Point of Life
Bettina Korintenberg
Related concepts: crisis of the living, critical zone, immersion, intra-action, responsibility, habitability, becoming with, relationality, collectivit
This is a time of multiple interconnected crises – crises of the living – that are paving the way for the sixth extinction, a term coined by Elizabeth Kolbert (2015). These changes are rapidly transforming the Earth’s critical zone, the thin layer where all life thrives and is sustained through complex, entangled life activities (see the entry “Critical Zone” in this glossary). The data-based facts about rapid and profound species extinction are well known; the rise of temperature and sea levels, the pollution of air, earth, and waters are well documented. Year after year, heat records are broken and scientists’ announcements and projections are ever-more alarming. How come humans with a mind trained by European modernity remain seemingly in-sensitive to the anthropogenic ruptures and transformations we are facing, and so un-able to properly react. Where does this lack of action or response-ability – a term introduced by Donna Haraway (2008, 71) to describe the ability to respond in a mode of multidirectional relationship – come from?
How we respond and feel responsibility is defined by the mode of relationship to all the living in and around us. The crisis of the living is essentially relational, as Yayo Herrero (Balmaceda and Herrero, forthcoming 2025) puts it. How we relate ourselves to all the living is powerfully organized by how we perceive the world. The concepts, habits, and cognitive schemata used to make sense of what is perceived through sensors and operations – technological or not – are grounded in the social imaginary (Castoriadis 1987). This imaginary refers to the world of ideas underlying a social reality, along with the practices and institutions built around it. Accordingly, how can we render and submit to response-ability?
I would like to tackle these questions by thinking alongside the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who proposes a revealing differentiation between two epistemological modalities of organizing a relationship to the world: the point of view and the point of life – the latter being a concept which Coccia (2019) unfolds in his widely received book The Life of Plants, guided by the idea of immersion as the state of life in constant metamorphosis.
To begin with, from the predominant way of a point of view: What does it mean to understand the world through the paradigm of the eye? The eye takes centre stage in Europe in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a powerful metaphor and structural element to shed light on reality, unveiling what are seen as hidden truths, and marking an essential shift in how we relate as humans to every-thing around and even in us. In his archaeological inquiry of knowledge systems in the European tradition, The Order of Things (1994), Michel Foucault defined this shift as one of the great discontinuities in the epistemes of “Western” culture (xxii) led by visibility and observation. The exclusion of the other senses “leaves sight with an almost exclusive privilege, being the sense by which we perceive extent and establish proof” (133) and thus establishes structures of knowledge and power. The condition of knowing turns on revealing a reality in front of our eyes: a reality that is presented to and dissected by the eye as a testimony that bestows certainty on the immediate. This practice of dissection performs this visual act of objectification: the separation of a body into its parts through the act of looking at it and defining it at a distance, fixing its morphological outlines according to categories, and organizing the world into a system of representation through visually identifiable characteristics. This staging of knowledge of the world and how it works is powerfully built into consciousness, e.g., through the spatial organization of (anatomical) theatres, which are composed like the ocular anatomy. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a structure of classification emerged in natural history that was based on “a knowledge of empirical individuals [that] can be acquired only from the continuous, ordered, and universal tabulation of all possible differences” (144). This means that an identity of the living is fixed and mapped within a “general grid of differences” (145) derived from a rigid system that serves to distinguish and classify visible phenomena in relation and in differentiation from other biological entities – a system exemplified by Linnaeus.
However, there is nothing to reveal, no contoured, fixed body or reality to look at from a point of view, a position separated and at a distance from what we look at. Instead, “we need to be less interested in what life is than in what it does,” writes Sébastien Dutreuil (2020, 180). He points towards an understanding of the world not through morphological characteristics but through ever-shifting states of fluxes, never-ending processes of transformations and entanglements. Coccia goes even further and defines the affective experience of being immersed as the main characteristic of life: “This being in the world, which in consequence is ours, too, is always a being in the sea of the world; it is a form of immersion [Es ist eine Form des Eintauchens – see below]. If life always is and cannot but be immersion, then most of the concepts and divisions we apply to the description of anatomy and physiology, as well as the active exercise of the bodily powers that allow us to live […] deserve to be rewritten” (Coccia 2019, 31). In this context I would like to emphasize the German translation (Coccia 2018) which transforms the state of immersion [“it is a form of immersion”] as a substantive into the verbality of an action: eintauchen. It is not just a state we are in, but a state that comes from the life activities and interactions of all the living, including ourselves. It is not interaction, but intra-action, as Karen River Barad (2007) conceptualizes it, which means that the ability to act emerges from within a relationship: “Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfiguration of the world. The universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming” (141). A point of life is always an interconnected web of movements, processes of entangled activities that create life beyond a visuality and always within a deep-time connection. Every-body contains the cascades of the consequence of its becoming, which is nourished by the substrate of material deep-time. It is a material mode of being in touch with one another, a contact mode rather than a mode of delimitation. Coccia points out that “all knowledge is that of an expression of being and life. It is never immediately the case that we can interrogate and understand the world, for the world is the breath of the living. All cosmic knowledge is nothing but a point of life [vie] (and not just a point of view [vue]), all truth is nothing but the world in the mediated space of the living. […] We need a mediator, a gaze capable of seeing and living the world where we cannot reach it” (Coccia 2019, 20).
As I write from a curatorial background, I would like to advocate for art and art exhibitions to perform the function of such a mediator to channel, impulse, and articulate experiences beyond the eye, recalibrating our senses to make sense of the world. This is art articulating the world from a liminal space, a space on the edges of the social imaginary, a space of the socially un- or barely thinkable. In this sense, art can bring into experience what is invisible, unheard, silenced, oppressed: broken voices – human and more than human – that gain presence through reconnections, testimonies, and reimagination as well as through atmospheres of a shared consciousness not yet named. Curating here becomes a lively and continuous practice of bringing together different voices to build up a shared and transdisciplinary process of re-understanding and re-imaging, a process from an unstable ground of “not knowing” and of collective listening and transformation within a relationship. Thus, I would like to frame this as curating from a point a life. This practice resonates with what Beatrice von Bismarck (2022) and others discuss as the curatorial – a mode of exhibition-making beyond representation, of generating knowledge within relational, processual, and collaborative environments. It signifies a radical shift from a truth to be revealed within a static exhibition setup, from an exhibition as a final result generating a point of view to open-ended processes of shifting constellations and connections within a “relational fabric of the curatorial situation” (17). The articulation in space which is on view or – better – open to experience is one of infinite possibilities of potential configurations which appear in a process of encounters. In this sense, the potential of the artistic and curatorial practices is that of connecting and bringing together, to create encounters of what lies separate: disciplines, people, objects, thoughts, practices, and matters. As von Bismarck (2022) puts it: “People and things, as well as the situation that joins them, are in a process of becoming, ‘in action,’ and can only be understood in terms of these relational processes” (18).
The point of life as curatorial practice resonates with the concept of the curatorial but takes it further by breaking down exhibitions and integrating them into an ecosystemic understanding. Curating from a point of life does not focus so much upon exhibitions as singular formats, but rather brings into constellation artistic-curatorial projects that entangle within a larger web of long-term research and exhibition-making, connected through thematic nodes that change over time. This envisioning and practice build on my experience as director of the IFA Galleries, which are two art spaces in Stuttgart and Berlin, and part of the Institute for Cultural Relations (IFA). Working in different collaborative setups and experimenting with formats and methodologies of what an exhibition can be or can be transformed into, the projects at these art spaces revolve around common nodes: the effects and continuations of colonial structures in our contemporary societies, the transmission of knowledge, memory culture and archives, migratory movements, and ecological mutations and futures. For the curatorial condition, encounters within the context of an exhibition are key since they create alternative knowledge and configurations and thus become political by breaking with fixed roles and epistemological frameworks (von Bismarck 2022, 23-26). Within the context of the point of life as a curatorial practice, the temporality of an exhibition in its articulation is not linear or scheduled towards a clear end. It can connect to an artistic practice and voice, a theme or methodology, or a collaborator that was part of a former project, and a new constellation can emerge from an exhibition project during its runtime and point towards a common future. This is a recursive practice of interludes, backloops, and preludes within a dense fabric of becoming-with, a complex web of encounters and intra-actions – response-abilities that create connections, bonds, and knowledge beyond the exhibition space. At its heart lies the idea of continuity: to build up stable but porous connections as ongoing reconfigurations. This continuity is not only temporal but also spatial. Projects are conceived in a more decentred and tentacular way: They can start in one place and continue in another, not by replicating the former constellation, but by carving out a new thematic aspect or another methodology in a different context. Or they appear simultaneously in different and interconnected venues, building up situations in resonance. Within these shapeshifting constellations, the reconnection to events, actors, and knowledge that have emerged within a curatorial situation is integral. It is a kind of deep-time understanding that everything in becoming is connected with what was before, within a thick presence pointing towards the etymology of “innovating” as in: “renew, restore” (Harper n.d). connections. This practice of reconnection implies the importance of building up networks of solidarity, communality, and generosity by strengthening and empowering one another beyond the limits of an exhibition as a temporal and spatial framework. Actors can reappear in morphing forms of collectivity of curatorial-artistic configurations, in a plurality of voices in a constant mode of negotiation, plurifying access points to the living: assemblies, ensembles, constellations, standing up and in conversation with. It is a messy mode of being immersed, eingetaucht, a “worlding practice” (Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter 2018), remattering as re-materializing the world, bringing to life knowledges of experience, of touch, of being in touch within a dense fabric of events and intensities.
References
Balmaceda, Elisa, and Yayo Herrero. Forthcoming 2025. “The Sacrifice & the Sacred. Yayo Herrero in conversation with Elisa Balmaceda.” In Decapitated Economies. Intercalations 5, edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, 380-391. Berlin: K. Verlag.
von Bismarck, Beatrice. 2022. “Curatoriality – The Relational Dynamics of the Curatorial.” In Beatrice von Bismarck, The Curatorial Condition, 8-45. London: Sternberg Press.
Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1987. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Coccia, Emanuele. 2019. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Translated by Dylan J. Montanari, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Coccia, Emanuele. 2018. Die Wurzeln der Welt: Eine Philosophie der Pflanzen. Translated by Elsbeth Ranke. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag.
Dutreuil, Sébastien. 2020. “Gaia Is Alive.” In Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, 180-183. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1994 [1970]. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Science. New York: Random House.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harper, Douglas. “Etymology of innovate.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Accessed 22 August 2025.
Kolbert, Elizabeth. 2014. The Sixth Extinction. An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Palmer, Helen, and Vicky Hunter. 2018. “Worlding.” In New Materialism: How Matter Comes to Matter. Last modified 16 March 2018, accessed 22 August 2025.