abstract
Degrowing poetics is an unmaking of dominant ideas about making. A film that disappears, like a bonfire, once we have seen it. Words that degrow into the compost in our farmstead, becoming humus for our chokeberries.
Degrowing Poetics raises questions for thinking with ecology and the poetics of analogue imaging. As a doctoral project, my work been shaped by the slow erosion of ideas, research questions, and artworks on a journey of impermanence. Through a method of mo(u)lding, I combine creative writing, photochemical experimental film, and crafting a “living” theory. The connecting tissue is a turn towards the ecological. By collaborating with the field of microbiology, I developed a worlding-view that I call “poeisis from the milieu of practice”—a fertile encounter between philosophy, art, biology, and indigenous research.
Degrowing poetics is an organically occurring, cyclical process of balancing and weathering. It resulted in various artworks, tools, a glossary, a protocol of care, and a proposition for a model of doing research. In the contemporary context of film art and photography, I use a “spiral model” to critically investigates assumptions around what growth—and the accumulation of images, things, worlds, beliefs, anxieties—entails. I focus on forms of poiesisthat include more than ideas in human minds or language—forms that aspire to incorporate multiple relations in the world.
Throughout the artist’s book Degrowing Poetics — [_] {}(o), I argue that contemporary analogue film practice affords critical complexity for ideas to emerge from its sites and landscapes. These places and thoughts can in turn affect larger ethical and practical questions of artists doing research, and the assumptions that underpin such production.
All images (c) of the author, his collaborators, and Vilnius Academy of the Arts, as detailed in the book Degrowing Poetics.
M. Ambrózy and R. Hazekamp, 17 October, 17:32 , 2025, digitalphotograph, Vilnius.