2. The initial idea for this project arose from ideas gleaned from several of my ecologically themed classes in college. Being in this environment, along with reading Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, led me to develop the thoughts that would become the genesis of this project. I have always been fascinated by the ways that humans interact with other species, and learning about mass extinction was devastating to me. Haraway’s ideas present alternatives to our current way of perceiving the world around us. She urges us to think of the other species around us as ‘companion species’ and find new ways to live symbiotically intertwined with one another, stating that ‘companion species are relentlessly becoming with’ (Haraway 13.) Because I also have a profound interest in the built environment, I wondered what ways the built environment of New York could be ‘hacked’ in order to make room for other nonhuman species. In a city of concrete, steel, and glass, how could its edges become softer and more malleable? How might one build in to create habitats in a place where habitat for wildlife has been eradicated? This project is one that exists in a specifically urban context, because though it may not be the ideal setting for wildlife to exist in, it must be altered to become more this way, as humans continue to encroach on more wild animal habitats.
3. In her book Staying With the Trouble, Donna Haraway states that we are in the ‘times of the multispecies’, (35) emphasizing the importance of ‘making oddkin,’ meaning that we need each other in ‘unexpected collaborations and combinations’ (4). As the climate becomes more chaotic, we must learn to work with other species in unexpected ways in order to survive. She introduces the word ‘sympoeisis’ which means ‘making-with ’ (Haraway 5), emphasizing that nothing makes itself or exists in a vacuum. Though biological sciences have placed humans in the center of our individualistic notions of understanding the world, sympoeisis is a word for worlding-with other species or other humans. Haraway highlights the necessity of becoming intertwined with companion species (13), and developing more complex relationships with them. She uses pigeons as an example, because they are a species with a very long history of entanglement with humans becoming domesticated by and living among us, ‘ becoming-with us for several thousands of years’ (Haraway 15). However, there are many other species that have long standing relationships with humans, such as bees and other pollinators.
4. Anna Tsing explores these ideas further in The Mushroom at the End of the World, which delves into the complex world of matsutake mushrooms and the people who pick them. It is through the lens of this one mushroom species that she addresses a much wider scope of subjects. In the first chapter, titled ‘Arts of Noticing,’ she explains that the capitalistic drive for progress is what has alienated humans from other species (Tsing 21). This is what has caused us to ignore many of the ‘world making projects’ around us, both human and not, that emerge from everyday activities of ‘making lives’ (Tsing 22). Making worlds does not have to be complicated, in fact, it is often intuitive. For example, humans used to burn the landscape in controlled ways to make room for new life to grow. Tsing also brings in the concept of ‘assemblage’ here, which she defines as ‘open-ended gatherings’ (Tsing 23) of different species. They leave room to examine the effects of species coming together, without assuming them.
5. My work draws from this concept of assemblage because it is creating a site for different species to come together and rethink the boundaries of their relationships. I imagine this coming together as an open-ended space that invites multi-species interaction, but is not prescriptive about how different beings might interact. It is inviting humans to think and live in the spaces and time scales inhabited by other species.