Anti-fascist eco-poetry fridge magnets
Interspecies Alliance Against White Supremacy
We Are Auntifa
Vending Machine Enhancement, CIIS
Sheepie’s Adventures
Neologisms with the Bureau of Linguistical Reality
A public participatory artwork focused on creating new language as an innovative way to better understand our rapidly changing world due to manmade climate change and other Anthropogenic events.
-BLR, Heidi Quante and Alicia Escott
See feature in BBC Wise Words: Why We Need New Words for Life in the Anthropocene
Definition: A person of any gender who plays an active maternal role in helping to raise children they have not physically birthed yet whom they thoughtfully and lovingly help to raise. They are non-biological chosen family who actively contribute to a constellation of care. This nurturing involves everything from helping with the everyday tasks of raising a child, to teaching, to unconditional love.
Origin: Natasha Cucek, Canada & Heidi Quante, Zara Zimbardo, United States, March 2017.
Kin (Germanic origin meaning one’s relatives shared by Greek genos and Latin genus ‘race’)
+ Cara (Italian) meaning dear (Latin) meaning beloved.
Refuvescence (colloquial)
The Werríng (noun, formal, pronounced wu•’rng)
To Wormdazzle (verb, slang)
Definition:
1) The almost miraculous moment of transition when compost is infused with fresh oxygen and turns from smelling rank to smelling sweet and full of life.
A recognition within it that this moment, which seems like magic, is the communal, cooperative, alchemical work of millions of individuals: the communal work of bacteria, worms, fungi and other organisms that are not not typically associated with magic. An acknowledgement that death, rot and decay are the necessary fodder for life, growth and beauty.
2) A collective moment of transformation when what seems mired, foul and utterly messed up in a society turns, as if by magic, into a progressive and uniting force. Where rotting structures and ideologies are turned or composted into fertile ground for new growth.
3) The agents of transformation within a rotting culture. Those who do the vital work of decomposing what needs to transform so that habitable futures may be possible.
4) Psycho—geographic location where what has been foul transforms into that which is divine.
Origin: Georgia Carbone, Alicia Escott, Zara Zimbardo, 2017
MARSIFY (verb)
1) Using techno-utopian* fantasy to transcend dire physical and ecological realities on Earth.
2) To attempt to solve a problem in the most statistically unlikely and unselfconsciously grandiose way possible.
*An ideology that fetishizes technological advancement as the key driver of all human “progress” and promotes technological fixes as universally beneficial solutions while ignoring any non-technological (social, political, economic, spiritual) aspects of a complex problem.
MARSIFICATION (noun)
1) The expansion of colonial fantasy beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. “Manifest Destiny to the stars*”. It is an extension of the phenomena of colonizing ‘new lands’ often accompanied by narratives of starting life anew, a civilizational reset, an apparent freedom from the social and political problems colonizers believe they are ‘leaving behind.”
2) The various cultural, political and economic processes through which techno-utopian fantasies divert our attention from the dominant global economic system’s erosion of the life-support systems of Earth.
3) The drive to turn relatively lifeless Mars into a new Earth while effectively turning biodiverse Earth into Mars. The process of making Mars habitable while Earth is being rendered increasingly inhabitable.
4) The delusion that the blank slate of the red planet will be an escape from inescapable problems on our home planet. For example, the idea that humans could escape to Mars if we destroy our own climate.
* Manifest Destiny is a 19th century American ideology that was used by U.S. elites to justify westward expansion of settler colonialism as inevitable and divinely ordained.
Origin: Patrick Reinsborough and Zara Zimbardo in collaboration with The Bureau.
Send
For Día de los Muertos altar-making at California Institute of Integral Studies in 2017. Accompanying statement: This nicho is dedicated to communication and information technologies that have died or are dying. Each a revolution, composting into new forms/old desires to collapse time and space, to carry our voices. Sensate memory of the time of travel, the weight of distance, the wonder of the arrival of a message.
Inside: mini-framed pictures of air mail letter, card catalog, cassette tape, rotary phone, floppy disks, handwriting, payphone, carrier pigeon. Dirt on the bottom with small mirrors reflecting the sky. Outside: “I love you” and “I miss you” written in Morse code.
