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View all of Maythe's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
The Practice of Not Knowing
This is a comic that explores the affective experience of sharing a built environment and material cultures, making and re-making more-than-human kinship, and dealing with anticipatory grief with a senior and reactive dog. It touches on the core themes of uncertainty and unknowability—and by extension, speculative imagination—inherent in multispecies entanglements, tying it inextricably to the preemptive grief that arises from living with a senior, and increasingly tired, dog who no longer has the same energy he once did, especially when faced with a motorcycle. It engages with the various emotional valences of everyday life shared with a nonhuman companion. The comic has two pages and 11 panels. It is drawn digitally on a white background with black 6B pencil brush on a tablet. Panel 1: I don’t know where Frank, my nine-year-old collie, has been for the first two years of his life. (Drawing of a young border collie puppy) (read more...)
Drawing More-than-Human Kinship
In my work as an anthropological ethnographer and illustrator, I have been working to connect seemingly disparate disciplines together—at times, even as a messy and rough bricolage. Thinking broadly about kinship—both intra- and inter-species—as a fundamental and foundational practice toward a mutually thriving future, I experiment with different formats and genres to reimagine what it means to produce ethnographic work. This reimagined work is not only informative but also beautiful, like the kinship I experience with my dog, Frank, who is depicted in the illustrations below. My investment in beauty is also an intentional form of resistance against neoliberal capitalist systems that prioritise profit, results, and efficiency over beauty, process, and patience. It matters that the illustrations in this series are digital. Using a software called Procreate on the 11” iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil, I actualise my imaginations on the screen. That is, this specific combination of technologies (read more...)
The Ugliness of Multispecies Intersubjectivity: Pandemic Racism and the Love of Animals in the U.K.
Content and Trigger Warning: This post contains profanity and strong references to violence against Black Lives Matter protesters, but more specifically, protesters who are Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. In 2020, we saw the collision of two simultaneous crises. First, the COVID-19 pandemic forced social, political, economic, and cultural changes in our lives. Adapting to this crisis hasn’t been an easy task, especially for individuals, communities, and societies that were already marginalized. (more…) (read more...)