Art In The Environment

Save The Bees - Chloe Anderson

Speculative fiction film examining our current relationship with bees and why we need them

Response to: “If there is to be multispecies ecojustice, which can also embrace diverse human people, it is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species.” -  Donna Haraway,  Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin

Lynn Randolph, Cyborg, oil on masonite, 10” x 7 “, 1994 

Cover Art on Donna J Haraway’s “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature”

I. Please Plant Me When I Die

II. Humanity is too hung up on the uncertainty of death. We have morphed death to be a massive event where in reality it’s just the cycle of the universe. People are wrapped up tradition, in religion, in rituals and ceremonies that do more harm that good to the world of the living; in death we are still destroying the world that we lived in. We spend thousands of dollars on funerals, emit fossil fuels when cremated, cut down millions of trees to make coffins and for what? To hold a massive sad death party for a body that isn’t even alive to appreciate it. We need to seriously reimagine our perspectives of death and consider how we can improve our rituals for the sake of our planet.

III. I am a living human who is comfortable with the idea of death. I believe that when I die, I would like to return to the earth I was created from. I believe my life is a cycle like the blooming of a flower or the transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly. The stardust that made me will return to the earth and be reimagined into a tree or a flower and the cycle of life shall continue. I believe that death is beautiful and I refuse for my death to be honoured by harming the world I left, I wish only to aid it as it aided me in life.

IV. I imagine a world where death is a celebration not a sadness. I imagine a world where my children instead of looking to a bottle of ashes on a fireplace or a stone with my name in a field, look to a mighty tree and remember me. I imagine my children touching the bark and feeling my energy and my love and the energy of the earth together as one. I imagine a world where bodies are not burned or embalmed or altered in anyway but are laid to rest as they were, a perfect memory of the person they knew and loved, with them forever in the very air around them, in the grass beneath their feet, in the warmth of the sun. I imagine a world where death is a celebration of life, not an money making industry.

V. I will continue to speak up because I want my children to live without fear of death. I want my children to throw a party and celebrate my life and the times we had together, not force themselves into debt by having a ‘traditional’ funeral for me that costs thousands of dollars; I want to leave behind a legacy, not an expense. In a perfect world, this reimagined death would provide a more personal, intimate experience for the living and would definitively give us a purpose after death, continuing the circle of life.

From the Littchballet exhibit by Otto Piene at the MIT List Visual Arts Centre

“Light is the primary condition for all visibility” - Otto Piene

“A century of technological modernization, including innovations that have helped propel dramatic and absolute increases in production and consumption, lead many people to be optimistic, even complacent, about finding technological solutions to all current and future dilemmas. “ - Raymond De Young and Thomas Princen: The Localization Reader: Adapting to the Coming Downshift. 

I believe that death is inevitable I believe that death is an experience only for the living I believe we fear death only if we have not lived I believe we fear to live fully on the chance of death I believe death is our greatest guide and teacher

We must cleanse ourself of thanatophobia We must accept the inevitability of death We must become content with impermanence We must understand that life only has value in death (there is no story without an end)

We must choose to live in spite of death

Building A Rainbow - By Amy Youngs

“An art installation that transforms waste into a colorful indoor water feature that grows edible plants.” - Amy Youngs

Vermiponics (aquaponics and worms) - a mix of aquaponics and art.

Response to: “Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non- human world.” - The Dark Mountain Manifesto

https://archive.org/details/Bee_Festival_at_Botanical_Preview (1)

I’d like to use this video as it shows a group of bees interacting with each other while the other videos I found only show one bee. This interaction, the image of a colony of bees, will be important to my film as this is how bees normally live, being social creatures.

https://archive.org/details/toalfa_gmail_Bee (2)

AND

https://archive.org/details/oursharedvideos_yahoo_Bee1 (3)

“Experience suggests that by opening more fully to the presence of ‘self’ in others, including animals, we further develop that presence in ourselves and thus become more fully alive and awake participants in life.” Barbara Smuts, Encounters with Animal Kind

Exposed: Experiments in Love, Sex, Death and Art

Elizabeth M Stephens, Brooklyn Museum, San Fransisco USA

“I am participating in the feminist project of making the world an equal playing field for men, women, lesbians, queers, sex workers, professors, artists, trannys, septuagenarians and everyone else who wishes to play.”