JU – Jag är du – A multispecies spatial poetics set as an urban intervention in downtown Växjö
“Respecting place history and being curious about what has come before / what lies below is important in moving in a direction that is adaptive to climate change challenges and recognizing the possibilities for a radical contemporary transformation of space and placeness.”
Nesting this project work within a longer-term research practice Under Ekarna, a ‘plats-specifik’ culture project in the Northern regions of downtown Växjö, I explore the nexus of what it means to be a feminist farmer / transdisciplinary designer, urban interventionist and co-author of multispecies spatial poetry – a more-than-human project.
Under Ekarna, I will be churning time through the seasons of Spring and Summer and it’s stories, moving, living and gardening-with the question ‘ VAD ÄR ETT LANDERI?¨ (what is a landeri?); an exploration related to socio-spatial soil histories and communities, with agri-culture and feminist technoscience, food webs and knowledge fructification. Over the years, this greater research project will take different forms.
This project will give frame to the beginnings of living-with this overarching question and is one expression of what will be an ongoing process of coming-to-know this place. In its essence it is the infrastructuring of a dialogue between place and species, what I propose as a ‘communication with placeness’.
Through critical ‘urban’ spatial intervention and close attention to multispecies relationality, I will be exploring a plats-specifik ontology of becoming through polyvocal authorship, sticking with the trouble of anthropocentric urban development and temporalities of change. As a ‘plats-specifik’ project, this work demonstrates ways to make collective, public and critical connections to placeness; the thick, implicated and multisensorial. It is to intervene in capatriarchalonialist (capitalist, patriarchal and colonialist ideological) politics of urban space, and to offer an alternative imaginary to the ways we see ourselves participating in the performing and making of multispecies publics.
