Dirt Writing

Dirt Writing is a proposal to write with the layers of time beneath the earth, its a way to rethink a collective connection to the ground on which instituting practices stand and a way to rethink the curatorial towards the more than human. For this workshop we wrote somatic texts, connecting our bodies to other beings, social spheres, political landscapes while laying with our hands in a small hole. The workshop offers suggestions about how to write to accompany more than human worlds from our immediate sensorium into speculation about deep layers of time. We used our left hand to write what is lost, occluded or subject to oblivion.

We collectively processed our writing using CA Conrad’s writing suggestions to make filters and from this we created a curatorial text about place. We exchanged text and whispered the words back to the earth each taking another persons and speaking to the dirt, noticing how it responds. We cut and edited our text on the page. We used a glue made from flour and water and many hands, minds, bodies and beings made this text with us. The practice unfolded over three and a half hours and attempted to decenter and collectively produce a curatorial text related to more than human perspectives.