There was a shopping mall
Now, it's all covered with flowers
You got it, you got it
If this is paradise
I wish I had a lawnmower
You got it, you got it
(Talking Heads ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’)
The 1988 song ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’ by Talking Heads envisages a post-Anthropocene world where human activity no longer is the dominant influence on the world. Flowers grow where shopping malls once were, mountains and rivers stand where a factory was. Daisies cover the site of a former Pizza Hut. Yet our narrator is maudlin; what he really wants, is a burger. What he has though, is a rattlesnake for dinner. Despite our narrator’s ambivalence, it is clear that the song was a riposte to consumerist culture that was dominating the West at the time and would continue to do so up until the present - the accompanying music video features text about rates of deforestation and the increase in production of toxic waste. The song might be seen as a piece of subtle, measured and even wry agit-prop.
This nuanced strand of thinking about environmental thinking can today be seen in re-wilding campaigns, purpose disruptors, collaborative community projects and artistic and creative thinking. All these strategies often accept that the strategic use of more direct action is useful but point towards more complex ways of re-thinking humanity’s relationships with the world around them. There is also an important caveat in some of these approaches – this is not a call for a return to a pre-lasparian world (we still might crave a burger) but a reaching towards an intertwining, of nature, humanity (and everything it has done) and what was thought to be separate or external from humanity. In the exhibition “If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower” Adham Faramawy, Cecilia Fiona, and Jen O’Farrell exhibit works which evoke a world where the boundaries between bodies, species and landscapes are porous, shifting and in constant negotiation. These are works that quietly refute the prevailing conception of the human subject in Western thinking up until now, that the human is always a separate entity, to be considered apart and above other species and ecosystems. Instead of this way of thinking this exhibition proposes that the world around us is less of a backdrop and more of an at least equal protagonist; not separate but co-constitutive of our being in the world.
The prevalence of wall-based and floor-based sculptural works through the show offer a sense of the tactile that is suggestive of one of the themes that runs through the exhibition; that of the ethics of entanglement. This framework insists on the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman entities which includes animals and ecosystems but also includes objects and technologies associated with industrialisation and post-industrialisation. The surfaces of Faramawy’s works include technological detritus such as stray mobile phones and wires embedded on surfaces which depict rough earth, rock and stone. O’Farrell’s work brings together textures and surfaces that are suggestive of forests and the earth but also the urban and constructed. Meanwhile Fiona’s practice, encompassing painting, sculpture and performance invites viewers to consider how their own identities are interwoven with the wild and fantastical.
Each of the artists’ works poses questions about where the body’s boundaries are in relation to its surroundings. Instead of the clear division that prevailing Anthropocene thinking has assumed, there is the more complex division that is alluded to in Faramawy’s series title ‘The stickiness of an unclean break’. Connections stubbornly remain despite the desire for a clean break. This might the human subject’s desire to separate from the landscapes around them, from other living organisms, or indeed from each other through a process of deeming certain groups other. This desire is doomed to fail; instead bodies and identities are indelibly linked to what surrounds them whether that is ecologies or other people. Our subjectivities blur in and out of each other and what surrounds us, always sticky and messy to the frustration of those who want to assert clean boundaries, borders and differences.
Fiona’s work might also be understood as depicting the hybridity of being. The result of hybridity is a move away from essentialism to a sense of an ongoing sense of the interconnected with other people, histories and ecologies but also a wider connection with forces that could be mythical but might also well be quantum realities (or indeed both). Boundaries are momentary, their supposed fixity nothing more than an apparition that hides a state of flux and transformation. Transformation and interconnectedness are made manifest in the surfaces and materiality of Fiona’s work, as they are with Faramawy’s and O’Farrell’s. With the latter, interconnectedness is also architectural – motifs within the work gesture towards the built environment and urban environments as much as more ancient landscapes such as woodland. Within that relationship is the question of how landscape has been transformed by human activity into the urban but also, vitally, the implication that this process might go the other way. This was a shopping mall, now it’s all covered with flowers. Landscape and human agency are interwoven in O’Farrell’s works, memory and history fused with layers of rock and soil.
‘If this is paradise….’ is an exhibition that insists on the lived encounter with what surrounds us and an exploration of what a new conception of intimacy might be through thinking about that process of perpetual interaction. Intimacy becomes a form of ecological resistance where we allow ourselves to reach out, touch and intertwine with phenomena which are no longer categorised as ‘non-human’ but instead perhaps as ‘more-than-human’. It is an exhibition that is against fixity, that instead revels in sites of encounter that are in turn fragile, entangled fugitive and joyously alive.
Cecilia Fiona will perform ‘Harvested, gathered, carried (the life of souls)’ from 2- 5pm on Friday 6 June.
For more information please contact: Georgia Griffiths, georgia@niruratnam.com
