Côr-lan Siwan by Iain Biggs (Bristol) and Lindsey Colbourne (Nant Peris), 31st May 2020
“Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge” - Donna Haraway
This blog is about a collaboration during lockdown. With many thanks for Iain for asking me to contribute, and for our ‘conversations’ via email, from which the conversational text below is taken (alongside words from Iain’s blog). This is rather a long blog, but it has been such a rich exchange, that I hope you’ll find something of interest in it.
It has felt very pertinent that the CORVID-19 outbreak developed in parallel with our collaboration on this work the idea of Corlan (COR; ‘small’ and LLAN ‘enclosed open spot/patch) – a small safe space. Iain has been working with the idea of fanks/folds for sometime, and it is thanks entirely to him that we have had this framework to work with. I have struggled – since a very young age – with the sense that we have been living precariously with ecosystem collapse and climate change, and yet the general sense is that we (those in the priveleged global north, especially those of us living on the legacy of colonialisation and exploitation of humans and non-humans alike) are just continuing on more or less regardless. Perhaps now we are facing up to
“Precariarity as the condition of our time – the condition of being vulnerable to others.
We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.
There might not be a happy ending. The only reason this sounds odd is that most of us
were raised on dreams of modernization and progress ” - Bronte Velez
