MAKING  WITH(IN) A DAMAGED PLANET:

Scavenging, storytelling and play as vital methods for recontextualising material understandings, in hope of crafting a kinder world.





As agents on the edge of human-enforced planetary disaster, we must find ways to entangle ourselves ‘with the trouble’ of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Haraway, 2016). Avoidance, mental dissonance, acceptance, and compliance are destructive, contagious thought patterns structured to assert *humanity* and maintain depersonalisation of the more-than-human-world. I argue that craft is a model, a language, an acting that can entangle us compassionately, playfully, hopefully, erotically, and divinely with this trouble. I argue that thinking, acting ecologically does not just deal with planetary collapse, but is a spiritual practice capable of glitching us from capitalist paradigms, embedding us with care, and denouncing the supposedly intrinsic loneliness, isolation feelings, that capitalist-individualism asserts.

I begin with Butler’s analysis of *independence* as damaging, making point of defining “us” as capable, enmeshed, response-able “agents” rather than a collection of “individuals”. I recount my first experience crafting from abundance within racially charged “Aboriginal school camps”, following with discussions of cultural tourism versus genuine methods of embedding craft with spirituality, and story. I discuss language as an operating system, how English grammar is not embedded with ecological frameworks like many native languages, and how this spawns unsustainable capitalist, colonialist thought systems. Monetary economies are then scrutinised, and used as example for showing how ideologies directly effect material reality. Waste is brought into focus through insightful discussion with Katherine Soucie, followed by a deconstruction of fashion waste systems, specifically, from purchase to charity shop to landfill. Upcycling is denounced as a capitalist enterprise, and craft is asserted as a more beneficial solution. The Geish movement is analysed as example of Divine Craft, aided by ethnographic research and interview with Geish Manifesto author, Princess Pathojen. Community activation through craft is discussed. Experimental local research project, Craftanoon,is analysed as well as inter-continental craft projects. Finally, Divine Craft is defined as intersection between storytelling, scavenging, meditating, making, listening, and is pitched as an essential mode of thought, a powerful way of becoming with(in) a damaged planet. 

Acknowledgements


This dissertation would not be possible without the help of a plethora of my comrades.

I extend my thanks to interviewees, Bradley Dare, Katherine Soucie and Princess Pathojen for inviting me into their worlds and providing me with their unique insight. 

To my mother, Sharon Mascall, who crafted with me before I remember remembering, and my father, Paul Dare, who fed my curiosity, made me look outside of my body to a universe beyond. And to them as my parents, for their constant and undying support in whatever field I pursue, thank you.

My secondary research would not be possible without the kindness of Diego Rodrigues, who listened to me ramble for hours, and gave me more books to read than I could carry. Thank you. 

To my dear friends, Elio Fantini and Scarlett Box, who’ve provided me space to discuss my ideas, and kindly spent time providing their insight into my work. Thank you.

To my partner Nomi Adler, for their undying support, constant encouragement, book recommendations and meticulous proof reading. Thank you.

And finally, to my partner Nasir-Allah Simmons, for always challenging me, questioning me, extending, and enriching my ideas through hundreds of conversations, and rigorously critiquing my work. Thank you.



Texts most influential, guiding and resourceful to this dissertation include: Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider, Donna J. Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble, James Bridle’s Ways of Being, James Lovelock’s Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Judith Butler’s The Force of Non-Violence, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweet Grass andThe Democracy of Species, and Timothy Morton’s Hyperobjects. Outside of academia, within the field of powerful, accessible and inspiring storytelling I find Alexis Write’s Praiseworthy, Cristóbal León and Joaquin Cociña’s The Wolf House, Haruki Murakami’s Pom Poko, James Reed’s My Octopus Teacher, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterflyand Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, and Margaret Atwood’s Metempsychosis.

Methodology
Discussion begins regarding our positionality as agents in mutual affected/affecting systems within a damaged planet. Here, poetic language is inseparable from academic analysis, as fields of philosophy/ecology, and should not be undermined. My distressed reaction to impending planetary disaster is as relevant to the following research as any interview, museum trip, or textual analysis. Distress serves no reason flattened, if not used to strive towards change, and activate my audience through poetry. We are on the brink of disaster, and fixation on enriching texts with hyper-intellectualised, hyper-specific language does little but segregate readers, and forge hierarchies between those whose English literacy gifts them understanding and those whose doesn’t. I do not subscribe to western, English, *human* definitions of intelligence, nor their fetishisation of the academic format, I believe in poetry. Poetry helps us ‘stay with the trouble’, it does not reduce emotional gravity, embedded empathy, nor the real horror felt from information regarding the *Anthropocene* (Haraway, 2016). ‘Poetry is not a luxury,’ but a necessity to expanding understanding, feeling that understanding, and activating unconcerned audiences (Lorde, 1983).

My chosen language reflects this importance of poetry within ecology, often referencing Earth as Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’, as not to forget spirit, nor our place within a divine superorganism (Lovelock, 1979). English does not provide absolute clarity for this discussion; I often use words whose definitions are contested by the text, i.e. *species*, as our language has not reached common terminology for an evolutionary web rather than evolutionary tree (Bridle, 2022, pp.107-111). These act as place holders for a word to come – they are the closest, simplest term with the language we currently have, but their definitions are fabulated and must be perceived through lens of destructive, reductionist scientific practice, or enforced binaries and boarders (Bridle, 2022, p. 52). To highlight these discrepancies, words as such are outlines with *asterixis*.

Poetic format also gives direct attention to my personal biases, of which I do not try to flatten, nor pretend to be absent. I am in this body, I am a collage of everyone I have ever met, a point of agency my directly adjacent tendrils of an interconnected cultural mesh, I can never speak for the mesh as a whole. 

I recognise my immense privilege in whiteness and class, and subsequent biases from socialisation as capitalist, gendered, English speaking, individualist, who is only recently glitching from internalised capitalist systems towards queerness, ‘compostist’ (Haraway, 2016), and modern scavenger cultures. This dissertation tackles the question of how we can shift power centres from capitalist, colonialist thinking, and thus aims to speak to people embedded in capitalist, colonialist, white-centric and patriarchal structures. To those raised in gift economies, who have deep connection to country, my argument is incredibly rudimentary. 

My positionality removes me from an embedded understanding in parts of my research due to language barriers and lacking exposure, specifically, in my experiences and research within various indigenous cultures. An inability to conduct experiential research reduces research to interviews with people who have, making information further fabulated; less reliable due to unknown biases of whom I am talking to.

Experiential research has been applied where it can: acting within the Geish movement, activating community craft projects, personal scavenging/crafting, and excursions to museums, exhibits and events. Though limited by personal bias, experiential autoethnographic and material culturalist research provides unique and fuller recounts and analysis (Chang, 2008), to broaden scope, this is supported by selected interviews with creatives and some surveys of participants of events. 

Secondary research attempts to include variety in form (i.e. books, films, artworks, albums, podcasts, etc) and diversity in authorship with a trend towards feminist/ecologists, however, as the academic institution supports whiteness, my research tends towards older, white-centric academics, with much further variety in authorship found in texts that exist outside academic convention, such as narratives, films and art. Regardless of my positionality, limitation in language, internet algorithm, the scope of texts can be expanded upon, and I recognise this as research limitation. 

A Damaged Planet

 Agents of the Edge of Disaster


Our planet is damaged (Morton, 2013). The ‘Capitalocene’ has shredded our wild places for farmland, urban sprawl, landfills (Haraway, 2016)(David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, 2020) (Kovacs, 2023). This planet is overpopulated by *human* ideas, the most destructive being that *humanity* cannot coexist with non-humanity. The binary opposition between *man* and *nature* shows this (Bridle, 2022, p.17) (Haraway, 1991). Western creation stories depict *humanity* as ‘passing through an alien world on a rough road to [our] real home in heaven’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p.7). It matters what ideas we use to think with (Haraway, 2016). A hopeful divinity that is not scared of death, nor uses this fear to control its population, sees outside of life/death binaries, sees material entanglement, inherent embedding with(in) Gaia, and our decomposition as becoming-her. This latter thought pattern has been prevalent within *human* communities indigenous globally, all of which were subject to genocide in the name of property law, ownership, man/land, white/non-white distinctions as made by colonising forces throughout Europe. The tailoring (through bloodshed, human and non) of a world to a thought pattern has seen Gaia choke, sweat profusely, tremble with rage, swing her seasons out of balance until we come to the tipping point. On that cliff is where we stand, with an English language and a capitalist culture, neither of which are equipped to tell stories that might aid us in healing. 

        ‘The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.’ – Audre Lorde, 1984, Sister Outsider, p.112

*Independence* is one of the most damaging of these stories (Butler, 2021, p.40-41). It is a ‘phantasy’ (Butler, 2021, p.36) thought too often, although our material world is deeply, erotically entangled, ‘to pick up an object up, is to pick up everything that is attached to it,’ (Muir, 1869). This school of thought is defined as “ecology” within academia, though its fundamental value has been understood in depths unimaginable to western minds by native communities for millennia, manifested through language, spirituality, and practice. Life/death, me/you, dream/dirt binaries fall away, soil: our rotting place, birthplace, sustenance, material history. 

The western mind and its binary infusion sees an argument against individualism as an argument for compliancy. Striving for comfort sees system thinking as an out – if I am not an individual, then I am not responsible (Morton, 2013, p.4). We are not individuals, we exist in a mesh of various states of matter, in constant effect/affect-with one another on scales from atomic to molecular to cultural to planetary. Within this mesh, a fractal, ever complex, we are points of agency dragging it, directing it, making decisions in its unfolding. Within our scope of scale, we are powerful beings, able, we contain thinking chemistry, we have ‘response-ability’ (Haraway, 2016). Our response-ability is to actively step out of nihilism, comfort, compliancy, as it is enforced by western paradigms, to see these paradigms as limited, destructive, optional (Fisher, 2008). Our response-ability is erotic love with(in) Gaia, as she is ourselves (Hildyard, 2017). We must listen, learn from the more-than-human-world, appearing as divine ‘idiots’ to the status quo (Posthumanism and Technology, 2021). We must commit to eating each other kindly.

Weaving Into Country

Ancestorial Teachings and Aboriginal Sensationalism


10 years ago, I attended Camp Coorong, an “Aboriginal Camp”, with my rich white school, which involved Aboriginal themed education from “camp elders”. We participated in walking tours of the Coorong, guides of edible plants and other bush tucker - including maggot-looking witchetty grubs, and collected reeds from which we would later weave baskets. My young teenage brain cared little for learning, immediately fixated on weaving. My basket wasn’t tight like our teacher’s, but I was overwhelmed with devotion to the craft, trying to perfect stitches. I left with little more knowledge regarding indigenous culture than I had before, a conflated ‘single story’ of “Aboriginal-ism” as depicted through the settler-lens (Adichie, 2009), but I had *learnt*, rather stolen, a traditional craft. My lacking context, and sensationalised teaching in this distortion of “Aboriginal” culture rendered it ‘a skeleton without a soul,’ (Simmons, 2024). My school paid them for was a performance of “traditional cultural practice”. The commodity was their racial identity as seen by settler culture whose ‘desired end is to have indigenous product without indigenous people,’ (Simmons, 2024).

Bradley Dare, my brother, an archaeologist and anthropologist who has spent years working with indigenous communities, gave me insight to an indigenous culture that wasn’t pay-per-view. He said the binary of traditional/modern was a western fabulation, aiding to conflation of all aboriginal people as black, tribalists, dressed in ochre paint, and playing the digeridoo. “Traditional vs modern”, “black vs white”, “us vs them” are binary terms rendered useless in real experience with indigenous communities, not to mention Australia’s diversity in landscape spawning hundreds of distinct languages, cultures and craft practices. There is no succinct united “them” (Dare, 2023). At Camp Coorong I was not learning, nor listening, my school had paid for an acting of these binaries by Aboriginal bodies. We were *cultural tourists*, rather, cultural thieves.  

In Dare’s experience, indigenous practice is very much alive, but adapted to post-settler landscapes and industry, i.e., hunting practices may be the same but use guns rather than spears. Post colonisation, modernisation of tools, transportation, and medicine made life easier to lead; a body that didn’t spend everyday hunting, gathering, making, and walking had a much greater life expectancy, and if judging quality of life by quantifiable aspects such as life length, there is no denial of the benefits of some aspects of modernisation/industrialisation had to indigenous communities (Dare, 2023). Though this industrialisation cast a ‘great ochre coloured haze’ over country (Wright, 2023), flattening and sapping the land, followed by the policed dispossession of person from country.

The indigenous body, culture, and birthplace are intrinsically linked, ‘this land is me’, says Barret, removing indigenous person from country is a fate equitable to death, it is a violent mental and physical severing from self, culture, land, practice, understanding, knowledge, and spirituality (Barrett, 2013). The weight of this severing is not something a settler could understand (Tywoniak, 2020). The new land on which indigenous people were placed was constructed surrounding monetary economy, not gift/craft/exchange economy as was known. Land was now a resource, rather than living place, to be extorted for the benefits of person or cooperation. Within this new environment, displaced indigenous people were forced into low-wage slavery and heavily policed by a law that was alien to them, under a state in which indigenous law –which shows respect to country as much as individual - had no standing (Dare, 2023).

To survive within the wage economy, cultural tourism boomed, a great percentage of which is the aboriginal art and craft industry (Cook & Loveday, 1983) (Zeppel, 1998). Art and craft within indigenous practice are different to how craft and art is perceived to a western audience. Indigenous practice is an oral/audible tradition, unlike a sight/visual-centric western culture, making ‘in indigenous culture is not actually about manufacturing something, it's telling a story.’ (Dare, 2023). The land is remembered through stories instead of maps, that might later be translated into artworks, that depict the story and in turn, the land (See figure1, 2 & 5).


f.1 Pakura (2013) collaborative painting by artists of spinifex people 
Via British Museum 


f.2 ‘Pakura’ Display Plaque at British Museum (2023)

Every basket woven, tree carved, boomerang painted, contains a story, that is what the object really is. As Aboriginal hierarchy is structured around retaining knowledge, Dare said, many stories are gatekept; some only to be heard once a member has ‘graduated’ to higher level in the community. This gatekeeping practice has been a key part of the maintenance of indigenous culture through the transition from art-for-practice to art-for-settler’s-money. Art produced for mass consumption tell the sort of stories you would tell a ‘very, very young child’, the akin to nursery rhymes, they are ‘okay to tell anyone’. The indigenous mass-produced art economy thus contains a massive inside joke, that ‘the consuming world is being almost patronised,’ (Dare, 2023). 

Art and craft practices manifest indigenous culture, pre colonisation, industrialisation, and modernisation, ‘you had to make everything, that meant literally everything you made was a story. So, the cultural connection was much deeper because … it was unavoidable in everything you did,’ (Dare, 2023). Dare said this past is longed for, but colonisation was non-consensual. Adaptation to modernised, mass-produced materials was accommodated, often eventually finding their place in standard cultural practices. Within the communities he’d visited, all objects are considered *natural* as they come from country, and once their function is reached, their remnants should return to country (Dare, 2023). I asked Dare if he’d witnessed an underlying ecology within the indigenous communities he’d spent time with, to which he said no. Everyone, and every culture can be wasteful, and connection to country does not suspend this. Aboriginal faith is with country, country’s ability to regenerate, overcome, grow, and change, as well as their great ancestral lines and knowledge which had seen their people survive for millennia (Wright, 2023, p.1-8). 

Anything that comes from country should return to country, whether that be biodegradable or non-biodegradable materials. “Aboriginal” does not equate to “ecological”, especially in country that has been flattened by colonialism, whose infrastructure rarely supports humans who have not assimilated into settler culture, and where the mass of available materials through which to engage with traditional practice are not gathered from country directly, but rather made immediately available through the processed, plasticised mechanisms of industrialisation (Dare, 2023). All material still from country (or Gaia), inherently natural in their birth from the land, but cruel to this land in return and extraction. 

Note Dare’s recounts are one settler’s perspective from time spent in various communities throughout Australia and Melanesia on anthropology expeditions organised by local people. His insight into various indigenous customs is contextually removed, filtered through his biases, and reduced by tendency for information to be simplified in language and metaphor a settler mind can understand.

At the British Museum I looked for baskets like those I remember weaving. The baskets, rendered “artefacts”, sat in a glass case dedicated to the conflation aboriginal cultures. The placard reads ‘weaving ancestral knowledge … ancestral beings were transformed into animals and plants’, and their knowledge maintained and passed down through the properties of plants and action of traditional crafting (Living and Dying, 2023). The placard preaches the making of baskets as ‘a weaving of self with country’, an active acknowledgement of interconnected lifecycles outside of life-death, person-nature, culture-material binaries. That ancestorial blood remains in these reads, between fingertips, embedded within the craft, they continue to teach from beyond flesh, and the act of weaving is praise to ancient knowledge, the abundant gifts from country (Living and Dying, 2023). Yet the “artefacts” were lifeless, incapable of decay, nor teaching. They were rendered objects, incapable of being heard through the confines of thick glass. They’d died in their dispossession from purpose, embalmed, placed in a permanent open casket, for aliens to glance at in passing. The same could be said for those woven for us, in “cultural performance”, whose soul was lost in a translation to English, and intention lost in racialised tourism. 

   
f.3 Jug (2011) Tjunkiya Tapa                                      f.4 Basket (2010) Jenny Mye


f.5,6 Sculpture of a camp dog (2011) Lena Yarinkura





Matters of Language 

Personification is for Everything



Robyn Kimmerer, an Indigenous American, raised English speaker, discusses distribution of word types in English in comparison with her preferred, native language, Potawatomi. In Potawatomi 70% of the words are verbs: active, moving, living words, versus English’s 30% (Kimmerer, 2013, p.11-12). English’s noun heavy distribution reflects its object-oriented-ontology (Morton, 2013). By using English, one sees the world distorted by compartmentalisation, as a collection of objects rather than an interweaving, ever-complex web on inter-relationships. This way of perceiving centres humanity, as unique “persons” in an otherwise still and dead world. It’s all in the pronouns! As a *species* reliant on language as cornerstone of communication, and manifestation of self/culture, how we use grammar matters. 

In Potawatomi, animacy is embedded into many *things* English considers objects, i.e. rivers, mountains, animals, insects, trees, etc, all ‘possible verbs in a world where everything is alive,’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p.15). Personhood becomes an action, a doing, a verb, rather than a thing. Being a person is an active becoming with and within other persons, there is an embedded sense of response-ability with personhood. We are what we do, not what we are, there is no stillness in being, but active unfolding. Within this understanding, “you are not a bad person for doing bad things,” becomes a scapegoat for cruelty. Verb-centric language creates intrinsic understanding of interconnectivity, as all actions/persons are fluid, foremost an interaction and therefore constantly in effect/affect one another. The language format forges constant observation of mutual influence, under guise of mutual reliance. Further, in Potawatomi most nouns are for settler-introduced objects; wood in a table will be a noun, unlike the tree from which it came which is a doing, living verb. ‘A bay,’ for example ‘is a noun if water is dead … trapped between its shores, contained by the word’ (Kimmerer, 2013, p.15). To see something as an object, is a grievance of freedom. Through this lens, English is a cruel language, one that makes grammatical excuse for violence, centres humanity, and spawns capitalistic thought. Timescale is to human lifespan, creating fabulated urgency to fill time with tasks, in an ever-shortening reduction; hours, minutes, second (Posthumanism & Technology, 2021). This timescale renders landscapes still, unbreathing, things, nouns. If resources were considered living persons, personhood considered to stem from action instead of mass, and action/persons in constant effect of one another, individualism, economy, and capitalism become unthinkable systems. Exerting cruelty on another for personal gain, is inherently exerting cruelty on the self. 

Considering global warming, massacre of biodiversity, and wild place flattening (David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet, 2020), ecological indigenous knowledge has begun to gain respect within academic, and some political settings. But the material skills shared are effectively useless when applied to land bound by private property laws, both personal and national (Kimmerer, 2013, p.20). What can we, *individuals*, rather, interconnected agents do to embody a shift from colonial-capitalist thinking whilst unravelling in that system? We need to shift the centre of power, who is heard, by changing who we listen to. We need to learn from non-white, non-capitalist communities, non-human communities! We must be in constant self-critique, remaining with the trouble of our ignorance as a fabric to make with rather than something that binds us. 

From my trip to Camp Coorong, I take the skill of basket weaving, and how it stunk like sweet riverbeds and broke over time so I might make it again. From my learning from my brothers learning, I take the importance of stories, how they manifest themselves through all shapes and sizes, the importance of remembering, containing these stories, and embedding them into craftwork. From my reading of Kimmerer, I take recontextualization of my only language – English, as void of animacy, gifting personhood only to humans, and thus rooting, linguistically, the “Anthropocenic” superiority complex. I understand language is an operating system, and English will never describe what is happening to, or be able to forge change for our planet. From the Ibis folk, I say eat garbage! From ants, I see culture/organism binary as inseparable (Wheeler, 1911) (Changizi, 2010)( Aichert, Bochynek, Cossairt, Garnier, Rubenstein & Schiffers 2021). From eucaryotes, I take our ability to eat each other kindly (Journey to the Microcosmos, 2019) (Gilbert, Sapp & Tauber, 2012). From Gaia, I take rage. And from my points of agency, I take ‘response – ability’ to make-with a damaged planet compassionately (Haraway, 2016). 

Symbolic-Material Entanglement

 Monetary Economies and Industrialisation



In our late-capitalist, techno-embedded world, symbolic landscapes have become centric in view, namely as *virtual reality*. Confusion regarding the lack of separation between *virtual* and “material” worlds stems from reductive, binary thinking of technology vs. nature and symbology vs. reality (Haraway, 1991). Our language – *virtual reality* – constructs the illusion of separation, that *virtual reality* does not exist within the real world but in parallel to it. Virtual reality is, however, grounded materially through hardware, radio waves vibrating between routers and receivers, making it a material “thing” or “place” (Lohnes, 2017). It’s sense of virtual-ness, as our lacking language defines it, is therefore its symbolic presence and irrational impact on non-virtual living. Material portals, hardware, can transport us to an image landscape in which interact and effectively live. Once focus returns to the “real” world, there is an imposing memory and continuous living in the symbolic world. Our exponential investment in *virtual* worlds (i.e. social media), is driven by surveillance corporations who have convinced us to survey ourselves, using this data to curate personalised advertising space which further embeds our psyche with commodity fetishism (Posthumanism & Technology, 2021) (Han, 2010) (Doctorow, 2023). Intrinsically linked to our profiles, hyper-consumerism becomes not only for products, but bodies. Our *selves* become commodity, curated for the purpose of selling to others (Žižek, 1989). However, hangovers from the symbolic to the material have been present long before 21st century technological explosion. 

Currency is purely symbolic, is virtual; note/coin/card its hardware, and cultural weighting its software. Interaction between the symbolic world and the material world as intrinsic; the development of economy, immense value given to pure symbology has distorted our perception of material reality, making it unimportant in the shadow of an idea. The value of reciprocal relationships, and Gaia’s gifts, have been replaced by a drive to collect as much symbol of accessibility to resource as possible. Currency is real, it dictates material accessibility to food, shelter, land. It is the driving interest behind industrialisation, resource-ification of land and people etc, but it also isn’t real. It is an imposition from the western world, and useless is a non-human, post-Capitalocene sense of time. Within a monetary economy, the human world is centric, thus distorting, and de-personalising the more-than-human-world so it can be utilised without guilt to gain something effectively useless. It is the system that maintains its usefulness. It is a fabulation, a story, with apparent and violent material consequence. It matters what stories we tell.

Pre-colonisation, many indigenous tribes in North America and Australia functioned through an economy of gifts (Kimmerer, 2013, p.26-32). Within this system, what is given from earth, person, animal, river, plant, etc. is taken (never in full) with gratitude and expected to be returned through some capacity. The gift economy grows a sense of love between things, embedding the cultural importance of living and dying well for the human and more than human world. Interdependency is inherent to cultural understanding: we need the land, the land needs us. Under this guiding practice ‘objects … remain plentiful because they are treated as gifts,’ (Hyde, 1979, p.27). 

Within a world whose:
wild places of spontaneously occurring biodiversity is now limited to 25% (or less, this figure is contested) (Ollos, 2022) (Tyag, 2018), 

weather and natural disasters are more extreme and fluctuant than they have been for the past 50 years (Met Office, 2023),

mass inhabitants pollute approximately 37,000,000 metric tonnes each year of CO2 alone (Tiseo, 2023), 

produces 2,000,000 metric tonnes in landfill per year just in household waste (Alves, 2023), 

human population will stabilise at a peak of 10.4 billion by mid-2080 (United Nations, 2022),
idealism of humanity living off the land in a gift economy with(in) Gaia is far from achievable. Post industrial revolution, our planet has changed drastically. The *natural* gift economy is system built from and for balance between *human* and the more-than-human-world. Considering mass *human* overpopulation, and resultant unsustainable manufacture, production and farming practices that prioritise this population at expense of wild places and spontaneous biodiversity, the gift economy is inaccessible for most ecosystems. Not to mention carriers of this knowledge have been subjected to continuous genocide, forced assimilation into euro-centric capitalist culture through colonialist practice (Kimmerer, 2013). Under capitalist hegemony, the mobilisation of gift economies could also easily pervert, reinforcing ideologies of the more-than-human-world as property to be equally distributed, under the name “gift” instead of “resource”. However, hope prevails; gift economies can be constructed within our metropolitan late-capitalist dystopia. Rather than abundance in wild places, we have abundance in wastage. This is where we can scavenge for gifts; food, clothing, construction material, technology, and live in the glitch from monetary economy, reducing the need for continual mass production.




f.7-9 Discarded Stuff in Paddington, Dalston & Peckham (2023) Author’s own

Working with one crew in the London squatting community, we set up a “Free Shop” which included rails of found/donated clothing, and free food found from bins, cooked into delicious soups and stews. This glitched space was a gift economy, built from garbage. The nature of costless items saw members of the public behave differently in the space – they took little and gave back what they could. People had said if the clothing was listed for a very low price (i.e. 1 pound per item), they’d feel inclined to buy as much as they could – its great value for money! But removing money, consumerist inclination was also removed, and items were left for the next person to stumble upon them. The “Free Shop” was repeated at Craftanoon atThe Great Imagining, and the same gratitude and caring consumption was practiced without suggestion by a completely different demographic (Craftanoon, 2024). Projects like this are powerful systemic glitches.


   f.10 Dalsten Free Shop (2023)                                                        f.11 The Great Imagining Free Shop
   via @the_friendly.society                                                                   (2023) Author’s Own
   

Eat Garbage! 

Praise to the Away Place



Katherine Soucie is an artist and academic who has spent the last 20 years working to reclaim the means of disposal. Partnering with independent textile mills initially in Vancouver and now London, she is the goddess of the not-quite-sock. Currently, her Leyton studios are Medallin Mill and JALex Swift’s bins, the soul receiver of up to 250kg of clean textile waste monthly. From this mass of material, she organises, experiments and crafts to produce clothing, installations, and artworks, which are displayed in galleries and/or sold to an intimate patron-like consumer base. Her heart is as a researcher, teacher, seagull, scavenger, crafter, not mall business owner, though she may act as one; she expressed great resentment for this aspect of her practice, finding it to be confining, claustrophobic, unsettling, disingenuous and creatively stunting. Her true practice is centred in compassionate conversation with the disposed materials and machinery she finds herself working with. They manipulate one another, talk to one another through an intra-active craft, affect one another, achieving mutual creative liberation, constructing non-linear narratives that tell one another’s stories, and reaching DNA infused “end points” that encapsulate what is key – the process of making/becoming-between textile-y, mechanistic, and flesh-y souls. Soucie considers intelligence and soul as extending far beyond traditional *Anthropocenic* definitions, as embedded in both material and methodology (as though these could be considered separate anyway). Her wealth of skill in material manipulation, relentless curiosity, and tender feeling, position her as an agent acting with, and a translator for voices to which most are oblivious. Her process is a spiritual act, and active becoming, a mediation, and a process of learning. She embodies a word I cannot find in English, but with label as Divine Craft.


f.12-13 A(MEND) (2019) Katherine Soucie


f.14 Soucie’s Layton Studio Room 1 (2023)             f.15 Soucie’s Layton Studio Room 2 (2023)

Soucie recounted how her material perceptions had shifted, as she stood at the cusp of adulthood, in a chance encounter with vast landfills in Canada; ‘it was from everything from like, recycling depots to general waste to animal waste to biomedical waste … just hundreds of acres with these pits,’ (Soucie, 2023). The landscape was scattered with 18-foot tractors and bulldozers, birds circling the scene from above and the sort of smell that lodges itself in one’s nose. Feelings of astonishment, beauty, wonder, and guilt swirled, and Soucie felt intrinsically tied to this hyper-modern landscape. She saw herself, her residue lost and indistinguishable, but undeniably embedded within these garbage pits, she was in Gaia, becoming-planet. Landfills are ‘the mines of the future,’ she said, the largest and most bountiful, untapped resource (Soucie, 2023). They are Gaia’s youngest and fastest growing biome, yet to stabilise, that will spawn critters with unmatched resilience. Her excursion to this part of herself, and her cultural normality that she’d been forcibly divorced from, changed her life’s direction entirely. She vowed to use from it, respect and embed value in waste, take from the Away place rather than add to it, or worse, ignore it. 

The landfill excursion should be mandatory in every school curriculum, but that would violate human-centric health and safety guidance. Instead, we are taught the importance of cleanliness, a removal of our residual self from our acting self – our material memory as it exists in biodegradable and non-biodegradable objects from our figurative memory that morphs and changes in the brain place – it removes what we’ve done from who we are, how we affect from how we continue to act. ‘Leaving things clean over here,’ we flush our remnants ‘into a totally different sphere called Away,’ but with(in) Gaia, ‘there is no Away … no here and no there,’ instead, there is what we can and cannot (or choose not to) observe (Morton, 2013, p.31). ‘Away’thus becomes an ideologically and materially toxic sphere, intrinsic to the maintenance of white/human supremacy, capitalist enterprise, and economic growth. Rich, western, capitalist, countries, home to the vast majority of those acting in and profiting from hyper-consumerism, become a 3rd level simulacrum, an obscured image of a holistic world that, ‘masks the absenceof a profound reality,’ (Baudrillard, 1994, p.6). This forgotten reality, however, is immediately tangible to those in countries subject to imperialistic waste exportation. One cannot be ignorant to this system when its repercussions are on their doorstep.

The simulacrum is curated by western capitalist systems. In the UK, the population majority employed in service industry [approximately 81% in 2021 in the UK (O’Neill, 2023)] and access to necessary living requirements [food, property, etc.] is unavailable outside of purchase, creating localised ignorance to global chains of production and disposal, manifested further through capitalist-centric education, nationalist propaganda, and labour-induced exhaustion. This system purposefully naturalises lacking criticality, curiosity, and care for how things got here, and where they’re going next. The answer is to the Away place, or the great pacific garbage patch, or massive landfills in Turkey, Holland, India, Canada, Mexico, and China (Eurostat, 2022) (Donovan & Pickin, 2021) (Alves, 2023). The landfill trade is a lucrative industry, and for some countries that have been economically stunted by a long legacy of colonialism, a dependable source of national income, though it reinforces euro-centric power dynamics and effectively continues colonisation through matter of waste instead of persons (Michealson, 2021). The culture of disposal, (and correlating hyper-consumerism, trend chasing, obsession with cleanliness) hence not only reinforces human-supremacy, but white-supremacy. 

Constructing Guiltless Atmospheres

 The Charity Shop Problem

 

For the western fashion industry, the “charity shop” is a sponge for consumer guilt, in both purchase and donation. It creates an illusion of a fabulated closed circuit [purchase – use – donate – purchase – use again]. The “charity shop cycle” is an idealisation, designed to continue support for consumerism and mindless wastefulness for those who are “environmentally conscious”. Donators chose charity shops over the bin, assume their items will be resold, and rarely question where they will go if not. Charity shops to not advertise that 80% of stock is exported, almost exclusively to Ghana, where if not sold in Kantamanto market, it is illegally dumped or burnt, polluting land, air, and sea (Johnson, 2023) (Choat, 2023) (The Revival, 2023). Donating to charity shops is to step outside of consumerist and colonialist guilt although the action itself directly, but silently, contributes to neocolonialism. Purchase from charity shops is more sustainable purchase than direct from manufacturer/new from store, but it is so far from solution to fashion wastage, or an industry that alienates us from ourselves so it can sell us an identity.

f.16 Fast Fashion Landfill in Ghana (n.d.) Via The Revival Earth 


f.17 Kantamanto Market (n.d.) via The Revival Earth

Industry is toxic (Marx, 1887). The drive to produce more *sustainable* materials by clearing land and planting hemp instead of cotton, throwing away all our *non-sustainable* clothing and adopt something new is toxic - we might as well say the solution to industrial textile waste is growing new industries (Simmons, 2023)! An economy built around purchase through an abstract value (money) is toxic. Trying to make a new form of currency, shop, material, fashion, is toxic! We don’t need new, we need garbage, we need to stop perceiving things as broken, we need to learn to make with one another, without the fabulations of independency that monetary economies reinforce in us! 

In discussing Divine Craft, note it’s separation from the term “upcycling”. Upcycling is the act of using of older/broken clothes as a basis to make new clothes, through mending, reworking, dying etc. When upcycling, the goal has end, creating an “upcycled garment”. Divine Craft is an action, the process of experimentation, exploration and engagement, conversation, and care for materials, it does not reach an end point as it recognises the constant fluctuation and entanglement of material reality. Something Upcycled is an object, has boarders, Divine Craft is a boundless, spiritual act. The process of upcycling also engages with a drive to make “end products”, whereas Divine Craft has no noun nor adjective it can reach, nothing can be “divinely crafted” because this language suggests its process to be finished, it is always present tense. Upcycling is a linear, goal oriented, process that mimics its predecessor: manufacture (the process of taking resource, laborious manipulation of resource, to reach consumable product, which will then be purchased, used, discarded, and replaced). Divine Craft will never reduce the materials it engages with to “resource”, weighting them as less important their manipulator. Divine Craft is and endless collaboration. Upcycling mimics manufacture, only differing in its resources strictly being second hand, and as a process, makes no effort to step outside of capitalist structure. Though upcycling begun as fixing/morphing one’s old clothes for themselves, it’s popularisation has created is new markets, and *conscious consumers*. ‘There is no ethical consumption under capitalism,’ (collective origin, approximately 2014) whether it be upcycled or new product, the process of maintaining a monetary market, trends cycles, and compulsive consumption (of *sustainable* goods) that is violent and perpetuates the ecological damage which upcycling claims to fix (Žižek, 1989) (Fisher, 2009). Divine Craft is purposefully unpurchasable and unmarketable. It is a continuous intimacy between substances that are entangled, it is a spiritual acting, a response-ability to a damaged planet. 


f.18 Tote (2024) via V&A

The Revival Earth is a Ghanian artistic collective working in response to the excessive fast fashion waste, majority from western countries, that lands in Kantamanto (THE REVIVAL, 2023). Local craftspeople and designers are employed to upcycle from the masses of waste to create *upcycled* products that western audiences deem purchasable, selling through partnerships with British institutions such as the V&A - upcycled tote bags 55GBP (V&A Shop, 2023). Their products are unaffordable to the mass population of Ghana (Ghana minimum wage is approximately 32.5GBP/month as of January 2024 (TRT Afrika, 2023)), who do not require the upcycling tag to buy second hand garments – they can get those directly from the Kantamato market. There is little public transparency regarding wages for Ghanian manufacturers, nor the split of profits between their employees and the institutions once items are sold in Britain or online. The Revival offers short courses in ‘upcycling and the circular economy’, how upcycling, ‘can transform fashion waste by generating jobs, reducing inequality, and minimising the environmental impact of the fashion industry,’ (Future Learn, 2023). The weighting on creating economic prosperity outweighs the core issue - Western countries enforcing neo-colonialism through the exportation of waste to African countries. Avoidance of this conversation could almost be perceived as though the west is doing Ghana a favour by dumbing their garbage there (Symmons, 2023). The ‘creative [capitalist] solutions’ feeding back into western consumption habits may disperse some fashion industry income to Ghana, though this cannot be confirmed without direct conversation with The Revival. The collective is “not-for-profit” but revolves around money-commodity exchange, thus the need for transparency regarding wage distribution is absolutely necessary. Upcycling is a neo-liberal solution to a neo-liberal problem, and due to its mimicking of an exploitative structure, knowing who is making money from production matters.

Sustainability, good moral fibre, is what The Revival, like the majority of upcycle brands (i.e. Rokit Originals, Beyond Retro, Patagonia Recrafted, Urban Renewal, etc.) are really selling. Their value in projecting “upcycle culture” and conscientious consumption/disposal is stunted completely by its place as commodity – it is the market that is the issue! The streamlining from genuine emotive interaction between co-existing, inter-connected and inter-dependant agents to exchange of abstract values. 

21st Century Rag Pickers 

The Ecological Geishaning


Through the London queer scene, I found the playful, idiotic, waste-eating movement correctly and incorrectly referred to as “Geish”.The Geish Manifesto, written by performance artist and Geish creature, Princess Pathojen, loosely recounts the entomology of Geish; from a sector of Geishas who were strictly men dressed as women, later reaching western drag communities who dropped the “a”, continuing to refer to their dress/fantasy/costume/decoration/adornment as just “Geish” (Pathojen, 2023). Since Pathojen’s entry to the London Queer scene post-pandemic, “Geish” has evolved as the term for fanciful, playful, stupid, garbage-centric, loosely constructed, cheap, found-object, messy, maximalist, trinket-core, poorly hand-crafted fashion/styling assemblage (the two are inseparable in reference to Geish). I asked Pathojen if they thought Geish was inherently ecological, to which he said no, her first encounter with the term was from, ‘super cunty dolls (trans women) who were using this word to just describe their clothes,’ which were designer – not mindfully sourced or anti-capitalist by any nature, but not ‘any less Geish,’ (Pathojen, 2023). Pathojen’s Geish, however, is waste-minded, dependant on a scavenging-making-remaking process; his Geish is a Divine Craft. 


f.19-20 Princess Pathojen (2023) via @cultofshane

Though Geish has a long legacy outside of Pathojen’s practice, we both witnessed their drastic influence within the London Queer community, through performance, publications, and consistent active engagement in raves/parties, changing “Geish”s definition locally to meaning ecological, handmade, scavenged ensembles. The more trash-Geish queer people go to a rave, the more queer people see it, see how achievable it is and return in their own head to toe trash-Geish. The “cuntification” of the hand-made, the truly waste-centric, encouraged the community to stop buying frivolously and instead start hoarding trash to make with. In 2023, designer is seen as almost embarrassing within the Geishified queer scene (Pathojen, 2023). The movement has escalated because the queer scene thinks itself as “left wing”, although this often fails to manifest socially, it does create receptivity to ecological response-ability. The scene refused to continue classist, capitalist-centric hierarchies around wealth, and purchase-ability, instead giving praise to creativity and resourcefulness.


f.21-23 Aje’s Geish (2023) via @ara.ata_

Trash-Geish is enriched by its capacity to fall apart and be remade, it is always in fluctuation between safety pins, and thus is rarely made *well enough* to be purchasable within mainstream audiences. Regardless, some practitioners, Pathojen included, do sell trash-Geish. Upon my asking about this, Pathojen said, ‘buying my Geish? Yes. Buying Geish? No.’ expressing his need to commodify their practice to make rent, though believing Geish looks are best achieved when items are found, crafted with, and assembled into looks by they who wear it. Geish is transferrable between people as Geish is affected by the mood, walk, expression of the person wearing it, therefore one person’s Geish can never be another’s – it become their fantasy in their individual construction. Regardless, purchasing it reduces the process of assemblage, making the clothing less intimate, less intrinsic to one’s character. It reduces Geish to a bought identity, thus reenforcing identity commodities, rather than a spiritual intersection of the communal and the individual through the styling of found objects. It eradicated the planetary connection and the muscular effort of making; it kills its soul. The mobilisation of Geish as a Divine Craft has been through its observable nature – that it appears accessible, plus the attraction of queer/punk subversion from mainstream fashion. The audience also broadened through essential subculture photographers and zine-makers such as Mia Evans, Max Auberon, Rae Tait, Heloise Darcie.


f.24 Keelan and Ellie at ‘r u a goff’ (2023) by Mia Evans via @ahgeewiz

f.25 Zena for the Geish Manifesto (2023) by Mia Evans via @ahgeewiz


f.26,27 Cloud (2023) by Max Auberon

Pathojen hopes for a trash-Geish world, where all adornment in and outside fashion is praise to garbage. I draw parallels between her ideology and the work of William Morris, a maker and writer of the post-industrialisation arts and crafts movement, heavily influential within Britain and then-adjacent colonies. Morris believed beauty to be a necessity for wellbeing, for the collector of beautiful things, but more so for the producer; to Morris, the only ‘real art is the expression by man of his pleasure in labour,’ (Morris, 1879, via William Morris Gallery, 2023). The arts and crafts movement Morris spoke for was one of artisanship, in which refinement of skill was a joyful, meditative task for the practitioner, their knowledge is considered valuable, important to be maintained through generational teachings (Morris, 1888). 

Though fundamentally similar as anti-mass production, trash-Geish diverges from artisanship in its focus on play (Darcie, 2022, p.9-10). Perfection is unknowable in trash-Geish, skills are not to be taught with divine clarity, but loosely, (if taught at all) the movement relishes in experimentation. There is no mistake or misstep in constructing trash-Geish because doesn’t try to make purely beautiful objects; ugliness, campness, is a common motif. Morris had a strong sense of binary division between the ugly and the beautiful, untransferable to the anti-binary practice of Geish (Starting Out, 2023). Though both despise the uniformity and reduced decadence in industrialised, mass-produced goods, for Morris this is in material, and for Geish people this is in idea. The material residue of industrialisation is prime material for the Geishaning, though its discarding, dirtying, metamorphosis from purchasable to scavenged item through the act of disposal, it becomes beautiful, ugly, camp, Geish (Soucie, 2023). Unlike Morris’s arts and crafts movement, as people crafting divinely, and only taking from abundance materials, our task is not to make more beautiful, decadent and richer things, but to make ugly, mass produced, detritus beautiful and soulful; embedded with play, care, and joy.