Libby Catchings
(University of Denver)
Melanie Kiechle
(Virginia Tech)
Sho McClarence
(University of Denver Iliff School of Theology)
Send message to Convenors
Discussants:
Kera Lovell
(University of Utah Asia Campus)
Sho McClarence
(University of Denver Iliff School of Theology)
Phia Steyn
(University of Stirling)
Kristin Prins
(Cal Poly Pomona)
Formats:
Panel
Streams:
Creativity, Sensibility, Experience, and Expression
Location:
Linnanmaa Campus, PR126B
Sessions:
Monday 19 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Entanglement, revived: transdisciplinary approaches to craftivism as ritual world-building.
Panel Creat01 at conference World Congress of Environmental History.
This panel uses material culture studies, spatial theory, clinical approaches to grief, and craft rhetorics to explore how craftivism offers adaptive epistemologies and powerful tactical support to those grappling with environmental degradation and the political possibilities of “vibrant matter.”
Long Abstract:
This panel draws on Material Culture studies, Spatial Theory, Craft Rhetorics, and clinical approaches to grief to explore how craftivism offers both adaptive epistemologies and powerful, tactical support to crafter-scholars grappling with the afterlives of environmental degradation and the political possibilities of "vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010).
Using a campus circularity case study, Speaker 1 explores Creative Reuse as a material entanglement (Gruwell 2022) to support communal recuperation from Climate Grief and advance circularity, thereby facilitating the “grounding and worlding” (Henrik and Sverker 2019) needed for resilient urban ecologies.
Speaker 2 examines the People's Park movement in the 1960-70s, where radical environmental justice protesters used craftivism as a tool of "world building" to reclaim urban green space, then comparing tactics with Atlanta's "Stop Cop City" movement (2021).
Speaker 3 explores artistic making in queer communities living in Thirdspace (Soja 1996), showing how many marginalized groups constitute authentic experience. In so doing, they imagine how craft repurposes both material and environment towards new relationality.
Speaker 4 examines mass-craftivist projects for COP26 (Glasgow 2021), centering the Coat of Hopes created along the Coat’s 500-mile journey to the official proceedings -- an emblem of the “griefs, remembrances, prayers and hopes connected to their local landscape[s].” The paper explores not only the memories stitched on individual patches, but also considers measurable impact on COP26 delegates.
Speaker 5 analyzes an interdisciplinary campus craftivist project reclaiming discarded agricultural matter and putting it to productive craft, materials science, narrative, and community-building use.
This presentation analyzes the visual/material culture of the People's Park Movement as an “archaeology of displacement,” exploring how activists enacted political placemaking through murals, landscape architecture, and other ephemera that illuminate alternative archival possibilities for activism.
Paper long abstract:
The amorphous People’s Park movement was a sporadic chain of more than four dozen protests in the late Vietnam War era in which activists protested a range of issues including police brutality, gentrification, and systemic racism by taking over vacant lots and insurgently converting those lots into "liberated zones" they often called "people’s parks." Most of these park projects were ephemeral, often being fenced or torn down by police days after construction began. Park creators, therefore, archived their protests—creating and compiling their own materials outside the bounds of institutional archives. Since the late-1960s, supporters have memorialized their movements through galleries, books, and later archival collections, websites, and social media accounts to construct their own historical memories of these protest actions counter to the state, yet often times analysis of these movements has been reduced to photographs and memoirs rather than the craftivist innovations that originally dominated their movements. While scholarship on the relationship between archives and activism has tended to focus on community archives, the People’s Park Movement's disparate constellation of parks and archival materials presents an alternative lens through which to explore material culture through the lens of historical memory and social movement organizing. Through tangible archives of scattered wine jugs, handmade signs, misshapen sculptures, and printed newspapers, activists sought to “liberate” privatized urban green space. In doing so, they left behind an archaeology of displacement that illuminates how activists were using visual and material culture to explore issues of identity, colonialism, and coalition-bulding within the urban realm.
This paper explores artistic making in queer communities living in Thirdspace (Soja 1996), showing how many marginalized groups constitute authentic experiences. In so doing, they imagine how craft repurposes both materiality and environment towards new relationality.
Paper long abstract:
This paper is an avenue of exploring materiality of space, through an in-depth look at authentic experiences in lived community. I will focus on two related insights: I consider the way that queer people are connected to marginalization and thirdspace; and second, I further explore queer artists as uniquely able to express these two elements. In this context I additionally analyze the work of: Felix Gonzales-Torres' “Untitled: A Portrait of Ross in LA”. This project pulls from critical spatial theory and queer theory to think about making. Critical spatial theory is about rethinking one’s participation in the spaces that exist in everyday life. Specifically, critical spatial theory is an interdisciplinary theory that pulls on ideas of space and the active participation in common societal frameworks surrounding the entanglement of agency of typically urban settings. This paper will expand the critical spatial theory to think about space and place more broadly to allow for an understanding of authentic lived experience inside of Edward Soja’s idea of “thirdspace” or spaces that exist as uniquely subjective and lived within. The queer theory aspect looks at individuals who have been relegated to the margins because of some deviation from traditional types of sexuality and gender expression. Queerness is not just about ostracism from the societal order but an attempt toward the complete annihilation of identities from the traditional social order. This study looks at queer art through the lens of queer theory to express the ephemeral nature of this type of expression.
This paper uses a multi-generational, upcycled yarnbombing to explore how the "vibrant matter" (Bennett 2010) of post-consumer waste enacts material entanglement (Gruwell 2022), thereby supporting communal recuperation from climate grief, waste circularity, and more resilient urban ecologies.
Paper long abstract:
This paper considers the daunting “material afterlives” (Walter & Ilengez 2022) of consumer waste locally and transnationally, using Jane Bennett’s “vibrant matter” (2010) and a new-material account of entanglement through yarncraft (Gruwell 2022) to not only capture the complexity of our relationship with consumer waste, but also promote circularity and the rituals needed to process climate grief.
Taking an inter-generational, ability-inclusive, campus yarn-bombing installation as a case study, the paper shows how participants repurpose campus waste and half-finished yarn projects to not only build community and celebrate participants’ creative impulses, but also meditate on the co-constitutive nature of crafter, onlooker, and materials in an urban landscape. In addition, participants navigate the classist, colonial inheritance of a “biosemiotic threshold” (Hoffmeyer 2008) where nature-as-fortress must remain untouched by evidence of consumer activity – notably in a conflict with self-identified environmentalists. At the same time, installation responses reveal a sense of joy and belonging that move away from a mindset of climate “palliative care” and toward a mindset of growth and rehabilitation – key factors in mitigating climate trauma (Schmidt and Tsui, LetsReimagine digital forum, March 2023).
Taken together, the author argues that, like the “tactical urbanism” Kay et al promote as part of an emergent transitional ecology (2019), collaborative, public, circularity-minded projects have the ability to foster individual and community resiliency toward the crises of the Anthropocene – crafting vibrant, restorative artifacts both material and discursive along the way.
Environmental documentary photography presents a powerful form of craftivism, both for the photographers who feel they can do something about environmental grievances and for the viewers/posterity that gain knowledge about it. These hypotheses are reviewed, investigating the example of Documerica.
Paper long abstract:
According to craftivist Betsy Greer, craftivism can be understood as a "way of looking at life where voicing opinions through creativity makes your voice stronger, your compassion deeper & your quest for justice more infinite". Building on this broad definition of crafting activism, I plan to investigate historical environmentalist documentary photography as a craftivist approach. The specific focus will be on the Documerica program which lasted from 1972 to 1977 and was sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency. 70 photographers and photojournalists shot thousands of pictures, mostly in the USA, documenting what they saw as environmental concerns at the time (e.g., junkyards, air and water pollution, mining scenes).
I am interested in the motivation, self-effectiveness, emotional connection, and political dimension that the program had for the participants. To investigate these fields, I plan to conduct interviews with some photographers and possibly other people involved (oral history research). In addition, I try to find out what effect the documentary activism had on the affected nature and population and if it created environmental awareness.
This paper critically explores the meaning and impact of the Coat of Hopes both along its 500 mile journey from London to Glasgow in September and October 2021 as part of the Camino to COP, and its daily presence at the gates of COP26 in November 2021.
Paper long abstract:
This paper critically explores the meaning and impact of the Coat of Hopes both along its 500-mile journey from London to Glasgow in September and October 2021 as part of the Camino to COP walking pilgrimage, and then its daily presence at the Gates of COP26 in November 2021. The Coat of Hopes is constructed of hundreds of small square blanket patches, each representing local environmental hopes, prayers, memories, griefs and/or fears of their creators, that were handsewn onto the Coat at various stopping points along its journey on the shoulders of Coat Pilgrims. Consequently, the Coat of Hopes had to embody the hopes and fears of all the contributors, Coat Pilgrims and Coat Guardians and served as their personal messages to official delegates to the COP26 deliberations. When delegates to the official proceedings entered and exited the Gates of COP26, they were invited to feel the weight of these hopes and fears by physically donning the Coat and listening to the Song of the Coat of Hopes that were sang to each new coat bearer and pilgrim.
Overlapping craftivism and art activism, Protest textiles are a term I am coining in my practice-based research which refers to textiles that are used in protests. They can harness power in objecthood, performative elements and subversiveness to tackle social injustices and the climate crisis.
Paper long abstract:
Overlapping craftivism and art activism, Protest textiles are a term that I am coining within my practice-based research that refers to textiles that are used as protest or within protests. Protests with textiles are becoming more prevalent, as can be seen by the Pussy Hats at the Women’s March protest at the inauguration of Trump. They overlap craftivism and art activism and can be viewed as either a sperate entity or a genre within both disciplines. Consigning them under the umbrella of only craftivism does them a disservice because craftivism as a whole is not protest, likewise having them be merely a section of art activism dilutes their voice, history and purpose. I am suggesting that the term protest textiles be used to describe this burgeoning field. Art activism favours participatory collaborative art practices that are not encumbered with art objects. Textiles by their nature and tactility are object oriented, which should then be antithetical to art activism, but it is the history of the art object that is at fault.
There is power in objecthood. Textiles can fulfill this objecthood without significant baggage that fine art materials are susceptible to. The performative element to the crafting of textiles can be utilized as an act of protest. The most powerful element textiles can bring to art activism is their subversive nature when used in protest. This text will aim to describe the importance of textiles within protest; to shape a history within protest textiles; and to provide examples of this.
This paper analyzes an interdisciplinary campus craftivist project reclaiming discarded agricultural matter and putting it to productive craft, materials science, narrative, and community-building use.
Paper long abstract:
Cal Poly Pomona (USA) began as the agricultural campus of the California State University’s polytechnic university. Situated among what was then citrus groves and horse ranches, the Pomona campus retains a strong agricultural program, including departments of agribusiness and food industry management, and apparel merchandising and management. Sheep are among the animals in the agricultural program raised for food, and their wool is a campus waste product. This paper analyzes a collaboration among faculty and students in agriculture, engineering, mathematics, anthropology, folklore, and more on this campus, as well as local community partners, to reclaim this wool—washing, carding, dying, spinning, and knitting and crocheting it—while studying the properties, histories, social structures, and stories of wool and its human uses. This craftivist project (Greer 2003, Corbett 2017) asks participants to see agricultural waste differently, to engage with local community craft histories and practices, to work by hand to better understand the properties of the material, to take a slow approach to creating textiles that can be quickly machine-made while sharing folktales and personal stories of craft textile production. In this work, collaborators seek to shift participants’ relationship to waste products, to share local and indigenous knowledge, to build a shared sense of purpose and understanding across disparate academic disciplines, and to demonstrate the possibilities created through shared conversation over skill development and productive practice.
Tuvalu´s plan to build a digital version of itself and Ursula Poznanski´s dystopian eco-thriller Cryptos (2020), both force us to consider which new forms governments will take in virtual worlds as our planet becomes uninhabitable - and they offer interesting options for fresh North-South dialogues.
Paper long abstract:
Starting point for this paper´s “bi-polar” reflection is Tuvalu´s plan to build a digital version of itself (http://www.tuvalu.tv; https://youtu.be/IWEdkWnVkJo?feature=shared) and Ursula Poznanski´s dystopian eco-thriller Cryptos (2020), which portrays a world in which living in different virtual worlds has become more desirable as most of planet Earth has become uninhabitable due to climate change (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptos_(Roman). Both “hyperreal” events raise a number of interesting questions, for example, what does “peace” mean in the metaverse where jurisdiction and democracy is not as clearly defined?
The “sinking islands of the Pacific” have repeatedly served as an iconic site for global climate crisis discourse. Often, this has led to the spread of counter-productive “othering” narratives, which stimulated climate voyeurism as well as climate tourism (Farbotko 2010). Offering a cultural narratological and eco-translation studies perspective, this contributor wants to explore the possibilities for establishing sustained cross-cultural exchange between Germany and Tuvalu. Presenting insights from the recently concluded “Eine Uni – ein Buch: Die JGU liest Whalerider” (https://eine-uni-ein-buch.uni-mainz.de/), which was quite successful in creating ad hoc connections between students and scholars at the University of Mainz and the University of Dunedin, I hope to enter into fruitful conversation with other participants who have been wayfinding across similar North-South lines.
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