2021
ENERGY EMERGENCY REPAIR KIT
The mycelium inserts (an edition of 30) are all unique from one another.
The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) offers a host of situated activities and speculative probes designed to respond to today’s energy emergencies. Intermingling diagrammatic designs with instructional convolutions and perplexing protocols, the kit provides a non-programmatic yet highly pragmatic collocation of materials for navigating, communicating, operating, and un-doing the investments that have come to overdetermine energetic relations in the past, present, and future.
This project was funded by the University of Alberta as one of two projects destined to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.
The team was a wonderful combination of academics, thinkers, writers, artists and a recording engineer:
Joan Greer, Lisa Moore, Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier, Tsēmā Igharas, Tegan Moore, Catlin Kelly-Kuzyk, and us Jerome Tavé & Kyle Lawson
Joan Greer, Lisa Moore, Sourayan Mookerjea, Mark Simpson, Jessie Beier, Tsēmā Igharas, Tegan Moore, Catlin Kelly-Kuzyk, and us Jerome Tavé & Kyle Lawson
CONTENTS OF THE KIT:
Triggered most immediately by the pandemic moment circa 2020, with its strangely intermittent and inscrutable convolutions of petrocultural business-as-usual, this kit reflects and reckons the long-roiling and fully chronic energy emergency orchestrated over several centuries by racial-fossil capitalism’s mass production of injustices.
This repair kit positions energy as more than just a resource to be exploited and managed, more than an infrastructural obstacle to overcome, more than fuel for the nightmares that lie ahead (or that are, in too many cases, already here). Energy is life. Energy is death. Energy involves investments and divestments -- of desire; of affective connection; of interspecies interdependence; of care and repair.
This repair kit positions energy as more than just a resource to be exploited and managed, more than an infrastructural obstacle to overcome, more than fuel for the nightmares that lie ahead (or that are, in too many cases, already here). Energy is life. Energy is death. Energy involves investments and divestments -- of desire; of affective connection; of interspecies interdependence; of care and repair.
With this in mind, the thinkers and makers in Team E.E.R.K. have conspired with multitudinous experts, from mycelial decomposers and speculative designers to recording engineers, to create a provocatively user-friendly guide to various modes and methods for grappling with the pressing energy scenarios that burn today and may flare tomorrow.
The kit acknowledges the energy spent on and vital to its creation: the bonds of endeavour; the glow of affection; the pulse of attunement; the drive of subtraction; the charge of uncertainty; the resilience of exhaustion; the obstinacy of making do; the shadow of fossils; the pull of futurity; the zeroes and ones; the force of an otherwise.
The kit acknowledges the energy spent on and vital to its creation: the bonds of endeavour; the glow of affection; the pulse of attunement; the drive of subtraction; the charge of uncertainty; the resilience of exhaustion; the obstinacy of making do; the shadow of fossils; the pull of futurity; the zeroes and ones; the force of an otherwise.
