Manifesto: Thoughts on the common space of which-craft
Which-craft collective

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"Which-craft" is a deliberate wordplay.

It operates as both a semantic intervention and a practical programme, transforming a term historically weaponised into something that empowers. However, turning our wordplay into methodology, it points towards the multiplicity we desperately need: which crafts, which approaches, and which ways of working together can serve us now?

The figure of the witch offers us a powerful entry point into understanding this marginalisation and imagining alternatives. For centuries, the witch has served as a cultural repository for everything that dominant power structures feared: autonomous knowledge, collective care practices, and organisational mechanisms that refused hierarchical control. The philosopher and feminist activist Silvia Federici conducted a historical analysis demonstrating that witch persecution was never merely about superstition but represented a calculated strategy to dismantle knowledge systems. In Caliban and the Witch, she argues that the destruction of women's power was essential to primitive accumulation, achieved through the systematic persecution of those who possessed knowledge outside official channels, including healers, midwives, women who lived in community with other women, and anyone who challenged patriarchal authority. The cultural persistence of the witch as a threatening figure reflects ongoing anxieties about uncontrolled agency and alternative epistemologies, what Creed identifies as society's fears of "women who refuse domestication".

Caliban and the Witch
by Silvia Federici

As witchcraft is built on ecological knowledge systems, Sustainable built environments cannot emerge from singular disciplinary approaches but require what we might call an ecology of practices: traditional building crafts that carry generations of indigenous wisdom, collaborative design processes that centre community voices, innovations that learn from natural systems, circular material flows that refuse extraction, social infrastructure that builds collective capacity. Each of these represent specialised knowledge that remains limited when practised in isolation but becomes transformative when brought into relationship with others. The platform's commitment to "matters of care" situates environmental practice within ethical frameworks.

Which-craft is a shared imaginative space, the same kind of transformative thinking that the witch historically represented, the dangerous ability to perceive possibilities that dominant culture cannot recognise or permit. When spatial practice becomes imaginative practice informed by multiple knowledge systems, built environments shift from instruments of environmental destruction into laboratories for experimenting with regenerative relationships. We seek to create conditions where diverse voices can gather around questions of care and spatial justice. Envisioning alternatives to both historical oppression and ecological destruction whilst remaining grounded in concrete practices of mutual support and collective learning. Magic is created when systems are linked together. This platform aims to create our own magic, offering a space to foster connection and care.

This manifesto represents our conviction that marginalised communities can repurpose historical symbols of persecution into contemporary tools for liberation and regeneration.

© 2026 Which-craft