Description
The Arts if Living in a More-than-human World is about affect, about stopping, listening, and feeling the vibrant matter of this world, and of our selves embedded in it. The title refers both to the arts, (specifically to painting, photography, fiction and poetry), and to daily life as an art form that might be lived differently—a difference that emerges in relation to more-than-human life—the life of the world that we collectively depend on and are symbiotically attached to. This astonishing and lively work brings new materialist concepts to play, as it explores the poetics of embodied living in everyday life. It brings arts-based methodologies together with current research in the natural and biological sciences, moving well beyond many old, familiar, well-established disciplinary boundaries. The poetics of living-as- and of writing-as-inquiry draws inspiration from “the fleeting, viscous, lively, embodied, material, more-than-human, precognitive, non-discursive dimensions of spatially and temporally complex lifeworlds” (Vannini, 2015: 318). It is informed by an ethics that dismantles the centuries-old assumption of human dominance and ascendance over the material world. It engages in an exploration of our human selves in motion, as emergent, and as embedded in the complex, interwoven materiality of the world–a world that is always in motion. This book pushes at the edges of our understanding, and of our capacity to communicate, offering a bridge between the thinking and the doing of new materialist inquiry.
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With a wild grace, Bronwyn and Jane move us through the entanglements of life with more-than-human beings. Their work embodies the intra-action of art, philosophy, and a creative relational methodology for living response-ably with water and sky and stone and soil. Theirs is a book we want to live in as our body is pulled into the ink, the paper, the ipad, the rock pool, the flower, and their fields of existence, creating a more-than-human empathy. Merge with the pages of The Arts of living in a More-than-human World. You’ll be glad you did.
Tami Spry, author of Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography
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With this pageful romping good time, Bronwyn and Jane take readers on a deeply entangled, more-than-human adventure within and across the creative ecologies in which they both live, work and become, but also across the miles that separate (but don’t really separate) them. Their attention to the relational in this creative-relational enquiry includes attention to their readers, and to each other. As usual, with these two giants of thinking-theorizing-creatively-doing, the insights and provocations proliferate. This is a book about in-betweens and symbiosis that sympoietically takes itself and its authors in/across/through timespacemattering, with a wild array of atmospheres, including but not limited to autoethnographic tree empathy, auntie Pam’s Kaw Swey recipe, school shootings, strokes, isolation, lichens, streams, cherry liqueur, kookaburras, a Dragon Angophora, gold-beaters, viruses, and a couple of dozen gorgeous photographs and iPad artworks. This self-described ‘encounter in motion’ brings us into their intimate and long-standing friendship with the kind of vividness and affective detail that, despite COVID, the miles between them, the centuries under discussion, the diffuse ways, means, and complications of being material across time, we feel we are in their friendship circle, and we are deeply glad to be here. This deeply moving text asks, ‘What is a legacy?’ but then Speedy acerbically dismantles our attachments to them in just one of their brilliant introductions, “There are so many of us now crawling ant-like around the planet, making a mess, legacies falling everywhere, clogging up in the corners like dust piles.” Epic in scope and heart, this book somehow manages to inhabit both the microscopic and the cosmological all at the same time, and no one should miss the ride.
Prof. Daniel X. Harris, Creative Agency Research Lab, RMIT University
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This book is an invitation and provocation to become more fully of our damaged planet. Treading new pathways to make their way through the pandemic, Bronwyn and Jane have forged a community of scholars and artists to playfully demonstrate the possibilities of a relational art of living. The result is a new, interdisciplinary methodology, extending new materialism to see beyond the separation of humans from our world. They illustrate practices of living that make visible the tangible memories we, together with the trees, hold in the spacetimematterings of our world. Here the reader will find hope in this stunning exploration of a practical utopia of everyday connections, palpable and vibrant, that are life in the more-than-human world.
Johanna Wyn, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, University of Melbourne
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The Arts of Living in a More-than-human World, Bronwyn and Jane write, is “about affect, about stopping, listening and feeling the vibrant matter of the becoming of this world.” We stop, listen and feel with them throughout, their writing and their images bringing us close, irresistibly drawing us in. They take us into and immerse us in their exchanges. We travel between them, from the west of England and Wales to eastern Australia and back, and back and forth, in their encounters with each other and with the more-than-human—the holly oak, the horse chestnut, the granite, the sandstone, the lichen. Davies and Speedy’s text is theoretical and artful, playful and serious, intimate and political: a profound, delightful, elegant creative-relational inquiry.
Jonathan Wyatt, Professor of Qualitative Inquiry, University of Edinburgh