Daniel Durnin (RCA) - 2024-25 Students
Daniel.durnin@network.rca.ac.uk

A Practise led investigation into the structures and systems of living through the prism of the back to the land, and survivalist movements within an ecological framework.

With the current global environmental crisis unfolding before our eyes, our disconnection from nature has never been more prevalent. (Kesebir, 2017) This removal from nature has exacerbated a sense of disconnection of where our basic needs originate. If our understanding of basic natural systems of living is not complete, how do we re-engage with and work towards new models of co-existence for the human and more than human? (Morton, 2017) How can spaces be opened for this ancestral and tacit knowledge to be accessed and implemented within a wider community context? Using the production and distribution of knowledge grounded in the ‘made’ canon of objects of utility, how can we share and distribute this knowledge, craft, or technology? (Dormer 1997) The research further examines how these functional objects can transform into powerful tools and create currency in our global development.
This research project seeks to produce effective alternatives in a speculative reorientation of a global policy framework that is rooted in production, work and localism instead of finance, consumerism and globalism. As part of this process I aim to manifest new paradigms of production and systems to create discourse across current bodies of labour, assets and agency.

By developing an artistic or poetic intervention of emergent future human and non-human communities and spaces, it is hoped this research will contribute to individual self-actualisation and offer models of legitimate frameworks in which to move towards.

The practical work transcends the communication, distribution and creation of radical utilitarian objects and their systems, ‘we have to make the future ourselves’ (Ingold:2013). These utilitarian objects and artefacts can inform the proposed systems and rituals in which the artefacts permeability can be explored, documented, and create new narratives. By addressing the socio-cultural artefact within community, the practice will produce novel civic frameworks that can redefine, inform, and inquire the systems of living and places we inhabit creating a concert of utilitarian objects from multiple paradigms. Through these processes of making and re-making the objects, systems, and exchange of knowledge it will contribute to and inform to the output of the project.

Primary supervisor: Dr Jesse Ash