earthly threads

earthly threads is a collective action towards digital re-enchantment, unfolding through a numbered series of rehearsals, a zine, and public gatherings at the Secret Garden in Bushwick, Brooklyn. The project treats the digital as a transspecies site where cables, land, animals, waters, resources, and waste mix together, and asks how community care and body-based practice might counter the flattening of life into digital data.

Digital mediation conditions us into a binary logic — online or offline, body or mind, user or self — leaving us with a disembodied sense of both community and self. earthly threads resists this split, not by rejecting the digital, but by bringing the body, and each other, back into it.

Each rehearsal returns to the same opening questions: where are we, what are we living through, where are we being taken? Rather than resolving them, we draw an eternal spiral into a multiplicity of possible actions. Chromatically, the body becomes one with the space through light and through language, read silently or read aloud to us; we transit a meditative experience that makes us wonder what we put our fingers — the tip of life — towards.

Anchoring this, a zine of the same name, works as a container of process and research, and provides a print version of each rehearsal that participants can take with them and read along, to themselves or to others. Distributed for free in zones of what I’m calling “collective dissociation”, like the subway, the zines interrupt cycles of bodily dissociation by materially bringing attention back to the physical, in one of the places where we experience the most communal disconnection mediated by our devices.

Moving bodies through breath, hand, body, collective body, and signals, and through blue, red, green, and grey, throughout each rehearsal participants bodily feel what it means to act and think collectively into other paradigms of sociality and connection. At minimum, each rehearsal asks participants to set the phone face-down and tune their attention inward — a moment to slow down and conspire, breathing together once more. Citations sit alongside each line: a friend’s firsthand account, Federici’s concern about whether the mechanization and even robotization of our daily life is the best that thousands of years of human labor can produce, Steve Paxton’s movements for the spine, and many more. Participants can follow the threads, if they wish.

Developed in conversation with participants of Digital Resistance with Kara Lynch, in dialogue with Social Practice Seminar (Greg Sholette, Tom Finkelpearl, Nicolás Dumit Estévez), and in conviviality with Counter-planning for the Blue Screen with Jesal Kapadia, earthly threads is an ongoing program — an offering to change our inner sensibility toward the power in our hands and our interpersonal, digitally mediated connections.