What We Are and What We Did
In his 2008 essay, Going Home (Anansi), in reference to our changing relationship to land, Governor General’s Literary Award-winning poet and essayist Tim Lilburn writes:
What we are: detached long ago, while still in Europe, from that part of the Western intellectual tradition that would have taught us the suitability of living undivided from one’s earth,” we cannot value what we most need, indeed cannot name it. What we did: we met the new land as conquerors and subjugated it. We moved too quickly over the ground, omnivorous, self-uprooting on principle, marked by the inevitably anarchic character of capitalism… Finally we just filled it with our will, so that the land came to look tired in its heart: almost empty but crammed with human intention, sick with a sameness that came from us.
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Web Site: http://petersibbald.com
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Find It
Focus
A fermentation (a.k.a. Compost) of media, technology, social justice, art and the environment as experienced on the ground through the eye of one Canadian photo documentarian, intended to help fertilize the zeitgeist and yield a mixed crop of new ideas surrounding civic engagement.
Origins
Out on the land seeking moments and light, I’m often reminded of the similarity between the life and livelihood of a visual journalist/artist and that of the farmer.
To Wit
“Well Ed, the Fishers had their auction last Saturday morning. I watched as the neighbourhood descended on the place and picked it clean. After it was over, and the Fishers had driven off to their new house in town, the auctioneer walked over the property with me. His name’s Freddy. Interesting chap, friendly and outgoing. Runs a beef and dairy herd on the farm next door, plants corn, grain, potatoes, turnips, does auction sales some blacksmithing, small auto repairs and real estate. What I believe is called mixed farming.”
Letters from Wingfield Farm, ©1989 Douglas Beattie. (Act 1) Wingfield Farm
Ongoing Investigations
• The Meaning of Land
• Rurality
• The Nexus of Technology,
Implimentation and Power in
Visual Communication
• Legacies of Colonialism
• Sustainability vs. Resilience in
Socio-Ecological Systems
