Essay 3 — Ancestral Futures (of Food?)

To further the mission of impact on nature through science and transdisciplinary collaborations Wyss Academy for Nature created “Habitat” as a narrative space of reflection and experimentation on the interconnectedness between art and ecologies.

How do we reconstitute our modes of being so that we live in ways that reflect and sustain our necessary relations of belonging to the earth? Art has the enormous power to shatter outmoded paradigms and draw freely from the past in order to address and face the challenges of the future, so art is a good place to situate this rethinking of our connection to and place within—indeed dependence upon—nature, as earth- and waterbound beings. 

This essay reflects on the imaginary of fishing, algae, and the sea by presenting artistic research by Veronika Spierenburg, as well as a highly aesthetical meditation through the medium of film by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, and the cooking and research on micro-and macro algae of Maya Minder. All works explore an area where the interconnection between land and water determines the climate and shapes the landscape as well as the working environment of its people. The camera (historical and contemporary) observes and explores the landscape with an artistic sensibility and captures fishing nets and boats, past, present and possible futures.