🅸🅽🆃🅴🆁🅲🅾🅽🅽🅴🅲🆃🅴🅳. Like the web of a spider, like the self-reconstituting system that is the human body, like every ebb and flow and function of every ecosystem that maintains equilibrium within nature. Interconnected, like the interactions of ecological, biological and evolutionary processes that complexify and make manifest, corporeality.
A self declared “a city girl with a nature brain”, artist, Wangechi Mutu’s memories from her youth in Kenya, inspire her deeply rooted fascination with the embodied self in sympoiesis with nature and the universe. Wangechi Mutu’s practice engages the intersubjectivity of humans and animals; the relationships and coexistences of various organisms, between the earth and the sky. Wangchi constructs fragmented bits of raw material—tree bark, osseous matter, feathers, leaves, paint, and epoxy to create monumental sculptures that hybridize the female form, animal and plant. These materials synergistically fuse, mirroring the potentiality of the fragments of our lost selves, that we have internalized. Instead of externalizing representations of human evolution unto machines, Wangechi Mutu embodies the human’s ontological core. She creates warriors against an inevitable technocratic war, superimposing these bodily forms back into nature. With Mutu’s, Sentinals, we witness regal representations of divine feminine(s) in protective stances, reclaiming and reintegrating themselves onto the earthly ground beneath us. These, as well as her sculpture work with Crocidillis, lead us through explorations on ecologies, that intersect not only the male gaze, but the disconnected human gaze.
Animals, in many Indigenous cultures, are saturated with great spiritual significance. Such as we see in the Seven Sacred Teachings. Each teaching is embodied by an animal to emphasize that every action we take as a human is made manifest within nature.
Love - Eagle Respect - Buffalo
Courage - Bear Honesty - Bigfoot Wisdom - Beaver Humility - Wolf Truth - Turtle
In Romily Alice Walden's, Crip Ecologies archive 2018 we see an archive of the artist's limitations within the natural world, due to their lack of access. Barriers to resource that reflect human fragility that go on to reflect ecological fragility, visualize the ripple effect from non-reciprocity. The BUSH gallery is a space seeking to bring awareness to this acceleration in lack. A trans-conceptual gallery, their definition on trans-conceptualism is, “to reposition ideas born within Indigenous and western epistemological conditions. A trans-conceptual space requires your body to be in a constant state of flux – never settling, like the flow of water in a river. One of the goals of BUSH gallery is to articulate Indigenous creative land practices which are born out of a lived connection to the land.” To BUSH, integration of indigenous practices is what will honour the life we have.“You never dishonour the gift. A gift asks something of you. To take care of it. And some thing more.” if we use this as a metaphor for the gift of life.” (Braiding Sweetgrass.) To author, Robin Wall Kimmerer we are bound by reciprocity, life is but a cycle of it. Life gives to us and we must give back to continue the flow of resources and maintain equilibrium with the, more-than-human word. The cycle of, honour and humility, as Kimmerer puts it.
It’s as though we have forgotten that we live amongst those and that apart from us. We have become submerged in our individualism, our displacement with the natural systems that we thrive off of. Consumed by thoughts of yesterdays without planning for tomorrows, we have become brain over body. “Or on the contrary, is the human intellect rooted in, and secretly borne by, our forgotten contact with the multiple nonhuman shapes that surround us?”(David Abram) Under our mechanical bodies, or our "body-subjects", as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would refer to them as, we are malleable, adaptive, we flow just as the water in our oceans. To disregard this fact is to be completely disembodied, entirely disconnected from the experience and the gift that is life and living. Abram asks us, are we so different from spiders? To him, spiders are as adaptive as we. Despite the notions that their genes are preprogrammed, that their web-spinning is merely a robotic act, is to say that we are no different from the objectified anatomy we see in textbooks. "The tentacular are not disembodied figures”….”generations are like “a series of inter laced trail.” (Donna Haraway) Every act a spider makes is oriented around the world around it and every act influences the act that will follow, with regard to the spatial and temporal boundaries of it’s perception. To think like a spider, is to be respectful, to be resilient and to be embodied. Tomás Saraceno shows us with Arachnophilia, that a spider’s perception of the world functions through the vibrations it sends out. By extending its own senses outward, the world in turn, responds back. This type of vibrational communication of seismic signals is studied within animals, but not so much with humans. How can we be more like the spider? Respectful, resilient, embodied, able to communicate with nonhuman kin? I think the first step is, to make kin, as Donna Haraway might say.
“Despair is paralysis. It robs us of agency. It blinds us to our own power and the power of the earth. “…”Restoration is a powerful antidote to despair. Restoration offers concrete means by which humans can once again enter into positive, creative relationship with the more-than-human world,“
…”Restoring land without restoring relationship is an empty exercise. It is relationship that will endure and relationship that will sustain the restored land.”
-Braiding Sweetgrass