S3E6: Foraging
Transcript
MM: Mary Mattingly
SB: Sara Blaylock
LK: Lutz Koepnick
Introduction
MM:
So it started with an idea, you know, what if like clean water is a human right? What if food could be that way too? And what could a city like New York look like and how could it function if that was the case here?
LK:
This is Mary Mattingly, a New York based artist. She is talking about her long-term project Swale, a floating barge that allows visitors to jointly steward the land and pick berries, herbs, and other food items for free. In today’s episode of Art of Interference, we speak with Mary about her work, her aesthetics of foraging, and how it seeks to move us beyond dominant paradigms of extraction. I am Lutz Koepnick, today’s host of Art of Interference, and as guest and co-host I have Sara Blaylock with me today. Hi Sara.
SB:
Hi, Lutz
LK:
Sara is an art historian teaching at the University of Minnesota. She has done a lot of work on artists who engage with the public outside the box of the regular art world, artists who think of art as a common good. Also, Sara recently co-organized a workshop in Liverpool that allowed an intriguing group of people from either side of the Atlantic to, among other, rethink the role of foraging and art amid our world of climate emergencies.
SB:
Thanks for having me, Lutz. Usually, the “civilized” world looks at foragers as relics of the past—people just scraping by. But if we look through the lens of thinkers like Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and James C. Scott, the story flips. Foraging isn’t a lack of progress; it’s a sophisticated, often rebellious, way of being. It challenges the paradigm of extraction, the way modern power and capitalism have come to organize our lives and engineered Earth into a mere resource, a tool to play out one-dimensional ideas of progress.
LK:
Let’s start with Tsing. In her work, specifically The Mushroom at the End of the World, she talks about the matsutake mushroom. These things thrive in “human-disturbed” forests—the ruins of capitalism, essentially.
SB:
She argues that foraging is an art of noticing, of non-extractive attentiveness. In a world obsessed with efficiency and monocrops, the forager is an expert in what she calls “assemblage.” They see the hidden connections between the soil, the trees, and the seasons that the industrial or capitalist eye totally misses. “Foraging, she writes “is a multispecies performance. It’s the art of living in the ruins without trying to pave them over.”
LK:
And that’s where James C. Scott comes in. If Tsing makes us think about the art of foraging as an art of collaborative survival, Scott gives us the politics. In his book Against the Grain, he talks about how early and more modern states hate people who move. States want “legibility”—they want you in one place, growing grain, so they can tax you and count you and control your movements.
SB:
Foragers for him are the ultimate “illegible” citizens. By relying on the wild, they bypass the supermarket, the tax man, and the grid. Foraging becomes a tactic of evasion, a strategy to undermine systems of control and governance. It’s not that early foragers couldn’t farm; it’s that they often chose not to because they valued their autonomy more than the “security” of a kingdom or a state bureaucracy. And that’s where Swale and Mary Mattingly’s work fit in.
LK:
Imagine walking down to a New York City pier and discovering a lush, edible forest floating on a decommissioned barge. That’s Swale, launched in 2016. Itwasn’t just a garden; it was a provocative “living laboratory” designed to bypass a strange legal quirk: in NYC, it’s generally illegal to grow or forage food on public land. By taking to the water, Mattingly created a floating commons where anyone could harvest fresh berries, kale, and herbs. In her own words:
MM:
Swale is a floating food for us where people can come to pick fresh food for free. So. You’re welcome to pick anything on here. There are a lot of edibles and also medicinal plants. Part of the point of Swale is to get onto the water, to get people onto the water, to get excited about the water.
SB:
What I love about this project is that Swale was a true masterclass in regenerative design, using filtered river water to sustain an ecosystem of over a hundred species. Beyond the greenery, Swale challenged our perceptions of public space and food security in urban “deserts.” It’s a brilliant bit of artistic subversion that asks: why shouldn’t fresh food be a public right? It’s part sculpture, part protest, an effort to rewild our streamlined ways of life, and all things told entirely delicious.
MM:
Our ideal is that there would be lots of forageable spaces all around New York City. So you could be on your lunch break and you could pick apples from a tree, and the health that is in that apple that’s fresh off of the tree as opposed to being in a supermarket and sitting on a shelf for weeks is just enormous.
LK:
Foraging, according to Anna Tsing, is what you do when the world—like ours—starts to fall apart all around you. Matsutake foragers explore what it might mean to live with environmental disturbance; they offer one model of collaborative survival on a damaged planet.
SB:
Mary Mattingly’s work takes up similar questions. It responds to a world in which ecologies are out of balance, but instead of simply cultivating feelings of loss and grief, her work asks how we, as a species, might live alongside others—without assuming total harmony or falling back on domination. Like Tsing’s mushroom foragers, her practice inhabits the ruins of modern capitalism.
LK:
So, in today’s episode, we talk with Mary Mattingly about the path that led her to do this work. We hear her thoughts on time and history, on collaborating with human and nonhuman entities, and on what we might learn from plants, water, and soil as we try to become better stewards of our planet.
SB:
And we also hear from the workshop participants we held this summer in Liverpool on ecological thought and speculative methods for retrieving lost futures. They didn’t pick berries from floating barges or forage for mushrooms, but they share a range of perspectives on the relationship between art and foraging today—and what it might mean to live, and to live well, amid the disturbed ecologies of our present moment.
PART ONE
LK:
Mary Mattingly is an unusually interdisciplinary artist whose work, in her own words, explores “ecological relationships through sculptural ecosystems and collage.” Over the last two decades, she has worked with and across numerous media: photography, installation, sound, and collage, and if you wish soil, seeds, and in particular water as well. In her efforts to redefine art as an ecosystem, she never tires to reflect on the materials—the media, the minerals, the resources—that make art, or for that matter, art in any medium possible. Water takes on an important role in almost all her work, so I was curious to learn more about the different tributaries that make up her career as an artist:
MM:
I was starting with a background in photography and trying to combine that photographic work with making these sculptures that I felt were quite necessary for the moment. Maybe they addressed my fears and concerns. I was trying to build these sculptures that I called wearable homes. And they were these three-part systems. One was for a desert, one was for an Arctic, and one was for a waterlogged tundra. So three tundra situations that I felt would be more and more prevalent and common in the near future.
LK:
The Wearable Homes project started in 2006. It was meant to address pressing questions about climate migration and how design can foster new structures of mutual aid. The project gained unexpected echoes during the COVID-19 pandemic and the monastic, isolated life it imposed on us.
MM:
The wearable homes addressed those tundras and supported the wearer. They took the form of like a pretty long-term photographic project as well as a product where I experimented with using these homes in different scenarios, whether I was in Oregon and I would go to the high desert in Oregon to use the tent slash sleeping bag that would roll up and become something portable during the day.
I did that work for a while and found that I was getting more and more fearful of a future that was becoming more and more present and was becoming also less and less engaged with people in my community and was kind of buried in scientific research, not doing anything to maybe respond more positively to it. And I remember a turning point with finishing a project and somebody asked me what would be next. And sometimes that, sometimes a question like that, can be really helpful in a moment where you feel stuck and you feel like incredibly negative about maybe the state of the world as you’re seeing it, understanding it and what you can do in it. And I think that was a moment where I thought I have to do something pretty drastically different. And in my case it was to look for community through art. I started to focus on making the sculptures larger to include more people. I thought of sculptures as something that was wearable to something that became spherical. Something that could encompass potentially many, but that was porous.
LK:
In the early and mid 2010s, Mary created public work such as the “Flock House,” the “Triple Island” and the “Torus” sculptures that combine architectural structures with more organic elements and they invited audiences to speculative journeys. She also started her widely noted “House and Universe” project—a series of photographs and performances that featured Mary bundling all her possessions into large sculptures and hauling them through different urban and industrial landscapes.
MM:
And that then transformed again into what I would call like a human-assisted living system where it wasn’t maybe these sorts of cloaked technologies and these wearable sculptures, but it was really, um, an instrument that held water, that held soil and plants that I was growing and that could be read as almost an aquaponic system to an extent that needed human attention as a way to care for the non-human worlds and somewhat enclosed in a porous environment to see when something was maybe off about it, to see if it was an issue that could be addressed by the humans who were involved in it. So really a monitoring and a keeping alive of this small-scale ecosystem was something that just really compelled me to work in a different way.
LK:
Water, in Mary’s projects over the years, takes on an ever more important role. She creates large complex sculptures called Water Clocks. They look a bit like Rube Goldberg structures but attune audiences in public settings to reconsider their scales, their sensing of time. She captures the slow formation of ocean salt in a series of sculptures and photographs, drawing awareness to issues of water scarcity and the human transformation of natural landscapes. And she pursues long-term collaborations such as Swale, her forest gardens and foraging sites that live on the water, not just to bypass city laws, but showcase the elemental life-giving powers of Earth’s hydrosphere.
MM:
Yeah, I think it probably came from my childhood and growing up in a place where water was really contended with in so many ways, uh, where it often times flooded in the spring. And I remember we would always have to pale water out of the basement where we at one point realized that the water wasn’t potable, although we had been drinking it for years. Because it had just recently again been tested and found that the same, the same chemicals that were banned agriculturally were still being used. And that then pointed me directly outside of my own environment.
LK:
Mary in fact got engaged into ongoing conversations about the privatization of water in countries as far as Bolivia and susbsequent efforts to make it a common good again. Which eventually brought her back to think harder about water struggles in the US as well.
MM:
I wondered what the future would be for access to water and that trying to sort of examine, wonder, uh, learn more about water systems in the area I grew up in, outside of Springfield, Massachusetts. And now living in New York City where we have a very highly controlled water system called New York City’s Drinking Watershed, which encompasses much of the state of New York and essentially extracts water from many different communities, has pushed people out, has flooded areas, has moved entire communities to other locations. You know that this is an ongoing struggle. This is something that certain places and peoples do better than others, and everybody’s fighting at the same time as learning from one another. And everybody’s connected in this really deep way. So I think really with water, water is where it started.
LK:
And this, of course, is where Swale comes into the picture and some related water-based food and forgaing projects Mary has done since. Or better: float in.
BBC Speaker:
A new way to try to tackle the lack of available land to grow vegetables in a city has been dreamed up and of all places. New York, a barge constructed out shipping containers is being constructed to become a floating food forest. It will be part farm and part. Art project.
MM:
Well, the Floating Food Forest was pretty much a collaborative idea. It was, um, thought up by me initially, but I worked with a lot of different groups and about 15 Organizers to put it together to this phase right now. So people can come on to swale and pick fresh free food, stay, um, hang out, there’ll be events and then they can come back.
LK:
Built atop a reclaimed 130-by-40-foot sand barge, the project served as a “floating food forest” where visitors could forage for fresh produce for free. The barge featured a variety of perennial, salt-tolerant plants and utilized a rainwater collection system and a filtration system that cleaned river water for irrigation. Since picking food on New York City’s 30,000 acres of public land has been illegal for nearly a century, Swale utilized marine common law to circumvent these land-based regulations, making foraging legally possible while on the water.
MM:
The benefits for people all over the city for more access to free, fresh food are incredibly important now, and it’s a resiliency measure. And anyway, all of those things led to think through the water as a place to forage that’s public. That could be docked adjacent to public parks. So it could in essence be a provocation to the parks department to say, “Hey, this is a place where you can forage. It’s working right here. People are coming on board and are able to pick. Apples, berries, herbs, uh, why can’t this happen in the park?” And I think that in that sense, Swale wanted to be an example for the Parks department to say, if it can happen here, why can’t it happen there? You know, we were able to get access to one park and growing space in one park where anybody can come 24 hours a day and forage. And I think that that’s the start of something. And you could see that if more people get involved, if more people want to, then it could, it could kind of grow from there.
LK:
The word swale usually refers to a low-lying stretch of land—often wet—a kind of channel that helps manage water runoff. It’s not the kind of landscape people tend to value. In fact, swales are often seen as marginal, even as a kind of wasteland—land that doesn’t easily lend itself to modern agriculture, or to the kinds of political structures and hierarchies early grain-based societies developed.
But that’s part of what makes them interesting, of course. Like the hybrid spaces Anna Tsing writes about in her work on matsutake foragers, swales are disturbed environments. Landscapes in ruins, if you wish. And precisely because of that, they open up new ways of thinking about coexistence—about forms of interdependence and survival that don’t fit neatly within the logic of modern capitalism, where the nonhuman world is so often reduced to a resource, a site of extraction. Mary’s swale project is all about constructing or reconstructing a modern equivalent of old boglands, to embrace disturbed or hybrid places as spaces of transformative collaboration and reciprocity—a modern forager’s utopia.
INTERFERENCE 1
MM:
What if like clean water is a human right? What if food could be that way too?
SB:
Wow. Those are big questions. Ambitious ones.
LK:
Absolutely. Together with your colleague Sarah James from the Manchester University School of Art, you invited me to participate in a workshop earlier this year that tackled similar questions. It wasn’t about foraging, but it discussed what it might take to move beyond our extractivist past. What was this workshop all about?
SB:
Sarah and I both share a specialization in the history of art from the German Democratic Republic. While we’ve known one another since about 2013, we collaborated a few years ago on an exhibition called “Anti-Social Art,” which took place at the Tweed Museum of Art on my campus right around the time our books on the GDR came out with the MIT Press in 2022. While Sarah’s book Paper Revolutions explores artists whose politics were squarely rooted to improving state socialism, those in my book Parallel Public were quite fed up with formal mechanisms of political change.
Because state politics were extraordinarily hierarchical in the GDR, on a grassroots level the population claimed quite a bit of agency. We were both really energized by the idea of bringing together a small group of scholars, artists, and cultural workers whose interests promote art as a social good, kind of loosely defined. I’m really energized by art that acts as a material basis for community building, and Sarah’s twinned interest in how art can serve to translate and perhaps offer alternatives to climate and social catastrophe brought us together.
LK:
At the end of this gathering, I asked a few of the participants about their idea of foraging—in general and then more specifically how it might work as a principle of art making, art curation, or art viewing. Everyone was gathered in the Observatory’s communal kitchen, helping Lucy—the center’s fabulous chef—to prepare dinner. Naturally, I asked Lucy first to respond to the first of my two questions.
Lucy:
I think it’s great if you’ve got time, and it’s great if you’ve got no money as well. Yeah, you can find treasures in all sorts of places. And I think you can kind of, like, learn your local landscape a little bit as well. Which is kind of fun. I lived in Cornwall for a couple of years and did a lot of sea foraging. Seaweeds and things that grow in moist, salty climates basically.
LK:
Did you eat them? Did you cook them?
Lucy:
Oh, yeah. One in particular that I found, which grew in, like, all of the stone walls around Cornwall, is this, like, fleshy little, kind of in the watercress family, called wall pennywort, and it’s super, super nutritious. And you can just pick it, put it in smoothies, blend it. It’s quite mild. It’s, like, a little bit peppery but super delicious. And I was just like, “This is everywhere. Like, why is, why is no one eating this?”
Sarah James:
I’m Sarah Edith James. I’m Professor of Visual Culture at Manchester School of Art, where I teach on art history and theory and histories of the Cold War and contemporary. I’m, like, local. This is my local observatory. Okay. But now it’s a research center, an artistic research center. And all of the people here: we have artists, we have curators, we have thinkers, unconventional thinkers, right?
Valentin Diakonov:
I’m Valentin Diakonov, curator of modern contemporary art at the Whitworth University of Manchester. I was thinking of foraging as something that presents a contemporary understanding of a possible ecological being in the world for a lot of people, a lot of artists, and not only artists, a lot of communities. And it reminds me very much of a concept that Marx has put forward quite a while ago, uh, the concept of Urkommunismus, the prehistoric communism. According to Marx, there were prehistoric societies that lived on land without violent extraction. They were all helping each other find things because the land was already plentiful enough for them not to think about the divisions of labor that create inequality. According to archaeologists who tested his hypothesis over and over again in relation to all kinds of societies that can be documented, there was no Urkommunismus in any of them. But interestingly enough, in the Soviet context, in the nineteen twenties, in the early revolutionary times, there was this great idealistic drive in thinking of communities in Russia that were not industrialized, not urbanized, as maybe potentially representing this wonderful future of foraging. And when the Stalinist industrialization came into effect, all of those ideas were completely discarded. When I think about what we have now in the urbanized post-industrial world, where we own a fraction of what could be owned, right? We usually don’t own land. We have commons, but we don’t own a lot of commons. Foraging is what we kind of do all the time. And I feel if we’re not corporations, we are foragers. We kind of have to forage all the time for everything, including our identities, including our ways of, you know, making whatever could be made in the world. So it’s a productive, very contemporary principle. It is a very contemporary principle in this– in a wider sense. It relates to almost everything we do. Yeah. Yeah.
Emilia Terracciano:
My name is Emilia Terracciano. I’m a lecturer in the history of modern art with a special focus on the histories of the Global South in the art history department at the University of Manchester. I do forage with my son. So, for example, nettles, uh, dandelion leaves, elderflower, berries, all kinds of berries. There’s a particular type of seaweed that grows in Wales that we sometimes forage, which is fantastic. Kale, wild fennel, sometimes you find radish or wild garlic. So various things which also you can find in Italy, which is where I mainly grew up. It’s a knowledge that I acquired through my mom; it’s passed on. I think we all potentially are quite plant-blind. We don’t know the names of trees and plants or, let alone, demonized weeds. Whenever I recognize and rejoice in the act of foraging, I also think about that passing of information that has taken place over at least decades—yes, in, in my, my own lifespan and hope to pass on. I don’t think my son is remotely interested. He’s only two years old, but I hope that one day he’ll be a great forager. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Chris Williams-Wynn:
I’m Christopher Williams Win. I’m an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and I work on modern and contemporary art in a global context.
LK:
I asked Chris whether he in his role as an academic understands himself as a forager. Or what that could possibly mean.
Chris Williams-Wynn:
I think I would admit to it, yes. I mean, I call myself professionally an art historian, but I… One of the things that’s interesting to me about artistic practice and artistic production, and I, and in, in that I include critics and curators and others in the field, is this drawing on other disciplines, on other frameworks, on other concepts, and building something new out of these. But always this movement towards something else, and how that something else can be transformed potentially or placed in relation to other things. I like to think of myself somewhat as a bit undisciplined or indisciplined. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a beautiful term. Yeah.
Katerina Korola:
Hi. I’m Katarina Carolla, and I’m an art historian specializing in photography.
LK:
While we’re talking, you’re holding in your hand a, a leaf that you found earlier outside. Yes. Are you a forager?
Katerina Korola:
Yeah. I was thinking about whether it was just like, oh, because you’re not supposed to. So I’ve just, um, taken a little bit of, uh, fern from the forest, and I will put it between two pages of a book I’m reading and try not to move it too much on my way home. And then a few months from now, when I pick up the book again, because I will surely have forgotten that I put this leaf in it, um, I will find the leaf, and then I’ll think back to the time I spent at the Bidston Observatory in England talking with my colleagues.
LK:
A moment of wonder.
Sarah James:
My last foraging tale was, was, uh, was not a good one. It was foraging in Frankfurt and. Amazing mushrooms, morels. I’m a massive morel fan. And I don’t think they were bad mushrooms, but I was so excited with how many we found, I ate a vast amount of them and went on a very strange like morel-induced
LK:
… oh, they were a little magic?
Sarah James:
I think so. I think … But maybe, maybe if you, maybe … ‘Cause they’re such a luxury you would never normally eat so many, right? But I love that coming together of like something that is supposedly now luxurious, yeah? But was something that would be really not at all, like rare.
LK:
I mean, just to make this clear for also your academic administrators there weren’t any magic mushrooms involved.
Sarah James:
No, there were no magic mushrooms. There were no magic mushrooms. Let’s, let’s be clear, and this was sponsored by the British Academy, and no hallucinogenics were involved in the making of this workshop. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you.
LK:
At the end of my foraging trip through the kitchen, I circled back to Lucy, the chef. I was curious whether any of the food we were about to eat was foraged too? And if so whether she’d actually let us know.
Lucy:
I actually did bring some bits, uh, from the garden, though to put in, to put in the food. Just the bay leaves. Not much is in season at the moment. Looking forward to eating that tonight. Yeah. Thank you. You’re welcome.
PART TWO
LK:
Mary Mattingly started out as a photographer and still maintains her photographic practice: to enjoy the art of introverting, as she told me, amid the complex demands of her public art and social practice projects. Overall, however, her work involves a lot of planning and negotiation. Not just with different artistic collaborators, but with public authorities, engineers, local interest groups, grant agencies. You name it. She somewhat unexpectedly enjoys such behind-the scenes work as well. It’s part of her collaborative ethos.
MM:
I’ve loved collaborating with people who have a different sense of building than I do. Maybe an engineer or an actual builder or people who are interested in breaking down silos as well. And fundraisers are fascinating to me. What I learned from collaboration with people is the need to compromise. A project starts from one place, maybe considered by one or a few people, but then can grow and become something else. The more people you are able to work with and engage in an idea.
And I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Maybe with a project like Swale where it’s not always that people might be collaborating on, on this boat project, but there’s a larger group of people who are working toward an idea of public food or what that can be, what it can be to have more access to food and public space.
LK:
The process behind Mary’s installations can be pretty mind-boggling. It takes a huge amount of diplomacy and negotiation to bring these projects into being. For many artists, that level of collaboration—and the compromises that come with it—might feel limiting, even a bit claustrophobic. But Mary sees it differently.
MM:
It is really a creative space. You’re looking for creative ways to reframe something or or loopholes to find in some sort of a policy where you see it an opening up. Maybe it’s that idea of working within certain limitations that gives you more space to think expansively. I find that that is something that I enjoy
LK:
I asked her whether she considered water and plants—the driving forces of her aesthetics of public foraging—collaborators as well.
MM:
I have to admit that I’ve thought I’ve thought about collaboration as more of a human to human potential. But I see it. I have a broadening understanding of what collaboration can be when thinking through non-humans, plants that I might be working with, cultivating, growing, caring for, and I would love to have this maybe collaborative exchange. I think I need to learn a lot more before I can, and I think I need to have a deeper understanding of different languages. Not just human languages. And that I think involves patience and time, which I sometimes give myself. But I think the fun of collaboration is really that ability to learn from one another. And that certainly happens through working with water, which I would consider a big teacher. And certainly happens working with plants. Plants teach me about patience and time, different timescales.
LK:
We have touched on this issue of different timescales, the question of deep time, our relation to planetary or nonhuman time, we have touched on all this repeatedly this season already. Our final episode this year—it will be called “rocks”—will dig much deeper into this and explore how artists and geologists today can learn from each other in addressing the planetary crises of the twenty-first century. But time is a central theme in Mary’s work as well. And like the rock artist and scientist we will talk to in our final episode, Mary too seeks to push our understanding of time beyond the narrow box of human everyday perception.
MM:
Yeah, with the water clocks, I’ve thought a lot about what it would mean to be on tidal time or what it would mean to be on glacial time. And I think, you know, time is, obviously I’m generalizing, but something that we’re all constantly thinking about. Right. And, and it’s a, it’s an ever-present, you know, when is rent due? Could it instead of be at the first of the month, could it be after the next dry spell?
Is there a way to think about nature and non-humans in the timescales that we live by? I overheard somebody talking about this idea that decisions that we might make every day can be thousand-year decisions, that we’re making when we go to the grocery store and we buy something in a package. We’re making these long-term decisions about the worlds that our, our ancestors will inhabit. That our kin will inhabit that, you know, we are inhabiting. And I think there’s a way maybe to combine time systems to try to understand a diversity of time that could become part of our daily lives.
LK:
Time is a big topic, a medium, of Mary’s practice. The different water sculptures she has made over the years, they don’t simply measure, they embody time. Or think of the role of soil and food in her practice, growing crops and plants outside the confines of contemporary food supply chains. They need time to do their work.
SB:
Foragers, if I may chime in here, are certainly mindful about time as well, or what Mary calls the diversity of time. You can’t forage or find something simply because you want or need to find it. You certainly also don’t want to over-forage and thus impoverish future growth. You instead need to be much more mindful about the time, the live spans, the cycles and often erratic rhythms of what you seek to gather—or assemble, as Anna Tsing would say.
LK:
You know, I think Mary had something quite similar on her mind when she told me
MM:
If atomic time has become our common language, you know, from which industry can flow, from which work can be counted for pay, and it’s an industrialization, it’s a commodification of time. There’s clearly so much space for different timescales to come together and for people to, I think, be present or sensitized to other timescales.
SB:
One of Mary’s early projects I am really fond of is a series of pieces on the timescales of cobalt, its extraction for all kinds of purposes—for military and consumer electronics
LK:
Initially she, was drawn to cobalt because of its vibrant blue hue, a color she has long loved and frequently incorporated into her “On Being Blue” series.
MM
When cobalt is in chemical form and it’s heated up to about 3000 degrees, it can transform into this intense blue, uh, when it cools. So people make glass with that and porcelain and, and other things. And, um, it’s just a pigment for paint. And that I think was. When I, when I would see stuff like that, I realized that this is something that I really wanted to explore more and figure out where it comes from and what else it’s used for.
SB:
Yeah. But then, after this initial love affair with cobalt Mary also started to explore what she considered the deep-seated “poetic contradictions” of cobalt’s uses in photography, a technology whose material existence heavily depends on this hard and brittle metal. Each quick picture we take rests on and consumes geological elements thousands or millions of years in the making. Some of Mary’s work on the paradoxes of cobalt was done around Lake Superior, where I live. Which makes it particularly salient for me.
MM:
It’s really remarkable to note the speed of extraction and how much time it’s taken for those minerals to accumulate or those elements to accumulate in the ground and how quickly we can use them up for the speed of life, which so many people are used to.
And I think that was one reason I wanted to delve into the camera specifically. And I was able to research cobalt more in depth because I was in a place in the US where cobalt had been. It had started to be mined again after decades of not being affordable to mine. It really, in this country, it’s less expensive in so many countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is where most of it is currently mined. Because of the US military’s need for cobalt, for the pure cobalt that has allowed for people to start mining it in this country again as a sort of a stockpile for the military as a backup for the military. I could assume that as I’m purchasing a fairly new camera, that it probably contains cobalt from a mine that is being utilized in the contemporary moment and to trace all of the cobalt mines in the world and see where it’s being purchased. So you know that your camera is part of this war machine and I had to really think, think twice about using it at that point and really felt paralyzed learning more and more about the supply chain of cobalt.
LK:
When talking to Mary about this project, we were very curious to hear whether this paralysis changed her long-term relationship to her camera, the very photographs she captured about cobalt mining and shipment sites or any other things.
MM:
I wanted to understand photography as one of the, um, most democratic forms of social justice. You can take a photo that can resonate, that can change law, that can, um, be so important in the fight for justice around the world. Yet at the same time, it has this backend that is so unjust that you have to really think twice about using it. And I think I wasn’t sure if I was taking advantage of every photograph enough to feel right about using it.
SB:
Do you know that the English cobalt actually derives from the middle high German Kobold.
LK:
As a native German speaker I probably should, shouldn’t I. But I don’t, really.
SB:
In middle-high German it means goblin, or household spirt, it’s often used to describe mischievous creatures that can have toxic effects. German folklore is full of such Kobolds, they are omnipresent in the Grimm’s fairytales.
LK:
That might actually explain what Mary did with some of her cobalt images later: she cut them apart, collaged them, as if to exorcise the evil spirits that haunt modern photography . . .
SB:
. . . or less theologically speaking, to derail thoughtless uses of photography and restore some sense of poetry amid our disenchanted, extractivist present.
MM:
With photography, how could it be less consumption and more production? And I think utilizing what was already there and in my life, what images were there, what images I could find that I could cut up and then repurpose felt a lot like the sculptures I wanted to make. I think that repurposing of materials, that transformation, that finding another life and that also saying amidst all of this. Struggle that you find embedded in the image. There’s still place for poetry.
INTERFRENCE TWO
SB:
I really like this idea of poetry as a kind of repurposing…in fact, thinking of poetry as a kind of life and linguistic foraging is pretty enticing. Because, like foraging, writing a line of poetry is intentional, and it is also transitory, even transitional…a place where consumption and production meet, become equals, and then double back on themselves. Foraging is both intentional and also improvisational, and is thus both a nice metaphor and a practice for life…for making life an artform, even.
LK:
One of the texts you and Sarah James asked us to read in preparation for the workshop was a short 1986 essay by science fiction writer Ursula LeGuin called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In this essay, LeGuin argues that storytelling has been too dominated by the “heroic” model of conflict, conquest, and weapons, when human culture may be better understood through containers: bags, baskets, and stories that gather, hold, and sustain life. She proposes fiction as a carrier bag rather than a spear: a form spacious enough for ordinary lives, relationships, fragments, ambiguity, and ongoing processes instead of a single triumphant plot.
SB:
Yeah, what she proposes is to think of art or literature more along the line of foraging, of the gatherer, rather than in terms of dominants model of arresting time and leaving signatures or shaping timeless works, of conquest, extraction, control, and domination—the hunter model.
LK:
And what I really like about this odd little essay is the fact that it thinks of foraging not just as a technique, a non-extracting way of engaging with the world around us, but as an aesthetic, a formal principle. So I asked some of the folks at your observatory workshop about their professional views of art as foraging. Their thoughts about LeGuin’s essay and forms of art that resist the hunter’s spear, that gatherers rather than extracts or leaves heavy footprints.
Here’s Katerina Korola again, the historian of photography:
Katerina Korola:
Foraging can actually be for many artists working today very integral to their photographic practices. Recently I’ve been thinking a bit with Jeff Wall’s work. Um, his, quite well-known essay, Liquid Intelligence, where he describes a dry optical versus a kind of liquid chemical understanding of photography, and the dry for him is associated with what he calls a ballistic modern understanding of vision versus the much more, unpredictable, um, fluid and relational chemical mode. I think for me, these are two twinned halves of photography that have always been together. And like to go back to Le Guin, function kind of like her carrier bag. So you know, if you’re thinking about the photographic surface itself, its sensitivities, it’s constantly gathering input. It continues to gather input even after it’s fixed. Um, it might yellow or the silver might oxidize and become a shiny iridescent surface. It’s not as fixed as we think of it . With the modern digital camera, you can say, “Oh, I’ll take a million. I ran out of storage on my phone. I’ll just buy more storage.” So I feel like that kind of attitude is still more in the hunter mode than in the forager mode. Whereas the forager might be, like, appreciating a moment that deserves to be photographed. It’s really hard to rewire yourself when you’re in a condition of, like, pure consumerist possibility.
This return to analog photography for a lot of people is precisely that kind of enforced limitation, knowing I have, 36 exposures and I need to be mindful about it, and thoughtful, and think like what photograph is worth taking. I think that’s a question also like the forager might think of, like which nutrients do I need? Which leaf will serve this purpose?
LK:
This is Emilia Terraciano, the scholar of contemporary art:
Emilia Terracciano:
So when I think about artists that work organically and draw from different places in making artworks, I think perhaps filmmakers more than painters. ‘Cause that transition is embedded in the medium. It’s also quite seamless. It’s also a way of storytelling that can move from the past to the present or from the future to the past in a more kind of smoother way. Painting I do tend to see it as a form of appropriation. I like the idea of a forager, which, uh, can be also a very romantic way of relating to the act of making. With foraging, there’s this immediacy and also drawing from one’s immediate context in situ. You can’t really rely on what’s like 10 miles away or to the future, right? So there’s that immediacy that is, uh, required for making art. So I think more of a suturing and a stitching through film, I think is an analogy that works best for the way I think.
LK:
Chris Williams-Wynn presented some thought about the unruly East-German artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt at the workshop. I asked him about whether and how her work fit the idea of foraging:
Chris Williams-Wynn:
What’s interesting to me is this idea that we’re foraging here a set of techniques. We’re taking material, we’re taking a set of processes that we learned, in her case, in a very controlled environment, and transferring this into an environment for her that was so much about artistic production, number one, but number two, about forging social connections. I think that’s fundamental, and I think that comes from, on the one hand, this, like, absolute expertise, this a-absolute sort of fluency with the machine that she’s established, but because of that fluency, she’s able to undo it. I think it’s a classic case of, you know, know the rules before you break the rules kind of thing.
LK:
And Valentin Daikonow, the curator who earlier in our conversation speculated about the affinities between foraging and Marx’s notion of Ur-Kommunism, offered some final thought about whether museum curators, not just artists, operate like foragers as well:
Valentin Diakonov:
Oh, absolutely. Of course. Basically, you just go around the cultural field, you go around the exhibitions and, uh, whatever collections, and you pick stuff that does not belong to you, and you reuse it for your cultural project.
It’s, it’s, it’s those, uh, ephemeral constellations. You forge something, it’s very ephemeral. You do an exhibition, and then it gets dispersed and everything’s fine. And you can’t control it. Yeah. Yeah. You can’t control it, really. You have to forage.
PART THREE & CONCLUSION
LK:
You have to forage. Foraging today obviously doesn’t solve the many problems of our extraction-based economies and unjust food-supply chains. We should also not be naïve about het fact that any call to harvest your own food will simply alleviate historic inequities.
SB:
What I value about Mary Mattingly’s work is that she is quite aware of these issues. Her interest in public food forests, in rethinking water as a commons, in the deep time of geological materials and media—all this is driven by this idea that humans relate to each other as they relate to the nonhuman environments they inhabit.
LK:
And vice versa. Our social interactions mirror the way we relate to what’s not us. That sense of reciprocity, of mutuality, deeply energizes Mary’s appearance in public as well. Her work has received tremendous public attention and she knows about the importance to speak about it to a larger public. But she never thinks of such talking as a one-way street; she loves metaphors to develop their own lives between speakers and listeners—and dissolve the lines between listening and speaking.
MM:
I think maybe there, there should be less, less speeches and more conversation.
I was able to go to SUNY Plattsburgh yesterday, and there was somebody in the discussion who was a nurse. I was talking about a water clock and I said, it’s, it’s like this water clock is like a body on life support and it’s, it constantly needs the water running through it.
And I had just read something, which is an incredible quote where he’s talking about a kidney failure. And he was in the hospital and he said something like, my kidneys are like marshes. I am hydrosphere. You know, and he talks about how interconnected his body is with the hydrosphere. And this nurse said, you know that our blood is essentially salt water. It is the sea. And I said, I have no idea. I mean, I’m thinking in metaphor all the time. Um, and I think that that is. The languages coming together are what’s so wonderful.
SB:
Less speeches, more conversations. I like that.
LK:
And this idea of conversations as place where different languages can come together, human and perhaps even nonhuman, is quite powerful as well. It fits very well with Mary’s position of art as a bridge—a space in which the imagination can mesh what society often tries to keep separate.
MM:
Art is bridge building and art is a way to connect, uh, one person to another. I think what artists can offer is alternatives. Like different ways of looking at climate, um, potentially solutions, but also just offer imagination. We are responding to stories and we’re also telling our own stories, and I think, um, this is one way that artists really relate to the issues of migration and climate change. And we’re also trying to invent new worlds or invent other possibilities.
LK:
Sara, you have worked quite a bit about different artists that have worked outside the box of the dominant art world. What’s your take on this idea of art as a bridge, as a facilitator of transgressive foraging? Some people might say: it’s not really art at all. It’s just a different version of social work. Or a cloaked form of environmental activism. Where’s the art in all this?
SB:
Oh, I like this idea of foraging as transgressive! I actually want to use the word subversive here. And what is this practice of art-as-foraging subverting? The commodity culture that overwhelms our environment, both on the macro scale of the earth and on the micro scale of our individual psyches. The research I have done offered me glances into the ways that art can offer a population an alternative to a larger social system that is limiting and oppressive.
Foraging is again a nice metaphor and a life practice…because the drive to subvert the status quo, requires us to look for and then authorize its alternative…to not only embody but implement an oppositional worldview that, as bell hooks writes both “opposes dehumanization” and “enables creative, expansive self-actualization.” Art is such an excellent way to self-actualize because it is material and dialogical; it is the mediation between my life and yours, a way to connect us…to keep us moving, to process, to challenge complacency.
LK:
Historically speaking, foragers tended to always push against processes of domestication; They often refused the subordination to the order of the state, its need to keep people sedentary, fixed in place. “Foraging,” writes art historian Emilia Terracciano, one of our interlocutors in Liverpool, “wild plants rewards those who harvest with care but also feeds those for whom reading the land is a matter of necessity and intense pleasure.”
SB:
Let’s be clear: foraging doesn’t really provide a formulate to repair our damaged planet, our damaged relationship to the world around us. But what I like about the idea is this: its unruly utopian spirit, it’s refusal not to surrender to the ruins of our present. Mary Mattingly certainly knows a thing or two about this.
MM:
I don’t know what it’s gonna be like here in the future. I don’t imagine that it’s gonna be any easier than it is now. It’s pretty hard now. So there’s something that sadly is utopian about this, and it’s utopian because we’re in a time where it feels like it’s such a stretch to have food considered a right or a service or public.
LK:
I think of foragers and artists as elective affinities amid our dire times. They insist on what we have in common and they act in concert with what is not us.
SB:
They believe in the promise of forgotten pasts and express their hope in unpredictable futures.
LK:
Against all odds of the present.
SB:
Against all odds.
LK:
Thanks Sara for joining me today and sharing your thoughts.
SB:
Thanks for having me and asking me to forage along.