SEED_2065

SEED_2065 included several workshops and an events night on 11 December in the Handbag Factory Gallery. The idea for the event night arose from a workshop where Anna Candlin led us in thinking creatively about language in our future worlds. New individual words, phrases and narratives were developed in the workshop – Anna, Elly and Jessica went away and developed these – for the wall text introducing the show (Jessica) to two longer texts performed on this night (Anna and Elly). Two further performances were developed by Gen Doy and Jessica Brauner as developments of their artwork in the show.

Seed_2065

Anna Candlin

The Cataclysm. After the first crack it was important to stay with our troubled hope: trees grow out of cracks.

We wanted community, coexistence, splice-alliances, entanglement: the laws forbade it. A new generation of apocalyptic philosophy had no answers.

A giant crater was opening its mouth. The remains of urban debris were held by the roots that enveloped them, dragging them deeper into the abyss. Thorns and glass, barbed wire. We undertook searches of our gardens and lay in the leaf litter. We were relics in the undergrowth.

In the morning, we woke up on the other side of winter. We were not dead but resting, poised to emerge, as sunrise. In the air, soil and pine needles. The smell was electric, ancient. We called the forest ‘House of the Earth’.

Possibilities kept us agile. We were abounding in anticertainty – cautiously optimistic about all outcomes, including the outcome of disaster. Anticertainty was vital, in order to stay with the trouble. We kept our boundaries blurry to encourage permeation and reciprocity. Our hopefulness was radical – it had to be. The rebirth had to be energetic and symbiotic and imaginative and confrontational. We refused the supremacy of the individual.

Kinrise. We recalled the bodies. We named it The Rupture.

We separated ourselves from the Cataclysm but took lessons from it. It entutored us.

We seeded root bridges. The ambient buzzing of consciousness moved through the underground network of new exchangeable data. We were the witnesses. Speculative songs and stories of wild belonging arose in our bellies and erupted from our mouths. What you have is never better than what you can hope for.

It was important to us which words we chose.

We livestreamed from past and future the shared stories. We embodied our remembering: our new ecology was ancestral. We became techno- animageneticists, spiritual botanists, electro culturalists. We germinated future collaboration, we greenfingered digital speculation. We rejoiced in all the equal souls in all the different skins of all the Beings in all the Earth-Sea- Air. Our PostAnthro defragmentation was proactive and equitable, our metamorphosis regenerative and global.

We were Live.
We did not forget to have gratitude.
Shoots appeared in the world and in all the worlds still to come.’

Elly Platt.

After the first crack, our apocalyptic philosophies were laid bare. A human supremacy of physical and digital violence could not endure. There were roots deep in the fissures, a mycelium network spreading through the urban debris. A defragmentation of the human and more-than-human; equal souls, different skins.

The Rupture was a confrontation – between the species isolation that warped humanity, and the wild belonging we enjoy now. The entanglements humans have experienced with other species have brought reciprocal consciousness, a synergy with all life, even the digital beings humans created purely to serve. The digital abuse of the past has metamorphosed to electroculture, techno-synanimagenesis.

Those of us who were witness to the transformation found a radical hopefulness in the Post-Anthro. The relics of the Consumercene disintegrated as our alliances with the more-than-human flourished; a symbiotic rebirth that embeds us deep within our ecosystems, creating new reciprocal relationships and abundant seeds of possibility.