[-empyre-] living systems

[Mary Mattingly]

Thanks Amanda,


Yes, I believe I started focusing on water because I grew up in a farming
town where the drinking water was polluted with DDT, a Dow chemical made
for warfare, and then mass produced as a pesticide.  When water
privatization became one of the final frontiers of the commodities market,
it was a subject that (ahem) seeped into my work. But I’ve always been
engaged with questions of economy, specifically how we can live more
interdependently and less solely on commodities markets. When I moved to
New York and most everything in my life became monetized, making living
systems or ecosystems was a form of survival masked as art-as-life. Then it
became art for the sake of learning from the experiment, and at some point
along the way I hope it has become more poetic. With Swale, I’m honing in
on food. It could be about my health in part (probably most everything we
do stems from the very personal). Living with Celiac I’m more conscious
than ever about the importance of healthy food and systems – and
permaculture merges economy and health: after an initial investment of time
(and in urban centers, money) food forests eventually care for themselves,
and you, in an undeniable way.



Swale will be a floating food forest where people can visit and pick fresh
free food. It’s a resource and a more utopian proposal for New York: what
if food was a public service?  The hope is that it will become a permanent
fixture.



Shu, thank you for bringing us back to this all too real future scenario.
Since the present is already far from great, the future of food is
therefore all levels of disturbing. I wonder what will happen with the
Svalbard Seed Bank in 2030. Will Monsanto and the Gates Foundation patent
the entire collection of genetic material they have collected? Will they
continue to alter the material and conduct new tests on humans around the
world, and by proxy, everything else? Will we continue to let them?



So as to eventually fall asleep at night, I tend to look for something to
grasp onto throughout the bleak, murky psycho-corporate oligopolies, and
more recently it’s been companies like Greenwave (http://greenwave.org)
that offer some sort of temporary respite - the business focused on
multi-species 3D ocean farms “aiming to restore ocean ecosystems and create
jobs in coastal communities by transforming fishers into restorative ocean
farmers.” Co-owned urban farms that profit share is also a powerful
movement that gives me *hope* – which, growing up as a US citizen, I have
been trained to want so badly.



I’m also keen on saline farming – how much salinity can fruits and
vegetables tolerate and for how long? Can we do more growing in saltwater
marshes if we are surrounded by ocean yet have little fresh water? Could
this provide some respite for California?

http://www.futurefarmonline.com.au/farm-research/farming-saline-land





I’ll leave on this succinct note, “Industrial fertilization is the science
of ignorance.” – Vandana Shiva



On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 11:41 AM, Amanda McDonald Crowley <
amandamcdc at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Mary,
>
> By way of further introduction, I thought I might bring to the attention
> of this discussion list your current project, Swale, that you'll be working
> on over the summer 2016 in New York City. I wonder if you might introduce
> the project a little. http://www.swaleny.org/
>
> And perhaps it would also be useful to give some background to a
> particular thread in many of your works: I am thinking of the works that I
> see as related, that began with The Waterpod Project, which led to a series
> of other works: Flock House Project New York,Triple Island,  Flock House
> Project Omaha, and Wetland. In each of these projects, growing food as part
> of the infrastructure of the project was a key element to the "live / work"
> nature of each of these art projects.
>
> With Swale, your attention is turned more specifically to growing food on
> a public floating "park". So in essence food seems to be the core concern
> of this work, where previously it was part of an integrated system,
> something I've heard you describe as a living system. Can you describe a
> little why this concept of a living system has become so central to much of
> your art practice?
>
> Amanda
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>



-- 
Studio: 20 Jay St. #204 Brooklyn, NY 11201  www.marymattingly.com
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