Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Still image from That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
Simulated installation, excerpt of That the Earth is the Middle of the World, 2-channel HD video & sound, 11-minute seamless loop, 2020.
That the Earth is the Middle of the World (2020) is a two-channel video that incorporates
excerpts from Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (79 CE), a scientific encyclopedia cataloging all the
earth’s elements, systems and creatures known at the time in the early Roman Empire. This text
is one of the first of its kind in its formulation of an encyclopedic approach towards natural
phenomena, and has since become fundamental to the study, documentation and knowledge of
nature in the West.
Each channel of the video is projected onto free-standing, billboard-like structures. On the left, a
submerged humanoid narrator recites chapter headings from the table of contents of Naturalis
Historia, while on the right we bear witness to a baroque and hallucinatory ecosystem seething
with natural and synthetic life forms. The video is a collage of over 500 elements, and imagines
“nature” as a product of conceptual bricolage informed by the arts, sciences, technology
industries and pop culture.
The endless list of natural phenomena recited by the narrator
conjures both creation à la Noah’s arc and extinction— an endless womb-grave in which the
human is imagined as a residual or vestigial structure of the landscape. A self-conscious
investigation of apocalyptic aesthetics, the work both indulges in and grapples with the
cinematic languages of spectacle and destruction. As the two scenes are intermittently
drenched by rainfall and fogged by morning mist, foley tropes borrowed from horror and sci-fi
cinema create a narrative that vacillates between earnestness and irony, between the Romantic,
the tragic and the absurd.
Credits
Written, directed and animated by Mara Eagle
Voice by Ayam Yaldo; Water loop animation by Stephen McLeod.
Special thanks to Jamie Macaulay, Ayam Yaldo, Phil Hawes, Nadia Myre, Eric Simon & Tobias Rees.
This work was made possible with the generous financial support of the Berggruen Institute.
Please contact hambonbonehoney@gmail.com to access the full preview version.
Théâtre de l'inconnu, 2-channel HD video & sound, 13 minutes, 2018-20.
Still image from Théâtre de l'inconnu, 2-channel HD video & sound, 13 minutes, 2018-20.
Still image from Théâtre de l'inconnu, 2-channel HD video & sound, 13 minutes, 2018-20.
Still image from Théâtre de l'inconnu, 2-channel HD video & sound, 13 minutes, 2018-20.
View of Théâtre de l’inconnu in the exhibition La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 28 November 2020 to 4 april 2021. Photo: Guy L’Heureux.
Still image from Théâtre de l'inconnu, 2-channel HD video & sound, 13 minutes, 2018-20.
Still image from Théâtre de l'inconnu, 2-channel HD video & sound, 13 minutes, 2018-20.
View of Théâtre de l’inconnu in the exhibition La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 28 November 2020 to 4 april 2021.
Excerpt of Théâtre de l'inconnu, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal in the exhibition La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 28 November 2020 to 4 april 2021. Photo: Guy L’Heureux.
Installation of Théâtre de l’inconnu in the exhibition La machine qui enseignait des airs aux oiseaux presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 28 November 2020 to 4 April 2021. Videography: Philippe Léonard.
In Théâtre de l’inconnu a faltering narrator recounts the life-cycle of Saturnids, winged insects belonging the family of giant silk moths. The two-channel video installation manipulates elements borrowed from several National Geographic flower time-lapses, the 19th century opera Adriana Lecouvreur, and excerpts from various literary, scientific and ancient texts. The title of the installation gestures towards early modern scientific compendiums, such as Thomas Muffet's Theatre of Insects (1658) as well as architectures designed for viewing, including dissection amphitheaters, operating theaters, and entertainment venues for performance and cinema.
Also a venue for spectacle and observation, the gallery space is filled with an interactive and inflatable sculpture of a silk gland sheathed in metallic vinyl. This extracted organ, described by the narrator (in the words of W.G. Sebald) as a “cluster of small, intertwined tubes resembling intestines,” is based on photos from current research attempts to engineer transgenic silkworms whose glands have been modified to produce human collagen for use in cosmetic products. At once tragic, satirical and monumental, the installation explores how Western practices of sight, description and representation have produced and sustained a concept of nature amenable to industrialization and exploitation.
CreditsWritten & animated by Mara Eagle
Voice by Ayam Yaldo; Textile installation - Bronwen Moen
Special thanks to Jamie Macaulay, Ayam Yaldo, Phil Hawes, Nadia Myre, Eric Simon, Tobias Rees, Stephen McLeod, Cecilia McKinnon & Prudence Gendron.
This work was made possible with the generous financial support of the Berggruen Institute, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
Please contact hambonehoney@gmail.com to watch the full online preview version.
Whether the world be finite, and whether there be more than one world...
Late
one afternoon in an underground shopping centre in the city of Montréal, I came
across the word ‘nature’
lettered in rainbow neon. Upon crossing the tiled threshold of the
establishment I was overcome by the disturbing aroma of rodents, birds and
reptiles that have never felt the rays of the sun or breathed the air of the
outdoors. I continued deeper into the low-ceilinged, cave-like recesses of the
shop where I encountered a collection of sixty-two Siamese fighting fish, each
silent and solitary, displayed in otherwise empty, watery cylinders two inches
in diameter and methodically arranged to showcase an organized spectrum of colors,
spanning from ‘Cambodian Red,’ ‘Super Orange’ and ‘Pineapple Yellow,’ to
‘Butterfly Blue,’ emerald and violet hues. Later I would read that in the wild
these typically murky colored fish only saturate when agitated, but that in
captivity they’ve been bred to be always vibrant, as though in a constant state
of alarm.
…of
the elements and the planets… of god, of monsters… of the eclipses of the moon,
and of the sun…
What
is nature? Where does it begin and end, and are its contours stable over time? What
is the nature that is invoked in the fields of science, art, literature,
environmental conservation, industry and commerce, and how is its value
inscribed and extracted differently in each? What world orders are
enacted in these domains and, further still, how do these fields of discourse
and representation inform or interfere with one another?
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In
1831 a young Charles Darwin was invited to circumnavigate the globe aboard the HMS Beagle, a survey ship commissioned
by the British crown to chart the coast of South America. Aboard the ship were
also three young Fuegians who had been abducted by the captain and crew of the
same HMS Beagle the year previous. One of them, Jemmy Button, a boy of sixteen, was re-named after the object he was “traded” for: a single
mother of pearl button. The Fuegians were brought to London, dressed in English
attire and circulated around high society as curiosities and talismans of the
celebrated expedition. Over the course of the next year, one of the Fuegians
would die of small pox while still in England, while the others, having been
“civilized,” were now en route with Darwin to return to their native home,
Tierra del Fuego, supposedly to serve in their communities as Christian
missionaries and British allies.
…of stars which suddenly appear or of comets… of colors of
the sky and of celestial flame… of sudden circles…
During
his next five years on the expedition, Darwin amassed an exemplary collection
of tropical specimens—dead, fossilized and alive—to be brought back to England;
Harriet, one of many Galapagos tortoises stowed on the Beagle, would live on in
a botanical garden for 170 years, eventually dying only in 2006. Throughout
this time Darwin kept meticulous notes of his observations that would serve as
the groundwork for On the
Origin of Species and his
theory of evolution, which amongst other things still holds nature marvelously
accountable today. As a student of post-Darwinian natural sciences the question
“why” becomes possible at every turn: why does the bird have radiant plumage?
To attract a mate. Why do armies of ants form death spirals, in which thousands
of ant march themselves in a circle to a fatal state of exhaustion: an unfortunate
bi-product
of an otherwise evolutionarily advantageous adaptation.
How
has nature come to be understood as a stable ontological phenomena existing
somewhere “out there” beyond the realms of the social, the political and the
historical when the discipline of natural history has been so embroiled in colonization,
imperialist trade networks, religion and trafficking? Capture, collection,
captivity, spectacle… the cabinet of curiosities, the natural history diorama,
the exotic animal in the zoo and the possibility of bio-engineering dragons all
seem to stand midway between art and science, entertainment and knowledge, such
that one might almost be tempted to call this no-man’s-land itself
— nature.
Also
in 1831, the same year that Darwin embarked on the Beagle, the noted Romantic
painter John Constable exhibited his Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows at the Royal Academy of London. In the
foreground of the painting, brambles lit with dew frame the return of a peasant
from work, while in the distance a storm, presumably passing, hangs over the
ominous yet wonderful scene. Like many paintings of its kind, the underlying
geometry organizing the image is constructed so as to funnel the viewers gaze
to the cathedral, such that they might realize their own metaphysical
dimensions through the landscape. Even though Constable sought to create images
that were in his own words “legitimate, scientific, and mechanical,” critics
were apparently quite appalled by this six-foot paysage calling it
by turns theatrical, exaggerated and especially “unnatural.” One even pointed
out that, given the meteorological conditions represented by the artist, the
rainbow— a symbol of hope and redemption well alive today in the midst of COVID 19—was utterly
impossible.
…in what places the sea has receded… of cities which have
been absorbed by the sea… of lands which have been swallowed up…
On
an overcast Saturday morning sitting at our old oak dining table, whose legs
were carved with ornate motifs of climbing ivy, a woman with black flowing hair
set before me three plastic dishes, a jar of water, several surgical
instruments and a large meaty eyeball encased in a shaggy skirt of gristle that
clung to the steel tray on which it was presented. Thinking back to this day, I
see my clumsy, child-sized hands attempting to still that greasy, over-sized
eyeball as I began
slicing through its tangled layers of fat and muscle. I make my first incisions
into the outer layer of eye, normally transparent but now clouded over in death.
“Concentrate.” Cutting along the equator I am careful not
to damage the thick and fibrous nerve that sprouts from the organ like a
nascent germ striving to break ground. I imagine what might grow
if we were to
bury it on the sunny side of the house beside the row of peonies.
Once
torn apart, the two half-spheres release a clear jelly-like substance and a
pool of water, known by some to be the sources of tears. Thinking back to that
coagulated puddle of secretions I am reminded of Aristotle’s theory of sight: the eye, he proposed,
emanates a continuous medium of moisture that merges with air to form a “liquid image” in the
mind that is experienced as vision… color, shape, line, depth, surface.
Emitting this aqueous substance Aristotle’s eye probes its surroundings like a
misty tentacle groping a watery world into being.
…on
the navigation of the sea, of the rivers… and whether the ocean surrounds the
earth… that the earth is the middle of the world…
Still
holding the deflated globe in the palm of my hand I watched as the secretions stained
my skin a grayish color and soon realized that something else, very black and
oily, was also leaking from the eyeball. Reaching into the front portion of the
bisected organ I remove a glistening, jewel-like stone and with sticky,
blackened fingers, hold it up to my own eye. A spot of light cast by the stone
dances frantically on the walls of the sunlit room, attracting the attention of
the cat who positions himself with furtive urgency to stalk the flickering
apparition. Looking through the transparent gem I see the sky become the ocean
and the ocean become the sky as the whole of the world is refracted upside
down.
… when and where there are no shadows… where the shadows fall
in opposite directions… of daylight in the night…
The
ophthalmologist with the flowing hair explained that I was holding a
crystalline lens that once focused rays of light onto the retina of a rabbit. Their
eyes being similar to our own, rabbits can be used in lieu of human subjects
particularly when it would be unethical to use humans, she continued; for
example, if one wanted to study the effects of nuclear radiation on vision one
couldn’t use humans, which is why in the 1960s they placed rabbits rather than
humans at varying distances from small atomic bombs that were detonated by
scientists who were trying to understand the effects of nuclear radiation on
eyes. The results were to be expected: the rabbits placed 42 miles from the
site of the explosion received retinal burns larger than those placed 300 miles
away. Thanks to this study, she told me, we now know that the intense light
produced by nuclear bombs can cause temporary or permanent blindness.
I
don’t remember if we continued the dissection, but if we had we would not have
found the iridescent, blue membranous layer called the tapetum lucidum which
lies behind the retina of nocturnal animals. By reflecting light back into the
eye for a second time, the tapetum lucidum improves night vision and is
responsible for the bright eyeshine seen in deer, cats, dogs, deep sea animals
and other creatures who roam the darkness. Being diurnal, rabbits lack this feature,
and on the day of the experiments I should say it is thankfully so for one
cannot imagine what kind of fantastic eyeshine would have flashed from those
eyes as they beheld the infernal and blinding light of the explosions intended, as it were, for their own private spectacle.
…on showers of milk, blood, iron, wool, flesh and baked
tiles… on the sound of trumpets heard in the sky…
Working
as part of the avant-garde in post-war Japan, Tetsumi Kudo envisioned an
ecology in which humanity, technology and polluted nature merged into a
symbiotic whole. In his sculptures from the mid-seventies, primordial and seemingly residual lifeforms are born from the carnal union
of batteries, fungi, thermometers, genitalia and stray parts of the human body, and mingle
in orgiastic decay such as one might find blossoming on the walls of a
Chernobylist theatre. It can be difficult to reconcile the coexistence of
horrific, erotic and comic elements in Kudo’s work. His innate sense of
humor, use of vibrant color and the satiric pathos of his assemblages seduce
attention and empathy at the same time that undercurrents of violence and
perversion repel easy appreciation. For many, the grotesque and absurd
conglomerations of severed parts of the human body and foreign objects—organic,
technological and kitsch—have a distinctly dystopian and macabre tone. But one
might also understand Kudo’s synthesis of these elements as a desire for union
or reunion, in which humanity and nature merge in harmony and balance. I wonder,
can one ever return to what was never let go of? Did such a split ever really
happen? In the context of feminist writing on monsters by theorists such as
Barbara Creed, Donna Haraway and others, abject hybrids like Kudo’s become
hopeful metaphors for a new world order that rejects notions of categorical
purity and human exceptionalism in a garden without origins, somewhere between
a dream that’s been forgotten and the nightmare eternally that returns.
…animals born of beings that have not yet been born
themselves… of bodies which have a third nature, or of bodies which are animal
and vegetable combined…
In
the winter of 2018, I attended a black-tie event at the New York Public Library
hosted by the Berggruen Institute, an independent think-tank based in Los
Angles. The event was held in honor of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, the
recipient of that year’s cash prize of one million dollars. Along with the
other artist fellows of the institute, I took my name-tagged place in the great
hall as a meal was being
served prior to the ceremonies. It was here, in a seat next to NT, a Stanford
professor of synthetic biology, that I first encountered the idea of Earth’s “life-well.” Organisms, NT explains, are
constrained not only by their environments and the need to reproduce, but also
by the lineage of lifeforms that came before them. With the ability to modify
biology at the genetic level we are learning that all lifeforms that have ever
existed on Earth represent only a snow-flake on the iceberg of possible
lifeforms… what if we were able to liberate life’s design from the constraints
of lineage and enter a new world of possibilities? This post-Darwinian vision
of unfettered freedom from genetic ancestry, which has become entirely
plausible thanks to gene editing technologies such as CRISPR, is what NT calls
“stepping out of Earth’s life-well.” Earth’s ‘life-well,’ which in NT’s
metaphor is the world we live in, is a dark and mucky hole, a living crypt if
you will, in which humanity and nature are trapped by the constraints of ancestry,
reproduction and the environment. The hopeful wish is that through bioengineering,
we will escape and transcend this “prison.”
… marvelous properties belonging to certain fishes… places
where fish will eat from a human hand….places where fish recognize the human
voice…
NT
is a kind of scientist one rarely comes by these days— he is a lover of literature
and feminist scholarship; he speaks almost entirely in metaphor and his sense
of humor gives him an irresistible nutty charm. A quick internet search reveals
the scope of his achievements, influence and passion within the field of
synthetic biology. And yet his dream of stepping out of Earth’s life-well still
makes me irritable and queasy to this day. What he sees as a liberation from
ancestry I have come to see as a loss of rich connection with extended kinship
networks. Is it not humbling and beautiful in the midst of COVID-19 to remember
that eight percent of human DNA is of viral origin? Or that microbes outnumber
the quantity of human cells composing our bodies by a factor of ten to one,
making this ‘thing’ we call human actually mostly something else? Where the human begins and ends has become
increasingly ambiguous; these forms of connectedness remind us of the
interspecies entanglements that characterize living things at every level.
It
is not that I value the ‘natural’ bonds of ancestry and symbiosis over
‘artificially’ reconfigured bonds of genetically designed organisms. Of course
the venomous cabbages whose cells produce scorpion poison (modified to be
harmless to humans but lethal to pests) are not outside these webs of
connection and, in fact, they probably have a lot to teach us about the leaky
continuums holding us all together. But rather than considering lineage as a
hinderance from which we must liberate ourselves, what would it mean to look at
the ways in which we are bound to each other as something to protect rather
than escape from?
…of marvelous births… of monstrous births… of those who have
been cut from the womb…
It
is ironic that a gene-splicing technology invented 3.5 billion years ago by
bacteria (now commonly called CRISPR) has been celebrated as humankind’s ultimate triumph over
nature and is expected (or hoped) to herald in some kind of “post-historical” future. In looking back to early naturalists such as Pliny the Elder,
whose Naturalis historia is among the earliest encyclopedias in the West as well as
one of the very first compendiums of natural phenomena, one finds that his
category of ‘nature’ maps quite differently onto the world than the one we
commonly operate with today. In fact, humans are an integral part of his vision
of nature, their presence weaving in and out of chapters on plants, animals and
the climate at times seemingly arbitrarily. Human technologies are also
discussed at great length in Pliny’s account as these things were not
considered separate from nature. Indeed, the idea of two mutually exclusive and
antithetical realms composed of nature on the one side and culture on the other
is simply not present. Pliny’s general approach to categorization defies our
modern conception of how the world is ordered—reminding us that nature is not
something that exists “out there,” its secrets waiting to be revealed and
dominated, but rather it is in fact historical and subject to change. This is
not to say that it is only a construction of art and science, but rather that
it seems to be continually emerging, existing in multiple, paradoxical forms at
once.
In
the midst of an on-going ecological collapse I wonder what new kind of nature
is coming into view today, and how are the discourses and interests of
environmental conservation, activism, capitalism, settlement and biotechnology
among others yet again actively reformulating this Protean figure? How can we
“save” what we can’t even define or point to?
…of the dimensions of the world… of stones that have fallen
from the clouds, and of the rainbow…
This essay was written as a companion piece to the two-channel video, That the Earth is the Middle of the World (2020). The italicized phrases were adapted from the table of contents of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia.
Still image from Meat Voices, single-channel HD video & sound, (2019- present).
Still image from Meat Voices, single-channel HD video & sound, (2019- present).