Less machines

While reading about the «Workshop in Rotterdam: How to Build a Bike Generator», discovered the larger solution scenarios for human powered societies, that tackle much more then climate crises and fossil consumption. They present integrated solutions to increase biodiversity, reduce city concentration, production near place of consumption, better health, sustainable farming, better soils and food, more wellbeing. All of that with less machines and more human power, as envisioned in the Human Power Plant. Photo by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

Setembro

"Feeling the touch, discovering the colour, memorizing the smell. Weaving quietly different textures and tensions. Creating peace to guide action. Liberating the mind to shape possibilities." June 2021, What can we do with what we already have?...

Photos by Monica Pinheiro CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

July

"Particular attention should be paid to the material used, for good craftsmanship is built on natural foundations, and nature assures the material's quality. (...) When a certain locality is rich in a certain raw material, that material gives rise to a certain craftware. It is this resources, the gift of nature, that are the veritable mother of craftwork." Soetsu Yanagi (2018). The Beauty of Everyday Things.  

Photos by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

nearness, seasonality and sustainability

The plants used in my tapestries come from my little garden, are gathered during my walks, or collected during visits to friends and family homes. Some are used right after collection in order to maintain enough elasticity to be worked out. Others are used dried because they offer great flexibility or because they gain other affordances with time. 

Seasonality plays a special role in my tapestries. Not only because plants availability vary according to each month, but also because I like to use daylight when I make them. Each tapestry has the plants of the season and corresponding availability, embedded. If you observe attentively you can guess the seasons they crossed until closure. 

I like to think in sustainability like a verb. The process of discovering ways of make things with what is available. Weaving them into being otherness. Like plants that are considered «invasive». I find it a lack of imagination. A strange classification for bio materials that can thrive in desolate places. Surviving by themselves, without any kind of input or demand on our part, and with their qualities can be transformed in so many beautiful or useful things. 

Weaving the tapestries is a way of giving body (and soul) to my living framework of doing what I know, the best I can, with what I have, wherever I am.

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

May

"While options range from incremental changes to fundamental reform, science provides a clear warning about continuing on our current path." in Beyond growth: pathways towards sustainable prosperity in the EU, document for the European 'Beyond Growth' conference taking place next week (15 to 17 May, 2023), prepared by the Parliament, Directorate-General for Parliamentary Research Services, presenting "the economic and socio-ecological challenges facing today's society and offers a reflection on possible transition pathways and associated tools to move beyond growth in EU policies. The focus is the European Union and its Member States, with the global context integrated where relevant for understanding the status quo and discussing options." See also the brief «'beyond growth': concepts and challenges» (May 2023).

Photo by Monica Pinheiro, free to use if you respect the license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

December

"Make what you can of what you have been given. Live what can be lived. That's what excellence is." Ryan Holiday (2019) Stillness is the Key. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

Success

"The Natural World definition of success is not keeping offspring alive in a generation. Success is keeping offspring alive for 10 000 generations or more. This is the magic of Nature." But since "you are not going to be here to take care of 10 000 generations from now, what organisms learned to do, is to take care of the place, that's going to take care of their offspring. (...) Life has learned to create conditions conducive to life (...) that's also the design brief to us. We have to learn to do that." in Biomimicry video from Biomimicry Institute. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA.

The choice is (still) ours to make

To form a collective will, a «We», "will require the critical production and sharing of knowledge, resistance to flattening aesthetic diversity, and the invention of sustainable models that don´t threaten the viability of the whole, whether economically or ecologically, socially or institutionally" and "asserting a new biocentric imperative for living, producing, and consuming. (...) The choice is (still) ours to make." T.J. Demos (2016). Decolonizing Nature. Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.  Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

September

"We need to ask (...) not only what sustainability means when employed, but also whose interests it promotes and whose are excluded." T.J. Demos (2016). Decolonizing Nature. Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA ( CC ).

June

 

"Whether in the case of donor-supported schemes or government-supported tree-based restoration interventions, it is crucial that sustainable financing solutions for such projects go beyond the planting stage. This can only be achieved if the scope of the restoration intervention is seen as a process beyond tree planting that requires more investment to ensure the planted seedlings also grow to be trees." See figure 1, page 12. Duguma L, Minang P, Aynekulu E, Carsan S, Nzyoka J, Bah A, Jamnadass R. 2020. From Tree Planting to Tree Growing: Rethinking Ecosystem Restoration Through Trees. ICRAF Working Paper No 304. World Agroforestry. Photograph by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

January

"Amidst global inequality and ecological crises, it is questionable whether the virtuous circle of the welfare states is in fact virtuous. (...) I identify three caveats of the policy idea and illustrate how the traditional virtuous circle is actually embedded in a vicious circle of ecological collapse. (...) [1] the belief in cumulative economic growth as beneficial for human wellbeing has proved to be outdated. (...) [2] social goals including human wellbeing and equality became (at least implicitly) suppressed by GDP growth. (...) [3] The policy idea of a virtuous circle established a compromise between social and financial goals without paying attention to the negative environmental consequences of economic growth." Tuuli Hirvilammi (2020). The Virtuous Circle of Sustainable Welfare as a Transformative Policy Idea. Sustainability vol. 12, 391.

May

“(…) whenever suitable conditions to move demand and supply closer can be identified by reducing the number of technological and human intermediaries and intermediations, a series of effective possibilities emerge to reduce the amount of non-renewable energy inputs via increasing the quality of technology outputs and their social usefulness.” Transforming innovation for decarbonisation? Insights from combining complex systems and social practice perspectives. Nicola Labanca et al (2020). Energy Research & Social Science, vol. 65, 101452. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).