The questions were remnants of tasks we undertook in the rainforest as part of a workshop facilitated by curator Camilla Palestra based on Jennifer Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis’, A
Field Guide for Weathering: Embodied Tactics for Collectives of Two or More Humans. We
participated in the workshop sat around the table, in the open-air dining hall where we ate all

our meals together as a community of artists, curators, anthropologists, biologists, entomologists, sharing space amongst the trees that lined the paths that led us deeper into the forest.

It is from this workshop that I’ve titled one of the works I’m developing in response to the residency. Weathering, being weathered, time and erosion, destruction and renewal. In the forest all things merged and became one another. Time as we had previously comprehended didn’t exist. All things were (and are) cyclical. As in the forest as with all of life. This notion concealed from us in our concrete towers back in the city. Disconnected from the land and its rhythms and cycles.

I could write a detailed account of all the things we saw and did during the residency but this won’t articulate the shifts in perspective, the feelings encountered that go beyond words for me - the intensity of the environment, the physical endurance of continuous perspiration whilst experiencing a constant state of heightened sensory perception.

Through an enriching program of expeditions, lectures, and talks, Speculative Ecologies 2022 gave us much to digest. Philosopher and writer Emanuele Coccia vibrantly presented ideas of earth as non-natural and constructed. Everything having been manipulated, chiseled, shaped, produced by billions of generations of designers of the most diverse forms having made the planet habitable.

Charles Clements discussed the domestication of the Amazon and ideas around niche construction. Organisms constructing their environments, like the leafcutter ants constructing entire cities underground and cultivating fungi.

Ants surprisingly played quite a significant role in my Amazon experience, every meal time along the steep descent to and from the dining area I’d be tip-toeing and hopping over steps often in the dark trying not to squash or interrupt the highways of ants marching back and forth. I’d always thought leafcutter ants ate the leaves but they don’t, they cut trimmings from plants and carry them to their nests to cut into smaller pieces before inoculating them with a fungus that serves as a primary food source for the colony and home for the brood.

The Adolfo Ducke Forest Reserve where we were based is one of the most important research sites in the Amazon where researchers from The National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) stay for extended periods and is one of the most intensively studied patches of rainforest in the world. One such researcher being entomologist “Chico”, so legendary he only needs one name. Chico-the-great kindly and generously helped me better identify and gather knowledge on these advanced nonhuman societies.

When looking to nature and thinking about ant and other superorganism species, how can we learn from successful nonhuman advanced societies to discover new ways to reimagine human futures? How can we cooperate and become more symbiotic with our host and kin? How can we restore balance knowing we are always weathering in the unceasing cycle of destruction and renewal?

I would like to say a special thank you to all who I shared time and space with on the LabVerde residency. I’m sure there will be much more to say that is yet to be processed and will be expressed through the development of the sculptures responding to processes of destruction and renewal in the coming months..