Upwelling
Found steel drums (welded).
108” x 72” x 48”
Temporary installation view at the UC Davis Waste Water Treatment Plant.
Materials sourced from—and returned to for installation—the UC Davis Waste Water Treatment Plant.
“Upwelling” is an ephemeral welded amalgamation of steel drums which I scavenged from and ultimately returned to the site. The work was activated by bulldozers over the following weeks, which continuously crushed, rebuilt and re-arranged the piece. The metal drums became a vibrant mass of ever-reassembling matter.
Viewers were invited to participate in nature walks on site and to engage with ideas about waste streams, matter flow, decomposition and re-composition. We listened to a surprising diversity of biota—ravens emitting up to 30 different kinds of vocalizations, lizards crawling under scrap metal piles, shore birds probing the sludge fields for food, and songbirds lending voice to the site’s ephemeral sound signature.
We asked questions about radical noticing and deep-imagining, regenerative worldmaking and listening / sounding as social practice, multispecies relationships and sensory ecology, and our local waterways and waste streams. The site is home to rotting couches and waterfowl, rusting mountains of metal and colonies of ants. Spending time at this troubled site helped us to trouble notions like “natural” and “nature” through listening and sounding practices. We questioned the idea of “nature” as pure and static, exploring the ways that contamination, pollution, and waste flow touch everything. The project was an experiment in cultivating a radical intimacy with a contaminated site. The ephemeral architecture of the trash piles—some containing objects dating back to the 1970s—catalyzed conversations about different timescales and the ways that matter breaks chronology. Are we looking at environmental debris or architecture? Are these metal drums or speculative artifacts? The question creates fertile ground for speculation, re-imagination and radical noticing.
What does it mean to find new ways to listen, to pay attention, in these uncertain times? Can paying attention manifest as a kind of consciousness, a kind of political act?
2020
