[-empyre-] RUDERAL WITCHCRAFT

Thu Nov 7 04:08:48 AEDT 2019

Greetings all,

And WhiteFeather so great you dropped in, and your research sounds amazing.
Magic and witchery as a way of knowing is essential to this conversation --
I am so eager to hear more about your work. It makes me think about:

 - ways of knowing ruin: plants that tell about disturbance, toxins, human
activity, certain peoples
 - ways of knowing the future: plants used in divination like yarrow stalks
for the iChing or yarrow flowers under the pillow, or runes carved into
beech branches; plant behavior as predictive technology
 - ways of knowing our selves and each other, our bodily processes, our
dreams, as vector of exchange...
 - ways of knowing place and relationship, complexity, solidarity

 - healing technology, communication technology, resource exchange

Some other magickal musings:
In between city buildings, in empty lots, in the gaps in the cement, the
squares of soil for street trees and dog shit, on the sides of highways,
and dusty strip malls, in traffic triangles, on the edges of mono-crop
agriculture, between heaving cracks of old post-industrial lots, and
abandoned factories…. evidence of the past 500 years of catastrophe
unfolds. 'Weeds' tear through these interstitial places, rapidly spread
seed, break up or bind together soils, offer nutrients, and play host to
insects and other outcasts of modernity.

We, the inheritors of colonial and capitalist legacies, try not to *see*
these abject/ transitory/ wasted/ intermediary sites as anything other than
an unpleasant interruption in our journey to another, “better,” place. When
we do encounter these places with any kind of pragmatism, it is with an eye
to take it back in time or to advance it forward -- both imaginary
temporalities that breed more wasteland. See Walter Benjamin’s IX theses in
Theses on the Philosophy of History. These wastelands are born of
catastrophes that have harsh temporalities at their core: future
temporalities that privilege progress and an emancipatory future, and that
wax nostalgic for an untouched nature of the past that never grieves the
violence and devastation of colonization. Our unfolding and cascading
catastrophe is born of denial. Denial of difference, of reciprocity, of the
moral claims of the past. And yet, the very ruins most of us wish to evade
are waiting to be noticed, waiting for us to reckon with weeds, toxins,
boulders, pasts -- in resistance, solidarity, recuperation, relationship,
reciprocity.

So ruderal witchcraft might have an important intervention into time and
speed. Can we slow down time with this work?

M

--
beforebefore.net
--

On Tue, Nov 5, 2019 at 4:23 PM Marisa Prefer <marisa at pioneerworks.org>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> So excited to be in conversation here- many thanks, Margaretha, Oliver and
> others, for inviting a feral multi-species-ness to convene in this digital
> space in a time when the relationships between physical and ethereal matter
> feels increasingly slippery.
>
> I am slowly gathering steam that builds around this waxing moon in
> Capricorn; I write from a low-lying seaside community in Red Hook,
> Brooklyn; near the harbor where we recently gathered to honor the ocean
> waters in this seventh year after strong floods (unprecedentedly for our
> times) blanketed streets and sidewalks. Are they not simply waters in
> pursuit of reclaiming their home, that has been concretized by humankind?
> Much of Red Hook is built on landfill, atop a salt marsh estuary that was
> once full of the 'native' Salt meadow cordgrass, or spartina.
>
> Spartina now blankets many of the wetlands across the eastern US, and is
> feared as an 'invasive', although it is often also endemic to nearby
> regions where it stands. It thrives alongside polluted wetlands, spreading
> by its roots, sending signals to encourage microbial life below ground. The
> linguistic demarcation of binaries (native v. invasive) as related to
> control or valuation / eradication of plant beings sets a tone similar to a
> common us vs. them dynamic, a reminder of the structural logic that was
> employed by the cultural purges of the early modern European witch-hunts,
> and is all too familiar in American politics around gender and cultural
> variances. Though humans have created drug compounds extracted from
> phytochemicals found within plants, we do not know them by their names. The
> hemorrhaging of connective tissue between consuming and experiencing plants
> is a wound that can (must) be treated, locally.
>
> In searching for the incantatory amongst the edges; I find many of the
> plants that APRIORI has created signs for– in the slivers of soil in
> sidewalks and alongside street side tree-pits. This landscape that has been
> re-inundated with saltwater is, in its seventh year, full of ruderal plant
> magic - a derelict ecotone where plastic bags soaked with pet dander cling
> to Knotweed, Mugwort, and Plantain whose roots exude organic compounds into
> soil helping to bind carbon from the atmosphere. Empty lots radiate with
> this intermingling; Seaside goldenrod, Jimson weed, Mullein, Evening
> primrose - which all thrive in sandy, disturbed, salty soils, are
> "following us" as armenian-american writer, activist, herbalist, and one of
> my dear teachers, Rosemary Gladstar says of her favorite plant beings (the
> 'weeds')– they're ones that are right there when and because we need them.
>
> I cultivate the 'weeds' that live in the streets of my neighborhood-
> growing them in rich humus in raised beds far from immobile heavy-metal
> contaminants that lie dormant within human-altered soils of Red Hook's once
> fertile red clay- (for which it gathered its name) to make decoctions with
> their leaves, stems, fruits, roots and seeds. Many of these plant elixirs
> are macerating on my shelf, waiting to be strained for next year's
> allergies, inflammation, coughs and infections. I share them with fellow
> city dwellers; neighbors, friends, and strangers. I believe that the term
> 'weeds' is more of a descriptor for a human's state of mind than a name for
> a category of plant- an act of deeming a plant who is growing where a human
> wishes they wouldn't. But feel it is important to recognize how humans have
> demoralized them merely for holding this transitory space, the queers and
> in-betweens who reclaim the streets as a vibrant, messy places for all
> kinds of phenotypes to gather.
>
> To cultivate the 'weeds' might be seen as an unpopular tactic, eschewing
> the neat and narrow rows of kale and brussels sprouts, (is it me, or did
> brussels get a PR team this year like kale did back in 2010?) but perhaps
> it is those who hold the hold the powers to thrive amidst, that are the
> technologies (and are extracted for use in our technologies) who remind us
> of the presence of magic within all beings.
>
> I aim to practice the work of taking more time sensing in these 'weedy'
> spaces, - for feeling the prickliness of Japanese hops as they catch on my
> skin, sending me nerve-numbing medicine as I try to pull them from the
> fence. As the spines of get stuck in our arms and fingers, can we be (with)
> them, embodied at the edges– before pulling them out?
>
>
> *Marisa Prefer *
> *(they, them, their)invisiblelabor.org <http://invisiblelabor.org/>*
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 11:13 PM Oliver Kellhammer <okellhammer at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>> Yes to the 'rudeness' and category-defying ferality! One of the things
>> that can be maddening to purists is the Interzone between the ruderal and
>> indigenous, the hyper-ecologies that self assemble into novel ecosystems. I
>> have fond memories of stumbling through a Superfund site next to the
>> Willamette River near Portland and coming upon the indigenous Madrone and
>> Cottonwood trees growing cheek to cheek with Paulownia and Robinia.
>> Red-tailed hawks and western fence lizards took advantage of the thermal
>> opportunities afforded by weedy expanses of abandoned pavement, while
>> homeless folks made funeral pyres of salvaged electrical wire with which to
>> burn off the insulation before selling it for recycling. Yet toxins were
>> leaching into the water table and the fish were too contaminated for
>> healthy consumption.
>>
>> The ruderal may be empowering but not perhaps for those that ruined it.
>> Yet the ruderal is playing out a longer game of earth repair that may or
>> may not include us.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 10:57 PM WhiteFeather <
>> whitefeather.hunter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>>> Hello, empyrites!
>>> I can't express how excited I am to see this topic of discussion come up
>>> here, and to learn from you in this shared space, about what magic and
>>> witchcraft mean from your different contexts and positions. My current PhD
>>> research is very much centred in practice-based (witch)craft, in
>>> relationship with biotechnology (I have a practical background in cellular
>>> and microbiology), and of course with a very keen eye on feminist
>>> witchcraft historians such as Federici, also Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre
>>> English before her, as well as favourite feminist technophile philosophers,
>>> such as Donna Haraway, and very (most?) importantly, other (bio)tech-witch
>>> practitioners.
>>>
>>> I'm very much interested in 'troubling' scientific narratives and
>>> methodologies through practice and philosophy, where they historically and
>>> contemporaneously intersect with mammalian bodies/selves especially, but
>>> also expanding this to better reflect multiple senses of
>>> other-worldliness--including deviants, hybrids and more-than-mammals (for
>>> example, microbes essential to the nutrient uptake and growth of our plant
>>> foods/medicines as well as those that emerge, feeding on and reducing
>>> toxicity in spaces such as the 'ruderal').
>>>
>>> What a magnificent word ruderal is, for it contains the word, *rude*.
>>>
>>> Some of the most rude experiences I've had in the field have been with
>>> regards to confronting ideologies around ecosystems and “protected”
>>> (pristine/pure) areas, particularly where privileged systems of knowledge
>>> production influence policy that restricts, undermines and suppresses
>>> lived/embodied/anecdotal knowledges, when those knowledges run counter to
>>> capitalist imperatives. I can expand more on these experiences later where
>>> there is interest or opportunity.
>>>
>>> So looking forward to reading everything,
>>> WhiteFeather Hunter
>>> :::she/her:::
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
>>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> http://www.oliverk.org
>> twitter: @okellhammer
>> mobile: 917-743-0126
>> skype: okellhammer
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
>> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
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