DIY Healing
With(in) Ancestral Lands
ancestral wounds, cultural memory, wellbeing, anarchist aesthetics
DIY or DIOurselves Healing with(in) Ancestral Land is an autoethnographic research project working with(in) ancestral soils and land to heal ancestral wounds at the intersection of cultural and family memory. Trauma caused by and within sociocultural systems seeps into family systems, often replicating within (Ward, 2013/2018; Firestone, 2019; Foor, 2017; Thomas, 2011), and leaving epigenetic changes in future generations’ DNA expression (Weaver, et. al. 2004, Gapp, et. al., 2014). Stored in our DNA, cultural and family memories, trauma negatively impacts our ability to relate to ourselves, each other, and our environment in healthy ways. Individually, we are vulnerable to PTSD, depression, anxiety, and loneliness as a result of stored intergenerational trauma. Collectively, we perpetuate the sociocultural patterns that cause trauma in social fields, cultural memory, family systems, and in our own bodies (Till, 2012; van der Kolk, 2015; Siegel, 2017; Hirsch, 2008; Hirschberger, 2018; Atkinson, 2018; Firestone, 2019).
Drawing on Person-centered Art Therapy and working within an Anarchist Aesthetics framework, the overarching goal of this project is to generate theory grounded in experiential data (Charmaz, 2006) of making and creating to build knowledge in an underdeveloped area of aesthetic theory. By working and creating with(in) soil and land as witness to expose hegemony in cultural memory and reframe narratives that perpetuate trauma we can expect to
- Generate a theory of how DIY healing might work (or not) and why it is appealing, i.e. a theory of how to prefigure personal and communal well-being in the cracks of a dominant narrative.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the intersection of cultural memory, family memory, and personal memory in artwork.
- Have further developed Anarchist Aesthetic Theory by generating a theory of how to represent without static/material emphasis.
Background
Soil and land, as part of place, bear witness to sociocultural trauma literally (Targulian and Bronnikova, 2018) and metaphorically (Makanji, 2019; Aitkenhead, 2015; Martens, 2019; Robertson and Martens, 2019). Changes in soil content, quality, and overall character are reflective of human activity. Access to, or denial of, land and soil seeps into and patterns cultural and family memory (Mapa Teatro, 2001; Hunter, 1995; Book, et. al., 2017; Casey, 2000). Stories, values, and behaviours are built around what happens on the land and in soil. Soil and land therefore become symbols of unsettled lives (Swidler, 1986; Kilbride 1995), periods of social transformation, damaging or healing as they may be. It stands to reason that soil and land can be a conduit to uncover and recontextualize shared myths and beliefs rooted in ancestral trauma. Trauma needs a witness to heal the wounds. Soil is the immortal witness.
There is research and work in Art Therapy addressing the effects of sociocultural trauma on family systems and individuals (Hogan, 2016; Guzman, 2020; Samuels and Rockwood Lane, 2013). There is research and work in Participatory and Socially Engaged Art addressing sociocultural trauma in communities, as well as work on soil as artistic research material (Book, et. al, 2017). Lastly, innumerable fine artists of all types have long created to make sense of trauma… cultural, familial and personal. Yet, there is still a need to look deeper into the dynamics of how sociocultural trauma plays out in family systems and then feeds back into cultural memory. This interplay of inherited traumatic memories at the intersection of social systems, family systems, and personal well-being is where we begin. And Anarchist Aesthetics, I believe, lives at this intersection.
Anarchist Aesthetics aims to create “…an aesthetic premised on the reciprocal, dialectical, relationship between actuality, potentiality, and reality.” (Cohn, 2006 p.159). A “…balancing of the potential and the actual, the subjective and the objective…” (Cohn, 2006 p.159) is a framework to tease out the potential for healing in the interplay of how memories are made, gain power, and take hold between the private and public. To examine memory from the perspective that there are unrealized potentialities, that things could have been and still can be otherwise, gives us deeper insight into the how and why memories are created and carried into cultural being… and deeper insight into healing at the root by exposing the edges and limits of our field(s) (Atkinson, 2018). The question then becomes, How do we create a representation of the healing processes that “…imagines what might be, taking account of what is…” (Cohn, 2006 p.160), and exposes “…the potentialities dormant inside the real…”? (Cohn, 2006 p.160)
Person-centered Art Therapy holds clues that fit well into an Anarchistic Aesthetic. The idea that “All individuals have within themselves the ability to guide their own lives in a manner that is personally satisfying and socially constructive.” (Hogan, 2016 p.66) means that if we “…free the individuals to find their inner wisdom and confidence, they will make increasingly healthier and more constructive choices.” (Hogan, 2016 p.66). Trauma caused by and within systems is disempowering by its very nature. It can lead to a mistrust of, or over-reliance on, authority. Which doesn’t bode well for deep healing, the sort of healing needed to heal longstanding intergenerational trauma. DIY movements however, have empowered individuals and marginalized groups (Mattern, 2017), showing therapeutic value to boot. (Smith, 2014)
DIY movements thrive in the cracks of a hegemonic mode of being while promoting autonomy, mastery, and purpose (Pink, 2009/2018) by empowering with agency. Yes!, we can build a house ourselves and not be trapped in mortgages that unfairly advantage banks and the finance industry. (Evans et. al., 2002; Weismann and Bryce, 2013) Yes!, we can make, produce, and distribute our music without bowing to the music industry monopoly’s predatory terms. (Mattern, 2017) Yes!, we can create furniture that is beautiful and well made, learn a craft, and build a healthy sense of self. (Smith, 2014) Yes!, we can develop a deeper, MFA (Edmondson et. al., 2016) or Ph.D. (Dougherty and Whitaker, 2020) level art practice and not pay high fees to art schools trapped in a neoliberal economic reality. By choosing how to live, work, and be in the world, DIY practitioners individually and collectively prefigure a society of their own terms, on their own terms. DIY healing is prefiguring wellbeing starting with the self and family system.
Cultural memory shows up in the stories we tell ourselves and each other, in our emotional and physical responses to trauma and triggers, in what we value, and in what we teach our children to value. (Firestone, 2019) Cultural memory permeates and structures family systems, family systems that live with and perpetuate memories of trauma. This intersection of cultural and family memories is underdeveloped and, I feel, important to understand how to short-circuit, reframe, or restructure what we know about trauma and healing. In the book Mind, a journey to the heart of being human, Daniel J. Siegal, MD asks the question “Where is Mind?”. The conclusion is that Mind is within us, and between us. (Siegal, 2017) Mind flows through and inhabits physicality, the space around, and links us all. This concept of mind, intangible yet felt, is where I feel cultural memory is created. Created then expressed as values, artifacts, stories, fears, and so on. How to get at this concept of Mind via art though…?
I posit that
- Reframing cultural and familial memories handed down through generations via DIY practices will aid healing ((Lehrner and Yehuda, 2018)) in a way that therapist or authority-led healing could not.
- And that ancestral soil and land can be a conduit to our cultural memories before memory. We can reframe cultural and family memory by going back to pre-history, a time before living memory, through soil and land.
- The physical act of working with(in) ancestral land will help us “own ourselves” ((van der Kolk, 2014)), reclaiming body and spirit.
Tapping into soil memory, combined with family history research, we revisit the trauma in a safe way through mindfulness, reconnection to natural and communal rhythms, and rebuilding relationships with ancestors. At the moment, however, this is speculation. I’d like to ground a theory of DIY Healing in experiential data. To do so, I ask the following questions.
Research Questions
Working within an Anarchist Aesthetics framework, this research project asks three questions.
- If land, place and soil retain cultural memory, family memory… Might there be DIY (or DIOurselves) healing and wellbeing in working and making with(in) ancestral land? i.e. soil, clay, and other natural elements native to the land.
- How might working with(in) ancestral lands and family history/genealogy research inform each other? Are there patterns to follow? Is each case unique?
- And how might we document this work within an Anarchist Aesthetic; i.e. represent the work clearly as one potentiality at just one moment in time?
Aims and Objectives
The overarching goal of this project is to generate theory grounded in experiential data (Charmaz, 2006) and build knowledge in an underdeveloped area of aesthetic theory. By working with(in) soil and land as witness to expose hegemony in cultural memory, to reframe narratives that perpetuate trauma we can expect to:
- Generate a theory of how DIY healing might work (or not) and why it is appealing, i.e. a theory of how to prefigure personal and communal well-being in the cracks of a dominant narrative.
- Gain a deeper understanding of the intersection of cultural memory, family memory, and personal memory in artwork.
- Have further developed Anarchist Aesthetic Theory by generating a theory of how to represent without static/material emphasis.
Methodology
The need for a method that enables seeking wisdom in self-directed healing is clear. I use the word wisdom specifically to draw upon what drove Joseph Beuys’s work (Mesch, 2017) and combine it with projects like ‘Soil as Witness, Memory as Wound’ (Makanji, 2019), ‘Public Soil Memory for the Plantationocene’ (Martens, 2019), and ‘C’undua A pact for life’ (Mapa Teatro, 2001) that seek healing through witnessing. This combination would address healing from trauma in a more systematic way in situations where therapist-led healing is not possible or undesirable. Therapy that tells what and how to fix may completely miss or aggravate the root trauma precisely because the individual, or community, feels powerless. This is what I see in Beuys’s work, struggling with inflicted powerlessness that could not heal by being vulnerable to an “authority”. It feels to me like he was self-witnessing, searching for empowerment. The experience of witnessing holds a power not unlike being witnessed and a wisdom gained from direct experience. Making with ancestral soil, in ancestral lands, is an experience of bearing witness to ancestral trauma.
From framing art-making as experience, and autoethnography as generating phenomenological experience data, the leap to generating theory is not so far. It’s a short hop really. Grounded Theory (GT) Methodology in Sociology and Contextual Inquiry in UX are two research methods that generate theory based in rich qualitative data, experiential data, either observed or reported. GT is already making headway into art and design through research and projects as a constructivist method that builds from the ground up, rather than lays it on from top-down. (Medlock, 2013; Vassilakaki and Johnson 2015; Konecki, 2011) GT as a methodological framework is wonderfully suited to a DIY ethic for this very reason. For the purposes of this project, the general GT format of progressively asking questions, collecting experiential data, analyzing and coding the data, refining questions, collecting experiential data, analyzing and coding the data, and stopping at a point when a coherent theory emerges is what I propose. Activities wise, I look to family history and ancestry research, one or two residencies in Ireland and/or Scotland in environments with knowledge explored back into prehistory, into a time before recorded family stories.
Family history and ancestry research will be on one of two of my family lines (or both since they intermarry) rife with socio-cultural and familial system trauma. The starting point will be when my Whites of Ireland and/or Robertsons of Scotland emigrated, working backward as far as possible within the time allotted. Both lines are shrouded in secrets and have troubled family systems with a history of socio-cultural trauma. This is what I know to date from research over the last twelve years. Having recently signed myself up for the IHGS Correspondence Course in Genealogy that prepares students for examination at the level of Higher Certificate in Genealogy, I expect to be able to uncover more. Visits to archives, local museums, and living history museums will supplement online database searches and family stories. Journaling not only the research, but the experience of doing the research, will be important to witnessing what has come before.
Residencies that facilitate making with soil in Ireland and/or Scotland would be the second phase of research. Learning about what the land and soil have witnessed will prepare me to reconnect and rebuild relationships to the past via soil. “I let myself be affected by the world and answer to it” (Diaconu, 2017 p.942) is the spirit of this making phase. From this phase I expect at least a tactile journal of the experience as well as reflections of being a witness (or not). By tactile journal, I mean that I anticipate the physical manifestation of residency work to be sculptural and performative using a variety of materials including soil, clay, and other natural raw materials found in the Irish/Scottish landscape. (I am inspired by the work of Englefreit, 2021; Cummings, 2021; Book et. al., 2017, and Makanji, 2019) Photography, audio and video will be explored as means to document work in a way that makes clear that the work, and the representation of the work, is just one realized potentiality of the many possibilities. The outcome of the first two phases would likely be an exhibition and supplementary reflective text. It is also important to note that the written work should reflect the DIY nature of the project in language and in structure. What this entails can be negotiated and sorted out while in process.
Ethics
Ethical considerations for this project revolve around concerns for the Artist Researcher’s well-being while undertaking an autoethnographic study of personal and familial traumatic memories. While the end result is expected to be healing, discomfort arises in any healing process. While healing wounds, it can get worse before getting better. To mitigate the emotional disruption surfacing ancestral trauma can bring, a Person-centered Art Therapist should be available for support as needed. Ideally, this project could be a collaborative effort with the Person-centered Art Therapist who would focus on observing the therapeutic efficacy of a DIY healing method. I could then focus on understanding of the intersection of cultural, family, and personal memory in artwork as well as further developing Anarchist Aesthetic Theory. The Person-centered Art Therapist would either be a third advisor or a private therapist with regularly scheduled check-ins. At minimum, the role would be for feedback, sounding board, safety valve, and safeguard. In either scenario, collaborator or safeguard, it’s important to note that in sticking to the DIY premise of the project, this role is not meant to guide or structure work, or the healing process in general.
Timeline
Background research genealogy and cultural history starting with emigration and working backward toward prehistory. Exposing family myths, uncovering missing family history and tying it into broader socio-cultural history.
Phase One
Background research genealogy and cultural history starting with emigration and working backward toward prehistory. Exposing family myths, uncovering missing family history and tying it into broader socio-cultural history.
Phase Two
One or two residencies in Scotland for the Robertson Line and/or Ireland for the White line. I’ve identified a few possibilities that would enable research with soil and land as far back as pre-history.
Phase Three
The final year will be spent synthesizing experiential data with family history research and reflecting on work in residence. I expect to plan an exhibition of work and writing; the place, space and format to be contextual to the results.
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