Instructions for Accumulation Practice
by Nora Almeida
Be ambient like dust or love. Spread out your fingers and run them along every banister. Search the ground of the stormshed. Move slowly, gaze downward. Pick up discarded objects and sort them into piles: temporary, permanent, whole, and partial. Bend at the waist but keep your chest open. Whenever possible, use your back. Stand beneath the drain pipe. Join the dataset. Welcome. Be in the wind and find yourself caught against a fence. Dig a small root cellar or commandeer a corner. Hold your breath. Love all the cardboard and plastic bags that find you. Ask people for their names. Repeat them aloud. Multiplication is a mindset. Everything lasts. Everything changes. Wait. Walk in the shadow of moving vans with a handcart. Live in urban areas near selfish, wasteful people. Count seemingly empty things: helium, the stock market, pleasantries, clouds. Follow careless youth as they shed chewed straws and smoke and spit and bits of skin. Date a machinist. Organize a plastics drive. Keep your palms up and slightly cupped. Say: yes, I would, thanks. Lie on your back, mouth open. Make eye contact. Think of usage as time. Think of time as a container made of petroleum. Pretend to be cellulose. Expand. Bump into escarpment with your hips, collecting bruises. Photograph everything. Enjoy promotional leaflets: weaving them into shiny placemats, folding them into paper cranes. Allow the bread to mold. Climb carefully into the ravine along the causeway. Inhale exhaust. Invite intrusion. Put your body in the mud. Learn what it means to be permeable. Collect ideologies in a notebook instead of your heart. Plant things. Watch them grow. Remember. Nothing is a particulate. Grace is temporality.
HABITAT
Chlorophyta (green algae), sand (imported), microplastics, concrete, salt, fishing net, rock, square former wood pier piling (likely black locust / robinia pseudoacacia), metal, bladderwrack (seaweed), rust, human hair, coated twine, bird feathers, oak (Quercus) leaf.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, writer, performance artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn / Lenapehoking. Her art explores intersections of archiving, environmental investigation, and spatial disruption. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), and Open Water (ongoing)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed, post-industrial waterfront spaces.
Website: https://noraalmeida.com
Next Chapter in this Issue: Removing Refuse — iki nakagawa
PUSH/PULL is an online journal published by Culture Push, a virtual venue that allows us to present a variety of perspectives on civic engagement, social practice, and other issues that need attention. PUSH/PULL helps to situate Fellows and Associated Artists and the work they do within a critical discourse, and acts as a forum for an ongoing dialogue between Culture Push artists, the Culture Push community, and the world at large.