Abstract In January 2010 I deployed an ethico-aesthetic technique to address urgent issues in the area where I live. This began within Houghton Bay, a suburb of Wellington, New Zealand and later spilled over to two other suburbs. I came to call the whole area of the project, the “Valley of the Wild”.
This technique is similar to Felix Guattari's notion of "ecosophy" that operates across the three registers of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity. Within the Valley of the Wild, processual ethico-aesthetic techniques and modes of expression demand a rethinking of relations between humans and the environment, without preference to either. Instead, they are thought and enacted ecologically, or what Guattari terms "ecosophically".
This research project and process began to be one that considered how it might be possible to collectively generate or create a community of care or ethics for the three registers. In other eco-art projects, the question of stewardship is present. But I suggest, through this process-based art research, that what is needed is durational stewardship. Durational stewardship refers to ecologies of care that operate over long time scales and that fully implement the worlding experience of ecosophy. A durational stewardship also challenges the notion of the relations between artists and community as it may require artists to situate themselves within the project indefinitely, demanding a reformation of subjectivity that operates across the three registers.
This project addresses processes that occur in the everyday but that can become resingularised: listening, noticing and waiting.
The techniques, processes, conditions and events will continue to become. It is from such becoming that more sustained evental conditions emerge that provide a sense of collectivity across the community, our suburb and our subjectivations. Via such evental conditions, systems of durational stewardship become possible.