Tilly Glascodine: 25 - 30 November, 2023
Tilly is an artist living and working in Naarm. Her practice revolves around creative approaches to community learning, imagination, and experimentation through librarianship, research, workshops, publishing, and art making. During her BREW residency, Tilly made a short poetic video essay on the western view of nature, drawing on ecofeminists and environmental philosophers such as Val Plumwood.
Tilly Glascodine
When I went to visit Plumwood Mountain, almost a year ago now, Israel had just escalated attacks on Gaza after October 7th. It feels almost unbelievable to think that this heightened violence (of course the colonial violence of Israel is much older than 2023) is still going, but each day we see more death, destruction, loss, grief, horror, and Australia’s inaction against Israel’s onslaught.
I have been a fan of Val Plumwood since my first year of Gender Studies when I was introduced to her work in an Environmental Philosophy class. I liked Val’s writing because it was the first time I had read a philosophy that so clearly drew the links of logic between differing forms of oppression, especially the philosophical links between patriarchy, colonialism, and environmental destruction. Despite being placed within environmental philosophy, her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature is a framework for understanding all beings that are made nature and therefore less or “backgrounded.” As Val writes, nature is what is made valuable only in terms of use-value to those that fit within the sphere of human, making nature a cultural category that includes many oppressed categories of humans- that is those humans who are so often denied humanity.
Film still (Tilly Glascodine, 2024)
Film still (Tilly Glascodine, 2024)
For me Val’s philosophy sits closely alongside Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necropolitics, that is who can kill and who can be killed. As Mbembe writes, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.” Val’s philosophy in the Mastery of Nature explores the justification of this right to kill. Nature for Val, is that which, within Western logic (a logic of colonisation), has no inherent right to life. Nature is what can be made use of and if it is useful to destroy it, so be it.
In regards to Palestinians being murdered by Israeli forces, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” In the colonial logic of Israel, Palestinians are made animal and therefore killable. Palestinians are delegated in this way to the sphere of nature, and therefore without an inherent right to life, forming the basis of Israeli sovereignty over Gaza.
It can be difficult when it feels like we are faced with mounting disasters; ongoing environmental collapsetracking closely alongside ongoing colonisation, genocide, and deep-seated inequality. This is why I think Val’s philosophy is so important as it helps us to see the ways these are not individual battles but are instead inherently linked. We need to address the philosophies and logics that Val outlines which allow some beings to be made killable. This includes the forests, the ecosystems, Palestinians, the many women murdered this year in Australia, and the many people who die directly and indirectly because of Australian neoliberalism and colonialism, among so many others equated with the sphere of nature.
Film still (Tilly Glascodine, 2024)
Film still (Tilly Glascodine, 2024)
Surprisingly there is no biography of Val and her life (apart from a joint biography of Val and her ex-husband Richard Sylvan by Donimic Hyde), despite being a seminal philosopher in the development of ecofeminism internationally, and her philosophies being so relevant today.
Val’s philosophy has given me so much in helping make sense of the world and all its violence and I wanted to go to Plumwood Mountain to understand her better and how she came to the theories she wrote and were so meaningful to me. I went to explore her library and to film her house and the mountain, two things I knew had been a huge inspiration to her work. Being at Plumwood mountain gave me a sense of Val’s life, but I think the thing I learnt most was the importance of her legacy and the work that is being done by Ruby and Clancy (the caretakers of Val’s property) and the Plumwood collective to make sure her work and philosophy is not forgotten. My residency project, which I am still slowly working on, is a small gesture towards a film biography of Val’s life on Plumwood mountain, which I hope can go towards this work of celebrating and archiving her philosophical contributions as well as her life and the way it was so influential to her theory.
I have shared here some stills from my filming on the mountain. It was strange to be somewhere so beautiful and serene while reading the news each day of the violent attacks on Gaza, but it reminds me that what is here is what is there, there is no disconnecting the peace of the mountain with the turmoil of Palestine, in the same way there is no disconnecting human from nature. These are things Val has taught me.
Read more about Tilly’s work here: https://tillyglascodine.com/
Film still (Tilly Glascodine, 2024)
Film still (Tilly Glascodine, 2024)