Art, time, nonlinearity with Manuela Infante and Mandy-Suzanne Wong (Art after Nature 5)

Estado Vegetal is Manuela Infante’s riveting experimental performance art through which plants are charged with an agency capable of uprooting culturally grounded conceptions of the world. The book Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking, edited by Giovanni Aloi, is the first book dedicated to this performance and features essays from scholars and artists, including a fictional continuation of Infante’s work by Mandy-Suzanne Wong. Here, Infante and Wong join Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard in conversation.

Manuela Infante is a Chilean playwright, director, screenwriter, and musician who creates her own performances and tours in America, Europe, and Asia. Her works include Estado Vegetal and Metamorphosis. 

Mandy-Suzanne Wong is a Bermudian writer of fiction and essays. She is an award-winning author whose books include The Box and Drafts of a Suicide Note.

Giovanni Aloi teaches art history, theory, and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is author or editor of many books on the nonhuman and art.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and founder of the Green Lantern Press.

A performance of Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal (Vegetative State), performed by Marcela Salinas, is available to watch on YouTube.

Art after Nature is a series edited by Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard that explores epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities.

Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking is available from University of Minnesota Press and includes pieces by Maaike Bleeker, Lucy Cotter, Prudence Gibson, Michael Marder, Dawn Sanders, Catriona Sandilands, Sibila Sotomayor Van Rysseghem, and Mandy-Suzanne Wong.

Episode references:

The Conquest of America / Tzvetan Todorov

Capitalist Realism / Mark Fisher

Horizon / Manuela Infante

What is University of Minnesota Press?

Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.

Manuela Infante: 00:06

I think that linear time and circular time coexist.

Giovanni Aloi: 00:12

Ultimately, you cannot escape the way in which language produces reality, but at the same time, you can twist and turn and doubt clarity.

Caroline Picard: 00:21

Both of you, I think, are able to create subjectivities that resist being fixed.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 00:27

Readers expect to see themselves in characters. I am frankly not that interested in being a mirror for other people, but I'm not interested in being my own mirror either.

Giovanni Aloi: 00:41

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another podcast of the Art After Nature series published by University of Minnesota Press and edited by Giovanna Loy and Caroline Piccard. Art After Nature explores the epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding environmental consciousness of the humanities. Authors featured in this series engage with the recent ontological turn appending anthropocentrism in order to grapple with the dark ecological fluidity of nature cultures. The anthropogenic lenses of inquiry emphasize an ethical focus for grounding the more than human politics of our era.

Caroline Picard: 01:21

Today, we are here to talk about the latest book in our series, Estado Fetital, performance and plant thinking edited by Giovanni Aloy with authors such as Michael Marder, Micah Bleecker, Lucy Cotter, Don Sanders, Catriona Sandlands, and Prudence Gibson, Sibylla Sotomayor von Risigam, Mandy Suzanne Wong, and Manuela Infante, an anthology about the performance work, Estado Vegetal, cowritten by Manuela Infante and Marcela Salinas. It's

Giovanni Aloi: 01:58

such a great pleasure to be here with Mandy Suzanne Wong, Manuela Infante, and, of course, Caroline Piccard. And I guess one of the ideas with this gathering is, of course, to just replicate a little bit what the book does, to use Manuel Infante's performance as an excuse to talk about plants, to talk about decentering the human, to talk about the failures of language and representation and speculative possibilities to reenvision our relationship with plants and the rest of the world.

Caroline Picard: 02:30

I mean, maybe just jumping in on that too, I would say, I was struck in thinking about both of your work, how you are really also grappling with philosophical questions and specific philosophies, but I also feel like are producing something that is new. You know? In other words, it it is not simply a translation, which I feel like is something you talk about in the book, Manuela and Giovanni. But then at the same time, I think it's interesting that you have Mandy, you work in fiction. Manuela, you deal with the theater, and those sort of frameworks are very discreet and different.

Caroline Picard: 03:06

Different. And I'm even just interested in hearing you talk about how each of you think about those two frameworks. Maybe we can talk about why they're different. And then also, like, how does philosophy shape those spaces or inform those forms potentially for both of you specifically?

Manuela Infante: 03:23

Yeah. It it was so I mean, it's it's been such a dream to to read this book because it's kind of what you always hope to happen. I mean, not may maybe not everybody that makes theater, but but for me to see this kind of circle come around where you've been reading academic writing and other forms of writing, and that inspires you to create a theater piece that then inspires a book that continues. I mean, I think there's something circular there that kind of gives me hope for nonlinear narratives in a way. So So there's something very exciting about seeing that circle come around and also to change the shape from a circle to a to a branching out.

Manuela Infante: 04:08

It's it was absolutely fascinating to read Mandy Sussan's what do we call it? A story? A short story? Essay slash story? I don't know.

Manuela Infante: 04:17

I don't know what. Maybe you can tell us more. But because just to see these characters to continue to branch out in really unexpected directions, that's really scary and fascinating, I mean, to me, because it's really like, there is kind of an authorship that was already not mine when I wrote the piece because those ideas were coming from others. I know we all know this, but just to to see it in such a concrete way is really special. And in a way, Mandy Sousan's text really helped me get to know these characters better, which is really special, I think.

Manuela Infante: 04:56

I wish I could share it with Marcela, but we have to translate it for her to be able to read it because she's actually the actress. Because what we do is we do a lot of improvisation, and these characters sort of come out of her. And she I always say she's like she's sort of like a like a medium. Like, she just absorbs people and things in the world and then sort of just, like, spits them out. So I think it would be so fun for her to be able to read it.

Manuela Infante: 05:20

But, yeah, I mean, the experience of it's really cool that we have Mandy Sousan here because you do kind of expect a writing an academic reading of a artistic piece is something that we're more used to than a fictional sort of continuation of the of the work. It's it's a really crazy experience.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 05:42

Thank you so much. Like, it's just amazing to be here with you for one thing, Manuela, but also the characters that you made and that Marcela made. Like, I saw her the whole time. Maria Soledad cannot exist without Marcela even in a fictional text for me. What I just wanted to do was, yeah, like you were saying, just continue branching into things that the theater could not or you decided not to show us in the theater, namely the tree.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 06:12

And I didn't want to fill the gap. You know, that gap is there in the play for a very good reason, and absence is such an important protagonist in the play. But, also, I just wanted to play with, you know, what might the tree have thought about or how might the tree or have responded to attempts to empathize with it. Because Maria Soledad is one of the characters who does try to empathize with the plants, like, not Eva, but Maria Soledad does try, and how that well intentioned love fails to be reciprocated entirely and how empathy fails. So in that sense, the gap is not really filled.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 06:56

We see a little bit more, but the gap is not really filled. To go off of Caroline's question about philosophy, theater, and fiction, when fiction is literature as opposed to fiction being philosophy or fiction being theater because they're all different forms of making worlds and making stories, you can really zero in in literature on a particular perspective, one that doesn't even need to exist, that doesn't need to manifest. You don't have the challenges of having to deal with a real human body or even a real tree body. You don't have to worry about explaining anything, really. Like, fiction is not really there to explain the world to you like philosophy is.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 07:43

You don't generalize your or you you can refuse to generalize. And I think that's one of the things that fiction can do that needs to kind of be reclaimed in the literary world. You know? Like, fiction has gotten really political and is being used for many agendas, but I I really wanna reclaim the idea of, like, how Giovanni talks about vegetal mythologies, about characters being just absolute individuals. Where that relates to philosophy is you end up with, like a pressure cooker, like Manuel has, like a pressure test chamber.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 08:18

Can these general ideas, like we are both influenced by object oriented ontology, can the sort of general view of the world that is in object oriented ontology apply to this one person, this one tree? And does it hold true? Does it still work when we have this very particular vision of this tree in this particular moment?

Giovanni Aloi: 08:42

Yeah. That that makes perfect sense, Mandy. I was thinking about the notion of playful mistrust in the context of language is obviously that there's a paradox here because I think both your approaches to writing are so deliberately non anthropocentric. And yet here we are with a book. And a book is the quintessential structure in which we organize words.

Giovanni Aloi: 09:06

Oftentimes, especially academic books, impose a range of limitations that I find more and more uncomfortable, that I find, so limiting. And that was also one of the big ideas. It's not, like, original in a sense of first time it's been done, but to really try and break down the notion of what still is an academic book can do by incorporating fiction, incorporating poetry, not treating the essay as the classical container that's built on absolute references from the western canon, but trying to break that down differently. My contribution is is kind of narrative driven and stemmed again in a different way from what Mendi Susand did from the segment in Estado Quejatal with, that sees Nora and Joselino dealing with the potted plants because, obviously, potted plants is being one of my, main interests right now. And I just felt like that part of what the difficulty of explaining certain things in a clear way or in an absolute way through language in an academic sense, it all seemed futile in the context of the segment involving Nora and Joselino and in relation to what I was doing with my potted plants.

Giovanni Aloi: 10:19

And and these questions that kept haunting me, especially after seeing Estado Grietal and wondering what are pots, as in torture devices or vessels of care. Can we even bring ourselves to care about what a plant might want? How can we ever know what a plant might prefer? And the the notion as well of having come first, there's so much wrapped into that specific sequence. And I think that was my way to try and expand that expectation of what an art historian should do with an essay and how how it should be structured or how how little of your own personal experience should be involved in that encounter with language.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 11:01

I think we're all in our different ways trying to let the plants into our language and trying to be under their influence. And it's taking us out of our comfort zones, taking language out of its comfort zones. So, you know, the academic essay genre starts to leak into memoir, starts to leak into fiction. You know, language loses its clarity. You know, like, when I tried to write about what the tree was experiencing, you know, I used a lot of run on sentences to describe what the roots are doing because the roots are constantly processing incoming and outgoing communications.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 11:38

So this plus this plus this. And that's like the antithesis of clarity in good writing, in spoken language. That's the opposite of what prose is supposed to be. I see that as a small way of letting plants in to break up the language, to break up language's goals with, in this case, their roots. Just like how the tree gets into the concrete, gets onto the street, and starts breaking up the smooth running of the city.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 12:08

We can do that with language too.

Manuela Infante: 12:11

Yeah. I even thought when you said the tree getting to the actual, how do you say, water pipes. I was like, oh, that was such a good idea. I didn't think of that. It was really like, I wanna write that into the to me, it's really about the show, but also theater, since then.

Manuela Infante: 12:31

I mean, I think that from that piece onwards, I've been writing vegetal theater from then on, even if it's about other things. It sort of didn't leave me. But I do think that for me, it's really about honoring the gap, honoring that gap that separates me from that other thing. I just thought because you were talking about this gap, Giovanny, and I was thinking this gap that is actually the place where I cannot completely speak about that other, which is actually the gap that kind of protects, if it can, that other from being appropriated and consumed and absorbed. So to me, the practice of theater making is really the practice of creating gaps or kind of honoring these gaps.

Manuela Infante: 13:15

And I like when you were saying, Mandy Susan, about, like, I wasn't filling in the gap, but I was kind of stepping in the gap. And and what I read in both your pieces in the book is that one could think that you're filling in the gap because you come and sort of expand on a territory that that was presented with gaps, but you just create more gaps. It's kind of a proliferation of gapping that I think is very beautiful. In your narrative, Mandy Suzanne, you come to really speak for the tree, which is something that I, as you say, avoided doing and even when I sort of did it at the end. Was it actually the tree speaking or was it the accumulation of voices that we've been hearing the whole time?

Manuela Infante: 13:54

And are humans fantasizing, imposing readings on these plants, or are they actually interpreting them? It's really fascinating. As you step in that gap, you just create more gaps, which is, I think, really fantastic. And, also, Giovanni, your whole reflections about the potted plants, I learned a lot from them. So I think all these writings are also kind of looking for ways to speak about things without appropriating these things or not running away from the desire to speak about them, because we could also do that.

Manuela Infante: 14:29

Right? We can't talk about things without appropriating them, so let's just not talk. But I think we're all staying with that difficulty. Yeah. And that produces some very special formats, I think.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 14:42

I like the way Giovanni puts it in in the introduction to the anthology about, like, yielding humans' heuristic sense of superiority to a productive vulnerability. I think that's what we are aiming for here too. I mean, like, when you let freedom into language, you kind of end up with a double undermining of language because it doesn't make sense. Therefore, it cannot convey the tree. Therefore, you know, you mess it up further.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 15:08

Therefore, it cannot you know? So it you're just creating more and more inability, more and more vulnerability. I was reading recently a review in which the reader said that when a text has so many gaps, it might seem off putting, but it's actually very welcoming because in the gaps are where you are called upon to think.

Giovanni Aloi: 15:32

It activates. Yeah. That that's one of the things I guess I I was interested in in relation to the the way in which language is deployed in texts, in the book, as well as in the performance. And this notion of playful mistrust is, like, an acknowledgment that ultimately you cannot escape language. You cannot escape the way in which it produces reality, But at the same time, you can twist and turn and doubt clarity.

Giovanni Aloi: 15:56

That's one of the things, I guess, that led me to challenge the idea that a book like this should feature a set of academic essays in the most classical and boring sense is that clarity was the last thing I wanted to do here. I wasn't interested in commissioning analysis of Estado Verghe et al because I really feel that that would have been, like, killing it. You know, every time you overanalyze an artwork, it leads to an impoverishment of that artwork. It leads to a demystification that turns it into an object. And, again, I guess that kinda looks back to what Manuela was saying, the notion of how can you talk about something without appropriating it, without totalizing it.

Giovanni Aloi: 16:40

And I guess it becomes really difficult to do that when I am not a performance studies scholar. And, initially, I was intimidated by it. I stopped when the impulse was to put this book together because I love the performance so much. And I thought, oh, will people look at me as what does he want now? You know?

Giovanni Aloi: 16:58

Like and I'm sure some people in performance studies probably think what does he want now? What is he doing with this? But I think that's part of the fun too that this is not a performance studies analysis of. And also putting together a whole book of eyes and mouths dissecting it from a performance studies perspective or a range of performance studies perspectives just, like, scared me to death. It's like, why would I subject such a beautiful work of art to this terrible destiny of being, like, chopped up and broken apart?

Giovanni Aloi: 17:33

You know, it's not it's not gonna work at all. It kinda reflects a broader crisis, I guess, in my journey as whatever I am that I see reflected in your journey. It's all three of you for that matter because Caroline always expresses herself in different medias. These are conversations we also had in Chicago many years ago, how you use comics to review, for instance. And I to me, that is another crisis of language that I see you address in a way that produces something completely different that fills in a gut.

Giovanni Aloi: 18:05

You know? So I think there is something maybe that's the next book we should all work on edited by. But there is something there, I think, that it's it's really important and that it seems to be the baseline that a lot of this nonhuman, posthuman mistrust for clarity for that utopianist positivism seems to build upon, but I think there isn't much conversation about how people are really trying to, in a format sense, unsettle the foundations.

Caroline Picard: 18:36

One of the things that this also makes me think about it's also related to the form of the book, the setting of the theater, but maybe also just more generally narrative. Like, it seems interesting to me that within the different forms we're talking about, there is a way to on the one hand, it's like you're bringing the plants from the background into the foreground. It's not like a seamless surface all of a sudden, and it's not like the plants are the main star. There are these gaps, I think. But it seems interesting that even if you can sort of play or modulate traditional Cartesian western background, foreground conceptions, for instance, or, like, yeah, mind body, those sorts of divisions.

Caroline Picard: 19:22

I feel like there's nevertheless linearity that remains. It, like, sort of remains a driving force. And, again, I feel like both of you, Mandy, Suzanne, and Manuela are so sensitive to language whether it's, like, following speech patterns or breaking up linguistic forms. Even if you're playing with repetition and a kind of circular narrative, it's still like everything has to go forward. You have to start the book in one place and get to the end or, like, you know, the performance begins and ends.

Caroline Picard: 19:55

I think maybe philosophy doesn't have the same problem because philosophy is, like, I'm building the world. And so because I'm building the world, I can talk about how time works as the philosopher, but you never have to, like, address its continuity. Because as a reader and maybe this is part of what you're talking about, Giovanni, is being, like, kind of problematic. As a reader, you're kind of suspending your experience of temporal progression because you're just thinking about how the world is constructed.

Manuela Infante: 20:28

I love the question of time, and I think it's a really complicated

Caroline Picard: 20:33

one.

Manuela Infante: 20:34

At least in the theater, I think there's simultaneous time structures coexisting. There's kind of the time that is actually passing, and then there's a time like in a plant, if you see a plant's body, you will see time. Right? You didn't see it pass. You weren't there when it passed, but you can visually see it.

Manuela Infante: 20:54

And I think that's another form of time that is kind of materialized in a shape. And I think a theater piece has so it has the time that is passing. It has the time of the fiction, so that can go back and forth and blah blah blah. Right? And it also has the time that you can kind of understand by just looking at the shape of the piece.

Manuela Infante: 21:17

I don't know if that makes any sense. And I use the example of the plant because I learned that from plants. When trying to imitate plants in writing, I remember the day I said, oh, the time is right there. The whole time that has gone by is right in front of me in this exact moment in the shape of I guess that applies to anything. So that's one idea that I wanted to maybe bring into this stew.

Manuela Infante: 21:41

And the other one that came to my mind, I don't know if it has anything to do with this, but I think that linear time and circular time coexist. I really love this story of, oh, I'm not gonna remember any of the names. There's a Todorov, yeah, book called, I think, The Discovery of the Americas or something like this. And he tells the story of when Hernan Cortes, so a Spanish guy, comes to the Aztecas. And the Aztecas have a circular conception of time.

Manuela Infante: 22:09

So they have a conception of time where, they have these paintings and everything that is going to happen and has ever happened is in the paintings, and it will just repeat. So the the circularity of time is stuck in this painting. And when the Spanish came, what he did so that his time paradigm didn't break apart was he sent somebody to paint the Spanish into the paintings. So so

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 22:33

in

Manuela Infante: 22:33

that way, I think somehow, and I I'm not sure I can explain how, I think that example sort of, to me, speaks about how linear and circular time cohabit.

Giovanni Aloi: 22:44

That's a wonderful way, actually. As as you spoke, I had this thought. In relation to what Caroline was saying, I was thinking about the time of consumption. Maybe this is where I think Caroline's constellation of ideas can also, like, acquire a different perspective. I was thinking about the time of the consumption of the piece or the artwork itself is not necessarily in theater, it might coincide with the unfolding of events, and the unfolding of events can happen in different time frames and in different time structures is illustrated, but yet I walk into the theater at 08:15.

Giovanni Aloi: 23:21

The performance starts at 08:30, and it's over at 10PM. And that I can't alter. But within that linearity, there's all these other linearities and circularities and fragments that can be arranged in different ways and behave in different ways. I started to think too about images and images that I carry with me. And, you know, when you started to talk about the painting, I'm like, yes.

Giovanni Aloi: 23:45

Because I have images of Estado Verital in my mind that I can see right now, and why should these not be part of the performance? We've been talking about gaps. We've been talking about breaking up and fragmenting, and this performance lives in me and keeps impacting moments in my day where I go downstairs and I water my plants and Nora and Joselino talk in my mind. It doesn't happen every day. Don't don't be but it happens enough.

Giovanni Aloi: 24:15

You know? Like, once a month, I spare a thought. And I think that is still the performance, and it's still part of that time frame upon which it unfolds. And it's out of your control. It's in a sense out of my control too, and it's decommodifying any aspect of the performance because it no longer requires the actors to get on stage to be in the theater box.

Giovanni Aloi: 24:41

The theater box lives in my head. So what do we do with these images or video recordings that live in our brain, which become a little bit what you've described with the painting? They're just fragments of stand alone time capsules that perpetuate themselves.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 24:59

If you think about it, a book is the same. It's an object that itself has its own material boundaries, which we tend to measure in terms of, quote, unquote, page time, but it's really a number of pages that are in front of us, and we can go back and forward at any time. I do think that there is a lot of market it goes down to market pressure on literature to have a sense of moving forward, to have a sense of beginning, middle, and end, but it really doesn't have to. And I'm trying to do this in my new work, which is about the ocean. It can be very much about setting up a moment and having it be as if almost still, which it would never actually be still because the ocean never is.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 25:42

But, again, you know, multiple timescales. But I think linearity is something that we don't have to have. We don't have to be a slave to if we don't want to even in a book, but there's market pressure.

Caroline Picard: 25:56

It also makes me think about certain forms of storytelling that maybe come from more oral traditions that are completely intrinsic to a culture and a cultural identity in a society. But, also, because they are sort of passed down orally, there are multiple different variations. I'm thinking about, like, the epic of gays are, for instance, but I'm sure that there are others. And it seems like it's a very interesting moment when the narrative is fixed. And maybe a similar thing happens, like, when you this is maybe a clumsy parallel.

Caroline Picard: 26:33

But for instance, like, photograph the plant or photograph the ocean or make a painting of the pristine alpine meadow. In other words, when you create this framework around the thing that is facilitating, you know, it, like, fits into commercial consumption. It fits into, again, these very, like, colonial Cartesian relationships to space and otherness, how fluidity works. Because it's true. Fluidity itself doesn't have to be forward moving.

Caroline Picard: 27:02

It can go backwards and forwards, and it is circular. But there's a way where I think the human subject or, like, a sense of subjectivity, the self doesn't have to be disoriented within those movements or shifts.

Manuela Infante: 27:16

Yeah. I think I just did a show, I think, last year, I don't remember, the year before, about endings. It was called How It All Ends. Oh, well, of course, it had many layers, but on one level, it was sort of a a reflection on this fantasizing with the end of the world, kind of a gesture of, like, let's stop with this dystopian thing and, like, really look at what the end brings, why we're obsessing with the end. And in Spanish, it's really beautiful because the word fin, which is the word for end, also is the word for finality, like why something exists.

Manuela Infante: 27:51

So something's fin, something's end, is also its reason to exist. And from that, I kind of take the idea that there is something about progression towards an end that, of course, has to do with this idea of it's a very religious thought that is in the apocalypse feeling, right, that in the end, everything will make sense. And and it's because the end is something that sort of organizes everything under this unity that, of course, has hierarchies that are defined by somebody. Right? But it's the idea that the end will fix that's why I thought about it.

Manuela Infante: 28:29

The end will fix sense, and it will fix sense in a unified way, and things will make things will make sense in the end. And I think an important part of this more than human experiments that we're doing in a way is also kind of countering the idea that things make sense or that narratives are there to kind of unify sense. So I think it, in a way, it does make sense or it not I don't wanna use the same word, but, I mean, it it works that we are creating these things that are endless. Endless in the double meaning, like sort of pointless and at the same time not flowing, as you were saying, not being fluid towards this endpoint, which is how classical narrative is constructed. And I think it's a it's a political issue how why it's construct constructed towards that end because there's a sense that is trying to be conveyed, a chosen sense of the world.

Giovanni Aloi: 29:25

I think that's incredibly important, Manuela. I struggle a lot, with my graduate students. I don't mind struggling with my undergraduate students. They're there to be bent and twisted, you know, and then that's fine. But I expect graduate students to have digested some of these ideas.

Giovanni Aloi: 29:40

And I think sometimes I forget how much we have been working with these ideas so long because of our posthumanist exposure to these concepts, and they actually still seem quite foreign to other thought models. So for instance, if you have a discussion, it's not unusual for a student to then, so what's what do I take out of this? And I always feel like you've understood nothing out of this. If if you're worrying about the moral, the nugget that you can put somewhere out of this, that's not the point. My impression is that that sort of expectation that an ending will come to make things clear, to sort it all out, to finally make sense of life lead to a very unhappy life because that moment is always very elusive when it appears as it's an illusion, and and it reveals itself as something else unless it really might be your your last breath.

Giovanni Aloi: 30:33

I don't know what happens afterwards yet. But I really find that it's a quintessential aspect of all this posthuman, nonanthropocentric thinking and conception of production of what we do, that it seems odd to me that it's not been already digested into everyday interactions, in conversations, in discussions. It's more than fine that discussion ends on a very weird note that narratives are not resolved, that sometimes that threat doesn't go as you expected, and you're left wondering, but what will happen next? And that's the end of it. You know?

Giovanni Aloi: 31:07

Like, all of that is just the way life goes. It's so everyday. And I've I I wonder how do you go through everyday life if you're expecting things to solve themselves in a meaningful way by the end of the month or by the end of the year or or by the end of the course. That's the other thing that bugs me. I want graduate students to get to the end of the course with more questions than they had when they started, not with certainties.

Giovanni Aloi: 31:32

But still there is a sense that if you don't receive a certainty out of this, you're not getting your money's worth.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 31:39

I think, though, that you've hit the nail on the head with they feel like they're not getting their money's worth. I think that economics has they have internalized more than, say, experience even. It's capitalist, but I guess also communist too. But, like, in capitalism, everything is a piece of capital. Everything must have a use.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 32:00

Therefore, everything must have a purpose in some larger thing, which usually ends up being to make money. Right? This sort of use based ideology is just really ingrained right now in anglophone thinking to the point where it does, yeah, totally shape our stories and what people think stories are for. I have noticed recently that literature from outside the Anglophone world, even though most of the world has been conquered by capitalism, like, I just have been reading a novel from Transylvania, so Romania, but written in Hungarian. There is no linearity.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 32:38

Everything is deliberately chaotic and broken up, and there are different languages all over the text. And that is the milieu in which one lives in Transylvania, yet that has gotten into this author's narrative structure. You don't come out of it with anything that you could say, oh, now I know how communism works or anything like that. You just come out of it with a sense of chaos that living there, like, entails. I do think it's a very anglophone and capitalist thing that stories must work towards something within themselves and beyond themselves.

Manuela Infante: 33:14

Yeah. And you I mean, you can really feel the frustration of the audiences. I I get it a lot with, with we're not getting something. I think we've spoken about this, Giovanni. I don't know if in the book interview or other conversations, I really try to deliberately put in theater pieces blocks of obscurity to kind of trump that desire to consume, capture, resolve, and audiences are having a really hard time with it.

Manuela Infante: 33:43

I was interested when you started speaking, Mandy Suzanne, about art getting I don't know how you said it, but I was the other day thinking that theater has gotten very journalistic, at least in the, like, theater festival. I mean, there's a more conservative theater where they're still doing Hamlet and blah blah blah. But in the festival universe, there's a lot of journalism being done by theater, and I'm kind of an outsider to that. Also, looking for how can we reclaim spaces for the theater ritual that are not necessarily narratives and chronicles oriented towards, you know, necessarily visibilizing some issue or fixing the world in a certain ideological way. And it's a very polemical thing to think.

Manuela Infante: 34:27

That's why I I was interested when you started with that. And then I thought, well, probably theater is taking on the work of journalism because at least in in our countries, journalism is completely co opted by it's like journalism cannot really do its job anymore. So I think somehow the theater is just jumping in like this firefighter just like, okay. We're here. Where's the fire?

Manuela Infante: 34:48

We'll just put it out. Yeah. I also think it's a very systemic economical issue.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 34:55

I read somewhere that, relevance has become a currency for art. So the more relevance you have, the more currency you have, the more your art is worth. And so it's economics again, and that's not how it should be. I I get a lot of that too. Like, you know, my latest book is about a box.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 35:12

Yeah. Who who who gets this?

Giovanni Aloi: 35:17

But it shapes the way we think, and it shapes our expectations of life and art. And I think that that's what really becomes very problematic. I thought we were moving past that because, of course, you know, so much of mainstream culture during the seventies and the eighties was all about that already. It was nothing new, but it really feels that in a world where the Internet was proposing this fragmentation and plurality and and and a globalization that could be positive or negative, we're finding ourselves more and more closed in and pushed back. And it seemed like that's why I think, I guess, I always use my my students as the canary in the in the coal mine.

Giovanni Aloi: 35:57

I'm like, you should be the ones who are leading this breaking apart fragmentation, polyvocal existences, and instead, you are the ones who seem to be becoming more and more conservative, not in your values because the values are not on paper conservative, but the framework of their mind is is becoming conservative because it has incorporated these capitalist structures as natural, as default. So these are my expectations. These are my dislikes. Something that makes me uncomfortable, I get it a lot in my student evaluations, is not good. And I'm like, well, you know what?

Giovanni Aloi: 36:34

I'm gonna double down. My first class is tomorrow, and I'm just gonna tell them you're gonna feel so uncomfortable. And you have that student who, in the last semester, said that in their evaluations to thank for. Because if you feel that being uncomfortable through these conversations that are about art creativity and exploring and mapping and speculating is a bad thing, then the supermarket is over there. And the supermarket doesn't want you to be uncomfortable, and that's the place for you.

Giovanni Aloi: 37:02

You know? Not quite gonna put it in so many words. But

Caroline Picard: 37:07

I mean, there's also a part of me though that, like, I think is very interesting that at the same time we live in this collective reality that is very unstable just in terms of weather events, forced migration, all of these issues that is also, like, simultaneous with this ongoing interest, I think, in, like, nonhuman or more than human types of consciousness. So I don't know. In some ways, I feel like it makes sense to me, like, in the same way that all of these political this is me revealing my own bias or self or whatever. But it's, like, in a state of the world where we should continue to anticipate more and more massive bodies of people moving, it seems striking to me that this is a moment where, you know, nationalism is on the rise, and there seems to be a greater intensity or interest in trying to fix borders. And they just feel like that is, like, an impossible proposition.

Caroline Picard: 38:05

But perhaps it's also mirrored in people suddenly being very interested in, like, journalistic theater or, like, quote, unquote, realistic forms of writing because those adhere to, I think, a stable world view that is also comforting to many. It seems like that's just an impossible position to maintain. And so I feel like I'm always excited when you start to see real cracks and fissures in the ways that people are making things because there's so much opportunity there. You know? And I feel like, for instance, even in Estado Vergital, I feel like the conversations that you're having also are kind of about how theater and creativity yes.

Caroline Picard: 38:46

It's about these philosophical gaps and creating space for multiple subjectivities, but there's also a lot of play and spontaneity in that that development and that that's actually, that's where you find stability. It's sort of, like, through a form of adaptation, not following this kind of objective perspective, so called objective. Do you know what I mean?

Manuela Infante: 39:09

Mhmm.

Caroline Picard: 39:10

Students in general, you join the academy because you want stability. And these days, you have so much debt, and everything is so expensive that then you wanna make sure that you have deliverables.

Giovanni Aloi: 39:23

Yeah. And certainties that you can sell on to jobs and opportunities. And I understand how ending a class with a patchwork of different thoughts that don't seem to to gel together immediately as one answer seems puzzling. But that's how I was raised, you know, when I was studying in London. Like, Goldsmiths was famous for putting you through this sort of spin machine kind of situation where you were bombarded with different perspectives, some of which you had never heard, some of which you couldn't quite understand.

Giovanni Aloi: 39:57

And then you wait ten years, and one morning you wake up and it's like, I get it. That's what it was. And I've met people who have gone exactly through the same process, and I can't even explain to you. I just think there is a lot of value in that. I understand that it's not for everybody, but I think it's the most organic way.

Giovanni Aloi: 40:17

I don't know if it's a good word to use in this context, but because we we tend to use plants as metaphors around which to reconstruct our way of thinking, then there's this organicity, whatever that might mean, which is also kinda dangerous, I guess, in times. But there is a sense of certain things being allowed the time to settle and fall into place in ways that used to be allowed a couple of decades ago and that now just seems to be like we can't. You know? The semester ends May 15, and by May 15, I need it all in place, structured. So this Tetris, the Tetris of of thinking, you know, and if it doesn't fit, something is wrong.

Giovanni Aloi: 40:55

And I think newer generations have also been trained to think that if something is wrong, it's not wrong with them, that it's wrong with the outside. You know, they they there's something wrong out there that needs to be fixed or that you compromised, so I don't know what to do with it. It's a strange mindset, but I think I wonder if it's going back to what you're saying, Caroline, a compensatory approach or if there's something deeper going on. I I always go back to Mark Fisher's book on capitalist realism. So much of what I read in his book just made me stay up at night thinking about the way in which he kind of gathered little clues in the behavior of students that signified a much broader malaise from which we have no escape route.

Giovanni Aloi: 41:44

And I wonder if what we're doing with language, what we're doing with these performances, what we're doing with engaging with art in a certain way, the the nonhuman turn is one desperate way to really try and push through something that otherwise keeps smothering you before it becomes you. Positive note.

Caroline Picard: 42:04

I'll just say yes.

Giovanni Aloi: 42:07

Let's be affirmative. I think you're right.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 42:10

Like, I mean, those of us who do make art are doing it because we can't help it. I'm doing it because I can't help it. It it must mean that there's something that I'm trying to fight. I don't know, which might be this whatever form of stifling that doesn't not really going anywhere, but except to just say, yes. Yeah.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 42:29

You're right.

Caroline Picard: 42:30

So I feel like both of you have expertly created works about subjects that resist being seen or being comprehended or being fixed in the way we're talking about, you know, whether it's a box, whether it's a tree or a potted plant. To me, it seems like there's a very subtle form of resistance in that accomplishment.

Manuela Infante: 42:52

I think maybe also because of being a South American, what I was saying before, I think it's really about even all the the non human conversation is really just about difference. I just did this show called Horizon, and it it's an interview to my father who's an astrophysicist. It's about the astronomical horizon. I'm not gonna go into that. But, of course, it also resonates with the historical horizon where you had this idea that the Earth was flat, and if if a boat went over it, it would, like, fall into these monsters.

Manuela Infante: 43:21

And then after that, they discovered that the Earth was round. Right? But when they discovered that the Earth was round, they invented the Antipodes, which was this geographical territory where there was people living that were upside down. So to me, that's really fascinating about this bias towards difference where the only thing that you're able to imagine that is on the other side is you, but upside down. You're not able to really allow for obscurity on that other side.

Manuela Infante: 43:49

And I think and that show is really about me and my father traveling to The to Canada to do his PhD. So it's it's really about us coming from the other side to this side and blah blah blah. So I think being somebody that comes from that other side, there is this constant experience of being portrayed as just them but upside down and somehow not seen in that. For example, if I go to theater festivals, what they are expecting from a South Chilean theater maker in European theater festivals is political stories about dictatorships and all that stuff. And that's really an imposition.

Manuela Infante: 44:29

It's the antipodes all over again. You know? It's like we want you to tell us the story of how we colonize you, but we don't want you to tell the story that you want to tell.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 44:40

Because we have to look outward at difference. Our art can look outward at difference rather than just keep reflecting what's already in front of it. Yeah. I totally agree. Like, readers expect to see themselves in characters, you know, in literature and in Hollywood, whatever publishers expect.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 44:57

You know? How is this reflect the current moment? How is this relevant now? How do we see ourselves? And I am frankly not that interested in being a mirror for other people, but I also think that, I'm not interested in being my own mirror either.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 45:12

I don't find myself all that interesting. But like with Manuela, you know, when you are a writer of color from a very minor country out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, people expect to read about race. They expect to read about Bermudians rising up and whatever. You know? They don't expect to read about a little box made of white paper.

Manuela Infante: 45:31

Yeah. I think it was, responding to the question of why maybe we create this kind of work. It's like this this form of subtle resistance to what was it? How did you put that?

Caroline Picard: 45:42

Yeah. The idea of both of you, I think, are able to create subjectivities that resist being fixed.

Manuela Infante: 45:49

Yeah. I think it comes from, for me at least, from a very biographical, physical experience of trying to wiggle out of that fixation again and again and again.

Giovanni Aloi: 45:59

That's one of the things, I guess, returning to the performance that I found extremely fascinating is the polyvocal quality and how it initially puzzles the viewer. And then when you start getting a gist for it, I felt like, oh, I'm getting it now. And there's still an ambiguity throughout it all that you wonder who is talking now. And at some point, you do realize that that's perhaps not the question to ask as you ride through that journey. And that that staying in that space makes you approximate something of an otherness that you can't quite describe.

Giovanni Aloi: 46:35

And it's that state of feeling unsteady and open and vulnerable to a sense of stupidity as well, a sense of I am not understanding this. And most of that feeling you realize is caused by the fact that it's the rest of the world, the education you've received, the the schemata that you've been pushed into that makes you stupid to the point that you might be feeling uncomfortable when exposed to this level of pull and push and uncertainty. One of the reasons why I wanted the book to come to life is because the performance seemed on one hand to be a fantastic primer for critical plant studies, and I I've suggested it that way to many colleagues. If you don't have time to read Michael Marder, Mancuso, my staff on art, and whatever else, and you wanna grasp the main threads of the conversation, just watch Manuela Infante's. And in a couple of hours, you'll get a gist of the main threads.

Giovanni Aloi: 47:34

I think they probably hate me after, you know, they're like, okay. You say so. This is actually, you know, a lot more than I bargained for. I think it's a fantastic primer as I say in the introduction of the book. It's a fantastic primer to critical plan studies.

Giovanni Aloi: 47:47

I know you didn't mean it that way, but it also expands the whole range of possibilities of what critical plan studies can be. To me, it's a promise for a future of creativity that if taken seriously can really, no pun intended, open up the box to, you know, a different relational and also a different register of creativity that I think is really, really important. So that is a lot of my drive. This form of resistance that Caroline is, like, pointing at is all that there is really. I don't know what else there is that it's worth pursuing right now beyond practical applications.

Giovanni Aloi: 48:24

You know? It's another aspect that is not pertinent right now, I guess, to this book. But sometimes I wonder about this cultural undoing that we try to promote with our work and this resistance and more practical aspects of, you know, can I do something that might push a law forward that that can kind of, like, benefit a river or, you know, something super tangible from an ecological perspective? Otherwise, between these two clarities, I see a lot of back to to Mendez's end point, lots of mirrors that are just reassessing what I already know that make me feel good about myself or that try to just simplify, oversimplify what I perceive underneath, and I'm not interested in that. It's like easy consumption.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 49:09

I did want to say one thing about Marcela Salinas. I had to watch the play, several times in order to there's so many layers of things to be awed by, you know, and the first thing is Marcela Salinas herself. Like, to me, when I first watched her for the first time, she's like a demon. She was shape she's shape shifting, and it's so effective that this is a one woman play and not because I I kept asking myself why one person and not just have different actors for each part. But she's just virtuosically showing how it's possible for one person to really take otherness in in multiple ways and for one person to have tons of different voices.

Mandy-Suzanne Wong: 49:55

That was the first layer of wow for me. And then you watched it again and started thinking, okay. Why why these choices? And went from there, just found more and more wow.

Manuela Infante: 50:07

Yeah. She's a she's a creature. I've been pushing her even further in the last work that we're doing now on on vampires. That's a whole new episode of the podcast. We're really working on indeterminate creatures that are simultaneously many beings at the same time.

Manuela Infante: 50:24

So it's now not even spaced in time, like you're doing this, your character doing this, but she's actually doing animals and humans and several humans just by little twitches and really trying to compose a permanently polyphonic creature. She's like, like an Olympic athlete. Like, you can just take her further and further, and she'll just go faster and faster. It's really impressive.

Giovanni Aloi: 50:48

That's inspiring. And I guess that that's the the very important part of it all is, like, the inspiration, you know, to break through and and try. There's also a big failure is hovering all over this. You know? We talked about the the expectations of commodified consumption.

Giovanni Aloi: 51:06

Writing is particularly vulnerable to that too because there's good writing, and bed writing is always lurking. Into any experimental approach, bed writing is the slap down. These books go through peer review, and peer review can be amazing and very generative, but it can also be a place of destruction for any idea that is original, any idea that is out of the box, becomes this sort of target for repression. You know? There's this kind of vicious game that scholars like to play that it's kinda sadistic.

Giovanni Aloi: 51:40

And I feel that that is also important as part of the conversation, this will to take risks and to negotiate what failure might look like in a productive sense in the context of the nonhuman turn, in the context of nonentropocentric views because failure has been constructed as a humanist conception along with all the other terrible concepts that we have inherited from humanism. You know, the hero never fails. Here we are bordering into darkness, bordering where the ground becomes muddy and slippery and where we might just get bogged down into quicksands and never come out. We have to we have a responsibility, I feel, to go there and to go there head high, looking down, looking left, looking right, and just trying to make sense of what that might be. And I find more and more that failures terrifies people, and it terrifies me.

Giovanni Aloi: 52:35

I mean, who likes to receive, you know, an email that says, sorry, but and we've all received, like, hundreds of them. And that's probably why after a while, you become immune to that vulnerability, and you just kinda plow through. It's really, I think, important to to think more creatively around notions of failure in this context specifically. Maybe that's, again, another project we might pursue in the nearby future.

Manuela Infante: 53:02

Yeah. I think the antidote is community. I mean, I think failures and success are such a big thing because we're alone. But when you sit in a room like this one and you talk to people because to me, really, this conversation is like, I have to write tomorrow. You know?

Manuela Infante: 53:17

And I have to write with that fear, and it's there. As you speak, I feel like, okay. Yeah. I can do it. And I have to go the radical way, and I was just about to give in because I was afraid.

Manuela Infante: 53:28

Think of surrealists. Think of Dada. Think of, like they all went deep into the mud and really hit it hard and probably failed to the view of so many, but they could do that because they were community movements. It's great to create community in that sense. So we're not so afraid of failing every

Giovanni Aloi: 53:49

day. We don't wanna wrap it up with a conclusion because everything cares.