Kyle Miron

Finding Place

Finding Place is the first piece of a two-piece work, comprising the notes, thoughts, meditations, and photos of things that I worked on during Thesis. Last year, when the lockdown began, I found it fascinating that people were open and receptive to baking sourdough bread when faced with the idea of doing nothing for weeks. What is ‘doing nothing’? Is it a measure of value? How do we think of value? And what is the value of baking bread for oneself or their family, friends, or neighbours if you can simply go and buy a loaf from a grocery store? I dedicated time to myself to learn to do the same, and through many failures in getting it to work, realized that to expect it to do something—to not ‘do nothing’—was to devalue it. This 120 page, hand-sewn book is the culmination of readings in Jenny Odell’s ‘How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s ‘Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants’, Masanobu Fukuoka’s ‘The One-Straw Revolution’, and Georg Simmel’s ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. It details the several months of Thesis I spent learning how to grow my own sourdough starter and baking bread as a practice in attention, and the resulting turn towards understanding ‘place’, both personally and communally. It comprises photos I took of the suburban neighbourhood I was forced to return to in January, my thoughts on suburbia and cultures of convenience, and how they condition a lack of human ecosystem. And it contains ruminations and examples of how we may, as a species, rediscover our place in the natural ecosystem.The final part of the book looks at how design can be used to package the practice—to create tools that allow for small shifts in the way we form communities, the way that we exchange with each other, and the way that we understand our relationship to other beings.

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