Text below about the f i e l d c l u b (HERE) from the most recent issue of the excellent COLLAPSE journal (HERE). The theme for this issue is geo/philosophy.

“Their irony is not the cynical resignation of the city-dweller; for their work documents a continuing attempt to live ‘off-grid’, disconnected from public utilities and drawing as little on outside resources as possible. Much of the collective’s work draws wryly on incidents in the day-to-day course of this experiment in living, small occurrences that never fail to blacken the name of Eden. This intimate engagement allows them to challenge the credo according to which just a little goodwill and a little less technology could enable humans to temper their depredations in favour of a more gentle and wholesome coexistence with nature. f i e l d c l u b’s concern with this uneasy ‘complicity’ with other living beings leads precisely into what can beseen as assays into Morton’s ‘dark ecology’. To become close to nature, they demonstrate, is at the very least to repudiate the notion that the Earth is something unreservedly worthy of our admiration, and from which we can draw comforting meaning. The series of devices exhibited in f i e l d c l u b’s contribution to this volume intimate that man’s relation to the soil, no matter how ‘traditional’ or ‘simple’, strips us of our ‘beautiful soul’ credentials and reminds us we must ‘kill to live’; at the same time, they lampoon the efforts made through technological mediation to flee the ‘scene of the crime’.

In a contribution to the latest issue of Condiment Magazine (HERE) i talked about two people in Tokyo who i thought were interfacing between rural actions (growing and producing your own food) and city spaces. Attempts to live ‘beside grid’ rather than ‘off grid’. I wanted to talk about why this interfacing might be necessary and not just a novel or amusing reaction to Tokyo city (i.e. the ‘slow life’ movement). Not necessary because i am a proselytising militant E.L.F. member, but necessary to these two people as human individuals, as something they need to do, especially something they need to do in Tokyo. A non-linear, non-hierarchical, max-neefian kind of need (HERE).

Image above of Max-Neef’s need matrix, in spanish because i couldn’t find it in English.