Workshop: Carrier Bag Walks II: Belgrade Forests
Annual Lecture Series 2: ‘On constellations, earth & carrier bags’

In her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction written in 1986, Ursula K. Le Guin references anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher’s claim that the first device made by the human species was not the spear but probably a recipient, a container to hold gathered products, and a carrier bag. In the temperate and tropical regions of the world, people mostly sustained themselves with plants and occasionally caught small animals and fish which required containers and nets to gather, catch and bring home. Hunting on the other hand required a spear, a different and durable object with which to stab and kill. Although less occurring, this event nevertheless made for an exciting story–with action and a hero. It is a story of domination and killing, one which Ursula le Guin continues to state she has never felt part of, neither have I. But “the trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story,” she adds.

Gathering has been and still is a steady and peaceful act which still makes the world go around. It gives me relief to think that the first invention of my own kind was one which held many different things together rather than kill and cut to pieces. In gathering, one practices the “arts of noticing”. It involves the noticing of seeds, roots, growth, transformations, decay, cycles, beginnings and ends, differences and diversity. A container, a bag, a vessel is made to hold everything together– entangled, assembled and collected.
I will be coming to Belgrade from Istanbul where the lungs of the city are called Belgrade Forests–a toponym and place which emerged around the same time as the Great War Island–a former sandbank started to appear in maps around the 16th c. We will take walks while thinking about dispossession, earth, history, future, care and all the complexities the toponym and the former sandbank presents. While between the waters of great rivers, Sava and Danube, we will collect and gather matter and thoughts in order to reimagine new connections to earth. The imaginaries, which can be contemplated in diverse media such as prose, poetry, sculpture and drawings–to name a few, will be finally shared and ephemerally inscribed on an urban public space with water–a final performative ground calligraphy.