Making Do as Compost
A provisional manifesto
Embedded Files
Annie Woodfill, 2020 - ongoing
"So much of earth history has been told in the thrall of the fantasy of the first beautiful words and weapons, of the first beautiful weapons as words and vice versa. Tool, weapon, word: that is the word made flesh in the image of the sky god; that is the Anthropos. In a tragic story with only one real actor, one real world-maker, the hero, this is the Man-making tale of the hunter on a quest to kill and bring back the terrible bounty. This is the cutting, sharp, combative tale of action that defers the suffering of glutinous, earth-rotted passivity beyond bearing. All others in the prick tale are props, ground, plot space, or prey. They don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter. The last thing the hero wants to know is that his beautiful words and weapons will be worthless without a bag, a container, a net." —Donna Haraway
illustration by molmir
Bioturbation is is defined as the reworking of soils and sediments by animals or plants. Bioturbators are deemed ecosystem engineers because they alter resource availability to other species through the physical changes they make to their environments.
Humans are prolific bioturbators --mining, unearthing, spreading, etc.-- our global processes exponentially compounding layers of waste and trauma on a scale of diagenesis itself... Is it possible to cultivate local vermiculture to poke holes, dig in or stir up alternative time and chemistry among these overwhelming processes themselves?
some recognizable existing features:
a landscape "cultivated" to move the few into a future by oppressing the present (the dregs of colonial invocation)
persistent claims over and of a modern society
ableist infrastructure
the persistent manufacturing of hard objects
increasingly frenzied and desperate pursuit of improved newness (acceleration)
As we participate in this world, maybe there are blind spots around these features that could be chances for what Donna Haraway calls staying with the trouble. We could begin to recognize instead what’s in the decay, the malfunctions, the physical or conceptual gaps and distances, the anomalies in data, the misbehaviors, the glitches, etc. as opportunities to reverse engineer agency towards interconnection *while no one’s looking*
Artists and musicians can easily move in *unofficial* DIY tangents, forgo planning for experiments in situ, perpetuate open-ended process and remain undefinable where making-do is mutation as opposed to procedure.
Slit-scan rearranges our experience of time through video.
Where standardized practices enforce uniformity, making do as compost offers transitive escape from the prophecy of sameness.
Different than recycling or upcycling, it is the process of burrowing into local strata (infrastructure, administration, habit) through covert play, and wiggling around without normative ends.
This movement is for nurturing, oxygenating, making visible, metabolizing and instigating open-ended entanglements.
The expanse of the Archipelago represents the push and pull between the particular and the universal; an ongoing uncertainty that prevents the local from closing in on itself and avoids passive global assimilation.
Rhizopus is a species of multicellular fungal system that spreads as it digests decaying matter, i.e. common bread mold. It can be used in fermentation and to make medicine.
Making do as compost loosens inert bedrock, unearthing uncertainty as the material for building scaffolding that remains alive and changing. This scaffolding is localized with an innate chain reaction of temporary and but ongoing and malleable activity.
Instructions connected to
Instructions connected to
Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna Haraway
(Duke University Press, 2016)
Notice the contingent networks both surrounding you and including you
Notice the contingent networks both surrounding you and including you
“Encountering the sheer not-us, more-than-human worlding of the coral reefs, with their requirements for ongoing living and dying of their myriad critters, is also to encounter the knowledge that at least 250 million human beings today depend directly on the ongoing integrity of these holobiomes for their own ongoing living and dying well. Diverse corals and diverse people and peoples are at stake to and with each other.” (p.56)
Affordances are relative relationships with environment. This perspective takes an ecological approach to interaction where we can see the social constructs behind functionality.
Re-evaluate your affordances with empathic imagination
Re-evaluate your affordances with empathic imagination
Kessler Park Reservoir was built to hold extra water for the industrial growth happening in the early 1900s, but was left abandoned as newer water facilities were established over the years.
“Refusing to either look away or reduce the earth’s urgency to an abstract system of causative destruction, such as a Human Species Act or undifferentiated Capitalism, Tsing argues that precarity—failure of the lying promises of Modern Progress— characterizes the lives and deaths of all terran critters in these times. She looks for the eruptions of unexpected liveliness and the contaminated and nondeterministic, unfinished, ongoing practices of living in the ruins.” (p.37)
Look for open-source/tap into what is already morphing
Look for open-source/tap into what is already morphing
“M. Beth Dempster’s Master of Environmental Studies thesis written in 1998, in which she suggested the term sympoiesis for ‘collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change.’” (p.33)
Remain permeable
Remain permeable
“The tentacular ones make attachments and detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms; they are both open and knotted in some ways and not others.” (p.31)
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