Addressing Karukinka

Abstract

Ecological change at the hands of humans is strikingly evident in Tierra del Fuego, so too human transformation at the mercy of geography. This mirroring between the human and the ecological is what captured my attention when I first visited in early 2010, and it has been the driving force for my curatorial practice ever since. What does it mean for the work of a curator to be motivated by an archipelago? How does it transform the definition of curatorial practice? What does curating for an archipelago entail? To answer these questions, I explore the relationship between myself and my subject of study in a literary manner. In what could be called a fictocritical (Stephen Muecke, ‘What is fictocritism?', in The Mother's Day Protest and other Fictocritical Essays, Rowman and Littlefield International, London, 2016, p xiii) style I address Tierra del Fuego as an ‘actant' (in the Latourian sense of non-human entities that have agency as explained in Bruno Latour, ‘On Actor-network Theory: A Few Clarifications', Soziale Welt 47, no 4, 1996, pp 369-381) or as a hyperobject (this term refers to objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localisation, such as climate change, Styrofoam, and the wind. I classify the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego within this category of hyperobjects as defined by Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, London, 2013) and tell it stories. By revealing how I came to know my subject rather than what I know about it I aim to enact a practice of transversal ecological address (this article is one of a series of multi-versed approaches to writing on Tierra del Fuego. In other essays, I adopt different tones of voice when addressing different ‘characters’. These tones of voices are not just metaphorical, but performative for each essay and are forged through dramatised rehearsals of past or possible encounters).