The Island of Wasted Land/Time

Islands

 

Yasamin Ghalehnoie

I came to think of wastelands via the island. The island has salty rocks and edible red soil, sedimentary though not arable. The soil on the island has resisted monoculture cultivation, real estate, infrastructural programming, and various forms of “sustainable development”. The land that cannot be squeezed any more is taken as wasted. OK! I think of futures where the island dissolves into bodies of water~~~~~~

Soil has agency in regard to the temporalities it hosts or operates within. It resists the productivist function of land and it remembers and bears time in its geologic sedimentation. Friction to extraction. What it proposes is that which needs another sensibility, towards wasted land, wasted time, and the pace of our breathing breathing breathing and resting.
I roam around here.

What is a wasteland?
the land that rests?
does the invisible work of repairing and caring.
So is it the difference between production and reproduction that marks land as wasted?
Is it that things are wasted if no form of value could be extracted from them?
Wastelands rest over the rigidity of the productivist value systems.
Against the three million years of volcanic eruptions.

My body is wasted?
I am lazy. I am resting.
All the ways
an intentional strike to rest.

Wastelands are connected to my skin, body, and autoimmunity. Have my skin cells been wasted? I think of time, speed, and overwhelmed systems that start to self- attack. Is my body a wasteland? A land that unless under immense endurance and production is wasted of its potential and its future realizations; eruptions of fluids, saliva, mucus.
I find something reassuring in being able to fail.