Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue of the Swamphen Journal was born from the Strange Letters Symposium held in 2021 when we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic; a period of life gone strange in which we were forced to adopt new modes of meeting, communicating and being together-apart. In the Western tradition, people have often turned to letter writing as a means of connection with distant others but this symposium asked us to reimagine the letter for the strange times that we have found ourselves in (for some these strange times began with colonisation). To challenge the letter writing tradition, interrogating the communicative capacity of the more-than-human, seems strangely fitting when the nonhuman is so clearly asking us to listen.' (Publication summary)

Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa. For this special cross-Tasman event, and from opposite coasts of Australia, we convened panels for participants under two invitational titles: “Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn” and “Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics.” Our project averred that the work of art in the Anthropocene was under interrogation by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. Connected with this shifting ground, we argued that new energies and collaborations were emerging across the postconventional arts and ecological humanities, creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: that the human is more-than-human and the social is an eco-social domain in a preternatural age of extinction and climate destruction. We set out to feel the pulse of what contemporary artists and researchers from Aotearoa and Australia were doing, making, speculating on, or writing about in the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Our project’s defining call was to explore encounters in a new frame of particular planetary aesthetics: moving from the particular, bodily or affective encounter to trace, reveal or refigure planetary connections, relations and concerns. (Louise Boscacci and Perdita Phillips : Particular Planetary Aesthetics)