Ensemble Practices

In this chapter an intellectual position is modified by a sense of what, in practice, individuals can manage to do in a ‘global’ culture of possessive individualism. The chapter as a whole builds on use of the term ‘mycelial’ to describe how the work of Christine Baeumler incorporates the roles and skills of citizen, neighbour, artist, university teacher, student of ecology, researcher, curator, and mentor. Art is a parasite that feeds upon the corpus of culture. Its insularity is just a conceit. In 1980 Simon Read and his partner left London to live on barge on the Suffolk Coast, where he began modifying his successful cosmopolitan aesthetic to think about health and management of increasing unstable coastal and estuarine systems. Simon Read and Luci Gorell Barnes continue to refer to themselves as ‘artists’. The more generally such relationality is acknowledged the better chance people have of creating the creative commons on which any kind of future for species will depend.