Planting Seeds

Flying House

Green Gate 17

On once woody branches, translucent tendrils and the softest of leaves emerge. Even the most reluctant of trees are budding out. The days are getting longer and some of us can lift our heads a little higher. Despite small signs of life’s persistence, something is gnawing at us that we can’t ignore.

As the scope of social and biological devastation has broadened, the tactics employed to bring this destruction about have diversified. The margin for creative self-expression has decreased as threats to populations and landbases have expanded, limiting dialogue and action around these issues. The response generated in both mainstream and radical narratives only seems to create a negative symbiosis with the expanding devastation. The call and response between the dominant culture and radical narratives moves us very little. We find ourselves looking for inspiration.

People look for meaning, spirituality, and guidance in a myriad of ways. Some of these attempts are obviously fulfilling, while others are not. Why does it make some of us so uncomfortable when people wholeheartedly try to reconstruct “a  indigeneity?

Another way people – including some of our anarchist friends – try to make sense of history is through anthropology. It outrages us that people who have been torn from their culture have sometimes had to reconstruct stories, customs, and languages with the superimpositions of academia. Anthropology is a tragic byproduct of capitalist colonialism which we don’t want to reproduce here. We want people to tell their own stories because we know objectivity is a farce. In a world where anthropology’s truth is a given, we want to make space for something different.

In this exhibit “Planting Seeds” discusses the importance of a search for one’s own spirituality and talks about what a relationship to a landbase can actually look like.

This also continues with themes of autonomous, land-based, lived anarchy, and the differences we sees within indigenous and anarchist approaches to occupations. We will continue discussion on these themes in projects to come.

This project, as we’ve stated already and will continue to reiterate, is an experiment with time and conversation. We are alarmed that something as basic as conversation is being stripped away. Our relationships are mediated by lit screens and character counts, just the latest tools of domestication, making further demands on our time and removing the wonder that human animals once enjoyed through experience and experimentation.

When we say, time and time again, we are looking for your thoughts on these topics and others close to your heart.

We will continue what we started here, while this can result in a stilted dialogue, it’s a dialogue worth having. We encourage viewers to savor the slowness and contemplation of storytelling, of letting ideas mull over and become new ones over time in the context of face-to-face conversation. And so we carve out a small hole and plant some seeds, dreaming that this experiment may germinate into new ideas, because alone and disconnected, we are lacking.

Until the leaves fall,