Paper short abstract:

Thousands of images of the word ‘also’ photographically mined from gravestones in a Victorian London cemetery wildlife park present a decentred monument of pluriversal relations, democratising human and non-human worlds, and revealing the systemic contradictions in the process.

Paper long abstract:

'Not I, but also' (2024-) presents a series of photographic images isolating all instances of the word 'also' appearing on gravestones in Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, one of the 'magnificent seven' Victorian London cemeteries, now managed as a wildlife park for the wide-ranging community. Through the thousands of largely macro, constrainedly repetitive images, I am affording new hierarchies of attention and relations, decentred from the named human subjects of the graves, towards the plants, moulds, and microorganisms colonising the range of stones, geopolitically mined from around the world, bearing myriad fonts and lettering in various states of disintegration according to their geological composition at the time of extraction, now captured chiefly by smart phone in all weathers, times, lights, and moods.

Privileging this minor conjunctive adverb, the project presents a vast contemporary vanitas – a reminder of our equality in death – and, questionably, a grammatical and visual allegory of democratic relations or justice within the social and natural order – a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière, 2004).

While aiming to reconfigure the monumental towards a landscape of pluriversal relations, opening dialogues with botanists, geologists, historians, film makers, graphic designers, stone carvers, musicians, necromancers, et al, my authored project nevertheless also performs the now-dominant economy of picture mining, feeding voracious networked algorithmic ecology-destroying heaps of affective geotagged data, reproducing sameness and minutiae difference for our relentless restless attention … also, also, also.

Not I, but also explores non-didactic engagement with narratives of climate change and justice and its inherent contradictions.