Ecological Gyre Theory
Abyss Lessons: Vortextual Thinking amidst the Ecological Turn,  2020

Abyss Lessons was a five part curriculum, exploring, through geologic and hydrologic states, our human and other-than-human entanglements through depth as a measure of being. Within this curriculum, we apprehend the ‘empty’ space that characterises the abyss, in the hope that it may illuminate a way through our world which is increasingly defined by absence. Over five sessions, we will engage select abyssal sites as vessels in this program, diving into explorations of ascension and descension, the entanglements of natural and industrial worlds, spaces between extractivism and ecology. Further, we recognise the unseating of human primacy through ecological change and collapse, and seek to consider the world without humans; or, how to mark and monumentalise the other-than-human through the conceptualisation of the ecomonument.

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Participants were encouraged to enter into these abyssal sites with us, as week by week we consider ways of embracing and entangling with volumetric and vortextual sites, through applications of flow and depth across theory, place and the personal. We will move between reflections on environmental pasts, presents and futures, the ethics of the national park, but also psycho-ecological consequences in the contemporary period. Supported by a comprehensive reading list and workshop tasks toward cross-disciplinary and collective outcomes, we invite those interested to traverse these sites with us; to step into the depths and be beholden to the abyss.

These lessons took place over Zoom, with a shared Google Drive for collaboration and resource sharing.