Realms of Exposure: On Design, Material Agency, and Political Ecologies in Córdoba

Abstract

yearold child in the Argentinean city of Córdoba is taken to the hospital and is kept breathing through artificial respiration. A scorpion had crept in through the grate of the shower and stung him. Similar humanscorpion encounters have become more common over the last ten years and have prompted a public campaign on how to avoid being stung. In this chapter we take an interest in morethanhuman urban encounters of this kind. We want to understand what it means to share a place, not with cute, cuddly, or majestic animals that are easily visible, but with small animals, insects, and organisms that we instinctively fear will hurt us. The chapter therefore contributes to a growing literature that elaborates methods and frameworks to think about animals as fellow urban inhabi tants. This has ranged from following the traces left by water voles and badgers in Birmingham in trying to upset expert ways of knowing the city; to writing accounts that try to sensitize humans to how penguins and flying foxes experience the city of Sydney as “narrative subjects”; and, finally, to draw on media accounts of a tiger, an elephant, and a cow, which fled zoos, circuses, and slaughterhouses, to elaborate on the possible political agency of nonhuman animals. In relation to this literature, our contribution lies in approaching animals that we instinctively fear and, rather than using more traditional ethnographic methods, we use material design as a method of speculating about such morethanhuman relations. Design has the advantage of sustaining affective, social, material, and political tensions and possibilities with species that we humans relate to. In this context, the chapter describes and reflects on an alternative shower grate that we designed with the idea of shifting the roles and relations between humans and scorpions toward cohabitation. A central aim is, therefore, to make urban dwellers more aware 5 Realms of Exposure: On Design, Material Agency, and Political Ecologies in Córdoba