DAMN # 80

Issue 80 celebrates those who dare to do away with a prescribed way of being – to those who embrace the sort of thinking that avoids only a functional, sensible, or efficient world in favour of something more organic.

Organic typically means relating to living matter and in farming more specifically means production without the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. We rest on this, looking at food, (blockchain) farming and fishing, but take the term further, to the moment before contemporary sensibilities are imposed. To shapes, materials and ideas that fight for a sort fo freedom from the constraints that lead to so much predictability.

To DAMN° organic is about an approach, a yearning to break free from the constructed way, and the associated limitations imposed on us by an industrialised and capitalistic system. We hear from French Anthropologist and DAMN° regular, Arnaud Gaillard on how this take on organic can influence thinking and lives.

We sit down with Samuel Tomatis who works with algae as a material and visit the last windmill in Holland that still produces paper. Their is also a visit to see the work of Diana Scherer. We learn how public space in a post-Covid era operates in India and look into how the pebble has influenced some of the most influential contemporary architects from Snøhetta to Aedas and MAD.

We look at what organic time capsules might look like, question the politics of the organic food movement, and delve into the latest thinking on left-right brain balance which might not be quite what was always believed.

There is an interview with Cooking Sections about their long-term project Salmon: a red herring which explores the relationship between how we eat, the climate emergency, and how salmon farmers use synthetic pigments in salmon to make the pink colour — an industrial and chemical process that has a catastrophic impact on ecosystems beyond one singular fish.

There is also room devoted to experimental film maker Jodie Mack, the attention grabbing, iconoclastic projects of Danish conceptual artist Jens Haaning, sense designer Anicka Yi, and Asia Leofreddi’s work with the body, as well as Turkish artist Emre Huner who releases narratives from their more predictable and linear understandings.

It’s a far-reaching issue but what holds it together is the idea that all the man-made, top down strictures imposed, legalised and policed to keep things “normal” might also be restricting creativity and minimising the free and experimental long-term thinking we need to tap into for our mutual survival.