002. Eco-Reliquary
Hello ###,
Throughout this week, I've been thinking about ecologies quite a bit: ecologies on the brink of destruction, ecologies that are already gone, growing ecologies and ecologies which remain unknown.
'Ecology' is a word that usually assumes the color green. I think of it as a lush space, the warm smell of soil. When I think of ecology, I think of my house in Florida. I think of the iguanas who come to lounge in our backyard, shit too close to the pool, chew on anything that blooms in our backyard garden, and I think of our home on the other side of the glass sliding door. I think of the rigid climate-controlled environment we spend so much time inside, as if our bodies were as fragile as medieval manuscripts (76 degrees on the air conditioner). I think of summers spent inside of our house-turned-bunker as hurricanes raged on the other side of our front door, listening to the radio and playing checkers under flashlight when the power cut out.
For this letter, I wanted to consider ecology both in its stagnancy (a diorama in a museum) and in its entropy (dynamic transformation over the course of a few brief seasons). I selected objects, books, people, places, sounds, videos that both manufacture and interact with all kinds of ecologies in our present world, that consider ecologies to come. I am examining not only the space of these ecologies, but how bodies interact inside them. How the body itself becomes an ecology.
T O U C H
This past week, I read Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonté. It's a Surrealist collage-novel constructed out of old Victorian catalog images. There are only a few words at the beginning of each section, the rest of the story is told through these bizarre collages. In some images, you have elegant ladies with an orb of light for a head. One series has animals (such as birds or lions) with well-dressed human bodies courting lovers and wreaking havoc in elegant parlors. Then there's this sequence of images featuring a woman with these veiny wings. You have no idea who she is, or why she's in this house, but it doesn't matter. Equal parts Freudian analysis and fever dream, each time I go through this book, I manufacture another narrative, I fill each scene with my own meanings.
I finally got my hands on Fear Indexing The X-Files this week. In this slim essay-book (zine? micro-novel?), artists Nora Khan and Steven Warwick study various episodes of The X-Files and use images from the show to explore the history that would shape the show, such as the rise of the internet, the climate of fear in the Clinton era following the end of the Cold War, fear of the end of the American dream, fear of the government's watchful eye. Despite the show's science fiction premise of alien-hunting and horror, Khan and Warwick show us that The X-Files wasn't that far of a break from reality — what we fear most is what we don't understand.
Aase Berg's poetry collection, Dark Matter, has been sitting in my pile of unread books since July. Berg is a fantastic eco-poet. Every poem is a kind of hallucinatory contamination. Across the landscape of this collection, bodies mutate, revel in cell death, a land is born out of unsettling circumstances and frayed nerve endings. The bodies in these poems do not exist separately from machines, from oil, from rock, from sky. The ecologies Berg crafts in his writing monstrously hybridize into something simultaneously biological and artificial. Epic poetry for the Anthropocene: "Now the matter writhes in unthinkable lines. Now my spirit / writhes, the number of fingers varies on the same hand. Now / there is a bubbling in the stone where the flesh wants out of the / skin. Now the things are not playing dead; this world wants out / of its skin."
There are many books about ecofeminism out there but Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva's collection of essays is by far the most insightful and engaging one I've come across. It's hard to believe that this book was published in 1993 (checked this book out from the library, but I'll definitely order the updated edition once I get my next paycheck). Many of the topics Mies and Shiva address are the same kind of environmental debates we're still having today — issues of environmental racism, the disproportionate impact climate change has on impoverished communities, how capitalism and patriarchal nationalism have perpetuated environmental destruction, the neo-colonialist exploitation of natural resources under the guise of 'development', and the ways modern science can perpetuate these oppressive global systems. If you want to learn more about ecofeminist theory, I would highly recommend Ecofeminism as a comprehensive jumping-off point.
I read Claire Vaye Watkins'Gold Fame Citrus this past summer, and it's a book that I haven't been able to get out of my head. The novel is set in California, where a semi-sentient sand dune has devoured most of the Southwest and a drought is pushing humans east to escape their pending apocalypse. I would say more but I don't want to give too much away. Watkins' writing is saturated with language, fast-paced. Without warning, the story can shift into a radically different direction. She has a way of telling this story of the West, of surviving in the desert, of secret nuclear testing facilities, of spiritual organizations making their home under the slow, hot sun. In one particular part of the book, Watkins does a bit of speculative biology. While other post-apocalyptic climate change novels are awfully bleak, Watkins envisions new species of animals, adapting after the humans have gone and mutating to match their new world. What will come after us?
L O O K
Ana Mendieta is an artist who I constantly return to. Her radical explorations of the ephemeral body, natural spaces, rituals, and violence against women were some of the first pieces that got me interested in environmental art. Her Silueta Series (1973-1980) never ceases to amaze me. In her artist statement about these works, Mendieta said: "I have been carrying out a dialogue between the landscape and the female body (based on my own silhouette). I believe this has been a direct result of my having been torn from my homeland (Cuba) during my adolescence.I am overwhelmed by the feeling of having been cast from the womb (nature). My art is the way I re-establish the bonds that unite me to the universe. It is a return to the maternal source." Mendieta repeatedly criticized the predominantly white, middle-class American feminist movement. Her performance art never shied away from the rawness of pain. When she engaged with natural spaces, Mendieta's body becomes inscribed into the landscape of the surrounding environment, yet it cannot last. A sudden breeze will come, animals will pass over the outlines of her body, the ocean tide brings a new skin of sand. What is left of her is devoured by the early blooms of spring.
Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project was installed inside the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2003. With the help of some mono-frequency lights, some projection foil, scaffolding, and haze machines, this giant hall becomes a contained environment. The mist dissipates into cloudlike formations, mirrors help contour the light into a radiating sphere. This space exudes warmth as if the sky outside is not a great enough comfort for us. The landscape of the room is rendered into a harsh duotone of searing yellow and black, sucking all other colors from the space. What I would do to lay inside this room.
In the 1950's, with the rise of nuclear weapons, botanists and plant-lovers began to experiment with atomic gardening. The idea was that radiation would strengthen these plants, cause new mutations useful for human development, a new garden for the new Atomic Age. Scientists hoped to redesign plants through controlled nuclear blasting to speed up the breeding process. In order to test the effects of different levels of radiation, a circular style of garden was created, so that the strength of the atom-blasting weakens as it passes each ring. To this day, scientists are still experimenting with atomic gardening and this round garden formation still remains. If you want to check out some amazing pictures from the original Atomic Gardening Society, and other images of Atomic Gardeners with their irradiation bunkers go here.
Landschaftspark, in Germany, shows us the power of post-industrial landscape architecture. After being a blast furnace plant for many years, it was decided that this derelict space would be re-developed into a massive, recreational public park. Unlike other parks, however, Landschaftspark did not completely tear down all of the industrial structures. The rusting metal skeletons still stand, although the local ecology has now run its course, covering most of the park in green space. In a way, the park resembles a giant playground, with all kinds of paths and footbridges to connect between what's left of the massive buildings. Because the site was so polluted from years of use, the designers introduced vegetation into the streams of water along the park to revive the local ecology. As time has passed, these plants have acted as filers, removing toxins from the water. Memory and time play a large role in this park. As the iron construction continues to rust and erode, it stands as a reminder of Germany's industrial past. This is a park designed for contemplation, for walking through the traces of history.
L I S T E N
The soundtrack for Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris has been on a constant loop this past week. This film is brilliant in so many ways, but the soundtrack is seriously underrated. The power of Solaris rests inside the ecological. As this crew of scientists orbits a mysterious new planet, they find themselves deep in a hallucinatory fracturing of reality. What they experience is beyond their scientific knowledge, uncalculable by their machines, as the planet's great sea swims beneath them like a smear of mutating cells. The soundtrack lingers, unravels within your ears. Listen to it here.
I'm definitely late to this, but Bjork's new single, The Gate, has also been a song I repeatedly go to on my daily commute. The song heaves with strings and woodwinds, an animal that evolves into something snarling and electronic. Bjork's music is perpetually set against the harsh, visceral landscape of Iceland. Let it rest against the heat of your eardrums.
Terrestrial has definitely been a podcast highlight for me since the summertime. The podcast is about our changing environment (and society) and the choices we must make in light of this global transformation. Episodes have tacked subjects from environmental racism to the ethics of having children during climate change. My favorite episode has got to be "Would you compost your body?" which examines our current wasteful burial practices (including toxic embalming fluids and thick wooden caskets) and proposes a radical new idea: body decomposition. The episode traces the history of American burials and considers new possibilities for our current funerary practices.
Lastly, I've finally taken the plunge into the world of Sun Ra. A legendary jazz composer and originally from Saturn, Sun Ra is the original interstellar voyager, a pioneer of Afrofuturist music (and poetry!). Each experimental album is a journey through space. I would advise just putting his entire discography on shuffle and see what happens.
L I C K
After reading an essay about her in one of my classes, I've become engrossed in Martha Graham's amazing choreography. Her style is derived from breathing, a kind of contracting and releasing of bodily movements. Unlike traditional ballet technique which places emphasis on a sense of weightlessness, Graham's dancers are weighted, remain close to the ground, moving with the fluidity of heaving lungs. Their movements fill up the whole space, with no need for elaborate set decoration or costuming. Graham was heavily inspired by the women of mythology and several pieces re-tell their stories. There is a rejection of all kinds of institutional (and social) technique threaded throughout her work, a moving beyond the boundaries of classical performance. Some of her pieces can be viewed on Youtube including Diversion of Angels, Adorations, and Heretic.
I finished Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach Trilogy in, no joke, just a couple of weeks. It's one of the most unsettling and brilliant sci-fi dystopias I've ever read. It begins with four women walking into something, armed to the teeth. An area that is hostile to humans in every way imaginable. An area that nobody comes back from alive or, at the very least, whole. Now, this futuristic, gothic horror is being adapted into a movie and the official trailer was released just this week. Honestly, the visuals look amazing, the casting is phenomenal. I can already tell that this movie will chill me to the fucking bone.
I ended up on Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty website the other day and came across this particular article about the influence of nature on his designs. "Birds in flight fascinate me," Mcqueen said, referring to his Autumn/Winter 2006 collection, "I'm inspired by a feature but also its colour, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering." After the Widows of Culloden, McQueen would turn to flowers. In Sarabande (S/S 2007), you have the iconic "self-destructing" dress made of flowers that fly off the model as she walks, leaving a trail of blossoms in her wake. McQueen's work draws both from the bounty of spring and the bite of decay. You can watch the original runway show for Widows of Culloden here and Sarabande here.
Whether it be a Youtube video-essay or a long-form piece on an arts and culture blog, I'm always a sucker for a good film analysis. If you have seven minutes to spare, watch this video which shows every scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's movies that has water in it. It's beautifully compiled and showcases the brilliance of his cinematic technique (especially if you haven't seen his films before). For Tarkovsky, water was the ultimate medium, able to channel motion and pure stagnancy. It is an element of entropy that can barely be contained as it spills across the screen.
C L I C K
When you begin reading a JSTOR article about nuclear strategy that begins with a quote from Alice in Wonderland, you know it's gonna be good. In Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals, Carol Cohn writes about her time observing nuclear "deterrence intellectuals" who work inside and outside of the government in all kinds of consultant capacities. Cohn focuses on the rationalizing language used by the defense community to justify their lack of compassion, distance themselves from more humane modes of thinking, and perform calculations with no regard for human agency. The gendering of militaristic language does not go ignored, and Cohn, an outsider in this male-dominated field, raises many important questions about the way we talk about nuclear weapons and plan for human suffering.
After Us is an online publication that explores the future of technological development and its impact on humanity and our current environment. Through essays, fiction, visual essays, After Us brings together art, science, and politics into a new playing field. You can check out some pieces from their second issue on their website, including an essay about human transformation after an apocalypse and an interview with Zaha Hadid Architect's new director about the politics of architecture.
Although this essay was published in July, I can't stop thinking about The Fallout by Lacy M. Johnson. This piece explores a superfund site in St. Louise (superfund site: area so toxic that it will take years of government funding to completely clean it up) and the impact this leaking nuclear waste has had on local residents. You see the role of government bureaucracy in controlling this mess, an absence of accountability from the polluters responsible. As the residents discover that they've been living under a wasteland that's slowly killing them, there's the fight to have your suffering be heard, to receive environmental justice. Great writing and great reporting. Please check it out.
Today I went on a mushroom-identifying walk through Prospect Park. We learned how to differentiate between Parchment fungus and Turkey Tail (the pores). Fungi are responsible for returning the nutrition found in dead trees back into the forest environment, sustaining the rest of the ecosystem. Their mycelium can wrap around the roots of trees and make the tree's nutrient-gathering process more efficient in exchange for sugars (mushrooms can't photosynthesize. Today I learned about a kind of mushroom (Cordyceps) that grows inside of bugs, slowly takes over their nervous system, then controls the bug in order to spread more spores through the rest of the colony. The largest living organism on our planet is a 2,200-acre fungus spreading its network of mycelium hairs across Malheur National Forest in Oregon through the root system of trees. All I'm saying is don't underestimate your ecosystems.
Until next week,
Ellie