In tandem with the IPCC 1.5 Special Degree Report, the recent shift in the conception of Patchwork opens new questions about how we might imagine the collapse/catastrophe scenarios, and how we adopt general preparational strategies that attempt to mitigate its effects. The recently-held series of Wordpatchworkshop (Punctum, Prague) brought together a number of speakers who dealt with just such themes and topics, and constituted a liminal patchwork of its own, with its own discrete dynamics and infrastructural preconditions. As Arran Crawford writes, “patchwork is a machinic evolutionary sorting process. Patches adapted to reality will thrive, patches not so adapted will be cut. In this sense patchwork formalises collapse and reconfigures it into a sign of systemic health.” How then does the contemporary notion of patchwork transmutate and respond to the coming catabolic and degraded post-sustainable landscape, and what are some of its implications for systemic praxis?
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