a liquid platform on the climate crisis,
anthropocenic interactions and ecological transition
a project by MUSE Science Museum Trento conceived
and curated by Stefano Cago
Artist
in Residence #1: MARY MATTINGLY
December 2022
In December, "We Are the Flood"
invites the first artist-in-residence to MUSE, an absolute
novelty in the museum's history. She is Mary Mattingly,
considered to be one of the American artists who is most
effectively confronting environmental issues and, for this
reason, chosen as the cover artist of the forerunner volume in
the current vision of the topic, "Art in the Anthropocene",
already published in 2015 by Open Humanities Press. Mattingly
was in Trentino in December 2022 at MUSE for an intensive
period of research and creation.
Mattingly has made headlines in the
United States for his work designed on a barge in New York City
as an 'edible landscape', capable of circumventing the city's
prohibitions on city land and allowing anyone to climb up and
eat freely. The resonance achieved by this work prompted the
city of New York to launch its first edible public garden in
2017, demonstrating how art can aspire to change society.
Mary Mattingly, who lives and works
in New York, was born in Rockville, Connecticut in 1978, and
studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York and the
Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. The artist, who
focuses her research on climate issues, sustainability and the
value of water, has been included in the publication "Nature",
part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series commissioned by
the Whitechapel Gallery in London and MIT Press, and has
received awards and recognition from Eyebeam Center for Art and
Technology, Yale University School of Art, Harpo Foundation and
Art Matters Foundation.
The artist-in-residence has been
selected with the collaboration of the board of research
advisors of "We Are the Flood".
At MUSE, Mary Mattingly creates a new work conceived ad hoc.
From the experience as artist in
residence, the work 'Lacrima' was born, a water clock
which ideally measures the time of the climate,
particularly of the Dolomites and the Marmolada glacier.
It invites us to reflect on the waters of our glaciers
that run away, on the land that holds this precious good,
on the aquifers that preserve this resource in the soil
and in time, on the importance of ancient traditions that
guard the relationship with water
Here
are the words of the artist, quoted from the book "We Are the
Flood", Postmedia, 2023:
2° REPORT DI ANALISI ECONOMICO-TERRITORIALE PER
IL FRIULI VENEZIA GIULIA
Lacrima
Dolomites
Water Clock
Mary
Mattingly
“Lacrima” is
a water clock that keeps time with the climate of the
Dolomites and the Marmolada glacier. It describes an
increasingly littoral place where “glacier” is understood
as a word that refers to a flexible part of a water cycle
that cannot ever be fully contained. I began to
appreciate the Dolomites as a series of precarious and
fragmented ecotones.
Rocks: The
geologic time scale is another representation of scale,
but one focused on time based on the Earth’s rock record.
Like water, rocks have stories that are told through a
system of chronological dating using chronostratigraphy
(the process of relating strata to time) and geochronology
(geology that aims to determine the age of rocks). The
striation of rock forms in the Dolomites tell a story of
multiple extinction events, separated by hundreds of
millions of years.
A
Performance: “Lacrima” is a slow performance. Water
performs its movement through the Dolomites in miniature.
It asks, what will the Dolomites feel like mid-century?
Who and what will be able to survive, and will humans here
assist in engineering a landform transition, or will human
engineers be in a losing battle with the waters’
gravitational forces as it reaches for the valleys and
oceans?
Futures:
Before mid-century, the Marmolada glacier is predicted to
have all but disappeared. Listening to the Water Clock can
be considered an act of contemplation, but it leaves me in
anguish. It speeds up as it warms, following the heat’s
acceleration, marking water time, and a human inertia – a
stagnation that leaves many unable to act.
Emotion: The
anguish over water’s transition begins in my bones. It
contains grief, a feeling of powerlessness, incremental
shocks to my system that I cope with by pushing them aside
in order to remain in a system I am codependent on and
I’ve been taught to believe cannot survive without. The
water clock bridges science and imagination, but lives
within the emotion of anguish. Buried within anguish is
the question, what do I have to tell myself in order to
believe that what I’m experiencing and seeing is ok?
Listening:
The water clock listens, responds, asks me to listen, and
asks visitors to listen alongside it. I disappear
alongside the glacier as it disappears, our timescales are
now in sync. And I listen with other people connected to
this place who are in more immediate anguish, while the
water continues to keep its own time, telling its own
story marked by a slow violence that is speeding towards
collapse. Each Lacrima cycle loses a few ounces of water.
At this rate, eventually they will see it run dry.
Cycles: Like
Kobo Abe’s novel “The Women in the Dunes” reminds me of
the water clock. In the book, two people must spend their
lives emptying sand from a building or it will bury them.
It’s a story about endurance, destiny, repetition, but
also environmental change. Here, instead of sand, drops of
water from the local hydrological cycle repeatedly fall
into vessels and then overflow onto the platforms below,
cycling back to the top to fall down again.
MUSE: The
museum is the active archive. It describes the urgency and
precarity of this ecotone, while conserving its memories
and social histories.
“Lacrima”
responds to “Clepsydra,” a water clock I built in Cuenca,
Ecuador that accounted for glacial melt in Ecuador.
Glaciers around the world are in relation, not connected
by proximity, but by sets of similar conditions.
