Game designed for a workshop by the collective (D)raft in the Language-Based Artistic Research Special Interest Group’s ‘Gathering II’, Vienna.

Oddkin: a compost writing game

The concept of kinship also involves considering the multispecies dimensions of our writing: our kinning means thinking with the human and more-than-human, with the organic and the inorganic, with the living and dead. It involves, as Donna Haraway says, ‘making oddkin’: that means making ‘unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles’. In this workshop, (D)raft invite participants to explore (odd)kinship through Haraway’s notion of the ‘compost pile’. Enacting the tender, mushy connections between our practices, participants will become ‘compostists’, working collaboratively to forge a new grammar for our wor(l)ds and to explore notions of practice that are ‘always situated, someplace and not nonplace, entangled and worldly’. References: Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 60.

(D)raft members at the time:

• Hannah van Hove (VUB)

• Delphine Grass (Lancaster)

• Sarah Jackson (Northumbria)

• Helena Hunter (Nottingham Trent)

• Maria Gil Ulldemolins (UHasselt)