Supported by Stanford Arts Institute and Anicka Yi Studio (Metaspore Fellowship)
Immersive installation: 6-channel projection, live sound performance, sculpture & scent
https://etaletc.com/resurgent-earth
Resurgent Earth is a practice of materials science through expressive experimentation. Exploring the affordances of local biomaterials and engaging in a study of local ecology through artistic (but scientifically rigorous) methods, the resulting sculptural installation is not only an art installation on view at Et Al Gallery in historical San Francisco Chinatown, but a living, nomadic patchwork of decaying and growing biomaterials, functioning as a biomaterial sample-book.
Theoretically, Resurgent Earth engages with multidisciplinary conversations in philosophy, design, critical theory, and ecology to consider beings as “open-places-of-meeting,” in queer theorist Jasbir Puar’s words, humanity as sculptural sensory organs of a networked earth (as information theorist Benjamin Bratton might describe), and all physical systems (including bodies) as an interpenetrated and co-constituted weave of many kinds of us—and many kinds of Others.
In a world systematically managed, calculated, disciplined by technocratic forms of governance that believe the generativity of the world to lie in its willingness to be produced; its openness to penetration; its frictionless instrumentalization—still the earth wells up, recalcitrant, excessive, spilling out of containment—incalculable—irreducible—impenetrable. Resurgent Earth is an observation of the insurgent movements of a spilling earth through similarly indeterminate, flexible, odd methods; engaging artistic methods to inquire after local ecology, materials, and biology. A collaboration between sapient arts and the sheddings of a vital earth, this project engages with riverbeds, cocoons, eucalyptus detritus, geosmin, sounds and sights gathered from the same place that physical materials were gathered in an interactive installation.