Surreal Encounters: Playing With the More-Than-Human at a Community Farm

Introduction

Arts-based research offers ways of engaging a “defiant imagination” to challenge the status quo (Foster, 2016). Its creativity and openness—as opposed to research that seeks definitive answers—means that there are possibilities for participants and researchers to attend to the nuances of lived experiences of the world, and for knowledge produced to “sit within a sense of mystery” (Fernandes, 2003, p. 99). This is particularly important in research that seeks to further social and ecological justice. Here, given the drastic issues of climate change and species extinction we are facing, there is a need for creative approaches to research that avoid replicating injustices; a need to tell a different story about the planet and our relationship to it (Kingsnorth & Hine, 2011). Posthumanism, as it intersects with creativity, expands traditional academic framings of arts-based research (Harris & Rousell, 2022). It not only acknowledges that we are deeply entangled with the natural world, but also recognizes that there is pleasure to be had in embracing this. As Haraway (2018) points out, “Generative, effective multispecies environmental justice must be as much about play, storytelling, and joy as about work, critique, and pain” (p. 102).

The cultural movement of surrealism, more than any other, provides a way of playfully seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary, magic in the mundane, and making visible new and surprising connections (Foster, 2019). The surrealist movement has been involved with ecological concerns since its earliest days in the 1920s when it emerged in Paris from the radical absurdism of Dada. It was women surrealists—Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Ithell Colquhoun, Valentine Penrose, and Suzanne Césaire among others—who espoused environmental concerns alongside feminist ones. As such, they may be seen as the forerunners of deep ecology and ecofeminism (Rosemont, 1998). Their work called for a “redefinition of the relations between humankind and the animal, solidarity with endangered species, [and] a nonexploitative regard for the planet we live on” (Rosemont, 1998, p. li).

Here, there is resonance with posthumanism, particularly when it is understood as building on feminist theory, not least those new materialist approaches that stress the “embodied, embedded and sexed roots of subjectivity” (Braidotti, 2019, p. 48). These perspectives do not reject the humanist issues of social justice and equality, but rather understand them as more-than-human endeavors (Braidotti, 2013). Moral concern is extended to other species and even to rocks, rivers, and trees, drawing on new materialism’s belief that all matter is vital and affective (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010). Haraway (1988) describes how, in the vein of ecofeminism, and in a critical sense, “the world encountered in knowledge projects is an active entity” (p. 593). This is in opposition to the (“bourgeois” and “masculinist”) majority who view it as a resource to be mined. There can be no environmental justice or reworlding without multispecies environmental justice “and that means nurturing and inventing enduring multispecies—human and nonhuman—kindreds” (Haraway, 2018, p. 102).

Abram (in Abram and Hine, 2011) argues that it is the “more-than-human”—landforms, rocks, animals, and plants—that are “our real neighbours, the folks with whom we need to be practicing real community, if we want to be living well in any place” (p. 63). This might prove a useful way of understanding “community” at Burscough Community Farm in the North West of England where an arts-based research project took place, full of surrealist spirit. This 18-acre not-for-profit farm in the middle of the flat lowlands of West Lancashire relies on volunteers to help grow its organic fruit, vegetables, and flowers using permaculture principles. The farm is unlike any of the uniformly planted agricultural fields surrounding it: vegetables and flowers grow in roughly marked strips, fruit bushes and young apple trees form an unkempt forest garden, and self-seeded alder has produced thick groves, as has the abundant leafy willow that volunteers have endeavored to weave into living tunnels and arches. Feral cats and rescued chickens roam the site, and myriad bees populate a cluster of hives. The volunteers include retired people, home schooling families, the long-term unemployed who include disabled people among their numbers, and GP health and well-being referrals.

The farm’s deep ethical commitments to the human and more-than-human drew me and my colleague Barnaby King (who has since left academia to focus on performing arts) to volunteer at the community farm. As well as digging and planting, we carried out small-scale arts projects there, including a community performance and a photography exhibition. We thus had a vested interest in the farm, and also a shared commitment to artistic creativity and environmental and social activism. The yearlong arts-based research project that is discussed in this article took place over the course of the growing year. It incorporated workshops in Creative Writing, Photography, Mindful Movement, and Natural Sculpture, which were held, respectively, in the balmy spring, hot summer, early autumn, and beginnings of winter. The project culminated in a lantern-lit sculpture trail around the farm to celebrate the festival of Samhain, rooted in ancient Celtic paganism, at the end of the October.

The overall aim of the research was to explore how arts-based processes can foster new forms of communication and collaboration within and beyond the community farm. We were particularly interested in looking at how creative activities might enable people to explore (and perhaps even deepen) their experiences of being at the farm, whether as volunteers or visitors. These activities thus had the multiple purpose of producing knowledge about relationships between the human and more-than-human, of potentially nurturing these relationships, and of bringing more people to the farm who might become much needed members. Not only might this offer a wealth of benefits to the new volunteers (see Burke, 2022) but it would also help to ensure the farm could continue to make its contribution to the biodiversity of the local area and demonstrate its potential to contribute to an ecological reworlding (Haraway, 2018).

The article begins by sketching out some of the synergies between posthumanism and a “surrealist sensibility” (Foster, 2019). Definitions are deliberately kept loose: the “keyword” of posthuman scholarship is multiplicity (Braidotti, 2019), and surrealism certainly does not require locking up in the “dungeons of narrow definition” (Rosemont 1998, p. xxxii). Surrealist artist Toyen describes the movement as “a community of ethical views” (cited in Rosemont, 1998, p. 81), which seems appropriate here, particularly if the notion of community is extended to the more-than-human, hybrid creatures, the soil, and the air. The article moves on to discuss the research methodology employed at the community farm and the importance of keeping it “open, alive, loose” (Lather, 2010, p. x). That way there is space for those chance encounters much beloved by surrealists. These abounded at the community farm and some are detailed in the following three findings sections, which explore creativity, wonderment, distortions of time, and our more-than-human participants.

Questioning the Primacy of the Human

As Coole and Frost (2010) argue in their Introduction to The New Materialisms, “the ways we understand and interact with nature are in need of a commensurate updating” (p. 5; also cited in Oppermann, 2016, p. 24). It is posthumanism that might act as the “site of such updates,” where various threads, such as material feminisms and ecocriticism, “converge to produce new epistemological configurations” (Oppermann, 2016, p. 24). Posthumanism is critical of anthropocentric humanism and views all forms of matter as having capacity for agency (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022). From such a perspective, humans are not autonomous, not separate from the world of nature and animality (Sundberg, 2014). Inquiry is opened to nonhuman life, “from animals to artificial intelligence, from aliens to other forms of hypothetical entities related to the physics notion of a multiverse” (Ferrando, 2012, p. 10). As such, posthumanist approaches hold potential for “out-of-the-box-thinking” (Oppermann, 2016, p. 25).

A different perspective—and one that dissolves the human/nonhuman divide and other problematic dualisms—is certainly necessary when it comes to tackling environmental crises and encouraging a more just society (Fox & Alldred, 2020). Environmental justices are always entangled with social injustice, as well as contextual, historical, and cultural matters and matterings (Koro et al., 2022). As Moore (2016) argues, the nature/society dualism is as “directly implicated in the modern world’s colossal violence, inequity, and oppression” as the binaries of Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism (p. 2). This is violence against the human as well as nonhuman. Briggs (2015) laments how even environmental movements maintain this false divide between people and the planet. Our preoccupation with sustainability and renewable resources has only shifted our role from dominating nature to managing it (Briggs, 2015). A change in thinking is required if we are to develop a less destructive, more harmonious relationship with the Earth and this involves becoming open to the life force and spirit of those things we have considered to be inanimate (Briggs, 2015).

The concept of the Anthropocene, while useful to some extent, shows Nature/Society dualism “at its highest stage of development” (Moore, 2016, p. 3). Its seemingly rational, yet market- and profit-focused, “business-as-usual,” stance has the unfortunate effect of sapping our capacity “for imagining and caring for other worlds” (Haraway, 2016a, p. 53). Haraway (2016b), who prefers the term compost instead of posthumanism, and humusities instead of humanities, proposes the chthulucene as an alternative to the Anthropocene and a means of “staying with the trouble.” This is a compound of two (“problematic”) Greek roots, khthôn and kainos, “that together name a kind of timeplace for learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” (Haraway, 2016b, p. 2). Kainos means the present, now, a time for fresh starts and does not require conventional relationships to “awful or Edenic pasts” or “apocalyptic or salvific” futures (Haraway, 2016b, p. 2).

An understanding of a “living present” (Abram, 1997, p. 201) is nothing new to indigenous cultures who have not fallen completely “into the civilized oblivion of linear time” (Abram, 1997, p. 202). It is also important to acknowledge the complex epistemic traditions of indigenous peoples “wherein animals, plants, and spirits are understood as beings who participate in the everyday practices that bring worlds into being” (Sundberg, 2014, p. 35). These knowledge systems, unlike those in the majority world, have not been organized in terms of dualist ontologies. Indigenous research thrives on story, and Smith (2012) outlines the harm wrought on indigenous communities as stories have been dismissed and knowledge colonized. Indigenous stories enable the handing down of tribal values based on ancient knowledges (Kovach, 2009) and tend to encourage holism, a mutual balance, and harmony among animals, people, elements, and the Spirit world (Archibald, 2008). Similarly, a posthuman approach acknowledges the “world’s dynamic self-articulation, or narrativity” (Oppermann, 2016, p. 30). This radical perspective, says Oppermann, is “one that cannot be dismissed as the stuff of dreams” although it “strangely alters the tenor of our reflections and the tonality of our dreams” (Abraham, 2010, p. 141, cited in Oppermann 2016, p. 30).

For surrealists, dreams are the stuff of life, and they aimed to dissolve the dualism of waking life and the dreamworld. André Breton—a leader of surrealism—insisted on “the resolution” of dreams and reality “into an absolute reality, a surreality” (cited in Allmer, 2022, p. 121). Engaging with dream images, with the imagination—even with insanity—surrealists aimed to disrupt the rational. This was politically motivated: not only did they understand that being human involves much more than rational thought (Conley, 2013), but also they wanted to stage a rebellion against a rationalism that had brought about the horrors and upheavals of war.

In its attempt to avoid and renegotiate dualisms, posthumanism owes a debt to surrealism: “the dream world can offer a unique space of visualization; the possibilities opened by the future are already embedded in the mystery of the present; the conscious becomes the unconscious” (Ferrando, 2016, p. 4). Surrealism also opened the possibility for understanding that “qualities long thought exclusive to human beings thrive and exist in other beings and other things” (Conley, 2013). Well known for disorienting and subverting the everyday through objects, surrealists often saw objects, matter, as having power and agency (Sowels, 2022). Liberating them from their established uses stimulated imagination and desire (Sowels, 2022). Meret Oppenheim’s Le Déjeuner en Fourrure (The Fur Luncheon) of 1937 is one of the most renowned of surrealist objects. A teacup, saucer, and spoon made of antelope hide, it “makes visible, with quite remarkable economy, the problematic presence of the wild in the civilized, the place of the animal in society, and the containment and ordering of female sexuality” (Warner, 1995, p. 385). It might also play with conventional ideas about time: “no chance here of a Proustian knock of ‘a spoon against a plate,’” given that even the spoon is made of noiseless fur (Mavor, 2017, p. 59). Le Déjeuner en Fourrure is thus about “forgetting the past, as well as about forgetting the future by experiencing the present in a most non-normative way” (Mavor, 2017, p. 60).

Oppenheim also engages with the female surrealist treatment of nature as a source of creativity (Brough-Evans, 2016). In so doing, several surrealists played with the notion of hybrid creatures, comprising plants, humans, and animals. One such artist is Leonor Fini, whose “posthuman sensibility drove her work and her life” (Ferrando, 2016, p. 5):

I experience an erotic world where there is no divergence, no hostility, where everything mixes together (. . .) I like to feel myself in a state of metamorphosis like certain animals and certain plants. (Leonor Fini, cited in Ferrando, 2016, p. 105)

Lancashire-born Leonora Carrington is well known for her fabulous hybrid creatures in her paintings and fiction, which “take for granted the transience of any distinctions among states of life, death, time, embodiment” (Lyon, 2017, p. 163):

A human animal may fade into a painting, or take flight, or mate with a boar; a bee swarm can become a goddess; vegetables collude; decay is self-animating; deep time enters the present. (Lyon, 2017, p. 163)

In her world of the imaginary and those “perverse and comic fairy tales,” she conjures through paint and words, “the conventional hierarchy of values is turned upside down in a spirit of rebellion” (Warner, 1995, p. 382). Carrington spent much of her later life in Mexico where her work—which had always employed a plethora of mystical and occult symbolism (Aberth, 2010)—became imbued with Mexican indigenous views of reality, including nahualism, which understands “a fully determined, intimate relationship” between human, animal, or vegetable (Brough-Evans, 2016, p. 107). Carrington, with “ecofeminist vision” (Arcq, 2022, p. 95), thus questions the “primacy of the human species among life forms on the planet” (Aberth, 2010, p. 8). This is work which, according to Lyon (2017), actually makes posthumanist thinking possible rather than the other way round. If we accept it on its own terms, with its emphasis on materiality and relations that exist outside of a humanist narrative, “we will find therein a composite multiverse that contemporary posthumanist theory is struggling to encompass” (Lyon, 2017, p. 168).

Knowing Differently

When taking a posthumanist perspective, which stresses the interconnections and entanglements with our environments, “methodological thinking should respond in kind by fostering similar interconnections” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 834). Ulmer (2017) argues that if we decenter humans as the only life form capable of knowing, “then a wealth of research possibilities emerge” (p. 834). Employing arts in the process of knowledge production can help to make visible “threads of interconnectedness” (Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022, p. 39). Such an approach can keep research encounters “alive” as well as challenge the status quo by encouraging participants and audiences to see the world from different perspectives (Foster, 2016).

In collaboration with local artists, we designed a series of 16 workshops in four blocks; each block consisted of four workshops that were roughly aligned with the four seasons. This seasonal design, inspired by our involvement in the growing year at the farm, afforded an aesthetically pleasing structure to the project. In carrying out the work, however, we began to understand that the elements had a real part to play in the knowledge produced. The first of the workshop series, Creative Writing, took place during a balmy spring in the earthy-smelling warmth of a polytunnel, where we jostled for space with trays of sprouting seeds. We shared the design and delivery of sessions with a local published author who had a keen interest in the Lancashire landscape and growing food.

We played a series of surrealist games in Creative Writing as a way of encouraging collaboration and overcoming some of the anxieties surrounding the writing process that participants expressed. I opened this session with a short talk about surrealism and showed the group images produced by some of the aforementioned surrealist women artists. Play is one of surrealism’s key identifying factors, in particular playing collective games (Cox, 2014). These “exercises of the imagination” offered surrealists a way of freeing “words and images from the constraints of rational and discursive order, substituting chance and indeterminacy for premeditation and deliberation” (Gooding, 1991, p. 10). The ultimate aim was “collectively achieved revelation” (Gooding, 1991, p. 11).

We began with the most well-known game, the exquisite corpse (cadavre exquis). The name comes from a line of poetry created through the technique: The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine. Each player was instructed to write a word on a piece of paper, fold it over to keep it hidden, and pass it onto the person next to them who added the next word, and so on. We used the following sentence structure: adjective; noun; verb; adjective; noun. Some of the results of this can be seen in the subheadings below. A question-and-answer game followed. Each member of the group posed a question on a piece of paper before folding the paper and passing it on to their neighbor who—without seeing the question—provided an answer.

For the second block of workshops, held during the very hot summer, a series of Mindful Movement workshops were led by one of the farm’s volunteers, a dancer and movement therapist. She developed a range of loosely structured exercises (or what might perhaps be better described as games or challenges) that involved roaming a particular space, gathering of sensory experience, and an invitation to play in different ways with the found environment. This was shaped by the intense heat and having to regularly seek shelter under a hastily constructed canvas canopy.

The third workshop series took place in early autumn, with the farm’s manager—formerly a professional photographer—leading four photography workshops. These saw participants taking shelter in the barn to protect their cameras from the rain. As autumn began to turn to winter, we completed the project with our final series of Natural Sculpture workshops, led by artists from the renowned outdoor arts company, Walk the Plank, who had been involved in a previous community performance at the farm and were drawn back to the rural Lancashire setting. These had also begun with a playful invitation. Participants were asked to choose a pumpkin from the freshly harvested pile in the barn. This would transport them to their ideal place on the farm (reminiscent of the transformed pumpkin that takes Cinderella to the ball). Here they were to create sculptures or installations that would capture some aspect of the land and tell a story to their viewers. These were stories that would be told to an audience of the general public during the festival of Samhain that honors death and rebirth.

Participants included current volunteers at the farm and a number of local people who happened across the project through information posted on social media. We were also joined by university students on occasion. People came from a variety of backgrounds and ranged in age from late teens to mid-80s. There was an almost equal mix of men and women. Some participants just took part in the genre of workshop that most interested them; others tried out more than one, and a couple of participants took part in all four. Numbers at the groups fluctuated. Attendance was highest at the natural sculpture workshops where we regularly had more than 20 people turn up. Mindful Movement’s attendance was impacted by the summer holidays and some weeks had around 20 participants, whereas others just a handful. Photography and Creative Writing each had a core group of around eight attendees.

Creative Writing, Photography, and Natural Sculpture produced data in the form of poems, images, and objects/installations. We supplemented these with informal, audio-recorded conversations with participants, which took place both during and after the workshops. Mindful Movement did not produce any tangible outputs, so we relied more heavily on these conversations as a way of attempting to capture insights and understandings. This was far from ideal, given that the bodily experience of this work was difficult—if impossible—to translate into spoken language. However, this tension in itself was an interesting one. Ulmer (2017) suggests that representation is perhaps something “that might be troubled in degrees” and “less-representational” research might prove to be an intermediate goal (p. 839). The importance of posthumanism, she points out “may not be in knowing, but in exploring how we are entangled with other organisms around us” (Ulmer, 2017, p. 839). The following sections begin to explore these entanglements through the stories that emerged during the project, and do so with a surrealist spirit.

Conclusion

This chance pairing, generated through the question-and-answer game played in a Creative Writing workshop, encapsulates the fear generated by the climate crisis—predictions of a time when the sun fails to rise—as well as a possible solution. Perhaps we might avoid—or at least not dwell on—a catastrophic end, through posthuman creativity and engaging the imagination to conjure up more positive worlds. If, as Rebecca Solnit (2014) believes, “the destruction of the earth is due in part. . . to a failure of the imagination or to its eclipse by systems of accounting that can’t count what matters,” then this is essential, and never timelier, given mounting ecological crises.

Surrealism offers an engaging way to develop these faculties and to see beyond hegemonic norms, including that prevailing notion that the natural world and the human world are somehow separate. Human and more-than-human matter(s) might be viewed as devoid of hierarchical scale, on “one plane of being” (Hultman & Lenz Taguchi, 2010, p. 526, cited in Sinquefield-Kangas et al., 2022, p. 41). Surrealism requires a sense of humor, a readiness to accept paradox, luck and chance, and to experience the marvelous.

At the time of writing, the community farm continues to flourish. On my most recent visit, bunches of straw flowers hung from the ceiling in the barn, drying in readiness for the upcoming wreath-making sessions. There are also spoon-carving workshops on offer. These crafts are a legacy of our research project, and both involve the willow; it forms the structure of the wreaths and is readily whittled into utensils. Despite being regularly harvested, it is growing prolifically and has taken over even more of the farm. Through the creative activities, it continues to draw people to the site where they are able to experience its magic.

A willingness “to live in the realm of mythology, metaphor, and mystery” is a radical move (Rankin, 2015, p. 78), and it is the arts that might enable the understanding that everything is connected, from people to animals, plants, water, the oceans, and the mountains. Whereas this is nothing unusual in Indigenous cultures, in the Western world we have “come to believe that we are connected to nothing” (Rankin, 2015, p. 78). Regaining this insight offers much-needed hope.