Invasion of the Nightcrawler: Embodied Explorations of Subterranean Spaces

Invaders can be quiet, unmeasured and unassuming; slowly transforming a landscape through the spread of invasive disease, religious beliefs, or beneath the grass, in the dark. One of the most commonly known earthworms in North America, the nightcrawler, arrived with the first wave of European settlers burrowed inside potted plants and sacks of spoiled crops. These annelids, traveling alongside their human counterparts as resources of free labor, now play a vital role in the complex systems of soil health and water treatment as humans confront the effects of pollution and the resulting toxicants that cycle through soil, water, and animal bodies. As a method for understanding the complex relationships between humans and earthworms, I have conducted research-based multimedia projects informed by a partnership with Cornell Cooperative Suffolk County, an extension of Cornell University, to discover the connections between animal labor, eco-colonialism, and how religious systems influence relationships to the underground. This presentation will illustrate how both human and nonhuman bodies are influenced by religious authoritative systems regarding their relationships to labor, nature, and burial, leading to greater conflicts around ideas of ownership of, and belonging to, a place. By contextualizing my projects amidst ecocritical and postnaturalist theory I will explore how the visual and sonic expressions of the Umwelt of earthworms can create a sensorial bridge between the human and annelid body and the relationship to environmental conditions.