healing together

In 2017 I put out a call for folks experiencing grief brought on or aggravated by isolation to sit for portraits and talk to me about their experiences. As I began conducting interviews, the project quickly morphed into a series about healing emotionally, spiritually, physically, and mentally. So many of the responses I received included stories of herbal healing and the need for time to rest or just be outside. All of the interviews discussed below were initially conducted in 2017; however, I have since felt compelled to find out how these folks’ healing processes have continued and I’ve updated a few of their portraits.

———————————————————————

The series began as an exploration of the afflictions of my peers, focusing in on the impacts of isolation. At this time, I began to learn more about herbalism and the interdependence of living things. The paintings steadily took shape as documentation of the daily healing journeys of those around me.

In her introduction to Octavia’s Brood, Walidah Imarisha presents the term visionary fiction.1 Visionary fiction is a kind of speculative fiction distinguished by powerful narratives that help us imagine futures in which we all heal and thrive. Through these narratives we create spaces for playfully and creatively exploring our relationship to the world. We get excited together. We begin to understand one another's drives, desires, and needs. Offering forever morphing definitions of our identities is a means of helping others understand us-- a way to connect more deeply. 

Appreciating our differences, we unite around what we have in common: the need to create the world we want to be a part of. These paintings are love letters for me... and for you, who have felt undeserving of a place in the world.

In talking about what we need then prioritizing and planning how we can make these things happen, we support each other in getting common needs met. 

And these conversations are important for thinking about what we want. Who we want to be. Rather than just what we don’t want. This goes beyond survival. I must constantly reinvent and adjust my reality to integrate new information and experiences, if I want to keep growing. It often feels radical to desire to create with those who differ from me-- especially as I learn more about myself and realize how different I am from every other human.

Being anti does not tell the whole story, and does not alone lead to problem solving. We have a need for radically different groups to work and create together.

  My work documents (non)fictional stories-- situations that seem fantastical and those that have been normalized by daily experiences. I am interested in making healing and creating more accessible. I want to help other people realize that they have the power to heal themselves and the organisms that surround them. I have often viewed my healing efforts as daily resistance against the normalization of patterns that impede my growth. I am encouraging myself to envision healing as a lifelong process of learning from behaviors that diminish my power, then course correcting.

  Healing is a daily practice that calls us to cultivate our power and to care for ourselves and, ultimately, the world around us. Finding (and losing) balance while living in the wiggly middle, where course correction is constant, can be easier to navigate as a collective.

As a network, we help new worlds take shape-- worlds of people learning how to understand each other. This is particularly important for people of color, LGBTQ people, disabled people-- people made nonhuman through the systematic restriction or denial of access to basic human rights like food, shelter, safe working conditions, medical care, fair treatment under the law, and safe living conditions.

 We think, speak, write, draw our visions into existence so we can share ourselves, and grow as we expand our understanding of other people’s lives.

The way we think is influenced by what we read, hear, see or otherwise interact with. This input can influence where we place our focus, what we deem important, and how we conceive of ourselves and the world. Religion, popular culture, institutions such as schools, and our local communities interact and inform one another to shape our sense of self and, ultimately, our sense of wellbeing. Colonialism and centralization have made the current framework of thought more generalized, structured, and universalized leading to the loss of specificity and diversity in our use of language. When one way of thinking is deemed more valid than all others, the experiences and views shared becomes limited. Specificity of language and the freedom to share ideas affect how well we understand each other, and thus our closeness to one another.

When we introduce new frameworks, new ideas, into the collective consciousness, what we can imagine expands infinitely. We inspire new thoughts in others, and our ability to acknowledge and work with each other’s differences grows.

We must tell our stories to resist the limited frameworks we have been subjected to, and to combat the tendency to treat some stories as more important than others. The information we share can be taken, partially or fully erased, and rewritten, so it is especially important to uplift the voices that have been removed from Western history by centuries of colonization. The erasure of traditions, and personal and cultural knowledge means the loss of the models, or shared basic understanding, which allows us to learn from our predecessors’ failings and successes.

Getting comfortable being vulnerable enough, open enough, to get closer as a community is difficult when we are busy surviving. So, our lives become centered around individual productivity and success for the accumulation of wealth. This way of living encourages isolation.

The most common definitions of the word individual include: single; separate; of or for a particular person; a single human being as distinct from a group. The prioritization of the individual seems nonsensical if we acknowledge that we are all made up of each other. Donna Haraway captures this message when she discusses the relevance of using the concepts of sympoiesis and holobionts when conceiving of ourselves in relation to the world. We are cast as holobionts, “entire beings” or “safe and sound beings,” that make up complex patterns of relationships.2 Through sympoiesis we “make-with” our fellow holobionts, since “nothing makes itself; nothing is really auto-poietic or self-organizing.”3 We are allowed to be whole in relation to one another and contingent upon one another. The term holobiont is interesting not only because it thinks beyond the stringent distinction of individual, but because of the implications it has in the context of healing. Healing is generally defined as to restore; to make whole or sound. Holobionts are already whole and sound, so it must stand to reason that healing requires us to conceive of our wellbeing in relation to the wellbeing of the world around us.

Healing from isolation is wrapped up in all other forms of healing, since we need and utilize each other to live and grow. 

  The healing I am interested in portraying includes all forms of life in its the process. The landscapes we enjoy and the food systems that sustain us rely not only on humans, but on fungi, bacteria, bugs, and plants. We don’t need to work for progress at the cost of connection to ourselves and each other. Without those connections we get lost in our isolation, desensitized to any damage we may cause and the lives we’re making precarious. There are ways to make-with or become-with one another that prioritize the thriving of as many holobionts as possible.

In the words of Donna Haraway: “It matters which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others.” It matters “... to those many critters across taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness.”4 We assume the role of “caring for and with precarious worldings” which we have made more precarious.

Haraway’s holobionts acknowledge the connections between narratives from varying perspectives, and the fact that, despite beginnings for some being endings for others, we can move from wallowing toward creating “... on-the-ground collectives capable of inventing new practices of imagination, resistance, revolt, repair, and mourning, and of living and dying well.”5 Then we will be able to tackle the dilemma of how to ethically and effectively go about mitigating and reversing the damage.

———————————————————————

1. Brown, Adrienne Maree and Walidah Imarisha, eds. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK Press, 2015.

2. Donna Haraway, “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble,” In Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet, eds. by Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M26.

3. Ibid., M25.

4. Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (British Isles: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015), 2-3.

5. Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E. Flux Journal, no. 75 (September 2016): 11.

6. Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E. Flux Journal, no. 75 (September 2016): 8.

References:

Benson, Peter and Edward F. Fischer. “Broccoli and Desire.” Antipode 39, no. 5 (2007): 812.

Brown, Adrienne Maree and Walidah Imarisha, eds. Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Oakland: AK Press, 2015.

Haraway, Donna. “Symbiogenesis, Sympoiesis, and Art Science Activisms for Staying with the Trouble.” In Arts of Living On a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna Tsing, Elaine Gan, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubandt, M25-M50. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Donna Haraway, “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E. Flux Journal, no. 75 (September 2016): 8.

Laura E. Donaldson, “On On Medicine Women and White Shame-Ans: New Age Native Americanism and Commodity Fetishism as Pop Culture Feminism” Signs 24, no.3 (Spring 1999): 678, 680.

Sita Reddy, “Making Heritage Legible: Who Owns Traditional Medical Knowledge?” International Journal of Cultural Property 13 (2006): 161-188.

———————————————————————