M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

Christina Hemauer/Roman Keller
A Moral Equivalent of War Christina Hemauer/Roman Keller: A Moral Equivalent of War, 2007 © Hemauer/Keller
organic matter from the new world was dumped ashore
on arrival around the major port cities of Europe. For her
Seeds of Change projects in Marseille, Liverpool, Exeter,
Bristol, Dunkirk and other sites – always where no
previous studies of ballast flora have been undertaken –
Alves sought the location of ballast spoil sites through old
maps, port records and rumour, took earth samples and
endeavoured to germinate whatever archaic seeds have
been lying dormant in the substrate. The resultant
presentations have gathered the textual and
photographic evidence – as well as the plants themselves
– and often involved the collaboration of local residents.
Gardeners near the Finnish port of Reposaari, for
example, had apparently been proudly tending unknown
exotic plants for years. In other instances there was so
much ballast coming into port that, as is the case in
Liverpool, it was often used to build the foundation for
new roads – hence plants from Asia, Africa and the
Americas can still be found sprouting from cracks in
undeveloped niches of the city. Thus since the ‘discovery’
of the New World – a very short amount of time in
botanical terms – there has been an exponential increase
in non-native, ‘alien’, ‘invasive’ flora arriving, surviving and
thriving unofficially in Europe, and an embedding of the
colonial project as an overlooked, displaced botanical
legacy in the ground. All of which prompts the questions:
could slavery be described as an environmental issue?
By conceiving of ‘materials’ – bats, landfill, cactus, engine,
solar panels, air-conditioners, weeds and so on –
synchronically, as instantiations embedded in space and
time, wrapped in a daze of trophic process and streams
of history, the profoundly ecological work of art may
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approximate a design-object scenario that Bruce Sterling
has christened the ‘spime’: no longer an artefact or a
product ‘the spime is a set of relationships first and
always, and an object now and then.’(2) Nevertheless,
whatever else these aleatory projects may have in
common – not least the assertion of the human species’
place in ecological thinking – it’s clear that for them
previous parsimonious ideas about what is
‘environmental’ can never be sustainable.
Notes
1 Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, ‘Death Warmed Over’,
The American Prospect, vol. 16, no. 10 (September 2005), p. 30
2 Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2005,
p. 77
Max Andrews (Bath, UK, 1975) runs the Barcelona-based curatorial office
Latitudes (www.LTTDS.org), with Mariana Cánepa Luna. Latitudes' recent projects
include Lawrence Weiner’s ‘THE CREST OF A WAVE’ (Fundació Suñol, 2008), and
'Greenwashing. Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities' (Fondazione
Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, 2008). He is a regular contributor to Frieze and has
been an essayist for publications including Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a
Semblance of a Whole: Walker Art Center Collections (2005); Henrik Håkansson
(Dunkers Kulturhus, 2005 and Museo Tamayo, 2008–9); Day for Night: Whitney
Biennial 2006; Brave New Worlds (Walker Art Center, 2007–8); and Life on Mars:
55th Carnegie International 2008.
This article was originally published in Frieze Magazine, Issue 108, June-July-August
2007 and is here re-printed with permission of the author and editors. For more
information please visit www.frieze.com