‘‘go touch grass’: towards a poethics of meadowing’

Description

This is a talk about meadows. A meadow is a place of expanse and exposure, where Man shoots the mother deer in the Disney classic Bambi (1942). It is a site of slag heaps, fly-tipping, wild and opportunistic overgrowth; the edge land between industrial estates sprung up with buddleia against the odds. Ambling between creative and critical approaches, this talk makes a case for the gerund meadowing as a conceptual and methodological imperative for porous and cross-pollinating consciousness. The excesses of meadows suggest how we might glean forms of abundance and ongoingness from the discards of capitalist efficiency. We will take seriously the imperative ‘go touch grass’, not as pastoral consolation or escape but rather as a cultivating logic of regeneration. The aesthetic tendencies of meadowing — dense citation practise, polyrhythmia, borrowing from the im/possibilities of dream — are entwined with an ecological ethic of entanglement and suspension.

Period	13 Dec 2023
Held at	University of Nottingham, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	Regional