Introduced by Paulo Tavares
HD video, sound, 29' 30''
Year: 2013
The film presents a speculative exercise about the relation between ecological theories and sociologic, economic and management models. Such reflections are intercalated with tales about the ritual of anthropophagy in Brazil in the early 16th century, whose imaginary defines the film's visuals, be it microfilms of books and etchings, or museological and graphic material on Amerindian socio-cosmologies.
Paulo Tavares: To open up this brief conversation, a naïve, intuitive, counter-question mark: what about the film’s title, Where to sit at the dinner table?? My (mis)interpretation of this dilemma presents the following architecture:
It is of course about the place one occupies around the table in relation to others (one imagine financial deals are discussed, vast tracts of lands are negotiated, communities and territories are scrambled), and therefore, it is about uneven distributions of power within the technocratic, white-collar, economic-driven, managerial forums of neoliberal democracy and its colonial logics of accumulation by dispossession. In this political dinner most people occupy a place that is at the same time at and off the table – they sow, harvest, cook and serve the meal.
But the film’s question mark also suggests a different spatial diagram, which overlaps and clashes with the diagram described above. The polarity is set not only by the relations between the subjects that attend and serve the dinner, but also between those who are sitting around the table and those who sit on the table — animals and plants, perhaps humans, the evening meal itself — in which case the context is not managerial, parliamentary and consensual (with its structural and veiled exclusions), but sustained by the relations between prey and predator: the antagonisms of enmity.
Here we find cannibalism’s political-economy of appropriation and its epistemic/aesthetic counter-hegemonic potentials, but also, and no less important, this spatial regime also suggests the massive plunder through which colonial-modern capitalistic formations colonize environments and populations. In the latter scenario, state and corporate cronies feast on the destruction and death of both humans and non-humans.
Pedro Neves Marques: As in all things economical, it is a question of distribution. As the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro says, talking about anthropophagic perspectivism, what one eats is not the other but its position. Moreover, and this is extremely important, what one eats is the other’s condition of enemy.
What I wanted to speculate on, as a kind of sci-fi tale of a story that happened in the past, was the predation between the apparently distinct fields of ecology and economics. More specifically, the impact of the metabolic and energetic models of ecology—as they appear in the 1950s, attributing roles (or classes) to minerals, plants, animals, and humans in the ecosystems—on the cybernetic and probabilistic model of our computational economy. But also vice-versa, with the Neo-Darwinist, neoliberal mentality later impacting on ecological studies of complexity and self-organization, turning society into a market based self-regulation of corporatized individuals. While in former case, conceptually, “strikes were unheard of: the green plants went on producing for the herbivores without shirking, feather-bedding, or complaining,” in the later case markets technically foster the survival of the fittest, without any social protection or care or even a concept of humanity anymore. This is the opening image of the film, a tapestry by Albert Eckhout: an ecosystem of predatory animals, endlessly feeding of each other, holding on to each other by the mouth, creating this hybrid monstrosity that exists only in the mind of colonizers, past or present.
In both instances, however, distribution is subsumed by production, growth, and by necessity exploitation: of human, non-humans, the earth, it is irrelevant what or who as long as a surplus keeps on being added. That is, it is quite irrelevant that we acknowledge the agency of others, humans or non-humans, if that is the tendency capitalist markets are also pushing for. If we accept that, politically, it is a hopeless struggle.
Where to sit at the dinner table? is then a game of perspectives, uses, and appropriations. It is about how and where you position yourself on the table — or the field of war, or this planet — changes the value of given theories, ideas, concepts. Like you say, one’s either sitting around the table or on the table itself; one’s always either being exploited or exploiting — and this also applies to the uses of theory. I’m very fond of the idea that if objects are subjects, concepts are objects too.
PT: The table’s complicated architecture — a chessboard of an earthly war between conflicting perspectives — reflects a key friction between dissident political ecologies. This is present both in your conceptual references as well as in the narrative strategy of the film, which is structured through a series of visual oppositions and superimpositions. The film opens by stating that it consists of appropriations of various materials coming from different sources and fields of knowledge, from anthropology to ecosystem-theory. This material is presented in a multilayered and sometimes obscures forms, but always exposes frictions and articulations, disputes and coalitions, violence and exchange, conflicts and alliances. Antropofagia — its aesthetic/political tactics — is a key influence to this work. Is “Where to sit at the dinner table?” an invite to a cannibalistic potlatch?
PNM: Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagic philosophy, and all that grows from his 1928 Manifesto Antropofágico leading up to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s cannibal metaphysics, is highly influential on me and something I’m working on both in my artworks and writing.
Antropofagia offers another way of looking at appropriation, beyond its standardized, capitalist version: this market democracy of hybridization, which is, in fact, a farce. The problem is not so much the simplistic idea that contemporary capital has learned how to profit from difference, but rather that at the heart of capitalist economics there must always be a difference separating exploiters from exploited, that capitalism is inherently exclusivist. Anthropophagy, however, is very consciously about eating one’s enemies; it is against something. And only so is appropriation political, otherwise it is reduced to management, which is in part the story of this film.
But there is also appropriation's epistemological side, which the film tries to narrate, that is, that one can write an history of ideas (of concepts and theory) via appropriation. I knew in advance that I wanted to tell this story of economical and ecological systems via the historical and cosmological body of the encounter between the Europeans and the Amerindians, with anthropophagy at its centre — this 16th century shock of cosmovisions, filled with surprising, and very physical, exchanges. On the one hand, anthropophagy was the one thing that colonizers could not stop the indigenous from doing; to the Jesuit’s amazement they easily converted and traded merchandise but would just as quickly be found in the forest eating each other again. On the other hand, the whole enterprise of the discovery of America was anthropophagic, for each side tried to place the other within their worldview, to give them a place.
I tried to build the film, not necessarily dialectically, but through a mesh of layers in friction, of contradictions — a technique I tend to like. I tried to create this tension in the abrupt jump cuts between the two apparently distinct narratives. But then you also have overlaps like the indigenous objects that become diagrams or signs, the language of economics superposed with indigenous flowcharts (none of which is postproduction, but just as I found it at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of the Indian). There is this difference between what you see and what you hear. What you don’t have are bodies, only representation. With so much predation in the film, in the end I decided to credit all of the film’s sources in the generic, a kind of recipe. It felt honest to me, transparent.
As for the film’s title, it may very well be a question to the spectator. But perhaps it’s also important to say that the film closes with a question too, a quote from Pierre Clastres’ “Society Against the State,” where he asks “is it possible to conceive of a political power that is not founded on the exercise of coercion?” and then this sentence with which the Jesuits portrayed the Amerindians, “Without faith, without law, without a king.”
PT: … and also without a proper market, that is to say, without — or against — a particularly type economy, lacking a capitalist-led system of distributions based on the fiction of private property and its oppressive disciplinary geometries of control. Indeed, a whole different economy, a dissident cybernetics, another form of arranging the relations between people and things in space and time. The film shows a confrontation between a governmental rationale that emerged with the articulation between eco-system theory and financial capital and what the Manifesto Antropofágicocalls a (cosmo) politics as a system of “social-planetary distributions”, the phrase to which you refer at the beginning of the film.
PNM: Ecology holds this ambiguity, where it is simultaneously a political horizon, in which I believe, and a major influence on the current technocratic and financial governance system. The passage from cybernetics to the violence of complex systems, this relation between power (statistical control) and survivalist potency (each for himself, producing a surplus to be appropriated). At a certain point in the film there is this reference to how the technology of systems theory used in the first, environmentally concerned,Limits to Growth report ultimately benefited the advance of our data ridden capitalism, how it helped capitalism project itself further into the future and map new outsides to feast on. This was in the early 1970s, but it’s still present today in technical discussions about climate change, for example. Again, one should be attentive to one’s enemies.
But then there are these sentences by Oswald de Andrade, “we are cosmo-energy,” or “we had Politics, which is the science of distribution. And a social planetary system,” which push you to another way of dealing with the universe, with the body, with others, with the economics-ecology hybrid. Against economics, in this dissident philosophy, as you say, distribution is the act of politics. Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy was both cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical, a world view extending beyond the human, and radically anti-classist, anti-capitalist. For him, as for most Amerindian thought, ecology would never be stratified into classes of producers, consumers, and parasites, it would never be automated or robotic either, because one’s role, one’s production, and value is always negotiated. A strange, alien, socio-political model, with our radically others, the indigenous peoples, surprisingly, at its center. A model from which ecology is, hopefully, learning from. In the end, perhaps appropriation is not only about enmity, but also about finding true allies.
Credits
Written and Directed by Pedro Neves Marques
Music: Pedro Neves Marques; Terry Riley; Martinho da Vila
Sound: Pedro Sousa
Editor: Pedro Neves Marques
Voice Over: Vítor de Andrade, Ariana Couvinha, Gonçalo Gama Pinto, Pedro Simões, and Don Patterson
Produced by Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Spain
With the support of Companhia das Culturas, Castro Marim, Portugal; and Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Many thanks to: the cast, Mariana Silva, Eglantina Monteiro, Eduardo Guerra, Margarida Mendes, Joana Escoval, Ana Luísa Bouza, Ana Simões, João Ribeiro, Gonçalo Sena, Teatro Praga, Cristina Correia, Susana Pomba, André Romão, Diogo Evangelista, Gonçalo Pena, Maria Judite Alves
Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Pedro Cera, and Galleria Umberto di Marino
HD, 29' 30''
Introduced by Paulo Tavares
Year: 2013
The film presents a speculative exercise about the relation between ecological theories and sociologic, economic and management models. Such reflections are intercalated with tales about the ritual of anthropophagy in Brazil in the early 16th century, whose imaginary defines the film's visuals, be it microfilms of books and etchings, or museological and graphic material on Amerindian socio-cosmologies.
Paulo Tavares: To open up this brief conversation, a naïve, intuitive, counter-question mark: what about the film’s title, Where to sit at the dinner table?? My (mis)interpretation of this dilemma presents the following architecture:
It is of course about the place one occupies around the table in relation to others (one imagine financial deals are discussed, vast tracts of lands are negotiated, communities and territories are scrambled), and therefore, it is about uneven distributions of power within the technocratic, white-collar, economic-driven, managerial forums of neoliberal democracy and its colonial logics of accumulation by dispossession. In this political dinner most people occupy a place that is at the same time at and off the table – they sow, harvest, cook and serve the meal.
But the film’s question mark also suggests a different spatial diagram, which overlaps and clashes with the diagram described above. The polarity is set not only by the relations between the subjects that attend and serve the dinner, but also between those who are sitting around the table and those who sit on the table — animals and plants, perhaps humans, the evening meal itself — in which case the context is not managerial, parliamentary and consensual (with its structural and veiled exclusions), but sustained by the relations between prey and predator: the antagonisms of enmity.
Here we find cannibalism’s political-economy of appropriation and its epistemic/aesthetic counter-hegemonic potentials, but also, and no less important, this spatial regime also suggests the massive plunder through which colonial-modern capitalistic formations colonize environments and populations. In the latter scenario, state and corporate cronies feast on the destruction and death of both humans and non-humans.
Pedro Neves Marques: As in all things economical, it is a question of distribution. As the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro says, talking about anthropophagic perspectivism, what one eats is not the other but its position. Moreover, and this is extremely important, what one eats is the other’s condition of enemy.
What I wanted to speculate on, as a kind of sci-fi tale of a story that happened in the past, was the predation between the apparently distinct fields of ecology and economics. More specifically, the impact of the metabolic and energetic models of ecology—as they appear in the 1950s, attributing roles (or classes) to minerals, plants, animals, and humans in the ecosystems—on the cybernetic and probabilistic model of our computational economy. But also vice-versa, with the Neo-Darwinist, neoliberal mentality later impacting on ecological studies of complexity and self-organization, turning society into a market based self-regulation of corporatized individuals. While in former case, conceptually, “strikes were unheard of: the green plants went on producing for the herbivores without shirking, feather-bedding, or complaining,” in the later case markets technically foster the survival of the fittest, without any social protection or care or even a concept of humanity anymore. This is the opening image of the film, a tapestry by Albert Eckhout: an ecosystem of predatory animals, endlessly feeding of each other, holding on to each other by the mouth, creating this hybrid monstrosity that exists only in the mind of colonizers, past or present.
In both instances, however, distribution is subsumed by production, growth, and by necessity exploitation: of human, non-humans, the earth, it is irrelevant what or who as long as a surplus keeps on being added. That is, it is quite irrelevant that we acknowledge the agency of others, humans or non-humans, if that is the tendency capitalist markets are also pushing for. If we accept that, politically, it is a hopeless struggle.
Where to sit at the dinner table? is then a game of perspectives, uses, and appropriations. It is about how and where you position yourself on the table — or the field of war, or this planet — changes the value of given theories, ideas, concepts. Like you say, one’s either sitting around the table or on the table itself; one’s always either being exploited or exploiting — and this also applies to the uses of theory. I’m very fond of the idea that if objects are subjects, concepts are objects too.
PT: The table’s complicated architecture — a chessboard of an earthly war between conflicting perspectives — reflects a key friction between dissident political ecologies. This is present both in your conceptual references as well as in the narrative strategy of the film, which is structured through a series of visual oppositions and superimpositions. The film opens by stating that it consists of appropriations of various materials coming from different sources and fields of knowledge, from anthropology to ecosystem-theory. This material is presented in a multilayered and sometimes obscures forms, but always exposes frictions and articulations, disputes and coalitions, violence and exchange, conflicts and alliances. Antropofagia — its aesthetic/political tactics — is a key influence to this work. Is “Where to sit at the dinner table?” an invite to a cannibalistic potlatch?
PNM: Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagic philosophy, and all that grows from his 1928 Manifesto Antropofágico leading up to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s cannibal metaphysics, is highly influential on me and something I’m working on both in my artworks and writing.
Antropofagia offers another way of looking at appropriation, beyond its standardized, capitalist version: this market democracy of hybridization, which is, in fact, a farce. The problem is not so much the simplistic idea that contemporary capital has learned how to profit from difference, but rather that at the heart of capitalist economics there must always be a difference separating exploiters from exploited, that capitalism is inherently exclusivist. Anthropophagy, however, is very consciously about eating one’s enemies; it is against something. And only so is appropriation political, otherwise it is reduced to management, which is in part the story of this film.
But there is also appropriation's epistemological side, which the film tries to narrate, that is, that one can write an history of ideas (of concepts and theory) via appropriation. I knew in advance that I wanted to tell this story of economical and ecological systems via the historical and cosmological body of the encounter between the Europeans and the Amerindians, with anthropophagy at its centre — this 16th century shock of cosmovisions, filled with surprising, and very physical, exchanges. On the one hand, anthropophagy was the one thing that colonizers could not stop the indigenous from doing; to the Jesuit’s amazement they easily converted and traded merchandise but would just as quickly be found in the forest eating each other again. On the other hand, the whole enterprise of the discovery of America was anthropophagic, for each side tried to place the other within their worldview, to give them a place.
I tried to build the film, not necessarily dialectically, but through a mesh of layers in friction, of contradictions — a technique I tend to like. I tried to create this tension in the abrupt jump cuts between the two apparently distinct narratives. But then you also have overlaps like the indigenous objects that become diagrams or signs, the language of economics superposed with indigenous flowcharts (none of which is postproduction, but just as I found it at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of the Indian). There is this difference between what you see and what you hear. What you don’t have are bodies, only representation. With so much predation in the film, in the end I decided to credit all of the film’s sources in the generic, a kind of recipe. It felt honest to me, transparent.
As for the film’s title, it may very well be a question to the spectator. But perhaps it’s also important to say that the film closes with a question too, a quote from Pierre Clastres’ “Society Against the State,” where he asks “is it possible to conceive of a political power that is not founded on the exercise of coercion?” and then this sentence with which the Jesuits portrayed the Amerindians, “Without faith, without law, without a king.”
PT: … and also without a proper market, that is to say, without — or against — a particularly type economy, lacking a capitalist-led system of distributions based on the fiction of private property and its oppressive disciplinary geometries of control. Indeed, a whole different economy, a dissident cybernetics, another form of arranging the relations between people and things in space and time. The film shows a confrontation between a governmental rationale that emerged with the articulation between eco-system theory and financial capital and what the Manifesto Antropofágicocalls a (cosmo) politics as a system of “social-planetary distributions”, the phrase to which you refer at the beginning of the film.
PNM: Ecology holds this ambiguity, where it is simultaneously a political horizon, in which I believe, and a major influence on the current technocratic and financial governance system. The passage from cybernetics to the violence of complex systems, this relation between power (statistical control) and survivalist potency (each for himself, producing a surplus to be appropriated). At a certain point in the film there is this reference to how the technology of systems theory used in the first, environmentally concerned,Limits to Growth report ultimately benefited the advance of our data ridden capitalism, how it helped capitalism project itself further into the future and map new outsides to feast on. This was in the early 1970s, but it’s still present today in technical discussions about climate change, for example. Again, one should be attentive to one’s enemies.
But then there are these sentences by Oswald de Andrade, “we are cosmo-energy,” or “we had Politics, which is the science of distribution. And a social planetary system,” which push you to another way of dealing with the universe, with the body, with others, with the economics-ecology hybrid. Against economics, in this dissident philosophy, as you say, distribution is the act of politics. Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy was both cosmopolitan and cosmopolitical, a world view extending beyond the human, and radically anti-classist, anti-capitalist. For him, as for most Amerindian thought, ecology would never be stratified into classes of producers, consumers, and parasites, it would never be automated or robotic either, because one’s role, one’s production, and value is always negotiated. A strange, alien, socio-political model, with our radically others, the indigenous peoples, surprisingly, at its center. A model from which ecology is, hopefully, learning from. In the end, perhaps appropriation is not only about enmity, but also about finding true allies.
Credits
Written and Directed by Pedro Neves Marques
Music: Pedro Neves Marques; Terry Riley; Martinho da Vila
Sound: Pedro Sousa
Editor: Pedro Neves Marques
Voice Over: Vítor de Andrade, Ariana Couvinha, Gonçalo Gama Pinto, Pedro Simões, and Don Patterson
Produced by Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Spain
With the support of Companhia das Culturas, Castro Marim, Portugal; and Biblioteca Nacional do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Many thanks to: the cast, Mariana Silva, Eglantina Monteiro, Eduardo Guerra, Margarida Mendes, Joana Escoval, Ana Luísa Bouza, Ana Simões, João Ribeiro, Gonçalo Sena, Teatro Praga, Cristina Correia, Susana Pomba, André Romão, Diogo Evangelista, Gonçalo Pena, Maria Judite Alves
Courtesy of the artist, Galeria Pedro Cera, and Galleria Umberto di Marino