‘Now every lemon is infused with the love of my mother. But the lemons do not belong to me, and it brings me great joy knowing that everyone who cuts into a lemon and enjoys its sweet gift is feeling the love of my mother at no expense of her own.’
Our Starter Culture is a tool that aims to reintroduce empathy to help us approach and be able to operate in a world where a climate crisis exists. The project develops an intersectional pedagogical methodology centred around the creation of empathy, which begins with a participant sharing a remedy through conversation. The gathering of these remedies is a rewriting of the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (1552), an Aztec herbal manuscript by Martín de la Cruz and Juan Badiano.
The remedies, as zines, can be explored in an online blog https://ourstarterculture.tumblr.com/ that shares resources and thoughts to assist the individual in better understand the climate crisis as an intricate web of social injustices, which draws on the work of adrienne maree brown and Agnes Denes. Through the mediums of the zines and blog, the participants become the audience of the work, inspired by The Reenchantment of Art by Suzi Gablick and Grant H. Kester’s definition of ‘dialogical aesthetics.’
Ultimately the work aims to question – can we, by looking at the creation of empathy and an ethic of care, begin to view small domestic remedies as revolutionary acts of healing ourselves, our community, and the Earth?
I am an environmentalist and public practitioner who is slightly addicted to crafts. My work explores the role of the individual in relation to Intersectional environmentalism. Informed by feminist ethics of care and alternative public practices, I use conversations and relationships to reframe the climate crisis. My latest project, Our Starter Culture, experiments with the idea of remedies as pedagogical tools to sow, cultivate and harvest empathy in the fight for climate and social justice – which you can view in more detail here: https://ourstarterculture.cargo.site/
I completed my Undergraduate degree in Architecture at IE University in 2018 and went onto complete an MA in Situated Practice, where I took the site writing module, at UCL in 2020. I will be continuing my studies at UCL by attending the Institute of Education and The Compton School to gain my PGCE in Secondary Art & Design.
Currently my focus is on finding a community within which I can best serve as an enthusiast of critical theory, crafts, ethics, and pedagogy. So, for now, you can view my work as my partner’s sweater, my best friend’s shirt, and my dog’s blanket.
My work is my path to understanding my position in the environmental movement. I am lucky that this work has taken me on the journey of understanding empathy and generosity, first shown to me by my mother and later reinforced by bell hooks, adrienne maree brown, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Suzi Gablik, Carol Gilligan, Joan Tronto, María de Jesús Patricio Martínez and many others. I humbly want to share what has been so kindly shown to me so that we continuously work towards strengthening our relationships as a form of activism.
Martín de la Cruz, Emily Walcott Emmart, and Juan Badiano, The Badianus Manuscript: (Codex Barberini, Latin 241), Vatican Library: an Aztec Herbal of 1552 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940).
bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (London: Penguin Books, 2020).
