Ghostly Ecologies ~ Spectral Futures
This text-based work emerged during my participation in the Pimoa Cthulhu, First Tentacular Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies.
Ghostly Ecologies is an essay in the form of a manifesto, inspired by pollination as a model for thinking about connection, exchange, and transformation across human and nonhuman worlds. It operates as both a space for observation and a speculative passage for noticing worlds within worlds: the transferences within mycorrhizal networks, the bodily cues between pollinators and flowers, the chatter of bacteria inside the guts of soft-bellied frogs, among many more. These interconnected realms reveal forms of existence shaped through relations, exchanges, and encounters with others.
As an aesthetic and conceptual framework, Ghostly Ecologies is rooted in the idea of ghostliness, understood not as a reference to supernatural specters, regret, or ecological vengeance, but as a way of attending to the invisible, the fleeting, and the difficult to perceive. It moves toward a poetics of intimacies and invisibilities, honoring the countless interactions that compose our existence as a mixture of tangled and overlapping worlds.
Ghostliness becomes a metaphor for ways of being that dwell at the limits of human understanding. Through the experience of spectrality, the text embraces a world marked by strangeness, partial perception, and continual transformation. It points toward the interstices between worlds: fungal spores transported by the wind, the dream of a bird's egg that will never hatch, a fingertip hosting a swarm of viruses. In doing so, Ghostly Ecologies invites readers to consider life as an ongoing process of transmission, entanglement, and coexistence.
Ghostly Ecologies is an essay in the form of a manifesto, inspired by pollination as a model for thinking about connection, exchange, and transformation across human and nonhuman worlds. It operates as both a space for observation and a speculative passage for noticing worlds within worlds: the transferences within mycorrhizal networks, the bodily cues between pollinators and flowers, the chatter of bacteria inside the guts of soft-bellied frogs, among many more. These interconnected realms reveal forms of existence shaped through relations, exchanges, and encounters with others.
As an aesthetic and conceptual framework, Ghostly Ecologies is rooted in the idea of ghostliness, understood not as a reference to supernatural specters, regret, or ecological vengeance, but as a way of attending to the invisible, the fleeting, and the difficult to perceive. It moves toward a poetics of intimacies and invisibilities, honoring the countless interactions that compose our existence as a mixture of tangled and overlapping worlds.
Ghostliness becomes a metaphor for ways of being that dwell at the limits of human understanding. Through the experience of spectrality, the text embraces a world marked by strangeness, partial perception, and continual transformation. It points toward the interstices between worlds: fungal spores transported by the wind, the dream of a bird's egg that will never hatch, a fingertip hosting a swarm of viruses. In doing so, Ghostly Ecologies invites readers to consider life as an ongoing process of transmission, entanglement, and coexistence.
This project started during Pimoa Cthulhu, First Tentacular Writing Residency at the Institute of Postnatural Studies
Published in This is Jackalope Issue #03, 2020 (ENG/ ESP)
Published in Compost Reader, Cthulhu Books, Institute of Postnatural Studies
This text is also accompanied is by a collection of stories and poems that explore embodied entanglements within nonhuman worlds. It includes Spectral Futures, a series of short stories inspired by the structure of fables that reimagine nonhuman beings not as symbols or stand-ins for human concerns, but as participants in complex and interconnected perceptual worlds. The stories seek to foreground uncanny intimacies and relationships across species while reconsidering how nonhuman life is represented.
The framework also includes Other Tongues, a collection of poems inspired by pollination and the intimate exchanges between pollinators and flowers. Through poetic language and speculative transformation, the poems explore interspecies relationships as sites of reciprocity, proximity, and wonder, imagining bodies, perceptions, and desires as continually shaped through encounters with others.
The framework also includes Other Tongues, a collection of poems inspired by pollination and the intimate exchanges between pollinators and flowers. Through poetic language and speculative transformation, the poems explore interspecies relationships as sites of reciprocity, proximity, and wonder, imagining bodies, perceptions, and desires as continually shaped through encounters with others.