Craftanooning
Intoxicating Play and Activating CommunityMy exposure to trash-Geish and squat culture embedded me within a material glitch from a capitila-centic world. ‘Everything is in such abundance, you just need to know where to look’ (Anonymous, 2023). The squatters kindly gave me a room in their reclaimed building and helped me to fill it with discarded materials (see figures 7-9, 27). The project made space for queer people to connect and craft outside of the drug-fuelled rave/party scene and access materials to make Geish. It was successful for its time running from [secret location], craft was the agent of intoxication rather than drugs, allowing community bonding whilst having something to stim with. Unfortunately, due to its location, some attendees could not see Craftanoon beyond the scope of a party, disrespecting the space by stealing, and breaking things that were not part of the extensive “free-game” pile, one of many reasons residents called for Craftanoon’s end. Informally, Craftanoon continued in spirit, adopted by other adjacent collectives such as General Waste, who have squatted several buildings since, and turned them into Art Houses.
I had the opportunity to reactivate Craftanoon in a public space as part of The Great Imagining Expo from 10th December 2023 to 4th January 2024. This change of location and public opening allowed for cross sub-cultural, cross age-group conversations regarding ecology. This environment was academic, and lacked queer influence in presentation, occasionally replicating neo-liberal values through its structure, lectures, and attracted audience, but Craftanoon gave a sense of play the space otherwise lacked and was especially popular with younger children. The first iteration of Craftanoon was treated disrespectfully due to its party-like appearance, the second people found alienating because of its classroom like appearance. Craftanoon had positive impact on both settings, however, neither fully nurtured the project so it could expand to its fullest, most bountiful effect. Ideally, it should be open to the public, offering free resources for freedom in creative expression, and yet subconsciously respected as something to be nurtured and cared for.
f.28 Craftanoon at Squat (2023) Mia Evans
f.29 Craftanoon at The Great Imagining (2023) Author’s own
f.29 Craftanoon at The Great Imagining (2023) Author’s own
From these projects, the power and possibility for waste-centric craft to be the attracting force for playful experimentation and inter-community conversation and collaboration became abundantly obvious. Collaborative craft has long had a place in fighting for social and ecological justice. The AIDS Memorial Quilt, for example, remains one of the largest international collaborative pieces in the world, spanning over 120 thousand square meters of handmade tributes to beloved family and friends who died during the height of the HIV/ADIS Crisis, although it is still ongoing. This initial response was at the beginning of the Queer rights movement, following the Stonewall Uprising and Matchechon Society’s assimilationist politics of the 1950, its breadth gave a sense of scale to the loss and care, humanising the gay community in the public eye in ways it had not been before (Fantini, 2024).
f.30 Virtual AIDS Memorial Quilt (n.d.) via National AIDS Memorial
f.31 American AIDS Memorial Quilt 1996 Display (1996) via AIDs Memorial Quilt
Crafting for ecological justice spawned the crochet coral reef, another international collaborative art project that involves crochet scenes of complex and inter-dependant, inter-connected creatures that collectively form reefs, biomes home to 25% of ocean biodiversity, currently undergoing genocide from global warming induced coral-bleaching (Blue Planet II, 2017) (Coral Reef Alliance, n.d.). As intra-species reliant on balanced ecosystems, global warming triggering drastic change in ocean acidity causes corals to reject their symbiotic algae partners who live in their cells, they become individuals rather than communities, turn white, and die (Fujiwara, Hisata, Kawamura, Nishitsuji, Satoh, Sekida & Shoguchi, 2021) (Maire, Van Oppen, 2023). This massacre has been brought to public attention through effective storytelling in crochet. Much of the installation was ‘a looping of love and rage’, as its material turned from plastic wastage, to intricate depictions of the life its residue was aiding in killing (Haraway, 2016, p.79). Plastic waste was recontextualised, reclaimed through crafting love from an agent of destruction, acting spokesperson for coral biomes.
f.32 Crochet Coral Reef (2022) by Margaret and Christine Wertheim via Crochet Coral Reef
Craft has the power to entangle us with the trouble. It activates us through play, meditation, and collaboration, tying us empathetically together with unexpected kin. Divine Craft embodies waste idealism, curious process, storytelling, and collaboration. It listens. It receives and tells stories, it loops individual stitches together to forge complex and ever-expanding, ever-fractal mesh that is becoming with(in) a damaged planet.