Current conflicts (in the Middle East, Africa, or Northern Europe, among others) attest to the failure of diplomacy in geopolitics or at least reveal its crisis. Drawing on a concept borrowed from cultural anthropology, and on the diversity of cosmologies specific to each culture – where one observes a complex ecology of relations, with their associated cosmotechnics and cosmopolitics – the contributors to this issue will examine the contemporary relevance of this notion through artistic and scientific practices that promote alternative ways of being and collaborating with the (non) living. This reflects the thesis of a “multimodal diplomacy” advanced by the artist-researcher Juan Castrillón, who describes it as a mode of listening, conversation and worlds-shifting grounded in immersive and ethnographic practice. Through digital, visual, and sonic media, this approach brings forth onto-epistemological differences as sensory and transformative qualities much needed for worldbuilding otherwise. The authors, artists, and researchers featured in this issue will focus in particular on the dynamics at work in the Global South, which offer meaningful and reliable examples of worldmaking modeling, participatory engagement and perspectival difference. Coming from a wide range of disciplines (anthropology, digital humanities, design, heritage studies, diplomacy, life sciences, etc.), they will also seek to explore these issues through the use of contemporary digital tools, which provide unprecedented possibilities for generating and producing meaning from embodied, sensory experiences lived by human and other-than-human entities.
On multimodal diplomacies
