The Tongue as a radical site for execution
"Write a few lines to define execution means to you at the moment of time (or how you want to approach the notion of execution)"
caution: this is the slimy, oozy, liquid and slow tread on execution
execution : I am interested in introducing the force, in the context of a post-environmental ecology, of tongue-led inquiring. The tongue, I want to propose, operates and couples with, protrudes from, and dissolves certain forms of violence, governability and everyday life flowing through physical and social spaces.
Fran Gallardo, Execution: "Slow Twerking Tongues"
Execution is habitually conceived as an immediate action in time. It is explosive and violent, spectacular, full of spatial and social effects; an eruption of instant visibility. Bang, run, NOW!. In the monogamy of your screen a server goes down after a DDoS attack; or an anguishing multitude crowns a cash machine. !. Throughout this paper I aim to engage with a different kind of execution; one that is incremental and accretive. Its consequences are far-reaching, and yet they are played out in different range of temporal scales and bodies. This is relatively invisible execution: slow, sluggish, lingering, and decelerated. Some instances are climate change, sea level rise, the dwarfing of the cryosphere, toxic drifts, biomagnifications. But the ones this paper will be focused are those mediated by (our) tongue: butterfly plant arms-race, cannibalistic cells and other other slowly unfolding micro-environmental catastrophes.