VISIONARY INSTITUTE
Nested Narrative, Storytelling for the flourishing now and the future.
I consider the unfolding of my ART practice as a non-linear narrative, with stories within stories that communicate my encounters with the magic and complexity of the world in a manner that doesn’t over-simplify or flatten but it allows ambiguity and mystery. Donna Haraway says that ‘Understanding the world is about living inside stories. There is no place to be in the world outside of stories.’ The fundamental premise of the Voynichese Labyrinthine Speculations is grounded in recognition that we are earthbound critters of the land entangled with the multispecies wonder living and dying inside such story.
Stories are necessary for understanding and communicating the importance of our times and its predicaments. The stores this ART practice (with its idiosyncratic language) invokes are intended to stimulate action and awaken moral imagination by evoking a sense of the connectivity and entanglement of our lives with the lives of non-human others; ‘Drawing us into deeper understandings of responsibilities, reparative possibilities, and alternative futures.’ And as researchers into the Anthropocene it's about ‘developing new languages for our changing world, stepping into the unknown; making risky attachments; and joining and supporting concerned others.’
I make use of a form of narrative known as ‘nested’ or ‘labyrinthine’ as used by authors such as Bruno Schultz, Jan Potocki and Borges. These terms describe a type of story in which one event leads to numerous branching paths that also multiply into many other possibilities or where one object may contain the essence of and is in relation to, all other objects. The Voynich Method is the way in which I navigate through these labyrinthine narratives. I do not limit this approach to working with the Voynich Manuscript, I search for this sense of ungraspable complexity in my land practice.