Living with precarity points to a historical opening; at the same time, the distress is also real. I don’t intend to mobilise anything except the intensities you feel in daily life for making sense of the current precarious circumstances and perhaps towards a purpose - of your own. All the following is to share my journey thus far.
As a way of practice, I’ve been exploring an operational framework called Speculative Anthropology together with Chen Zhan, an architect, anthropologist and independent filmmaker. It’s probably audacious or reckless even to attempt to infuse design thinking into anthropology, given that speculation and reflexivity don’t usually go hand in hand. I’m sharing it here as a work-in-progress methodological experiment.
Descriptions of life can be visionary when they enable us to see what we could not see otherwise, including the futures that are embedded in the present. At the same time, the power of world-building is embraced to sometimes unlearn and sometimes multiply the world we currently reside in.
Being anthropological means cutting through the fine grain of everyday life to attune to the mundane acts, faint traces and their dispositions, while accounting for how worlds are composed as a whole. Being speculative means confronting and amplifying how things are made into the way they are, while envisioning how things could be different. The encounter between the anthropological and the speculative expands both. Descriptions of life can be visionary when they enable us to see what we could not see otherwise, including the futures that are embedded in the present. At the same time, the power of world-building is embraced to sometimes unlearn and sometimes multiply the world we currently reside in. In this framework, one is simultaneously an observer and a dreamer.
ORCHID, BEE and I is a fictional ethnography of a near future, prompted by our own and collective experiences of living with the pandemic and the climate crisis.
ORCHID, BEE and I is a fictional ethnography of a near future, prompted by our own and collective experiences of living with the pandemic and the climate crisis. It delves into the paradoxes of protection, isolation, care, intimacy, symbiotic relationships, anthropocentric practices, and the deeply-held human desire for companionship with other species.
Film still from ORCHID, BEE and I, 2022, dir. Chen Zhan and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
Scenarios are key here. It is through scenarios that we piece together the different threads of world-building, such as, how people live, how they relate to each other and other species, what forms the dominant power takes, and so on. By imagining how a different world might manifest in everyday scenarios, we hope to keep the imaginary alive and flashed out rather than reduced to thin abstraction. Through the design of spaces, props and costumes as well as sound, the scenarios reflect, confront, amplify or challenge certain aspects of the world we are living in now. Also, each scenario is a prompt for collaboration, including with movement artists, bio-designers, food designers, mask-makers, sound designers, filmmakers and researchers. World-building is a collective endeavour, after all.
Film still from scenario PLASTIC LOVE in the world of ORCHID, BEE and I, 2022, dir. Chen Zhan and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
One of the scenarios is Plastic Love; it starts in the home. Fully unpacking the scenario would make this column very lengthy. Instead, I list here a few points of discussion from the tangible to the abstract and welcome further conversations outside of the column.
Companionship: What would happen if the pandemic were exacerbated and humans decided to embrace complete isolation and also cut contact with all animals for self-protection? What would it look like to form a household with a plant? What kind of cultural habits would emerge?
Plastic: Plastic is a complex matter (as discussed in the previous column). It is a major polluter; yet during the pandemic, it has become indispensable to combat the virus. Plastic divisions become a new socio-spatial landscape of protection and isolation. What would home be like if the domestic space were remade by this plastic landscape when every single activity needed to be separated?
Control: During the pandemic lockdowns, it was common to feel out of control. But how much control do we really want? At what point might we be so in control of our life that we lose contingency and creativity and eventually our agency?
Film clip from scenario PLASTIC LOVE in the world of ORCHID, BEE and I, 2022, dir. Chen Zhan and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
The framework of Speculative Anthropology derives from what anthropological thinking has taught me about attuning to relationality (or, simply, a kind of way-finding and sense-making). I find two types of relationship building essential.
The framework of Speculative Anthropology derives from what anthropological thinking has taught me about attuning to relationality (or, simply, a kind of way-finding and sense-making).
The first is to establish a meaningful connection between our everyday life and the big, abstract global issues of our time. Seeing big problems in the abstract tends to produce polarised, entrenched opinions, which then tend to become symbolic. Much of the mood linked to distress, disorientation and displacement comes from the gap between the symbolic and the experiential.1 Our views and feelings are a lot more nuanced when it comes to actual lived experiences. After all, big issues are made up of a myriad of concrete, small fragments, each of which is real and tangible and each of which is a piece of our daily lives. The work is to piece these fragments together across scales and temporalities, in which we situate ourselves.
The second is to connect different aspects of life. The fabric of life is inherently seamless (rather than segmented as falsely suggested by the division of disciplinary knowledge), and it requires analytical continuity.2 Take the simple practice of eating rice; it simultaneously weaves together cultural practices, rituals, myth and cosmology, national food security, global trade, industrial crop cultivation and the genetic erosion that comes with the creation of a monoculture. Indeed, here we are back to the transversal mode of sensing and sense-making discussed in the second column.
On the part of “speculative”, it is fair to say that anthropology opens up a space to discuss conditions and potentials of human life. Familiar ways are not the only way - something that is so easy to forget.
On the part of “speculative”, it is fair to say that anthropology opens up a space to discuss conditions and potentials of human life.3 Familiar ways are not the only way - something that is so easy to forget. It is a sense of possibility, really. It keeps life lively even when reality sometimes appears inert. It constantly pushes the boundaries of our perception, conception and imagination.4 Most importantly, it is not about the accounts of the world of the other in themselves, but rather how these enable “the permanent decolonisation of thought.”5 I, for one, consider multiplying perspectives and worlds - of humans and more-than-humans - a fundamental condition for justice.
Acknowledgements
ORCHID, BEE and I is an on-going collective endeavour with many friends and collaborators. We are fortunate to have worked with (up to this point):
Co-Producer: Laura Belinky
Cinematographer: Keidrych Wasley
Movement Artist: Mira Hirtz
Bio-Designer: Clara Acioli
Food Designer: Orlando Lovell
Mask-Maker: Vicky Wright
Researcher: Agata Nguyen Chuong
Sound Designer: Alonso Esquinca
Focus Puller: Manu Amler
Read the entire "Living with Precarity" column by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng.
Cover image: Film still from ORCHID, BEE and I, 2022, dir. Chen Zhan and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng
Bio
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng is a transdisciplinary design researcher. At the intersection of architecture, anthropology, performance and filmmaking, Cyan’s collaborative work is committed to generating new sensibilities and imaginaries. The wide-ranging themes include non-canonical frameworks of being, knowing and practising, aesthetic agency, and modes of co-existence between human and more-than-human. Cyan received commendations by the RIBA President’s Awards for Research in 2018 and 2020 from the Royal Institute of British Architects. Her work has been exhibited at Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics (2020-22), Driving the Human: 21 Visions for Eco-social Renewal (2021), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others, and included in the Architectural Association’s permanent collection. Cyan holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association (AA), and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015-17). She currently teaches at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London.
Notes
1 On this point, I have greatly benefited from exchanges with Biao Xiang, Director of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, including via events, emails and personal conversations. More on this, please look out for Xiang’s forthcoming book: Biao Xiang and Qi Wu, Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World (Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2023).
2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993).
3 Tim Ingold, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London; New York: Routledge, 2013).
4 Many anthropological works exemplify this point in their own fascinating ways. Just to name the most recent one I have encountered: David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London: Penguin Books, 2022).
5 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology, ed. and trans. Peter Skafish (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Bibliography
de Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structural Anthropology. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Ingold, Tim. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London; New York: Routledge, 2013.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.
