The fascination with dirt, mud and earth runs deep and taps into a longstanding, mythical and magnetic psychology. Dirt is not necessarily clean or unclean, vital or morbid. It has a certain agency that resists reason, and it can also soil the temple of high art.
Dirt has been the dumping ground for politics, art and mind. The depths of the earth have absorbed toxic waste, blood, countless corpses, radioactivity and palimpsests of political and legal measurements and geometries. Dirt’s connections with the air and sea, plant life and ecosystems are physical and reciprocal, political and psychological. One can follow the flow of dirt from the base to food politics and back again.
This issue of Drain presents forms of creativity emerging from the encounter between an ordered world (or a world order) and the chaos of dirt, and asks how it might be possible for dirt to produce a disturbance of aesthetic, ecological and political categories and affects.
This issue was led and edited by Greg Minissale.
Thanks to Avantika Bawa for co-editing this issue.
IN THIS ISSUE
Essays
Amoeba + Pseudo-Amoeba – Astarte Rowe
Uninhabiting the Corrosive Littoral of the Anthropocene in the Levelled Sands of Being – Justin Clemens
Microontologies of Art, Design, and Architecture – Myra J. Hird
Thought Experiments
Dirt is Not Soil – Joshua West Smith
Dirty Feet – Richard Speer
Reviews
Minus Us: Reflections – Taryn Tomasello
Interviews
An Interview with Gabriel Lalonde – Greg Minnisale
An Interview with Sarah Witt – Jodie Cavalier
Aurous and Geometric Interventions: An Interview with Claudia Wieser – Astarte Rowe
Biomorphic Aesthetics and the Crystallization of Process over Eidos: An Interview with Jessica Drenk – Astarte Rowe
An Interview with Carli Holcomb – Greg Minnisale
Creative Writing
Dirt Drawn Into Dust – Phil Sawdon
A Vein Root – Gili Haimovich
Harvest – Gili Haimovich
Island Farm: Ambling Through Time – Tim Cooke
Art Projects
The Moon – Jarrod Beck
DIN and Sakuro – Angus Carter
We All Live Downwind – Shanna Merola
you are, all of this, except for – Mike Callaghan