Narracene

[…] an ecopoem is environmental [in] that it is ecocentric, not anthropocentric. Human interests cannot be the be-all and end-all of an ecopoem.

John Shoptaw: Why Ecopoetry?
(full article HERE)

Narracene is an ecopoetic world-building project which asks:

• What if the human capacity to extractively narrativise the natural world had the same pollutive, non-biodegradable quality as plastic pollution?
• What if this residual narrative (which already, inarguably, possesses a life of its own) not only outlived us, but created a new world from the refuse we will leave behind?
• What if, therefore, the fantastical world of myth and legend does not lie before our collective living memory, but after?
• What right do we have to that world, if any?

The first creature to emerge from this soupy idea was APHOS: a prologue for an imagined epic set and performed upon the plastic-choked oceans of the world I now call ‘The Narracene’.

Since then, the idea of a mythic future waste-world has evolved to not only walk on land (and burrow deep beneath it, and fly high above it), but beyond its textual origins, into collage, costume, dance and (most recently) TTRPG.

Narracene is…

…a lament against man-made climate change, pollution and reckless consumption.

…a refutation of the nihlistic arrogance that assumes that the world will end with us, and calling this selfish doom-spiral ‘The Anthropocene’.

…an homage to the awesome power of storytelling as a creative (and extractive) power.

…an exploratoion of a ruined, beautiful, post-human world and the inner lives of the mutant plastic merpeople and fairy-folk who call it home.

Like any project you develop over a long time and hold close to your heart, ‘Narracene’ is often a source of frustration. Like its chorus of mutant myth things, it is an amalgamation, a gross gestalt of influences* that refuses to stay as one thing for any length of time and often threatens to wriggle off the line entirely, though I refuse to let it go.

Whatever Narracene eventually choses to become when it fully emerges, I hope it frightens me.

*a gross gestalt of influences:

Staying with the Trouble & A Cyborg Manifesto (Donna Harraway)
Heart: The City Beneath (Rowan, Rook and Deckard)
Earth Shattering: ecopoems (ed. Neil Astley)
The Last Alchemist (and all the work of Colin Thompson)
Rainworld (Video-Cult)
Our Wives Under the Sea (Julia Armfield)
Orpheus and Eurydice (and other katabasis myths) (Greek/Various)
Plastic Beach (Gorillaz)
The Silt Verses (John Ware and Una Hussen)
Vassen RPG (Johan Egerkrans, Nils Hintze, Graeme Davis)
Mutazoine (Die Gute Fabric)
Māui fishes up the North Island (Myth, Aotearoan)
Other Minds & Metazoa (Peter Godfrey-Smith)
The art of Hannah Höch
Stalker (Andrei Tarcovsky)
The Theban Plays (Sophocles)
Troika! & Acid Death Fantasy (Luke Gearing)
Beowulf (Myth, Old English/Norse)
The Medusa and the Snail (Lewis Thomas)
Norco (Geography of Robots)
Without Sinking (Hildur Guðnadóttir)