ecesis

noun   |   ece·sis   | \ i-ˈsē-səs , -ˈkē- \

the establishment of a plant or animal in a new habitat

The Lost Boys of Neverland, upon learning that it is their potential mother (Wendy) whom they have shot from the sky, and upon panicking that they have lost her forever and realizing they cannot safely carry her to their underground house, resolve to build a mossy house around her as she heals, complete with roses and a chimney. The survival of our home planet, complete with its roses, storms, disputed boundaries, marches, slowing currents, chimneys—all of its familiar and all of its sea change—demand such uncanny, subversive, and sometimes desperate turns of thought regarding how we understand house, home, and habitat—and how we make and tend them. As editors it has been a joy to array a collection of such experiments in this, our third issue.

Ecesis has an etymology you can really burrow into. Oikos, Greek for “house,” gives us ecology: the study of the home; economy: the management of it; eccumenical: the worldwideness of it; and, of course, ecesis: the making of it.

It is such fun to offer artists a tight kernel of a word, one often relegated to specific contexts of scientific literature, and to watch them soak, distend, and ply it into queries of the moving body, speculations on inhabiting another’s body, questions for the long dead, liminal slips or headlong charges into other habitats, studies of creatures adjusting to disturbance, inks and oils and lights exploring architectures of loss, newness, and memory. A musing on extraterrestrial agriculture echoes a song attending a newborn earth. Many dwell on the fertile overlap of wordsmithing and worldsmithing in how language fashions habitat. Always speculative in some sense or another, sometimes retro-speculative with a revisionary hunger or a warm wistfulness, these works unfold homecomings and home-leavings of all sorts.

Here are urgent celebrations of phenologies, and of the season of a single arc of dawn or afternoon; incantations for the freedom of migration and movement of humans, animals, and rivers alike; inquiries into violence and the arbitration of lines; challenges to speciesism. In their arrangement: an insistence that these all are forged in the same seedhead.

Could there be more crucial, fruitful work?