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To Build an Ecological Art Institution: The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life

Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, Raluca Voinea
 

This text, written from the perspective of The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, set up by a group of cultural workers including Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea as well as tranzit.ro, narrates the arrival of the artists to Siliștea Snagovului in Romania. The station was tired and weary – worried by the rising heat and dry days and disillusioned by human’s extraction from the soil and inability to live peacefully with one another. It asks that we take seriously the questions of institution building, of who and what it is for, and of forging a relationship to the land based on mutuality. The contribution is part of Art for Radical Ecologies (Manifesto).

The starting point for thinking ecology from the world cannot be a point that is off-ground, off-world, off-planet, and it cannot be expressed from a being without a body, without color, without flesh, and without a story.
– Malcom Ferdinand, 20221

The wind is blowing at 50 km/h and it is 21°C, plus. For early February, this is excessively warm. I don’t mind having the sun defrosting my clayish body of soil, but I fear the trees will misunderstand this temperature and start their vegetation too soon, at the risk of being frozen during the capricious days of

March. There are legends in this corner of the world, about an old angry woman who set out to search for the spring, taking out successively her layers of coats in the heat of the sun, only to see the weather change suddenly and thus freezing to her death.

Last year it rained a cold, muddy rain the whole month of March. The people taking care to transform my exhausted body into a flourishing garden were unable to plant much. I was grateful for their unwillingness to bring the heavy machines that I am so used to, which until recently were tilling my upper strata of soil, to make sure the monocultures they were sowing did not have to compete with unwanted vegetal beings. I still have the memory of the forest that once covered my body, before people started to inhabit these lands; even later, when they were just surviving on my back, their existences were not intrusive; we could exchange gifts and I offered my full sustenance to their temporary stays. The villagers were building small houses, using some of the clay I was providing, mixed with sand, water, horse manure and straws. The houses smelled good in winter, heated by the wood in the stoves. The stoves and their bowls for food were also made using my flesh. Thus, I could feel a continuum between my body and their lives, and I was supportive in growing the plants that provided them with daily subsistence, with materials for clothes, or for baskets and roofs, for medicine and for enjoyment.

It all changed when the threshers and the seeders appeared, with their metallic bodies, big wheels, spiky tails and fuming horns. Their drivers didn’t even come down with their feet on my surface, to feel my shivers; there were no ways I could communicate with them anymore, in the absence of direct contact. And yet I was lucky: intensive agriculture wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. When I looked north, only 20 km away, my fellow lands were pierced through, daily, for their black blood, or south, some 40 km away, concrete foundations and endless rusty pipes carrying shit had forever shaped my sister soils into strata of breathless misery. At least I could still see the sky, the wheat ears were gently listening to my moans, and on my edges there were bushes feeding and nestling the birds.

Container by studioBASAR. Flag by Marx Machines Inc. (Filip Herbert, Anna Olszewska), installed within the framework of the project ‘Lectures on the Weather’, curated by Anna Smolak, 2022. Cosmos Garden planting, 29 October 2022. Photo: Catrinel Toncu

The Station with wheat and sunflower, July 2021

The lake nearby the Station, July 2021

The New Rural Agenda Discussion with Jatiwangi art Factory, 23 July 2022, 40°C

First collective session of Cosmos Garden planting, 29 October 2022, 23°C. Photo: Catrinel Toncu

When my new owners arrived and started making measurements, I was deeply worried. So were the eglantine bushes, the wild rabbits and the pheasants, the little field mice and the groundhogs, everyone who until then had been able to coexist with the big machines and the cereal crops, with the unshaded heat and the pesticides, but would have had a much harder time with urban people used to comfort, two-storeyed villas, concrete pools and loud music at their parties.

Artists they said they were, these newcomers. Were they the kind of artists who need white plaster walls and grey shiny floors for showing their canvases painted with acrylic paint, or rubber black rooms for showing their videos? And who need outside gas heaters in winter, and air-conditioned rooms in summer for keeping the visitors comfortable?

I had a hard time guessing their profiles. After they bought me, they paid me rare visits; each time they came in different configurations, scrutinized me with a mix of puzzlement and helplessness, took selfies with me, but they were not yet able to get into a proper conversation. When my old acquaintances, the machines, stopped their annual marches at my edges, I knew this was the time that another work was to be enforced upon myself. From my sisters down the road, I knew the order: first they would take samples of my different layers, to read my capacity for holding their buildings, not understanding how much more there was to read in those geological layers, how many sediments of rock, sand, wind, tears, blood and history. At least I did not threaten them with earthquakes, like my relatives in the depth of the city nearby were latently reminding the inhabitants about their transient little lives.

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