Getting tentacular- building a phytoplankton zine
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What happens when the best biologies of the twenty-first century cannot do their job with bounded individuals plus contexts, when organisms plus environments, or genes plus whatever they need, no longer sustain the overflowing richness of biological knowledges, if they ever did?
- Staying with the Trouble, Donna Harraway
The Jolly Upcycler and I made a zine all about phytoplankton. These extremely small but overwhelmingly abundant organisms are unpredictable, extremely susceptible to the changes of the Earth inflicted by humans, but responsive in complex, tangled ways.
Elise is a former marine biologist and a specialist in phytoplankton identification. She imparted her knowledge, I gave it words, she gave the embroidered form of phytoplankton and I put it together. It was a joy to get an understanding of these microscopic ocean organisms that have such an impact on our lives.
Why phytoplankton?
We (unless you're a marine biologist like Elise) rarely think of phytoplankton, the knowledges bound in their webs. We are rarely told that phytoplankton are responsible for 50-80% of the oxygen we breathe and that they could quite literally take our breath away. We are not separate to phytoplankton, but webbed in them.
Grief is a path to understanding entangled shared living and dying; human beings must grieve with, because we are in and of this fabric of undoing. Without sustained remembrance, we cannot learn to live with ghosts and so cannot think.
- Staying with the Trouble, Donna Harraway
And yet, the choices, the abundance, the waste of the anthropocentric world is impacting phytoplankton so heavily that it pushes us all in the natural world to the precipice of an unliveable world, reducing its resilience.
It was a pleasure to make this zine with Elise. I am super interested by collaborative zine building. It's a method to impart information, communication and thoughts that I've only really just come across. The creative way to organise information in a way that fits the flow of content and thought is fun to play and experiment with and I've really enjoyed become more versed in the world, especially at Stockport Zine and Print Fair..being surrounded by wonderful, interesting and thought-provoking artists.
Check it out if you're interested.