vi. Past Papers
My life as a tree Marissa Stoffer The second in a series of excerpts from student papers, this article is extracted from Marissa Stoffers’ dissertation, submitted for the Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art, class of 2020. We are grateful to Marissa for sharing her work. If you have a past paper you would like to share, please contact us at herbologynews@gmail.com.
It is -20°C, January, Finland. I am numb but my mind feels clear after so many thoughts. Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Refresh. I walk... Like the frozen forest I am standing in, I am frozen— literally and creatively. I have come here to make art, or at least think about art for the first time in a year. As an artist, I have come to question the very act of making, the materials I use, and the energy consumed for those materials. I believe it is important to unpick how we relate to the world around us because this affects how we live and act— our politics, our beliefs and ultimately our individual and collective impact. This is the ‘human-dominated, geological epoch’ (Crutzen, 2002)— the Anthropocene; a time that stretches further back than we think. If you search the internet for ‘world’s biggest environmental problems’, the top four categories are: deforestation, soil retrogression/degradation, human overpopulation, and extinction. The Western world has been in a coma of consumerism since the industrial era. But anthropocentrism and the mechanisation of the mind and body began much earlier than this. For several hundred years the dominant orthodoxy has implicitly assumed that inanimate things are fundamentally devoid of mental qualities. This view has become integrated into our science, our literature, and our arts. Ultimately it has incorporated itself into our deepest social values, and thus
become reflected in our collective actions. We treat nature as an impersonal thing or collection of things, without spontaneity, without intrinsic value, without rights of any kind. Natural resources, plant and animal species have been exploited for maximal shortterm human benefit. These are mindless entities, deserving of no particular respect or moral consideration. They exist to be collected, manipulated, dissected, and remade. (Skrbina, 2017:265) And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on earth.” Genesis 1:281 This is the problem. I will argue that the answer is kinship. It is biodiversity, heterogeneous, multi-faceted and inclusive. It is weird, dreamy, and refers to the mythological— yet it is practical and ecological. It evokes the Animistic. The concept of Animism engages philosophical concepts of the soul and what it means to be alive. It is derived from the Latin word anima, meaning breath, life or spirit. As a term, it is wide-reaching and varies depending on culture and environment, but what remains coherent across cultures, is that Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world (Swancutt, 2019). It involves attributing sentience to animate and inanimate objects, including animals, the environment, plants, spirits, or even technological items such as computers, cars and robots. Western popularisation of the term was engineered by anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his most noted work, Primitive Culture (1871), but Tylor borrowed it from eighteenth-century chemist George Ernst Stahl, who proposed ‘that spirits or souls of living things or beings control physical processes in the body’ (Swancutt, 2019).
