Working with living organisms means knowing how to keep them alive
Replicate the conditions where I find the organisms, take them out of their habitat, and create the closest one possible to work with them. Do humans do this with al creatures? Is this like building my own bacteria zoo? Do bacteria know that this environment is not natural?
Taking other‘s environments to replicate the ones we need to make the organisms feel nurtured. This sounds familiar….
I felt the legs of the star fish today for the first time in my life and felt their tenderness and understood their movement. I dońt know if they are called legs, because I have not yet studied star fish and I have never wondered how its tentacles/legs/feelers are called. For sure they are not called legs. What was Gaia thinking? What part of her make her evolve in these spongy wet fast moving tentacles that really dońt understand how to attach themselves to my weird palid boney hairless hand? What was the starfish telling me in its tentacular humid language?
What is it that makes some animals kings, daughters, travelers and others intrudors? Roadkill? Food?
The ants go up and down the thread. They only see thread. It´s pink. But they only see thread. One that was put there and knotted by a human hand (and colored with pink).
„Defining the question is not defining the project“ – The first step is empathy, then comes the complexity.
The sturgeon is a living fossil. An interdisciplinary being that migrates from the sea to the river for reproductive purposes. This fish is being threatened by human behavior, around the water, the sea, the river, the fish, an endangered species by our poor knowledge about its care and importance. The female sturgeon matures for reproduction when it is around 12 years old, and many times, before she can lay her first eggs, a human cuts its stomach open for caviar. We know almost nothing about this fish. How can we get to know its environment to learn how to care for it? How do we replicate it so it is perceived as home and activates the fishes homing behavior? How do we nurture it? Can we do this by not being extractivists but by observation and study?
Christinas way of analizing the sturgeon is (among others) to listen. Listen to the water and its flow. Learning how to use the river, a knowledge long lost.
Every animal with a bone structure has otoliths, calcium-carbonate stones inside their ears. It´s possible to know the age of the animal by taking out and studying these stones. Ear geology. Antropocentrism in the ear-geology.
We also share a side line, the lateral fascia.
Marta wished to have gills when asked about superpowers. I wished to have a fish-tale. What is the difference between a woman and a fish.
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BIOFRICTION — HANGAR, BARCELONA
Identify, classify, categorize, name. The human need to understand, give a name, label, compare to and look for ways in which an organism can be useful. How can I hack taxonomy? Where, in this hacked taxonomy can I find the fish/woman?
Radical ecologies – Art Lab Berlin
Artscience River project – DIY Hack the Panke
WATER ECOLOGIES
De-construction in times of climate change
Fara Peluso – symbiosis human/algae through accesories that enables respiration for both human and plant
WHAT LIVES IN THE RIVER IN A MICRO-LEVEL? CO-EXISTENCE OF MICROPLASTICS AND ORGANISMS
Replicating the environment of microbes in the river (or in the contaminated river, in the stinky river, in the bad water, how to replicate it, are there organisms whose lives depend on the contamination of the water?)
IMVEC — the institute for grassroots monitoring of contaminated areas
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