Social Logistics in the Heart of the Shipwreck

In this session, artists and spatial practitioners James Enos and Annie Simpson will reflect upon their ongoing project Port Futures + Social Logistics, as well as subsequent efforts to develop an artistic methodology rooted in suspending belief in any singular spatial theory as a way of knowing. The presentation offers a research strategy for artistic production concerned with connecting circulation studies / struggles to notions of polycrisis and planetary urban critique. Calling for both the collective and inductive study of the material present, Enos and Simpson will emphasize conjecture and speculation through forms of artistic fieldwork where practitioners are themselves passenger-travelers working to displace the classical duality assigned to the sensible/intelligible, abstract/concrete, or rational/irrational.

Rooted in a study of the Southeastern United States’ historic material interests, Enos and Simpson will trace edge conditions and connections across territorial divides in opposition to known tropes or scales: from volcanoes, to nuclear tests, to vast infrastructure, and through voids constituting global energy transition. The presentation will focus on film, drawing, literary, and diagrammatic analysis to consider, perhaps anecdotally, how claims like Robert Smithson’s “nobody wants to go on vacation to a garbage dump,” calls for artists to enter the ruined and infernal regions where the systemic meets ground.