Thoughts on the Anthropic Landscape
Looking down on BogotĂĄ, a metropolis that is home to more than 7 million humans, from Monserrate:
Over the past week, Iâve been working at FLORA ars+natura, a contemporary art space in BogotĂĄ, Columbia. Operating out of a multistory building in Northern BogotĂĄ, Floraâs programming focuses on the relationship between humans and the natural world, and features artists who explore related themes in a variety of media. I was lucky enough to be selected to participate in their Cabinet Program, a monthly rotating installation series that takes over Floraâs large front window, which looks out on Calle 77. Below, a view of Flora from the street, including the Cabinet space.
Yesterday (Saturday July 5th), we launched my project, the second version of Speculative Arboriculture, and I gave a talk about my artistic practice. José Roca, the artistic director of Flora, provided some very helpful Spanish translation and facilitated an excellent q & a session with the assembled group (who turned out despite the concurrent Argentina-Belgium World Cup Game!).
The talk I gave was a new iteration bringing together themes Iâve been working through over the past few years, and Dan suggested that I summarize some of it here. So below youâll find images pulled from the lecture slides, along with text that represents some of what I talked about.
The talk began with an explanation of the concept of the Anthropocene and my relationship to it, followed by a brief discussion of my artistic roots, and finally several projects that span two modes of my artistic practice: field work and installation/video work.
So, to begin, this talk is called "The Anthropic Landscape: Humans/Ecology/Time", and we'll start by looking at a very old rock.
The image below shows a very old rock, one that interests me greatly. I'm interested in this rock because of the white band that runs through the middle of it. The band is a layer of sedimentation that represents a period in geologic time during which a mass extinction occurred. This particular band is known as the K-T boundary (now renamed K-Pg), marking an extinction event that occurred roughly 66 million years ago, when Earth lost 3/4 of its species, including the dinosaurs.
Rock samples like this one, which is held in a museum collection, are connected to intact landscapes as well. Extinction events can be read in layers of rock like these in the Badlands near Drumheller, Alberta, where glacial erosion has exposed the K-Pg boundary.
 The International Commission on Stratigraphy is made up of professionals who study rock strata and help decide how periods of geologic history should be divided and named. As the chart below indicates, they have named our current age the Holocene; this epoch began 11,200 years ago and means "wholly recent".
However, the interesting thing about the field of stratigraphy at the moment is that scientists from beyond geology have begun to suggest that due to human impact on ecosystem function, we may be entering a new geologic epoch. In thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, changes that humans are creating in the environment currently may be visible in the geologic strata as a new band indicating a mass extinction.
So should we cross out Holocene, and try something new? One suggestion that has gained much notoriety, with both dissenters and supporters, is the term "Anthropocene". In my words this means "the age of human impact" but is frequently interpreted in popular media as "the age of man" (as a feminist I find this problematic).
Beyond this issue of gendered language there are other relevant discussions occurring around the debate over the Anthropocene, and while I don't wholeheartedly support the use of the term, I find that it has great utility in thinking about the perceived gap between humans and "nature".Â
The image below is a photograph I took of the Rio Tempisque in Northwestern Costa Rica. I lived near the river for a few months as an undergraduate in a study abroad program in environmental science. It was one of the few rivers I had seen that retained its oxbow curves and ability to move around on the flood plain. In California, where I grew up, rivers in the flood plain were straightened into concrete troughs.
I love this image of the Tempisque for many reasons, but here I'm interested in it for its ability to provide a stark contrast with the image below, a photograph of the city of Dubai, surviving on a desalinated water supply in the middle of the Arabian Desert. (the photo, by Jens Neumann/Edgar Rodtmann, was featured in Elizabeth Kolbert's 2011 article on the Anthropocene, is still one of the top image results for the term)
What the concept of the Anthropocene does for me is provide an umbrella under which to collapse these two images, erasing the boundaries that tell us that they are separate, divergent systems.
In collapsing these boundaries, we need to approach another question of language. In the age of human impact, the concept of nature as something "over there" and separable from human activity is no longer tenable.
As rising green house gas levels affect every corner of the planet, nature as a category distinct from humans ceases to exist. For me, I find it clarifying to replace it with the term "ecology". (And here I am indebted to the writing of Timothy Morton among others in this line of thinking).
I still I find myself using the term nature frequently, both in relationship to my artistic practice and in everyday life, but this way of rethinking language helps explain a lot of the concerns that I deal with in my work. And on that note, let's move on to that! I'll start with my artistic development- we'll go back quite some time to begin.
Below is a painting that I made when I was ten years old. (this always draws laughs, of course). But really, when I look at it, I see that my interests have been fairly constant. This piece depicts the interactions between plants, animals, soil and landscape, which taken in total, represents the phenomenon of an interconnected world, the subject of ecology.
Of course there is one very significant species lacking in the image above, and it took me some time to come to terms with the fact that humans are also part of ecological systems. As a child I preferred to ignore them, and spent a lot of time pretending to be a horse or a bunny.
Over the years since I made that watercolor, my artistic practice has evolved to include a variety of mediums and approaches, and many of them involve time spent outside in the landscape. Below is me at work in a cow field on the Dutch island of Schiermonnikoog during the summer of 2009.
In this image, I'm at work on Flyway, a project created during a month long artist residency in response to the realization that islands in the North Sea are part of an important migratory bird route termed the "East Atlantic Flyway". There is more information about the project here. I include it mostly because it was the first time I completed an outdoor, site-responsive project that felt successful.
Since then I've created a few other outdoor, site-responsive projects. Below are images from Neversink Transmissions, a project Dan and I worked on as part of a fellowship program during the Summer of 2011. It was sited in the Catskills along the banks of the Neversink River where it flows through Claryville, a small village without much access to cell coverage or broadband internet. The project consisted of a "cell tower" built of driftwood that broadcast (via local wifi and micro-radio) a series of interviews with local residents about the ecology of the river and its role in the community. Water from the Neversink is transported to New York City, and is said to be the purest source contributing to the city's mammoth water needs. Activities along its course in the Catskills (from mowing grass off its banks to spraying pesticides to constructing retaining walls) affect the quality of drinking water for all of the NYC metropolitan area.
While I thoroughly enjoyed investigating the ecological systems at work in these scenic spots, my day to day reality is very different. Below, a photo of my usual habitat.
I spend the majority of my time living and working in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in an extremely urban landscape full of pavement, multistory buildings, and very few dedicated green spaces. Gradually I've come to embrace this fact, mostly by shifting my understanding of ecology to include urban ecosystems. With this focus in mind, I've found a plethora of interconnected systems to investigate.
The following two projects, which I see as part of my "field work" practice, come out of this relatively recent pivot towards investigating the ecological systems at work in the city around me. The Urban Soil Appreciation Initiative is a project that launched in Philadelphia's Wissahickon Valley Park in August 2011 and continues today in other forms. While there are many, many classifications for soils in agricultural regions, urban soils have largely been ignored, grouped together in a single, undifferentiated group. This is slowly changing with the advent of government initiatives like the NYC Soil Survey, which was completed only a few years ago and was the first of its kind in the United States.
With urban populations increasing all the time and interest in urban agriculture on the rise as well, awareness of the state of the soil in cities seems more and more relevant. The Urban Soil Appreciation Initiative also involves workshops that ask city dwellers to find soil in their neighborhoods (in itself a surprisingly novel task for many) and bring it to a central point where it can be sorted (removing glass, rocks, garbage), mapped, and used for rubbings and drawings. We also discuss potential types of contamination that can occur in urban soils and resources for soil testing.
Another ongoing field work-based project I've been developing over the past three years is Invasive Pigments. It started when I was growing algae from Superfund sites in a series of sculptural bioreactors, and I noticed that the green goop collecting in the bottom of the containers looked a lot like paint.
I tried painting with it, and was more successful than I expected. I mixed it with gum arabic, the traditional based for watercolor paints, and made the "algae portrait" below.
But of course algae provides a fairly limited palette, so I started looking around the streets of Bushwick. Over the course of a single summer, I was abel to develop more than sixteen new colors drawn from the leaves, fruits, flowers and berries of a variety spontaneously growing urban plants, often colloquially known as "weeds". There is a video here that covers the process of harvesting and making the pigments.
As I started attempting to identify and better understand the plants I was using for pigment, I learned that almost none of them are considered "native" (with native meaning already present in what is now New York prior to the arrival of European colonists in 1609). Transplants from Europe, Asia and Northern Africa, many of them are also listed as invasive species by states and local municipalities where they flourish. The few that are considered native have been transported abroad where they have naturalized and made it onto lists of invasive species complied by other countries. Below is my Invasive Color Wheel, depicting some of the plants I use arranged in a color wheel by geographic origin.
While working on this project I've uncovered fascinating stories about many of the plants I work with. Asiatic Dayflower, which creates an amazing blue (hard to find, as I described here) originated in Japan and a cultivar of the species was used in woodblock prints prior to the arrival of synthetic prussian blue.
Additionally, it is one of the few plants I work with that has been given the title of "superweed". This means that it has developed resistance to Monsanto's Roundup herbicide spray and can grow successfully in fields alongside corn and soybean crops that have been genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup.
During this portion of the talk I also showed several of the maps I've made using the plant pigments and told a few other spontaneous plant stories, some of which can be found on my website and in other blog posts.
Invasive Pigments has taken a new turn this summer in that I'm actually cultivating spontaneous plants in a garden setting. Working in a series of raised beds supplied by the Center for Strategic Art and Agriculture, I'm tending these "weeds" with all the love and care one would generally save for a vegetables or landscaping. Below are images of the garden in early March and in mid June.
These lush plants sprang from soil I transplanted in the winter months from locations around Bushwick where I'd seen interesting communities of spontaneous plants during the previous growing season.
I presented the project during Bushwick Open Studios, and will show paintings and an installation made from the garden in the CSAA gallery in the fall.
This concluded the field work section of the talk, and I moved on to Speculative Arboriculture, the installation and video-based piece that lead directly to the piece I created for Flora.
Growing out of my interest in (and apprehension about) the rapidly expanding field of synthetic biology, Speculative Arboriculture is a meditation on the intelligence of plants. The field of plant neurobiology is also on the rise and alongside the ascendance of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, a new level of collaboration, control and manipulation has been injected into the relationship between plans and humans.
For Flora's window vitrine, I imagined a sculptural installation that suggests an infestation of cyborg-like machine-plant organisms. Taking the form of a series of plant-like sculptures sprouting from the walls, floor and ceiling of the space, the project references the potency of rapidly evolving genetic modification and the erratically expanding geographic and ecological ranges of plants and other organisms in our globalized era. Appearing simultaneously clinical and overrun, the space suggests two possibilities: a controlled lab setting for the study of synthetically generated plant life, and a quarantine room for an out-of-control invasive species under close observation. Below is the plan I created for the piece when I proposed it to Flora.
Although the color shifted (to hazard-symbol orange) and I added some live plants and an aquarium pump cycling air, the installation stayed fairly true to the proposal. As described in Flora's wall text, the piece is made from the vines of the invasive Oriental Bittersweet plant (Celastrus orbiculatus) combined with salvaged branches, electronics and wires. The sculpture also hosts a small colony of Mother of Millions (Kalanchoe daigremontiana) seedlings, a rapidly reproducing, toxic and very tough plant ideally suited for the oncoming environmental changes caused by global warming.
The installation is meant to remain somewhat ambiguous. Is this an organism that was carefully built in a lab setting by humans who are exploiting it for resources of some kind? Is it an escaped GMO that has evolved to coexist with technology? Or a new form of life that has arisen spontaneously from the ashes of human hubris? Regardless, the installation envisions a future in which plants and technological structures have evolved to coexist. What kind of future this is, utopian, dystopian, or something else altogether, is left to the viewer to contemplate.Â
Tomorrow I'll go back to Flora to document the piece and work on some additional video footage, so more photos to come! Update: Some photos on my site and more on flickr.
