What will evolve in our plastic world?
October 2017
“Help nature bounce back!” Reads a poster in the toilet at the London Wildlife Trust reserve where I volunteer. This optimistic, rubbery, idea provokes a train of thought:
What will evolve in our plastic world? What will adapt, absorb, and grow out of the landfill? In a fundamentally altered geology - the extracted, discarded, ‘single-use’ landscape - through the process of breaking down, ingesting and reclaiming molecules, what qualities will be expressed? Perhaps we are already living this process and it is prosaic rather than apocalyptic? A kind of reverse or Post-Frankenstein’s monster?
Common Marbled Carpet larva
Frankenstein is apt here, because much of our embedded thinking about ‘nature’ in the Western tradition is based on the legacy of that Romantic tradition out of which Mary Shelley speaks. The Enlightenment began to create a sense of separation between humankind and concepts of ‘nature’ which has come to be problematic in the Anthropocene.
Yet current thinking, in biology (Barad) and philosophical Posthumanism (Haraway) as well as literature (Morton) and the arts - through newly formed disciplines such as the ‘geo-humanities’ - increasingly questions the boundaries of consciousness, to include not only other life forms, but natural phenomena and constructed objects too.
“Can we help but suspect that all the time that we imagined ourselves to be thinking about inanimate objects, we were ourselves being “thought” by other entities?” (Amitav Ghosh).
Exploring this inversion through studio practice imagines an evolution where human actions (Levi’s “small futile mysteries”) are no longer dominant. Perhaps insects take on the role of manipulating the ‘fabric’ of the environment.
Wax moth caterpillars ‘eat up’ the plastic bags buried in the soil , potentially altering their DNA in the process. Spiders spin over the holes where resources have been extracted to exhaustion. The altered chemical composition of the atmosphere affects their habitual practice, recalling Peter Witt’s famous 1948 photographs of the ‘effect of psychoactive drugs on garden spiders. New forms appear, are worked on. Helen Marten’s 2016 Turner Prize installation resonates here - a world collaged through human makings; some abandoned, some revisited, some nascent.
It is important to resist the reflex to anthropo- (or gyna?)-morphise. Projecting human desires, attributes or habits onto the ‘expanded’ posthuman entity, repeats a pattern of ‘colonisation’ (Demos). The danger of romance lurks - in the sense of the Romantic idea about nature: illusion and wish fulfillment - a pristine ideal which can be ‘accessed’ by meditation or mystic thinking.
The practice is to invert the idea of ‘nature as resource’ by dissolving the perceived boundary between human and environment. To imagine a landscape made up partly of sense-making, order-restoring activities by some expanded consciousness, partly of unintended consequences - the byproducts of thoughtless consumption.
In pursuing this train of thought I chew over ideas relating to re-calibrating human values related with making and producing things, and ideas about what constitutes a local material or environment in the face of a layered, global, commodified urban place, such as Finsbury Park.
Bibliography
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Demos, T.J. (2016). Decolonizing Nature, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Ghosh, A. (2016). The Great Derangement Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. North Carolina: Duke University Press.
Levi, P. (1975). The Periodic Table. Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore.
Morton, T. (2007). Ecology without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shelley, M. W. (1818). Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones.