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.