DRIFT | Okayama Art Summit

Piece Title: DRIFT

Date: September 27th to November 24th, 2019

Show Title: If the Snake

Venue: Okayama Art Summit, Okayama, Japan

Held in Okayama City once every three years, the Okayama Art Summit is an international exhibition of contemporary art. With Pierre Huyghe taking the reins as artistic director, the Okayama Art Summit 2019 brings the artistic touch to various historical and cultural sites near Okayama Castle and Okayama Korakuen Garden for two months from 27 September to 24 November, 2019.

Curator: Pierre Huyghe

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additional documentation for tenure portfolio [hidden on published website]

Summary: This work aims to highlight the impact of constructed waterways on urban ecologies, by comparing the microbiomes of a moat, enclosing an 11th century castle, and the free flowing river it was separated from almost a thousand years ago. The exhibit consists of a metagenomic analysis of these two water bodies, and buoys that act as tide clocks installed at the sites of collection.

Description: Urban microbial populations tell stories about the history of human intervention in engineered environments. Indeed, altered landscapes most obviously impact the native populations of plants and animals, but also the invisible but ubiquitous microbial ecologies. This exhibit highlights the ecological impact of constructed waterways, by comparing the microbiomes of two adjacent bodies of water. One is a river, flowing through the city, a tidal system affected by the nearby Pacific Ocean. The other is a moat that surrounds a castle built in the 11th century. The present-day moat is the last surviving structure of five concentric fortifications, and was filled with water from the river. These bodies of water have been separated for almost a thousand years, which is a long time by human standards - approximately 30 generations, three per century. Microorganisms exist on a time scale of completely different orders of magnitude. Indeed, three generations can pass in just an hour. This piece includes a metagenomic analysis focused on anthropogenic adaptations, accompanied by another edition of the GENE ZINE, specific to the microbiome of the two waterways. The installation part of this piece is a set of tide clocks - buoys that keep track of the time and amplitude of the last tide. The buoys installed in the river fill with water at high tide, maintaining the level as the tide recedes, and flush at low tide. Thus, the level of water in the buoy illustrates the volume of water that has come and gone and the time that has passed since. These tide clocks are a method to reveal more-than-human time scales, opening the way to relate to other organisms that operate on very different timescales than our own.

Materials: custom made tidal buoys (polycarbonate tubes, closed cell foam, chain, concrete blocks); GENE ZINE (risograph prints, purified DNA from the Okayama moat or river)

all images by Elizabeth Henaff unless otherwise noted