Jennifer Teets
Electric Brine

KIOSK is proud to announce the Belgian presentation of Jennifer Teets’ recent publication Electric Brine.

Jennifer Teets is a curator and researcher based in Paris, she will introduce us to the research that proceeded the making of the book in a lecture that is taking place at Cirque Auditorium on October 26th at 19:30 (Louis Pasteurlaan 2, 9000 Ghent).

Flowing, seeping, leaking, cascading, shaping. Electric Brine is a selection of poetry and critical essays written by women from diverse fields such as literature, geography, media studies, history of life sciences, sociology, and poetics of science and fiction. The literary and scientific fabulations these women create speak of embodiment, language, and the ability to trigger political imagination through reading, writing and witnessing.

Electric Brine was co-edited by Elise Hunchuck and Margarida Mendes. All visuals have been designed by Sophie Keij, Atelier Brenda.

The book features contributions by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker and Lisa Robertson. Published by Archive Books, Berlin.

Introduction by Els Roelandt:

How can we live together on a damaged planet? Which instruments and tools can we use to make our lives and the future of all living beings better?

From Audre Lorde, we learn that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. The poet, feminist, and civil rights activist wrote of the need to embrace difference—not to merely tolerate people who are different, but to embrace difference because it provides a "fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic" (Micah White).

If we want to change or dismantle the existing system, we will have to look for instruments other than those we used in times of modernity. Language is an important tool for this—the meaning we give to words, the way we fill in and use concepts in our thinking. We can fabulate and confabulate.

Fortunately we have sparring partners in this project—original thinkers, scientists, and activists such as Donna Haraway, author of the influential 2016 book Staying with the Trouble; Lynn Margulis, who advanced symbiogenesis theory; and Masanobu Fukuoka, author of the 1978 book The One-Straw Revolution. Not in the least we have Anna Tsing, author of The Mushroom At the End of the World (2015) and Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (2017) a title to which the opening question of this short text refers.

And there is Anne Duk Hee Jordan, the Berlin-based artist currently exhibiting at KIOSK, whose oeuvre is deeply invested in underwater research, the world of ocean creatures, and the longing for symbiosis.

To name but a few.

In the book Electric Brine, writer and thinker Jennifer Teets has collected for us the amazing voices of six poets, writers, and scientists who propose tools for seeing the world differently, and who highlight the concept of flow in our thinking and creating. They see water or its misty partners, fog and the atmosphere, as a system of travel and capture consisting of fluid boundaries. These writers show us how language can create a fog of ambiguity, and is a condensation of reference.

These authors teach us how modernity can soon be confined to the past if we approach it as liquid, between chance and contrivance. With Electric Brine and Jennifer Teets, lets enter into the possibility of a shifting and forever flowing world.

Jennifer Teets is a para-spaced curator, writer, researcher, and occasional performer. Today she is based in Paris. Her research and writing combine inquiry, sciences studies, philosophy, and ficto-critique, and perform as an interrogative springboard for her curatorial practice.

She is curator ofThe World in Which We Occur, a research-based entity that explores themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. TWWWO began as a live event series over the telephone (inspired by James Lee Byars' World Question Center) in 2014, and has since expanded to other formats, such as Matter in Flux, an online monthly study group with participants and guest thinkers from various fields and various parts of the world.

Together with artist/philosopher Lorenzo Cirrincione, Teets curates Elusive Earths, an ongoing in situ work, process, and inquiry that looks into the elusiveness of rare clays, soils, and earths with forgotten origins. This research resulted in an exhibition presented at Etablissement d’en face in Brussels in 2014.