Transcript from my new video poem performed at Baltic's Sowing Seeds study group on Thurs 10 Dec. Invited by Verity Birt to lead a session, as was Clémentine Bedos
Oftentimes, living in a city as densely populated and highly urbanised as London, it’s impossible to feel in ownership of my body. Everywhere at every time of the day, I’m on private land that I have no stake in. In my rented flat, at one of my jobs or in my studio, buying groceries or lunch, travelling through zones, meeting with friends in a park. My body is a caveat shuffling from property to property, some overtly not mine and others more covertly so.
I’ve found that recently whenever I’m overwhelmed with claustrophobia or mood-spiralling I take to endlessly cooking or fermenting or scavenging or sewing or cording as a body activation tactic. These methodologies require manual dexterity but allow for a sort of free association game for my eyes and brain. There are no exactitudes no wrong answers and no failures, only moments. While clearly a successful distraction, I began to notice how these processes poked at and frayed my understanding of my own artistic practice, revealing messy layers of thought and action encapsulated in stress balls. Practice with a C is now practise with an S.
When I briefly lived by the coast, I became time rich and money poor, so took to roaming the coastline on foot for hours obsessively identifying wildflowers. Firstly, I moved slowly as a separationist endeavour, discovering and observing these beautiful and strange beings that belong to a different world. Then I moved with haste as a capitalist, researching and extracting their names, etymology and uses for my studio or kitchen. The perfect stride only came when I saw myself among them, in and with and part of. We share air, water and food, we communicate by moving our bodies when we are happy or in shock.
The slow apocalypse is happening, so slight and grey most don’t notice. The political narrative in which climate crisis is imminent but preventable suspends reality in the forever future. But this is now. I have come to realise that my art practice and prepping have a lot in common. I am a friendly anarcho-survivalist, slipping between the institution and the nothing, staying alive with my carrier bag of tools, skills and recipes, waving at people through windows.
Edges are where things happen and cities are mostly edges. Overlapping, shifting boundaries, the action is always in on under beside beyond the place you might be thinking of. In a municipal park, mowing dictates the intersection between in and out of bounds. Since the perimeters of usage are clearly defined by different lengths of the grass, we are faced with an invisible nut omnipotent authority. When we are locked out of the parks we contribute taxes towards maintaining, we should consider whether it’s for our protection or the grass’.
I think a lot about the nature / culture dichotomy drilled into the very foundations of our capitalist realism. The flattening of wild nature replaces biodiversity with universities. I wonder why as humans are we educated from an early age to see ourselves separate from the land? in what ways are we primed to project our ideals of beauty onto the passive landscape? how does this indoctrination practically play out in our shared greenspaces?
In part my theory is a long purposeful degradation of education which has made us vulnerable to a toxic dependency on supermarkets. Here there is an unlimited offering of produce, all cartoonish, shiny, neatly stacked and mostly wrapped in plastic. The commodification of fruit and vegetables has stripped them of their unique being-ness and difference, and replaced them with tokens of labour oppression and carbon-intensive globalism. I consciously boycotted supermarkets almost a decade ago - not always convenient or affordable, and at times impossible - but I have reconnected with food in a totally new way. Investing my money in businesses that are transparent or local or regenerative prevents me from total meltdown.
Spending time finding wild food in the city is a tonic to loneliness and can diversify diet. When you begin to move slower and look harder, everything is suddenly vivacious and herbaceous. The reduction of council spending in certain boroughs due to central austerity benefits our greenspaces immeasurably. More undisturbed growth means greater chances for pioneer plants to settle, attracting pollinators, insects and mammals. To find edible species is overcoming our plant blindness and aversion to dirt. We must learn to be non-judgemental observers
My relationship with the other-than-human is interdependent and intrinsic. I’m not an economist but I could tell you of fifteen plants that taste better than spinach that grow straight out of the ground. I’m not a dietician so i wont lecture you on the advantages of eating food that hasn’t been flown in from another country in a refrigerated box. I’m not a herbalist however you should at least know all medicine came from wild plants.
Strenghtening our allyship with the undergrowth is one way to consider how to co-exist. In order to learn anything about ourselves, we must realise we are kin with the ivy, worker ants and mycorhyzal network. We are biologically and culturally entertwined.
In pre Christian middle ages, followers of Paganism illustrated their bodily entanglement with nature through personification of the seasons. The Jack in the green for example is the spring equinox character, an embodiment of fertility and the symbol of prosperous regeneration and procreation. Whole communities would gather wearing traditional costumes made entirely from new growth harvested from common land, to sing and dance for days on end. We are experiencing a revival of these celebrations, which both respect the secular origins and respond to contemporary issues.
If you have ever been emotionally stressed by whether a discarded drinks bottle will end up in a big pile or be incinerated or sent around the world on a boat or find itself in an animal’s stomach, you might be an eco-worrier. This was the default mode of my existence during the formative years of my environmental illness. It was the sort of depression that seeing a littered park would send me in a tailspin, it kept me rooted in bed for days, I fluctuated between hopelessness and numbness, outbursts of crying and anxiety. I tried to ask myself why would people disrespect our shared spaces, why didnt they care, and what could I do about it. I was internalising the catastrophe, taking personal responsibility for capitalism and how it entrenched civilians in destructive behaviours.
I realise now how passive that version of me was, waiting for people to find a reason to change, waiting for a government to act in our interests. Incessantly waiting. I now have accepted the only way to stay alive is to embrace the chaos, practise gratitude and be authentic to myself. Those insecurities and afflictions now charge my work with a new purpose. To appreciate and highlight the abundance of material resources that are overlooked and underused. To ascribe alternative value systems that decouple us from capital and build community.
The micro becomes the macro, zooming out of cells and fractals to reveal cultural patterns, epochs and landscapes. The entirety of civilisation in a petri dish.
Each activity is a collaboration with something other-than-human. Heat, bacteria, thread, debris. Most things wouldn’t happen without all the players. A few happen perfectly fine without intervention. I am not a participant, I am a co-conspirator. We work together in slow ways, in a mirror or a chase or a dance. I know that I am dispensible, the point is that I should be able to dispense myself as i please.
Fermentation simply put is the creation of an environment that is hospitable for benevolent bacteria but not pathogens, who then share, digest, consume and transform the available resources into a self-perpetuating system of material transcendence. Fermentation builds community between the microorganisms that digest and secrete unique flavouroids and between the humans that traditionally practice this ancient preservation technique.