Interspecies Intimacies

Click on images in galleries below to view full image

Apocalypse of the Familiar: Revealing Taken-for-Granted Consumer Habits,
Part II

The two Apocalypse of the Familiar videos are works-in-progress. For the first section of the indoor projections’ video, I chose silent audio to emphasize the alignment between fibershed consciousness and our repurposed, tiny home—mutual manifestations of living ones’ ecological ethics through co-mingling beauty and politics. The audio for the second section is that of the ever-present rustling of the mylar VHS dress loops. I transposed this audio onto the outdoor yak video to highlight the collision between our fibershed community in relation to the extraordinarily toxic textile industry and digital-technology-obsessed societies that have resulted in so much suffering and death.

The visual story of the yaks and VHS dress ends with two conclusions: 1. The extended rustling after the images disappear demonstrates how plastics will be on this planet long after humans. 2. Non-human ecosystems in conjunction with traditions of interspecies intimacies (a kinship commons) will overcome anthropocentric tyrannies. We end as we began—in silence. These videos and stills demonstrate how bioregional symbiotic relationships can disrupt extractive economies rooted in settler colonialism. They are apocalyptic in that they reveal the contradictions of weaving the embodied-energy stories of synthetic and natural objects—reminiscent of ecotheologian, Thomas Berry recognizing objects as subjects: “We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.”