Articles & Essays
War Trash: Rebuilding Laos With US Bombs
Growing up in a country littered by the detritus of war, rural Laotians in the most heavily-bombed regions set off into the jungles to harvest unexploded ordnance that could either transform their family’s economic future or seal a terrible fate.
Curse of Geography: Mount Mabu
Deep in the interior of Mozambique, Indigenous tribes protect one of the world’s last undisturbed rainforests while contending with corporate extractivism and foreign conservation efforts that place their primordial livelihood in peril.
Chromatic Oracles
Residents of the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina, Puerto Rico create oracles with botanical inks on behalf of loved ones who introduced them to the world of plants.
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Multimedia & Performance
queer tongue gloss
Mavi Veloso’s queer trans language is always in flux, twisting Brazilian Portuguese and English phrases into new contortions that coat the tongue in a queer kind of gloss. Listen as she performs an essay-poem (or something like that). Supplemented by a queer abécédaire.
telluric dreaming
telluric dreaming is dreaming of, with, and in the earth. they say that to tremble, to let ourselves vibrate, is to co-regulate the body’s frequencies with the earth’s breathing. it is listening to ourselves: the body in relation.
What if this is literature?
As an introduction to the work of Parwana Amiri, we’re republishing her story, “The Olive Tree and the Old Woman,” and making it available for sale from Publication Studio Guelph.
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Editorials
The Great Glasgow COP-Out
In early November 2021, thousands of global environmental and climate justice activists gathered in Glasgow, Scotland for the 26th annual convention on climate change to demand for an energy transformation and the health of the world’s most vulnerable communities.
Navel Gazing
An insight into America’s “culture wars” using the example of Dave Chappelle to highlight the extant and emerging fault lines of artistic freedom of expression and censorship.
Squatch: A Big, Hairy, American Metaphor
In the redwood forests outside Santa Cruz, author Sidd Joag’s childhood curiosities are awakened when he meets cryptozoological archivist and founder of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum, Michael Rugg, who life’s work leaves him questioning the relevance of Bigfoot’s existence versus the value of celebrating intellectual curiosity.
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Photo & Video
Listening 2021: Mycelicopia
Conceptual artist Zhao Rongjie brings the psychedelia of spore prints to film in an hypnotic visual collage of rare mycelia and symbolic natural (and unnatural) soundscapes.
Field Diary: Among the Mushroom Hunters
In the mountains of southwest China, conceptual artist and director Zhao Rongjie meets a husband and wife team of mushroom hunters who welcome her into their home and introduce her to a simpler, antiquated world of physical labour, spiritual inheritance, and symbiosis with nature.
“Education by the Stone” and the Silent Primer of Blood
Plants and resilient Indigenous people on the walls spoke to me. I listened to them. I still try to silence myself to learn more from them. This was my first primer on how to rise as an Indigenous person and ‘bleed the stone’, transforming bodies (human and non-human) towards life and liberation.
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Poetry & Prose
queer tongue gloss
Mavi Veloso’s queer trans language is always in flux, twisting Brazilian Portuguese and English phrases into new contortions that coat the tongue in a queer kind of gloss. Listen as she performs an essay-poem (or something like that). Supplemented by a queer abécédaire.
The Painting
Thirty-two years after Willem de Kooning’s Woman-Ochre was stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art, it was discovered in the bedroom of a deceased woman in rural New Mexico. Only the painting knows how it got there.
What Breaks
A Palestinian girl growing up in suburban Ohio is proud to receive an A- on her 9th grade genocide report. Later, grown up, she asks Can a fact be sad? I wish to know.
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Various
Curse of Geography: Qinghai-Tibet Plateau
In the wake of the 2010 Yushu earthquake, celebrated Indonesian artist, Arahmaiani, spent ten years working with Buddhist monks on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau to cultivate sustainable rebuilding projects and amplify the voices of women in Tibetan civil discourse.
Curse of Geography: Badakhshan
In the inaccessible borderlands of Badakhshan, Tajikistan, the M41 or “Heroin Highway” serves as the primary trafficking route for opium and heroin smuggled out of Afghanistan on its way to Russia and Europe, leaving a trail of uneven development and outward migration.
Curse of Geography: Western Newfoundland
During the early 1990s, when cod stocks in Western Newfoundland were on the brink of extinction, a moratorium on fishing caused the “largest mass layoff in Canadian history” and threatened the cultural fabric of coastal communities reliant on the ocean for their livelihoods.