DANGEROUS DEPTHS

DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE is an independent art publication questioning antrhopocentrism.

Contributions by:
Zazie Stevens (ed.) with Heleen Blanken, Brackish, Fiona Glen, Carolin Gieszner, X Arias, Annika Kappner, Eszter Koncz, Hattie Morrison, Maria Naidich, Michaela Spiegel, Jenna Sutela, Timaeus, Stef Veldhuis, Hedwich Rooks, Hannah Rose Whittle

A new tête-bêche diptych chapbook from innovative poet Cody-Rose Clevidence, DEARTH & GOD'S GREEN MIRTH discovers dark songs unseen in distant places unheard.

Careening wildly between the philosophical angst of being a human on this planet in this certain moment in human history, and barefaced, godless whimsy, the two projects in this t'teb'che diptych chapbook discard formalisms, even their own, to investigate the relationship between the space of the whole universe and god. Protoformal, DEARTH is a collection of scifi dirges for all of living things on a small contaminated planet. In God's Green Mirth the poet playfully degrades god, for fun.

Cody-Rose Clevidence is the author of BEAST FEAST (2014) and FLUNG/THRONE (2018), both from Ahsahta Press, LISTEN MY FRIEND, THIS IS THE DREAM I DREAMED LAST NIGHT from The Song Cave and Aux Arc / Trypt Ich from Nightboat, as well as several handsome chapbooks (flowers and cream, NION, garden door press, Auric). They live in the Arkansas Ozarks with their excellently named animals.

‘Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist’ is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together as part of the project ‘Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th-Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape’, initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris. Through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling-as-method, the project focuses on retrieving a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that perhaps informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor. The ‘Fieldguides’ invite collaborators to shed light on this from multiple angles. Joshua Cohen and Johanna Lot are the guest contributors of the third edition.

This publication El Plástico, the Sun that lives inside the Rock is an observation on evolution of material plasticity, it is a story about plastic whose native land is Mesoamerica. It explores the past, present and future of plastic through encounters with various people — a weaver from Oaxaca, a taxi driver, a sociologist working on trash collection in Mexico City and the owner of a small family-run plastic factory. The book contains a polymorphous project resulting from several years of research by artist Viktorija Rybakova and designer Goda Budvytytė, it also includes a conversation between philosophers Kristupas Sabolius and Catherine Malabou, and essays by Post Brothers and Chris Fitzpatrick.

Editor: Goda Budvytytė and Viktorija Rybakova
Texts: Goda Budvytytė, Chris Fitzpatrick, Catherine Malabou, Post Brothers, Viktorija Rybakova, Kristupas Sabolius

The first in a series of publications emerging from the transoceanic platform Kal, Kal Rituals proposes queer and trans feminist ecologies, embodiments and mythmaking.

The contributions trace and disrupt cross-colonial legacies through bodies of water lapping at the shorelines of the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Atlantic.Kal Rituals is an ode to transterritorial alliances that disrupt binary contours of time and being. Kal Rituals assembles practices of queer world building in extended pandemic time, amidst deep ecological and social transformations, offering an expression of anti-colonial resistance and joy.

Kal is a transoceanic platform enacting queer-feminist pasts and futures and decolonialecologies from South Asia and its diasporas and post migrant Europe.

If it can be said that experimental filmmakers are "expanding" the artistic field through an exploration of the potencies, modes of dissemination, or even performance of the moving image, in the Anthropocene age, these practices hope for another kind of expansion: to expand our experience of nature.

Appending flowers to the film strip or burying it in the ground, inventing observation devices, allowing the camera to be affected by natural forces, engaging one's own filming body in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, reconstituting ecosystems at the moment of projection: the ecologies of experimental cinema presented in this book constitute forms of practice and engagement that awaken a heightened sensitivity to the living world through cooperative links, casting other beings as subjects and agents of filmic processes, and, finally, reshaping the economy of filmmaking. Thus, ecologies of perception, medium, production and multinaturalism are deployed, contributing to the restoration of our sensory bond with the natural world.

Addressing technical, aesthetic and anthropological issues of cinema, Expanded Nature – Écologies du cinéma expérimental (Ecologies of Experimental Cinema) considers how filmmakers and collectives from different parts of the globe form communities with other non-human beings and work through their films to deconstruct human privilege. At the crossroads of disciplines, anthropologists, philosophers, filmmakers and artists, and researchers in visual studies come together and investigate a different history of cinema, written from the point of view of nature.

Texts by Elio Della Noce, Scott MacDonald, Jean-Michel Durafour, Kim Knowles, Philip Hoffman & Janine Marchessault, Karel Doing, Chris Dymond, Alice Leroy, Rose Lowder, Chris Welsby, Yaniv Touati, Bidhan Jacobs, Lucas Murari, Teresa Castro, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Gérard Leblanc, Frédéric Brayard, Jacques Perconte, Vincent Deville, Lukas Brasiskis & Charlie Hewison. 

Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred is an artistic project recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling as method. It has as its focus the retrieving of a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that might have informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company Slave Lodge in Cape Town.
 
The investigation follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women from Angola, Moçambique, and Madagascar, and from India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as through the bodies of women emigrating from the Netherlands, and Huguenots fleeing France. The investigation traces practices already existent at the Cape in the healing ecologies of Khoi, Nama, and San women. Because upwards of four million Angolans were trafficked to the Americas, the project follows recorded practices among women there too. This project of recuperation leads towards a polyvocal Herball of contraceptive plants, the collaborative Fieldguides, and a part-fictionalized Return from Cape Town to the interior of Angola.
     
The Fieldguides are conceived as generators of collaborations, which is to say that they are a means to invite guides to beam light onto the investigation from multiple angles—historical, anthropological, experiential, ethnobotanical, literary, and more. The guides are influential researchers and writers whose insights, experiences, and reflections shaped the investigation. The guides were invited to write towards the project in a word-of-mouth form; each contribution will, in turn, occasion a set of gatherings during which the text will be read aloud.

Fieldguides for a Preternaturalist is a series of small chapbooks designed to bring collaborators, audiences, and readers together within the project Nothing of Importance Occurred: Recuperating a Herball for a 17th Century Enslaved Angolan Midwife at the Cape. Initiated by South African artist Wendy Morris, Nothing of Importance Occurred is an artistic project recuperating missing narratives at the Cape through speculative investigations of plants-as-archive and storytelling as method. It has as its focus the retrieving of a library of botanical-medicinal knowledge that might have informed Morris’s enslaved ancestor, Maaij Claesje of Angola, midwife in the Company Slave Lodge in Cape Town.
 
The investigation follows streams of contraceptive plant knowledge that flowed to the Cape through the bodies of enslaved women from Angola, Moçambique, and Madagascar, and from India, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, as well as through the bodies of women emigrating from the Netherlands, and Huguenots fleeing France. The investigation traces practices already existent at the Cape in the healing ecologies of Khoi, Nama, and San women. Because upwards of four million Angolans were trafficked to the Americas, the project follows recorded practices among women there too. This project of recuperation leads towards a polyvocal Herball of contraceptive plants, the collaborative Fieldguides, and a part-fictionalized Return from Cape Town to the interior of Angola.
     
The Fieldguides are conceived as generators of collaborations, which is to say that they are a means to invite guides to beam light onto the investigation from multiple angles—historical, anthropological, experiential, ethnobotanical, literary, and more. The guides are influential researchers and writers whose insights, experiences, and reflections shaped the investigation. The guides were invited to write towards the project in a word-of-mouth form; each contribution will, in turn, occasion a set of gatherings during which the text will be read aloud.

Plant Magic gathers writers, artists, poets, illustrators, plant-and-mushroom-lovers and ecological thinkers, to share their experiences, knowledges, and stories around plant and mushroom magic. Oscillating between poison and remedy, plants and mushrooms reconcile ambivalences. They are powerful agents that are unpredictable in their existence and effects. They hold potential for resistance, intelligence and knowledge beyond human understanding.

When we look at plants and mushrooms we see hope amongst ecological grief. Every day we witness this magic of growing organisms, transformation and resilience. We are looking to them for guidance while still learning to listen to their silent, sensual ways. Often, the act of listening itself can calm our buzzing minds and raging hearts and make meaning blossom in a wordless way. In this publication, you might encounter stories of creating relationships with plants and mushrooms, fungal intimacy, poetic love letters to plants, herbal spells, stories of becoming postcolonial mushrooms, tips for combating the disturbing presence of scorpions, an essay introducing you to psychedelic becoming and many visual contributions of more-than-human relations.

[Publishers' note]

Contributors: Aimilia Efthimiou, Anais-karenin, Anı Ekin Özdemir, Avant Garden, Bastian Carstensen, Carla Di Girolamo, Coline-Lou Ramonet Bonis, Corinne Wiss, Cory Papalardo, Ella Ponizovsky Bergelson, Freia Kuper, Freya Häberlein, Indra Leonard Frings, Ko-Fan Lin, Leonie Brandner, Lucie Feigl, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Marta Orlando, Maya Land, Monaline Mourbat, Nicola van Straaten, Nina Berfelde, Rafa Cunha, Rahel Preisser, Sara Blosseville, Shani Leseman, Yasmine Ostendorf, Sigourney Pilz, Totholz 5d, Xrysafeniax

CONTRIBUTORS Anna Bierler, India Boxall, Craig P Burrows, Alex Hampshire, Kayla Adara Lee, Marijn van der Leeuw, Melanie Matthieu, Gabriella T Moreno, Amira Prescott, Harrison Pickering, Astarte Posch, Ananda Serné, Zazie Stevens, Gedvile Tamosiunaite, Mia You.

cover image Ananda Serné & Poyen Wang

DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE is a seasonal art publication on perception, the sensory, the non-human, ecology & erotica with an emphasis on interconnectedness. The artist's intimate knowledge based on observation, questioning anthropocentrism through beauty & language. Reflecting on the past season while softly moving into the next, each issue launches in-between seasons; appreciating experience, transition, and metamorphosis instead of anticipating the next big thing.

The new publication triangulates between geopoetics, geopolitics, and cultural geography; a 464 page issue with some 50 contributors as well as a large section on Swedish philosophical geographer Gunnar Olsson.

New Grounds for Dutch Landscape uses an experimental, site-specific method to demonstrate how 17th century painters Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema did not so much represent the newly made landscape of Holland as reenact, through their painterly factures, its reclamation and ongoing threats to its stability: from flooding and drainage to abrasion and erosion.

These low-level dramas of recalcitrant matter allowed the Dutch to develop an ongoing temporality at odds with history painting’s decisive instant and a vocabulary of substance that wrested meaning away from humanist landscape painting’s expressive figures. — [publisher's note]

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene is an edited anthology of poetry by contemporary UK writers, whose work manifests ecology in the body, in language, in lyric and colour and play. A book that arrives with its own weather, an acid-bright sense of urgency, detail and care; a book that speaks to a nowness that slides between crisis and the everyday arts of noticing which bear us through massive scalar change, survival and sorrow.

As Bernadette Mayer writes in 'The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica': 'Do not be afraid of your own heart beating / Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm'. Riffing on the etymology of 'anthology' as a gathering of flowers, this book samples from a luminous range of poets responding to 'the anthropocene' as a kind of thought device for grasping extinction, global heating and climate breakdown.

'Poems are the future sliding against the past', writes Timothy Morton in the book's foreword; these works perform the shimmering art of recognising the multiple temporalities, tenses and agencies, problems and potentials of this fraught term, 'the anthropocene'.

The weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist theorist Francoise d'Eaubonne's Feminism or Death surveyed women's status around the globe and argued that an internationalist feminism was not just about equality but about life or death - of humans and also of the planet.

D'Eaubonne first proposed a politics of "ecofeminisme," the idea that the patriarchal system also destroys the environment, and that feminism and environmentalism must be connected.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the "killer plant" trope in fiction, film, and video games.

Before the Demogorgon of Stranger Things and the appearance of Mario's iconic foe the Piranha Plant, writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were exploring the lethal potential of vegetable life, inspired by new carnivorous species discovered on expeditions into the deep jungles of the world and breakthroughs in the grafting and genetics disciplines of botany. Suddenly, the exotic orchid could become a curiously alluring, yet unsettlingly bloodthirsty menace; the beautifully sprawling wisteria of the stately home could become anything but civilized, and the experimentation of botanists weening new shoots on their own blood could become fuel for a new genre of horticultural nightmare.

Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can be found within this new collection, representing the very best tales from the undergrowth.

Daisy Butcher is a Gothic and Horror scholar attached to The Open Graves, Open Minds project. Her research focuses on the monstrous feminine and body horror from the 19th century Gothic short story to modern film and TV.

Published 2020

Sex Ecologies explores pleasure, affect, and the powers of the erotic in the human and more-than-human worlds. Arguing for the positive and constructive role of sex in ecology and art practice, these texts and artistic research projects attempt nothing short of reclaiming the sexual from Western erotophobia and heteronormative narratives of nature and reproduction. The artists and writers set out to examine queer ecology through the lens of environmental humanities, investigating the fluid boundaries between bodies (both human and nonhuman), between binary conceptions of nature as separate from culture, and between disciplines.

In newly commissioned texts from such writers as Mel Y. Chen and Jack Halberstam and a selection of influential essays—including an annotated version of Audre Lorde's “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”—as well as images and sketches from works in progress by a diverse group of artists, Sex Ecologiescombines insights from the fields of art, environmental humanities, ecofeminism, gender studies, science, technology, political science, and indigenous studies.

Sex Ecologies, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthall Trondheim, emerges from an arts-driven research project collaboratively developed between the art center and the Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory. Conceived not as a result but as a seed arising from this transdisciplinary fertilization, the volume presents a case for the role of sex in environmental and social justice.

Contributors:

Katja Aglert,Tarsh Bates, adrienne maree brown, Mel Y. Chen, Pauline Doutreluingne, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jes Fan, Ibrahim Fazlic, Jack Halberstam, niilas helander, Stefanie Hessler, Jenny Hval, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jessie Kleemann, Audre Lorde, Nina Lykke, Montserrat Madariaga-Caro, Camila Marambio, Astrida Neimanis, Pedro Neves Marques, Okwui Okpokwasili, Marie Helene Pereira, Margrethe Pettersen, Laure Prouvost, Filipa Ramos, Catriona Sandilands, Sami Schalk, Serubiri Moses, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Kim TallBear, Anna Tje, Alberta Whittle, Victoria Wibeck, Elvia Wilk

Copublished with Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway) and the Seed Box (Sweden)

ROT, LANGUAGE & A STRAY BUTTERFLY

CONTRIBUTORS Eady van Acker, Anouk Asselineau & Myrto Vratsanou, Britt Browne, Finca Tierra Negra, Yuri Hasegawa, Celine Caly, Aimilia Efthimiou & Comfy Shrooms, Paige Emery, Elizaveta Federmesser, Edwin Godínez, Meg Hadfield, Freya Häberlein, Johanna Hedva, Zsófia Jakab, Lijuan Klassen, Marijn van der Leeuw, Juliette Lizotte, Niklaus Mettler & Anja Wille-Schori, Hatty Nestor, Kamila Sipika, Zazie Stevens & Alex Valentina.

DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE is a seasonal art publication on perception, the sensory, the non-human, ecology & erotica with an emphasis on interconnectedness. The artist's intimate knowledge based on observation, questioning anthropocentrism through beauty & language. Reflecting on the past season while softly moving into the next, each issue launches in-between seasons; appreciating experience, transition, and metamorphosis instead of anticipating the next big thing

Cover image: Zazie Stevens

TEKELI-LI in "Mountains of Madness" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft is a scream that frightens polar explorers upon their arrival in a hidden city at the South Pole. An online bibliography listing Antarctic fictions is called the same.

Taking the shape of an encyclopedia and an adventure book, "Tekeli-li" is the first catalogue of artist Judith Neunhäuserer, mapping the various elements constituting her œuvre and research. This book includes a special ephemera: a handmade recycled A4 made from the publications used during her research. 

This third issue reviews the many ways in which medicine has pathologized non-procreative sexual desire— those bodies that challenge gender binaries or expose different abilities—while imagining other ways of collectively well-being.

"The issue opens with a commissioned work by visual artists CANDICE LIN and P. STAFF that evokes the central concerns of the journal in subtle and unexpected ways. Lambda Literary Award–winner INDRAPRAMIT DAS speculates on other forms of kinship in a new science-fiction story, while a transnational questionnaire offers insights into the continuous fight for reproductive justice.

We republish a chapter from the autobiography of the late South African, trans, traditional healer NKUNZI ZANDILE NKABINDE, which is introduced by RUTH MORGAN.

We continue to honor the power of poetry with works by ROSA CHÁVEZ and STELLA NYANZI, while celebrating the energy of collective action with a piece by WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA DO? In anticipation to his new book on queer desire in the Caribbean, scholar ANDIL GOSINE shares a previous article addressing the notion of “against nature,” while our Columns section brings news from Brazil, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, and the UK during a season of pandemic fatigue, but also care work, organization, and hope." — the editors

For centuries, the garden has been regarded as a mirror of society, a microcosm, in which the broader relationships between nature and culture are played out on  small scale. From this long cultural tradition also raises a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the Earth.

On the Necessity of Gardening tells the story of the garden as a rich source of inspiration. Over the centuries, artists, writers, poets and thinkers have each described, depicted and designed the garden in different ways. In medieval art, the garden was a reflection of paradise, a place of harmony and fertility, shielded from worldly problems.

However, the garden is not just a neutral place and intended solely for personal pastime, it is a place where the world manifests itself and where the relationship between culture and nature is expressed. In the eighteenth century this image shifted: the garden became a symbol of worldly power and politics. The Anthropocene, the era in which man completely dominates nature with disastrous consequences, is forcing us to radically rethink the role we have given nature in recent decades.

There is a renewed interest in the theme of the garden among contemporary makers. It is not a romantic desire that drives them, but rather a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the earth, by connecting different fields of activity in landscape, art and culture. Through many different essays and an extensive abecedarium, On the Necessity of Gardening reflects on the garden as a metaphor for society, through concepts such as botanomania and capitalocene, from guerrilla gardening to queer ecology and zen garden.

Contributors: Maria Barnas, Jonny Bruce, Laurie Cluitmans, Thiëmo Heilbron, Liesbeth M. Helmus, Erik A. de Jong, René de Kam, Alhena Katsof, Jamaica Kincaid, Bart Rutten, Catriona Sandilands, Patricia de Vries.

At a time when few women could write and most were denied a formal education, Hildegard von Bingen became a legendary healer, visionary, musician, artist, poet, and saint. In Physica, Hildegard presents nine "books" of healing systems: Plants, Elements, Trees, Stones, Fish, Birds, Animals, Reptiles, and Metals. In each book she discusses the qualities of these natural creations and elaborates on their medicinal use, explaining how to prepare and apply different remedies. With its emphasis on balancing the humors, Physica has strong affinity with the Oriental medical approaches gaining great respect today.

The modern reader interested in natural healing will recognize the enormous truth in the theories of this twelth-century physician, many of which prove effective today, serving as a reminder that our cures for illness depend on our natural world and our place in it.

As Hildegard states in Physica, "With earth was the human being created. All the elements served mankind and, sensing that he was alive, they busied themselves in aiding his life in every way."

Translated by Priscilla Throop a Latin and Greek scholar, she holds a master's degree from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. She is a member of the Vermont Classical Language Association and is currently translating Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae. She lives in Charlotte, Vermont.

An illustrated examination of Beverly Buchanan's 1981 environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination. 

Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan's environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination.