Posthuman Practices of Care beyond the Entropocene: How the FARN. collective Designs Ways of Thinking-With in «The Shape of Trouble to Come»

Abstract

In The Shape of Trouble to Come: A Posthuman Ritual (2021) the FARN. collective responds to the actual condition marked by indeterminacy and environmental destruction. In the ruins of capitalism (Anna Tsing), represented on stage with electronic waste of computer technology, the German theatre collective presents in an experimental trial various speculative stories that allow the spectators to see themselves as part of a larger ecological context and attune the perspective to polyphonic assemblages with multispecies worlds. These world-conceptions presented in various scenes are based on texts and ideas of Donna Haraway, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Paul B. Preciado. In reference to Anna Tsings attempt to focus on the “arts of noticing,” author focuses in this article on practices of care which lead to a thinking in relationalities, especially to a thinking-with (Haraway). This thinking-with is a way of living-with, being aware of troubling relations and significant otherness that transforms those involved in the relation and the worlds we live in. Analyzing different polyphonic assemblages which the FARN. collective created author shows how posthuman practices of care create trouble in established epistemologies and leads to an experience of becoming and of being vulnerable to others.