Water Talks : Rewilding craft: restoring relationship through making objects entangled with place

• Main Author: Sundström, Elin
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Konstfack, Keramik & Glas 2021
• Subjects: performativity; place; water; animism; site-responsive; relational; intraaction; natureculture; Rewilding craft; interdisciplinary; Humanities and the Arts; Humaniora och konst
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:konstfack:diva-7810

On the brink of a sixth mass extinction, I renegotiate, through crafting, some basic assumptions on which our economy-culture is built, those of separation and dominance. The project Till Källan / Water Talks is based on a method where I ask various places what they would want me to do on site. It is a process of reconnecting to place and the non-human, a radical rethinking of relationship between human and the other. I investigate the possibilities of craft to be a conductor of that relationship.The paper tracks various lines of thought around my practice, like trickles gathering more water into my pond. It starts in a quantum physics philosophical base for how the world is in a state of becoming through intra-action, on to why water is the perfect medium to affect the world through a puddle. I look at how my practice has an affinity with animism as philosophy and indigenous ways of relating to place and materials. I explore various facets of performativity, in world-making, craft-making, in the resulting objects and in the restoring of relationship through ritual. The enquiry that runs through the paper is what craft is when the object was made for a place rather than for the “art-world” or other economic systems. Going back and forth between a western and a non-western mindset, between practice and theory and between the poetic and prosaic, makes for a synthesizing of sources, leading up to the concept of Rewilding Craft, and a number of crafted objects and images that speak of the relationship.