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Published in 2022 as part of AHRC-funded project Ecological Belongings: Transforming Soil Cultures Through Science, Art, and Activism with Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies At Warwick University(1)
Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy of Studio Fabre Hardy and Artist Research Associates at the Centre for Agroeocology, Water and University, (CAWR), UK.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
Living Justice is co-founded by Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Their life-long dedication is to live an ethics of care in the everyday by remembering and enlivening our interdependence with each other and the living earth.
Published in 2022 as part of AHRC-funded project Ecological Belongings: Transforming Soil Cultures Through Science, Art, and Activism with Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies At Warwick University(1)
Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy of Studio Fabre Hardy and Artist Research Associates at the Centre for Agroeocology, Water and University, (CAWR), UK.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
Living Justice is co-founded by Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Their life-long dedication is to live an ethics of care in the everyday by remembering and enlivening our interdependence with each other and the living earth.
Published in 2022 as part of AHRC-funded project Ecological Belongings: Transforming Soil Cultures Through Science, Art, and Activism with Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies At Warwick University(1)
Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy of Studio Fabre Hardy and Artist Research Associates at the Centre for Agroeocology, Water and University, (CAWR), UK.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
Living Justice is co-founded by Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Their life-long dedication is to live an ethics of care in the everyday by remembering and enlivening our interdependence with each other and the living earth.
Published in 2022 as part of AHRC-funded project Ecological Belongings: Transforming Soil Cultures Through Science, Art, and Activism with Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies At Warwick University(1)
Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy of Studio Fabre Hardy and Artist Research Associates at the Centre for Agroeocology, Water and University, (CAWR), UK.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
WELCOME AND CONTEXT
‘We are called to inhabit matters of care and shape fecund freedom stories of defiant abundance to cultivate the re-awakening of our ecological sovereignty’ (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2021).
Studio Fabre Hardy is the collaborative art and design practice of Miche Fabre Lewin and Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Our work enlivens our human capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell
within. Through her arts practice-based doctoral research, Miche innovated the concept of sympoiethics as a theoretical ground for such collaborative world-making with each other and the living Earth (Fabre Lewin 2019). (2)
Together, we cultivate sympoiethic practices that offers an ecology of embodied experiences with soil, food and water to re-enculture the art as an everyday expression of our interconnectedness. These are diverse and embrace creating food rituals and edible installations, making material studio works from a diversity of media, hosting forums of inspiration and Touchstones thinking, devising convivial gatherings and documenting, writing, filming and publishing imagetextworks to share the sympoiethic sensibility of our work.
We also co-evolve ecological performances and landscape designs in collaboration with the genius loci of places and their guardians and, with others, collaborate through Continuum Residencies held at Timberyard in the East of England. Inspired by the indigenous wisdoms of animism, Ubuntu philosophies, Zen Buddhist teachings, quantum cosmologies, archetypal dimensions and shamanic ritual, our sympoiethic practices value the senses, imagination, emotion, metaphor and memory as pathways for nurturing natureculture relationships (Fabre Lewin and Gathorne-Hardy 2022).
The art of sympoiethics offers the conditions to remember through our bodyminds how we can we truly flourish in our authenticity by being humble towards our shared interdependence within the ecologies of the living Earth.
HANDS IN SOIL
‘Hands in Soil is where we start creating, that moment of stillness, activating your senses, feeling your truth, appreciating your feelings without judging. Let’s see what the soil will give us. It brings us down to Earth.’ Billy Langa, member of Kofifi and co-founder of Theatre Duo Mahlatsi.
In 2012, we were invited to be artists in residence for three months at The Bag Factory in Fordsburg, Johannesburg. We called this residency Renaturing the City as our intention was to introduce the living soil, ecological food and the concept of food citizenship into Maboneng, the live-work precinct where we were accommodated. During the residency we fulfilled an outreach project with Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre (THMC) in Sophiatown, Johannesburg, and the ASHA Centre, UK, to work alongside Kofifi Youth Theatre Company (Kofifi). The brief was to design an urban food garden with Kofifi for the proposed new community theatre at THMC. True to our methodology, our response was to create the conditions for Kofifi to have an experience with the matter of natural, living soil and understand its vital role as the source and medium for growing ecological food in an urban food garden. This manifest as Hands In Soil performative ritual and workshop. This profound exchange offered us all a sensuous taste of the interconnections between the healthful organisms of healthy soil, naturally grown food, human bodies and communities, and the ecosystems of Gaia in balance. As a sensorium of experience, it was an holistic and embodied experiences with the matter of soil within the liminal, bounded space of the ritual process – a safe container to risk the raw and the real through touching soil and, in turn, being touched by the animate matter of soil.
Hands In Soil became a catalyst for an ongoing relationship with Kofifi during the rest of our Re-Naturing the City Residency. This included their participation in Taste the Garden at Food Wine Design Fair, and three theatre pieces conceived by Kofifi: Pula at Tastes of Maboneng; Song to Soil performed at(dis)locations/(trans)formations the end of residency exhibition at the Bag Factory; and Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation.
CURA AND THE MATTER OF SOIL
‘Allow me to be who I am, the soil. Allow me to give birth to the spinach that you eat. Allow me to feed you, allow me to give you the home you love. Yes, I am beautiful, yes I am strong, but what meaning can I have if you don’t take care of me.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Robert Pogue Harrison’s exploration of the myth of Cura shares how our capacity for care is inherent to being human. he gives a poetic narrative as to why being guardians of the Earth is essential to cultivating care as part of human practices in responsibility and consciousness. Below is a distillation of the myth he writes up his essay on the human condition In Gardens.
Cura (Care) is crossing a river, and picks up clay and shapes it into a body. Jupiter passes by and gives spirit to the clay body, the breath of life. Cura and Jupiter dispute over whose name is conferred on this newly formed creature. Earth turns up and claims to give it her name as the clay creature is made from her Earthbody. Saturn is called in as arbiter and pronounces that on the death of the clay body, Jupiter will be conferred the spirit of the body, and the Earth will receive the physical body. As the claybody is made from humus its name will be HOMO. Cura who has shaped the clay creature is given possession of it as long as it is alive on Earth and thus, the ensouled matter of humus/homo/human creature is held in her care during its lifetime.
CONVIVIAL ENCOUNTERS
‘There is so much we know that belongs to the soil. I belong to the soil. We are one.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Con-vivere means to live with, together, and is the origin of the word ‘convivial’. What are the practices which enliven experiences that extend conviviality to embrace the cultivation of ways of living well with each other, the Earth and its multispecies sentience? The intention for our ritual workshop with Kofifi was to be in a convivial encounter with the group and to prepare and cook a meal together from scratch on an outdoors fire. We invited the performers to bring fresh vegetables to the site and to build the fire together. As an introduction to our work with soil and ritual, we created a washing line displaying images of our previous projects with soil in South Africa and the UK. For the round of welcome, we set a table on the ground for displaying the vegetables and ingredients for cooking and, over conversation and sharings, we all began chopping vegetables. These were added to the open cauldron to slowly cook whilst we conducted the soil ritual. Each member of the group was invited to engage with the theme of soil through some object, poem or song as a performative ritual of three minutes. I was asked to start and began by sharing a wooden bowl filled with soil collected from the grounds of the THMC. The Kofifi performers then followed, each choosing to improvise with the same bowl of soil. The songs, stories, gestures and interactions that followed brought great vitality, power and gratitude to the workshop and from that depthful experience a significant bond was formed between us.
ART AND RITUAL ENCOUNTERS
‘She is a strong woman. She gives birth to life. She holds us with the umbilical cord of gravity.’ Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
Artful encounters engage us in a capacity to care. As a living energy and medium for apprehension and engagement of our lives, art-making invites an act and quality of attention by which we can experience and expand our relational existence as the source of our being. It enlivens our body’s myriad intelligences through which we can connect to the matter, processes and subtle energies of which we are a part. Living artfully and aesthetically unifies our human experiences and sensibilities within embodied and emergent processes of communication, sense-making and co-creation with each other and the animate world. By re-enculturing the arts in the everyday, cultivating embodied practices with the bodymind, and listening to the voices of nature, we can be restoring ecologies of relationship. Indeed, ‘Art’, ‘ritual’ and the artisan share their etymological roots in the Sanskrit term Rta, which translates as ‘truth’ or ‘order’, and in Hindu philosophy refers to ‘the dynamic movement from which all arises’ (Haley, 2016: 46). The root of the word ‘aesthetics’ is the Ancient Greek aisthanesthai, which means ‘to perceive’ – that is, to sense, to think and to feel how we humans are interconnected as an integrated process of co-creation with the ecosystems of the living Earth.
CULTURES OF BELONGING
The soil is a mother.
I have been told that the soil is the home of my ancestors,a part of my skin, where I came from, thus making it the owner of my joy, happiness and freedom, at the same time bringing in the feeling of belonging.
Lyrics excerpted from Song to Soil by Vicki Phiri of Kofifi Youth Theatre Company and performed for the opening of the group exhibition (dis)locations|(trans)formations at the Bag Factory (2012).
‘You started us on a journey which we were obviously ready for but didn’t know it. We began thinking about growing in a way we had not thought about growing before, whether it was growing staff, or growing young people, through that green window and perspective on sustainability’. Tricia Sibbons, Director of the Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre.
As the Cura myth intimates, our lives become meaningful through cultivating our own efforts in acts of care which call us towards self-realisation. As an encounter with the Earth through the soil, Hands In Soil offered an embodied call for activating care for the Earth, our shared place of habitation as primary to the design of a food garden. As a collective, we encountered the sacred substance of soil which yielded its many manifestation through the ritual – memoried and emotional experiences of the physical, sensuous, visceral and archetypal. Within this ritual of thanksgiving to soil we were all able to embody and apprehend the multidimensionality of the interrelationships between the ecology of the living soil and our human cultures. We were connected to the genius loci of place, to each other, the matter of soil, its ecological food harvests, as well as to ancestry, rites of passage, and artisan skills and practices from the kitchen. Within the bounded safety of time and space, the liminal conditions of a ritual enable us to feel and apprehend the whole, the holy, the health-giving – to notice and inhabit a shared cultures of belonging.
CURATING SYMPOIETHICS
‘There is a connection between humans that is the soil. I am the soil’. Reflection from member of Kofifi during
Hands In Soil (2012)
‘Hands in Soil raised awareness regarding the functions of soil as a source of creation and a sustainer of all forms of life. It got me even more excited about my studies in environmental science and understanding of the importance of soil in different ecosystems, and how, a failure to best manage good soil as one of our limited treasures on this planet would lead to a devasting future. Our soils should not only serve the needs of the human species alone but also the needs of other species like plants.’ Reflections from former Kofifi member (2022).
The art of sympoiethics awakens us, with and through our bodyminds, to emancipatory practices and reciprocal responsibilities for living, loving, thinking, being and acting in ways that are equitable and responsive to our co-dependent existence. Recognising life as an embodied, embedded and relational process of unfolding and entanglement calls us to apprehend and integrate an expanded conception of care. Sympoiethics as an embodied aesthetic enlivens our capacity for practising an ethics of care in the everyday which respects the integrity of each other, the sentient matter of our Earth and the habitats we dwell within. These embodied encounters recover the sacred connection between our human liberation and the flourishing of the living whole. We grow our humanity within such expansive artistic exchanges as they enrich our capacity for attending to our own inner worlds in communion with outer world experiences.
ENLIVENING PROPOSITIONS
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflection from member of Kofifi during Hands In Soil (2012)
1. Humus and the soil are living substances teeming with myriad communities of living organisms,
which know how to care for themselves and in so doing support the lifecycle of their
environment, and our human habitat on Gaia. The sustaining of organisms depends on the
fertility of the medium within which they thrive.
2. Living soils create biodiverse habitats and healthy organisms. From these biodiverse habitats
come the bounty of harvests rich in nutritional benefits for the thriving of our human bodyminds
and immune systems.
3. We are made from the Earth and our continued human existence unfolds through our care for
each other and the multi-sentient communities of the Earth. Our capacity for flourishing arises
from cultivating interactions which are in practical devotion to the Earth.
4. The body is a sense-making system that is always situated and it is in the lived experience that we
come to authentic ways of knowing. Consciousness, knowing and capacity is a continuous,
embodied exchange with the matter and living processes within habitats of place.
5. Human oppression and ecosystemic destruction are both consequences of an epistemicide, the
death of a form of knowing that all is interconnected. By bringing ourselves back into our bodies
through a relationship to matter we become aware how the meaning and essence of our lives is
grounded in a physical and metaphysical relationships with each other and the cosmos.
6. We live and belong within communities of kinship and our self-realisation comes through having
a sense of responsibility for how other people and our multi-sentient ecosystems are affected by
our acts.
7. The living arts are a whole-bodied aesthetic reconnecting us to health-giving relationships with
the visceral and reciprocal exchange between individual and community, habitat and human,
nature and culture and enliven feelings and memories in embodied ways that can awaken a way
of knowing and a consciousness of care to guide our actions within our interdependent world.
8. Sympoiethic rituals with the matter of soil and the substance of food inspire cultures of
belonging as we improvise and interact within environment and with our co-inhabitants.
9. Sympoiethics affords an ecological imaginary for recognising our resonance, reverence and
responsiveness towards the animate Earth through daily practices of tending and noticing that we
are all embedded within the physical forces, material interactions and cyclic processes upon
which we depend for our existence.
GRATITUDES
“I have never appreciated soil before today but now I have been doing something with soil – now that soil is here, something
is coming. Soil has spoken to me”. Reflections from Kofifi members during Hands In Soil (2012)
Thanks-giving to African soils with Kofifi Theatre Company. This collective ritual opened Third Paradise-Rebirth Day 12.12.2012 at NIROX Foundation in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. The ritual earthenware bowl contains living soils gathered from local biodynamic and organic farms and gardens during our Renaturing the City Residency.
Discovering that the origins of ‘to give thanks’ comes from the Old English word ‘poncian’, which traces back to ‘tong’ the Proto Indo-European word meaning ‘to think, to feel’, the sharing and expressing of gratitude inspires us to think and feel into our human beingness as part of the animate world.
Gratitude to Kofifi, Trevor Huddleston Memorial Centre, Asha Centre, Bag Factory, NIRO Foundation, Maboneng Precinct, Bronwyn Lace and Marcus Neustetter and Robert Loder.
FOOTNOTES
1 Soils are easy to neglect as we walk on them, yet they are vital to most of earth's lifeforms. Our abuse of
soils as a “resource” is heralding a global soil crisis and bringing new attention to this hidden element of our
landscape. Human-soil relations are changing. Led by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and funded with an AHRC
Leadership Fellowship, this project explores the cultural aspects of these transformations. By focusing on a
highly industrialised society, we explore how new ecological cultures are taking shape in response to a crisis of
relations with non-human nature.
2 Sympoiethics combines biologist Beth Dempster’s conception of ‘sympoieisis’, which defines ecosystems and
their interconnected qualities of entanglement, coproduction and cooperation, with ethics which is rooted in
the term ethos, which means a dwelling place where people come to know and create together. In 2016
philosopher Donna Haraway continued evolving the concept of sympoieisis.
REFERENCES
Thanks to those who inspired us and guided our thinking and being.
Dempster, B. (1995) ‘Sympoietic and autopoietic systems: a new distinction for self- organizing systems’
available online from http://www.isss.org/2000meet/papers/20133.pdf [12 November 2018]
Fabre Lewin, M. (2019) Artful Bodymind: Enlivening Transformative Research Methodologies. Doctoral Thesis
available at https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/studentTheses/artful-bodymind.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Food Rituals as a Practice in
Sympoiethics’ in Wright, J. (ed) (2021) Subtle Agroecologies: Farming With the Hidden Half of Nature. London:
Taylor and Francis.
10
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2021) ‘The Art of Planet Possibility’ in The Environment journal
of the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management April edition.
Fabre Lewin, M. and Gathorne-Hardy, F. (2022) The Art of Sympoiethics. The Ecological Citizen 5 (2):
186–96.
Gablik, S. (1992b) ‘Connective Aesthetics’ in American Art 1 (2), 2-7
Haley, D.’ A question of values: art, ecology and the natural order of things’ in Demos, T. J. (2016)
Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader. Manchester: Gaia Project Press
Haraway, D. (2017) ‘Symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art-science activisms for staying with the trouble’.
Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. (eds.) Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E. and Busbandt, N. London:
University of Minnesota Press, M35-M50
Holdrege, C. (2013) Thinking like a Plant. Great Barrington: Lindisfarne Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017) Matters of Care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. London: University
of Minneapolis Press.
Pogue Harrison, R. (2012) Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
The work of john a powell can be explored through the Othering at Belonging Institute
https://belonging.berkeley.edu
Ryan, K., Myers, N., and Jones, R. (eds.) Rethinking Ethos: A feminist ecological approach to rhetoric. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Press.
Salami, M. (2020) Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone. London: Zed Books.
Some, M. (1998) (Some 1998). The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding life purpose through nature, ritual and
community.
Weber, A. (2019) Enlivenment: towards a poetics for the Anthropocene. London: MIT Press.
Living Justice is co-founded by Dr Miche Fabre Lewin and Dr Flora Gathorne-Hardy. Their life-long dedication is to live an ethics of care in the everyday by remembering and enlivening our interdependence with each other and the living earth.