Paper Mourning
A collective papermaking and reflection practice that invites participants to slow down and collectively re-story the rhythms, violences, and narratives of extractivism. Participants reflect on how extractive systems normalize acceleration, productivity, and the constant disappearance of life.
Tools
The slow and embodied process of papermaking is a way of mourning extractive violence while cultivating attentiveness, care, and relational presence with the Territory. This activity precedes Letters for Fertilizing Otherwise Futures.
Extractivism depends on particular ways of organizing time. Extractive projects move through rhythms of speed, efficiency, productivity, and endless growth. Through those temporalities, forests formed over centuries are cleared within months. Rivers are contaminated in minutes — all while community consultation and permits are “approved” rapidly. These rhythms often leave little time to recognize the cumulative harm and to collectively process grief, loss, exhaustion, or ecological devastation.
Paper Mourning is an activity that serves as a way of interrupting these extractive temporalities through slowness, repetition, and embodied making. The activity invites participants to engage grief and reflection through the tactile process of making paper together.
The practice begins with participants researching extractive projects impacting their Territory and examining how governments, corporations, and media frame these projects through narratives of development, progress, opportunity, or inevitability. It continues by transforming these case studies into new paper. In this activity we respond through a combination of critique and “sensefullness” (Machado de Oliveira, 2021).
The act of tearing, soaking, blending, and reshaping paper becomes a transcorporeal practice of mourning: a way of slowing down and staying with loss rather than quickly absorbing devastation into the next cycle of productivity. The focus of the activity is not the final product of the paper itself, but the process of making it slowly and collectively.