Paper short abstract:

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.