I Want to Live Together: I Want to Hear You Even as Extinction Tears You Away

Abstract

This project is an attempt to grapple with how to live in a time of increasing extinction and loss. How should we go on? Knowing everything we know about how implicated we are in the unraveling of lives?

The project envisions a social infrastructure to catalyze both spatial and intrapersonal change, grounded where I live, in a peri-urban neighborhood of Los Angeles. The Garapito Creek Community School is an experimental design-build lab, galvanizing community members as agents of change through radical multispecies politics and interventions that address the needs of the entire community, human and non-human. It is the center of gravity for existential reckoning.

The project, and thus the politics of the school, insist that a design practice in the face of these existential threats must be personal, must be embodied, must honor grief, and must come into being through the rebuilding of deep relationships with others. These others are the plants, animals, people, and fungi who we must hear if we are going to live, together.