A number of us have been working pretty hard to organise a trip to Daylesford by Michael Reynolds. He came and gave a workshop on Thursday and a knockout public talk in the town hall that night. Between the workshop and the talk I raced home and put together this footage of the prepwork we volunteers carried out before his arrival and of the workshop itself so as the 300 peeps that came to the town hall in the evening could get a sense of what we had started. One of the local councillors was at the talk and there is word that he is going to pass a motion that this building remain so it can be completed and serve as a demonstration site for experimental building using waste.
Turning the compost is an obvious enough metaphor; artists do it all the time, cycling materials and concepts – peddling forward, foraging back. So I thought after a year and a half of generated content within this column it was time to do some chronological composting and see what sort of conceptual soil has been built as we move deeper into an era of ecological crises. Read on by clicking on image.
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A party that doesn't believe in climate change is a party that champions pollution.
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We're back from our waste gleaning residence in Newcastle, NSW. Our final post on the Artist as Family blog includes a short creative doco called 17 Days that I made using my track "Michel Duguy Compost Tea" where I sing Deguy's poem "O great apposition of the world" rockoperaesque with beats. You can see/hear here –
While it’s true that Western culture is the sum of its many, varied parts, the dominant paradigm can be packed into two obsessions – privatising resources (natural, human and creative) and killing off wild nature in case it takes us over. René Descartes (1596-1650) is responsible for articulating this paradigm; our refusal to live at peace with non-human nature continues the Judeo-Christian resolve of separateness and avoidance. ‘I think therefore I am’ is the Cartesian maxim (and early secular transition from God as centre to man as centre) that, for many, justifies our ecological abandonment and gives philosophical weight to the stupid idea of our superiority over all other things.Read on here.
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The first online site I created was justfreewater, a site dedicated to platforming the woes of bottled water. In the past three years since I began that site I have enjoyed watching greater public awareness and a broader debate around bottled water. During this time I have spent many hours putting together a comprehensive picture of our local situation while concurrently finding out more about the global pattern of privatising this fundamental public resource. My film Lalgambook (Mt Franklin) attempts to communicate, via poetical terrorism rather than journalistic rationalism, the link between the occupation of Aboriginal land and genocide of Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century and the occupation of public water and ecocidal practices of the bottled water industry today in the same region, which I call home.
Waste. No other single word defines our civilisation better. Ninety years of crude oil extraction, refinement and burning has turned the planet and its atmosphere into a monumental toxicological dump. But the rapid exploitation of oil deposits is only one corollary of our anti-ecological state, our mindset for waste has been gradually developing over 6,000 years.
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