#max liboiron

This quote continues the idea that specificity in language is important and that two words that might commonly be conflated are in important ways different from each other. Humility entails vulnerability and trust, which separates it from modesty. 

Two excerpts from Max Liboiron's Pollution is Colonialism, 106-109

Last month I attended a Trade School class lead by artist/researcher Max Liboiron, and I came home with the object below:

It's a piece of what used to be Barren Island, a South Brooklyn community built, as Max describes it "entirely on trash". It existed from the 1850's until its residents were forcibly evicted in 1936 to make way, I believe, for the development of new city infrastructure. Prior to this, it was a teeming waste disposal site, housing both "stinking rendering plants and disenfranchised inhabitants who processed waste from Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx" (Max's words, again). It was the garbage outpost for a growing metropolis long before Fresh Kills existed. Eventually, due to dredging, construction and shifting terrain, the detritus of the island began to disperse, and it washed up on the shores of what is now known as Dead Horse Bay.

This out of the way stretch of beach, located near Floyd Bennett Field, is an urban archaeologist's dream. But as Max discovered, the pieces of Barren Island that wash up on the shores of the Bay are are actually historically significant artifacts of a lost (and undervalued) community. Garbage pickers and treasure seekers technically should have an archeologist's license to remove artifacts from its shores, but this is loosely (if at all) enforced. The artifacts presented to us at Trade School in April were removed from Dead Horse Bay and modified into works of art before Max understood their true significance. As works of art, they are no longer pristine artifacts, and don't belong back in the sand at the bay, but she still feels that they should remain in the public realm, as testaments to a forgotten time and culture. So the concept of stewardship treaties arose, where in:

Any member of the public can become a steward by co-writing a stewardship contract, or Treaty, that designates the terms of care. The terms of these Treaties are open, but they must include plans to care for the artifact for the next two hundred years, and they must maintain some sort of public access given that the artifacts are part of the heritage of many New Yorkers and belong to the commons.

So I took the plunge, selected this particular art-artifact, and co-wrote a treaty. Each piece in the series is modified in some way by the artist's hand. The one I chose seems to be a chunk of compressed metal and horse bone.  It has small sea bird nests affixed to its craggy surface, fashioned out of reindeer lichen and chips of plastic from the bay. Check here for a much higher res image.