Clearing is an area in a wood or forest where there are no trees or bushes. Safety distance, one meter, one meter and eighty, at least two meters, four and half meters. Trying to read and explore the concept of relationship after the collective traumatic experience caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, starting from the reading of Chthulucene by Donna Haraway, I’m getting ready to watch the world in a perspective where relationships become something else and generate multispecies kindreds, both terrestrial and aquatic, spread and horizontal. Complex, fragile and cosmogonic textures. «The tentacular are not disembodied figures; they are cnidarians, spiders, fingery beings like humans and raccoons, squid, jellyfish, neural extravaganzas, fibrous entities, flagellated beings, myofibril braids, matted and felted microbial and fungal tangles, probing creepers, swelling roots, reaching and climbing tendrilled ones. The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres. “The inhabitants of the world, creatures of all kinds, human and non-human, are wayfarers”; generations are like “a series of interlaced trails”.» (DH) I borrow the woodland metaphor of the clearing in Heiddeger (The Lichtung) and I imagine unveiled visions, expanses and tangles, unexplored worlds and ways, new forms of interaction, borderless textures, networks. I try to think about the new dimensions of travelling and being together, the trajectories that will be created, what distance will mean. How it will be possible to restore places that provide shelter, harness temporality and spatiality, where someone is free to accept the catastrophe, leaving human exceptionalism and abandon the anthropocene perspective.

[This work is in collaboration with Covisioni:]