A wetland in which human senses are disrupted and re-attuned to the differing rhythms of the surrounding landscape and animals
Critic:
Lindy Roy
Year:
2019
‘Wastelands’ carry with them the powerful feeling of disgust in all its forms, but also a potential new mythology about nature and our place in it instead of outside of it. Newburgh, NY sits at a crossroads of divergent realities. On the one hand, Newburgh is characterized by a sublime and picturesque wilderness historically depicted in Hudson River School paintings. On the other hand, it is now an image of wasteland with train lines bringing in crude oil from the Bakken Oil Formation and shipping out dredged PCBs to Texas.
Wetland Craving balances ecology and economics through food. Desire for a specific food item, in this case crane eggs, is created through sensorial spaces in which human senses are disrupted and re-attuned to the differing rhythms of the surrounding landscape and animals, prepping the mind, body, and palette for something it is not accustomed to eating.
This manufactured desire in turn creates an economic demand to farm an animal which has ecological demands, specifically wetland habitats. The wetland created in response performs vital ecological functions in the local Newburgh watershed. Wetland Craving assumes the economic, material, and gastronomic interdependency between humans and non-humans while practicing new ways of living within the environment.
Disorienting and reorienting bodies and minds towards new possibilities creates new readings of objects and surfaces and therefore new social practices. In the short film, Egg Ritual the process by which one eats the crane egg is surreally imagined.
