(More) grafting the commons
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Last year I wrote an article about grafting various fruits onto wild hawthorns and apples. I was keen to trial various fruits without doing any research, as this attitude can sometimes lead to the quite unexpected. However, not surprising to me now, all these grafts failed. So today, armed with a little more knowledge and an awesome grafting tool, I took a small jar of honey, some pear cuttings, a roll of grafting tape and walked into the bush.
I decided to use two cultivars of pears (Winter Nelis and Beurre Bosc) that cross pollinate with eachother. Apparently, hawthorn makes a good rootstock for any of the rose family – apples, medlars, pears, quince, etc. On a 'wild urban spaces' workshop taken by David Holmgren earlier this year we were shown a 10 year old medlar graft David had done onto wild hawthorn. It was doing really well with abundant fruit (though hard to see in this photo).
Brett Adamson and David Holmgren stand on either sides of the graft.
The grafts I did today were dipped in honey to mitigate disease before being wrapped in grafting tape. Each was then given a splint for strength and protection. I'd like to keep making rose family grafts onto hawthorn over the next two months, so hopefully I can report some significant success, even unexpected, next year.
If you have any grafting tips or anecdotes I'd love to hear them.
Read more...
Simulated poetics – beaming in from home
Saturday, July 23, 2011
I'm participating in a poetry event in NSW today from the low carbon comforts of my central Victorian home, courtesy of Skype.
Of course digital culture is fully supported by industrial technics, so I'm not pretending this participation isn't without its pollutions and abuses. And I'm only guessing that my decline to be flown/driven up to participate in person constitutes a lower footprint, in comparison to using all this technology (including a plasma screen at the event end) to beam me up.
Here's the poster that was produced for this gig, in which the Bundanon Trust designer has taken an excerpt from a statement I wrote in 2004 and laid it over a photograph taken by Heidrun Lohr.
My Fellow panel participants are Yvette Holt, Chris Mansell and James Stuart. Read more...
Two forms of death: ecological and anthropocene made
Monday, July 18, 2011
Deborah Bird Rose (2011):
There are two big contexts of death. The first is the fact that death resides in life... Death, as a corollary to life, happens to all of us complex creatures. It may happen through old age, or illness; it may happen through hunting or killing; it may happen on larger scales through events such as cyclones, earthquakes, or volcanoes. In this context, living things are bound into ecological communities of life and death, and within these communities life is always making and unmaking itself in time and place.Read more...The second context differs from the first in being a uniquely human invention: man-made mass death. This form of death arises out of a will-to-destruction that seems to be confined to humans... The will-to-destruction can most vividly be thought of as death work. It involves imagining a future emptiness, and then working systematically to accomplish that emptiness... In ordinary life, death is the necessary completion of life. Man-made death is not necessary and does not complete life. Instead it is a massive interruption, a negation of the relationships between life and death.
Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos
Sunday, July 3, 2011
I have put together a panel for a forthcoming poetry symposium to be held at Trades Hall in Melbourne. Here are the details, followed by a film trailer that features David Holmgren called Anima Mundi, due for release shortly.
The opening panel for the forthcoming national poetics symposium, “Poetry and the Contemporary” (Trades Hall July 7-9), is a panel of three poets joined by sustainability leader, David Holmgren, the co-originator of the permaculture movement.
The panel is titled:
“Poetics and Future Scenarios: poems and poets in an age of energy descent and climate chaos”, July 7, 2.30pm Meeting Room 1(downstairs), following the Welcome to Country, 2.20pm. (Entry by donation).
David Holmgren will open the panel outlining the four main scenarios he believes we face as a result of human engineered climate change and energy depletion. He will draw on his bestselling book “Future Scenarios”, and over thirty years of research that has made him one of the key ecological thinkers of our time and a national treasure.
Three poets, Sue Fitchett, Patrick Jones and Peter O’Mara will respond with critical papers, prose and poems. Each are ecological activists in their respective regions.
Read more...
We're all on 'work experience' thanks to Liam
Sunday, June 19, 2011
We have just completed a week of work experience thanks to Liam Scott, a student from the local high school. Liam undertook to hang with us and see what a typical week for Artist as Family entails, and what 'work' constitutes, according to us. One of the things we did during the week was to measure up and draw a first draft design for the proposed permanent Daylesford Community Food Garden. Here's a short vid that snapshots the adventure.
Walking Bare
Monday, June 13, 2011
A video poem written in response to a long shoeless walk, thinking further about technics and technical mediations, mediations such as shoes and the digital footage that preceded, inspired and ultimately simulated this poem.
Flesh of the forest
Saturday, June 11, 2011
A find of wood blewits (Lepista nuda) yesterday on a walk was last night cooked up with garlic and parsley as a protein bomb, and shared with friends.
More uncapitalised food from the commons.
Read more...
Even in death Monsanto follows
Monday, June 6, 2011
Today I walked through a graveyard and noticed the grass around the tombstones had been recently herbicided. It caused me to make the observation, that which is hidden is no less violent, in fact the hiding makes the act a double atrocity.
Herbicides even kill the good soil microbes where we finally lay. Is there no rest from the tireless ecocides of Monsanto and co? Can not our bodies be simply left to rejoin the dynamic microbial flux that is supposed to renew life?
Roundup ready? Rapture Ready!
Monsanto'd graves.
Critical Mass Daylesford (latest ride)
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Critical Mass hard liners brave the early winter and take over the street on sun down, last Friday in May. Local singer Anthony Petrucci, from Souls on Board, comes into view for an instant just as his voice comes into sound.
Greenwash #23 in Trouble - Goodly Spores
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
To read, click on image and then click again for better resolution.
A scientific justification of nonscientific 'slow text'
Monday, May 30, 2011
Just as I was finishing a slow text treatment of a Bernard Stiegler transcript (below), my friend Ian sent through a link to an article that states “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”
A Free-dragging manifesto - FREE
Saturday, May 28, 2011
We have just made Words and Things, and my A Free-dragging Manifesto from How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara) available for free download. More info can be found down the right hand column of this blog. Otherwise just click away.
Ten months later
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
I was in Sydney earlier this month, so I checked in on the Food Forest and did a little work there with some local residents. When I got back, a family friend, Rory, who works for ABC radio, sent me the audio file of the interview I had with Deborah Cameron on 702 in September last year. This little archive vid brings all these things together.
Public is public
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Pic. Adam Trafford
A number of us turned out to protest the sale of a community park in Daylesford last week. Read more at the Daylesford Community Food Gardener's blog Just Free Food.
Read more...
Revisiting older writing while thinking about form and ecological poetries
Wednesday, May 11, 2011
From How To Do Words With Things: A Free-dragging Manifesto (2008), this text first published as Lalgambook: the Djadjawurrung and Coca-Cola Amatil, in D!SSENT magazine, Spring 2008.
Energy, primitivism and slow text
Monday, May 9, 2011
Primitivism, as a purely intellectual thing, is indeed problematic terrain. However, once the primitive, by which I mean activity that transcends history (such as foraging), cohabits everyday practice, it ceases to be utopian and becomes instead pragmatic, or something not of wishfulness or fantasy. This is especially the case if we are to consider global energy powerdown, where primitive forms will again have currency due to a fall in affluence.
So often ecological thought rides exclusively between humanism and ecology and skips energy altogether. "The energetic is nearly always left out of the equation" (David Holmgren, 2010), which seems strange especially when the aestheticisation or mediatisation of nature – our very predicament, or crisis – is precisely linked to high energy inputs – our affluence. Three hundred years of high fossil fuel productions has necessitated that art leads the disembodiment or 'hyper-separation' (Val Plumwood, 2002) process as populations swell into cities and radicals, peasants and indigenous folk no longer have anywhere to practice unclocked forms.
William Blake, printer and poet, with a love of being naked and in the garden, is one such marker of the end of European art as a low energy, unclocked, minimal noise activity. At the time of writing The Garden of Love (1794) coal furnaces were being build and beginning to change his beloved Albion for ever. Today, the screeching, oil dripping 'blob' of Thomas De Zengotita's Mediated (2005) culture, or the all-tech 'ambient blur' that Timothy Morton describes in Ecology without Nature (2007), are both – blob and blur – necessarily immersed in cheap crude oil, and they must necessarily find primitivist forms abhorrent or at best just another choice in a smorgasboard of options. Whereas, when you consider a powering down, even as a 'long descent' (Greer, 2010), the options to pollute, to be allopoetical, or to drive aesthetics globally, necessarily reduce. This reduction is very scary if you imagine energy powerdown (post global aggregated capitalism) as a return to agricultural toil, direct animal cruelty (as opposed to the indirect global cruelty we exhibit today; passivism is an option as long as others are doing the dirty work), and authoritarian sexual repression. But not so if one considers the possibility of an eroding private property (intellectual and physical) culture and the reestablishment of a foraging commons courtesy of collapsing globalised economies wholly reliant on cheap fossil fuels.
Rather than some vague Rousseauian pigmented or pixalated image of primitivism, which is of course just groundless fantasy, we now have real, of the soil, applied ecological breakthroughs that are current practiced modes of primitivism. These can be evidenced in Masanobu Fukuoka's 'do nothing farming', Permaculture's 'food forestry', and in a growing culture of urban foraging witnessed across the blogosphere (such as here and here).
For me, at least, primitivism is not a conjuring of the old world for old world's sake, but rather an attempt to concieve of a present and future with low energy inputs; today, for reasons to do with social and ecological justice, and tomorrow, for issues of species resilience. We are at the tailend of an era of cheap oil and many thinkers haven't factored this within their intellectual framework. It's like there's an abiding belief there will always be an abundance of energy, making what we do today always possible. Conceiving energy powerdown is to concieve of redistributed (reruralised) populations, which, among many other things, will attend to the homogenisation of global ascent capitalism – the so-called global village. Any socialism – from Marxism to Fascism – persevering with industrialisation is thinking fairly short-term, unless of course there is a conjuring of fantasy world resources on some distant planet.
I'm not advocating here a pure primitivism or necessarily a whole primitivism. It's way too simplistic to think along these lines, or perhaps just too early. However, in attending to technofetishisation and the spectacle and 'false cycles' (Guy Debord) of clock-time, I am advocating a rethinking of the primitive per-se at a time of peaking fossils, phosphates, fish, water and just about every other essential element that drives industrial culture on and on.
As a kind of 'doing-saying' (Joan Retallack) evidence of this rethinking, I repost my video-poem-recipe, A Place of Simple Feeding, after re-recording the spoken words today and adding a brief visual clip of the poem as a slow text 'mesostic' (John Cage) for the page. Or, at least a seconds worth of detail of it. The aesthetics aren't pure, instead they're mutable responses to the less than bodily in art today. The slow text (super and subscripted vowels) shows the physical relationship between letters, words, chance, foraging and berries. A move away from Cartesian letters lining up in monological rows (like this text), or ambient representations requiring large energy inputs – styrofoam art, international careerism et al.
Decapitalised art, decapitalised food.
Read more...
Natural Bitterness
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Natural Bitterness is now available online as a slow text mesostic:
Read the full work here.
Revisited, revised, reposted...
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Is the metabolic potential for a biophysical poetry – formed by the body (in an era of unfolding climate chaos and fossil energy descent) – an essential transition from catabolic literatures, which feed upon each other and perpetuate the systems of art that mediate our logic?
Greenwash #22 in Trouble - By Autonomous Association
Sunday, May 1, 2011
The human plates themselves are the seats of reciprocal and crossed interrelations among individuals and subgroups, their tools, their world-objects, and their knowledge, assemblages that little by little are losing their relations with place, locality, neighbourhood, proximity. Being-there is getting rarer. (Serres, 1995 p.20)
Click for bigger.
Read more...
Sketch – Making a slow text poem, with hyper (hyphae?) text inputs
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Video-sketch: Drawing, singing, yelling, thinking a slow text poem into being with hyper text inputs and world-as-everything mania, this video illustrates a fictional process of writing the first four stanzas of a new slow text mesostic, Step by Step, after the fact. The attempt with a slow text mesostic is to create silence out of industrialisation's hammering, thus utilising John Cage's mesostics as a chance-induced trigger for slow reading.
Doctoral mindmap (or, the unavoidable fact of nearly everything)
Friday, April 29, 2011
In preparation for my doctoral review...
Click for bigger.
The unavoidable fact of everything is a line from my friend Ian Robertson – graphic artist, John Cage enthusiast and designer of countless arts related books and publications, including my first two books, Words and Things and How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara). Read more...
What mushroom is that?
Thursday, April 28, 2011
I found this mushroom in a pine forest while taking Alison Pouliot's fungi workshop last weekend.
It was new to both of us, so Alison asked if I'd take a spore print and send her the results.
As the spores were white Alison emailed me back saying it may belong to the genus Tricholoma, though she wasn't entirely sure.
I took this peg today of a small colony of Inky Caps (Coprinus atramentarius) inhabiting ground under our young pomegranate. They are not only autonomous, auto-digesting and self-determined beings in our food garden, but edible too as long as we don't add alcohol to the meal as the combination creates allergy-like symptoms. Holding up the Mirror (or, the indecency/idiocy of shareholder science)
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
I photographed this ridiculous wall sculpture at the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) in Melbourne a few weeks ago. I was there for a symposium on weeds organised by the Weed Society of Victoria. Two friends of mine were giving papers on the ecological and social benefits of wild, autonomous plants, calling into question our governments' open cheque books to chemical companies who profit from a hyper-ideological ground war on weeds – which, in effect, is a war on our foraging commons.
It was an intense day with multiple views being aired and argued. It was clear change was in the air, not just because my pro-weed friends and others were invited to participate in a domain that has been a typically pro-war assault from science and government on self-organising floras, but because it is evident that this dumb-arse science isn't working. Katherine Wilson, writing in Meanjin back in 2009, holds up the mirror:
Read more...
At the time I was among those campaigning against the Howard government's courting of Monsanto – a company that US courts had found guilty of negligence, trespass, nuisance and suppression of the truth, among other crimes. For its environmental damage, including poisoning of rivers, Monsanto is one of the very few companies found guilty, under Alabama law, of 'outrage' – a conduct 'so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly tolerable in civilized society'.
With CropLife Australia we don't just have Monsanto advocacy in place to court unconvinced politicians, but Monsanto's brown brothers and sisters too – Dow, Syngenta, Dupont, Bayer, Nufarm etc. Here's a taste of their greenwash:
CropLife Australia promotes a life-cycle, or stewardship, approach to the management of crop protection products. Lifecycle stewardship starts with research and development, and includes manufacture, transport and storage, through to use, and eventual disposal of waste, including empty product containers and the management of unused and unwanted registered products. Our stewardship programs raise awareness and enhance the capability of farm chemical distributors and users to manage any risk posed by these products to people, the environment or trade brought about by incorrect transport, storage or use. The overall aim of the stewardship approach is to maximise the benefits, and minimise any risk, from using crop protection products. CropLife, its members and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Agsafe, either collectively or individually undertake a range of activities to ensure that products are developed, sold, used and disposed of appropriately.
The use of life-cycle and stewardship are clever, if you are a moron. But many of us aren't buying the profit-focussed science and there seems to be a bit of a rethink at the moment as government expenditure is requiring contraction. At the end of the weeds symposium the convener asked the room "where do we want to be in thirty years time?" I answered that we will want to hope that CropLife Australia is bankrupt and out of the picture, to which he, a DPI bureaucrat, clammed up with discomfort and mumbled something like "well, we won't go there, will we".
Oh yes siree, many of us will:
including friends Diego Bonetto and David Holmgren.
Greenwash #21 in Trouble - Michael Reynolds' Biotecture Future
Friday, April 1, 2011
Click for bigger, then click again for better focus.
Ecological pioneers: David Holmgren and Michael Reynolds at the Daylesford tip, 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)