Multi-Species World-Making: Arts and Crafts as a toolset for collaborative survival
Katalina Caliendo 2018, University of Hertfordshire

1. Introduction

Humans do not make alone. Humans create, build, and construct in collaboration with the interplay, contributions, and interventions from a multiplicity of other species, materials, and forces. Making is a multi-species and multi-material collaborative process of becoming, transforming, evolving, intervening, and interacting. As evolutionary biologist-cum-philosopher Donna Haraway states in Staying with the Trouble (2016), “ontologically heterogeneous partners become who and what they are in relational material-semiotic worlding. Natures, cultures, subjects and objects do not preexist their intertwined worldings,” (Haraway, 2016, p. 13). Processes of making in both biological and social contexts are continuous collaborations comprised of makers, materials, and environmental conditions.
This essay targets a small, diverse, and intricately related corpus of philosophical scholarship that builds a unique and reflexive discourse between “hard” and social sciences, one which illuminates connections across species and presents new tools for understanding the complexities of our social entanglements. Much of this literature is derived from key concepts pioneered by philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari— in particular their notions of assemblages. While, this paper will perform no direct analysis of these texts, their influence looms large over the literatures reviewed.
As a core concept assemblages contain the capacity to effectively disrupt and re-order preconceived arrangements of human and more-than-human ecologies into what ecological or material theorists such as Jane Bennett refer to as “flat ontologies”. De-centring the human from these relationships—particularly as they are reflected in all practices of making— can perhaps fulfil the task of finding “a more horizontal representation of the relation between human and nonhuman actants—of more accurately situating ourselves in the vivid complexity of the world,“ (Bennett, 2010, p. 98).
This essay pursues new definitions of the social, particularly those pertaining to making, by redefining making through the means of the arts and crafts. It also seeks to ontologically move past the limitations of Structuralist divides between “materials” and “forces”, or strict object/subject binaries (such as Heidegger’s notions of Thingness) (Heidegger, 1971). It will instead look toward the “shifting frames” of anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, in particular Actor Network Theory, as a means of tracing heterogenous connections across a variety of multi-species collaborations in both the arts and the natural world. Quite simply, the inherently socio-political relationships between various human and more-than-human ecologies are in need of new imaginaries, a new set of values with which to imagine the world.
Industry has accelerated a human-led climate change that impedes on the world-making resources and survival of many. Across hard and social sciences, the common approach to framing these threats are done within the context of the anthropocene—a word which etymologically places people at the centre of a new planetary epoch (Haraway, 2016). These problems persist because of the socialised separation of the human from the “natural” world.
Making and creating on multiple levels—from communicating through the intelligent crafting of objects and habitats, to the very notion of world-making beyond instinct—are constantly isolated and triumphed as being “essentially” human. However it is a myth that humans are alone in both their intelligent capacities for making and in their making processes (Ingold, 2013). There are conditions of what Haraway refers to as sympoiesis (making-with) across entire ecosystems, a concept this essay takes as one of its operative terms. Keystone species like Castor Fibre (the Eurasian Beaver), for example, construct ingenious canals, dams, and lodges which dramatically change landscapes. They are called keystone species for this reason, because they create biodiverse ecosystems in collaboration with their environments and through their creative faculties (Como and Deegan, 2015; Seenit, 2015; Crowley et. al, 2017 ; Johnston, 2017). Environmental conservationists and scientists are experimenting with their re-introduction as a means to both rehabilitate and preserve fragile ecosystems in the United Kingdom and continental Europe. Contrasted with the language and discourse of the highly contested epoch of the anthropocene, much of this project evidences an approach that de-centres the human, a move which has social implications as well. New imaginaries are needed because even efforts to restore ecosystems are framed around certain anthropocentrisms, the likes of which inherently fail to capture the making-with or collaborative nature that exists across species (Haraway, 2016).
In making, humans are a part of a plural process, not necessarily the architects or principal actors. In framing making processes as collaborations across species, materials, and forces we develop better tools to describe and debunk a world still problematically defined by binaries and the amassed propensity to focus on individual progress. In adopting these lenses, deliberate making—articulated through art and craft practices— becomes a tool for situating ourselves within the plural complexities and vivid nuances of respective ecosystems, epochs, and collectives. Artists like Tomás Saraceno and Pierre Huyghe (among others) play and experiment with multi-species collaboration and shared artistic license. Through their work they manage to comment on issues of collaborative survival, ecological fragility and collective futures. In examining their work we can hit upon a means to see an artist or craftsperson’s respective studio and practice as a microscopic toolkit for exploring macroscopic notions of world-making. Art and craft facilitate vital explorations with our relationship to the world and how we equipoise ourselves within it. There is a direct corollary between world-making processes and artist making processes. Through the arts we have a means to re-organise and re-imagine hierarchies of knowledge and making.

2. De-centring the human

The sound of water flowing through the cracks of layers of mud, willow, alder, and stone along the River Otter doesn’t last long. The architects and engineers of this area are diligent in its maintenance of dams, canals, and lodges which all support a continuously growing network made up of a diverse multi-species community. The beaver creates a landscape that humans cannot imitate.

The project of re-thinking making relationships between humans and more-than-humans requires the examination of multi-species gatherings and multi-material arrangements across scales, from microcosms to macrocosms. Framing humans, more-than-humans, and environments— and the ways in which they relate to each other in making— as “materials and forces” is a way to begin de-centring the human. In Actor-Network-Theory (ANT), socio-material theorists describe these respective “materials” and “forces” as “actants”, enlivened with “agency.” Doing so re-orients knowledge and making processes in a flat field. In Reassembling the Social (2005) Bruno Latour’s actors, or actants, describe matters or things which can be multi-species, multi-material, human, and more-than-human. ANT posits actants as points in an ambiguous or open structure, allowing space to see chains of connection amongst agents (Latour, 2005). It helps describe relationships between things the limits of language itself would otherwise make difficult to see as relatable.
As a result, ANT’s potential applications across disciplines are diverse (Crawshaw, 2010; Planck, 2015; Cypher, 2017). Material theorist Jane Bennett and anthropologist Tim Ingold, for example, each apply ANT to their work. Both use ANT to extend and compare the cultural, social, political, and material across scales. Both de-centre the human. They are distinguished, however, by their agendas. Bennett pursues a political theory that foregrounds more-than-human agency, while Ingold poses epistemological questions about making. Bennett aims to de-centre the human by establishing the agency of all actants, a move that constitutes the basis of Thing Power, a theory that stems from what Bennett calls a “vital materiality” (Bennett, 2010). According to Bennet, our conceptions of vital materials need re-evaluation both socially and politically. Vital materials constitute everything, from the bone, cells and blood that make up our bodies, to the electrical currents that power our cities (Bennett, 2010). This is not to suggest that there is no difference between humans and the constituent parts of our physiologies, for example, but to question the impulse to situate humans so squarely at an ontological centre or hierarchal apex in the arrangement of “things” (Bennett, 2010).
Making clear distinctions between our understandings of actants and agency is what allows different configurations of the same actions to be comparable (Latour, 2005). This is crucial to re-imagining our collective emplacement in the heterogenous collaborations this essay concerns. Tim Ingold challenges Bennett’s Thing Power by critically making such distinctions between actants and agency, contending that actants do not have a moving force or atomistic agency unto themselves. As such, agency is located in the affect between actants, specifically in the “leakings” and “actions” that occur along their points of connection (Ingold, 2011). While both Ingold and Bennett imagine material arrangements as uneven and horizontal topographies, Ingold emphasises an interpretation of agency as an enactment, a process that necessitates multiple actants to be performed (Ingold, 2011). Atomistic conceptions of agency, such as Bennett’s, fail to touch upon the process and mutually generated properties that Ingold sees in the vitality of materials (Ingold, 2011). It should be clarified, however, that the uneven horizontal topographies these actor-networks suggest serve the purpose of developing terminologies and strategies to better aid in research, not for establishing a prescribed equanimity between subjects. ANT doesn’t suggest an alternative objective reality, but presents a means for people to better experience or conceive of heterogenous configurations:

To get the right feel for ANT, it’s important to notice that this has nothing to do with a ‘reconciliation’ of the famous object/subject dichotomy. ANT is not, I repeat is not, the establishment of some absurd ‘symmetry between humans and non-humans.’ To be symmetric, for us, simply means not to impose a priori some spurious asymmetry among human intentional action and a material world of causal relations, (Latour, 2005, p. 76).

Bennett’s interest in de-centring the human serves the larger project of establishing a political vital-materialism, not a “perfect equality of actants, but a polity with more channels of communication between its members” (Bennett, 2010, p. 104). An asymmetrical flat ontology that implies various degrees of collaboration. Ingold likewise pursues asymmetrical flat ontologies, yet devotes emphasis to foregrounding a process-centred understanding of agency that more specifically elaborates the collaborative operations Bennett highlights. Read together the confluence of Ingold and Bennett presents a worldview where the human is de-centred, not in order to establish an odd parity between bones, beavers, bacteria, and soil— for example— but to better conceive of the interactions and connections which necessarily constitute all ecologies capable, or co-constitutive of, the production and making of “things”.

3. Form-giving

…form is death, form giving is life…Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible. -Paul Klee (Ingold, 2011, p. 210)

In positing this process-centred ontology, Ingold dismantles and challenges well entrenched Aristotelian constructs, particularly those that highlight the union of “matter” and “form” as the basis of making (Ingold, 2011). Contending these relations are not between matter and form, but between materials and forces, Ingold suggests it is a “question not of imposing preconceived forms on inert matter but intervening in the fields of force and currents of material wherein forms are generated,” (Ingold, 2011, pp. 210-11). Ingold introduces the notion of textility as a means to describe the terms of negotiation makers use when navigating heterogeneous materials, forces, and tensions ( Ingold, 2011). Here the carpenter is portrayed more like a weaver, responding to the undulations and densities of the fibre’s material. As such, it is the way heterogenous materials, enlivened by forces of tension and compression, mix with one another that “things” are made:

forms of objects are not imposed from above but grow from the mutual involvement of people and materials in an environment. The surface of nature is thus an illusion: we work from within the world, not upon it. There are surfaces of course, but these divide states of matter, not matter from mind. And they emerge within the form-generating process, rather than pre-existing as a condition for it (Ingold, 2000, p.165).

Specifically looking to more-than-human makers helps illustrate this contention. Human and more-than human making are both cultivated from the world and craft the world. Materials generate form through the negotiations of force between actants-—between carpenter and wood, between weaverbird and beak, between the mud, willow, water, and beaver. A process-centred ontological restructuring, derived from both Ingold and Bennett, helps re-position more-than-human actants as catalysts for world-making. Furthermore, framing more-than-human actants as world-makers presents an opportunity to more meaningfully reflect on how our human making practices are integrally linked to larger ecologies and assemblages. In anthropologist Anna Tsing’s recent polemic, Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), making processes across multiple species are presented as a means to strategise and plan for collaborative survival:

making worlds is not limited to humans. We know that beavers shape streams as they make dams, canals and lodges; in fact, all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water. Without the ability to make workable living arrangements, species would die out. In the process each organism changes everyone’s world, bacteria made our oxygen atmosphere, and plants help to maintain it. Plants live on land because fungi made soil by digesting rocks. As these examples suggest, world-making projects can overlap, allowing room for more than one species. Humans, too, have always been involved in multi species world making. (Tsing, 2015, p22).

4. Making-With

A riverside willow tree has fallen. Upon closer examination its trunk has been chewed down with what could only be dentin strong and iron rich teeth, teeth that continuously grow on an animal that eats bark and builds with branches. The willow trees growing in response to this process will re-sprout where these marks are made, promising new growth the following year and more material and food for future beavers. Coppicing and building with willow, beavers are crafting habitats for a diverse range of other species— birds, dragonflies, fish, amphibians all gather in the beaver pond. All of which contribute to the entanglement in various scales of their own making and which sprout more and more and more contributions that branch and sprout from each other.

Early on in Staying with the Trouble (2016), Donna Haraway contends that, “Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organising,” (Haraway, 2016 p.58).  Looking first to the microscopic scales of the biological and cellular for emphasis, Haraway then shifts scales to apply the same notions in consideration of the entanglements which shape macrocosmic relationships (Haraway, 2016).  Haraway introduces the term holobiont to describe symbiotic assemblages across spatial and temporal scales.  Holobiont groupings span structures of varying complexity, from the muskrat that co-shelters itself in the beavers lodge, to the bacterias that regulate our stomach acids (Johnston, 2017; Landecker, 2018).  Relating to one another without a particular host, each member of a given holobiont is framed here as a symbiont, that is to say, beings that are critically linked in processes of survival.  Relationships across these structures are not even or mutually beneficial, however, within these structures all are symbionts.  Described “more like knots of diverse intra-active ‘relatings’ in dynamic complex systems, than like the entities of a biology made up of preexisting bounded units (genes, cells, organisms, etc.)”, holobionts, or ‘entire beings’, are never one or individual (Haraway, 2016, p. 60).  Held together contingently and dynamically, holobionts engage other holobionts in complex patternings (Haraway, 2016).  
Anything that is made, either by humans or more-than-humans, contains complex multitudes of materials and forces.  All actants are entangled with other actants, they are intertwined, continually contaminating and animating themselves and spooling out into new combinations and assemblages.  Holobionts “do not precede their relatings; they make each other through semiotic material involution, out of the beings of previous such entanglements,” (Haraway, 2016, p.60).  These intrinsically collaborative processes are here termed as sympoiesis or “making-with”.    
To illustrate Haraway uses an example taken from American author Randall Munroe’s online comic strip, xkcd.com.  The comic, Bee Orchid (fig. 4.1), illuminates the diverse codings Haraway sees as prevalent in sympoietic chains, of how diverse actants like, plants, humans, and insects involve themselves in each others lives. The cartoon concerns a self-pollinating orchid whom’s symbiont is a specific species of bee that has long been extinct.  As such, the orchid’s petals and stamens, which resemble the patterning of the female bee, are a tracing of a sympoeitic entanglement that no longer exists.  The figures in the cartoon discuss the orchid’s imminent extinction, further compounding the vitality and importance of collaborative strategies for survival.  
In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (1987) Deleuze and Guattari similarly use the example of wasp and orchid to introduce their notions of de/re-territorialisation:

The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid’s reproductive apparatus… It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion…But this is true only on the level of the strata…At the same time, something else entirely is going on… a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and becoming-orchid of the wasp (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, p.9).

The significance here, and the way in which it most resonates with Haraway’s discussion of holobionts and sympoiesis, is the degree to which it emphasises the dissipation of individual boundaries and units in processes of becoming, growth, and generation. Haraway’s discussion of Bee Orchid, by comparison (specifically the emphasis it places on extinction and loss), serves to further signal just how precarious and delicate these relations are.
Precarity, or the notion of the precarious, serves as an operative term in Mushroom at the End of the World (2015). Tsing uses precarity to frame conditions of vulnerability as unpredictable and transformative forces, particularly when considering the possibility of life in “capitalist ruins” (Tsing, 2015). Tsing contends that “we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on state structure or community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others” (Tsing, 2015, p20). Survival is inherently collaborative. Through their discussions of bees/wasps and orchids Haraway, Deleuze and Guattari all emphasis this. In times of great precarity, as we are now in our current planetary epoch, Tsing contends that the success of both our species and our others is contingent on seeing collaborative survival as inherently true.
Given the degree to which these discussions are all framed within the context of making, one of the ways in which we can attune ourselves to the collaborative nature of survival and being is though deliberate making in the arts and crafts. This is not to say that art and craft practices need to provide strategies to solve environmental problems, but that they serve to effectively elaborate the experiments of thought pertaining to such theories.
Ingold uses the example of Simon Starling’s, Infestation Piece (2007-2008) (fig. 4.2) as a means to illustrate an artistic experiment that is centred on uncontrolled more-than-human collaboration (Ingold, 2013). The work is a bronze replication of Henry Moore’s Warrior with Shield (1953-1954) which Starling submerged into the mussel-infested Lake St Clair for two years before it was resurfaced fully encrusted with the invasive dreissena polymorpha, or zebra mussels (Ingold, 2013). The collaborative actants in this work did not necessarily negotiate or plan together, nor can it be said that their contribution was necessarily symmetrically equal. But, they were intricately involved with each other.
Bennett and Ingold’s ontological de-centring of the human does not create a symmetry in human and more-more-than humans interactions. For Haraway and Tsing, collaboration isn’t planned, controlled, or evenly distributed, though it is necessary to both make and to survive. Collaborative survival requires both following and knowingly participating, of making-with, in shared assemblages of contaminated diversity ( Tsing, 2015; Haraway, 2016).

5. The lines of web-nets

Peering through binoculars from the riverbank on the River Otter in Devon you may be able to glimpse the tags dangling from the ears of nine beavers. Shifting your gaze down the river, perhaps, you will see the outflow or inflow pipe of the “beaver deceiver.“ Now shift your gaze East, down past the river even further, toward a field, and you may see a tree wrapped in wire, glue, and sand. Shift your binoculars even further now, a longer distance, to a riverbank in Southern Bavaria, where if you look close enough you may notice that this bank is packed very heavily with hard clay, re-directing the water flow away from a field. Like lines upon a map the gaze of your binoculars connect the points between human and beaver social networks.

Working in collaboration with multiple species of spider, arachnologists, and various engineers and studio assistants, artist Tomás Saraceno has orchestrated the production of Hybrid Webs. Saraceno’s first experiments began with the black widow (or Latrodectus Mactans), engineers from the University of Darmstadt, and a new imaging technology capable of digitally modelling webs in three dimensions (Englemann, 2016). As part of an ethnography of Studio Saraceno in Berlin, creative geographer Sasha Engelmann highlights the social aptitudes and intra-active relationships between spiders as a way to explore what could be described as the agential-networks present in Saraceno’s sculptural orchestras. Derived from fieldwork completed in 2014, Engelmann notes that within the networks of webs there never is a solitary web, but that:
These collaborative experiments are always already about the relation between webbed forms. They are about comparing webs, to other webs, through analogy, metaphor, and metonymy, but more precisely about the meshing, layering and attracting of webbed forms to each other. The kinds of relations in the multiple and more-than-human style of experiment with webs at Studio Saraceno involve holding patterns and suspensions… (Englemann, 2014, p.2).

Saraceno placed various species of spiders together to analyse their behaviour, their ability to collaborate together, and their determination to produce webs—directly illuminating the social intra-action of their collective survival (Englemann, 2014). The continuous co-creative web-making, or sympoiesis, present in Sacraceno’s spider webbed installations serve as examples of multi-species collaboration. They both highlight more-than-human socially intra-active “work-nets” as well as allude to a visually manifested social theory capable of metaphorically stitching humans and more-than-human actants together. By paying attention to other species and their agencies, the Hybrid Webs suggest new insights into our own socio-political dynamics. New attention to both other types of agencies and other species will influence our politics (Stengers, 2003; Latour, 2011; Englemann, 2014).
The Hybrid Webs were most recently shown at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in a compressive exhibition titled On Air (2018). Upon entering the exhibition, one opens into a dark room filled with suspended cubed frames, open on most sides and internally filled with webs formed though the cohabitation of oddly paired spider groupings (fig. 5.3).
These webs appear both deceptively contained and frail. They are strategically lit and micro-phoned to both emphasise the overlapping interactions of all actants in the room (including the visitors to the gallery) and to visually showcase how the social collaboration between spiders and atmospheres results in the creation of their worlds. Hybrid Webs plays with precarity by placing unlikely spider-species groupings together, commenting on how a sensitive species like spiders socially adapt in order to thrive. This is something that the artist believes can be gleaned from observing these entanglements, that by “becoming more sensitive and attuned to environmental conditions, and especially to the invisible and elemental forces animating air and atmosphere, would make humans more social, too,” (Englemann, 2016, p.4). The following gallery contains a room where 3 meter long rows of spider silk are presented on a stage, undulating in response to the collective body heat of the visitors gathered in the gallery. Both the spatial configurations of the webs in the first gallery, and the pervasive responsiveness of each individual work overall, emphasises the co-constitutive and fluctuating natures of entanglements between actants.
Saraceno’s oeuvre not only gels nicely with many of the theories collected here in this essay, but has even reflexively fed back into some of the theories of Bruno Latour (Latour, 2011). In Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web (2009), for example, Latour sees solutions to certain problems ANT presents (particularly those pertaining to the unexpected linkages that connect fragile and complex “local”eco-systems) (Latour, 2011). There is a way in which an assemblage comprised of a philosopher like Latour, an artist like Saraceno, the spider-species, the galleries that house them, and its audiences form a holobiont. Here humans and more-than-humans form a social politics which is perpetually negotiated through collaborations and making processes. This inter-change across species through shared atmosphere presents an opportunity to not only become more social—as Saraceno has suggested—but to further reconsider certain divides and demarcations, like those between beaver architectures and human architectures, or spider architectures. Between art and craft, science and philosophy.

6. Scenarios of Imbrication

The canopy is open. Water moves down canals, covers lodges, ricochets off dams, swirls in ponds, rains down watering the foliage, floods the grasslands, evaporates into the air. It is a route, a resource, and a home— catastrophic and cyclical. Composing the make-up of our internal bodies and directing the construction of our habitats. Bodies and habitats which in the process leak onto each other. Living things are imbricated within it and imbricate within each other. Nothing is essential, but everything counts. The canopy is a part of an ever-flowing ecology of inter-relations which is cultivated by these relations—water, mineral, foliage, animal, beaver, human—are entanglements that overlap in their making.

When considering artistic interventions into more-than-human interactions and networks of sympoesis, Pierre Huygue’s Untilled, [Reclining Female Nude],(2011–12) stands as a writ large example (fig. 6.4). The key elements of this project incorporate a collective of reflexively interacting actants. Consistently shown outdoors and adjacent to museum or gallery spaces—much as it was at the Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art in 2014— Untilled is a reclining female nude replicating the human form, with a beehive in place of its head. The bees swarmed in and around the head-hive, occasionally wandering down the arm or bust of the figure, hop-flying to its feet, or zipping off to the nearby foliage on the museum grounds. As explained on the Ester Schipper webpage (the gallery currently representing Huyghe), “The bees leave the body and the garden of fictions and pollinate the outside area and vice versa, returning to the hive in the evenings” (Ester Schipper, 2012).
As an artwork/network Untilled de-centres the human-maker and elevates more-than human making, bringing to question where and when the making process starts or stops. The constant flow of the bee/participants/actants in and out of the physical sculpture also manage to reflect and engage key aspects of Deleuzian notions of de/re-territorialisation. It is almost as if the bees constitute, dissolve, and reconstitute the physical boundaries of the artwork as they fly off into the garden or return to the hive. As art theorist Dorothea von Hantelmann says of Untilled, it is “a work that literally and constantly changes and transforms itself” (Hantelmann, 2015, p. 10). Hantelmann posits Untilled as a moving network, likening its imagery to Haraway’s notions of the re-worlding of landscapes, technologies, and species—all without the premise of human exceptionalism (Hantelmann, 2015). Hantelmann contends that Huyghe operates within philosophical trends which de-centre the human and re-arrange human and more-than human hierarchies. This is particularly compounded by the way in which Hantelmann sees Untilled as demonstrating a non-necessity for a public audience, specifically because it operates with self-generating natures (Hantelmann, 2015). The bee’s function as a metaphor for both sympoiesis and world-making on multiple levels. There are ways in which they comment on the interactions between human and more-than-human species in specific spaces, placed as they are in galleries and museums. They collaborate within these conditions of human intervention and precarity in order to thrive. Speaking in 2004, Huyghe commented that “the term ‘scenario’ (is used) interchangeably with the word ‘screenplay’ and with the word ‘score’. So the production of the scenario is the production of the set of possibilities and rules that give rise to something ”(Baker, 2004, p.101). With Untilled, we see Huyghe engage this notion directly, we see a scenario, a set of possibilities, animated. Scenario has long served as a guiding principle in Huyghe’s work. Both the materials and the processes in Untilled are intentionally interwoven to instigate a scenario rather than be based on a scenario (Hantelmann, 2015). Huyghe’s articulation of scenario resonates with Anna Tsing’s use of the terms happenings and becomings to comment on the coming together of biological and environmental forces to create new and unforeseen arrangements (Tsing, 2015). Not only are the resulting outcomes ones which the artist can only guess at (like the movement of bees), the work itself is in constant generative flux. It remains indeterminate as it continues to expand— as the bees spread seeds and reproduce, the head of the sculpture swells gradually over time, thus dissolving the beginning and endpoints (Hantelmann, 2015 ). Focused on the becomings of a scenario and the fluctuating natures of these assemblages redirects the ontological gaze from “what something essentially is” toward observing the overlapping forces that mitigate its liveliness.
After Ingold, it is the difference between working on the surface of the earth and working from within the earths architecture (Ingold, 2000). After Klee, between form and form-giving (Ingold, 2011). Untilled asks its viewers to look not between definitions, but descriptions. Not to enclose and comport, but to understand “relatings”. By analysing the complexities of world-making as both a performative multi-species engagement and an event between heterogenous collaborators (though not necessarily equanimous), our interpretations of makers and the value to which we place on process reaches from beyond the embodied to the entangled. Visually represented in both Saraceno and Huyghe’s examples, varying scales of world-making and inter-action operate in a synergy of materials and forces. As makers deliberately collaborating with more-than-human builders and designers, they both perform and explore double articulations of these philosophical ponderings.

7. Castor Fibre, or the Eurasian Beaver (A conclusion and a proposal) In the United Kingdom, hunting exterminated the last recorded population of beavers sometime in the 16th century and the geographical isolation of the United Kingdom has meant that beaver populations could not be reestablished through dispersal (O’Connell et. al, 2008). Then, in the winter of 2013, on the River Otter in Devon, hundreds of years since last seen, chiseled tree stumps began to appear and later that year the beavers themselves were captured on film (Crowley, 2017). It is unclear whether the beaver re-introduction in Devon was due to an unlikely beaver migration, or so-called “Beaver Bombers”. It is suspected that the beavers were re-wilded, that is to say local enthusiasts who had grown impatient of waiting for bureaucratic legislation had taken matters into their own hands (Crowley, 2017). Responding to shifts in environmentalist thinking and environmental management strategies these communities feel that beavers are important social and ecological components crucially missing from the British landscape—from their potential to capture the imaginations of wildlife tourists, to their capacity to revitalise threatened eco-systems (Crowley, 2017). While re-introduction raises specific concerns for landowners, farmers, and those concerned with other species (like certain fish, for example), trials of re-wilding, like the one now officially in place in Devon, demonstrate Castor Fibre’s propensity for enriching landscapes (‘Seenit’, 2018). Experts claim that the benefits, ecologically and socially, outweigh the losses (‘Cornwall Wildlife Trust’, 2018). Beavers are master world-makers. They dramatically re-shape landscapes in concert with fish, voles, amphibians, plants, and mud, supplying water and soil resources that support multitudes of life (Johnston, 2017). Eurasian beavers in Devon coppice willow, regenerating their food and building material for future beavers and other species (‘Seenit’, 2018). Conservationists and environmental scientists describe beaver’s as eco-system engineers, key-stone species, and even molecular geneticists (Johnston, 2017). In beaver entanglements we not only see a reflection of many of the philosophies discussed in this paper, but an articulation of making that is particularly centred around cycles of regeneration and stewardship to others.
   The social implications of re-introduction, however, are thorny. Yet through exploring them we can better understand the ways in which our social decisions and choices are interwoven with different ecologies. Collaborative world-making between people and beavers could potentially have a large scale positive environmental impact. However, they can also infringe upon agriculturally established regions. Creating a communicative body that informs and promotes constructive beaver/human dialogues is important (‘Cornwall Wildlife Trust’, 2018). Beaver re-wilding projects are built upon discourses between local communities (as in Devon) where the ‘construction’ and ‘protection’ of a positive beaver archetype affects how beavers are interpreted (Crowley, 2017). However, as with any social, environmental, or political undertaking, beaver introductions are not invariably positive. The beaver introduction project in Chile’s Tierra del Fuego, detailed in Laura A. Ogden’s essay, The Beaver Diaspora (2018),for example, illustrates an instance in which such efforts problematically conflate human political concerns with ecological projects. Ogden uses diaspora—a term almost exclusively associated with human movement, settlement, and relocation—as a means to re-frame the beavers “to explore the ethics and politics of emergent life as relational and contingent rather than biologically stable and apolitical” (Ogden, 2018, p.66). The beavers in Ogden’s narrative come loaded with complicated social implications, as they contribute to the continuing euro-colonisation of this South American region through their transformation of its landscapes. Social expectations and ideals are deeply entangled with these ecological re/introductions. And it is for these reasons that theoretical frameworks, like ANT, can be used to more effectively describe and anticipate the causal relationships between human and more-than-human counterparts in such projects. Carefully and responsibly attending to the nuances of our collaborative making processes allows us to better re-imagine and construct our collective landscapes and cultures. Furthermore, pursuing perspectives rooted in flat ontologies presents an opportunity to more dynamically see the connections stitching human and more-than-human/social and ecological actants together. Within these projects, the participants at all scales across the spectrum—the conservationist, scientists, beavers, the Beaver Bombers, etc—are each and all makers, all involved in a process of sympoiesis.
   While ANT, Bennet and Ingold’s flat ontologies, and Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis each provide effective tools for analysis and observation, it is perhaps through deliberate experiments in making that we can further explore, and potentially better understand, the connective relations between the social and ecological, the human and more-than-human. The case of the re-introduction of Castor Fibre in particular presents a unique opportunity to stage an artistic interrogation. As such potent eco-system engineers they can serve as reflective of our own world-making capacities, help us engage in social thought experiments, and potentially aid in our rethinking of multi-species relationships. Just as Saraceno’s social spider experiments profoundly comment on collaboration and the interconnectedness across space and atmospheres, or as Huyghe’s scenarios comment on the fluidity between fluctuating boundaries of structure and environment, so might an artistic interrogation centred around beaver ecologies effectively comment on regenerative processes and environmental stewardship. Living and making with a worldview that is collaborative with—an imaginary where both humans and more-than-humans, imbricated with each other in their making process, dismantles the misguided species individualisms of the past. Making is one of our most important tools for collaborative survival.

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argillaceous matters: reflections on the dynamism of craft and clay

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