STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE.
This week we looked closely into the importance of not only witnessing trouble and environmental damage, but staying with this trouble and questioning healthy ways of change.
For this weeks experiment, I decided to consider the ways that human impact and interaction with the area caused significant damage and environmental distress to the surrounding vegetation. For my video I tried to mainly focus on how litter and human presence had polluted the Bellbird park area. I tried to incorporate overly saturated but dark videos into my work and include uncomfortable scene cuts with jarring music. Although the video encompassed parts of what I was trying to capture, overall, the video did not quite turn out exactly as I had wanted it to, which was disappointing but also a good learning experience.
This week’s reading looks at how to “stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth”. (Haraway, D.J 2016) This reading sparked a new way of thinking for me and encouraged me to analyse the way society tends to write off environments and other parts of our beautiful planet that are damaged. We tend to consider broken things as unrepairable instead of ‘nurturing what might still be.’ (Haraway, D.J 2016) I took this into consideration whilst exploring the human made damage of my current location (Bellbird park) and was drawn to the areas of trampled vegetation that humans had planted young plants in, in hope of rebuilding the damaged area. Signs asking visitors to stay away from specific native areas were also present which I found interesting and overall a positive start in rebuilding and caring for the damaged parkland.
Haraway, Donna J.. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373780