Annie Wilkinson

Blending creative fiction and feminist auto-ethnography, this photographic essay speaks from the compost pile of my ethnographic work on anti-feminism, drawing on both pessimistic and optimistic allegories from the garden to photosynthesize knowledge free from the conventional modalities of academic theory-making. It observes the end of 2020 (and 2021) with a both/and offer: a medium for processing the collective trauma of 2020 –the Year of the Bindweed– and an invitation to whimsically imagine the otherwise in the insurgent thallopower of the coming epoch, the Era of the Mushroom. As I strive to uproot its endless twists and turns, I follow bindweed’s path from Minneapolis to Mars and back as it courses through countless crises only to wind up back in my garden, rooted in an entangled system of White supremacy, heteropatriarchy, imperialism, and capitalism with no clear beginning or end to unravel.