Possible Sites

While Meg and Zephyr have been tending the Artist as Family's home garden, Patrick has been in Sydney looking at possible sites to plant the Food Forest. At one point today he was captivated by how wild nature goes about reclaiming urban environments to build habitat.

The following act of self-seeded brilliance is occurring at about 40cm above street level. The spider is a trusty companion, ready to gobble unwanted pests. Competition is often heralded as the main gig in evolution, but co-dependancy and cooperation are as much a part of evolutionary life. Working together and sharing resources and environments is key to interspecies survival.

Later in the day, Patrick and MCA curator Anna Davis arrived at CarriageWorks where they met with the executive producer Jamie Dawson who showed them a couple of possible sites. CarriageWorks is such a beautifully loaded locality that brings with it an enthusiastic community that is showing much support for our project. However, it's a difficult site in terms of planting a forest outdoors, and the awesome space indoors, with great overhead light wells and rain collection opportunities, would sadly restrict the movement of helpful pollinators and predators – lizards, bees, spiders and frogs – into the forest. Jamie and his team would be great to work with, so we're remaining very open.

Next stop: St Michael's church in Surry Hills.

A community member, Heide, living near to the church, contacted the MCA when she heard our project was looking for a home, and mentioned St Michael's as a possible site. Dotted around the world church grounds are currently being transformed into community gardens, which makes good sense as there are often soup kitchens being run from them, and fresh organic produce goes hand in hand with such great initiatives. Also, old churches such as St Michael's generally have 'clean' soil from which heavy metals are absent. Not that a combination of the right plants, compost, biomass, fungi and microbial life couldn't detoxify the soil organically.

We are working with the MCA on a proposal tonight, which will be taken to the church Warden meeting tomorrow night.

There's one or two other things worth noting here before we sign off. Here's a link to William Blake's The Garden of Love, which has been a precursory text for our Food Forest and for Patrick's presentation this coming Friday as part of Open Fields at UTS. Blake's poem is a kind of elegy for a lost erotic Eden; a lament about that which became divided. Rev Frances at St Michael's mentioned Eden too when we briefly met with him today. David Graeber (2007, p23), in a much broader context, bares this fruit on the subject:

Sexual relations, after all, need not be represented as a matter of one partner consuming the other; they can also be imagined as two people sharing food.

If you're in the area on Friday, come by and say g'day to Patrick at UTS. We'd love to hear your tips on what specifically keeps your garden or local environment full of wild love and reciprocity.

Compare This:

"No, no, no sickness really, only clean one. Because they lived on wild honey and meat. They have been living on bush tucker. Nothing. No tea, no sugar, no ice-cream or lollies, nothing. Only been living on bush honey, bush tomatoes, bush raisins, edible seeds and grass seeds. Any kind of seeds. They lived on yams. No sickness. Nothing, all good. Nothing, they were good living in them days. They only got sick from a cold. Only catching a cold, that's all. No more. No sickness, nothing. Because they living on different food. Yeah, different food bush tucker".

Joe, Ali Curung elder, NT, from Message Stick, series 12, episode 11: The Artists of Ali Curung, ABC iview, April, 2010.

With this:

"According to the archaeological evidence, [early] farmers were more likely than hunter-gatherers to suffer from dental-enamel hypoplasia – a characteristic horizontal striping of the teeth that indicates nutritional stress. Farming results in a less varied and less balanced diet than hunting and gathering does... Farmers were also more susceptible to infectious diseases such as leprosy, tuberculosis and malaria as a result of their settled lifestyles... Dental remains show that farmers suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers' cereal-heavy diets were reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed. Life expectancy...also fell... The settled farmers are invariably less healthy than their free-roaming neighbours. Farmers had to work much longer and harder to produce a less varied and less nutritious diet, and they were far more prone to disease".

Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, Atlantic Books, 2009.

With this:

"We want to bring together in this work current ecological philosophies and permaculture activisms, and show the corresponding ties with pre- or less mediated societies – societies who have possessed a land-based intelligence devoid of anxiety, self-harm, material entitlement, depression, food disorders, self-loathing, alienation, hypochondria, mood disorders, cancer, tooth decay, mental illness, diabetes, organised violence, memory loss (or blindness to violence), division of labour and subsequent ecological estrangement".

The Artist as Family, more notes on the Food Forest, April, 2010.

Rocks, logs and leaf litter

Some notes on the food forest:

1. Create many habitats for predators, such as lizards and frogs.

2. Create a site of intense biodiversity – flora and fauna – to help allay pests.

3. Allow fruit, nuts and berries not consumed by humans or non-humans to be left to compost on the forest floor.

4. Allow plants to seed, fruit and regenerate naturally by open pollination.

5. The food produced must remain uncapitalised and free from pesticides and other synthetics.

6. The intent of the forest is to trigger a foraging vibe for humans and non-humans local to the site.

7. To design the forest so it becomes self operating, self feeding and self watering.

8. Combine indigenous and exotic flora.

9. Create a 'green pharmacy' with many herbs.

10. Plant companion plants in close proximity to one another.

11. Bring in much biomass, top soil and compost to help create an organic base for the site.

12. This work is a fabrication, an artwork, based upon biomimicry. It participates in what it represents: a reunion of the conceptual with the corporeal; the mind with the body; man with woman; human with non-human; food with ecology; poetics with pragmatism.

Letter of support from David Holmgren

My support for this project comes from my expertise in the sustainability of our food supply system and positive design based responses at the household and community level that rebuild local, low impact ways of providing food. David Holmgren.

Read on by clicking on this image.

Invitation formally accepted

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New pioneers, old future

The ontological shift for an ecologically sustainable future has much to gain from the worldviews of ancient civilisations and diverse cultures which survived sustainably over the centuries. Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development

Thanks for this Detroit link, Anna. We've now watched Requiem for Detroit too. Bonza!

Open Fields

Please come along to this if you're in Sydney on April 30. Patrick will be outlining our project to date.

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For more info go to Open Fields.

A Direct Action

The problem with so much of the art we see today is that it is reduced to the symbolic; it is a mediation, and is not really of the world.

What we are trying to do with our food forest project is say: abstracted life has lost its appeal, it has caused too much division and separation. With a forest of food as a public art work, we aim to show how art can again be of the world, a part of it and not merely a symbol of it. It can put back in, not just take and make waste.

Our systems, based on growth capital, have failed – resource wars, divided society, pollution, class wars, mental illness, alienation – and however glaringly obvious the fact of all this is, the level of denial remains in the symbols that surround us. Be they on billboards, television, online or in galleries, our symbolic medias are powerful and manipulative, they collectively report back to us that we are advanced and thoughtful people who can live in a world unrelated to the microbial world below our feet. This is ecological disembodiment, and the ramifications for this separated, abstracted life are proving to be disastrous for the planet.

As a mass culture we have been flattered by a sense of our own progress and sophistication, and artists and ad people have worked hard to keep this middle-class myth alive, but beyond the seductive veneers and images, progress, and the mediation of progress, is concretely killing us.

If we are to re-embed ourselves in the cycles of wild nature, and by doing so have a chance at surviving what lies for us on the horizon, then our symbolic and domesticated states have to be confronted. Our symbolic, mediated, head-only orientations require interventions by our bodies, and those things that are essential to life – air, water, food, soil, dynamic ecology, habitable climate – become again the things most highly valued and respected.

The project of world peace, to think big, is the project of dismantling the spells of mediation, symbol and image that annul, disempower and calibrate us to the dominant ideology.

Art requires a direct action that's no longer ironising and cowardly, no longer self-conscious, anxious or innovative, but rather real and essential; a re-embodiment of natural systems.

A Food Forest

As a result of the project we did in Newcastle, we are very excited to share the news that we have been invited to participate in the In the balance: art for a changing world show at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney from 19 August to 23 November 2010.

In preparation for our project, we have visited Sydney twice in the last month. The first time we travelled by plane, but after measuring our carbon footprint between Melbourne and Sydney we decided to travel by car on interstate journeys henceforth; by bike on local journeys and by bus, train and tram on any subsequent journeys. In fact we have made the decision never to fly again until air travel is fuelled by non-polluting renewable resources.

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The project we have proposed for the MCA is a community food forest. Although we will have a presence in the gallery for the show, the main part of our work will comprise fruit and nut trees planted amongst vegetation that is indigenous to Sydney; bush plants that the Cadigal, the traditional owners of the inner Sydney city region, relied on for food.

As you can imagine, one of the most important elements of a project like this is finding the right location. On our last two Sydney trips, we have ventured all over the city in search of just the right site.

We visited Murralappi, the Settlement Neighbourhood Centre,

Frog Hollow,

Fred Miller Park,

and numerous other parks, but the one we have our fingers crossed the most for is Ward Park, in Surry Hills.

This is the corner of the park we hope to plant out. It's roughly 300sqm.

Before we drove home, we went to Ward Park once more to measure up

to pick up rubbish

to sketch our proposed food growing area

and to imagine the nearby residents looking down at the forest to see what fruit is in season.

Mapping Our Menu

For the next three years, Patrick will be a student again, undertaking research for his doctoral thesis in the areas of ecology and poetics. Part of his research is to document our family's transition from being oil dependent to as self-sufficient as we can be in terms of water, energy and food.

We have solar panels, water tanks and bikes. But what about our food?

We have been spending a lot of time in the garden talking about what it will take for our family to become self-sustaining in terms of what we eat. So, to determine how far we have to go, we decided to mark the beginning of our journey by spending 24 hours eating the food we have growing here in our garden or provided by our chickens, and the public food we are able to forage locally. No salt and pepper, no butter, oil or any condiments. We only drank our own rain water. We didn't drive anywhere all day and we didn't spend any money.

7:06 am
7:08 am
7:10 am
7:13 am
7:20 am
7:26 am
9:32 am
9:35 am
9:48 am
11:07 am
11:35 am
11:45 am
12:39 pm
12:44 pm
1:24 pm
5:12 pm
7:46 pm
7:50 pm
8:13 pm
8:27 pm
As you can see, we by no means went hungry, though we all lacked energy throughout the day, had headaches at one time or another, and felt lackluster.

Patrick: I experienced a mild depression along with a headache. As the head gardener in the Artist as Family, I know how much work it takes to generate our own food, and this challenge - or experiment - really emphasised the enormous task we have of becoming self-sufficient.

Zephyr: Just before lunch I had a nap!! I haven't done that since I was three years old.

Meg: I had a meeting to attend in the afternoon. While I was sitting in it, I couldn't help but feel that the issues that were being discussed that I normally feel are vital and worth discussing, were completely irrelevant compared to the imperative issue of finding food for one's self and one's family.

40% of greenhouse gases come from industrial agriculture (supermarket food): pesticides, fertilisers, tractors, harvesters, packaging, transportation, refrigeration, lighting etc. Food prices are only going to rise courtesy of peak oil. Communities that start to plan for energy descent now will be better off in the long run. What the Artist as Family is learning, is that relocalisation is a several year transition.

17 Days

Well, our residency has come to an end. In 17 days, we have collected much rubbish and many friends. We love Newcastle and are sorry to leave, though we are looking forward to returning to our community, our garden and our chickens. To everybody we met, thank you for making us feel so welcome, and to everybody who followed our journey on this blog, thank you so much for your support.

But before we bid you adieu for now, we hope you enjoy this short film about our time here. Until next time, signing off, The Artist as Family.

Thirsty Work

Now that our Lock-Up exhibition has been and gone, today we relaxed somewhat. Meg and Zeph took to the streets on their bikes as sightseers and Patrick worked on the film.

The lady behind the counter of the kiosk at Newcastle Main Beach told us that the local council asked them not to sell any drinks in glass as they are likely to end up smashed and injuring someone. So instead they only sell plastic bottles that get left on the sand or placed into one of the many bins that go straight to landfill sites without being sorted. It's a lose-lose situation.

Today as we navigated the beaches and streets, we were very impressed at how many water bubblers we came across – a fantastic council initiative to encourage people to rehydrate without having to pay money for a disposable bottle.

The Bins Full

We were in the Newcastle Herald today! Here is the photo that accompanied the article:

After breakfast, we donned latex gloves and began the task of sorting our accumulated waste: recyclable, non-recyclable, and organic matter.

We had set aside the weekend to disassemble our collection, though in 6 hours we had finished; the bins full, the exercise yard swept clean.

It was Zeph's job to gather and flatten all the cans. So after lunch, he and Patrick biked the 4 kilograms of aluminium to Hunter Recyclers where Zeph received $5 for his efforts (with which he bought a block of dark chocolate he generously shared with us elders).

Meanwhile, Meg was kicking back at the Loft Youth Venue, not far from the Lock-Up, where she gave a blogging workshop to a great group of students.

If you live locally and were planning to come down to see our show over the weekend, we're sorry, but the show is no longer. But stay tuned to these www's, as our short film about our residency will be screening here shortly.

Mottainai!

With three days left of our residency, our two main tasks are to process the waste we have gleaned in the best way we can, and to finish making the short creative documentary of our time here.

Here is a sneak peak from the film so far:

This afternoon, journalist Greg Ray and photographer Jonathan Carroll, from the Newcastle Herald came to the Lock-Up to interview us and photograph our expanding waste line. In the beginning of our stay, two and a half weeks in Newcastle seemed like a long time. Seeing all the rubbish we have collected through Jonathan's and Ray's eyes, we were able to see how much we had collected in a slightly objective way and we were filled with an aching regret that our culture's consumption leaves us with so much waste that can't be reused.

The Japanese call this mottainai, a term that Wikipedia defines as:

"...a sense of regret concerning waste when the intrinsic value of an object or resource is not properly utilised." The expression Mottainai! can be uttered alone as an exclamation when something useful, such as food or time, is wasted.

Going Backwards

From today's Age:

State's rubbish heap becoming a mountain

Recycling has gone backwards in Victoria for the first time this century, with an increase in organic waste being dumped into landfill, and mountains of glass sitting unprocessed at recycling plants.

While households are becoming more recycling conscious, the amount of some types of commercial and construction waste being re-processed has fallen sharply.

Recycling of organic rubbish - forestry waste, garden clippings and food - fell 20 per cent in 2007-08, according to a Victorian Recycling Industries survey. The drop was 14 per cent for glass and 4 per cent for construction and demolition waste.

The drop ends a decade of rapid growth for the recycling industry.

More organic waste in landfill poses a second problem - boosting greenhouse gas emissions. When massed in landfill it emits methane, a greenhouse gas about 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Environment Victoria campaigner Fraser Brindley said recycling had been hit by two events: the financial crisis affecting demand for recycled goods and State Government policies not supplying the incentive to boost recycling.

The rest here.

Never Mind

Our camera stopped working yesterday, a terrible thing to happen to a family of bloggers. This image is one of the last shots we took of our pile before it flipped out.

This morning we biked to a service centre from where we are hoping to hear good news. The technician we spoke to said she would do her best, though she was hesitant to say she could fix it, because it is six years old.

"Why spend money fixing an old camera when you can spend less getting a brand new model?" She asked. A valid question. If you are talking about the cost of things in dollars.

"Because we subscribe to the Repair Manifesto," we told her.

"I'm glad there are people like you," she smiled. "Otherwise I'd be out of a job."

As we left the service centre and pedalled towards the beach, we all agreed that that Repair should be added to the Reduce. Reuse. Recycle trinity. We can definitely see the merit of the first two actions, but the third? It's no wonder it features so far down the waste hierarchy:

When people choose to buy bottled water instead of soft drinks, the individual health benefits may be high, but the energy spent and pollution created to drink (or eat) anything from disposables has a great societal toll, regardless of what the vessel holds.

Every day as we bend to pick up forlorn plastic bottles on whichever beautiful beach we are on, we marvel at the complete lack of care exhibited by those who litter. But today on the beach, as we collected we talked about people, ourselves included, who buy packaged drink or food and then put the waste in a recycling or regular bin, thinking we've done the right thing.

Lest we feel too hopeful that we can properly process the waste we have collected over the last 12 days, here's Donovan Hohn to set us straight:

Never mind that only 5 percent of plastics actually end up getting recycled. Never mind that the plastics industry stamps those little triangles of chasing arrows into plastics for which no viable recycling method exists. Never mind that plastics consume about 400 million tons of oil and gas every year and that oil and gas may very well run out in the not too distant future. Never mind that so-called green plastics made of biochemicals require fossil fuels to produce and release greenhouse gases when they break down...

Our Artist Talk

We presented our artist talk today in front of a small and enthusiastic crowd of temporary jailbirds. Our talk was the last scheduled event on the Critical Animals line-up. If you are reading this blog for the first time today because you were handed our card by Zeph at our talk, welcome and thanks for coming along today.

If you couldn't make it to the Lock-Up today: our talk was about our project, waste, steady-state economics (in which economic activities fit within the capacity of ecosystems), permaculture, future scenarios, our Daylesford community and the Hepburn Relocalisation Network and our relationship with waste.

A big thanks goes to Gerry Bobsien from the Lock-Up for taking these photos and for her ongoing support. And likewise to Aden Rolfe, Co-Director of Critical Animals, for his enthusiasm for our project and for helping us pick up rubbish very early one morning.