Situated Knowledge & Material Practice

Donna Haraway — Situated Knowledges

Donna Haraway's 1988 essay "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" argues that the ideal of objective, view-from-nowhere knowledge is not a neutral position but a specific historical and political one. Instead, she argues for "situated knowledges" — knowledge that is accountable to its own position, partial, and in relation.

Her companion concept, from A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), proposes the cyborg as a figure for hybrid, boundary-crossing identity — relevant to any practice that works at the intersection of natural and technological, organic and synthetic.

Anna Tsing — Multi-Species and the Peripheral

Anna Tsing's work explores what she calls "collaborative survival in precarious times" — how humans and non-humans make lives together in damaged landscapes. Key works:

• The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015) — Using the matsutake mushroom as a lens for understanding global supply chains, human-fungal relations, and what she calls "the arts of noticing."
• Feral Atlas (2020, with Jennifer Degar et al.) — An interactive digital atlas of feral — unintended, ungovernable — ecosystems produced by human infrastructure. Salmon in drainage ditches. Kudzu across power lines.

Tsing's concept of the "Plantationocene" — the ecological transformation caused by plantation agriculture — is directly relevant to natural dye and textile practices rooted in colonial crop systems (indigo, cochineal).

Metaorganism

The concept of the organism as an ecological assemblage rather than a bounded individual. Humans are metaorganisms — the human body hosts more microbial cells than human cells; without its microbiome it cannot function. This dissolution of the individual biological boundary has implications for how we understand identity, agency, and relationship in material practice.

Plankton and Scale

From the Zurich program notes: "Plankton! Jellyfish is the biggest plankton." — a reminder that scale is relative and that ecological significance is not correlated with visible size. The most fundamental ecological transformations happen at microscopic scales. In material practice: the bacteria in a natural dye vat, the fungi in biomaterial, the mineral microparticles in pigment grinding.

Relevance to Material Practice

Situated knowledge asks: where does this material come from? Whose hands shaped it first? What ecological and historical relationships does it carry? When working with cochineal (insect dye from Oaxaca, commodified through Spanish colonial trade routes), or indigo (plant from tropical Asia, spread through colonial plantation systems), or linseed oil (pressed from flax, whose cultivation transformed European landscapes) — the material carries its history into the studio.

Acknowledging situated knowledge in material practice means working with this history as an active ingredient, not as background information.

References

• Donna Haraway — A Cyborg Manifesto (1985); Situated Knowledges (1988)
• Anna Tsing — The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015); Feral Atlas (2020)
• Arts as Ecology program — Zurich Art Summer Program (Zdkh), 2024
• Sophie Calle — The Hotel (L'Hôtel) (1981) — situated, witnessed knowledge
• Lucy + Jorge Orta — ecological and social practice