COVID lockdown year 2020 in World 63. Residents in Melbourne are only allowed to leave their homes up to a distance of 5 km, for up to one hour. New materials can’t enter or leave this distance. People nurture new communities – a new sense of value attributed to what is already there.
Within these new communities, people share tools, food, and knowledge. People have pets they consider family members, and eventually come to understand that even the plants they rely upon for food and fiber can also be considered community members. Rather than cutting and processing, negotiational relationships of nurture and forming are developed with nonhuman organisms such as plants and bacteria to grow material and form for clothing.
What if …
the hierarchical system of fashion production (producer at the top, production systems hidden, consumer at the bottom) was changed to a holarchical system (in which smaller groups of producer/consumers worked together in communities to produce fashion), and community systems were so radicalized that they included nonhuman organisms such as plants as members of their communities? What if we moved from a system of extraction and processing of fibers, to one of nurturing and forming of materials and form for fashion design? What if interspecies collaboration was possible?
Issue targeted:
overextraction of resources and subsequent waste from processing; reframing of nonhuman organisms from being sources for useful materials (see: the notion of Economic Botany) to actual community members with rights that need to be protected
Inspiration:
Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy; Eben Kirksey’s notions of multispecies ethnography; Donna Haraway’s Companion Species worlding
This World was contributed by Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran (located in Melbourne, Australia) using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to share and adapt the work in any medium and for any purpose, providing that they credit the author and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.
Response to World 63
It reminded me of the novel Silo by Hugh Howey.
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