Totems

For a while now I have been working on a series of Totems for the 21st Century.

Totem is a word for ancestor clan. The original term from the Ojibwe, Doodem, literally would translate as 'the expression of, or having to do with one's heart', with doodem referring to the extended family. According to Stephen Jenkinson you could say that whatever sustained you is your ancestor. And so your sense of belonging is perhaps a consequence of recognizing what sustains you.

To me creating Totems, by putting together things that find me, is a way to step out into the vast and wild territories of liminality where transformation and metamorphoses abound. A way to surrender to uncertainty - and the vulnerability it implies - which may be the only way to create space for resonance and connection.

I am thinking of my Totems as manifestations of connecting with what is - good and bad, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health - just like love. Or in Donna Haraways words : “staying with the trouble”.

I like to think of them as what Anna Tsing calls Polyphonic assemblages - temporary gatherings of elements where some elements collaborate, others threaten eachother, while some simply happen to be in the same sacred place..

Re-membering - putting together the lost parts of the wholeness that has been dis-membered by extractive/mechanistic/colonial/patriarchal/capitalist monoculture.

To me this is maybe the core of the human way of participating in the creation that is life. Where this was once the only way - closely connected to the life-forms sustaining ones own life, mediated by myth and ritual - in modern/colonial/patriarchal/capitalist civilization where the stories of separation has made disconnection the rule, this can be quite complicated.