The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to explore concerns of the 21st century. One UAL student was selected to visit one of our partnering institutions; Waltham Forest.
Nature, Art & Habitat Residency (NAHR), An ECO-Laboratory of Multidisciplinary Practice, located in Taleggio Valley, Bergamo, Italy, is a summer programme that aims to unfold and display a sensitive type of culture that relates to nature as a source of inspiration and a measure of available resources. The ultimate goal of NAHR is to unveil intimate links among all living organisms for more resilient development in which humans and nature are shown to coexist.
In this report, Anju Kasturiraj at Central Saint Martins shares their report as artist in residence at NAHR.
I arrived at the Soggiorno Mazzoleni wearing a dripping layer of summer brine and mosquito bites. While waiting in the house foyer, I ventured too far into the silence that only accompanies a sudden departure from the city. Before I completely lost my way, the house began to speak. The floors groaned and snored, a wasp paced in the doorway indecisively. Then came the mountain choir, as I tried to separate cricket and cicada songs; the ubiquitous church bells reminded me I had a body. Soon enough, my bones would learn to rattle and shake to these tiny booming rhythms too. This place is alive, and it wears its sense of duality, memory, and kinship like the ground wears a bursting skirt of albicocca in late July. Ilaria Mazzoleni, an architect, biomimicist, and founding organizer of NAHR, collected me in my post-carsick-numenosity and lead me to the room I would be staying in for two weeks.
The flat was made out of windows and sky. After I had unpacked and somewhat pulled myself together, I met Ilaria again for a project meeting. NAHR’s topic this year is soil, and I was there to create a short site-specific film in response. I shared fragments of my existing relationship to soil: my family’s history as agriculturalists, how my mother taught me to venerate soil as a living ancestor, what it means to be the colour of soil, and, as to be expected, something about Powers of Horror (1980). Ilaria helped colour the rest of my residency and making-process with a formative piece of advice, “soil should be the subject, not a metaphor.”
Research
I wanted to interrogate soil’s existence as a muddy ouroboros of life and death; the embryo for a germinating seed and the darkness of a burial. In Braiding Sweetgrass (2013), Potawatomi professor, biologist, and poet Robin Wall Kimmerer begins with a Haudenosaunee creation story. A flock of geese caught Sky Woman as she fell to the dark waters of earth, and lowered her to rest on the back of a turtle. They realized she needed land to survive, but even the strongest divers emerged empty handed against the water’s depths and currents. Finally, it was the gentle muskrat, who sacrificed himself and floated to the surface gripping a pawful of mud. It was the muskrat’s sacrifice, Sky Woman’s gratitude, and the other animals’ service which allowed her to spread the soil upon the turtle’s back and create the whole of the earth. The Quaran describes how Allah made man from clay, thus, humans will always have an intrinsic bond to the earth. While God created Adam from dust, Prometheus formed humans from clay and grew attached. Across time and place, soil has been our phenomenological material ancestor; where we begin, and where we decay. Soil is a womb, a grave, a house, and a skin. In typical ex-Catholic fashion, my existing understanding of soil was interwoven with my understanding of the body; my body. How has my body’s darkness and queerness been positioned by colonialism into a binary of threat and vulnerability? Is dirt dirty?
On my third day, we took a trip to the Val Taleggio Agricultural Cooperative. The valley has a vital history of cheesemaking and dairy agriculture; these practices are passed down as traditions and responsibilities. The cheese is raw and unpasteurized. During the entire cheesemaking process, the milk must always remain the same temperature as it was inside the cow. The cheese is handmade with elbow-deep movements and precise ritual. We saw the milk grow skin, then a body; curdling, forming, holding. I was given the opportunity to try a fresh dripping piece. It was primal and sweet, I hardly felt it slide down my throat because our body temperatures were so similar. I am often reminded that humans are animals, but I have never felt so aware of my positioning specifically as a mammal before.
Hexe: Derived from the Old High German “hagazussa,” referring to women who straddle the fences between the material and spiritual.
Hag [noun] an ugly old woman;
witch [noun] a woman who is supposed to have powers of magic, usually through working with the devil.
As I did further research on the region’s food heritage, I encountered the Lombardy folk tale “La Giubiana.” La Giubiana was a child-eating witch who lived in the forest. Local villagers lived in fear, until one mother, who was determined not to lose her child to the witch, set up a delicious trap. At night she lured La Giubiana out of the trees with a pot of risotto, so enticing, that the witch kept eating and eating, and did not notice the rising sun. La Giubiana was burned to death by the sun, and her decaying body nurtured barren grounds into fertile soil. There is speculation that “La Giubiana” is an etymological spawn of “Juno,” or “Jupiter.” Sant’Grata, one of the patron saints of Bergamo, was martyred for her refusal to worship Jupiter.
The soil became an intersection for histories and mythologies to entangle themselves in the serpent, into the skin and stomachs of the land. Soil troubles the distinction between the self and the other, the internal and the external. In my MA Performance Design & Practice Dissertation, A Mouthful of Soil: The Transubstantiation of Bodies in 1970s Performance Art and Film, I analyzed Marco Ferreri’s satirical La Grande Bouffe (1973), where a group of the bourgeois gather at a luxury villa with the intention to eat and stuff themselves to death. The villa begins to fall apart and become flooded with sewage and death, which is no longer contained within the body. Their hedonism was steeped in masculinity and upper class excess, in contrast to La Giubiana’s status as hagazussa. A childless woman troubles heterocapitalism’s notion of what a woman’s body is meant for, and I believe this feeds into the association with witches and cannibalistic infanticide. I wanted to explore these parallels further, through a revisionist deconstruction of La Giubiana and questions of reincarnation, nonlinear time, and the interconnectedness of soil and skin. In this version, La Giubiana uses clay soil to protect herself. In this version, she experiences pleasure and lives.
Process
In my initial proposal, I said I was going to make clay from the valley’s dirt. However, Ilaria suggested that the process of searching and identifying naturally-occurring clay would be more meaningful, and I took her advice. It took several days of hiking, collecting soil samples, and scaling riverbanks before I found naturally occurring clay. Time and fertility are knotted, ongoing threads throughout my work; I felt a simultaneous weaving and unraveling, when I finally found my clay site. The ground was a cracked yellow, surrounded by stone giants clad in their traditional moss and webbing. I shovelled dry clay into a mound and used a jagged rock as a pestle to break it down into a workable material. Each time I returned to the clay site, I climbed through the same boulders and allowed the same rock I fashioned into a crude tool to bruise my hand in the same place. I was reminded of how rock is a parent material to soil and began to develop my own physical understanding of how the earth’s materials hold us in their own cycles of ancestorhood.
From this clay and from water drawn from the Salzana river, I created two fertility figurines of pregnant women in labor, with crowning baby heads emerging. I made the decision not to filter twigs or small stones from the dry clay, because I wanted them to retain a holistic sense of place. Both figurines had a twig emerging from their nipple. I did not place the twigs there, but I intentionally refrained from removing them, especially after noticing their synchronicity.
The first figurine was small enough to hold in my peeling palm, I made her entirely out of clay. She was to be returned and eroded in the Salzana; Alpine waters full of stories and stones, smoothed into a slippery skin by the river’s insistence. I placed her in the water and the first to erode was the baby’s head; a water birth. After an hour, her features began to fade and I even mistook her for another stone; brown and slick with a protruding belly. She looked just like her ancestors. The second figurine was the size of a newborn, which means she was large enough for me to feel uncomfortable holding. I created this one in the ground at the clay site, as an altar in the tradition of land art. I shaped her belly and hips around a rock, which protruded from her birth canal as the baby’s head. I venerated her soil body by pouring milk over her, as a subversion and ode to the Shiva Lingam and housewarming ceremonies I grew up with. Traditionally, milk is poured over a phallic statue, as an act of offering, preservation, and material worship to the god Shiva. A new home becomes blessed as milk boils over the stove; a frothing maternal abundance, an omen of prosperity and health for the new inhabitants. She quickly attracted insects, and over the course of a week, adorned herself in a blanket of mold. Her off-screen declay is slow, and more closely resembles the breakdown of flesh.
Outcome and Intentions
I presented Le Tre Madri as a formative concept piece, at an intimate screening held at Soggiorno Mazzoleni. I am interested in continuing my work on themes of abjection, gendered esoterics, soil, and the material forms of ancestorhood. Towards the end of my residency, I had the chance to talk with Dr. Lucinda Coleman, a visiting dancer, choreographer, and Aboriginal Studies lecturer. She taught me that the Noongar word for “river” and “umbilical chord” are the same, bilya. She encouraged and challenged me to continue my research, and I am hungry to disrupt my existing grasp and further depart from Western-centric concepts of absence. Bodies of flesh and bodies of soil; I often gaze as a mourning response but there is so much more.
In my short film, Le Tre Madri, I explore how milk, flesh, and soil come together in maternal ritual. Le Tre Madri depicts the erosion of the first sculpture and the deification of the second; birth and death are two mirrors, creating in each other a murky reflection of infinity. I was interested in presenting a version of La Giubiana where the titular witch uses soil, a natural healer and source of many advancements in traditional and modern medicines, to protect herself and live. However, I was also exploring the concepts of nonlinear time and the image of giving birth to our own ancestors. In my retelling, I strived to depict these events as cyclical and omnipresent. It was La Giubiana’s death that fertilized the soil, it was death that allowed the cows to graze and fruit to ripen, it was death that allowed her to live.
This work was made possible through the support of Ilaria Mazzoleni, Lucy Orta, and Camilla Palestra. Thank you for your support and the efforts you have invested to make this residency an opportunity for growth and interconnectedness.
More about Art for Environment Residency Programme
In 2015, internationally acclaimed artist Professor Lucy Orta, UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion, launched the Art for the Environment Residency Programme (AER), in partnership with international cultural institutions.
Open to UAL students and recent graduates (within 12 months), applicants can choose from a 2 to 4 week period at one of the hosting institutions, to explore concerns that define the twenty-first century - biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, human rights - and through their artistic practice, envision a world of tomorrow.
Through personal research and studio production time the residency programme provides a platform for creative individuals working across various disciplines, to imagine and create work that can make an impact on how we interact with the environment and each other.