo, Mel Chen, Zairong Xiang, Vinciane Despret, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing), composting and sowing are also cultural, since there is no way to separate nature and culture. These are living processes to do-with (human and more-than-human), and reinvent stories. Among the main terms that this project mobilizes to activate composting, the following stand out: fabulation (Nyong'o 2018, Greiner 2017 and Haraway 2023), animacy (Chen 2012), artistry (Yuasa 1987, Manning 2016 and Williams 2019), common-ism (Gielen 2018) and failures (Bueno, 2020), considered as transformative devices for communities that resist and reimagine their futures.In addition to the expected results for academic projects - such as books, articles and seminars - the proposal will be to strengthen the flow between universities and other knowledge networks that explore research strategies, conceived from alliances between some ancestral practices and contemporary micropolitical actions. (AU)