PLUME Issue 2: Ecofuturism

PLUME

Eco-Futurism Featuring

Dr. Morgan Mies Meghan Navoy Sabrina Nelson Dr. Ian Lambert Leslie Tom

Contents

PLUME

a publication by the College for Creative Studies

connecting community

to disrupt linear research

interconnected

resources

an

from

single

Editor’s Note

In 2022 the world is feeling tension from all angles. As societal structures bend and collapse following the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, the earth mirrors back to us a similar emergency of instability. From record-breaking heat waves to prolific flooding, we can feel the climate rapidly changing all around us. Scholars from every field urgently speculate on the historical lineage of today’s predicaments while much of the population struggles to face the climate crisis with hope or direction. As we look for models of transformative action in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, PLUME recognizes that support and enlightenment may very well be found in the lessons derived from creative practice.

Artists are no strangers to the cycle of destruction and recreation. Inherent in the nature of creating work arises the necessity of productive destruction and revision. It is not uncommon for a person to experience creative loss, but it is the act of using loss to birth something new that marks the artist’s journey. As a community of skilled creative practitioners, the College for Creative Studies (CCS) is fertile ground for new hope and action to take root. As we stand equipped with a unique

ability to work in the midst of destruction, we must take account of the supplementary tools at hand.

In PLUME Issue 2: Ecofuturism, our goal is to connect the CCS community with resources to support this existential undertaking. While still providing our usual categories of curated print and digital resources, we chose to expand this issue to include the wider creative community beyond our college. The city of Detroit holds cultural and material extremes in revolutionary transparency, and as such is a potent contextual location for work around the climate crisis.

CCS as an institution cannot begin to tackle a global crisis without first situating itself within our immediate environment. Images, interviews, and articles centered on this unique urban ecosystem are presented alongside our traditional academic resources in order to encourage interconnected modes of research. By rooting ourselves into the immediate cultural, material, and intellectual ecologies at hand, the CCS community will be well-equipped to help envision a new future for us all.

Concrete

Dr. Morgan Mies

Anyone who’s not afraid of concrete is a little bit nuts. It’s so very hard. And it goes over pretty much anything. And it is everywhere. As a human being, today, in the early 21st century, a person spends a quite significant amount of time, literally, physically, on concrete: walking on it, standing on slabs of it, moving around on surfaces that are made mostly or completely of concrete. City dwellers in specific very rarely move about on surfaces that are just plain earth, or dirt, or whatever that stuff under the concrete is. I’m reminded of that old Cat Stevens song about the children. Cat sang the following words, if you’ll remember:

“Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass

for your lorry loads pumping petrol gas And you make them long, and you make them tough But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can’t get off

Oh, I know we’ve come a long way We’re changing day to day But tell me, where do the children play?”

Of course, there is an answer to this question. The children will play on concrete. And they do. I myself played on concrete growing up. These days, I find myself playing with concrete as well. That’s to say, there’s much concrete to be found in my neighborhood on the west side of Detroit. This concrete is in an interesting form. It has been smashed up a good deal

over the last few decades. That’s for the usual Detroit reasons. A lot of structures fell down or got taken down, intentionally or less so. So, chunks of concrete are to be found among empty lots and behind large but now empty warehouses and factories.

This broken concrete exudes a certain humility. I know, you are having trouble believing me about this. You don’t think of concrete as having feelings and you’re pretty sure that if concrete does have feelings, a feeling of humility is not among them. But you are wrong. And John Ruskin was also wrong, though he was right about so many other things, when he coined the term pathetic fallacy. He objected to the technique by which poets transpose human feelings and emotions onto the world of things. But the only mis take in the pathetic fallacy is to imagine that the feelings and emotions that are simply out there in the cosmos were ever the special provenance of human creatures in the first place.

Sadness, for instance, existed in the first instant of the Big Bang, or whatever it was that happened there at the beginning, and this sadness has existed ever since. Human beings did not create sadness, we simply came around to participate in it and to add our own little nuances to the everlasting melancholy. And that’s just one example. Same thing holds for joy. And for silliness. To think that we invented silliness is actually quite silly. But I digress.

Sometimes, when messing around in the garden-type space that my beloved Shuffy and I are making in the empty lots behind our house I will walk around the neighborhood, alone or with friends, and collect broken scraps of concrete in order to arrange them into shapes and mini-structures in the space that we are calling a garden and in which we are also planting growing things, trees, bushes, shrubs, weeds, vegetables, humongous gourds, tiny wildflowers, all the sorts of things that one can grow in this part of the world and often when I am carrying these bits of broken concrete down the block, cradling them sometimes, the chunks of concrete, in my arms and holding them almost like little babies, when I am transporting this concrete from piles over there to piles over here a warm feeling often creeps over me and I am practically overcome with sense of gentleness and a kindness toward the concrete and the concrete, I should mention, also feels this way about me It is, after all, not the fault of the concrete. All the stuff that was making Cat Stevens feel so bad, we can’t blame the concrete for that. Concrete simply is what it is. And it is amazing. Can we acknowledge that for a moment, please? Have you ever mixed fresh concrete? There is magic in it, my friends.

The word comes from the Latin, of course, concrescere, which means something like ‘to grow together’. It has almost an organic feeling to it, does it not, this word? And when you are mixing concrete there is

a process of coming together and then a hardening and a binding and a making firm that is wondrous to behold, to feel, to witness. Concrete is a substance that wants and needs to bind. Concrete likes to hold itself together and it enjoys holding other things together too. It’s a holder-together er sort of person. Yes, I called it a person. Shouldn’t we start doing that? Mightn’t we acknowledge that there is a giant friend amongst us? Isn’t it about time that we introduced ourselves properly?

This friend has been around for a few thousand years actually, the ancient Egyptians had already made friends with the stuff even before the Romans became obsessed and started slathering it all around the ancient world. Gypsum and lime, that is all you really need. (I’m eliding the distinction a bit here between cement and concrete but this, as you can tell, is not a scientific paper. Those interested in the chemical properties of cement may consult the internet). Basically, just some gypsum and lime and the alchemical magic is ready to happen.

I found some especially interesting fragments of concrete not too long ago just across from the garden. These were chunks that must have been part of a wall. They contained scraps of metal inside. The chunks were in a pile and most chunks were about the size of a largish book. For some reason, the chunks tended to be triangular in shape. Book-sized triangles.

At first, I found them ugly. I didn’t know what to do with them, if anything. Then, for some reason, I placed a few in the ground around some trees. The spikey nature of the pointy concrete triangles was pleasing. They obviously liked their new home. You could tell because the concrete chunks had become perky and eager, they were taking up their spots almost without my doing anything. These were chunks of concrete that had become lethargic and they needed some help remembering how to be just the sort of chunks of concrete that they actually are. It is in the nature of concrete to be stubborn. Well, that’s fine. Water, after all, has its own version of stubbornness (it goes where it will go!) and so do I. Shuffy can be very stubborn. Stubbornness is a quality of many persons. It can be worked with. It can be learned from.

What exactly am I trying to say here? What does it have to do with ecology or the future? I suppose these things are either clear to you or they are not. It is like the lines in the Neutral Milk Hotel song about the two-headed boy.

“Two-headed boy

There’s no reason to grieve The world that you need is wrapped in gold silver sleeves

Left beneath Christmas trees in the snow And I will take you and leave you alone Watching spirals of white softly flow Over your eyelids and all you did Will wait until the point when you let go.”

Dr. Morgan Mies is an author of several books and has been featured in numerous publications including the New Yorker. He is also a professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.

Resources

Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence

With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics

W. Mules BD581 .M86 2014

T. Morton GF75 .M685 2016 Radical Ecopsychology: Psychology in the Service of Life

A. Fisher BF353.5.N37 F57 2013

G enerosity

Meghan Navoy

Within the vibrant creative community of Detroit, Meghan Navoy of Rosemarine Textiles stands out as a leader for sustainable business practices and ecological mindfulness. A graduate from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), Navoy moved to Detroit where she has been operating her own natural dyeing business since 2018. Taking a break from her dye and sewing studio, Navoy spent some time talking with us about her path, passion, and vision for a more sustainable world.

PLUME: Thanks so much for joining us today, Meghan. Let’s start with your time at FIT. While a student there, you helped pitch and build a rooftop natural dye garden. How did that come into fruition?

Meghan: I was really involved with school when I was there. I was an R.A. for two years and involved in the textile club, and my friend was the vice president of the student council. We decided to apply for a grant through the Clinton Global Initiative in order to start a rooftop dye garden, and we got accepted. FIT really supported the project, and we did a lot of fundraising to make it happen. Within a matter of months it all came together and we had a beautiful garden. Now there’s a club of various majors that maintain it, so any student at the school can work and use the plants.

P: That’s really amazing. At that time were you already ecologically-minded in your work?

M: I became really obsessed with zero waste in college. I realize there’s a lot more nuance behind it now so I don’t really like to use that word anymore. But at the time, I was really interested in working with plant material and my dye mentor, The Dogwood Dyer, helped suggest a list of different plants to include in the dye garden project.

We planted the garden when we were graduating, so we didn’t really get to use it. But because we did that, other students were empowered to take on other projects like composting discarded muslin, natural fabrics, and food from the cafeteria. I think they may even have bees now, too. It’s really cool.

P: That sounds like a powerful initiative. Once you graduated from FIT did you move to Detroit right away?

M: No, I actually worked and lived in New York for a little over a year after I graduated. I did textile fabric sourcing there, and because our fabric sourcing department was so small we were able to do projects like the recycling program I set up. We had thousands of fabric headers getting thrown away, so instead we gave them to fabric recycling companies and local artists who work with scrap materials. It was frustrating to see all the waste, but it was rewarding to set up the recycling program.

P: I can only imagine. Was it the waste that drove you out of corporate textiles and into your own business?

M: I had always wanted to be able to just focus on my own sustainable projects. My partner and I decided to move to Detroit, and I worked for a few years to save up money until I could rely on my business full-time. That was in 2018 and I’ve been working for myself since then.

P: What does ecological justice mean for you and your business, particularly in relation to Detroit?

M: I try to be very conscious, but sometimes I feel so frustrated and powerless because of the systems around us. We don’t live in a circular system and designers often don’t even consider what the end-life of their products are. Even though it is frustrating, I try to focus on what I can do even as a small business. For example, in my studio I try to reduce the water use as much as possible and reuse rinse water because dyeing is very water intensive.

Detroit definitely has a lot of environmental justice issues; a lot of the city is a food desert, we have the Marathon refinery, and there is really significant water pollution. There’s so much about the climate crisis that’s not even really situated at the forefront of people’s conversation. And especially in Detroit, I think it should be.

P: Absolutely. In Detroit you’re regularly confronted with nature in the urban environment, but despite this we defnitely still need more conversation and action around these issues. That’s why the work people like you are doing is so important here. Do you feel like there’s a relationship between the transparency of your ecological footprint and the responsibility of being a business owner?

M: I definitely value transparency. I’m really against gatekeeping and I feel people should be generous with information. I try to be as generous with information as I can be when people ask me questions because it often pushes me to be more thoughtful.

We all benefit from sharing information, and there’s definitely a lot of learning I still have to do. It’s hard as a small business to know exactly where every material comes from when you’re ordering on such a small scale, but I’m trying to be as mindful as possible.

P

: That mindset of generosity is so important, and I feel like that’s a way to help build up our community and help other people make it under the dominant capitalistic systems in place.

M: I’m trying to operate my business and life from an abundance mindset, with the knowledge that there is enough for everyone. The more people who are interested in environmental sustainability

and lower waste methods, the better. It’s not a large-scale solution because the greater systems make the lion’s share of the waste, but we can only do what we can control.

P: Are there any particular books, resources or practices that help you connect to the planet meaningfully and cultivate your sense of abundance?

M: I participated in a feminist business school that helps you identify ways to run a more collaborative and less extractive business. It’s based on a feminist business model that is anti-capitalist and focused on generosity. I am also really inspired by Sarah Gottesdiener, a small business owner and spiritual writer who inspires me to give back with my business and be as generous as possible to my employees. It may seem strange to cite a spiritual teacher as one of my business role models, but she truly does inspire me.

P: Extractive models of business often rely on an underlying presence of fear and scarcity, so I can see how having a spiritual way of navigating out of that may be important. If we ask ourselves what is an antidote to fear, I think the words generosity and abundance can come to mind. How do you see this ap proach to your work contributing to the future you want to see?

M: I’m definitely interested in doing more community-oriented projects and using my business to give back. Like having a knitting

circle, for example. Or setting up in a park and helping people learn to mend their clothes or sew a patch for free. I’d like to make what I do and value more accessible. I started a YouTube channel last year to help share information around running a small textile business, because there aren’t a lot of easily available resources on that topic.

I’m also interested in doing less. The speed I was going before the pandemic was not sustainable, so I’m trying to slow down, refocus, and stick to a direction that is consistent with my values. I want to focus on offering a small selection of pieces I feel really passionate about, and contribute meaningfully to my community.

Meghan Navoy is a designer and small business owner based in Detroit, Michigan.

https://www.rosemarinetextiles.com/ @ rosemarinetextiles

I nterconnection

Sabrina Nelson

In 2022 there seems to be discussions around every corner addressing historical and contemporary injustice in the world around us. In Detroit particularly, one artist has been intimately involved in forming and portraying this conversation for the last several decades.

Sabrina Nelson was Alabama-born and Detroit-raised in the 1960’s, a time of potent and turbulent change for the city of Detroit. In her childhood she experienced the dichotomy of external oppression with a vibrant home of powerful maternal figures. It was by watching the self-sufficient practices of her family that Nelson grew up empowered to channel both emotion and experience through her own physical practice. Nelson graduated from the College for Creative Studies and embarked on an impressive and meaningful career, focused on amplifying her voice in roles including artist, performer, and activist.

As both our ecological and social landscapes continue to shift locally and abroad, we decided to have a chat with Sabrina about how her work speaks to contemporary times.

PLUME: Throughout the thread of your life there has been an active relationship between your internal and external worlds. In your childhood, your family of makers helped you cultivate a very rich internal life. What’s your vision and experience of putting your internal dialogue out into a public space?

Sabrina: So there are two philosophers that I resonate with, one of them is Rumi and one is Nina Simone. Nina says, “It is an artist’s duty to reflect the time that they live in.” Rumi said, “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” So keeping those quotes in mind, when I grew up the world was where your neighbors were. It was really just your community, and you didn’t hear as much about the wider world. Now we live in a world with the internet, and information is always hitting you. You have to figure out how to adjust to it. You can’t change it, but like Rumi suggested, you can change your reaction to it.

So, it’s really not about changing the world, but about changing our reactions to it. And so when we hear about all the lives suffering through trauma or racism, it hurts me deeply. When I hear about children starving or being killed anywhere in the world, or when I hear about Breonna Taylor or George Floyd, it hurts. We think of these things as separate, but we’re all connected. So what do we do with that? How do we heal each other? What or who does the medicine look like?

I don’t know how to stop thinking about these things, so I feel like I have to make something in response. That’s where all the drawings, paintings, and performances come from. I have the need to make and I don’t think I will ever stop.

P: And that’s fundamental. I think you’re speaking to something that a lot of artists through space and time talk about. You know, doing this because they are compelled that there is no other way for them to communicate a thought or feeling or phenomenon. Like you mentioned, this is how they’re able to practice medicine in a way. I think that’s poignant.

S: Art is medicine. That’s what I am prescribing myself, the medicine I need to move forward. And I think if I didn’t do it, I would be really sick.

P: Your work responding to people who lose their loved ones sounds a lot like working with grief, and using your work to transmute the grief of our times. You did a lot of work about the pain of mothers losing their children and, in particular, Black mothers losing their children. I’m curious if you find an overlap or some sort of connection with this maternal devastation and the environmental crisis happening?

S: Mother Earth is losing her children and we’re losing our mother. If you separate yourself, your breathing, soft-skinned self from the planet, that’s not right. We are the planet that we live on, that we inhabit, and we’re not taking care of her.

I focus on Black mothers having to bury their children because I feel like it’s where I’m from, but also because it creates a form of what empathy should look and feel like.

We are plants, we are seeds, we have been planted in ruins and we will grow like trees. You know what I’m saying? The trees breathe and they communicate with each other. And if we’re not taking care of each other, we won’t take care of this planet. And when we watch mothers bury their children, we’re watching our planet die.

But you know, I’m not Frank Gehry. I’m not doing installations with the Earth, if you will. But most of the medicine that I talk about is from the Earth, and whenever we kill that apothecary we’re dead. All of our lives are so connected, but we do so much to separate ourselves. Art is like a puzzle with all these conversations and experiences in your head, until one day you realize everything is connected. You know, it’s just like the way you think as a child. The world is us, and we have to take care of each other.

I feel that everything is connected. There is no disconnection.

Sabrina Nelson is an artist and activist based in Detroit, Michigan. She also works as an esteemed Admissions Counselor at the College for Creative Studies.

https://www.sabrinanelsonart.com/ @ sabrinanelson67

“We are plants, we are seeds, we have been planted in ruins and we will grow like trees.”

I ntention

Dr. Ian Lambert & Leslie Tom

The Zelkova tree, or Zelkova serrata, is a deciduous tree species closely related to the Elm tree. Both beautiful and resilient, it is prized as a street tree due to the shade created by its spray of delicate leaves, distinctive bark, and resistance to disease. This is perhaps how in 1997, a cluster of Zelkova trees found themselves nestled in a row off of Warren Avenue, flanking the entrance to the then newly-built Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

By 2018, however, a number of the Wright Museum’s Zelkova trees were in decline – either dying or already dead due to girdling, a condition caused by incorrect planting methods in which the tree is strangled by its own root system. Wanting to divert the trees from a landfill, the museum sought alternative uses for the disposed trees that prioritized partnership with local artists and aligned with its institutional values. From this search emerged the d.Tree Studio project, a collaboration between the Wright Museum and CCS that encompasses an experimental 15-week studio course on urban lumber, object-making, and storytelling in Detroit.

“We naturally fell into a conversation with CCS because we are both institutions rooted in design,” Leslie Tom, Chief Sustainability Officer of the Wright Museum said. “We put a lot of work into designing a curriculum that considered all of the different ways that students could

tap into history with intention.”

Students participating in the project were tasked with creating physical artifacts from the harvested Zelkova lumber, an act that challenged students to consider intention, storytelling, and place-making while engaging in the technical process of craft.

“The moment when you take the tree through the saw and it falls in half - for the first time, we’re peering into this tree. We saw the beauty of what we could do with this stuff,” Dr. Ian Lambert, Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at CCS, said. “We asked students to pause and l et the material lead them, to learn from the trees as a material. This creative exploration has led people down several paths and the work they have created comes about through a deep, emotional process.”

For both the Wright Museum and CCS, it was important that craft was punctuated by an understanding of African material culture as well as African American experiences and voices in Detroit. The project included events, content, and site visits that exposed students to a rich patchwork of community narratives to help inform their work. One such touchpoint was the Treeposium, where a panel of Detroit community members shared their experiences with students.

“We brought local artists, designers, landscape architects, and elders to the

table who’ve experienced Detroit trees to share their stories,” Tom said. “These opportunities shifted how the students began relating to this wood. They moved towards thinking: what does place mean? What are these Detroit trees? What is the history of Detroit?”

The curriculum culminates in a student exhibition to be held at the CCS Center Galleries, but its organizers envision a legacy that lasts beyond the current iteration of the project, with the potential to expand to other organizations and locations.

“It provides a wonderful template and it’s interesting to think of the next line of possibility,” Dr. Lambert said. “It’s important that we spend some time looking back at unpacking the experience, because the project itself grew arms and legs. But now we’ve mapped it out, we know the parts that might lead to a greater level of impact as we move forward. The exhibition is ‘here’s what can do’ not ‘here’s what we did.’”

In addition to serving as a roadmap for future programs, both Dr. Lambert and Tom see the d.Tree Studio as a tool of persuasion. Beginning with a few declining Zelkova trees, the project has initiated a process of reframing overlooked or devalued objects in order to view our spaces through a more empathetic and holistic lens.

“The Wright Museum’s landscape architect for our Green Stormwater Infrastructure work, Patrick Judd, of Environmental Consulting and Technology, Inc. said ‘What is loved is cared for and what is cared for is loved,’” Tom said. “Through the design lens, we are helping people shift their hearts and minds to look at the world differently. So when they pass a tree, they can see that it’s more than just a dead thing that needs to go to a landfill. Look at the potential here, look at this project, look at all that we were able to create.”

Dr. Ian Lambert is the Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan.

Leslie Tom is the Chief Sustainability Officer at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan.

The d.Tree Exhibition will be held in the Center Galleries from March 19th to April 2nd, 2022.

Tickets can be reserved by visiting

“We asked students to pause and let the material lead them, to learn from the trees as a material.”

Beauty in the

Inuit