WHAT WE NEED IS TO NEED LESS
Written By Alyce Santoro
In spring of 2007, the Sundance Channel visited my studio in far west Texas to document my “sonic fabric” project for the “Create” episode of BIG IDEAS FOR A SMALL PLANET. At the time, I was a newcomer to this part of the world. I had recently moved from Brooklyn, NY to the Big Bend in search of a place where I could deepen and grow my art practice, which was becoming increasingly engaged with the concept of permaculture and experiments in living sustainably.
Shortly after the Sundance Channel’s visit, I moved my base of operations from two little adobe buildings in the middle of a tiny wild-west downtown to some rugged land 6,000 feet up in the ponderosa pine, juniper, and oak-covered mountains.
For an instant new studio, I purchased a 1970’s school bus, which required just a bit of engine work before it could be driven (mostly on dirt roads) from downtown to its new home in the woods. With the addition of three small solar panels and two deep-cycle batteries (the entire setup cost less than $500), I immediately had a structure in which to work. The solar panels provide plenty of energy to power a sewing machine, printer, scanner, stereo, and lights.
The remainder of the electricity needed to run our tiny home and music studio is slowly being converted to renewable sources using a few more small sets of solar panels coupled with a homemade wind generator made from recycled materials (the blades are cut from salvaged PVC pipe and the motor was removed from a discarded exercise machine). The open-source plans for our windmill were developed by some good friends for use across the border in Mexico, and are available at www.velacreations.com.
This image shows the sonic fabric
necktie designed by Alyce Santoro
Another environmentally innocuous technique we’ve implemented is the use of a sun oven for most of our summer cooking, including bread baking, veggie roasting, and stewing of grains and beans. The sun oven is an incredibly simple-to-use device that works much like a conventional oven, only it cooks more evenly and requires NO resources such as wood, propane, natural gas, or electricity…all it requires is a sunny day! (Please see my blog “Alyce’s Solar Kitchen” [www.sunovencookery.blogspot.com] for recipes and resources on building or otherwise acquiring one of your own: ).
All of this to say, I could distill the essence of the lessons of the past year down to just two words: START SMALL. In addition, use what you have on hand, make or grow all you can, purchase as little as possible. Our entire culture runs counter to the notion of smallness and conservation. We have been taught for so long that we can BUY what we need, that now it seems, ironically, that even “green-ness” is being marketed to us as something that you have to spend lots of money to get.
Contrary to the dominant mindset, we do not need $20,000 solar set-ups to run our homes. What we need is to need less. Use fewer inefficient and unnecessary electric appliances, live in only the amount of square footage that’s actually needed, and get a $2,000 solar set-up instead.
A simple poster I made recently will be on exhibit as part of the “It Isn’t Easy” show at Exit Art [www.exitart.org] in New York City, opening on July 24th. The show asks artists what being green means to them, and the piece sums up my feelings on this pretty well:
Since the “Create” episode aired, I’ve changed the name of my studio from “The Center for the Obvious” to “The Center for the Improbable & (Im)permacultural* Research”. I have created a video of the strange and cacophonous antique loom on which sonic fabric is woven at a small textile mill in New England (sonic fabric is not only made from salvaged materials, the very machine [www.youtube.com] on which it is woven narrowly escaped exile to a landfill).
I’ve made a life-size set of sonic fabric sailboat sails (currently on their way to the Samstag Museum in Adelaide, Australia) and many strings of Tibetan Buddhist-inspired “prayer flags” (the original sonically- intentional properties of which sparked the idea to weave with tape in the first place). And I am about to launch a line of men’s sonic fabric neckties designed to serve a similar purpose: to turn the wearer into an emitter of subtle magnetic forces (for these and some of the other “philosoprops”, please see www.etsy.com).
*(Im)permaculture paradoxically refers to the notion of living sustainably and planning for future generations while simultaneously appreciating the ephemeral nature of existence.
