After Embeddedness: Dreaming Soil Ecologies Through Arts-Based Research

• In Event: Vibrant Earth: Bioculturally Embedded Educational Encounters Catalyzing Earth Regenerative Creativities

Abstract

In the winter of 2015, I was engaged in an arts-based (Barone & Eisner, 2012; Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund 2008) study within the context of an artist residency, which utilized a practice of socially-engaged art (Helgera, 2011). As an artist, researcher and teacher, I work relationally with humans and other-than-human beings through my arts-based and socially-engaged art practices grounded in matrixial (Ettinger, 2006) dialogic processes.

One aspect of the inquiry became an embodied exploration of edaphology, which is the study of soil and its impact on organisms-- in this case, in the context of the local environment. In addition to the arts-based methodology, I worked with a practice of awake-dreaming (the use of trance and altered states) on the land. This practice has roots in, among others, Modernist surrealist art (eg., Dali, Kahlo, Oppenheim). According to integral dream scholars, Bogzaran & Delauriers (2012), dreams “reflect the traces of alienation and fragmentation as well as recovery and remembrance of our state of interdependence” (p. 165). They further present

Dreams [as] fragments that can and should be connected to larger wholes…. Exploration of this collective level may bring awareness to our past…. our present (… current cultural and ecological embeddedness), and our future. (p. 137)

Employing the language of dream through an arts-based inquiry invites a “curriculum of improvisation” (Aoki, 2005/1990, p. 369). William Pinar wrote, “Whatever language we employ, we “become” the language” (Pinar, 2012, p. 35). Working with the language of dream I “became” the dream, and entered a form of embodied ecological democracy that precludes inherited or classified identities.

Shifting into the language of art following my awake-dream experience, I improvised my aesthetic study of a creek stream located in the local environment of a community. The resulting 8 minute video, entitled Embedded reveals the aesthetic findings and teachings combined (Still images pictured in Appendix, Figures 2-1 and 2-2).

This presentation will include a brief introduction to the practice of an ecologically democratic dream and arts-based inquiry. This will lead into an invitation to the audience to aesthetically experience the awake-dream through the combination of vocal sound, moving images, and improvised poetry, based on the awake-dream that took place at the creek-side. Below is an excerpt from the “involuntary poem”(Note 1) derived and written from transcripts of the waking-dream/trance state.

I am a worm embedded
in the skin of the earth
feeling it touch all of my body
moving worm-like I curl up in a still spiral
hibernating
soaking in
all the nutrients surrounding me
in this mineral rich soil



Note 1: Similar to dreams, author and playwright Bert States (1988) describes “involuntary poetry” as something that may “arise in our individual consciousness but they do not belong to us they unfold of their own accord (cited in Bogzaran & Delauriers, 2012, p. 66).

Author

• Barbara A. Bickel, Southern Illinois University - Carbondale