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part of the ongoing series summer library
Librarian 2 Laura Florence August 14 - August 28, 2021 Closing event: November 13, 2021 Laura Florence works at the Kennett Library in Kennett Square, PA. She is a writer, artist and frequent instigator of and collaborator in a wide variety of community creative endeavors. Visiting: Open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays 11-3, (check here or email us for updates), and by appointment. Check back here for details on our closing gathering too. See full details about the Summer Library project, including other Librarians' work, here.
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The Anti-Anthropocene LibraryThe Anti-Anthropocene Library is an Earth-generative generous project which encourages giving without directives, conditions, hitches, caveats, bargains or strings.
The Anti-Anthropocene Library eschews sectioning time as past, present, future. It denies/defies any/all so called “-cenes". It confounds concepts of linear time. It envelops, accepts, absorbs all time. It assumes freedom from the binary of positive/negative. It does not recognize difference between this or that, us and them, nature and non-nature, human and animal, human and nature. You are invited to consider the ordinariness and the utter miracle of the existence of each item. Each contains the entire history of the Earth. Each effortlessly holds multiple stories, art, poetry, music, science, and boundless wonder. InstallingThe Anti-Anthropocene Library zine
The Anti-Anthropocene CompostComposting the Anti-Anthropocene Library at the end of Laura's librarianship
The Anti-Anthropocene Compost is a physical presentation of a question which leads to more questions. What does it mean to decompose, decay, return to an elemental original form? What a wonder! How is it (we) humans have managed to create from Earth’s own materials such material that resist this return and now drowns, clogs and sickens the very source of its origin. Further, the Anti-Anthropocene Compost asks us to recognize the reality of our produced materials, both its varied qualities and overwhelming quantity. The Anti-Anthropocene Compost is finally a somewhat feeble but earnest conciliatory gesture that also insists we acknowledge and confront the real damage we have wrought.
Following on from, and layering upon, an earlier Street Road project, this compost comprises: The Anti Bin—a place to gather materials made by Earth that are unencumbered by the manipulations of the human enterprise: leaves, sticks, rock, soil, insects, wild brambles, wild flowers, so-called weeds, etc The Anthropocene Bin — a place to offer materials made by humans and also amenable to decomposition and return to original source: books and other paper products, non-animal food scraps, smaller portions of lumber scraps, small bits of non-aluminum metal, glass bottles and shards, pottery, fabric, yarn, rope/twine, etc. The Post-Anthropocene Bin—a place to compile materials we humans have collectively brought into ubiquitous bounty and will require unimaginable time to relent a return to Earth’s original source: plastics in their many forms, aluminum, coated wire, waxed cardboard, foam, styrofoam, etc. You are invited to add to the bins. Please DO NOT submit anything toxic: batteries, chemicals, combustibles, medical waste, drugs, paint, etc. into any of these bins…they are not equipped to absolve you (us) of such materials. Please take the time and attention to consider how you/we came to have such materials and note the confounding deep dilemma with which we are faced in needing to dispose of them). The Anti-Anthropocene Bonfire Book-burning
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