since 2018

Katarina Jazbec

Gentle stranger, I hope this email finds you well is a collection of letters, written by artists around the world. Each artist explores care in some aspect of their work, and each letter is written in response to the previous one. These letters, which may take the form of (creative) writing, sound or visual essays, will be published weekly, from June 1st onwards. With these letters, we invite you to think with us about new ways of thinking about and through care, in these changing times.

This letter by Katarina Jazbec, responds to Thukral and Tagra’s, which you can read here.

Dear reader, 

This letter is a link in a chain that connects a group of gentle strangers - writers and readers of letters about care and those who stumble upon the echo created by them. This letter is an address from a stranger to a stranger, with the hope that we can be kind-hearted to each other. Therefore, dear stranger, I count on your patience, kindness, and courage, to bear with me in these meandering thoughts on what I care about as a human, and what kindles my work as an artist. I dare to appeal to you in the same way as the infamous Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita: “Please reader, ... , do not skip these essential pages!” [1] There is despair in care, which I will write about. There is also hope, in that I share this care with you. 

I am someone that grew up in the Slovenian countryside surrounded by forests, green fields, valleys, and mountains, and spent the last five years of life in the Rotterdam-Hague metropolitan area with one of the most important greenhouse farming regions in the world [2] and the largest seaport of Europe. The transition from one to the other was, and continues to be, overwhelming. I admire the innovation that is cultivated here - it might very well be that greenhouses will solve world hunger - but I also often feel alienated in this landscape in which nature is so scarce. What kind of nature you might ask? I’m not a biologist, so I write from my experience and bodily knowledge. I write from the perspective of someone that feels nourished bodily, psychologically, and spiritually every time I take a walk in a forest that is blooming and not entirely controlled in its growth not controlled in its entirety. I admit that a city park can provide a glimpse of such an experience but as a (new) city dweller, I yearn for more prolonged and profound experiences of nature. And am I not part of nature? How come we so easily forget our connectedness? How come we opt for further separation from nature every day? 

Yet my yearning for connectedness with nature is romantic, naive, and twisted. I can hear Herzog laughing: “Nature is vile here [in the jungle]...” [3] Nature is chaotic and largely unknown to us. The wild and unpredictable haunt us. Last year I spent a few days in Kočevsko, the most densely forested province in Slovenia, the kingdom of bears and wolves. I was completely paralysed by the fear of a chance encounter with a bear. At the same time, I felt reverence for these mighty animals. Sometime later I visited my friends Aljaž and Eva, a Slovenian award-winning artistic duo named Plateau Residue. After a few years of living in Rotterdam, they moved to the most remote Slovenian forest, to create a home for themselves in this wilderness, together with nature. [4] I found myself divided by the overwhelming feelings of fear and reverence when I went for a short walk with Aljaž - what if we meet a bear?

Christmas break visit of Aljaž and Eva, Plateau Residue, at Novi Kot, Slovenia, 2019

To strip down my yearning for nature further, I am afraid too of boars, scorpions, and snakes, just to name a few. A certain degree of fear is necessary for our survival. But I wonder how we have grown so apart from  wildlife and wilderness that we only allow them to be close to us in stories, myths, tattoos, or smuggled as status pets from illegal markets [5] only to be caged in a garden or put in a display in a room? At some point in the past, western and central European cultures had a much closer relationship with wildlife. Slovenian writer and philosopher Mojca Kumerdej captures it beautifully in her short story The Woman with the Wolf. [6] She conducted extensive research in a region’s prehistoric age, when animals were sacred and hunted both enemies and allies. Some cultures around the world have managed to preserve this sacred contact until today. The knowing of Amerindians in the Amazon includes animal perspectives. They are aware that their image of a forest is not the only image of the forest. They know each animal’s image of a forest is different from theirs. [7]

I used this wooden flute to let bears know I’m in their territory when visiting the forests of Kočevsko last year. In the city I wear it sometimes as a piece of jewelry.

Dear reader, I ask myself again, why do we choose for further separation from nature on a daily basis? Kay Sara, an indigenous artist and activist from the Amazon, comes to my mind. In her thundering speech, [8] which she sent from the Amazon forest for the online panel discussion by the School of Resistance as part of her collaboration with Milo Rau on the new play “Antigone in the Amazon”, she worries people act like Creon in Antigone. “He knows what he’s doing is wrong. That it’s wrong in every way. That it will bring his fall, the fall of his family, the Apocalypse. And yet he does it.” In her speech, Kay Sara points to all the atrocities committed in the Amazonian ecosystem. Its predicted collapse will destroy Earth: the Amazon is  the heart of the planet and it might soon stop beating. Artists Milo Rau and Tania Bruguera reflect further upon her words during the panel. [10] They say it’s not enough to know, it’s about embodying the knowledge of self-destruction. But what exactly does it mean to embody it? To feel the pain, to embrace the finitude of our bodies? To listen to them, when they tell us: “Please stop”.

Dear reader, do we choose for our separation from nature, for self-destruction, and mass extinction because we ignore the limits of our bodies? As utterly delusional as we are, I have learnt very well from writers of literary fiction and past artistic projects around the effects of reading fiction, that delusion can, strangely enough. also be a constructive force. In Feral [11] George Monbiot, a British writer and activist, challenges what he calls “ecological boredom” and calls for positive environmentalists. “Environmentalists have long known what they are against; now we can explain what we are for.” [12] The for, he explains, is for rewilding, the mass restoration of ecosystems through the reintroduction of missing animals and plants. “Rewilding is not about abandoning civilization but about enhancing it. It is to ‘love not man the less, but Nature more’.”  
Dear reader, I hope you are still with me, patient, kind and courageous. I hope we share this care for the future of our planet. And I ask you in the Monbiot manner, how can we imagine a thriving future in which cities come together with nature, together with wildlife? Perhaps a glimpse of an answer lies in the letter prior to mine, written by Thukral and Tagra. Reading the letter feels like playing with a friend. Through play the reality of a city is bent, through play chance connections with nature can take place. For Donna Haraway play is one of the ways of cultivating response-ability, of cultivating our capacities to respond [13] in this context of the urgency of earthly survival for so many species of this planet, including ours. For her play is about making a proposition of that which is not yet -  but might be.

Cultivating response-ability happens in the proximity of human and non-human bodies, in revisiting capacities of our senses from perspectives of other critters (animals, plants, microbes…). Dear reader, I hope you find time and way to play outside on this summer day with a critter or two by your side.

With love,
Katarina

A friend critter: Hannah Kalverda with her friend critter by side on a summer eve.

Katarina Jazbec (b. 1991, Slovenia) is based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Katarina is a visual artist working in film and photography. In her work, which is based on long-standing participatory research, she looks for new forms of storytelling and builds heterotopias, while exploring the current questions of ethics, identity, freedom, and economics from different perspectives and ways of knowing. You can find her website here and Instagram here.

Click here for Thukral and Tagra’s letter, which came before.

Gentle stranger with all on.jpg

This series of letters is curated by Sophie Mak-Schram and facilitated by Alexander Norton. To read the series of letters from the beginning please go here.

Many thanks to Manon Beury, Tudor Etchells, Emily Medd, James Medd and Melanie Healy, Rapolas Rucinskas and all those who preferred to remain anonymous, whose contributions helped make this project possible.

Gentle stranger, I hope this email finds you well is a collection of letters, written by artists around the world. Each artist explores care in some aspect of their work, and each letter is written in response to the previous one.