sophie krier

THE VERTICAL AXIS: EDUCATION FROM BELOW

SOPHIE KRIER IN CONVERSATION WITH GABRIELLA GOMEZ-MONT

(the scale of the pluriverse)

Gabriella: Sophie, tell us a bit about you…

Sophie: I am a researcher, educator and artist, trying to reweave the relationships that people have with the place they inhabit – a place itself being very plural, composed by all sorts of things: landscapes, people, communities, animals, other beings. 

Lately I am also a horse person. I am putting them more and more into my trajectory again and am currently training in equine facilitated therapy, where you can use the natural wisdom of horses to enhance a process of realization with people who are struggling with an issue or trying to overcome an obstacle in their life. I want, through all of this, to do what I have always done as a teacher:  to bring people as close as possible to who they are and to what drives them, to the thing inside them that is unique; the thing that can make them go on for days, the thing that is difficult to articulate; a combination of talents and passions and histories… 

Horses have not amputated their natural intelligence and there is so much to learn from them. And ultimately what I think is the best horse wisdom is that, whatever happens, in the aftermath, well, just go back to grazing  (laughs). Grazing is pure wellbeing. Grazing for you, Gabriella, might be having this conversation – I know you love conversations, reflecting together about things; grazing is here, sitting on a picnic table beside a canal in Rotterdam in the evening sun, doing this interview.

Gabriella: Indeed! Good conversations are my grazing..

And to your point, I also remember from riding horses, long ago, how they have a way of amplifying human emotions, even perceiving your state of mind in the way you breathe, making visible things that you might not be aware of… 

Sophie: Yes. If you know how to observe a horse you will know how you feel. If you can read a horse’s behavior there is much insight to be had. Just their ears have 10 muscles and can communicate so many things. Or licking their lips for example is a sign of relaxation that usually happens when you also relax, as a rider or as a horse handler on the ground. I was trained as a classical horse rider as a kid but I am learning to meet horses again, now on the ground, face to face. They feel so much more impressive when I am on foot, because of their size, strength, speed. So you need to learn how to stand your ground with them in an entirely different way.  It, too, has taught me how difficult it is to be present. And also how fragile trust is: because horses, to treat you as a trustworthy leader they can follow, make many demands on your capacity to make choices – it is a trust that is hard to create and easy to lose. 

Gabriella: I imagine that both teaching and equine therapy are about learning how to hold space for others, to stand ground as you say…  

Sophie: I took a break from teaching recently, which gave me time to explore this other world. Now I am interested in combining them. For example: I would like to give workshops to artists that are stuck in their process, or have somehow blocked something important, professionally or personally. Horses unlock us when we show up and when we give everything we have to that moment. 

Plus I have been getting tired of the arts classroom behind doors I have to say. So I have been designing, for example, along with Henriëtte Waal, these open-air classrooms. We made a couple of them and I have a few more in mind for the future. 

Gabriella: Talking about your work: your art and design practices seem to be quite entangled with education, creative research and deeply collaborative methodologies. I have in mind the Outdoor Classroom, your Field Essays, The School of Verticality, your curatorial interventions with Erik Wong for Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Traveling Academy, your leadership role with several academic institutions related to both art and design. What is it about these intersections that you found interesting, what threads through them all?

Sophie: I would also like to mention Plateforme Art, Design, Société*- where I work together with anthropologist Francesca Cozzolino. The platform is invested in what we call  savoir sensible – a notion taken from Jacques Rancière. It is a concept that is impossible to translate in English, though in part it could be translated as sentient knowledge; or the sensitivity you need to acquire to tap into certain knowledges; or a knowledge that is connected to the senses, or that is sensitive  – there are many facets to it. This is why Francesca collaborates with artists: she believes that through these collaborations it is possible to not only tap into this kind of knowledge but also to restitute it, translate it, transmit it into narrative forms that are in themselves more open, that travel beyond the academic text.

There is a reason why I have been involved with her for five years: the thinking that she does on this is also what I try to do in much of my work.

I have always been looking for different ways of knowing and ways of acknowledging pluralities. I borrowed the term ways of knowing from the anthropologist Tim Ingold, with whom I have co-written several essays*. I was also involved in some of his projects, such as the Knowing from the Inside research trajectory – cross-disciplinary experiments with matters of pedagogy.

Gabriella: Is there a difference between speaking of knowledges (in the plural) versus other ways of knowing?

Sophie: Ways of knowing is still active, you feel a movement, it is never finished, it’s an action. Where as knowledges is categorized – I see archives, trays, drawers. With ways of knowing I see paths…

Gabriella: Life in flux…

Sophie: Yes. And plural.

I think it’s more true to the way that people actually know things in whatever role they have, either as farmer or artist. And many times those roles get collapsed, many of my collaborators are not just one thing. Neither am I.

So my work, my podcasts, my research, my teaching, is always about that: what do we know? How do we know it? How can we share what we know?

In the end I am just interested in learning myself.

Gabriella: So tell me more about Knowing from the Inside.

Sophie: Tim Ingold has a radical position. As I understand it, he believes artists do anthropology**. Making things, engaging with the flows of life that translate into materials: he says that is also what anthropology should be about. Not everyone agrees (laughs). But it’s interesting to me: he draws together anthropologists, musicians, dancers, artists, and puts them all in dialogue at the same level, as practitioners. And there are lots of experiments going on, transdisciplinary collaborations… a theater-maker and choreographer working with an anthropologist for example, creating discourse in other ways. 

It’s also interesting that Knowing from the Inside*** was a PhD topic, so instead of just an individual’s thesis, it was a collaborative theme, with collective outputs that might bring about more change, institutionally speaking. 

Gabriella: Deep collaboration also seems to be part of all of your work.

Sophie: I consider myself a relational artist. 

For one of my projects with Francesca we worked in Martinique with an ethnopharmacologist, a plant healer, a sociologist, amongst others… people that all have a deep and different relationship with the land. That got me into Edouard Glissant and his Poétique de la Relation – he says something beautiful, that the relationships you create are what matters most, what gives things meaning and depth. Even the vitality of an ecosystem depends on the quality and diversity of its relationships. 

Gabriella: Nothing exists except in its relationships. I am fascinated by that notion as well, in my own work – what happens in between things, that holding space, the connections, learning to learn amidst the gaps. And when the emergent is allowed to come into play… 

Sophie: That’s why I liked Documenta 15. It is very relational in nature, they tried to take away the pedestal. The artists are there and you can speak to them directly, the curatorial aspect was a collective endeavor, the unplanned has been allowed to happen. 

One of the principles of my best work is that it’s not me who decides. It’s about the vertical moments. Moments that, if you are present and let them come into your life, allow you to suddenly shift directions, or to know what you need to do, intuitively. 

Gabriella: Sergey Dvorstevoy – a documentary filmmaker from Tajikistan, has a beautiful way of explaining why untrained animals seem to do the craziest things for his camera: “Come, sit silently with me and everything will happen,” he told a questioning journalist.  It’s a different type of agency: an oblique logic of opening up a space for things to enter and emerge. A type of attentive-yet-also-open gaze. Because there is a drawing of a circle if you will, an attention and a presence that does end up activating things in their own way. It never pretends neutrality, there is a point of contact, a to and fro. It is also full of a strange trust I believe – a mutual letting go, like the horses lips.

Sophie: It’s very important who is present. It changes everything – all the time. It’s a crazy thing.

Gabriella: Back in the days when I was a resident at FABRICA, Marina Abramović was curating an exhibition of our work. I remember she spoke eloquently about  presence as an actual space. Presence almost as invisible architecture. And that a performance artist needs to understand how to inhabit a moment in a way that allows for people to enter that experience-space-scaffolding and feel a different spectrum of sensations, thoughts, intuitions. 

In your case, what is the Sophie intention, the quality of the Sophie presence, in the live scenarios of your work, when a project takes on a life of its own?

Sophie: It’s actually un-intentioned. It’s when I let go that everything happens. And I don’t let go very often (laughs). 

Though it’s really a combination of course. Because to let go you need to prepare first. For example. In yoga many it’s easy to want to skip the Savasana pose – the corpse pose – but one should not. It’s the moment in your practice that you can allow yourself not to do anything anymore: but only because you have already done everything. So then you just lie with your hands up to the sky, with your feet open.  You only need to let yourself rest… But it is actually very difficult to rest. We have completely unlearned how to rest. How to rest in one’s body, how to rest in space, how to rest with the people around us, how to rest with all these ideas bombarding us all the time.

Savasana is the pose that allows for your body to integrate it all and learn from everything you have done in that class. This is a great metaphor for the art process as well.

Gabriella: I love that. And rest is also strangely political. The feminist movement speaks about the importance of rest. It speaks about time poverty in sociopolitical contexts where bodies – especially women’s bodies – get quantified mostly as labor that sustains the market, and many times goes unrecognized and unpaid, such as care work, which results in millions of women who do not have a moment to spare for themselves. Rest in that context is rebellion.

Sophie: Rest is protest. That is a phrase from Camila Marambio who was part of our Pluriverse exhibition at the Het Nieuwe Instituut

Gabriella: So perhaps rest is a good example of other, more oblique, ways of knowing. Many times we think that Knowledge – with a capital K – is about complete understanding. Whereas I believe that art can add something very different and very important to how we make meaning: it has the capacity to fascinate us, and so we are willing to stay with open-ended questions, to engage longer with ideas, to struggle with complexity and the unknown.

Sophie: Art is more evocative. For me art also comes with the possibility of continuously falling in love over and over with this life and this chance that we have been given to be here for a certain amount of years – art as a desire to explore. To open up. 

That’s why I speak about being grounded. I don’t think one can have all those horizontal exchanges if everyone is not rooted too. That’s why I am interested in the vertical axis: that which grounds us in our own selves, to the land, to our ancestry, to our trajectories.

Gabriella: And in social systems true horizontality does not exist. Perhaps the ideal, rather, are structures that allow for different leaderships to emerge and submerge, to shape-shift dynamically instead of being entrenched power relationships. In education and beyond. 

I believe ecological frameworks and metaphors become useful here. For example, in terms of verticalities, I was fascinated when I read Robert Macfalrane’s Underworld and found out that there is more biodiversity in the crust of the earth than what we think, comparable to the biodiversity of the Amazon in fact. The thing is we can’t see it. It lives beneath our feet, it is invisible; an epistemological blindspot of humankind. Addressing these blindspots could allow for different assemblages and inventions: optics, vocabularies and tools for the invisible, for mutuality, simultaneity, non-traditional exchanges, a language of paradox even, mycelium-like… 

Sophie: Yes, it’s always the same question of how do we know, how do we see, what are the lenses with which we see. It’s why I bring in makers from different horizons and perspectives together. I try to go beyond the binaries of thinkers and makers. Artists are makers. Thinkers are also makers – they make thoughts. I like the idea of the reflective practitioner… maybe I will switch to that today, instead of relational art (laughs). Because it is about practice, and reflecting on practice, and practicing on reflection. To try to rearticulate what you experienced in the field. Back and forth. 

Gabriella: And what does art bring to the table in this sense, when we widen the frame?

Sophie: Artists bring another knowing and the unknowing*; the daring to doubt;  to think and do things beyond established categories. And how it then gets expressed aesthetically, relationally, socially, culturally or economically – artists are incredible that way. Every time art gets captured, well, artists then find a way back out of the corner, and in a way you did not imagine – off they go again!

*See Lucy Cotter‘s work and her upcoming book Art Knowledge: Between the Known and the Unknown. 

Gabriella: In terms of your recent work – and perhaps also, since you mentioned him, echoing Glissant and his archipelago thinking – tell me about the pluriverse and this “world where many worlds are possible”, a phrase that comes from the Zapatista movement in Mexico.

Sophie: Francesca, and Rolando Vázquez as well – who is Mexican but working on decolonial practices here in the Netherlands – pointed out Arturo Escobar’s book Designs for the Pluriverse, as well as his book Sentir-pensar con la tierra – to sense-feel with the earth – which is very related to savoir sensible. 

From being a Colombian academic invested in post-development paradigms, Arturo took a leap of faith into design theory and history. He reminds me of Tim Ingold – an academic with his feet on the ground. He is involved with land defense and works with different communities. As an author he is also very generous, he draws on so many ways of knowing; on ecofeminism, social design, systems thinking and more… and then he very diligently somehow weaves them together and then suddenly you feel oh – this is a new field. 

He is also dreaming of a pluriversal curriculum that will bridge the global south and the global north. I understand why he wants to think beyond nation states and specific fields of practice – even visual anthropology or other crossovers are still rooted in disciplines; the pluriversal has to transcend them entirely. 

See: Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton University Press, 2011; Arturo Escobar (translation Atelier la Minga and Réseau D’études Décoloniales), Senti-penser avec la terre, Editions du Seuil, 2018

Gabriella:Tell me more about the pluriverse.

Sophie: The pluriverse is a term first used, to my knowing, by the pragmatic philosopher William James in a lecture called Towards a Pluralistic Universe, from 1909, referencing a world where many things are possible at the same time. Many other thinkers have since picked up strands of the pluriverse (Walter Mignolo 2006 ; Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 2018 ; Barbara Glowczewski 2018). And Arturo’s thinking, geographically and culturally, was inspired in turn by the Zapatistas and the autonomy movements of indigenous peoples.

Arturo and these ideas inspired the podcast series as well as the exhibition that Erik and I created for Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. We wanted to translate an academic book into practical, concrete, and hands-on manifestations of the pluriverse.  To find people, places, actions of this pluriverse here and now. Because it is here  – though most of us don’t see it because we have been amputated from the capacity to see and engage with it. Coming from Mexico you know this. As a European I am a daughter of the so-called enlightenment, whether I like it or not, but through this search I have come to better understand our privileges and biases.

Gabriella: I met Rolando briefly at the Rijksakademie, his work is fascinating. Also, during the months I lived in the Netherlands I was intrigued to see how cultural institutions here are being pushed to readdress their colonial past. From the repatriation of looted artifacts, to certain public conversations. I find this necessary but also a space fraught with tensions. It can easily become a “check the box” agenda instead of a daily practice that uproots legacy thinking and behaviors. As a white woman artist from Europe – daughter of the enlightenment as you say – how do you enter the decolonial space?

Sophie: I enter it very humbly, as a student, as a learner and as a deep listener.

I did my last Field Essays* with Rolando, who co-directs the María Lugones Decolonial Summerschool every year. He is my friend and my teacher in what it takes to decolonize our ways of thinking, knowing, doing. He was on our informal sounding board for the Pluriverse exhibition and is also a friend of Arturo’s.

* See Krier (ed), Ismailova and Vázquez, Q. Meanderings in Worlds of Mourning, Onomatopee, 2022. www.fieldessays.net

Gabriella: I love the fact that even though this interview is about your experiences as a teacher, you continuously reference your role as a perpetual student.

Sophie: Yes. Otherwise I would be emptied out and I would have nothing to transmit. I am very fortunate to have met Rolando and to have been able to learn from him constantly, from the spaces and the questions that he has introduced me to. It has made me realize also how much there is to unlearn. And that we need to be aware of an impulse to want to understand everything, to think that all has been made clear, that there are specific answers to everything.

I see that reflected in my role as a teacher as well. My enthusiastic students thank me for helping them get lost; the less enthusiastic ones blame me for asking them to search so much on their own. But I don’t think life is a manual, nor give can we give the functioning from A to Z. We cannot pretend that we understand completely, that there are no questions anymore, that we will not fail, that there is no risk. Education should teach the opposite of this. 

Gabriella: Talking about the impulse to fully understand, or to fully see, in my own work I have been fascinated by the politics of (in)visibility. Beyond an intellectual curiosity, the tension there feels to me like an open wound that I still struggle with. Since on one hand, it is often because certain practices or other ways of being in the world have become submerged -and hence unlegible to a larger, more totalizing and homogenizing force – that they still exist and have resisted. 

Sophie: Glissant, the right to opacity…

Gabriella: Yes. I see that in Mexico City: many communities hidden within the folds of the megalopolis have managed to keep their own hyper-local governance systems, their own social rituals, practices and techniques… 

But on the other hand, not knowing about the existence of these other social articulations and possibilities is also what has us believing, for example, that there is no outside to a market-first planet so to speak; or that, as some have said, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We need that sense of the otherwise, of adjacent alternatives, of archipelago thinking and pluriverses, or heterotopias in Foucault’s terms; we need techno poetics too – other forms of inquiry and sense-making, to open up the scope of the collective imagination: all of which can also fuel resistance and transformation, because we foresee another path, learnt by creative contagion…

How to deal with the tension of both the power and the perils of visibility?

Sophie: First, these are not things to understand in the traditional way, but rather to engage with. To also put yourself at risk. It is showing up fully and the capacity for a deeper exchange. 

From the encounters that I have had the priviledge to be part of in the last years, I have met people that do see an outside to capitalism, that are finding the cracks and living within them, they are already practicing alternatives. They know it’s not all that big shiny object, that it has cracks, that cracks are hard to see but that they are all over the place.

Gabriella: And instead of being this big monolithic idea of who we are and who we can become – individually, collectively – exploring pluriverses also means exploring multiplicity and holding its tensions. Because rather than a single idea repeated endlessly – “this is how all the world has to be” – or attempting the seamless, frictionless, scaling of efficiencies – its potencies lies elsewhere: in saying, here is a possible world, but there is also another possible world, and another… 

Sophie: It also seems to me that these searches and social processes keep speeding up, maybe because of the pandemic and the climate crisis – which of course is not new but only recently surfaced in the collective consciousness. But they can also be co-opted very easily by the market, commodified and made superficial. 

And yes, multiplicity is tricky. With the Pluriverse exhibition, we took a risk by trying to make so many voices audible and have a polyphonic exhibition; we sampled from many people’s practices. As a telling anecdote: from my point of view, the photographer of the exhibition found it hard to know what to center, how to frame, where one work ended and another thing began – it was like all the pluriverses elbowing each other. 

Gabriella: But that’s also true in interdependencies, ecologies, symbiosis, systems, reality writ large….

Sophie: It’s unframable!

On the negative end, some people thought it was overwhelming, almost too much. On the positive side, many mentioned that they liked that – instead of representing these practices – the exhibition made the practices present. 

There is an open question there: being represented versus being present; versus bringing to presence; versus making present. Rolando quotes María Lugones who puts it this way: bringing to voice.

We also wanted a pluriversal yard as an articulating concept. That came into being thanks to Sean Leonard, our invited scenographer, who is from Trinidad and Tobago. He comes with very different experiences to ours. He is immersed in themes like the carnival and the yard tradition in Trinidad… These internal courtyards are spaces of negotiation and precarity, where multiple uses happen: co-living, cooking, sleeping etc. It is far from a perfect world, but it’s a space where you can learn to negotiate. 

Photo credits: Metamorfose Lokaal (Fig 1,2): Sjoerd Knibbeler; Archives (Fig 3,4,5,6): Sophie Krier; School of Verticality, Seeding Stories (Fig 7): Jörg Oschmann, Lungomare; Q. Field Essays (book cover): Onomatopee