Unearth/ Re-earth by the Coastal Reading Group at Undisciplined Environments in Stockholm

The Coastal Reading Group scooped up soil, seeds and clay in Stockholm this week for UNDISCIPLINED ENVIRONMENTS: International Conference of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE).

buckets-cropped

We culled from the texts we’ve been reading — texts about human constructions of and engagement with wilderness, nature and ethics — stripped them of punctuation and cut them into long pieces of printed text. We invited our visitors to treat this text as a finite resource, unearthing new meanings from it before adding this resource to the soil. We rolled these processed texts into seedballs, made of soil, clay, seeds and water.

addingclay

We re-earthed the text-and-seedballs around the conference area and offered them to an urban commons project on the edge of legality in the southern part of Stockholm.

Recipe for Unearthing/ Re-earthing:
part one:
– choose 3-4 strips of paper
– these words are finite resources you can only use each word once
– cross words off as you use them
– reassemble and unearth meaning
part two:
– cut out the words and phrases you used
– add the cut out text to the bucket of seedball mixture, saying the words and phrases out loud as they drop into the soil
– you may alternate your texts with others’

Recipe for Seedballs:
– 5 parts dry clay (red is ideal)
– 3 parts dry organic compost or soil
– 1 part seed
– 1-2 parts water