Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center was a part of "Liveable Worlds" October 6 - December 15 2023 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design curated by Julie Poitras Santos and Sabine Malcom.
By most any measure, the world is becoming less liveable. Climate breakdown undermines ecosystems and ways of living, paralleling crises in social life. These disruptions reflect long-standing patterns rooted in the inseparability of settler-colonialism, anti-blackness, and environmental destruction. Whether under political occupation, psychic pressure, or environmental duress; artists, designers, and filmmakers have long found ways to create in what are otherwise unlivable conditions. Liveable Worlds takes as its point of departure the notion that there are multiple “worlds”— material, psychic, and communal—and opens space to envision new forms of visualization, survival, collaboration, and community.
Artists include: Futurefarmers, Sky Hopinka, Athena LaTocha, Patte Loper, Mary Mattingly, Pamela Moulton/Posey, Oscar Santillán, Cauleen Smith, Will Wilson
Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center has been developed as part of Laboratory for Other Worlds, an ongoing research project and exhibition series on climate and the potential impacts of global warming on urban sea levels in the U.S. Northeast, based on climate science by researcher Andrew Kemp. This study center focuses on local salt marshes and their unique position at the edge of the sea and the land, and their history of rich ecologies buried within thousands of years of sedimentation. These marshes provide climate researchers with an understanding of ancient biomes, which are accessed via sedimentary core samples and used to reconstruct deep time habitats, and therefore ancient shorelines. This helps us understand the characteristic fingerprints that will affect future sea level rise. Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center invites viewers to contemplate the complexity of salt marsh ecologies and their great value to human knowledge construction and more than human lifeways.
Thank you to Dr. Andrew Kemp of Tufts University Department of Earth and Climate Sciences, Yaqi Cai, Ceci Carchedi, and Sawkill Lumber Company for their invaluable contributions to this project
Pedagogical objects are inspired by surrealist sculpture and painting and are designed to describe the subjective, lived experiences of microscopic organisms of the salt marsh biome and food chain.
Sculpture, drawing, 3D prints and animated video elements are designed to interact with each other to evoke an empathic response to microscopic individuals
Sea level rise is expected to have distinct spatial expressions that vary by latitude, and reconstructing past shorelines help scientists understand the characteristic fingerprints of processes that are affecting us now and will affect us in future.
To create these reconstructions, scientists examine ancient salt marsh core samples to find where species of foraminifera lived long ago. Foraminifera are microscopic, single-celled sea creatures that form shells and are found in abundance all over the world. Certain species live under water, others at the edge of the water. Once a foraminifera fossil is found, scientists can meticulously date the sedimentation found in core samples through carbon dating and pollution markers, and cross reference this information with which species of foraminifera lived at what time, and where, scientists can get a pretty good idea of where ancient shorelines were.
Research sites are selected because they have salt marshes that have remained undisturbed for at least the past 2000 years. Marshes are valuable research sites because they are fundamentally linked to the tides and sea level, and they are calm, quiet places where sediment is steadily added, as opposed to a beach where material is constantly being moved on and off. Many things affect the scientists’ understanding of any given site, including the distribution of native salt-tolerant plants, sea levels, ground elevation and composition, and tidal ranges.
These foraminifera fossil models are based on species found in the Belle Isle Salt Marsh in Eastern Massachusettes. These models are made from using a microscopic CT scanner on foraminifera fossils, which were then 3D printed by the project’s technical director, Yaqi Cai, who also designed the modular shelving unit holding the 3D prints. These prints will also be used to train young scientists at Tufts University how to identify foraminifera under the microscope.
Reliquaries were historically created as devotional objects to hold the biological remains of Catholic saints. The reliquaries themselves often represented the part of the body held within as it was when it was alive, for example, the object may look like an arm, or a portrait of the saint. The slide on this microscope holds the biological remains of numerous species of foraminifera found in the ancient mud of a core sample retrieved from Belle Island Salt Marsh near Boston, MA for scientific research. This reliquary is designed contain the bodies of these tiny creatures and represent their physicality when alive. Because microscopes that allow us to see foraminifera are very costly, this one is nonfunctional, however, the video nearby shows us what a live foraminifera looks like in her native habitat.
The environmental humanities, has as its goal to create thriving on earth for all beings. It is an interdisciplinary movement that bridges science, philosophy, and art that seeks to change the cultural and intellectual framework inherited from the enlightenment. It is a move away from focus on the individual human, and indeed, away from the human, and towards a more equitable relationship between us and the more-than-human world. It is essentially feminist and anti-racist and acknowledges we are one entangled body here on planet earth. This thinking owes an enormous debt to indigenous science and culture, and it seeks a creative, loving path out of the thorniest problems of the climate and ecological crisis. This framework asserts that no solution for the crisis can be found without the ethical reframing provided by the biggest imaginers of environmental humanist thought. The audience was encouraged to read, draw, and incorporate their drawings and writings into the exhibition
Cord grass is commonly found in the intertidal zone of the swamp, it is good at surviving saltwater conditions. As the tide moves through the grass, tidal creeks, and flood marsh platforms, it is a critical driver for movement of water and solutes in marsh systems. Tides create lifeways for grass and a multitude of creatures as it ebbs onto and off of the marsh surface both by sheet flow over the marsh and direct drainage to tidal creeks. If you look closely at this grass during specific moments of its growth, you can see droplets of water that have accumulated at the tips of the grass, representing a tiny but persistent and widely distributed method of water displacement throughout the marsh.
Water Boatman are commonly found in the New England Salt Marsh. They spend their lives in the water and feed on algae and plants. Their lifeways are a critical part of the food web of the swamp. Peoples native to New England used swarms of Water Boatman as a food source. They are the loudest animal on earth, relative to their size, and they create song by rubbing their large hind legs along their bodies.
These drawings imagine what microbes might look like to one another, the ways they might process the existence of their fellow microscopic creatures, and how they might develop kin recognition in their tiny cosmos.