Ungrid-able Ecologies: Decolonizing the Ecological Sensorium in a 10,000 year-old NaturalCultural Happening

Abstract

In the photo essay that follows, I share some field notes two years into a long-term research-creation collaboration with award-winning dancer and filmmaker Ayelen Liberona. Becoming Sensor mixes art, ecology, and anthropology in an attempt to do ecology otherwise. Part of a long-term ethnographic research project on an urban park in Toronto, Becoming Sensor speculates on protocols for an ungrid-able ecology of a 10,000 year-old naturalcultural happening. In this project, Ayelen and I engage the expansive mediations of art and the artful attentions of ethnography to remake the naturalist’s notebook. This more-than-natural history of an oak savannah in Toronto’s High Park offers one approach to cultivating a robust mode of knowing grounded in queer, feminist, decolonial politics.