Ghostly Ecologies

The Ghostly Ecologies

Ghostly Ecologies is a narrative framework focused on imaginaries around nature and nonhuman domains. It operates as a space for observation and as a speculative passage for noticing worlds witin worlds, such as the transferences within mycorrhizal networks, the bodily cues between pollinators and flowers, the chatter of bacteria inside the guts of soft-bellied frogs, among many more; interconnected reams where subjects are comprised by its interactions with others and where the agencies of the world interminably shift and merge into one another. As an aesthetic zone, this framework is rooted in the concept of ghostliness, understood as an uncanny ecology of multiple timescales, cycles, invisibility, and flesh.

However, Ghostly Ecologies do not refer to some anthropomorphic specters, claiming a space of regret and loss. Neither refer to a domain of eco-vengeance where our destructive actions upon the world come to haunt us in nightmarish ways. Rather, it goes towards a poetic of intimacies and invisibilities, to honor the unfathomable interactions that conform our existence as a mixture of boundless tangled worlds. Hence, the idea of ghostliness suggests that there are other ways of being that dwell on the limits of our understanding. Through the experience of spectrality, we embrace a world that is made of strangeness and oblique perceptions. Thus, ghostliness operates as a poetic strategy and metaphor that points out at the interstices within worlds, spaces that normally lie beyond our perception or are overlooked but that constitute a marvelous gathering, the profusion of a phantasmic world: fungal spores transported by the winds, the dreams of a bird’s egg that will never hatch, a fingertip hosting a swarm of viruses —the brood of zoonosis—. It is an undeniable fact that our present has drawn these invisibilities to the foreground, made apparent the fleshed and uncanny intertwinement between our lives and others.

This framework is comprised by a growing flock of stories and poems that are rooted on embodied entanglements within nonhuman worlds. Spectral Futures is a collection of short stories inspired on the narrative structure and tone of fables, no longer from a place where nature and nonhuman beings are a mere backdrop for moral tales or props for ventriloquism acts in humanlike narratives. Instead, these stories seek to become speculative constellations for multiple and interlaced perceptual worlds where the essential role of nonhuman beings is reframed and uncanny intimacies and resemblances are brought to the foreground. From a critical perspective, Spectral Futures insist on the fable as an opportunity to rearticulate new stories about nonhuman domains. This comes as particularly relevant in these times where we need to urgently reconsider our relationship with nonhuman entities and the predatory ways in which we represent them. Also, it poses the question: What kind of stories do we want to read in the midst of a so-called Postnatural world?

Other Tongues is a gathering of poems based on the imaginary of Pollination as a study of scale of intimate and sensuous interspecies relationships: a world where pollinators and floral bodies evolve as mirror of each other as if they were inseparable flesh. Poetry is a meeting place for rich concoctions and overflowing affects, a bridge that brings together different subjectivities as a cross-pollination event of uncanny transferences and emanations. With our tongue transformed into a long proboscis to collect nectar, or our floral body transformed to invoke a long-extinct pollinator we can find a passage to a world of wondrous entanglements.

This project started during Pimoa Cthulhu, First Tentacular Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies
︎︎︎Interview with the Institute of Postnatural Studies
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Published in This is Jackalope Issue #03, 2020 (ENG/ ESP)
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Published in Compost Reader, Cthulhu Books, Institute of Postnatural Studies
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