Children and trees
1. Insects and trees are something related. We talked about mosquitos and bees living in trees. Also streams and bridges and slides. Trees are related to activity.
2. Trees shelter you and bugs sit in trees. Cockroaches and spiders encircle them. Trees are for day dreaming and also for shelter and shade and picnics and running and tag and hide and seek.
3. Trees are spaces for meditation, wishes and blossoms. They might have fruit. They contain and encircle us and also provide something to go up into and sit in.
Following on from our conversation about new materialism and trees I am wondering if we could start writing about trees, but drawing on some of the children's ideas, and write some of it with them, using our Research Creation article as a starting point?
This could also be another team blog - I haven't been on the Trees200 but I will go on now and have a read. Hope it goes well today - don't let the bugs bite.
PS This post is from a Calder valley event going on at Half Term. Several people sent it to me and thought this was our project, which is interesting, given that its in Manchester. But it is about children and trees.
I think what new materialism affords is the rational too talk about trees as part of a shared and flattened material world without the inherent problems of anthropomorphism. From Bennet we have the idea of a life force and from Barad the notion of the apparatus from which there is noi separation. Simply trees and animals and also inanimate things such as stones and biscuits all exist in the same plane and as with old school materialism there is nothing beyond this - god or human subjectivity cognition or the Id. Problematically though when ever we talk about it for example - what does a tree feel - doing verbatim theater with trees , especially through the traditions of story telling there is a tendency to make the trees like us- not for us to become forest but for the trees to become human. Deep ecology and planet first are probably more aligned to new materialism as a political orientation. The reason it can't really work within our trees project at least at a foundational level is that all our work is very human centered. This is driven not only by the projects priorities but the nature of an interdisciplinary research project with the clash of ontology. This means that if we try and bring a new materialist orientation it can only really be understood from a humanistic perspective which is where most people sit, some in a very unquestioning habitus others from a political and ethical well considered position. However much we want to bring in an eco feminist new materialism without the anchors and perhaps the recognition of dominant epistemology within disciplinary approaches what we do will be understood from the prospective of the people doing it who may not be willing to abandon a humanist approach at a time when it feels more important that ever in relation to species survival.
ReplyDeleteI think research creation within this project is about creating open ended quilting points where people are brought closer together without having to become other - these points such as the tree 200 and the film and perhaps walks together to local trees are open ended and what comes out of them will be new and collective. If we were to think about how to introduce new materialism as a concept through research creation intervention then I think we would need to go to the scholars who use it within their work as a way of understanding the world and encourage them to think about how to help create a vocabulary where the thinking does not get put in a pigeon hole - the I know what this is box. Or gets used without a full understanding of the foundations of this way of thinking. I asked Johan about it once and he said he is a humanist and proud of it - I think this is why I can't really embrace the new materilialism as it requires a level opf giving up that I'm not willing to do.