Artist as Family: Replacing growth with belonging economies

Monday, 30 March 2020

Replacing growth with belonging economies

Last year we were invited to contribute a chapter to the forthcoming book, Food for Degrowth: Perspectives and Practices, to be published by Routledge later this year. Although, let's not count on anything like that occurring.

We called our chapter, 'Replacing growth with belonging economies: a neopeasant response'. We completed it in November.

Due to the times we're living we offer it here as a film. It's our most significant collaborative writing project since our book, The Art of Free Travel. (If you're a subscriber and reading this in your inbox, you won't see the below video, so here's a link to it).

Replacing growth with belonging economies

Lived, written and spoken by Patrick Jones and Meg Ulman

Text editing by Anitra Nelson and Ferne Edwards

Sound by Patrick Jones and Meg Ulman (assisted by Jordan Osmond)

Video editing and seven drawings by Patrick Jones (the second, third and fourth are in collaboration with David Holmgren)

Photographs and footage by Artist as Family, David Jablonka, Nina Sahraoui, Mara Ripani, Michelle Dunn, Thomas Dorleans, Michal Krawczyk, Giulia Lepori, Nicholas Walton-Healey, Ponch Hawkes, Gab Connole, Zac Imhoof, Anthony Petrucci, Jordan Osmond, Jason Workman, Ian Robertson and David Holmgren

Soundtrack: A place of simple feeding – a poem-recipe by Patrick Jones, arranged and performed by Anthony Petrucci

Gift Ecology Films

Shared under a creative commons license/non-commercial

an Artist as Family home production

Please let us know about your own transition from hypertechnocivility

8 comments:

Derek_Teixeira1 April 2020 at 01:36
Do you have the text available as stand alone? I love the video, but would love to read this over and over again.
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Emma Christian2 April 2020 at 15:52
I have listened to this twice. It's beautiful and full of truth.

My husband has recently lost his job due to Covid 19. It's a worry but we are using this time as a gift. A gift to be together with our children and home educate them together, start to establish vegetable gardens on our farm which we bought a little more then a year ago, to lean more deeply into our values of using whats on hand, upcycling and reusing materials whilst we finish fitting out the interior of our yurt. Him being home allows me to rest a little more with our 6 week old baby.

We hope to use this time we have here to create something that once all of this is over, we can open our home to our community and invite them in too.

xx
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Barry12 April 2020 at 19:38
Thank youyou sharing your insights and experiences. I found myself making notes that I know I will return to. Wishing you all much health
Barry
Barry
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About Us

Hello! We are Artist as Family – Zero, Meg, Patrick, Blackwood (Woody), and back in the day, Zephyr. We live in Daylesford, Australia on a quarter-acre permaculture plot, home to our School of Applied Neopeasantry at Tree Elbow University on Djaara peoples' country.

We base our creative practice on our concept of permapoesis, which simply means permanent making or regenerative living – an antidote to disposable culture. We practice an art that participates in what it represents; an art of social warming in an era of global warming. Food ethics and politics are central to our practice. Generating food that brings human and ecological health and global justice is our creative call to arms, within the sphere of the local. We teach a unique skill set of radical neopeasant homemaking, community economy making and other accountable living skills to volunteers called SWAPs (Social Warming Artists and Permaculturists) and teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs). We are bloggers, fermentors, writers, public speakers, poets, artists, video makers who also make music, but mostly we're a family who belong to a bloody great community and therefore we're much more than the sum of our parts.

Past and current projects

Artist as Family have conducted a number of fruitful projects in the past including '17 Days' (2009), commissioned by the Lock-up Cultural Centre in Newcastle and 'Food Forest' (2010–), commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, our work was featured in the international anthology of ecological art, 'Art & Ecology Now' (2014), and we wrote the Art of Free Travel (2015) about our 400 day cycle adventure to Cape York and home again in Central Victoria, which was shortlisted for an ABIA in 2016. We continue to give talks to sustainability groups, art schools, university students and community organisations. We teach Permaculture Living Courses (PLCs) from our home, at Tree Elbow University, which is the site for The School of Applied Neopeasantry in Daylesford, Victoria.

17 Days (2009)

'17 Days' involved foraging for anthropogenic waste along the coastline and throughout the city of Newcastle. Day after day we carried out the same simple task of walking or bike riding to collect countless bags of rubbish. We swam, played in the sand, picnicked, rested, communed with locals, gazed (as inlanders) in awe at the sea and picked up other people’s discarded refuse. After 17 days we had amassed a monumental pile of industrial food and drink packaging, which we exhibited at the Lock-up Cultural Centre as simply: the everyday detritus of hypertechnocivility as collected by a family on holiday.

Food Forest (2010–)

'Food Forest' is a public artwork that doubles as a community garden, a work that aims to foreground biodiversity and demonstrate that materially art can be generative, can be a resource unto itself, rather than just an extractor or exploiter of resources to make market desirable products. In other words art can be generative contiguous with ecological functioning. Food Forest is therefore a work that attempts to blur the traditional western line between art and that estranging term ‘nature’.