MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS
Exploring Embodiment as a Creative Strategy for Celebrating Intra-Agency and Fostering Regenerative Re-Imagination in the Anthropocene
in progress (since 2024)
The approaches explored and works created under the umbrella of MONSTERS'N'GHOSTS are responses to and challenges of my feelings of intimidation and helplessness in the face of accelerating climate change and environmental degradation. The project takes its name and original inspiration from the interdisciplinary edited collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, and is further spurred by the posthumanist approaches developed in Meeting the Universe Halfway, Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene and Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, among others.
Stepping outside my comfort zone behind the camera lens to enact various modes of embodiment, I seek to create visual counter-environments that open space for regenerative re-imagination amid the multiple toxic symptoms of capitalist insatiability. The works presented here reflect the different approaches I am exploring in a non-linear mode of research-creation. They are expressions of an evolving project and prototypes of a growing body of work.
(Click on images to enlarge.)
For the authors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, "monsters" point to multi-species assemblages that foreground our embeddedness in the webs of life. "Ghosts" in turn, evoke the lingering presences that haunt landscapes marked by past destruction and today's debris. Together, these "creatures of ambivalent entanglement" expose and unravel the phantasmal twin myths of human progress and individuality. In addition, for me, actively acknowledging creatures that commonly qualify as monstrous or ghostly implies transcending entrenched conceptions and tapping into unbiasedness, flexibility, and unconditional empathy instead. Moreover, I think of phenomena that evade the human eye or common sense (or both) − such as quantum effects or molecular biotic processes and principles − as "ghostly" without meaning to suggest that there is anything unreal or otherworldly about them.
To grow intimate with monsters and ghosts, I seek a deeper understanding of − and sensitivity to − the many forms of bodily and ecological embeddedness, intra-action, and multispecies entanglement. I hone my literal and figurative senses to read and respond to the stories etched into human-made ruin and the quiet, enduring miracles of life, and I give shape to these encounters through immersion, exposure, amalgamation, and other embodied practices. By taking artistic risks and welcoming contingency without abandoning pleasure, I make space for work that is vibrant, meaningful, and alive with inspiration. Leaving beaten paths of reasoning by entering affective terrain and exposing myself convey our shared vulnerability and limits of power. At the same time, these gestures signal the regenerative potential that emerges when we shed detachment and passivity and embrace insecurity in order to advocate for resilience, commitment, and care.
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