SUSSURRI.

He is explaining the use of the n’dehou, a one-note bamboo flute from Central Africa: “The Pygmies have invented a fabulous musical technique, or instrumental technique (…) You ask the flute to speak to you (…) and you reply to the flute.” He proceeds to demonstrate this technique: “I am teaching you how to do it. You should pay me.”

He, Francis Bebey, the renowned Cameroonian musicologist, is sitting in a garden somewhere in London. In the background, we see a pond, and flowers, grasses, plants, a lawn, something that might be a pavilion, a house. We listen to Bebey’s resonant voice and to his flute. What we hear is simple and profound. It may well be a story about the beginning of music: “All the music you can make with this flute is a conversation between man and his own musical instrument. I think this is interesting.” The melody weaves back and forth between man and flute, along with ambient sound: the rustling wind, the swish of water, birds singing. At some point, the sound of a passing train interrupts Bebey’s testimonial. He stops, slightly annoyed, and asks, “Who made the train?” As the noise subsides, Bebey begins to play again. (1)

When introduced to the idea of sussurri, a word that denotes the sound of wind blowing through trees, the whisper that exists between noise and music, the space that opens up between disquiet and composure, chaos and cultivation, it was this short video of Francis Bebey from 1995 that came to mind. It contains a great example of sussurri, but it also provides two instances of the encounter of sussurri with human infrastructure. When the sound produced by rushing air collides with a piece of machinery – the train, which stands almost like no other for the infrastructure of early capitalist industrialization – it is transformed into a painful disruption of human communication. On the other hand, when the same air is pushed through the n’dehou, it turns into a medium of creative expression. What a significant symbolism for the way infrastructure can affect us.

Infrastructural systems drive something that is in and of itself neutral (or undetermined) towards a defined and not necessarily impartial outcome.(2) They shape not only how bodies and material can move from one place to another, or how communities dwell in city or countryside, but also how people relate to the very conditions of their lives.(3) Are people passivized by the systems in place or are they able to imagine another relationship to the way they are governed? Can they gain the agency to participate in the decisions that govern social and political institutions? Can they even go beyond mere political participation and bring about change in organizational structures, for example by creating sustainable forms of solidarity with those who are disenfranchised?

An interest in infrastructure is also something that is shared by the three artists in this exhibition, Mary Ellen Carroll, Andy Coolquitt, and Phoebe Lickwar. It is by no means all they have in common, but it is what regards us here, because it might help us understand how works of art can participate in the contemporary world in a meaningful way. To be clear, I am asking about the potential of art, or rather: the potential of this art, to have an impact by participating in the process of worlding. In the framework of this exhibition, the word is being used to describe an active way of being in the world: As Karen Palmer and Vicky Hunter write, worlding is “not simply a result of our existence in or passive encounter with particular environments, circumstances, events or places. Worlding is informed by our turning of attention to a certain experience, place or encounter and our active engagement with the materiality and context in which events and interactions occur. It is above all an embodied and enacted process – a way of being in the world…”. (4) Mary Ellen Carroll, Andy Coolquitt, and Phoebe Lickwar, each in their own way, pay attention to particular functions or aesthetic values of infrastructural issues and in doing so, their works embody an interaction with specific materialities or enact certain ways of being in the world.

Someone once called pipes and cables the basic mechanics and root textures of urban life. (4) Part of infrastructure, they channel liquid matter or circulate electricity, and as they perform their functions, so do we. Pipes, cables, humans are fused in one (re)productive cycle that that binds our individual, everyday life to the larger economy and sociosphere. Andy Coolquitt uses materials that either stem directly from, or evoke these domestic fixtures. Metal tubing, electrical wire, sockets and bulbs are assembled in Ding Dong (2021) to create a sculpture that doubles as a slightly eccentric wall light. While such a work can be understood as adjacent to the semiotic field of technical paraphernalia, other sculptures by Andy Coolquitt shift in emphasis: St. Ides (2008) fuses together differently coloured plastic straws to form a long reed, which is displayed in an old liquor bottle filled with water, as if a decorative grass was being placed in a vase. Although its matter is man-made, this sculpture suggests an organic form.

Yet another of Andy Coolquitt’s pieces, Straws (2014), is made from all kinds of household debris. It reminds me of what the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick calls kipple (5): “Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers (…). When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more. (…) Kipple drives out non-kipple.” In Straws, the objects themselves might belong to the family of consumer goods, but the grammar of this sculpture tells another story: Like kipple, its form alludes to the wild reproductive drive that constitutes the dark side of consumerism: its unfettered depletion of valuable resources, its pollution, its hatching of more garbage than can be disposed of. Andy Coolquitt’s work slides seamlessly between diverse aspects of our passive relationship to contemporary infrastructure – we take for granted the pipes that bring us water or carry away our excrements and the electricity that fires up our computers. And we don’t think that we can change (much) about the way social, political and economic systems provide us (or, indeed, fail to provide us) with the means to live a good life. By bringing this to the fore, not literally, but by aesthetic implication, Andy Coolquitt’s art is whispering to us about the real conditions of our contemporaneity.

It is not difficult to assume that Phoebe Lickwar’s gaze towards the past, specifically to pre-agrarian peasant traditions in the geography that nowadays constitutes Italy, is also precipitated by a dissatisfaction with the real conditions of our contemporaneity. Her research into “a remnant agroecology that has survived the catastrophic forces of industrialization, plant disease epidemics, and climate change” takes the form of a photographic documentation of what is called landscape infrastructure. (5) This particular landscape infrastructure fosters a symbiotic relationality between humans, animals, plants, soil and water, and it preserves biological and cultural diversity. Hence its name: coltura promiscua – mixed cultures. (6)

I had never before heard the term “landscape infrastructure,” which, in the most simple sense, means the integration of natural systems with built systems, nor had I thought about the concept. Though it is an entirely plausible one. To quote Francis Bebey, “I think this is interesting.” I wonder, for example, whether there isn’t a radical difference between infrastructure that is concerned with nature as its material from any other infrastructure, simply,

because we, as human beings, cannot do without nature, and therefore our relationship to nature is a precarious one? Let’s think this through. If landscape infrastructure is using nature as its material, are we really building something or are we changing something, changing nature into another kind of nature? And how much can nature be changed and still stay nature? One might, for example, change wild plants, by “cultivating” them. However, looking back at the extractivist mentality that has driven modern agricultural development, the idea of cultivation has a rather ominous ring to it. Who decides what should be cultivated, by whom and at what risks to bio- diversity and what impact on sustainability? Do we really need genetically manipulated corn to stave off world hunger, or is this a ploy by large conglomerates like Monsanto in order to profit from the monopoly of corn production? However, one might think about this, it seems clear to me that the relationship between the existing natural environment and any new additions or changes must not be misaligned, as both nature and the survival of humanity depend on this balance.

The holistic approach of coltura promiscua seeks to align human intervention as much as possible with the pre-existing conditions of a particular natural environment. This is not a process of quick return but one of longevity, and the reason that Phoebe Lickwar can find remnants of this millennium-old practice even where it has been abandoned decades earlier. Because of this longevity, the ‘culture’ of this infrastructural project has sedimented. Culture, here, is not necessarily found in the actions or expressions of human actors, but in the plants themselves. It is they, who carry the cultural knowledge of the old techniques. Which is why Phoebe Lickwar writes: “We can read in the shape of the land and in the choreography of trees, …” (7) But, actually, not everyone can read this language easily. Thus, it is her photographic archaeology, documenting, for example, tree and vine formations, vineyard by vineyard, azienda by azienda, that make visible the patterns in nature that must be understood as materialized ecology. It is her specific photographic gaze that enables us to grasp what we see.

What we see when we look at a work by Mary Ellen Carroll is the concrete lining of a bayou emanating from headwaters in a slow, moving body of water fed by natural springs, surface runoff, and tributaries into a ship channel that carries the materials used in its construction. But then again, the bayou has a life of its own, whose movement at times is almost imperceptible, until its banks are breached from a torrential downpour created by the warmed waters in the sea that form a hurricane. A hurricane will not whisper through the leaves of a tree — it will topple the tree. If we stay within this metaphor, any relation between Mary Ellen Carroll’s work and the idea of sussurri would be absurd. And yet, there is something to be learned from the comparison. Even though sussurri is an effect of the wind blowing through a tree, it is a discrete sound. Even though the bayou moves through a concrete lining, its form is not entirely governable. Even though Mary Ellen Carroll’s objects are based on research into infrastructural processes and relationships that affect the conditions under which we live, they stand on their own. Their aesthetic form remains indeterminate.

Take A Curtain of Skin (2014), which refers to the planting of a grapefruit tree on property acquired by the artist Robert Rauschenberg that intentionally expanded his studio footprint while inhibiting the further development of a condominium complex to preserve the coastal ecosystem on Captiva Island in Florida. This singular silkscreen bears the image of a grapefruit peel. Green ink on cardboard, it is an abstraction, despite the fact that the peel itself is from a grapefruit taken from the tree that the research references. There is nothing literal about this image. And yet, it is concrete. The estate on which the tree was planted belonged to the artist Robert Rauschenberg where Mary Ellen Carroll had a research fellowship and spent time in 2014 in residency at the Foundation. The decision to make this work was not made in a social vacuum.

The thing is that Mary Ellen Carroll actively seeks to make visible the site where the relationship between infrastructure and the social become clear. The work begins with observing the status quo of infrastructure, subsequently gaining information about it, thereby aiming to make in into a more pliable material, with which some action can occur. Starting with the analysis of, and engagement with policy, for instance, Mary Ellen Carroll may devise ways to enact the responsibility that ultimately grows from our diverse but nevertheless always existent relationships to infrastructure. Take the responsibility toward the plight of unaccompanied immigrant children (UIC’s) in a “nation of immigrants,” who, due to US policy, were isolated in a chain link fence enclosure in 2018 at the southern border with Mexico. This treatment was in violation of their rights as determined in the Flores Agreement, and is at the foundation of Mary Ellen Carroll’s small painting FREE TO LEAVE (2019). The painting forms part of an ongoing decades long series started in the 80s that utilizes minerals as materials which act in concert with their environment, and which change their appearance over time. (8) This effect has been accelerated by the climate emergency. These works require that the steward of the work contractually agree to not intervene in the environmental effect as process, or the work will be destroyed.

A related work figured in the collection of works in DYKWTCA (Do you know there the children are?) by major international artists. (9) They were responding to an invited call to action to create a material history from these Flores accounts given by the detained children to the legal observers who were the whistleblowers. After being exhibited at The Corner at Whitman-Walker in Washington, DC in 2020, (10) the sale of these works of art would directly support organizations providing legal, medical, and mental health services to these unaccompanied immigrant children. With DYKWTCA, Mary Ellen Carroll and Lucas Michael created an exemplary initiative of infrastructure. What makes it truly valuable is that the process tasked the participating artists to read the Flores accounts given by the detained children. Hundreds of witness statements collated by the Flores lawyers were translated into the artists’ aesthetic capabilities and disseminated into their social and political networks, amplifying the children’s voices. It is this amplification that makes DYKWTCA into an infrastructure of solidarity.

Affective infrastructure acknowledges that the relationship we have with systems, institutions, and policy is one of embodiment. We are connected. How we are connected, and what to do about it, is not always easy to understand. Art, by virtue of its content, form or address, can visualize or demonstrate to the viewer this relationality between people, things and infrastructure, and by this effort, it may itself become part of the world.

Ruth Noack, 2024

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(1) Francis Bebey at Real World Studios, 1995, Real World Records, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=c6T6suvnhco

(2) A standard definition of infrastructure would be that it consists of the systems and structures that support the functioning of a society, economy, or organization and enable production, delivery and movement. In the past decades, this mechanistic definition has been questioned and/ or greatly expanded through, amongst others, political science, thing theory, new materialism and critical urbanism.

(3) Kai Bosworth, “What is ‘affective infrastructure?”, Dialogues in Human Geography, Vol.13, Issue 1, March 2023, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221107025

(4) Helen Palmer and Vicky Hunter, Worlding, 16 March 2018, in: New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’, website, https://newmaterialism.eu/ almanac/w/worlding.html

(5) Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Gateway, London, 2010, chapter 6.

(6) From a note by Phoebe Lickwar on the volume of work Promiscuous Cultures, 2022 — ongoing. See also https://www.phoebelickwar.com/photography/promiscuous-cultures

(7) ibid.

(8) The diptych Vanishing Point (2023) also included in this exhibition will undergo a similar process in response to the environment.

(9) See DYKWTCA.com and https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/17/child- separation-artists-washington-whitman-walker

(10) As Executive Director of The Corner at Whitman-Walker, I was able to make the decision to show these works at the beginning of an election year and in close proximity to the White House.

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