1ST ED. 2023
Donna Haraway
Donna Haraway's ideas have been an inspiration, both for my personal artistic practice and in my collaborations within the collective Worm School. In this collaborative project we embrace Haraway's claim that'thinking is a materialist practice with other thinkers' and set about composting our research together-holding conversations around various media that reflect craft practices and proposals for alternate futures and reimagined pasts.
In particular I recommend looking at The Camille Stories, the final chapter of Staying With The Trouble. Through an experimental speculative fiction exercise, Haraway explores her ideas for 'making-with' the more-than-human. What results is a strange, playful and optimistic proposal for 'on-going' within a vibrant, complexly entangled living-and-dying world.
The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
Byung-Chul Han
Contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han takes an in depth look at the decline of ritual in modern society.Han describes ritual practice as a process of making yourself at home in the world and making time habitable, a way of orienting ourselves around ritual objects that pass down generations, creating stability and a sense of belonging. His theory highlights the slipperiness of the current moment, in which we find ourselves drowning in an unending stream of new information and imagery. Surrounded by a late-stage capitalist culture, we are prompted to consume a torrent of cheaply made mass produced objects, in an attempt to furnish and fulfill our lives.
I found this book to be cathartic. It put a finger to a sentiment I had been having trouble articulating: that ritual may be integral to a generative object-making practice, one that feels nourishing rather than extractive. But in a world that no longer holds an understanding and respect for the ritual object, this realization is melancholic. It leaves one feeling that there is a pressing need to re-member our communities and connections to the people, beings, and places of our present.
Poetry is Not a Luxury from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
Audre Lorde
Poetry is Not a Luxury is poetic, fluid and bursting with optimism. The way Audre Lorde's words wind back and forth over and around themselves conjures a familiar choreography to that of clay and fiber craft practices. Lorde redefines the erotic as the essential creative impulse of humanity, a playful instinct for collaborating and making new ideas and realities pos-sible. The erotic is the sharing of joy, found in the places where you come to meet others and form bridges.
It is dancing, singing, cooking, and craft-those intangible cultural practices that bind us to each other, our land, and our ecologies. Lorde disregards the capitalist impulse toward individualism-to engage with ourselves is to be engaged in community. This text seems crucial reading as we learn to move beyond the cult of the artist-genius and the institutionalized hierarchy of academia that goes alongside it.
The Living Stones: Cornwall
Ithell Colquhoun
Ithell Colquhoun was a queer, British surrealist painter who, during the 1940s, lived and worked in a remote village in Cornwall, UK at the edge of the island. This area is famed for its enduring folk cus-toms, its wild landscape, and its neolithic monuments. The Living Stones reads as a studio diary and trav-elog of the area. To read it is to time-travel into this ethereal landscape with Ithell as your guide. Collquhoun's subtle and reserved descriptions are threaded with an animist connection to land, place, and culture, and the book exemplifies a relational artistic practice.
Always Coming Home
Ursula K. Le Guin
I think this book is Le Guin's most realized example of her Carrier Bag Theory. It reads as an anthropological study of a people yet to come, the inhabitants of a post-anthropocene California, thousands of years from our present. For her fictional Kesh people, Le Guin invented songs, poems, cultural objects, ideol-ogles, tools, ceramics, architectures, animals, land practices and crafts. She worked with a musician on an accompanying record of folk songs played on instruments designed specifically to emulate the Kesh way of thinking. These songs were so convincing, they had trouble copyrighting the material. They were told you can't copyright folk songs, that they belong to the people. Le Guin's craft is powerful and she has given so much to us in this text.
Embedded within its encyclopedic volume is a three part novella told from the perspective of North Owl, who is born into the Kesh valley as a half house per-son. Her father is an outsider. In her adolescence, she must travel to the edges of her world and enter the society of her father: a patriarchal monotheism, not unlike the western colonial ethic we might recognize from our own world. By following North Owl on this journey, we learn how to see the structures that bind us with both eyes open. If I have to choose one Le Guin book to recommend, it's this one. Always Coming Home speaks to them all. It is her life's work. Her Carrier Bag Theory pointed to the path, and Always Coming Home will show us how to walk it.