Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17537
Jessica White
At first glance, a review of Iris Ralph’s Packing Death in Australian Literature (2020) does not fit neatly into an issue themed ‘Strange/Letters’, for, as Ralph’s acknowledgements page indicates, this book grew out of the inaugural 2005 conference of ASLEC-ANZ (then known as ASLE-ANZ). However, Ralph’s analysis, which ‘addresses plants and animals in Australia and its literature’ (1), is very much about strangeness if we consider that, until fairly recently, the contemplation of the nonhuman was an unfamiliar approach to Australian literary criticism.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17540
Katherine FitzHywel
This poetic work is a multispecies love letter seeking to make the reader aware of the strange aporia of human ‘love’ for animals.[1] Contradictory human expressions of love, care, indifference, and harm towards animals can be seen in words that change perceptions of animals (as individuals, groups or in general). Consider the changing status of a ‘pet’ cat being discarded and becoming ‘feral’. Is ‘it’ a ‘pest’ to be ‘culled’, not even ‘killed’ or ‘put to sleep’ or can ‘they’ be ‘rescued’? This work explores multiple and conflicting affective outcomes words have on building compassion, understanding and support for animals, or adding to misconceptions which can result in disregard or violent treatment. The words we use to represent animals and express our relationships to them can reduce animals to iconic national symbols and supportive anthropocentric tools, or to draw out the diversity, multiplicity and intrinsic value of animal being and create space for animals in the text. The poem focuses on the contemporary Australian context for the aporia of human love for animals. It grounds the work in place and time by using Australian phrases, idioms, slang, associations, terms and names for animals, plants, and places while concentrating on recent events of bushfires, droughts, floods, and pandemic isolation. It references ongoing Australian settler-colonial practices where human animal entanglements and conflicts are highlighted, including horse racing, hunting, bushwalking, fishing, and farming. Repetition and wordplay are used to amplify, destabilize, complicate, confuse and decentre human perspectives. The method is informed by the fictocritical work of Ania Walwicz in horse utilizing ‘The process of associative thought and reflection. Improvisation and analysis. The flight of thought, a trajectory and reflection, retrieval, recoil. The use of multilevel text comprising poetics, theory and appropriated text’ (5). The poet aims to draw attention to the ways our relationships with animals are constructed and circulated through our use of language which forms an inherently anthropocentric frame of reference. Unresolved contradictions between intimacy and distance in human animal relationships are used to create a space of questioning to provoke thought. Work Cited Walwicz, Ania. horse: A Psychodramatic Enactment of a Fairytale. Crawley, Western Australia: UWAP, 2018. Print. [1]Although encompassing both, ‘animals’ is used here to differentiate ‘animals of different species’ from ‘human animals.’ Terms like ‘nonhuman animals’ and ‘other animals’ are definitions centring humans, in terms of what is not human rather than what are these beings. Words like ‘beast’ also have othering meanings.
{"title":"Setting Fire to the Poetic Correspondence of Multispecies Relationships","authors":"Katherine FitzHywel","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.9.17540","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.9.17540","url":null,"abstract":"This poetic work is a multispecies love letter seeking to make the reader aware of the strange aporia of human ‘love’ for animals.[1] Contradictory human expressions of love, care, indifference, and harm towards animals can be seen in words that change perceptions of animals (as individuals, groups or in general). Consider the changing status of a ‘pet’ cat being discarded and becoming ‘feral’. Is ‘it’ a ‘pest’ to be ‘culled’, not even ‘killed’ or ‘put to sleep’ or can ‘they’ be ‘rescued’? This work explores multiple and conflicting affective outcomes words have on building compassion, understanding and support for animals, or adding to misconceptions which can result in disregard or violent treatment. The words we use to represent animals and express our relationships to them can reduce animals to iconic national symbols and supportive anthropocentric tools, or to draw out the diversity, multiplicity and intrinsic value of animal being and create space for animals in the text. \u0000The poem focuses on the contemporary Australian context for the aporia of human love for animals. It grounds the work in place and time by using Australian phrases, idioms, slang, associations, terms and names for animals, plants, and places while concentrating on recent events of bushfires, droughts, floods, and pandemic isolation. It references ongoing Australian settler-colonial practices where human animal entanglements and conflicts are highlighted, including horse racing, hunting, bushwalking, fishing, and farming. \u0000Repetition and wordplay are used to amplify, destabilize, complicate, confuse and decentre human perspectives. The method is informed by the fictocritical work of Ania Walwicz in horse utilizing ‘The process of associative thought and reflection. Improvisation and analysis. The flight of thought, a trajectory and reflection, retrieval, recoil. The use of multilevel text comprising poetics, theory and appropriated text’ (5). The poet aims to draw attention to the ways our relationships with animals are constructed and circulated through our use of language which forms an inherently anthropocentric frame of reference. Unresolved contradictions between intimacy and distance in human animal relationships are used to create a space of questioning to provoke thought. \u0000Work Cited \u0000Walwicz, Ania. horse: A Psychodramatic Enactment of a Fairytale. Crawley, Western Australia: UWAP, 2018. Print. \u0000[1]Although encompassing both, ‘animals’ is used here to differentiate ‘animals of different species’ from ‘human animals.’ Terms like ‘nonhuman animals’ and ‘other animals’ are definitions centring humans, in terms of what is not human rather than what are these beings. Words like ‘beast’ also have othering meanings. ","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"68 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121021855","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17552
Michael Chew
This paper discusses letters and photo-stories as sites for making strange our familiar relationships with the non-human world, through considering images and methods from the action-research project ‘Portraits of Change’, which explored environmental behaviour change and human/non-human relations through participatory visual dialogue between urban youth in Bangladesh, Australia and China. In particular, it focuses on various themes arising in the exchange of letters and photo-stories created by students through workshops in Dhaka and Melbourne, and how these can both reinforce and challenge our ways of viewing the non-human world. These themes, including health, aesthetics and visuality, also highlighted differing environmental perspectives between youth in majority and minority worlds. The complexity of the multi-sited action-research engagements require methodological adaptations in both the participatory design of the workshops, and analysis of their resulting visual artifacts.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17543
Renee Mickelburgh
French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous says, ‘the book is a letter on the run’ ( White Ink 177) and I too have taken the letters of two Australian women gardeners on the run to create my thesis. I grasped the letters between wildflower illustrator Kathleen McArthur and poet Judith Wright and ran with them. I held them close as I grappled to understand how contemporary Australian women’s digital garden stories might work to create conditions of community and worlds in common. In corresponding about their gardens, the poet and the artist developed a deep friendship that bloomed into a broader conservation ethic and action. Their letters and deep female friendship evolved into a question about how to live in harmony with the more-than human world. They would go on to play vital roles in the protection of places I hold dear: The Great Barrier Reef, K’gari (Fraser Island) and the Cooloola National Park. As I held these letters close and analysed my own thesis findings the world around me suffered increasing, human-caused, environmental catastrophe and I felt myself writing with both love and fury, much like Wright did. I began writing strange letters to Kathleen McArthur, alongside letters to my supervisor Professor Liz Mackinlay. Through these letters I searched for what gardens said and did and felt when they were turned into stories. What happens to garden boundaries in this time of environmental love and loss, and digital connection?
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17544
T. Zettel, Sumugan Sivanesan
The T. Rudzinskaitė Memorial Amateur Lichenologists Society was founded in 2018 by continuing co-chairs Tessa Zettel and Dr. Sumugan Sivanesan at Nida Art Colony on the Curonian Spit, Lithuania, eighth Eco-zone. Named in honour of Tekle Rudzinskaitė, Lithuania’s foremost amateur lichenologist, after 73 years the Society remains dedicated to promoting the love and study of lichen in this galaxy and beyond. Its steadily growing membership of multispecies co-constituents participate in myriad curious forms of research, happenings and publications, collectively exploring speculative narratives and rituals around extinction that take lichen as guide, teacher, poet and friend. In 2091 the liveliest of its many enthusiast-led working groups are the emergent Crystal Radio Lab, the Metta Verse Mutual Aid Space Program (with subsidiary SpaceTime Fab Lab) and the Therolinguistics Reading Group. Periodically the Society publishes a bulletin—in whatever ready context is amenable—updating members on its latest movements; what follows is the 2089 edition, regrettably somewhat delayed. Please click on the links between the written pieces in the newsletter to see the recordings.
T. rudzinskaitje纪念业余地衣学家协会于2018年由Tessa Zettel和Sumugan Sivanesan博士共同主席在立陶宛库尔斯沙嘴的Nida艺术殖民地成立，这是第八个经济区。为了纪念立陶宛最重要的业余地衣学家Tekle rudzinskaitkov而命名，在73年之后，该协会仍然致力于促进对这个星系及其他星系地衣的热爱和研究。它稳步增长的多物种共同组成的成员参与了无数奇怪的研究、事件和出版物，共同探索以地衣为向导、老师、诗人和朋友的关于灭绝的推测性叙述和仪式。2091年，在众多由爱好者领导的工作小组中，最活跃的是新兴的水晶无线电实验室、元诗互助太空计划(包括附属的时空Fab Lab)和语言学阅读小组。协会定期出版一份公报——在任何现成的背景下都可以——向会员通报其最新动向;接下来是2089年的版本，遗憾的是有些延迟。请点击通讯中书面文章之间的链接查看录音。
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17541
Perdita Phillips, Astrida Neimanis
Four pairs of images from the Postcards from the Underground (2022) print series are presented here as experiments in translating invertebrate underground worlds. Artist Perdita Phillips and cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis collaborated to create an interdisciplinary ‘walkshop’ event to the coal mining town of Lithgow, as part of Phillips’ Artsource both/and artist in residence at Artspace, Sydney in 2017. The many forms of stygofauna—small invertebrate animals including worms, mites, snails, insects and many crustacea—can be found in the millimetreswide in-between spaces in groundwater. Short-range endemism is common—due to their distribution in isolated patches beneath semi-arid to rainforest landscapes in Australia—and sporadic relic distribution world-wide. Working between Neimanis’ text and Phillips’ drawings and found images, the conversations with and through stygofauna, underground water and mining were then developed into colour postcards, that use a red/cyan optical masking technique. The images can be decoded with a red filter that is held up to the eye. The previously invisible cyan delineations are then revealed from beneath—alluding to the layers of concern and the double state of both/and—“caught up in both the noticing and notnoticing of each other” that the artist/author were articulating (Neimanis and Phillips 137). The swirling patterns of swimming and the complex fingering of many limbs were rendered into cryptic scores. The postcards explore notions of hiding/revealing and comprehension and miscomprehension of subterranean ecosystems, through the multiple scratchings of the skittering limbs of stygofauna. Phillips, Perdita and Astrida Neimanis. Postcards from the Underground. 2022. Private Collection.
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Pub Date : 2023-07-05DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.9.17542
R. Fetherston
What can nonhuman road trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘roadkill’, teach us about ecological crises and human culpability? Incidents of nonhuman road trauma could be described as strange encounters, revealing the shared trauma of the nonhumans and humans involved while simultaneously highlighting the supposed inevitability of such events. I argue that the choice to check the rearview mirror – to exhibit attentiveness and care in self-reflection – is an act of radical correspondence with the more-than-human. Such correspondence functions as a kind of non-spoken letter to both nonhumans and other human drivers; a letter calling for acts of care and attentiveness that acknowledge the nonhuman experience, mourn losses, and possibly instigate radical change when it comes to how nonhuman road trauma is thought about now and hopefully avoided in future. In her work on the ‘Anthropocene noir’, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of ‘the Anthropocene parallel’ in which humans are spectators of the suffering of nonhumans, and also spectators of a suffering that is our own. Written as both an essay and a personal log of my own experiences with nonhuman road trauma, this work draws on Rose’s idea in an attempt to reconcile the concept of what I term a ‘strange spectatorship’, in which humans observe, are implicated in, and turn away from the phenomenon of nonhuman road trauma and what such trauma reveals about human-nonhuman relations, particularly for settler-colonial Australians. Reflecting on anecdotal experiences as well as the representation of roadkill in Australian literature, I explore the strangeness perceived in how settler-colonial Australians are both actors and spectators in nonhuman road trauma. I grapple with the idea of such trauma as a means of better understanding the settler-colonial impact on Australian natural environments, and the consequences for both humans and nonhumans if we do not better address the ethical and ecological consequences of our modern road infrastructure.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-04DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.8.16684
Perdita Phillips
This paper outlines the experiences of a short artist in residency called Follow the water at the Vancouver Arts Centre in Albany, Western Australia that began in November-December 2018. Investigating the local network of urban and peri-urban drainage, the project was an attempt to reframe drains from what they are normally seen as—of a way of transferring ‘problems’ to elsewhere—into a space of reparative engagement. Intimate, makeshift walks were taken with drain allies along road culverts and agricultural drains and through snaky, polluted and weedy country. Walks were recorded with cyanotypes and a further cyanotype workshop was conducted with the public on the subject of local watercourses. Whilst being attentive to the local stories of water, settler history and regeneration, the project nevertheless attempted to problematise the current quasi-legal and commonplace notions which see the flow of water leaving a property downstream (and downslope) as being ‘not my problem’. In a small way, this art project works through the “impurity of caring” (that acts of caring contain the wish that it were not so (Shotwell), at the same time that they are entangled) with a tactical move that I have termed “porous repair.” It therefore provides a short example of the complications of thinking through water stories using artistic means.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.8.16689
Leighton Upson
Ko te mahinga toi ka hono i te hinengaro, te tinana me te waahi. The practice of art connects mind, body and place. Painting is a great connector of being and place. It can promote strong connection to a particular forest. The process of painting is ideal for thinking with and elaborating an expression of human-plant-life relations. It animates the intensity of every exchange; it is an expression of being with the conditions. Through a painting-based art practice I have become very close to a particular site inside a fragment of an old growth forest named the Rātāpihipihi Scenic Reserve on the edge of Ngāmotu/New Plymouth city. Here, on the west coast of Te Ika-a-Māui, the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. It is in this place that I have spent a number of years painting alongside a group of centuries-old kohekohe (Dysoxylum spectabile), pukatea (Laurelia novae-zelandiae) and tawa (Beilschmiedia tawa) trees. Through the materiality and process of painting and being with these trees, I have come to articulate a concept of forestness. It is a deepening of my art practice as kotahitanga: practising “togetherness with forest.”
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.60162/swamphen.8.16687
Janine Randerson
More-than-human cosmologies, as expressed in contemporary art practice, present a plane for sensing and feeling the extent of the ecological strain on our planet. The relationship between geos, biota and Anthropos is untenable; we are divided by forced climate displacements for humans and the rapid mass extinction for a plethora of flora and fauna. From the intensifying tropical cyclones in Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean in 2019–2020, to the swathes of violently destructive wildfires in Australia and California sparked on occasion by dry lightning and fanned by strong winds, we no longer need scientific projections to hear and feel the shattering signs of climate change. Even the bastions of contemporary art can’t escape the convergence of weather gone awry as art objects and more-than-human waters meet. Venice, where I visited the Japanese Pavilion described in this paper, was later swamped by a deluge of lagoon water during the 58th Art Biennale in 2019. To radically shift our dealings with “others” is an urgent demand from the biota to weather systems, displaced humans and the more-than-human, at a planetary, as well as a situated scale. Keywords: more-than-human cosmologies, contemporary art, tsunami, experimental film, Len Lye, Venice Biennale, Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, weather, planetary energies, Gayatri Spivak
{"title":"Serpents, Tsunami Boulders and Lightning","authors":"Janine Randerson","doi":"10.60162/swamphen.8.16687","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.8.16687","url":null,"abstract":"More-than-human cosmologies, as expressed in contemporary art practice, present a plane for sensing and feeling the extent of the ecological strain on our planet. The relationship between geos, biota and Anthropos is untenable; we are divided by forced climate displacements for humans and the rapid mass extinction for a plethora of flora and fauna. From the intensifying tropical cyclones in Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, the Pacific Ocean in 2019–2020, to the swathes of violently destructive wildfires in Australia and California sparked on occasion by dry lightning and fanned by strong winds, we no longer need scientific projections to hear and feel the shattering signs of climate change. Even the bastions of contemporary art can’t escape the convergence of weather gone awry as art objects and more-than-human waters meet. Venice, where I visited the Japanese Pavilion described in this paper, was later swamped by a deluge of lagoon water during the 58th Art Biennale in 2019. To radically shift our dealings with “others” is an urgent demand from the biota to weather systems, displaced humans and the more-than-human, at a planetary, as well as a situated scale. \u0000Keywords: more-than-human cosmologies, contemporary art, tsunami, experimental film, Len Lye, Venice Biennale, Te Moana-Nui-A-Kiwa, weather, planetary energies, Gayatri Spivak","PeriodicalId":197436,"journal":{"name":"Swamphen: a Journal of Cultural Ecology (ASLEC-ANZ)","volume":"35 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129053626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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