The Posthumanities Hub is not just doing research or the conventional forms of academic outlets, like scientific articles, books, journal issues, chapters or anthologies. We also engage in artistic research and practice-led explorations. Often we combine scholarly and creative work.
In this space we share some of the work of artists and creators that work with us. We also use this space for photographic documentation of co-creative events and projects.
Francesca Brunetti
Soil Party: Rats, Roots, Worms and Other Punks
Francesca Brunetti is an artist and scholar, and she is currently employed as a Lecturer at the Institute of Creativity and Innovation, a partenrship between the University for the Creative Arts (UK) and Xiamen University (China). She completed a PhD in Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Dallas, as well as a MA in Communication Design from the Glasgow School of Art and a MA and BA in Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome.
Soil Party: Rats, Roots, Worms, and Other Punks is a multimedia project composed by twenty gifs created by using watercolor painting and stop motion animation. The purpose of the project is to allow the audience to experience the vibrancy and aliveness of the soil, where organisms like rodents, roots, and worms live a busy and active life. The artist wants to encourage audience to fantasize about a non-traditional way to see the soil as a diverse, surprising and inventive entity.
Soil Party: Rats, Roots, Worms, and Other Punks is a project that has been influenced by the work of indigenous philosophers Vandana Shiva, Wangari Maathai, and Brian Burkhart, ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, and environmental author William Bryant Logan. These scholars discuss how humans’ understanding of soil influences how they see themselves and the world as a whole.
According to them, the soil’s vibrancy, agency, and inventiveness have been overlooked in traditional western thought, and the soil has been viewed, along with other minorities (the other punks in the title), as a flat and passive background for man’s foreground actions. Traditional Western philosophy supported the concept of the human being as an abstract and unrooted entity, with theoretical thought regarded as superior to activities relating to the body and material world.