Can we land on earth?

I have recently read ‘Can we land on earth’ an interview with Bruno Latour by Line Marie Thorson, which is resonating hugely with me, worth saying ahead because so I’m communicating with you through that lens in this post. It's been one of those affirmative reads for me. 

As an artist my ‘material’ is ‘matter.’ I also work with with a portion of our planet that Latour calls ‘Critical Zone ~ the membrane that goes a few kilometres up and a few kilometres down.’ 

 

Matter expands infinitely into nature; which is everything. This immediately causes in me a feeling of stretching dismemberment quickly followed by anxiety about reconnecting so that I may become re-entangled with other earth matter. I feel I must somehow learn to engage with this reentangling urge.

 

So I work with materials I find in the pre compost layer. This is the becoming-critical upper zone, the layer visible underfoot and overlooked. Searching for understanding of what it is to be entangled. Deliberately trying to move observation downwards to reveal human affectivity in the soil. 

 

Like Latour, I “take a field site and try to understand as much as I can.” My first project was the mass housing estates being built on top of greenfield secondary terracotta deposits near home. Then there was suburban to urban Coventry which was also subject to re-modelling. These projects remain ongoing. 

 

I’m a fan of focus over distance.  I think you can learn so much from close looking at what is quite near.  Latour speaks of the amazing differences between specific places: ‘When you are on the earth-system, every single kilometre, metre and centimetre is different, and they confront and enhance the heterogeneity of the critical zone.’ My material/matter is specific and local. I revisit and note how things change next to other things changing. 

 

Actually, the scale at which my observations operate are getting smaller and smaller. So you could say my material is shrinking, but at the same time I experience a personal stretching and expanding as my knowledge grows, and then a further shrinking as I realise my enmeshment as a living being in the earth system followed by expansion with conjecture at the ramifications of my choices working on that system.

 

It’s important for us to know where life is and how it is affected. 

Mainly working at ground level means I work with waste; plant, creature and human. Working through a project about urban litter, notwithstanding my anger and disgust, I formed a conclusion that every living thing drops things. 

 

Parts of bodies fall to the ground constantly within our ecosystem. 

What falls matters. 

 

What is dropped becomes indelibly connected to others – after all, the ground is our grand and ultimate point of contact with each other. Gravity brings us together. However, we must conclude that human beings have lost the knack of dropping. Where trees are experts, we fail.

 

Working with ground level means I frequently grapple with the aesthetic problem of the small and mundane in art, in a culture that like the big and shiny rather too much. And this is where I feel kin with Latour, who calls it the ‘representational crisis representing Gaia.’ I feel my work is part of a cultural movement towards ‘rediscovering earth – reinventing what it is to have soil – and learning to find our ground.’ Landing on earth and still looking down carefully.