SPARK #32: Artist Diagrams as part of Modernity’s end-of-life care

Diagrams have power. They can show relationships, dynamics, mechanisms, compatibilities; they have the potential to dehierarchicalise information and help us grapple with complexity; they can upend our understanding of the world we live in. Right now we are breaching multiple ecological limits while the authoritarian right becomes ever more powerful. To paraphrase theorist and artist Simon O’Sullivan, what diagrams do we need to get us out of this impasse?

In her 2021 book Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa Machado de Oliveira describes modernity as a worlding story, describes modernity as a worlding story, one that presents itself “as a general project of civilisation that seeks to engineer society through humanism, reason, science, progress, and technology” but that rests on a foundation of violent extraction, exploitation and ecocide that is leading to climate breakdown. We need to enable modernity to die a good death in order for something better to be born, but we will only be able to create something genuinely different if we first become aware and suspicious of what modernity allows us to desire and imagine.

Drawing on de Oliveira’s idea of the diagram as entity, something that moves things in the world, artist and SPARK co-ordinator Jane Lawson leads a session in which we will ponder and draw our way through how diagrams can be a part of modernity’s end-of-life care, touching on core questions such as:

• Do we need to imagine the future before we can build it?
• In what ways can diagrams help us face our reality with humility and accountability?
• How can diagrams show multiple contradictory truths?
• Can new forms of diagram help us visualise a new kind of future?