Sustainability has many meanings, implications and layers. It must be alive and allowed to live in our environments so that it can thrive. There is no one perfect specific manual or recipe to be followed when living sustainably. When it is alive, each experience, element and attempt in and for sustainability is never the same. Each specific time, space, process and environment is different. Therefore, what one can do is reflect and draw from unique, concrete examples from those that have and are living it. And thereupon, imbibe elements that can be learned from, tested and transformed towards a current and relevant sustainable practice. Here is a well spring of inspirational sources that can been drawn upon in order to grow together within a wider deeper rhizome of connections.

I have to get lost...muddle and entangled in these themes and subjects. This is how I can test, play and discover how they work in daily life. What connections are made, how things unfold, fall apart or come together, for me and those around me. To live it is to know it and understand it. It's my life's game! However, I don't stand alone! I'm aware that what I do has a rippled affect, however big or small that might be, in the larger organism of life.

The Creole Garden

“It was a place known only to them, to keep the produce out of the hands of thieves, which they had invented, and we have since lost, was that in a very narrow space, they were able to grow dozens of different types of trees, different scents, coconuts, yams, oranges, pines, clementine’s, etc. they did it in such a way that the plans mutually protected each other. It was the essence of the Creole Garden. This principle of the Creole Garden is the same as the principle of rhizomes. It’s not the principle of the tree, or the genealogical tree. It’s the principle of distribution.”

(Edouard Glissant: One World in Relation)

Wiggling roots extending a rhizome of mutual support.

“Meeting across requires mutual stretching. Until you can hear me, our strengths will not be available to each other.” “We reach the bridge, shall we cross?” - Audrey Lord

I desire to create change within the arts, where, how and what are always the questions that come up. To let things be open, playful and platforms for change, planning seeds, nurturing them and over time seeing the results. This growth can go in many directions a lot that is not anticipated, this is as a result from responding to the current way of working and the external input given and drawn from what is already happening. This then takes the growth and artwork into another direction, all within the same context though, and yet flowering in new forms. It’s a farmer’s job and there is also room for design, experimentation and creativity based off of the basics that is already known and researched. Like those who cut and paste parts of plants and trees together to get new results, hybrids and new strains. Inventing from what is already there, studying, researching and transforming to make new relevant ecological art projects.

(Click here to read more about my attempts in this matter.)

"Ultra-red members have come to define “social practices” in ways that diverge sharply from contemporary art discourse. Once we understand “social practices” within a framework of struggle, it becomes immediately clear that one’s participation is not based on authorship of a social practice. Rather, a practice, if it is “social,” has no individual author." (Kyle Mckinley - Don't Rhine In Terms of Participation 2016 Social Practice and Social Reproduction)

Common
Common people, common room, a room with a view, room for one and room for all who are in this room? How long is the room? Duration and endurance, it takes time to be to become… Become what and who? with whom or for whom? Enter this room, speak in this room, read this room, question the room.

It’s about care, not control!

A personal exercise

“Take a second, take a little time to find something that each person really cares about. Something that matters. It doesn’t matter if it's big or little but something that matters. And how from that one proposes building a connection for a revolutionary terrestrial subject. How one proposes building the connectivity which can be part of transformation.” 50:24

“It’s about thinking about the entanglement that is the earth. And being responsible, cultivating the capacity of response. Being response - able. That cultivating the capacity of response. The connectedness our responsibilities to and for each other by have multiple consciousness within Gaia…”

Donna Harraway - 29:40mins

Staying with parts, projects, problems or characters and imaging and work together with all the possibilities… outcomes…connections and long-term results.

8th-05-2021
When walking with student from the young innovators program from the University of Utrecht and chatting with one of their teachers, our conversation led to the topic that there are specific ecologies within each social and sustainable project that the students were interacting with. The need for longevity for the student’s participation in these types of projects, in order to benefit of both parties to grow roots and take their own specific shape and form, came to light. This is for a few reasons. Each project has its own unique circumstances and by sticking with a project over a longer period of time, one has the opportunity to look at the local and specific setting and really find the specific areas that need attention. The students and the project team can work together to actualise ideas, see the results of the choices made and evaluate its outcome. This is preferred rather than a constant flux of opinions, suggestions and broad solutions being proposed constantly by passing through parties that have their own short-term agendas and perspectives. These can be good but it’s also by having a sense of responsibility to sit with a project for a longer time frame and working through and with the all the realities that have to be tackled. It’s here that both parties can grow together into their strengths and the experience and project can eventually be passed on from one generation to another. It is the same way a gardener would handle a sapling; the sapling needs to sit in a certain place for a period of time in order for its roots to grow strong enough before it can be moved to another location. If it’s constantly shifted around within the garden it will eventually die because its roots haven’t grown strong enough to absorb a constant source of nutrients. It takes time for these roots to grow strong enough so that the plant can hold it up in a lager plot of land or an open space where it can stand on its own. The natural growth needs time to find its symbioses within the larger ecosystem in order for the plant to thrive on the long-term. So, when working with a diverse project, doesn’t mean that things should always have to be in flux, rather some continuity mixed in the core of things is what contributes to and sustains a project in the long run. The results of which will be a deeper understanding of the intricacies of what it entails to create a wholesome project thereby also offering the participating students and partners the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding, meaning of these realities. A good example of this is artists Claudy Jongstra.

Shifting binary, procreation and family connections of trees…

"I began to wonder: If the artistic work required in order to collectively celebrate, to communicate without words, to draw, to dance, to sing, to build shared symbols and imagined futures, to raise children, to clean homes, to collect the garbage, to grow food, to heal, to learn, and to connect is not compensated or supported, how does it continue? Life is sustained by gift giving, by mutual aid, by lending, and by informal exchanges.

I learned that this idea — giving power and compensation to the labor that sustains life — is called the solidarity economy, and that it emerged from the global South in the 1990s, as economia solidária to describe economic practices and models which advance values of democracy, mutualism, cooperation, ecological sustainability, justice, and reciprocity." Caroline Woolard

“We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us.
So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”
Andy Goldsworthy

Working with time, nature and temporality...

Click here for the references

Circle That

Bless Ya Belly

The Traveling Farm Museum