World 262, Enactment i: report

This Enactment, involving residents of Gabriola Island, Canada, explored World 262, in which a ban on petroleum products leads to a culture of local rope production.

The Enactment was organised by the Gabriola Island Fibreshed Working Group: Megan Adam, Heather Cameron, Yarrow Koontz, Alyssa Semczyszyn, and Christi York, following an earlier visioning event at which World 262 was originally conceived. For further details of the visioning event, see this report:

The fiction guiding this Enactment:

In World 262, petroleum products have been banned since 1982. As a result, rope production was affected and land use planning was changed to facilitate local agriculture. On Gabriola Island, research was undertaken to optimise local products based on local materials. The scale of the island’s fibreshed was precisely mapped to establish benchmarked levels of need. Rope is now produced and maintained on demand, according to needs – agricultural, manufacturing, personal. A breeding program has also been introduced to bring back the woolly dog and expand the range of fibre used locally.

The enactment brought members of the local community together to participate in rope and cordage making as part of a “Refugia” weekend, which was inspired by Rachael Matthews’ discussion of a refugium in her book Rag Manifesto.

The Refugia event was a great success. It attracted a mixed group of people from the local community, including retirees, farmers, artists and tradesfolk, including some who were completely new to textiles. People enjoyed the playful, experimental aspect of making cordage from locally gathered plant materials and discarded textiles, and expressed great interest in knowing how cordage and yarn could be made. Those involved appreciated the positive activity of making within a group, and supported the idea of developing local resources to become more self reliant in meeting the community’s textile needs.

On the second day, community gathered for a Slow Social hosted by The Only Animal Theatre, an off-island arts company dedicated to bringing art and artists to the heart of the climate crisis. Set in an installation featuring textile art by Heather Cameron and Barbara Adler, the Slow Social invited the public to create cordage with natural materials and studio scraps while enjoying live music performances by loom-core spinning wheel band Thrums (featuring texts by Bobbi Rose O’Brien) and the Gabriola Microsynth Orchestra, who used the cordage and fibres to improvise a soundscape. On the final day, TYΦA, a video performance created by Matt Rogalsky and Laura Jean Cameron using cattail cordage to make place-based sound and music, received its world premiere.

Wide-ranging discussion at the event led to plans for working with the local Commons to create a textile maker space and grow flax on one of the Commons fields. Some participants from the Refugia event have since come together to assist a local farmer at sheep shearing time. A couple of hundred pounds of wool were sent to the mill to be made into yarn, creating an added income stream for the farmer and an opportunity for local knitters and weavers to be able to create “Gabriola Grown” garments.

Gabriola Island Fibreshed Working Group hopes to hold similar events again in future.

This Enactment was devised by members of the Gabriola Island Fibreshed Working Group, building on a World contributed by Graham Bradley, Mary Sullivan Holdgrafter, Tawny Maclachlan Capon, and Lynne Quarmby, 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 authors and share their material using the same Creative Commons licence.

Images: Sharon Kravitz and Mars Kurek.