We are weaving stories, aesthetics, landscapes, ecosystems, products and places that re-enchant our relationships with the pulsing, shimmering rhythms and messy entanglements of life on Earth, superseding nature/culture dichotomies to cultivate emergent ecologies where all of life can flourish.
“Forms of life” evokes the idea of other-worldy life forms so completely alien to our planet’s carbon-based life forms as to be unrecognisable to us. The idea of these strange life forms contains the possibility of a complete rupture and transformation of life as we know it, even if all they do is break our perceptions of the limitations on possible forms life can take, or offer seductive imaginaries about being recognised by alien life forms who find our own forms of life so fascinating that we can see our fleshy selves anew, as though from their eyes.
And “Forms of Life” evokes the ways in which the forms that surround us as we go about our lives - forms of cities, of ideas, of language, of social organisation, of architecture, of energy, of social relationships, of habit - delimit fields of possibility, shape our perceptions, give form to the lives we can live individually and collectively, but also contain the latent potential for new forms to disrupt habitual patterns and reformulate life itself.
This practice of mutual reciprocity is conceived against traditional notions of disciplinary practice that presume one knowledge-domain or set of practices to be more fundamental to achieving specific outcomes, or indeed that transdisciplinarity, the re-stitching together of "separate" domains of knowledge, is enough to overcome the problems created by the stance of domination of nature that characterised the anthropocene.
Instead we are proposing a reformulation of the broader ecology in which life is formed and forms are lived. The ways of thinking and practicing that got us into the current mess of species extinction, climate change and planetary degeneration are not the ways of thinking and practicing that will get us out.
Language is a series of impressions, audible or visible marks that impress a meaning into themselves, into one who listens and partakes in a network of languaging beings and forms. But speaking and writing are not the only things that leave marks, and any mark can be heard or read.
Fields of reciprocal mark-making and impressioning produce forms of life, whether in the poisonous impression made by cane toads on native toad-eating birds that leaves a mark of absence in our Northern bushlands, or by tracing a poem that causes us to feel the delicacy of a wave gently needling a twig that lets us sit by the next stream for idle hours on end, or by worms that remind tired soil how to grow things again, or the geological strata of plastic that will remain in the Earth's crust as an impression of human industriousness long after the uniquely languaging human beings are gone.