Editors' Picks: Cathryn Klasto

Cathryn Klasto

14 Sep 2023

As part of a series, members of L’Internationale Online editorial board revisit the archive of the platform, selecting contributions that resonate for them, their practice and the Museum of the Commons project. Here, Cathryn Klasto looks to contributions by Harun Morrison, Quincy Gario and Ursula Biemann for strategies in community building and the importance of citational flows.

Artist and writer Harun Morrison weaves the flows of times, (his)stories and spatialities in “When and Where to Become a Spider?”. I chose this text to revisit as a way of thinking through the web of the Internationale confederation and how the labour of assemblage will institutionally operate through the framework of the Museum of the Commons. Harun shows us the value of spider tactics, of moving through the world “attuned to vibrations” and “destabilising potential”, particularly when it comes to the critical task of institutional community building. Inspired by Morisson’s thinking with the spider, I turn to artist Ursula Biemann’s “Late Subatlantic. Science Poetry in Times of Global Warming” as another investigation in thinking with, this time thinking with the Earth as we collectively navigate interspecies planetary instability. Biemann’s call to action for artists and institutions to “attend to the planetary connectivity of ecosystems”, which she posits through pointed and direct questioning, feels particularly timely to revisit as we surpass Global Warming and fearfully enter Global Boiling. When everything is at stake, how do we respond to ensure a common future? She suggests that we must, as a starting point, reassemble the past, as decolonial methodology, a demand echoed in artist Quinsy Gario’s visual essay “i defied the lens so it struck us”. Through repetition and layered text and imagery, Gario dwells on material processes and legacies of decolonization and the ways in which those that did the work haunt and accompany us now. I have visited this text many times since its publication, in part because it always has something to teach me anew. At this particular moment I am occupied with citational practices and this essay shows me the critical importance of citational flows, rhythms, and grooves (as Katherine McKittrick might say).

Cathryn Klasto is a new member of the editorial board for L’Internationale Online. Cathryn is a transdisciplinary theoretician and lecturer in Fine Art at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Harun Morrison, ‘When and Where to Become a Spider’, 2020

Quincy Gario, ‘i defied the lens so it struck us’, 2019

Ursula Biemann, ‘Late Subatlantic. Science Poetry in Times of Global Warming’, 2015