Petrichor and After Hardeman’s ‘Petrichor’

One artist might plumb the depths of another artist’s work. Surface necessarily implies depth and Hardeman’s Petrichor documents grief as a play between surface and depth in the detritus of living. Budde’s poem After Hardeman’s ‘Petrichor’ follows her there with tender hands of language and a sharing of grief in all its levels

STRATA: A Performance-Based Film Project on Deep Time in the Body and the Geologic

This article introduces a poem excerpted from the text of STRATA, VestAndPage’s fifth performance-based film project, which deals with the notion of deep time, the formation of layers in human history, memory, and the geological. The lyrics exemplify how VestAndPage resume through poetic words their thought process, the information gathered during their artistic research that led to the making of the film, and the felt emotions and perceived sensations while performing inside the Swabian Jura caves system, the location in which they chose to produce the film. The authors highlight topics that serve as the framework for their co-creative processes, such as transcendental imagination and queer ecology, in discussing their experience of making the film

The Future as an Underwater World: A Dream Comic

The climate crisis is high in all levels of our sub/un/consciousness. As flash flooding and sea level rising around the world occupy the headlines while a pandemic is still raging, a nocturnal dream in January 2021 inspired this comic. In ink pen and watercolour, the comic depicts a dream of a future where humans have survived and cities are built underwater, where all the human world is submerged. Offering dreaming as method, Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million (2011) explains how dreaming and theory are not exclusive of each other. Like Million (2011), dreamings for me have ‘led to further searches for meaning’. What are the teachings of our dreams? [...

They Say We Can't Breathe Underwater

This photo essay takes the reader through the images and ideas Wood explores in her solo exhibit, They Say We Can’t Breathe Underwater, installed at A Space Gallery in Toronto in September 2022. It incorporates photos of the artwork and installation, along with a discussion of the concepts floating through the exhibit. The images and this essay are found at the intersections of Abolition geographies, Black Radical Tradition, Black feminist, Black Atlantic, Aquatic theories

Nun Cho Ga (Big Animal Baby)

In 2022, a woolly mammoth baby was discovered in Yukon Territory, on Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in land, by a young placer miner. Named Nun cho ga, which means “big animal baby” in the Hän language spoken by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, the baby is one of the best-preserved woolly mammoths ever discovered. She is around the same size as the Lyuba, who was discovered in Siberia in 2007

Stories from the Botanical Underground: Medicinal Plants as More-than-Human Knowledge Keepers

Plants are intelligent keepers and communicators of more-than-human knowledge. Their stories relate the agency of place and plants, showing us how to live where we are, what it means to contribute to the continuance of life, and how to collaborate with nonhuman others in resilient place-making. Botanical storytelling reaffirms people-plant relations, reimagines human relationships with the land, and intervenes in prevailing social and environmental narratives. Stories from the Botanical Underground, presented at the 2023 American Association of Geographers conference, relates the ecological-social lives of betony (Pedicularis), globemallow (Sphaeralcea), and vervain (Verbena) and the knowledge they hold for navigating socio-environmental challenges. This collection of stories intends to de-center human impositions of colonial power upon botanical landscapes and re-center the teachings of place and plants on a damaged planet. In this research, medicinal plants themselves are recognized as primary contributors of knowledge. [...

In Depths

Stretching hydrophone recordings of diverse marine life with the whirring noises of radars and excavation equipment, In Depths is an acoustic exploration of deep sea entanglement, through which subterranean soundscapes echo and resound from the abyssopelagic to the ocean surface. Drawing upon Stacy Alaimo’s notion of abyssal temporalities, In Depths uses time-stretching production techniques to contemplate subaquatic assemblages, consider the cumulative costs of deep sea mining, and value temporalities of slowness in resistance to the accelerating rhythms of resource extraction. ===== The audio file can be accessed at https://on.soundcloud.com/DdX3rHSoBTp9ccv8