Starting November 25th, 2024, einaidea and the Whitney Independent Study Program will hold a monthly meeting devoted to the collective exploration of entwined epochal ache. The Syndemic Reading Group will be a year-long workshop aimed at co-producing and co-speculating, one session a month, an interpretive body of our fragmented chronic grievance. Session to session, the emergence of such a body will be prompted by acts of reading, pulling in multiple directions. Besides the provocation of its conceptual framework, no other agenda will be pre-set apart from trading references and time-based annotations, sharing our acts of reading and attending the meetings with kindness and commitment. The workshop will be carried out by a reduced cohort, and the results of the process will be ultimately gathered in a joint publication to be launched in New York in the fall 2025.
This project takes the concept of syndemic as a point of departure in its approach to complexity, and in response to the collapse of the traditional narratives for present-time histories and to post-humanity as a condition in search for a clinic. The concept of syndemic was coined three decades ago, in the wake of the AIDS crisis, by various researchers in epidemiology and clinical anthropology. If the first syndemic officially identified as such resulted from the assemblage of Substance Abuse, Violence, and AIDS (hence its acronym, SAVA)—how should we call, today, one that is made out of Neo-Colonial Genocide, Overconsumption Extractivism, and Zoonotic Spillover?
Intimate and collective, widespread and placeless, global collapse is experienced as an entanglement of co-occurrences so decentralized—even if we can accurately locate its manufacture and its consequences—that one wonders whether it might be wiser to doubt their existence. Doubt and angst themselves feel like a form of stolen privilege and are subject to the powerful narratives of apocalyptic countdown. But animal and indigenous apocalypses took place before us in histories unwritten by colonial power. The motor of the Sixth Extinction is not cosmic agency but anthropic malfunction. In a form that is not yet thinkable, the volume of contemporary aberrations for the greater good resonates with, and complicates, what Bertolt Brecht had whispered to those born on his wake: "What kind of times are these, when / Talking about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors?"
The Syndemic Reading Group is formed by about a dozen participants who will meet online, once a month, on a Wednesday from 2pm to 4pm New York time and 6pm to 8pm Barcelona time. Every session will be facilitated by Sara Nadal-Melsió, associate director of Whitney ISP, and Manuel Cirauqui, director of einaidea. This workshop is part of ALTR\ES, einaidea’s Program of Other Studies.
Patricipants: Ignasi Ayats Soler, Grazielle Bruscato Portella, Manuel Cirauqui, Berta Gutierrez Casaos, Tamara Khasanova, Stella Liantonio, Daniel Melo Morales, Mireia Molina Costa, Ash Moniz, Sara Nadal-Melsió, Adrienne Oliver, Mana Pinto, Guillem Serrahima Solà.