Why art? On performance, theater, deep time, and the environment.
Why visual and performance arts, at all? What's the point of thinking with arts oriented engagements in these pressing conversations around the environment and ecology?
Marcia Ferguson:I think that what both wetland and period of animate existence gave everyone was the opportunity to feel what deep time could be. And we can't really get there through language.
Narrator:The urgency of climate change means that it is not sufficient for environmental scholarship to describe our complex relationship to the natural world. It must also compel a response. Timescales Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities gathers scholars from different fields, placing traditional academic essays alongside experimental sections to promote innovation and collaboration. This is the third and final podcast episode in a series that has featured the book's three editors: Bethany Wigan, director of the PEN program in environmental humanities Carolyn Fornoff, assistant professor of Latin American culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and now Patricia Kim, art historian and assistant professor faculty fellow at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. Patricia is joined in conversation by landscape designer Kate Farquhar and by Marcia Ferguson, senior lecturer in theater arts at the University of Pennsylvania.
Narrator:This conversation was recorded in November 2020.
Patricia Kim:Hi. My name is Patricia Kim. I'm one of the co editors of the forthcoming volume timescales. I'm an art historian, a curator, and educator based in New York City. Currently, I am assistant professor faculty fellow at NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study and the associate director of public programs at Monument Lab.
Marcia Ferguson:Great. Are we introducing ourselves?
Patricia Kim:I think so. I think that's what's happening. Yeah.
Marcia Ferguson:Okay. I'll jump in. I'm Marsha Ferguson. I am a senior lecturer, at the theater arts program at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm on the board of the Penn program for the environmental humanities and, have been an interested onlooker as that program has grown.
Kate Farquhar:I'm Kate Farquhar. I'm a landscape architect based in Philadelphia, and, I've been working at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and art for fifteen years. I became part of the project that produced this book in a coordination role, helping to bring the public into contact with an artwork called Wetland, which is a floating boat and experiment lab on the Lower Schuylkill. And we'll talk a little bit more about that soon, but I would just describe myself as a friend of the Penn program in environmental humanities and an enthusiastic cheerleader for environmental humanities in general.
Patricia Kim:So Kate and Marsha, it's I'm really excited to talk with you, and I was wondering, well, I've read your pieces as one of the co editors of Timescales, but I was wondering if you could describe your pieces and contributions to the book, perhaps sort of describe for our listener, what which artwork or what pieces, you talked about in your essay?
Marcia Ferguson:Sure. I I spoke to an artwork that was, at the time, a work in progress performance of Pig Iron Theatre Company's, 2017 work, Period of Animate Existence, which was a five act work, and it was, enormous in its scale. The the exercise of the small work in progress that we saw at the conference really delighted me and the the conference participants. And so my piece was really in some ways an appreciation for the way theater can encapsulate the large and the small. I think I'm quoting Dan Rothenberg, the director, when I say one of the things that he was attempting was to somehow convey things that are too big to get your head around.
Marcia Ferguson:And, by using a cast of, I think, is 87 people, tribe of elders, tribe of children, very original, approaches to these notions, They contributed this this provocation, and my piece was a description of of that, small work in progress. It was also a description of the larger work as I saw it a year later at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival in 2017 in its, its realized state and and also an argument about theater's place in the environmental humanities itself.
Kate Farquhar:Thank you, Marsha. I was so fortunate to be able to see the work in progress, and I really look forward to discussing it more. And I know you remember the work that I'm going to describe briefly, which is a very compelling small boat called wetland, which we understood as an experimental floating lab, a place for art, studying, and conversing. It was a work that was kind of collaged over a 45 foot long salvaged houseboat. Artist Mary Mattingly and several collaborators added a makeshift loft bedroom with beds in it to sleep in and other amenities to kind of round out the day, including a composting toilet and a solar array and a rain gathering cistern.
Kate Farquhar:Wetland also included other floating craft alongside it, such as gardens, that at times supported vegetables. During its residency as part of the PEN program in environmental humanities, It and its time on the Lower Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, it, added small craft to its neighboring gardens as artists created new works to join that whole assemblage. In time before its residency concluded, it ended up sinking. So among the things we're going to discuss, I think, temporality, but also the idea of works being temporary, I think, is something, that really interests me about art, the the role of art in an experimental project, and the impressions that it can leave you with and then the possibility that imbues those impressions, and I look forward to discussing it further.
Patricia Kim:Well, I'm really excited. And so I think to sort of kick off this conversation, I wanna ask both Kate and Marsha why visual and poor performance arts, at all? What's the point of thinking along arts oriented engagements or with arts oriented engagements in these pressing conversations around the environment and ecology?
Marcia Ferguson:I'll jump into that because I love this question. It actually is the question that prompted the piece that I ultimately contributed to the volume because it seems to me that as the environmental humanities is developing itself as a discourse and a field of study, there's a lot of discussion about, territory and and overlaps and, the interdisciplinarity of the endeavor itself, which, of course, is one of the things that I find most exciting about the program and also this volume, the the inherent interdisciplinarity of it. And, but I I really do argue for theater specifically, which is my medium, as a site for specific experimentations with time, which, of course, is the heart of time scales. The whole idea of an Anthropocene, which proposes an idea about time that acknowledges both the limits of human perceptions about time even as it points to the limits of human time on the planet, so which to me is very interestingly and importantly mind bending. It all it totally chimes with my sense of the ephemeral nature of performance, which exists only right this minute, right, and real good old fashioned live theater with people that are breathing in the same space, making us aware of a radical present, in other words.
Marcia Ferguson:And yet that combines with its ability to conjure any possible imaginable relation of time and space. So theater's always been a place for imagining endless time, and endless space. So, from fifth century Athens, where there's this verticality of the cosmos, the gods above, and human beings below working out complex relationships of destiny and fate and on and on. It seems to me that that, theater is specifically a place for these kinds of of specific experimentations around time. And, of course, the piece that I wrote about, which was something that occurred at the the the conference that I was there to help document and and moderate the period, period of imminent existence, pig iron theater production is all about this capability and this experimentation.
Marcia Ferguson:And it was itself one of those experiments. So I hope that that goes a little way towards what, to me, was so, energizing about about the conference and and really about the volume itself.
Patricia Kim:Yeah. And what I'm hearing from you, Marsha, is that for you, this theater arts and performing arts more broadly allows us to sort of think about and experiment with how to conceptualize the Anthropocene. Right? It sort of provides this kind of perfect metaphor in some ways for the different temporalities that we might explore when we're thinking ecologically. But I wonder, if you or Kate, maybe you wanna jump in.
Patricia Kim:If you can maybe talk more about sort of art and theater's relationship with the environment more broadly. That is to say why art when we have, sort of physics or biology, you know, practices and policy and remediation, even sort of environmental activism, right? We have all these different modes of engagement and inquiry, and yet the arts sort of seem to offer something else, something different. Kate, what do you think about that?
Kate Farquhar:It's such a great question. And, Marsha, I love your chapter about period of animate existence and its place in this project and the role of theater generally. There's so much to unpack there. In, reviewing our chapters and other portions of the book, I was just thinking about how grateful I was that that arts were central to the beginning of this project. And I see a number of ways that that arts play a role, you know, at the beginning of an experimental project like this, and I think, keep the possibilities for it open and energized.
Kate Farquhar:I see how when people engage with the arts, they expect on some level to have a sensory experience and to feel engaged emotionally. And I think that helps us when we're coming together to span disciplines, particularly when the subjects that we're gathering around contain moral imperatives at their core, or perhaps were brought together through our own separate moral imperatives and we're not sure how to act or how to proceed. I think that arts play a role partly because sensory experience shared sensory experience and, emotional engagement need to be a ground for, morally imperative collaboration. And I also think there may be examples that would challenge my thought here, but I think the arts don't pose so great a risk to us personally. They're ways to experiment safely together and that the rewards can really outpace the risks, particularly in the arts.
Kate Farquhar:For example, one of my favorite stories about wetland is how over the course of its, residency off the banks of Bartram's Garden, Danielle Redden had, you know, scores of conversations with passersby. Danielle Redden is someone who runs a public program in that area, a free boating program that's very popular. And she said that people would come up to her and ask about the boat, what is it. She would answer that it's, you know, an experimental lab, art project, gathering space. And then people would ask, does anyone live on the boat?
Kate Farquhar:And she would say, no. No one lives on the boat. And then very frequently, they would say, can I live on the boat? And that's the kind of speculation that I think where I think arts play a really important role in bringing us together around imagination and speculative possibilities.
Patricia Kim:I really love that, Kate. What you're saying is that these sensory experiences sort of allow for affective attachments, right, to build gaps, or to bridge gaps rather, not to build them, but to bridge gaps and to sort of draw these concepts that might be difficult to visualize or really understand into the realm of comprehension as a way to sort of spark a sense of urgency around these ecological issues. Marcia, do you wanna add anything to that?
Marcia Ferguson:Yes. I would. I I I have such fond memories of wetland. And, Kate, I love your piece. I think your notion of wetland as floating culture, was something that that just rang so true to me because I I too interacted with wetland as a tourist, so to speak, at first, and I had that same experience.
Marcia Ferguson:I wanted to live on that boat. There was something about its design and its proposals. It's not quite a boat. It's, an environment with a chicken coop and a rain barrel, and it it really did conjure, Noah and all kinds of, like, totems of of human cultures. But beyond that, it it becomes a metaphor or an emblem for this human impulse that I I hope what I'm saying chimes with you, Kate, to to do.
Marcia Ferguson:And I think maybe, Patricia, that the sciences that are grappling on chemical and, policy levels and different kinds of, sort of hard factual levels with climate change is a realm that is a is a kind of doing. But as far as the human body and all of us sharing this territory on this planet and the thingness of being alive, it's something that we all need to remember is that's who we are. It's it's it's how we move forward as a culture. So the the mind, the the intellect, the body, the emotional landscape, places like wetland, things like live performance. They are spaces where we can experiment and create metaphors for the intersection of these layers of human understanding and endeavor.
Marcia Ferguson:And I'm just gonna if if I can have the the nerve to quote your piece, Kate, that I I love this sentence so much. And speaking of doing, you say communication was carried by its setting and shaped by circles of busy hands infused by sensations of bobbing, eavesdropping, molding, sipping, bracing, balancing, basking, and shivering. The viscera got involved. I mean, for me, I that just makes me so happy, that that approach to to science. Right?
Marcia Ferguson:It's it's a place where our human bodies are doing the things that they need to do as as a kind of understanding and a kind of communication that our intellect, our our knowledge base needs you know, we we also need to breathe and swallow and and do all of these these things, these gerunds. Perhaps that's not a very articulate response, but I I'm I got so excited when I read because it's so frankly, it's so performative, this notion of what happens when you visit wetland. And it happened for me, so it it it really rang true. I think that's an important part of of thinking through all of our problems. We have to remember we're human beings.
Patricia Kim:So that's a perfect segue for my next question for both of you, which is, sort of around the construction, aesthetics, articulations, and maintenance of both period of animate existence, this theater piece, and of wetland, this sort of sculptural kind of living, boat, right, as allegories for broader questions around the Anthropocene. And Kate, your piece in particular really describe the ways in which the the upkeep of wetland, right, as well as its sinking, this sort this sort of kind of poetic end to its life kind of did that. And so I'm wondering if you could elaborate there.
Kate Farquhar:I'd love to. It's something that I still think about. For me, the work itself is very central to my memories about kind of being there towards the beginning of the PEM program in environmental humanities and being there for the time scales conference. And on the other hand, my memories of the relationships that I began are as central. At the time, I was in the process of learning about Wepland, and I was in the process of meeting a lot of people.
Kate Farquhar:I I met you, Patricia, and the other editors, and I was meeting artists who participated in one of our programs associated with wetlands, which was the eco Ecotopian Toolkit Competition, and I met members of the public. You know, I was learning about wetland. I was, working on an experiment in collaboration with you and with many other new acquaintances, and I still don't know how to maintain wetland. It's just hard for me to know it's hard for me to express, I guess, what I don't know. And at the same time, I cherish all of the projects that we began.
Kate Farquhar:And more than that, I cherish having met you and and the others that I met, the fact that we met each other, and the fact that we may, you know, collaborate again. And I think that what is so central to an experiment like this is the story of relationships and learning through relationships as a legitimate modality for learning and for expanding knowledge even as the unexpected happens or some things that you try fail in some way. That's definitely something that I carry with me. As I concluded the chapter, my hope was that because social questions and relational questions and questions about the exchange of knowledge were always central to the project of wetland. It's my goal that those questions live on with their own momentum and integrity because there are other artworks that are famous or compelling that have to do with ruination or the landscape, but were always have always been quite remote, both physically and socially.
Kate Farquhar:And wetland was not, in my experience, remote. And there were, many problems and opportunities that it brought one into contact with.
Patricia Kim:What you're saying, reminds me a lot of Donna Haraway's sort of making kin in the Anthropocene and that in order to survive sort of this kind of sixth distinction as it were, that these connections and relationships that you're describing, Kate, that went into the maintenance and sort of the upkeep of wetland are critical at this juncture. Marsha, I'm wondering, if the sort of question of kinship came up for you as you were sort of examining and exploring, period of animate existence.
Marcia Ferguson:Absolutely. It seemed to me kinship was key on on a number of levels for that piece. Kinship both on the level of what was inside the performance, but also kinship between the spectators and, the performers. It seemed to me that there was the aesthetics of the piece invited, in a strange way, almost a family style relationship to an old time story around the campfire about our extinction in in some ways, and and which is which is what marks the performance for me as something really, really strange, and unique and completely memorable. I left the performance with this very it's actually a feeling that I can't describe.
Marcia Ferguson:I think it's pretty much beyond words, and I'm someone who has made a living talking a lot about theater. But but but so so you remember the times that you really can't quite find the right words to express what happened. But I can also talk about kinship on the level of the aesthetics of the piece. Period of animate existence aesthetics were at once casual and cosmic, and a great theme of the piece was human time, obviously. And the way we count it, the way we can, document it.
Marcia Ferguson:And in this performance is counted in different ways, but, one of the most important and grounding ways it's counted is through rituals of kinship, of everyday caring for yourself, for others, specifically relationships between generations. And for me, again, this was a hallmark of what made it so special and unique because how many times have you seen bands and tribes of older people occupying a stage? It's not our youth centric culture's interest to really document the lives of elders. Then to bring into conversation with that tribe another tribe of children. And, sort of middle aged adult people were, at least in in several episodes of this performance, they were refreshingly absent.
Marcia Ferguson:And what happened when you have tribes of elders and tribes of children performing this delicate choreography of everyday care, but also a grander scale choreography of literally interweaving one another on stage, you get this very poetic sense of lifetimes and the limited reach, the limitations of the reach of a human life, and how inadequate it seems in some ways when right up against another section of the piece, which is all about the counting of cosmic time, other geological eras in which humanity is a memory, or on the other hand is a future promise that human life is just a kind of life. And so period of anim existence provided contexts for all kinds of discussions, that were subsequently pursued at the conference, but that are also pursued in the volume, even if people writing about all these different, wonderful subjects are not specifically responding to that performance. To me, it has such, a metaphorical significance for all of them because the environmental humanities itself was born of a desire to sustain inquiry across disciplines in the same way period of animate existence does that by sustaining inquiry across, children and adults and lifetimes and human beings.
Marcia Ferguson:So kinship rituals, kinship performances, if you will, are the sort of the key that unlocks all the the layers of feeling to me that go on in period of end of existence, individual and cosmic.
Patricia Kim:You know, I wanna go back to something that Marsha said regarding sort of the limitations of human time, sort of contrasting with cosmic or geological time, and kind of juxtaposed next to future future time, and sort of the uncertainty of the kind of distance or the distant future that is. And this is something that the editors and I were really hoping to to throw into relief. That is the incommensurability of different time scales that we find within these ecological discussions, as well as ecological movements and forces. And so I think it's sort of a perfect segue into the next topic around temporality itself, right, which is sort of the subject of this book as well as of the two different pieces, that you both wrote about. I'd like to first sort of think together about ephemerality, and we'll get to the kind of other, you know, geological time, human time, but there's something so striking about sort of the temporariness.
Patricia Kim:I think that's Tate, you pointed this out. Right? That things don't actually last. And so I was wondering, Kate and Marcia, if you could perhaps comment on ephemerality and impermanence, and how that plays out both in your pieces, and what you think the stakes are for these broader pressing questions around the environment.
Kate Farquhar:I think that ephemerality in human projects is way underrated. One of the things I really value is the opportunity to question the work, you know, the work that I usually do as a non academic, working in landscape architecture, and being alongside other people questioning the work that they do and then, kind of questioning the definition of work. I I guess one of the other things I was thinking about is, how many things happened around that time and then how there was sir a certain wisdom in the direction that they were going and the energy behind them that started to prepare me and give me the language that I needed to start confronting new realities. Hard times is one other way to say it.
Patricia Kim:Okay. I I think that you pulled out a lot of different kinds of temporalities. Right? Iteration, repetition, cyclical time, simultaneity, hard times. Marsha, what about you?
Patricia Kim:Same question about a fumarality and temporariness or impermanence.
Marcia Ferguson:I'm so used to thinking about this in terms of plays and performance, and it's so good for me to get shaken out of, my orientation, about the endurance of the length of a play and how how long an audience's attention can be can be kept on a certain theme or, you know, the interplay between entertainment, emotion, and virtuosity. These are all questions that I'm used to delving into, with other people in terms of creating a work of art. And I'm guessing, Kate, it it comes up for you in, in your work as well. But but it's the whole point is that it's ephemeral. I can't imagine doing this kind of labor for something that's going to last forever.
Marcia Ferguson:It would be a different kind of labor, I think. We would just simply and when I say we, I'm thinking about fellow artists, because, of course, theaters is innately collaborative. So you're always like Kate was saying, the relationships that you make when you're creating art, are half the point. At least they are for me. You create these intense communities, which are themselves ephemeral.
Marcia Ferguson:When you're talking about a a production, you are completely eating, drinking, breathing, thinking with this group of collaborators for six, eight, ten weeks, and then it's over. Then you move on. You remember them fondly, at least I usually do, or or you have good stories at any rate. So both on the level of lifetime performance itself and and on a slightly larger level of what it means in terms of an artist's lifetime and the collaborative communities and their lifespan, which is limited. Ephemerality is kind of the point because without that ephemerality, I think things would get stale and the quality of the imagination, it wouldn't be as fresh.
Marcia Ferguson:You wouldn't have new things to to bring into it because you've just been doing the same thing over and over again and working with the same people over and over again. So on that level, I think art and these kinds of collaborative artworks, and even the kind of artwork that that wetland was and is because we're still talking about it and it's been documented so well. Lodged within it is, of course, yes, the it's ephemeral nature, but there's something that you can say about the nature of ephemera that brings out the best in us perhaps, that brings out the freshest thinking and collaborative impulses. And, I mean, one of the things to say about this volume that I find so exciting is the very fact that some of these essays are, you know, bringing together chemists and composers, or what have you. And the the freshness of the writing in those instances, the chitchats.
Marcia Ferguson:Right? That's a word that's used in the volume that I really appreciate. The very idea, it's almost like neighbors leaning over the fence for a conversation about their territories and terrains and finding common ground. This is new, and it's and it's probably ephemeral. You know, time scales two, volume two, will be a very different animal if it exists.
Marcia Ferguson:And so I I guess I'm arguing for a a value, a real I put a real value on the very limitation of time and if immorality.
Patricia Kim:No. I I love that, Marsha. Sort of kind of it it really is a value change though. Right? Because we're so I feel as a culture, even in art history, so much of it is about archiving and conserving and preserving for the present and for the future and kind of in in my case, for ancient art history and archaeology, it's sort of this obsession over preserving something as it was at a particular historic moment of its birth, right, or its creation.
Patricia Kim:And, it doesn't allow for things to change, and it doesn't allow for things to sink, and and be temporary. And so I think, I think we have a lot to learn from theater, actually. I do too. I agree.
Marcia Ferguson:Myself included. I I learn from it all the time.
Patricia Kim:So I mean, maybe this is I had another question about, about time in particular, and I and I wanted to talk a little bit about deep time. Right? Whether it's deep in the past or deep into the future. Kind of this sense of monumental scale, a scale that's kind of so large and vague and abstract that it's hard for us to really visualize and represent with the tools that we have. And I think that on some level, both of your pieces start to grapple with that sort of deep and abstract sense of temporality and time.
Patricia Kim:So I was wondering, maybe if either Kate or Marsha, both of you, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are, and and what you've learned regarding sort of deep, sort of chunks of time, in your explorations of these two works.
Kate Farquhar:I think I'll jump in. I'm not sure what to say exactly about deep time in relationship to wetland except to say that when I scaled out and because I'm a landscape architect, I am accustomed to scaling out spatially, to capture the like, a regional landscape and larger regional conditions and features and, to some extent, geology insofar as it impacts the the built landscape or the experiential landscape, usually. The thing about wetland was that it was situated in its immediate surroundings by a historic colonial garden that has had many lives through the generations and is a very vital place presently. And then right immediately outside of its kind of garden environment, it was close to the largest refinery landscape that was still operating on the East Coast. And then since its residency and since we worked on the book, the refinery exploded and was finally closed because I believe there were just financial obstacles to running continuing to run and ensure activity there that was so unstable and harmful.
Kate Farquhar:So that is striking because of its enormous spatial presence and its the way that resources are defined, I suppose, on that landscape that's completely separate from the city, but affected asthma rates for generations. I wanted to explore Philadelphia's ongoing challenges with stormwater and waste disposal. So the ways that wetland was working on questions that were pursued during the industrial revolution when Philadelphia developed, like, the first public wastewater management system in the country, and now that system is old and under capacity and continues to have problems. There are ways in which I think wetland helped me consider how a lot of the aging infrastructure where I live is still settler colonial and bears out the problems that were kind of baked into the installation of settler colonial infrastructure.
Marcia Ferguson:I I resonate with this living in a city that's got this colonial inheritance as a part of our everyday life. I I completely resonate with what you're saying, Kate, and having been on wetland and and reading your excellent piece about it and its demise, it seems to me that it was a vessel that suggested time, deep time, future time, especially future time, and especially future ecological time. As far as what period of animate animate existence did in the world, the very notion of deep time, it seemed to me, was introduced through the first sequence, which was monumental cords, projections of the five extinctions, and then this very dramatic emergence of this huge object that was only very slowly revealed by the curtains pulling back. The Zellerbach, where I saw it, is a thousand seat house, so very large theater. So the stage, you can imagine, is accordingly quite quite large, and this object filled it, or at least it seemed appeared to fill it.
Marcia Ferguson:It was mind blowing to watch as the curtains you just couldn't believe as the curtains were pulling back that you were gonna see more of it, that there was more to be seen. And of course, wonderful light design, wonderful music by, Troy Herian. And it was just this dramatic emerge of a spectacular spinning black planet in and of itself without language. It was almost like introducing, like, here's the character. Here you go.
Marcia Ferguson:Here is the the subject of our piece. This is our planet, and this is deep time. This is what it looks like. The second movement pulled really it gave us a great contrast to that, by bringing us right down onto the human level with, basically a song and dance, a bunch of people. Right?
Marcia Ferguson:So this, I'm talking about a visual image that, and in a way I'm going to connect it to, to wetland in a minute, but, but a visual image excited in me as a spectator, and I don't think I was alone in this, a feeling of what deep time must be, and and, again, beyond language. But it was this feeling, this resonance, this, oh, wow. Okay. Too large to get my head around that, but there it is by the same token. So very, very emotional, response to this notion of deep time.
Marcia Ferguson:And one of the ways that I interacted with wetland was at Bethany's invitation. I brought my directing class. I was teaching, section of introduction to directing, and I brought my directing class onto the boat along with, Sarah Standing, who's an eco theater scholar. And she was there with my class to experience this this provocation, right, this floating provocation. And my students, I had them do improvisations then and there in the moment to kind of get at what it is that they were provoked by.
Marcia Ferguson:And they produced this really fun and entertaining series of of improvisations, but all of them had to do with end times. None of them were about floating happily with, ducks and chickens and and family, upon the seas. They were all sort of extreme. This is the the end of the human race. We can't breathe anymore.
Marcia Ferguson:We can't see anymore, you know, one after another. And when we talked about it afterwards, the emotion associated with climate change, the anxiety, the fear, the feeling of overwhelm was what came to the the surface for all of them as fledgling directors. And I guess I'm connecting those two things because of this sense of overwhelm with deep time, whether it's going forward into whatever place that we all will be, you know, strapping chick chicken coops onto surfboards and trying to exist the the waters of that are gonna swamp us any minute or or the the enormity of the black ball spinning in space on a stage in front of us. I think the emotional response is is deeply connected, and they they both point towards this notion, Patricia, that you're you're asking us to comment on of of deep time.
Kate Farquhar:I find that so moving, and I think I I loved there's so many things that were so that stay with me from the period of existence piece and that I really appreciate in your chapter. But the the way that you wrote about performers who were elders and performers who were children performing together and how the emotion associated with watching that unfold is kind of hard to capture in writing really stays with me. Like, I think as you're talking about the enormity, the the difficulty of starting a conversation, but then, in some ways, the importance of having conversations, like, in a nurturing environment or in a caring environment is something that makes me think of that scene and, like, how I realized as an audience member that I yearn to see a whole bunch of older people and a whole bunch of kids together.
Marcia Ferguson:That's great. And if I could just respond to that quickly, Kate, I I love that that you are landing on this emotion, and I think that we're coming back in a circle to, Patricia, one of your earliest questions in this conversation about why art. You know, we have a bunch of scientists working on these problems. Why do we need art in there? And I think that what both wetland and period of animate existence gave everyone was the opportunity to lift our head up from our screen or our piece of paper or our our discipline to feel what it is that everybody's working on, to feel what deep time could be.
Marcia Ferguson:And we can't really get there through language. We can really only get there through these feelings that are generated by these kinds of artworks.
Patricia Kim:This conversation is really answering some of the earlier questions about why art. Right? And obviously, or evidently from this conversation, it not only helps us interpret, but also really sense and comprehend and also grieve. Right? The scale of catastrophe, in addition to the scale of geologic time, that is it's it's so hard to kind of represent, but is usually represented in numbers and through graphs, but to be able to see it, through kind of the relative, you know, scale or size of stages, or to kind of see it with, a boat kind of against the backdrop of an old oil refinery, I think kind of helps illustrate these complexities, immediately and viscerally.
Patricia Kim:You know, this brings me to my last question, right, kind of I feel like this entire conversation we've talked about why art, or we made the case for art, right, as an important actor within these conversations around the Anthropocene and environmental humanities, as well as ecological studies. And so I just invite you to, I don't know, talk about any other works of art or media that you're excited about, that touch on similar things or or don't at all, or or if you're working on anything else at the moment that you'd like to share that might be relevant, to time scales.
Marcia Ferguson:I could speak to something that I'm working on now as a supporter. I'm on the board of the Unscripted Project, which is, an initiative begun by two Penn students, undergraduates. They've graduated now, but they won the the first presidential engagement award that that was given to a proposal in the arts. And their proposal, which they're realizing now, was to bring training in improvisation to, Philadelphia public school children. And so that's happening now.
Marcia Ferguson:They actually have artists, in schools. They have students over even over Zoom, learning improvisation, working with one another in improvisatory collaborations, and gaining these skills. And to me, this project is it's so exciting to be even just like a sort of a I started out as a a mentor, their faculty mentor for their project, and now I'm on the board. So I'm really a a cheerleader. But to me, it's so forward looking and visionary because the whole notion is to gift the generations coming up with these skills to collaborate, to imagine together, to, experiment, to do deep listening to one another, to allow our own behaviors and our own ideas to be consciously impacted and change because of interaction with the ideas of others, which is what improvisation is.
Marcia Ferguson:So I would say that project has great bearing on time scales and the the experimentation that's going on in this volume because this very essential trope of collaboration and experimentation, seems to me sort of a a seed or a key skill that unlocks the potential to solve our biggest problems.
Kate Farquhar:That's really exciting. First two things that come to mind for me are an exciting new project that has been organized by a number of landscape architectural organizations that include the Landscape Architecture Foundation, the McCarty Center based at Penn, the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. Sorry. I'm reading that because I didn't wanna get it wrong, but it's it's basically hosted by a number of organizations, and it's called the Green New Deal Super Studio. So during the pandemic, there are organizations and designers who saw an opportunity for us to get going and talk with each other about the possibilities of a Green New Deal and that the way the work is structured is to urge partnerships that include designers and nondesigners, of all kinds to gather around real problems and develop, you know, analysis of those problems and then ultimately produce policy recommendations, which I see as a really exciting direction for design and potentially for art.
Kate Farquhar:I'm also I've become interested recently in the trauma informed movement, I guess is what I would call it for lack of a better word, and how disciplines like mine, landscape architecture, might ask the question, what is a trauma informed way to work? And, Patricia, one of the things that I there's so many things that I love about your approach towards editing this book and also the writing that you developed in the introduction. I did see, you know, the mention of trauma as a concern in these topics. And in my view, there are other fields that are approaching the topic as though the the body and collaboration and gesture and feelings of belonging in the landscape are central concerns to the development of trauma informed trauma informed theory and practice. And that's something that I would encourage others to explore within their disciplines and across collaborations.
Patricia Kim:Thank you so much, Kate and Marsha for sharing some more, about the work that you're doing within and adjacent to, the environmental humanities, but also in relation to this bug project that, both of you contributed to. I guess, are there any other kind of questions or comments, that either of you may have? Patricia, I
Marcia Ferguson:I too like Kate, I I loved the introduction to this volume, and it seems to me to be doing something quite new and special. And it's written by three of you as I understand it, and there's some what I one of the things I really love about it is that there's a a real, like, a presence in the room of the of the people collaborating across this introduction. And you you do speak to the sharing of labor, the frustrations, and the the joy of breaking the kind of new ground that this volume breaks. So I was wondering if, I could ask you to just briefly comment on the creation of of the volume's introduction and and how the proposals within it, about work sharing, collaboration, bringing distant, methodologies and, disciplines together, how that might have translated into the work of creating the introduction.
Patricia Kim:Thank you so much for that question, Marsha. So the introduction as well as the coda were written collaboratively with Carolyn Fornoff and Bethany Wigan. And I think right off the bat, what's really special and unique about this project, I think, is the way in which you have three scholars from different fields, come together sharing their expertise. So I'm an art historian. Bethany specializes in Germanic languages, and, well, she's a cultural historian of the Transatlantic.
Patricia Kim:And, Carolyn Fornoff focuses on, modern Mexican literature and cinema. I focus on the ancient Mediterranean world. And so, in any other scenario, that might start off like a really corny and nerdy academic joke. Right?
Narrator:So what is it?
Patricia Kim:What are you doing, together? But, I think that we we purposely wanted to to take on this challenge of speaking with and to each other because the environmental humanities, I think broadly, tries to bring together and try out and experiment with new forms of knowledge building and knowledge production, because the challenges that we're presented with are so large and, in ways so incomprehensible to the human eye, right, and with the tools that we currently have, that these kinds of collaborations and ethics of care that both of you have been talking about throughout this conversation were needed. And so we explicitly wanted the chapter to be, you know, well researched and cited and and well informed, of course, but we also wanted to be creative and to experiment with different kinds of modes of writing, which was frankly, you know, out of my own comfort zone. But sort of in the spirit of us welcoming artistic and creative and speculative interventions as important aspects of scholarly inquiry, we also decided to sort of play around with language and experiment, in ways that were not only arts oriented, but kind of took a cue from the ways in which artists produce knowledge.
Patricia Kim:And you'll see that throughout the introduction, and especially in the coda. We learned, you know, I think, Marsha, you mentioned earlier in this conversation, the adaptation of the chitchat, right, as a mode of sort of scholarly inquiry, modeled, by Frankie Pavia and Jason Bell's, contribution to the book, in which, you know, just chit chatting, discussions that productively lead nowhere, collaboration for the sake of collaboration, are valid. We are so driven by success and by these, like, myths of of results, And, you know, it's a results driven culture that we live in. But we decided that, modeling the importance of collaboration. Right?
Patricia Kim:Sort of performing that through the introduction and the the coda in particular, were really important to us. So that's if you pick up the book, you'll be able to see the ways in which that that plays out. And and I will say that the coda, all of us, were really personal. Right, shared very personal information, in the coda, which is sort of atypical for scholarly books, in my opinion. And so that was, I think, definitely out of my comfort zone, but I'm glad that I was invited to to to open myself up in that kind of vulnerable way, and really just play with and experiment with creative writing as a sort of, contribution to these broader academic conversations.
Patricia Kim:So thank you for that question, Marcia.
Marcia Ferguson:Well, thank you for
Kate Farquhar:I love that. Sorry.
Patricia Kim:Oh, no, no.
Marcia Ferguson:Thank you for writing. I love hearing that. I really, especially the coda. I I I love the future the future past tense that's used. It will have been a time.
Marcia Ferguson:It it it does it feels it feels poetic, but also, you know, incredibly informative and very responsible in a scholarly way. But I love the Chit Chat Codetta. I mean, it's it's just a a very intriguing and and frankly entertaining, way to end, the volume. So So thank you for for being open to that.
Patricia Kim:Oh well, thank you for thank you for asking these questions, and also thank you both for, contributing your pieces to time scales. I don't think that the book would be as good without both of you. I truly believe that. I think that the contribution of this book, or the intervention of this book rather, is the way in which it really takes seriously not only the arts and humanities, but also the natural sciences together. And so I'm I'm truly grateful for your time and your generosity, and I really hope that our paths meet again sooner than later.
Marcia Ferguson:Thank you, Patricia, and thank you, Kate.
Kate Farquhar:Thank you. I so agree, and this has been really an exciting and provocative conversation that I know I'm gonna continue thinking about. And and in thinking about it, I will both wish that I had asked both of you more and other questions, and I'm just gonna have to hope that we will get to see each other again and continue talking.
Marcia Ferguson:And, Kate, I feel like I have lots of collaborations for us in my head already, so we're just gonna have to get together in real time and and make something happen.
Kate Farquhar:I love that. Wonderful.
Narrator:For more information visit z.umn.edu/timescales.