Thanks for sharing the Earth-inspired song competition Kamea! I saw your post today and am composing a song with a friend, thought to let you know - really excited ☺️
I love being able to connect woodworkers with local wood that we harvested ourselves and allow the stories and history behind the trees/forest to continue as art. Because the disconnect has always perplexed me - loggers felling trees are the uncultured enemy but the architects and woodworkers using those same trees are artists and progressives.
Thank you for supporting with this re-connection! And that's such a great way to put it — that oftentimes art has played roles of "art-washing" things (if that can be a term). Of course, there's a lot of nuance in that nevertheless. But I'm about to interview the co-authors of "Laundering Black Rage" and it reminds me in a similar but different way of how they use the framing of "laundering" — for them it centers on to Black rage against state violence being laundered and made more palatable in various ways, though in part through the realm of the arts and disproportionate funding moving towards the arts (i.e., rather than going directly to address systemic injustice, houselessness, and material conditions of oppression). Will continue to sit with your message and looking forward to exploring these threads further soon!
Interesting! I think there are art-washing parallels to the current discussion around mass timber in construction - there are some great carbon reduction benefits for the built environment BUT it launders the timber harvesting discussion to something more palatable, namely architecture and design, while at the same time perpetuating the structural issues of the timber industry (consolidation to multinational corporations, reliance on an unsustainable rate of construction that simultaneously does nothing to solve the housing crisis, clearcut/replant monoculture forest models, failure to support or reward loggers who are doing right by the environment, etc). So many threads!
Thanks for sharing the Earth-inspired song competition Kamea! I saw your post today and am composing a song with a friend, thought to let you know - really excited ☺️
I love being able to connect woodworkers with local wood that we harvested ourselves and allow the stories and history behind the trees/forest to continue as art. Because the disconnect has always perplexed me - loggers felling trees are the uncultured enemy but the architects and woodworkers using those same trees are artists and progressives.
Thank you for supporting with this re-connection! And that's such a great way to put it — that oftentimes art has played roles of "art-washing" things (if that can be a term). Of course, there's a lot of nuance in that nevertheless. But I'm about to interview the co-authors of "Laundering Black Rage" and it reminds me in a similar but different way of how they use the framing of "laundering" — for them it centers on to Black rage against state violence being laundered and made more palatable in various ways, though in part through the realm of the arts and disproportionate funding moving towards the arts (i.e., rather than going directly to address systemic injustice, houselessness, and material conditions of oppression). Will continue to sit with your message and looking forward to exploring these threads further soon!
Interesting! I think there are art-washing parallels to the current discussion around mass timber in construction - there are some great carbon reduction benefits for the built environment BUT it launders the timber harvesting discussion to something more palatable, namely architecture and design, while at the same time perpetuating the structural issues of the timber industry (consolidation to multinational corporations, reliance on an unsustainable rate of construction that simultaneously does nothing to solve the housing crisis, clearcut/replant monoculture forest models, failure to support or reward loggers who are doing right by the environment, etc). So many threads!