Ash Stories: A Spell Against Forgetting

Authors

Abstract

This paper shares the strategies of The Ash Project (2016-2019), a public art project through which we worked to commission a memorial sculpture and a series of walks, talks, workshops and exhibitions to create closer relationships between ash trees and local publics in South East England. The paper tells the story of ash dieback a deadly fungus that attacks the trees vascular system causing the death of ash trees across Europe.  Exploring ash trees and their place in European myth and identity, the paper situates the concerns of the ash within broader thinking about capitalisms intensifying impact on nature. The paper shares the way in which trade in plants creates increasing risks to plant health and the chain of species and landscape loss that follows. The writing moves between the situated knowledges that arose during the project to investigating the place of ash in the colonised landscapes of Australia, to think ­­about the way in which plants might perform complex relationships to a collective sense of national and colonial identity through an exploration of ash migrations via acclimatisation societies in Australia and New Zealand. Finally the essay shares reflections on grief, asking how we might perform memorial acts of walking and remembering as an approach to ethical relationality to place that acknowledges our complex shared histories in multi-species entanglements. 

Author Biography

Madeleine Collie, Monash University

Madeleine Collie is a writer, artist and curator who now lives and works on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations.  She led the collective memorial project The Ash Project (2016-2019). She established the Food Art Research Network in 2020 with the support of Custom Food Lab. She has an extensive history in creating and producing projects working across disciplines and always with others to blur the boundaries between experience and knowledge creation. She has presented work in Australia, UK, Spain, Germany, Finland and Singapore. She is a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash University and holds a Masters by Research in Curatorial/Knowledge at Goldsmiths College. She is a Teaching Associate in the History of Art, Design and Architecture and Curating Practices in the department of Art, Design and Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne and a Research Associate for the Centre for Art and Social Transformation.

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Published

01-11-2021

How to Cite

“Ash Stories: A Spell Against Forgetting”. 2021. Performance Philosophy 6 (2): 156-73. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2021.62320.

How to Cite

“Ash Stories: A Spell Against Forgetting”. 2021. Performance Philosophy 6 (2): 156-73. https://doi.org/10.21476/PP.2021.62320.