UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)
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Petrichor and After Hardeman’s ‘Petrichor’
Full text linkOne artist might plumb the depths of another artist’s work. Surface necessarily implies depth and Hardeman’s Petrichor documents grief as a play between surface and depth in the detritus of living. Budde’s poem After Hardeman’s ‘Petrichor’ follows her there with tender hands of language and a sharing of grief in all its levels
They Say We Can't Breathe Underwater
Full text linkThis photo essay takes the reader through the images and ideas Wood explores in her solo exhibit, They Say We Can’t Breathe Underwater, installed at A Space Gallery in Toronto in September 2022. It incorporates photos of the artwork and installation, along with a discussion of the concepts floating through the exhibit. The images and this essay are found at the intersections of Abolition geographies, Black Radical Tradition, Black feminist, Black Atlantic, Aquatic theories
Invisible Fish
Full text linkI’m going to describe an ongoing artistic project with the title “Invisible Fish.” This project began in 2018 as a collaboration with South African writer and director Lindiwe Matshikiza. Before I begin to describe how Invisible Fish came about, I want to set the scene by reflecting on a photograph of my daughter several years ago in an aquarium, looking at a diver cleaning the tank. I’ve had this photograph on the wall of my studio ever since I took it and, in many ways, I can trace the start of the thinking for this Invisible Fish project back to this moment.
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oceanic tauromachy
Full text linkoceanic tauromachy conceives of the new ocean beyond the tropes of catastrophe and disaster, as an evocative ‘zone’ of evolution, transformation, and unforgiving change, beyond the ontology of despair. The ecological turn has transformed the oceans into complex zones. It has become an apophenic abstraction stitching together other abstractions—an abcanny zone of aberrating non-meaningfulness, of clandestine unbeing, of fractal unbecoming. oceanic tauromachy is musica universalis of residual divinity in toxicity, of lingering sanctity in erosion. Here I invoke the froth that has been gurgling out of the spasms of the sea. The new ocean has become a breeding haven for chthonic deception which has been accommodating the holy havoc of bioprospecting exploitation. The sea bed exhibits the paralysis of our unhinged telos. The ocean has lost its topos. oceanic tauromachy is a will to recover; a preamble to invite and engage a diagnostic planetarity in praxis
Deep Listening: Tending Future Soil Song
Full text linkThe ground is the surface we call home. Inscribed in it is a record of geologic and social life. It is a site of earthly memory. The soil is marked by the now 400-year-long social and ecological crisis of colonial capitalism. Land dispossession, the plantation model of agriculture, chattel slavery, and the imposition of these modes of extraction and unfreedom worldwide leave the planets soils severely degraded. If current rates of degradation continue, the world’s topsoil will be gone in sixty years, according to a UN official (Arsenault, 2014).
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A Network Beneath the Soil
Full text linkA Network Beneath the Soil is a short fiction story that follows a young person who is struggling with their existence in a heteropatriarchal, colonial, racial capitalist society. They transform into part of the Amanita muscaria’s mycelium, a network of fungal threads that form a symbiotic relationship with the roots of plant organisms in the forest. The character is presented with a choice: to abandon their humanity and become fungi, or continue to exist as a human. A Network Beneath the Soil looks toward mycorrhizal fungi to express what we, as humans, might learn from the symbiotic relationships that occur below the surface of the Earth
Nun Cho Ga (Big Animal Baby)
Full text linkIn 2022, a woolly mammoth baby was discovered in Yukon Territory, on Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in land, by a young placer miner. Named Nun cho ga, which means “big animal baby” in the Hän language spoken by the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, the baby is one of the best-preserved woolly mammoths ever discovered. She is around the same size as the Lyuba, who was discovered in Siberia in 2007
Storying Futures of the Always-Already Extinct: Challenging Human Exceptionalism; Exploring Animal Survivance
No full textThis paper contends that anthropogenic mass extinction cannot be overcome via discourses that only humans can prevent extinctions: such discourses uphold problematic assumptions of human exceptionalism. This paper takes up Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance, which upholds Indigenous futures and speaks of Indigenous peoples’ continuous agential survival against settler colonialism, to challenge human exceptionalism, assert animal agency, and envision transformative futures where all animals―human and nonhuman―might survive with ethics and justice
Requiem to Window Sealant
Full text linkRequiem to Window Sealant is an autobiographical exploration of chemical sensitivity. Rather than framing her experiences explicitly within illness or suffering, the author gestures towards the sensory implications and the co-materiality of life in plastic worlds. The photograph is a multiple exposure of a body filled with a raft of grass, trash, and detritus floating out to Lake Ontario. It was taken at the mouth of the Don River