About the Project
We were raised by old people.
We were two mystical travelers, born two coasts apart–both white, grew up poor, working, and mixed class–depending on the year, on the day, the minute even. Our parents never had enough money to “put some away for college,” but on payday, we lived filthy rich. Chips and soda for everyone. Poor kids should not have to care for wealthy kids, but that is often the case.
When we sat down at dinner to chat we told stories–narrating our lives, we connected. Us. A spark, a sizzle, an affective performance of scholarly hutzpa broken in that moment. We are writers. Writers and critical scholars. We are storytellers. We both hate the world as it is, and yet work hard to grasp the beauty in the ugliness, bring it to the page in ways that only performance and affect can allow. The body brought us both to this place: M through the physical labor of working on the farm; K the psychical labor of working with queer-femme folks.
We were raised by old people.
K’s, matriarchal clan that spanned five generations of women until she was six years old, and her great-great-grandmother passed. M was raised by his great aunt and uncle. M was the youngest of a small extended family and the old people have been dead for years. As we read each other’s work, we noticed the overlapping themes of family, loss, trauma, healing, sexuality, poverty, mysticism, and spirituality. Our bodies kept bringing us back to this work. We found our voices intertwined and speaking to each other’s work in kismet ways. How is it that M can be writing about the “man” and “the boy” a composite of his grandfather, father, and him and K’s writing about Dorothy Jane and Renee, a composite of her grandmother, her mother, and her. Our work is incomplete without the other’s, the back and forth.
Ebb. Flow.
We were raised by old people.
We turn to artistic means to resist the contemporary neoliberal rational-technical practices which stifle creativity and reduce the myriad of human experiences to a singular technical discourse. We argue that art is uniquely positioned to act as a powerful counterpoint to the constant onslaught of the world of information (e.g., news via electronic media), and instead brings an embodied shared existence into full relief through art and story. It allows us, in short, to move from an information-based view of human experience into a rich and sensual shared present. Art renders the invisible, visible.
Combining creative non-fiction ethnographic vignettes with professional photography, and a digital platform, we examine what philosopher Glenn Albrecht refers to as solastalgia. Broadly speaking, Glen Albrecht, states, “Solastalgia is the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory” (95). Solastalgia is“the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment” (93).We are products not only of our “homeplace” (hooks), but also how that homeplace is affected by environmental stressors, like coal mining, living next to a nuclear power plant, and trauma buries deep into our cells. We cannot shake off the violence of home.
Through auto-ethnographic memory and photography, we examine the embodied themes of loss, melancholia, cultural memory, and solastalgia in order to understand our ever-shifting cultural and material landscape. This landscape is under systematic erasure with policies affecting the environment, movements of people, goods, and services, and continual interface with technology.
We were raised by old people.
Through aesthetic inquiry we press and pull you into our mystical asynchronicity, This experimental collaborative ethnography (Minge & Zimmerman ) seeks to explore how multiple, fractured affective narratives can speak with, challenge, and critique master narratives (Corey) through interwoven Performative Writing (Pollock ) practice.
In the current neoliberal order, the work of arts-based inquiry often falls by the wayside, in lieu of facts, figures, and predictions. However, given the current political climate, arts-based research is needed now more than ever. More specifically, as scholars who sedulously embrace alternative methodologies/theories. Using a digital platform has allowed us the opportunity to create a non-linear performance.
This project is a chance for you, our audience, to have an interactive experience with our piece. You may explore it as vignettes, photos, and sound; as vignettes only; as audio only; or as a wedding slideshow of photos with audio. Choose your own path. Find your own way.
Blessings upon you.
And also, with you.
Works Cited
Albrecht, Glenn, et al. “Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change.”Australasian Psychiatry, vol. 15, no. 1_suppl, 2007, pp. 95–98. Online.
Corey, Frederick. “The Personal: Against the Master Narrative.” The Future of Performance Studies. Ed. Sheron J. Dailey. Annandale: National Communication Association, 1998. 249-253. Print.
hooks, bell. “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance.” The Woman That I Am: The Literature and Culture of Contemporary Women of Color. Ed. D. Soyini. Madison. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. 448-54. Print.
Mingé, Jeanine, and Amber Lynn Zimmerman. Concrete And Dust: Mapping The Sexual Terrains Of Los Angeles. n.p.: New York: Routledge, 2013. Print
Pollock, Della. “Performing Writing.” The Ends of Performance. Eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane New York: New York UP, 1998. 73-103. Print.