Looking for reparative futures

Hvordan interagerer mennesker med de naturlige og sociale miljøer, de lever i? Hvilke typer socioøkologiske landskaber opstår? Disse spørgsmål har foranlediget mit forskningsarbejde i de sidste 10-12 år. Midt i en økologisk krise og på kanten af en hel ny tid, har jeg insisteret på lede efter reparative landskabsformende praksisser, før og nu, og studeret hvordan de udfolder sig og har udfoldet sig. Jeg har spurgt ind til disse samspil og indviklinger, blindgyder og brudte forbindelser, først som ph.d.-studerende, siden som postdoc-forsker, og gennem arbejdet med et hønseri, ølbryggeri, kornmarker, tangkulturer og fårehyrder.

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How are humans interacting with the natural and social environments they inhabit, and what kinds of landscapes emerge? These questions have occasioned my research, writing and teaching for the last 10-12 years. In the midst of an ecological crisis and on the edge of the future, I have insisted on looking for reparative landscaping practices – past, present, and future. I studied how reparative practices unfold, have unfolded, and how people are longing for how they could unfold. I have queried into ecological interactions and entanglements, entrapments and broken links, first as a Ph.D-student, then as a postdoctoral researcher, and by working with a hennery, natural beer brewery, biodynamic cereal fields, seaweed cultures, shepherds herding sheep and goats on heathlands, and a regenerative garden.

Jordbo

Jordbo er et ugebrev og en platform som jeg skabte sammen med Søren Høgh Ipland fra det danske medie Føljeton i slutningen af 2019. Første brev sendte vi 2. februar 2020. Jordbo er baseret på en dyb interesse for samspillet mellem mennesker og natur, og derved forsøge at opbygge landskabsforestillinger, hvormed mere hensigtsmæssige samspil kan skabes. Jordbo er i dag vokset til et arkiv over en verden i radikal forandring. Der sendes tre typer digitale breve: Et månedligt brev om en art eller miljø og deres forskellige kultur-relationer. Hver anden fredag sendes brevet Forvildet Læsning, som er en bærepose med historier om miljø, landskaber og beboelsesfilosofi. Hver onsdag aften sendes brevet Et Øjeblik og er en kort meditation.

Vi udgav desuden bogen Jordbo: En ledsager i uregerlige tider (2021) og har udgivet en kalender-dagbog-almanak i 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 – de er som arkiver med meditationer og særlige mærkedage og mindedage (fx meteoregne og havgræsser, moser og enge). De første to blev lavet i samarbejde med bogbinder Louise Midjord og grafiker Benjamin Graahede. Med 2023 og 2024 versionerne udviklede indholdet sig og er blevet formgivet Mads Christian Sansholm.

Skriv dig op til at modtage ugebrevet Jordbo her.

Herding Heathlands

An ongoing research and practice-based work since early 2021 that studies and collects how shepherds, sheep, fire, and plants together are the landscape architects of the heathlands – and potentially also other landscape types, weaving a fine mesh and diverse socioecological landscape mosaic. Using fieldwork, workshops, archive studies, and mobile methods, I develop mappings and stories, querying into more-than-human heritage futures and reinventions of landscape care and repair.

Cooking and recipes

Cooking, foods, and dinners are significant to how I work with landscaping. They are landscape-stories – narrated, eaten, embodied, and experienced.

Cooking is the basic relation between humans and landscapes, and cooking can be seen as an architecture of the relations between kitchen, livelihood, skills, and lands. Cooking can be surrounded by an elitist and bourgeois cultural practice, and uneven geographies of access, gender, time, and class are evident. However, cooking is a mundane practice that can empower and cultivate vital, embodied, and affective human-nature relations as well as social responsibility.

Cooking and mundane gastronomy can be powerful ways of commoning, because cooking is about becoming conscious of how our lives are connected socially and with the biosphere. It requires us to think very situated about the ethics of eating and what kinds of more-than-human communities and seasonalities that could be craved and created as landscapes.

Recipes are like oral stories: they move, are gathered, they unfold and creolize, and maybe move on. They are passed between generations, relatives, friends, maybe even foes. They move across borders, localities, families, and communities I was born in one country, grew up in another, and has a parent in a third. Living with a kind of transnational family, recipes is a way that I connect with them og those places. For instance, making and eating ajiaco or arepas or drinking aguapanela is way of connecting with my father, Colombia, and the kitchen-memories of my childhood in Denmark.

In a world with so many broken links, I believe recipes can be a way of connecting and repairing, and the photo-collage above might give an insight in how cooking and recipes unfold in my work.

(c) Emmy Laura Pérez Fjalland