Map of Contents: Everyday Matter of Life & Death
Keith Richard Clougherty
2024
Pen on paper, digitally collaged
Everyday Matter of Life and Death tells histories of climate change and the United States through the materials of the suburban New England home where Keith, a 19-year old sculpture student and budding eco activist, intervened to care for his nonagenarian great aunt, Auntie Sister. Each chapter of this 99,000 word cli-fi eldercare memoir is organized around a material that sustained life at Auntie Sister’s house over the course of her life.
The Map of Contents illustrates historic and contemporary infrastructure that kept Auntie Sister’s house supplied with fundamental energy and materials. Based on a détourned map created for the “Town of Braintree” Tricentennial in 1940, the Map of Contents charts mutations of the capitalist settler-colonies that have ravaged the sovereign Massachusett Nation since John Smith published his “Description of New England” in 1616.
The book and Map of Contents are entering a final phase of revisions this summer to hopefully be published in late 2024 or 2025. In its fully fleshed out form, the Map of Contents would serve as a hyper-linked companion to the book where underlying research and multimedia documentation would be archived. The book would also include complementary maps of Auntie Sister’s household and Turtle Island (north america) to trace the flows of matter-energy from sources of extraction, through processing and transportation, to points of domestic consumption and disposal.
Everyday Matter of Life and Death and its multimedia components aim to create a relatable framework to understand the relationships between the infrastructure supporting neo-colonial lifestyles and climate chaos. The goal is to support readers’ efforts investing in forms of alternative material infrastructure rooted in healing and reciprocity rather than exploitation and the annihilation of our planet. Or to at least name the primary culprit driving the runaway greenhouse gas effect on Earth (spoiler alert: it’s capitalism).
The Map of Contents illustrates historic and contemporary infrastructure that kept Auntie Sister’s house supplied with fundamental energy and materials. Based on a détourned map created for the “Town of Braintree” Tricentennial in 1940, the Map of Contents charts mutations of the capitalist settler-colonies that have ravaged the sovereign Massachusett Nation since John Smith published his “Description of New England” in 1616.
The book and Map of Contents are entering a final phase of revisions this summer to hopefully be published in late 2024 or 2025. In its fully fleshed out form, the Map of Contents would serve as a hyper-linked companion to the book where underlying research and multimedia documentation would be archived. The book would also include complementary maps of Auntie Sister’s household and Turtle Island (north america) to trace the flows of matter-energy from sources of extraction, through processing and transportation, to points of domestic consumption and disposal.
Everyday Matter of Life and Death and its multimedia components aim to create a relatable framework to understand the relationships between the infrastructure supporting neo-colonial lifestyles and climate chaos. The goal is to support readers’ efforts investing in forms of alternative material infrastructure rooted in healing and reciprocity rather than exploitation and the annihilation of our planet. Or to at least name the primary culprit driving the runaway greenhouse gas effect on Earth (spoiler alert: it’s capitalism).
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