Fieldnotes, or An Environmental Disaster
1 In the Great derangement, Amitav Ghosh discusses knowledge that results from recognition. Recognition is a “passage from ignorance to knowledge” that relies in an “already existing awareness that makes possible the passage from ignorance to knowledge.” See Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 4-5.
This book contains a recipe for soy-wax brick making. It has been the product of diligent, yet erratic work-cycles. It is the product of many surprises. And, as such, all that we know is that it is in a continuous entanglement with its milieu. We had hoped for an infallible instruction set, one that, in the spirit of Sol Lewitt, contained within it the steps towards a dependable authorship. Instead, we recognized that a rock in the winter is not the same as a rock in the summer;1 that unforeseen environmental factors were far more authoritative than we could have predicted. I still remember the sizzle, an acoustic deluge, intense yet fleeting. Tiny frozen stones sizzled and steamed as they plunged into a bowl of boiling, liquid fat. As the sounds desist, the liquid becomes more and more solid. The cool stones draw the heat from the fat and freeze their interaction in place, almost instantly. Delaying an immediate solidification was a concern in allowing the wax to evenly suspend the stones, our mix required time. Think here of a concrete truck, churning and churning, fending solidification
An Environmental Disaster
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