{"id":2433,"date":"2017-07-12T21:45:51","date_gmt":"2017-07-12T21:45:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=2433"},"modified":"2017-07-13T08:50:27","modified_gmt":"2017-07-13T08:50:27","slug":"intercalations4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/intercalations4\/","title":{"rendered":"Landscape and Memory: A Review of The Word for World is Still Forest"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"20170219_intercalations04_web<\/a>

Facsimiles courtesy of Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest. London: Granada Publishing, 1980. Excerpt by Anna-Sophie Springer. Typesetting by Elise Hunchuck.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Not to find one\u2019s way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one\u2019s way in a city, as one loses one\u2019s way in a forest, requires some schooling. <\/em>Walter Benjamin, \u201cTiergarten\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is fitting that the launch for Intercalations\u2019 newest volumes\u2014The Word for World is Still Forest<\/em> and Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago<\/em>\u2014will take place today in Berlin\u2019s Tiergarten<\/a> park. Like Walter Benjamin in his wayward rambles through the park and its artificial islands, which become the \u201cfirst chapter in the science of a city\u201d that is Berlin Chronicle<\/em>, so too do editors Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin in The Word for World is Still Forest<\/em> offer a schooling in disorientation:<\/p>\n

If you get lost in the forest, authorities advise that you stop moving and stay in one place to avoid confusion and increase the chances of being rescued. We see things differently: we suggest you stray far from paths cut by familiar habits and explore some of the innumerable perspectives on and of the forests that sustain this world.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kaleidoscopic practices of reading and writing have informed the Intercalations<\/em> series from the very outset, as I observed in a review of the first volume<\/a>, Fantasies of the Library<\/em>. These new volumes are no less prismatic. But while the library and its paginated affairs determined the promiscuous layout of the inaugural volume, in The Word for World is Still Forest<\/em> arboreal affairs facilitate an entangled book that consists in photographically touring the Tiergarten and its ancient trees, observing riparian erasure along Berlin\u2019s Landwehrkanal, thinking with the tropical rainforest of Ecuador\u2019s Upper Amazon, visualizing genocidal violence through a botanical archaeology of central Amazonia, witnessing the incremental decimation of teak trees in an Indonesian conservation forest, visualizing the extensive data sets of Harvard\u2019s Arnold Arboretum, surfing the subterranean \u201cWood Wide Web\u201d via elder Douglas fir trees in British Columbia, chronicling the interplay of apocalypse and exuberance in forest mythologies (on this see also Simon Schama’s chapter on forests in Landscape and Memory<\/em>), remediating the fictional forests of an imaginary exoplanet in Ursula Le Guin\u2019s The Word for World is Forest<\/em>, and, finally, becoming lost in (and, for the patient transcriber, finding one\u2019s way through) the literal<\/em> forest of a tree alphabet. (This is just one possible reading itinerary among others.)<\/p>\n

Multi-perspectival, The Word for World is Still Forest<\/em> takes as its object of inquiry the multinaturalism <\/em>of the forest that perhaps can be best glimpsed through \u201cthe Amerindian way of perceiving images in and of the forest\u201d that Pedro Neves Marques elaborates in his contribution. Though its method may be one of defamiliarization, this volume\u2014a forest school staffed by visual artists, curators, ethnographers, anthropologists, forest ecologists, data scientists, and forensic architects\u2014can be judged not by its capacity to disorient but rather by its potential for emancipatory orientation that for Marques consists in the question of<\/p>\n

how to inhabit the space of the in-between, the interval <\/em>between \u201cworlds\u201d\u2014collaboratively and politically\u2014in order to contribute to a decolonization of the many worlds from the imposition of the \u201cone world.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Taking place in an urban forest in the historically divided and fragmented metropolis of Berlin, the launch-walk promises to rehearse this volume\u2019s main discovery: that the city haunts the forest just as the forest haunts the city. Curiously, it is a walk that has been rehearsed by Benjamin\u2019s collaborator Franz Hessel, whose path in Walking in Berlin<\/em>\u00a0(1929) takes him past this<\/em> walk\u2019s very starting point (Tuaillon\u2019s Amazon on Horseback<\/em> sculpture) and then onward \u201cwithout a specific direction\u201d (ohne eine bestimmte Richtung<\/em>) only to find himself \u201causpiciously astray\u201d (gl\u00fccklich verirrt<\/em>). May its participants be so lucky. These rehearsals, like the one announced in The Word for World is Still Forest<\/em>, are vitally important for maintaining the extremely tentative ecological relationships that sustain “worlds” and for recalling the forgotten colonial histories that still\u00a0threaten to undermine them.<\/p>\n

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Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin (eds.)
\nintercalations 4: The Word for World is Still Forest<\/em>
\nBerlin: K. Verlag & Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2017.
\nWith contributions by Sandra Bartoli, Kevin Beiler, Shannon Castleman, Dan Handel, Katie Holten, Elise Hunchuck, Silvan Linden, Yanni A. Loukissas, Eduardo Kohn, Pedro Neves Marques, Abel Rodr\u00edguez, Carlos Rodr\u00edguez, Suzanne Simard, Anna-Sophie Springer, Paulo Tavares, Etienne Turpin, and Catalina Vargas Tovar.<\/span>
\nISBN 978-0-9939074-5-6
\nIn English, \u20ac 19\u00a0Buy at the webshop<\/a>.
\nDownload as PDF [ca. 26 MB]<\/a><\/p>\n

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