A Sound Story with Castor Beans (Ricinus communis)

Abstract

This article presents an artistic research-creation process involving debates on the concept of agency as it is understood in the area of multispecies ethnographies and affective ecologies. Our sound story with castor beans is narrated from two complementary perspectives: a textual one and a sonorous one. The research-creation process came to fruition thanks to the participation of various different castor beans (Ricinus communis) which inhabit or have inhabited the University Agroforestry Garden (HAU) ENES, UNAM, as well as other specimens which inhabit various zones of Morelia and Mexico City. Additionally, the financing parties of the HAU participate in the creation of the sound story, as do other techno-media-related actors. A few supplementary ideas surrounding the political ecologies of vibrational affects are also proposed, which are configured using, among other things, acoustic, affective and semiotic tangles, which themselves attend to the tensions, distensions and temperaments that lend different consistencies to these encounters. Taking these ideas as a starting point, some pragmatic strategies for destabilizing hierarchic and dichotomic modes of relationship between humans and more-than-humans, which give consistency to colonialcapitalistic- patriarchal common sense, are proposed, in order to encourage other forms of cohabitation.