In “Oeuvres,” Vinciane Despret asks if animals can create works of art. She proposes that thinking about animal artists and their intentions–and about distributing intentionality–makes us “hesitate and slow down.” Impatient though we are we’ve had to slow down ourselves over the last few days. On Sunday we snuggled the worms into their new home in the new worm cafe.
We introduced some of the older worms from our first worm cafe, to welcome them to Fairfield and our back yard. We hope they get on and that the new artists-critters aren’t too put off by these cold wintry days. Hopefully the shreds keep them warm as they settle in and await the next chapter and their first morning coffee
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I love how Despret ends this chapter, questioning a tyrannical concept of “instinct” that would not recognise the worms as co-composers of this work. Despret enables us instead to “guard preciously what it makes us feel, what feels like a force in the face of which being must bend–like we sometimes do in the face of love…What instinct both affirms and masks is the call of the thing to be made. That some things are beyond us. The captivation known to some artists. That this must be made. Period.” (122)
Working with Worms 