Inheritance 2.0
Presented during The Shape of a Practice, Inheritance 2.0 is a guided meditation that invites us to journey deep into the earth and back in time. Featuring excerpts from interviews with coal miners and paleobotanists, who encountered the remnants of a fossilized forest beneath the rolling hills of Southern Illinois, the audio is accompanied by a last will and testament written from the perspective of the ancient forest.
How do we imagine our collective inheritance? We have inherited a life-sustaining richness that has been long shared by a panoply of living beings, each with its own deep time: fossil fuel. Yet this too is our inheritance: climate chaos, acidifying oceans, epic biodiversity loss, and the accumulation of toxins in air, water, and soil resulting from the extraction of coal. Drawing upon interviews with coal miners and paleobotanists, Inheritance 2.0 is an archive of the earth’s past that lies in trust for the present. A guided meditation connects the sensations of our bodies to the temporal topologies beneath our feet, journeying deep into the earth and back in time to the Carboniferous period, when the coal seam was an ancient forest.
by Kayla Anderson, Sara Black, Amber Ginsburg, Sarah Lewison and Claire Pentecost
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