Engaging with Waste, Weeds and Wastelands with Jenn MacLatchy

Shared Ground

At the Deanery Project this spring, I met with Dr. Jenn MacLatchy (she/they), who is an artist, a kayak instructor, and researcher of settler descent living in Mi’kma’ki. Her doctoral research was focused on using arts-based methods to engage with waste, weeds, and wastelands to form a settler method for decolonizing relationship with land and tending to liveable post-Anthropocene futures.

In this episode, you’ll hear about this fascinating doctoral research and her art practice, which is process-based and focused on marine plastics, waste paper, and invasive plants, and different ways of weaving these materials together to explore relationships in the inextricably interconnected living world. We hear her perspective of seeing garbage as artifacts that can help us understand our culture, and about the problem –and the irony– of plastics. She shares the view that humans aren’t inherently bad for the environment, and offers an interesting twist on what it can mean to be less materialistic. We also talk about some lesser discussed aspects of Japanese knotweed (...and my secret love of the plant.)

EPISODE RESOURCES:

• The Deanery Project
• The website of Marlene Creates, an artist in Newfoundland
• A website about the Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes area and protection

Books referenced by Jenn:

• Flotsametrics and the floating world: How one man’s obsession with runaway sneakers and rubber ducks revolutionized ocean science. C. Ebbesmeyer & E. Scigliano (2009)
• Pollution is Colonialism. , M. Liboiron (2021)
• Waste. B. Thill (2015)
• Braiding Sweetgrass. Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015)
• Living Treaties: Narrating Mi'kmaw Treaty Relations. Marie Battiste (2016)
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (2017)
• Staying with the Trouble. Donna J. Haraway (2016)

Some website information about the Peace and Friendship Treaties from:

• Canadian Encyclopedia
• The Government of Canada
• L’nuey