Relation(al) Matters Archive: Online Conversation Series

What, if not relationality characterizes today’s planetary condition? One only needs to think of the ongoing and globally interconnected COVID-19 pandemic, the deepening ecological catastrophes or the increasing systemic global inequalities – is it not obvious how relational existence is? And is it then not astonishing how so many of those different systems (be they scientific, medical, socio-political or ethical) that seek to handle these entangled situations continue to work from the presupposition that what appears and acts somewhere – in a geopolitical region, a body-psyche or a specific life-form – is best understood as an in-divi-dual-ized entity whose effects remain in just one place? Instead of accounting for the manifold and differentiated entanglements, reverberations and consequences disseminating everywhere, and in always in/determinate ways?

The Relation(al) Matters Archive aims to collect insights and divergent practices to deal with the complexity of planetary entanglement. The archive is part of a project in which two claims are interwoven in the attempt to gauge what is going on: a) relational matters expresses the insistence on the intra-active and messily entangled condition of current times, and b) relation matters is an ethico-political wager for becoming more literate and carefully attuned to what entanglement as condition implies, what such a claim asks from those enlivening it.

Via conversational encounters with scholars and cultural practitioners, this archive wants to provide its viewers with insights, tools and provocations to respond to the current situation. It starts from a relational point of view yet, by doing so, it does not rule out critiques of the relation(al) matters we find ourselves in. Taking a relational point of departure does not propose relationality as solution. The conversations instead aim to inquire what relationality means in specific contexts and on different scales, and what a relational approach could offer in response to what is happening within, between, and around us.