Black Tent Meetings: The Art of Habitability – A Deep History of the Inhabitable Kurti Kachukha by Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun, La Intermundial Holobiente

The Black Tent Meetings by lumbung artists Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun is a series of events that reflects on grass, sandification, pikas, yaks, black beaches, and global environmental crises. Such reflections correspond to the gesture of making nature a subject of constitutional rights, such as in the 2008 constitution of Ecuador, thereby challenging the anthropocentric principle of the modern constitution. The concept of the black tent carries a similar concern. By connecting multiple actors, it can reactivate existing resources. In this sense, the black tent is an existing form rather than an invention for the future.

How can we rethink humancentric perspectives on worlding that tend to disconnect from inhabiting, creating, and maintaining a habitat where humans and nonhumans cooperate and co-produce? Addressing this question, the panel The Art of Habitability – A Deep History of the Inhabitable Kurti Kachukha, which launches the series Black Tent Meetings by lumbung artist Cao Minghao & Chen Jianjun, discusses a story of restoring and healing grassland by the inhabitants of Kurti Kachukha in the Qinghai province on the Tibetan plateau. This story shows the emergence of many more-than-human relationships in an entangled inhabitable network of humans, deities, ghosts, yaks, sheep, pikas, grasses, trees, rivers and sands, and rocks. A deep historical understanding of worlding reveals what makes Kurti Kachukha an inhabitable place.

After the panel, the new video work by Minghao and Jianjun, Grass, Sand, and Global Environmental Apparatus, will be screened.

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