[-empyre-] nature's reserved camouflage

[Amanda White]

Hi Johannes,

I will try to answer your question about performance and documentation in
relation to my Frugivore project.
Working with plants in this case is both private and a public in some ways.
When I am working on this project, I am engaged in a very intimate
relationship with the tomato plants, I'm trying not to say that
anthropomorphically, but quite literally in that what I consider to be the
performance in this case, is when the seeds are traveling through my
digestive system, which prepares them for germination. In this way, the
work is a meditation on this mutual, biological, symbiotic relationship.
While I am personally aware of the process, and the seeds (and later
plants) are participating in it as well it is not visible to an audience.
Documentation is therefore problematic without simply illustrating the
process through a didactic or diagram.  I was able to use microscopic
images to document the seeds before and after, and i created botanical
drawings that illustrated this relationship and documented the various
plants in lieu of a text didactic, however the major documentation of the
work is the plants themselves. When I show this work, I show the plants,
and always with some edible component, whether it be fruiting plants in a
greenhouse installation or garden, prepared sun-dried fruits, or a workshop
using the tomatoes to cook. Using these stretegies allows anyone who wished
to experience the work first-hand access by eating the fruit, they can
consider its history, and choose whether to participate in this
relationship as well. The audience may react with disgust or interest but
are able to visualize the process through eating. I am also always amazed
at the mass of plants that can by produced via this process, that the
combination of these seeds and my simple bodily processes can generate
rooms full of enormous edible plants.




On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Murat Nemet-Nejat <muratnn at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------




-- 
amandawhite.com <http://amandamarya.com>
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