Audio Journeys, Visualisation and Dark Lessons

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 3: Pedagogies

Abstract

I am proposing an audio work to take listeners on a journey underground into the dark compost pile of creative acts and earthy biomes. My independent research has involved the dark in relation to culture, the imaginative and ecology, while considering notions of the disappearing dark. My provocation is how we might re-embrace darkness as a biological, emotional and creative imperative for future survival at a time when our technological lifestyles demand longer light saturated hours. What are the lessons we can learn from our multi-species inhabitants who cultivate complex systems in relation to light and dark? In 2017 I created the first of an ongoing series of audio casts, in which I guided the listener underground to inhabit the world from the viewpoint of mycorrhizal fungi. For this panel I delve into the compost world and fungal gardens of leaf cutter ants. The audio works blend fact and fiction, with a dash of the wry and aim to plant a seed of possibility that could be mirrored in the human species world. A segment of the audio work could be presented with a brief supporting introduction and the full version could be made available for attendees to listen to in a break. The dark fecund (under)ground of the unseen – domain of women, queers and activists deemed unfit for the Man and Nature binary - is where I plant my research in an effort to subvert such paradigms. On the back of Helene Cixous imploring me to explore the dark while laughing with the Medusa, who - as Donna Haraway suggests - needs her tentacular allies, I look toward Anna Tsing’s notion of a “third nature” where life engages with it’s entanglements despite and in spite of capitalism.

Author

• Julie Vulcan, Western Sydney University