Manifesto
Craftanoon [kraaf-tuh-noon] (noun/verb) or Craftanooning [kraaf-tuh-noo-ning] (verb) is my silly little invented term for the practice of scavenging, meditating, and crafting with the abundance of consumerist residue stigmatised as ‘rubbish’.
I consider this practice to be a glitch; vitally disruptive, inherently anti-capitalist, and an effective entry point to consolidating the power of isolated agents towards the power of communal resistance. As we look deeper into the eyes of ecological disaster, learning the extents of our Anthropogenic imposition, I plead you to ask questions of the material around you and listen to their answers. I plead you perceive yourself as leaking, and speak to your residue as if it was your skin. I plead for the dissipation of object-human, life-death binaries, gaining empathy for all critters and chemicals alike, understanding we drip from the same goop. I plead for the extension of souls to irrational places: flesh, soil, concrete, oil, air, fibre, rock. And I plead for the embrace of a powerful, childish sentimentality when experiencing the overwhelming sensations of this shift.
Scavenging is the act of taking from abundant human detritus and removing its purposefully imposed ‘waste’ label. By scavenging we perceive ‘waste’ instead as a material rich with value, kindly gifted to us from our surroundings. Scavenging recontextualises resource/waste binaries and allows us to perceive objects’ life stories, respecting them as theirs, fluid, moving, evolving, important, and not dictated by linguistic definition.
By meditating with, analysing, questioning, and appreciating material, Craftanooning gives space to discover material history with curiosity. We ask what structures brought this detritus into human hands, and where it was going to go if not picked up. We ask how many hands the material has passed through to arrive here, how many forms the material had flowed through, and at what point humanity decided it was useless. By meditating, the material can teach us its history, its composition, its structure, its story. It guides our craft, as we guide it through our fingers, in a mutual, conversational practice that does not make hierarchy between material and practitioner.
Crafting directly bonds our time, imagination, and skin flakes into material. The material, an extension of our body as we become one another. By crafting we open a door to spiritual recontextualization of the body; questioning where it ‘boundaries’ begin and end. We consider how our selfhood is recorded within, stored by, is the objects in our life. Craft as an unending, transforming, ignorant, non-judgemental practice (unlike art), allows us to approach our leaking with curiosity. By spending time with our detritus, engaging in shared experiences, we can find gratitude for the happenstantial intertwining of an object’s life with our own, and appreciate this relationship as a gift from our surroundings. Further, this meeting point allows us to acknowledge our own affect in our environment, acknowledge our agency and muscular power through thought and body that has the capability to change our surroundings.
Gas, flesh, dirt, metal, plastic, fruit, language, electron, synapse, advertisement, oil, root, shoes, planet.
Rubbish is a gift, powerfully uncommodified, endlessly abundant, and toxic when ignored. Further, it is us. We sweat it, leak it all over the place with ignorance supported by colonial waste practices that export this part of ourselves we do not want to look at to countries we have purposefully under-developed and racially prosecuted. Our rubbish is our responsibility. Scavenging, Meditating and Crafting are response – abilities accessible to everyone dexterous. We must reclaim the means of disposal. We must recontextualise what we think of as ‘objects’ as their entire extraction/manufacture/production/evolution/decomposition, before and after they have reached our fingers. We must critically question their life stories and listen to their answers without justifications embedded in white/human superiority.
Destigmatize Dirt! Eat Garbage! Consume From Abundance – its Free!
I consider this practice to be a glitch; vitally disruptive, inherently anti-capitalist, and an effective entry point to consolidating the power of isolated agents towards the power of communal resistance. As we look deeper into the eyes of ecological disaster, learning the extents of our Anthropogenic imposition, I plead you to ask questions of the material around you and listen to their answers. I plead you perceive yourself as leaking, and speak to your residue as if it was your skin. I plead for the dissipation of object-human, life-death binaries, gaining empathy for all critters and chemicals alike, understanding we drip from the same goop. I plead for the extension of souls to irrational places: flesh, soil, concrete, oil, air, fibre, rock. And I plead for the embrace of a powerful, childish sentimentality when experiencing the overwhelming sensations of this shift.
Scavenging is the act of taking from abundant human detritus and removing its purposefully imposed ‘waste’ label. By scavenging we perceive ‘waste’ instead as a material rich with value, kindly gifted to us from our surroundings. Scavenging recontextualises resource/waste binaries and allows us to perceive objects’ life stories, respecting them as theirs, fluid, moving, evolving, important, and not dictated by linguistic definition.
By meditating with, analysing, questioning, and appreciating material, Craftanooning gives space to discover material history with curiosity. We ask what structures brought this detritus into human hands, and where it was going to go if not picked up. We ask how many hands the material has passed through to arrive here, how many forms the material had flowed through, and at what point humanity decided it was useless. By meditating, the material can teach us its history, its composition, its structure, its story. It guides our craft, as we guide it through our fingers, in a mutual, conversational practice that does not make hierarchy between material and practitioner.
Crafting directly bonds our time, imagination, and skin flakes into material. The material, an extension of our body as we become one another. By crafting we open a door to spiritual recontextualization of the body; questioning where it ‘boundaries’ begin and end. We consider how our selfhood is recorded within, stored by, is the objects in our life. Craft as an unending, transforming, ignorant, non-judgemental practice (unlike art), allows us to approach our leaking with curiosity. By spending time with our detritus, engaging in shared experiences, we can find gratitude for the happenstantial intertwining of an object’s life with our own, and appreciate this relationship as a gift from our surroundings. Further, this meeting point allows us to acknowledge our own affect in our environment, acknowledge our agency and muscular power through thought and body that has the capability to change our surroundings.
Gas, flesh, dirt, metal, plastic, fruit, language, electron, synapse, advertisement, oil, root, shoes, planet.
Rubbish is a gift, powerfully uncommodified, endlessly abundant, and toxic when ignored. Further, it is us. We sweat it, leak it all over the place with ignorance supported by colonial waste practices that export this part of ourselves we do not want to look at to countries we have purposefully under-developed and racially prosecuted. Our rubbish is our responsibility. Scavenging, Meditating and Crafting are response – abilities accessible to everyone dexterous. We must reclaim the means of disposal. We must recontextualise what we think of as ‘objects’ as their entire extraction/manufacture/production/evolution/decomposition, before and after they have reached our fingers. We must critically question their life stories and listen to their answers without justifications embedded in white/human superiority.
Destigmatize Dirt! Eat Garbage! Consume From Abundance – its Free!
Non-Commodity
& Malleability
Circulating waste as much as possible before it enters landfill has obvious benefits environmentally – less waste, less extraction, less industry, less violence. But benefits of scavenger-crafting from garbage run far deeper. The use life of commodities is linear; extraction -> manufacture -> selling -> owning -> disposing -> decomposing. For their worth to peak, they rely on us perceive them as ‘objects’ exclusively in the centre of this use life [selling -> owning], with little to no thought of what occurs outside of it. Disposal is necessary for commodities, because commodities do not aim to sell a ‘thing’, but rather the feeling of fleeting gratification that ‘thing’ supposedly provides. As the assumed satisfaction is unattainable from what has been purchased, more must be purchased (Zizek, 1989). To maintain this pattern of consumption without falling into ‘hoarding’ taboos (the concept of which falls apart once one considers themselves to be connected to parts of the planet outside their immediate vision (Morton, 2013)), what didn’t give gratification must be thrown away. In this sense, rubbish is a sort of opposite to ‘commodity’, though materially they are the same thing. ‘Dirt’ recontextualises the object within the sanitised consumer mindset who frames worth as contingent on monetary cost, it becomes useless, unsellable, worthless (Soucie, 2023).
Rubbish is not uncommodifiable, as we can acknowledge through practices such as upcycling. Remaining in this uncommodified framework, however, and refusing to sell our scavenging’s back to the public, gives us power to crack, glitch from Capitalist frameworks.
A practice as simple as scavenging, meditating, and crafting is fundamentally free, widely accessible, and malleable to a variety of settings. Craftanooning can be practiced alone, with friends, in communal collaborative projects, for closed community events, events open to the public, organised, disorganised, spontaneous, intimate, anonymous, etc. It is malleable, adaptable, evolving to fill whatever form it needs to!
Rubbish is public, and thus so is the idea of Craftanoon, and so I urge you to adopt this in your life in any small way, just personally, or getting together with friends to play around with materials over a picnic, or getting involved with a community centre running your own public Craftanoon. I urge that this idea is and must remain communal, please take it, reform it, adapt it, it’s yours, it’s ours!
The selling of Craftanoon (i.e. ticketed events or paid entry) fundamentally undermines the ethos and power in an uncommodified practice, and as much as I urge you so adopt it, I urge you not to sell it back to the public. Allow it to be a magical bug in Capitalist infrastructure who invites us into the world of Free: communal ownership, public art, gift appreciation, material meditation, and connection through locality.
Hosting open access Craftanoon involves preparation of scavenging for materials, finding space, gathering materials & equipment, and inviting/publicising the event.
Public open access Craftanoon provides a unique and necessary 3rd space that is not work/school/university and not home. Unlike most monetised 3rd spaces (cafes, raves, bars, etc.) you do not need to be a consumer to be there. Simultaneously, unlike most free 3rd spaces (libraries, parks, community centres) there is a free, unending abundance of activity and material for the community to access. Thus, Craftanoon is enriched with appreciation and gratitude for rubbish, whilst also creating a free 3rd space where people can meet, converse, play, create, and connect. The people and garbage are fundamentally bonded by a powerful locality, Craftanoon simply puts this on display, tying community to their literal environment.
We are currently in an age of massive digital communication but lived segregation. 1950’s Americanised suburbia, white picket fences, isolated family-centric living arrangements still dominate the ideal image of a ‘home’, although the segregation of suburbia and subsequent isolated individualism spawns paranoia, depression, anxiety, and fear of others (Curtis, 2021)(. Digital connection does not disassemble, but reinforces this segregation, each individual confined to the borders of their @ (software) and phone (hardware). Digital interaction is interaction between individuals, not inter-action within community. Digital modes of connection are not the solution to, but a supporter of infrastructure that segregates, constructs ‘individuals’, and only allows community bonding (and collective power) to form through controlled institutions of work, or sights of consumerism. What we desperately need is infrastructure and accessible events that enrich locality. Local, inter-personal, inter-community, inter-generational bonding. Social media here is not an enemy, but simply a false solution to chronic isolation. We can reclaim platforms for their inverse intention, using their massive reach to peruse tangible, material, face-to-face relationships (Doctorow, 2023).
Chronically overstimulated by our mixed online/away-from-keyboard reality, we are restless, socially anxious, endlessly searching for background noise or something to do with our hands. In striving to build community, Craftanoon acknowledges this and delivers its methodology as solution. Crafting mindlessly or with intention allows people to become intoxicated, loose their inhibition in socialising. It provides casual, inoffensive talking points that allow people to comfortably begin conversation, return to upon feeling overwhelmed or awkward. Craft essentially cradles those engaging in it, delivering a soft, comfortable, safe, non-judgemental space.
Meditation & Exploration
Meditating with found materials creates space for exploration and critique of both human and more-than-human systems. It also allows us to acknowledge and critique chains of production and disposal, feel the sweat of workers embedded in our clothing, the fracked soil that held this polyester’s crude oil, the ecosystems that were cleared to grow this plantation of cotton, the legacy of slavery embedded in those fields, whose ideology continues to manifest upon this poly-cotton t-shirt being shipped to Ghana after it doesn’t sell at the charity shop I donated it to (Johnson, 2023). Meditation creates space for vital critique. It allows us to perceive, and decide whether we want to support these systems through our consumer practices, and continue to worship the false idols that are commodities (Akim & AK, 2024).
On the contrary, this meditation practice also has profound grounding qualities, aiding construction of spiritual ties between the human and material as unified parts of the natural world (Schlumberger, 2024). We are living on a damaged planet. Human guilt, responsibility, and distress for ultimately human centric ideas of annihilation, grows masks of nihilism and acceptance who cover our reluctance to change behaviour and ideology. We must grow past life/death binaries that centre the human experience of life as the only one that is true. We must begin to grow child-like empathy for non-human material, listening to stories of so called ‘objects’, and the plethora of critters which compose and surround us. Rocks move. Plants think (Bridle, 2022).
Mediating with material involves paying attention to that which has been naturalised to invisibility, such as the structures of where something came from, why we are not taught the process of how something was made. With an endless curiosity, we meditate to explore the entire life of a thing, instead of just its within human-use-life intervals. Should we perceive plastic as composed of dinosaur flesh, might we feel less inclined to throw it away? Should we feel less inclined to burn fossil fuels if we understood their composition as akin to our bodies, carbon creature in a new form. Should we subscribe these materials with souls, we might see them as precious beyond their monetary value. We are made from the same things that surround us; we’ve just followed a different chain of chemical reactions. We will become dirt, become bed for fungus farming algae and algae farming fungus, entangled with roots and mycelium (Sheldrake, 2020). Our material unravelling did not begin and will not stop with human consciousness. We will return to rock. Will we be mined and burnt by hyperintelligent cuttlefish, become the sky, etc.
Material meditation allows for a more-than-human spirituality, allows space to grow appreciation and wonder for the more than human world, acknowledge our ignorance, and the fundamental preciousness of all material.
Speculation & Play
Meditative questioning and critique are complimented by craft’s encouragement of play, speculation, and imagination. Working with detritus only, without instruction, allows space for non-gamified ludic play. Ludic play involves imposing imagined, speculative worlds onto material. Most games revolve around epistemic play, which involves problem solving, gaining understanding of how a system works, often leading to an end point or reward. As our mixed reality involves more and more digital, gamified, reward based, epistemic play, space for ludic play, imaginative speculation, and creative projection are lacking for both children and adults.
Though gamification is often seen as beneficial for attracting and maintaining the interest of participants, it supports cultures of task-orientation and mechanised time. Naturalisation of a global mechanised time through hourly clocks shifted our perception from unique felt time to organised task-time. In the former, a task might conduct the length of time spent on it, however in the latter, time dictates the task. The issue with mechanised time is that dividing it into sections has no end, there will always be smaller and smaller divisions in which to fill more tasks (Han, 2010)(Posthumanism and Technology, 2021). Days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc. Han believes this is an underlying factor to the sense of widespread burnout. That the more embedded mechanised time is with our body, and way of life, the worse this burnout becomes. Gamification provides reward for this task orientation. Though, this gratification is disingenuous, reliant on a sense of superiority in a constructed hierarchy between those who can and cannot complete the task.
Ludic play cannot be gamified in reward-oriented sense because there is no clear or consistent goal. This also means there is no hierarchy of success nor genuine grounds for comparison between one person’s play and another’s. In crafting, this free form play is as vital an entry point as the maintenance of traditional artisanship, and analysis/deconstruction in how things are made. Learning technique and free creativity are also not mutually exclusive forms of crafting but can intertwine to explore unique techniques of constructing and deconstructing.
Encouraging speculation or imagining is a vital skill in growing from ‘Anthropos’ ideology. We must learn to think outside of Western human ethos of categorisation, segregation, organisation, and control, as supported and maintained by Capitalism. We must imagine ourselves as other critters, imagine how we can aid their experience of a non-human world that is so often manipulated, poisoned, beaten, and demolished by industry.
Material Imperfection
Craftanoon’s non-hierarchical, anti-perfectionist, playful methodology is enabled by the medium the space is constructed from. Garbage is fundamentally non-judgmental. Disregarded, stigmatized, alienated, and abandoned by polite society, inviting it into our space makes that space classless and free. Furthermore, the lack of purchase of both material and entry into the space allows for freedom from failure. There is no loss by doing something ‘incorrectly’, or not achieving the intended goal. There is no wastage in the space because the space is waste. Everything people do not want to take home with them is free to be de and re constructed, flowing, and evolving from event to event.
Craft as a term is vital for this practice, as unlike ‘art’, ‘fashion’, ‘sewing’, ‘artisanship’ or even ‘craftsmanship’ is does not imply constraints of rules. In comparison to art, craft has been stigmatised as a lesser practice, fundamentally feminine, childish, immature. Here in its stigmatization, lies its massive power. The power to exist outside of judgement, categorisation, objectification, and hierarchy.
In resisting the urge to categorise, objectify, perfect, and gamify, as well as to align with meditation of material stories, Craftanoon encourages cyborg ethos of continual reinvention, restitching, reconstructing (Haraway, 1991). The practice, not the ‘product’, is that point engaging with the material. There is no goal to dominate or control it, but to experience with it, learn from it, and play in mutual relationships.
Collaboration & Partnership
In enacting casual or organised Craftanoon events, community collaboration is incredibly beneficial to the enrichment of the space. As discussed, material to work with is widely abundant and easily accessible, especially in metropolitan areas. Equipment to craft with, i.e. glue, tape, scissors, needles, thread, paint, pliers, hammers, etc. may also come up on the side of the road occasionally, but this is not a dependable source. In avoiding the need to buy equipment, collaboration is vital for larger Craftanoons. Some solutions are listed below:
1. Encouraging people to bring their own equipment to share or donate to the space.
2. On a slim budget, thrift for equipment.
3. Contacting a dependable collaborator who has a plethora of equipment they are happy to lend to you.
Craftanoon adjacent Generosity Store and Mobile Workshops are also available should they suit your space!
Or take this idea and run with it, making your own version of Craftanoon!
The landfills are the mines of the future!