Louisa Chase’s Libations involved making a contract with the land and multi-species inhabitants to pour water as an offering every day for 30-days.

Louisa’s work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the 2024 Marŝarto Awards. Below, she talks about her work.

Art is as old as human culture. For most of the time, art was part of an exchange between humans and the cosmic order. Art was meant as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life. 

Andreas Weber

Background 

The word ‘libation’ comes from Latin libatio/libare – “to take a little from anything, to pour out as an offering”.  The earliest known use of the word in English is in 1382 in the Bible (Wycliffite, early version).  It seems that across cultures the sites where libations were poured  (variously altars, chasms, ground, sacrificial victims, bowls), the choice of liquid to be poured (water, milk, honey, wine, oil, blood), and the reasons for pouring (sacrifices, banquets, oath-taking, departures to war, visits to tombs) vary hugely.  What is consistent across cultures is the primary importance of the act of pouring.  

Throughout the world, libation rituals are often carried out as an offering to a deity or spirit, or in memory of the dead. Nigerian philosopher and post-activist Bayo Akomolafe expands on this in speaking about the practices of the Yoruba people

…things won’t always go our way, and that’s not such a bad thing. In fact, it is why we Africans offer libations. Not just to remember the joys of ancestrally gained stability, but to honour the gift of crisis, and – in the selfsame moment when the drink hits the earth and whips up dust, as if to unsettle the very grounds we stand on – to prophesy at the feet of the yet-to-come unthought and unimagined. We pray to hasten demise in order that we might live. A prayer of contradictions.

In the face of multiple contemporary crises, what rituals or actions are needed now?  What re-connective ways of belonging with our multispecies kin?  And living, as I do, in the area of England that most strongly and fiercely resisted the enclosures and the drainage of the land, and held onto its indigenous way of life until relatively recently, how can this history, this land-memory, this resistance, inspire work that moves away from patterns of colonisation?

Bayo Akomolafe says that…

…decolonisation is a queering of things, of relationships, of assumptions. A stunning ‘what if’ that pulses in the veins of our necropolis. It is an ethical call flowing with the currents of things, inviting us to listen to the murmurs of the supposedly ‘dead’ and ‘instrumental’ world around us. It is the rift in the spaces of power suggesting that there are many other ways to become-with the world that disturb the hegemony of humans and human interests. And this brings me back to the point I began with: don’t come out of the box; decorate its walls. Touch the box. Embroider its corners. Pour libations on its floors. Press your ears against its textured surfaces. In your awkward alliance, you will learn that enchantment is not in short supply, even in the places that feel most bereft of it. And you yourself will not be left intact.

So with his words in mind I wanted to walk this flat Lincolnshire land which, when I was growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s was utterly devoid of wildlife due to the widespread use of  DDT (which was finally banned in the mid 80’s).  Land which has been drained, and turned into vast fields for agribusiness, land which relies on huge infrastructure for keeping it dry enough in winter and wet enough in summer. Land which in many ways has become bereft, even as it produces vast acreage of crops for biogas plants and food. Land which to many is bereft of the enchantment more easily found in Britain’s rolling hills, moors, fells, craggy coastlines and woodlands.  I wanted to listen, pour libations, press my ears (and hands and feet) against its textured surfaces, and develop an “awkward alliance”.

Since moving to the village of Redbourne in North Lincolnshire, England in September 2023, I have been exploring a set of folktales collected from oral tradition in this very village between 1887 and 1889 by Marie Clothilde Balfour, some of which were recorded in Folk-Lore magazine in June 1891 as “Legend of the Cars” – Cars (also spelt Carrs) being the name for the flat marshlands of North Lincolnshire. 

One of these stories, ‘Tiddy Mun’ (Little Man) tells of a three-foot-tall water spirit in the form of a hunched old man. He was a guardian of the marshes in this river valley before they were drained, and with the right rituals in place would protect the houses from flooding and take care of the wellbeing of people and animals. The story tells of the changes brought about by the drainage of the land for large-scale agriculture, and the ills that befell the people, houses and cattle as a result. They believed that Tiddy Mun had been angered by the desecration of his sacred marshes, which used to provide abundantly for the people. Eventually the villagers remembered the ritual that used to placate and engage him, and they began once again pouring fresh water every new moon at twilight as an offering to appease Tiddy Mun and to ask him to bring back health for the people and land.  

Inspired by this story which contains the remnants of a libation ritual and tells of the loss of the indigenous marshland way of life, and following a five-day performance art workshop ‘Considering Time’ with Marilyn Arsem and her invitation to create a piece of work that centered on a durational action over 30 days, I wanted to experiment with placing my long-standing walking and outdoor ecosomatic movement practice within the framework of a 30-day action. The first part of this was to make….

a Contract with the Land and Multi-species Inhabitants

Each day for 30 consecutive days from Friday 12th July to Saturday 10th August 2024 I will pour ‘clean’ water as a libation – a ritual offering.
I will pour in response to a perceived invitation from the land and multi-species inhabitants.  I will do this as an improvisation – trying to listen each day for the right time to walk, and the right place to pour, rather than following clock time.  

I saw this 30-day process as a form of embodied inquiry – and a way of weaving together a number of areas of interest and research that I have been working with for some time.  Working with embodied inquiry, folk-lore, and ritual acts as a counter-balance to an over-reliance on intellectual knowledge-formation which privileges the logical-rational and the mind. 

Silvia Federici’s (2020) expansive conception of the body as going beyond the periphery of the skin finds “a magical continuity with the other living organisms that populate the earth: the bodies of humans and the not-humans, the trees, the rivers, the sea, the stars. This is the image that reunites what capitalism has divided, a body no longer constituted as a Leibnizian monad, without windows and doors, but moving instead in harmony with the cosmos, in a world where diversity is a wealth for all and a ground for commoning rather than a source of divisions and antagonisms.”

Walking art practice is a fitting methodology here.  As Ernesto Pujol states in his book ‘Walking Art Practice: Reflections on Socially Engaged Paths’, walking dwells “outside the notion of artistic talent and crafty skill.  Walking is not about the modernist myth of originality”.  It is a deeply democratic activity – not about the cult of the artist, but about something far less elitist. 
And Federici again: “fixation in space and time has been one of the most elementary and persistent techniques capitalism has used to take hold of the body. See the attacks throughout history on vagabonds, migrants, and hobos.  Mobility is a threat when not pursued for the sake of work, as it circulates knowledge, experiences, struggles”. This is the radical nature of walking art practice.

Approaches to Art

I am interested in multispecies witnesses/participants.   I wanted to experiment with creating work for and with other-than-human witnesses/participants, which also had relevance for secondary human audiences.  In a conversation titled ‘The Invisible Work’ between author, academic and environmental activist Peter Reason and biologist, philosopher and nature writer Andreas Weber, Weber states that… 

It’s a long-standing intuition of mine that this work , even if it is completely invisible, even if it is absolutely in private, has a profound impact, only that its impact is happening on the planes which aren’t seen.

Both Reason and Weber are engaged in co-operative inquiry, which Reason also refers to as ‘living cosmos panpsychic enquiry,’ with rivers. Reason writes about this inquiry in his Substack “Learning How Land Speaks”. 

This leads me to the question: how can I participate and make art respectfully in ecological communities where humans are integral to but not central to or in charge of life? 

ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), Takiwātanga or Kura Urupare?

There is another strand to this idea of ‘The Invisible Work’ which I am still in the process of weaving in – and it relates to my recent (late in life) diagnosis of autism and a lifelong difficulty with consistent engagement with other humans.

If I have a strong need for solitude, quiet and privacy, and a highly sensitive attunement to the more-than-human world, how can I work with this, rather than against it? How can I see it as a strength rather than pathologise it?  Does it in fact point to an arena of work which questions and disrupts the hierarchy of human and non-human, an arena which attempts to raise questions about who we make art for and with? Is it an invitation to take my strong lifelong engagement with the more-than-human world a step further and make the work deliberately for and with the more-than-human inhabitants of my locality? To see art as a gift to nourish the fecundity of life (to use Weber’s words again)?

In Aotearoa (New Zealand) where I lived for over 18 years, there are two terms for autism in Te Reo (the Māori language). Takiwātanga (in their own time and space) and Kura Urupare (gift/treasure in/around your head). There is some controversy over which is the preferred term, but when I read or say either of them out loud they vibrate and settle in my body as a strength. This is a totally different visceral experience from the vibration of the words autism spectrum disorder.

Expanding on the translation of Takiwātanga from my own experience I would add that in addition to being in my own time and space, when I allow this immersion in my true nature it opens up a vast expanse of other time/spaces within which I am enmeshed and connected, and communication happens in a completely different way, which is more conducive to fostering ecological reciprocity and place-based awareness.  

To further build on and deepen this ecological reciprocity and place-based awareness I drew on my understanding of Nita Little’s work, from my study and practice of movement. In her Attuning Score: Ensemble Web Building, she directs dancers to do the following: 

Now begin to move – not too fast, discipline yourself to move, not at the rate of your embodied attention, but at a rate that others with whom you are dancing can attend to the disturbance of your presence. Don’t move into this too quickly. Your assumptions will make you blind to the skill needed and involved in this practice. Allowing yourself to be disturbed is a major skill. Casting that availability is a further skill. Noticing and shaping one’s disturbance is to realize one’s spatial actions and to be present to how they influence the other dancer who is him/herself creating the space of being that you both co-habit. It is an action of co-habitation.

I took this part of the score and adapted it for my walking practice as follows:

Now begin to walk – not too fast, discipline yourself to move, not at the rate of your embodied attention, but at a rate that more-than-human others can attend to the disturbance of your presence.  Noticing and shaping one’s disturbance is to realize one’s spatial actions and to be present to how they influence more-than-human others who are themselves creating the space of being that you both co-habit.

As Little says, 

Like a highly sensitive seismograph, the variations we register are tiny, but their presence, when attended to, opens up our abilities. Learning to not just listen, but speak on these scales unfolds whole new territories of communication. Highly tuned to change, we can hold our own physicality lightly, ready to hear the disturbances our presence enacts upon the eco-systems of which we are a part.

Ontopoetics

I wanted to further explore the notion of ontopoetic response. Would the more-than-human world respond in any way to my actions?  I wanted to deepen my enquiry with “the world hidden within the world” (Freya Matthews).

In the story of Tiddy Mun, when the villagers have completed the ritual of pouring water into the dyke at new moon, at first all is silent. But then “tha pyewipe screech ‘ud come back, soft and tender an’ pleased” (pyewipe is the local name for the Lapwing, whose screech can still be heard in the area today). The villagers associated the call of the pyewipe with the voice of Tiddy Mun, the voice of the bird being one and the same as the voice of the guardian spirit of the marshes. In listening for the response of the bird, they are listening for what we now more grandly term ontopoetic response. Here’s an excerpt as recorded by Marie Balfour in local dialect in Folk-Lore magazine in 1891:

Walking with a foot in both worlds

I wanted to further the possibility, in the context of daily activities – computer screens, spreadsheets, funding applications etc. – of keeping one ear on the ‘hidden’ world. To hear and respond to the entanglements that could help me live in a more situated way with/in the complexity of multi-species relations in this particular place. 

Until a few years ago I had largely compartmentalised these ways of being – a time and a place for ‘being’ (retreats, spiritual practice, studio time) and a time and a place for ‘doing’.  Increasingly I have been trying to shed this duality.   

I wanted to practise remaining open to this ‘hidden’ world whilst still operating within what is variously known as consensus reality, the mundane world, etc. 

Transdisciplinarity

I wanted to deepen my understanding of transdisciplinarity, particularly in relation to articles 5 and 9-14 of the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, 1994, created and signed by B. Nicolescu, E. Morin and L. de Freitas. 

In particular I wanted to:

• examine the role of intuition, imagination, sensibility and the body in transmission of knowledge.  
• open further to an acceptance of the unknown, the unexpected and the unpredictable.
• remain open to going beyond exact disciplinary fields and enter into dialogue with science and spiritual experience. 
• maintain an open attitude to myth and religion (and folklore).
• work at not privileging one species over another, or one culture over another.  

Documentation for Secondary Human Audience

Given that the majority of the project was conducted privately and primarily with more-than-human and multispecies witnesses and participants, I wanted to find ways to document it for a secondary human audience.  

The series of video stills, photographs and photographic ‘drawings’ of water that is uploaded on the walk-listen-create website was taken with minimal equipment (old iphone SE) at or near the libation sites.  This series of images attempts to weave together the landscapes at a macro and micro level, and the ancient ancestral with the present.

As another way of documenting for a secondary human audience, and to expand the transdisciplinarity of my practice and begin to integrate science with art, folklore, intangible cultural heritage, and my own observations and embodied inquiry, I created a counter-map of the libation sites. 

Mapping is eternally linked to stories, and counter-mapping acknowledges the use of more than one knowledge base.

Laurence O’Dwyer

Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder, writes about counter-mapping in Emergence Magazine…

Maps are widely assumed to convey objective and universal knowledge of place. They are intended to orient us, to tell us how to get from here to there, to show us precisely where we are. But modern maps hold no memory of what the land was before. Few of us have thought to ask what truths a map may be concealing, or have paused to consider that maps do not tell us where we are from or who we are. Many of us do not know the stories of the land in the places where we live; we have not thought to look for the topography of a myth in the surrounding rivers and hills. Perhaps this is because we have forgotten how to listen to the land around us.

After the first couple of libations I found I had a curiosity about the waters I was working with and their health.  I wanted to know how they were, in the way that you would enquire about the health of a good friend.  So as well as sitting with the rivers, streams and springs, I have recorded the scientific data on water health at or very close to the libation sites (data gathered from the Watershed Investigations website). This online research was always done after the act of pouring and spending physical time with them. This part of the project has been incredibly time-consuming and is still underway, although just about finished!  Here is an example of one of the entries…

There Are No Conclusions, Just Emergence.

So, what emerged?

Time of day:  Dusk, definitely dusk!

I started out trying to listen for the time of day to walk and to pour the libation without any preconceived idea about ‘right’ time of day.  But I wasn’t surprised that quite early on the pattern of pouring at dusk emerged.  This was when I most regularly noticed the impulse arising  (except for a few occasions when I forgot throughout the day and therefore had no option but to go out at dusk! But even this ‘forgetting’ was probably pointing at the fact that dusk was the ‘right’ time).  Dusk, when the veil is thin and the liminal comes to the fore, and the ‘hidden’ world is more accessible. I generally had more multispecies witnesses/participants at dusk too – deer, hare, owl.

Ontopoetic response

My attachment to receiving some kind of communication from the other-than-human world was quite strong initially.  There were some very beautiful and connective moments; a flock of 10 geese (we haven’t seen any for about 9 months) calling loudly and flying directly overhead as I stepped out of the door at dusk, a peacock conversation with two human strangers one evening during my libation process, followed by peacock calls the following day, an otter who ran across the track right in front of me as I unpacked my rucksack to make some video by the river, the family of 7 ducklings who turned up in the garden and insisted on climbing all over my feet, the owl who silently landed on the post 3 metres away just before I extinguished the dying embers of the fire with a libation on Lughnasadh, and the owl who flew low over my head on the way back from a dusk libation. Owl calls were a frequent theme in fact, and I came to recognise them as the signal to pour.  

But on some days I felt to varying degrees that I had little connection or communication with my multispecies kin.  There is a grief that comes with that, especially one eerie evening when the large fields were utterly silent (a different kind of silence to the usual evening settling), lifeless and depleted.  Letting that grief be present was important.  The land is depleted here from decades of agribusiness. The waters are polluted.

I reflected on how easily ‘nature-based’ practices can themselves become extractive if the aim is to get some kind of response from the multispecies world or chase some kind of ‘enrichment’ experience, or even, perhaps, to make work such as this.  It’s an ongoing inquiry to find the balance, and to learn to trust that even when nothing appears to be happening and the work is invisible, there is perhaps still, as Andreas Weber says, ‘something happening on the invisible planes’.  

The weaving of art and life

After this project began, it wasn’t long before the research I have been doing all year on water and ancestral practices began to weave together.  Simultaneously with this  ‘coming together’ was a parallel process of disintegration.  I feel utterly different about my practice from when I first started, and this project has catalysed my thinking.  I am no longer sure that I have an ‘art practice’.  I just have life and an ‘ecological niche’ in which I am peculiarly situated according to  my nature and way of being.  This is the case whether or not I frame it as an art practice.  Rituals work on many planes, and each time I have engaged in durational ritual practices (including “Rite of the Six Moons” – a journey with New Zealand flower essences taken at dawn, mid-day and dusk every day for 6 months) things have changed significantly.  

Walking the self transparent

(after Nan Shepherd in “The Living Mountain”). 
It takes time to ‘walk the self transparent’ so that the illusory boundaries containing the ‘self’ fall away.  I know when it has happened because the multi-species world seems not to be alarmed by me… in this state I no longer startle animals and birds, and seem in some way to have become almost invisible (in this context invisibility may therefore be a positive state to be actively cultivated and aimed for, contrary to most current cultural narratives in the West).  When I allowed more time and space for the libation it happened on a few occasions during this project as I walked, listening out for the right time to pour, but I notice the sense of loss about not currently being able to live this way for large chunks of time. 

Brain strain

As I tried to attune throughout the day to the intuitive listening required for knowing when to walk and pour, whilst also carrying out my day to day work, I found it incredibly difficult to inhabit both these worlds at once.  The days when my deeper intuitive listening stayed ‘online’ were the days when I had almost no screen time and more time working outdoors. In the end I acknowledged that effort would not make it happen, and that the conditions for being more attuned to the intuitive realm for me are physical movement, working outdoors, and having a flexible schedule!

Self-discipline, and the shadow

I noticed my resistance on some days, and it’s hard to untangle whether this was because of something in my personal psychological make-up, or if it was simply that a libation was not required that day.  I remain open to one or both of these being true.  I reflected a lot on the shadow of self-discipline, which can become an inflexible tyrant.  I wondered about the ego, the need to stick with a task regardless, and whether constancy and regularity feed into the structures of modernity and capitalism.  I noticed my tendency to polarise, and the challenge of holding that any or all of these things can be in play at the same time, and can’t necessarily be untangled or eliminated, fixed, resolved.

Pouring at the periphery 

When I did get a strong signal to pour it was often not in what I thought to be the ‘obvious’ places.  With the possible exception of a small handful, none of the sites were what are typically labelled ‘sacred’ sites.  This seemed to be about the everyday sacred, the forgotten, the undervalued, the dismissed, the edges.  

The tyranny of the camera

Taking video or photographs of the act of pouring utterly changed it in ways that I did not feel were particularly helpful.  In the end I decided to only video/photograph the actual act of pouring a few times because of this.  On a few other occasions I took photographs afterwards, if at all.  I wondered if with time and practise it would become less of an intrusion.  

Water……. and fire

One of the synchronistic happenings during this project was finding out about a new book by Environmental Anthropologist Veronica Strang called “Water Beings: from Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis”.  One of the key themes in the book is that water and fire were once inseparable.  They were both represented and experienced as serpent or dragon beings, and in most cultures were considered to be aspects of the same energy, with water generally travelling downwards and fire travelling upwards.  Many of the nature-based spiritualities of the west have separated these elements, associating water with women, the emotional realm, fluidity etc., and fire with masculinity, solar energy, action etc.  Symbolically bringing these back together in my own understanding and dissolving the duality through pouring a water libation onto the fire embers at Lughnasadh felt both heretical and profoundly healing. 

I will end with this quote from Bayo Akomolafe:

The dilemmas of today have emerged from a context that learned to see the sacred as distant, useless and backward. In desacralizing the world, the post/modern centralizes mankind. This anthropocentricity has material consequences. In seeing ourselves as independent, essential, whole, removed, distant, complete, sovereign and in control, we neglect the world that grants us our bodies. We fail to decorate the porosity and ongoing transcorporeality (a term by philosopher, Stacy Alaimo) that means we actually live through manifold bodies. We shut off the ecological intelligences and senses that might reframe our problems in surprising new ways. We deaden ourselves to the miraculous, to the gift of the cosmos, to the ecstasy that interpenetrates all things.

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The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2024 will be announced in early 2025.