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The Immaterialist

resilient living in a limitless world

Tag: consumerism

September 17, 2021September 17, 2021

Interview #9: Lisa Wells, author of ‘Believers’

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June 21, 2021

Balance is the key to sustainable consumption

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Magical ✨ Every time we visit our lovely friends up here in lush north Bali the house project has taken a quantum leap. The roof is beautiful! It is a traditional sirap roof made of ironwood tiles. What fascinates me the most about the house is that everything is handmade! Everything! It is truly charged with time and skill.

I will be talking about both Aesthetic Sustainability and Anti-trend tomorrow at the @ubudwritersfest 🌱

My youngest son is teaching me how to draw a beetle eating monster with claws. At first I wasn't sure what it was, but he explained - slightly annoyed - and now I am paying attention and concentrating like a good student.

In my perspective one of the most important and vital ways of overcoming and turning around the immense environmental problems we are currently facing worldwide is radical reduction of consumption. When I write consumption, I mean it in the most straightforward sense of the word: buying too many things and going through and getting rid of them again way too quickly. The fashion industry alone emits more carbon than international flights and maritime shipping combined, and in addition hereto, think about the production and consumption of furniture, home accessories, toys, and other knick-knacks. However, despite the fact that altering our habitual consumer ways might sound easy, it ap- pears to be unbelievably hard. Even though we are bombarded with horrific and very tangible scenarios involving starving polar bears, whales with plastic-filled stomachs, and burning rivers, and even though these images are presented as interlinked with overconsumption, we continue to shop and we continue to discard the majority of our belongings way before they don’t work anymore or are worn out, and hence we continue to add to the mountains and islands of trash that are building up in land- fills and in oceans. Why? Because we are evil? No, of course not. Rather, the reason could be partly interlinked with an increasing detachment from our physical, natural environment and partly with the fact that habits are hard to change, particularly when engulfed in a busy daily routine. Furthermore, our lack of sustainable action is likely connected to the fact that status symbols are to an extent associated with new, glittery things, and to the constant craving for more that seems to govern our late-modern minds and societies, as well as to the despair that this entails.

Yesterday the first printed copy of my new book Anti-trend landed here in the jungle. I am so grateful 🙏 @oro_editions

See you next Sunday at @ubudwritersfest 💙

Today the latest two editions of the beautiful bookazine Håndværk landed here in the jungle. Thank you so much @rigetta_klint! I cannot wait to dive into the abundance of inspiring text and photos. The bookazine (I love that genre!) is published in both Danish and English and can be ordered online. I highly recommend getting a hold of a dose of aesthetically nourishing offline input.

I have worked with aesthetic sustainability for many years, and am often asked: How do you create an object that isn’t affected by shifting consumer-trends? An object that has the ability to fulfil both functional and aesthetic needs continuously. Is that even possible? Aren’t people too different to like things in the same range of objects?

Sustainability appears to have become a matter of sustaining or maintaining our present existence and routines—enabling us to continue to live, act, shop, travel, and eat the way we always have. Recycling systems, sustainable waste management, and the countless numbers of online platforms for the sale of second-hand goods legitimize and justify our continuous consumer-venture, and even enable us to label it as sustainable. Sustainability has become another word for stagnation or for immovability in the sense that we purchase sustainable products and pursue sustainable lifestyle solutions that allow us to continue down the same path of overconsumption and capitalistic growth, only in a slightly “greener” way. It is all mostly business as usual, with the only difference from “old school”capitalism being the label of “sustainable.”This kind of sustainability is static, or, perhaps more correctly, it is stuck. It might appear circular in the sense that some kind of circulation takes place: things get bought, consumed, and either resold, downcycled, and made into scraps to be used for some insignificant purpose, or converted into vouchers to be used to purchase new things—yet another way of legitimizing continuous overconsumption. But this kind of circularity is not real, and it is not sustainable or aligned with the circularity that can be found in nature.

North Bali house-project update ✨❤️

In Anti-trend I am working with openness and rawness and am very inspired by the concept of rewilding. The rewilding of nature is not about conservation. Rather, rewilding involves trust and openness: trust that nature will find its way and openness to diversity and to the new, resilient ways of life that may occur. Maybe the most resilient, sustainable ecosystem in our changed climate will not take the shape of a meadow or a rainforest, rather it might look and act completely different than anything we have previously seen, or anything we can imagine. This perspective has inspired me in the definition of the open, raw design-object. One needs a very good reason for designing new objects in a world overflowing with discarded things and product-waste, and this reason might be to allow for new ways of sustainable living to shape the design of new objects. This perspective involves daring to let go of control to create raw objects that can evolve and develop in the hands of the user—and maybe as a part of the shared ownership of users. Openness and rawness in object-design puts the post-production phase in focus. The raw design-object is open to changing needs and is aesthetically flexible and future oriented.

Songket shawl worn in the rice fields for protection against heat, moisture and insects

The Uncultivated writing project continues.

"We are losing the knowledge of working with our hands. So many things that we consider as finished and obsolete can be restored and valued if we change our ideas about them."

What is home? Or, what does it mean to feel at home?

"...commit to a place, feed that which feeds you, give life to that which gives you life, plant more seeds than you harvest, etc. If your lifestyle can sustain you, your community, and the myriad lives you depend on indefinitely you’re probably on the right track."

When I was recently interviewed by Story of Books about my upcoming book Anti-trend, I was asked:

More upcycling bliss! ✨

I'm on an upcycling-high! Yesterday these incredible lamps made from discarded motorcycle parts by my amazing neighbour @bajaupcycledbali moved into my house (photo 1-3). This morning I had coffee at yet another incredible little newly opened cafe in our tiny village - a cafe, mind you, made entirely from upcycled second hand wood and discarded windows and doors from old houses @nungkigiri (photo 4). My beautiful friend in Denmark is currently creating the most beautiful garments by upcycling discarded bedsheets @la_femme_rousse (photo 5) And our newly started weavers collective @alamanda_sudaji_bali has taken baby steps towards combining upcycled garments with our handwoven textiles (photo 6)

Last night as I was laying in bed, something pretty magical happened: suddenly my bedroom was filled with fireflies! They circulated the room and illuminated it in the most fairytale-like way, and then they disappeared again, into the garden, and from there into the jungle. I have seen fireflies many times here in Bali, but never before experienced a swarm flying into the bedroom; another benefit of living in an open house with no doors and no walls.

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