This week, we turn to a fearless and creative trans-disciplinary explorer of the emerging interplay between violent disappearance and the resplendent shimmer of life within the rhythms of the Sixth Extinction: Anna Tsing.
The below excerpts are relayed from an excellent interview relating to the 2017 publication of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, for which she was a co-editor.
Images are bounced from the website of artist Sadie Memphis Hennessy.
AEON
NANNY STATE
CYTOPLAST
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In closing, a quote from Tsing’s astonishingly inventive 2016 book, The Mushroom at the End of the World:
“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes – the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons – and the elusive autumn aroma.”
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Desperado Philosophy 