Smile Confident

Whether it’s the job we work for the majority of our waking hours each week, the unpaid labor we are tasked with doing to meet the needs of daily living, or the dedication we put toward our passion projects, no one is a stranger to work. It is such an important part of our existence, we often think of our days as time spent sleeping, eating, participating in leisure, and working. An assessment of the ways that people spend their time across the world shows that work – paid labor – undeniably makes up a significant portion of the human experience. And the percentage would be even larger if unpaid and therefore often invisibilized care and maintenance activities of daily living were also recognized as work. In a clever capitalist catch-22, we spend so much of our time and energy working, that we never really get the chance to question our understanding of work.

Creativity, in this case, was therefore not about art for art’s sake, but for survival. It was about surviving what was happening, preserving one’s identity at a time when everything was being erased, resisting the structures and building new worlds within the crevices of the old one. It was about healing and tending to the wounds of the trauma that came with being dehumanized, uprooted, devalued.

Recognizing our kinship with the life that surrounds us is the first step. Moving into relationship with those elements is the next. As humans, we have an active responsibility to consider our more-than-human kin just as much as we would all the human kin on our family trees. In fact, considering those humans and their futures requires that we actively work to support the living world that they all exist within and depend on. Human kinship is only one nested network in a greater web of interconnectedness with the more-than-human kin that surrounds us. This understanding releases us from the myth of separability modernity relies on to continue its tirade of extraction and exploitation of the living world, and asks us to reassess or re-image our human roles as conquerors, stewards and/or citizens using the lens of kinship.