Isabella Foster

Accumulative Condition, constructs of conviction

“To learn anything we must revitalize arts of noticing and include ethnography and natural history. But we have a problem with scale. A rush of stories cannot be neatly summed up. Its scales do not nest neatly; they draw attention to interrupting geographies and tempos.” Anna Tsing 37

The act of ‘noticing’ is typically thought of as passive; we happen upon some thing. However, within it there is an inherent trans-temporality, a non-linear movement through time; an experience shared at simultaneously different tempos or paces. Concurrent to the act of noticing, is the realisation of un-knowing, a time however momentary in which ones’ assumedly stable knowledge of reality is ignorant to the thing one is (now) noticing. Further within that temporally-stratified singular act is a transitioning time, a moment from which one is transported from the stability of that ‘knowing’ ignorance to the destabilised stance of negation, of discerning relations through the very conditions that called one to notice.

This negation began with a noticing. Some thing in the periphery catches and I follow.

The midlands of lutruwita (Tasmania); Black War territory. In the margins of my sight on a barrow between North and South I notice a spiraling form. I stand watching, confused at what it is: a sheep, stranded, blind, unshorn, deafened by rain and wind. Jolting over stone and succumbing to gravity. Stumbling and seizing. It’s white wool turned grey moves at a different pace to its structure. Slower, looping like a shoulders’ shrug.

… ‘their invisible and inescapable cargo of English law fell from their shoulders and attached itself to the soil on which they stood. Their personal law became the territorial law of the Colony.’ (1937)

Stalking this dying thing, I grow hungry for the spectacle this could become. The colonizing human hunting the colonized colonizer, the re-placed species. The human stalks the sheep, following, spiraling. But we’re both inside the same fence. Fat, bone, muscle, blood, imposed and introduced. The shadow we throw is relational and confused. 

I was painting some walls at a construction site and noticed the shadows thrown by a wall frame. The grid cast onto the concrete floor echoed the iterative patterns of cadastral maps. Delineating place and colonial ownership of land, the cadastral grid is drawn flat; a framework for human relation to nature, for idealistic manipulations of matter. A shadow from the Global North cast over the Global South. 

The infrastructure is framework through which to see. When I look through the midlands, I know where to drive the line. The metal and wooden borders are familiar to my European lineage, in this way, fencing becomes a guide for reading ever present histories. Agriculturally dividing land, the fencing performs the visual evidence of Western infrastructure. The infrastructure which is unseen, disguised, that which upholds systems of oppression.  

In opaque bush, I am overwhelmed, blinded. Like that sheep, I need fencing. I only know how to be told what to do, from there I can perform subversion, but only after sensing the framework. Performing sedimentary time by existing. Materialities of eating and shitting, the snake that eats itself and the human who stalks the earth. The sheep who cant tell north from south won’t read your maps.