conVerge - Ecology - Fiona Hall

Ecology - Fiona Hall

Hello. I would like to start by acknowledging that we are on Kaurna Land. As was just said I'm going to talk to you about two projects. One's a work in progress I've been working on over a couple of years now and the other one is a landscape architecture project which I was invited to participate in about a year ago which may never happen but I think that in the context of this Symposium it might be interesting to talk about it briefly. So obviously I don't have visual material for that one but I do for the first one.

The first project here is called 'Leaf Litter' and it's a work I've been doing both in Sri Lanka (where I can get access to many plant species from the tropical band) as well as in Australia. I'm going to start by reading you a wall statement that I was asked to write for a work which is being shown in Rotterdam exhibition titled 'Unpacking Europe' - which you can tell from the title has a very post colonial agenda. The artists who participated were from different parts of the world, some of whom are currently residing in Europe but none of them European in origin. The work was very appropriate in that context because as with my own, it's dealing with a lot of the post colonial outcomes that have shaped the society that we live in today. So this is the wall text which will briefly describe the work and then I'll talk as I go through some of the slides about making the work.

"Money doesn't grow on trees or does it? Plants have played a crucial role in the history of colonisation and the development of world economies. Many species have been responsible for the rapid growth of European wealth over the last 500 years. Plants along with the people have been shifted across oceans, battles have been waged over them and forests raised but everything comes at a price and now we are paying heavily for taxing the environment and for cultivating an even more widening gap between rich and poor nations. Many of the once plant rich countries are now amongst the poorest on Earth. Leaf Litter aligns the distribution of plant species with the distribution of monetary wealth. It also displays botanical connections across diverse territories. For plants like people have colonised where they can. Closely related species belonging to the same botanical family have evolved and adapted to wide ranging habitats. The systematic classification like the foundations of capitalism is European in origin. Futures markets and the future of botanical riches and diversity continue to be closely intertwined. But there are some things that money can't buy. So now to talk about the work. These works consist of plant leaves. I'm working with an accurately depicted leaf as in the tradition of botanical illustration which goes back several centuries. So my rendition of the leaf is the size of the actual leaf, they've all been made from actual leaves. So in the slides of course you don't really get that differentiation on scale and I thought that this would be a great introductory piece to show because it's a leaf of an ??Tree on an Indian one rupee note. Interestingly, this note also has the head of George VI on it and beautifully articulates the history of colonisation in India. The ?. Tree is an indispensable tree in India as it is a natural pesticide and antiseptic. About ten years ago now an American pesticide company attempted to patent the genetic make up of the?.. Tree and fortunately were unsuccessful.

This is one of the first pieces I did when I arrived in Sri Lanka. Back then I couldn't recognise any plants except the coconut palm and I've been on a near vertical curve ever since so now I am quite familiar with a number of species there. This is one of the first that I did which is Cinnamon and of course it's one of a number of the spice plants which were avidly desired by Europe from the medieval times and of course the Dutch, English and Portuguese waged appalling wars with each other for control over the spice trade.

This is black pepper, also on a Sri Lankan bank note and as I said in my brief wall statement, one of the things that fascinates me is the connective-ness amongst different species of plants of the same family. That is something I will try to show you with a few sequences of slides - as I said this is black pepper and

This is cabbage, on a German note. It's a hybridised form of the Brassica family. The botanic name? which is very Germanic to me. I have become very fascinated with Latin and while I am not a scientist or botanist, I think I look at Latin in a very different way to the way that a Botanist would - a very interesting system to me.

This is the Turnip which is the same family as is on Afghani money. Many of our most useful plants come from what the Oxford Book for Food Plants terms 'the fertile crescent' the strategically contested territory from around Afghanistan to that area East of the Mediterranean. I thought that was politically very interesting.

Now to run through a sequence of members of the Oak family. Some of you might be familiar with the garden project I did two years ago as part of the Sydney Biennale. When the land masses drifted apart they carried with them plants and animal species that had evolved up to that point and then of course they continued to evolve spearated. We share a great deal of similarity - our plants in Australia have connections with those in New Caledonia, New Zealand, South Africa, South America and India (we're on the same continental plate as India). It's fascinating to me that the oak family has an equally wide distribution as the Gondwana plants but it is only in the Northern Hemisphere (as far as I know). This is only the tip of the iceberg of the oak family which I'm showing you. I'll go through some of the fig family now. This is the edible fig. I was talking just before to Rene Boutin who knows a lot more than I do on the New Caledonian Families. We share a common interest in this area of plants, they are totally fascinating. English Elm, Russian Elm. Some of the edible plants here - carrot on Pakistani money, again going back to the whole area of the fertile crescent that so many things came from. Broad Bean on Afghanistan money. Cloves on Dutch/Indonesian money from when the Dutch ruled the area. The Olive here on Uranian money, it seems to come from a little further south east than Greece and Italy which we associate with the Olive. Passionfruit, Brazil. Pineapple, Brazil. So many things come from the tropical Americas. Chives on an Iraqi bank note with Sadam Hussein. The onion family also come from that same Middle Eastern region. Chilli from South America's Peru. Chocolate from Brazil. Chinese Gooseberry (Kiwi Fruit ) from China of course. One of the Yams on Indonesian money. Coco Leaf from which cocaine comes on Peruvian money. In Sri Lanka, I was staying close to where there was a coca plant and actually ate it's leaf after I painted it's portrait. I was quite curious. This is a very common street tree, different to say the Plane Tree but used as much as we might use the Plane Tree in Adelaide. This is the Red Cement Tree. This is a Lotus which is one of a number of plants, which I find really fascinating because it's impossible to know from where it originated because it has such wide distribution. This is a distribution from Western Asia right through to the Far Eastern Asia and even Northern Australia. I've been told that plants like the Coconut is another one where we don't really know where it originated. Perhaps with DNA testing we'd be able to get more information about that.

A couple of water plants I'm just going to run through the slides now because you get the drift of the work now and by the way, when exhibited, these are shown on the wall in alphabetical order using botanical classification.

On the estate where I stay there are five gardeners who look after the estate. The owner had this estate for about 40 years and while he's had some landscaping done the garden is mainly what they call jungle or what we would call bush - many indigenous species. The first morning that I woke up there it was sweeping day, the five gardeners for one day each week just sweeping. They do nothing but sweep around the estate.

I'm going to talk about the other project which I mentioned which will probably never happen. A little over a year ago I was approached by a curator in Berlin who works with what she terms 'artists who work with living plants' - in other words artists who work with plant material. It could be a garden or another kind of an art but it's living plants, not dried material or as in my work with Leaf Litter. She asked me if I'd like to be one of four artists to do part of a garden in the atrium of a corporation in France. I do have a great interest in landscape architecture which I would like to pursue more, but you need someone who'll give you the place and the money to realise the project.

So I thought, wow this is a great invitation and I found out soon after that initial contact that the corporate building happens to be Eventus Crop Science. Many of you probably know that along with Santo, Eventus Crop Science is a major company producing genetically modified crop plants. In fact I recall hearing, before this invitation, on the ABC News how one GM crop trial in the USA created major problems - they had to throw out silos full or corn in case it was contaminated by the starlight corn product. I also know that Eventus has been trialing canola and other plants in Australia.

Consequently I was in this terrible dilemma because on the one hand here was an opportunity to do a garden which is just my thing - a fabulous opportunity - but for Eventus Crop Science. So I had many conversations including a couple of lengthy telephone conversations with Barbara - did she realise what this company did? Why was she going ahead with it? She said she understood if I pulled out but she'd had a think and decided to go ahead. She was going to be one of the four artists as well as a New Yorker (whom I'm not familiar with) and one is a New Caledonian Artist, Denise?. who I happen to know because we were both in the 1996 Asian Pacific Triennial.

Anyway I then had probably about six weeks of an absolute quandary and I asked for information from Eventus and I got these books with big glossy illustrations of all of their corporate managers who interestingly were all men. It just went against everything that I would possibly think is right in the world, to work with a GM company. I ended up calling Alan Snider a Physicist in the ANU, who started the Centre for the Mind about four years ago. He had an interesting take - he said, if you say no you've missed the opportunity to do something, to have a voice. Whereas if you say yes then you have a voice and you have a responsibility to use that opportunity. So I said yes. This was February last year and since then I developed my ideas on the space in the atrium.

The atrium was on the ground floor of the building, an inside glass space with some sunlight and a lot of artificial light. The space faced north so got dull light for most of the year - it's like our southern light in Australia. An even temperature all year round and a dry heat. I also had a space that you could look down on from the mezzanine level but you couldn't walk through. So I had to think what would be suitable for the space, me and for Eventus Crop Science.

I decided to use a Japanese Cycad. Cycads are some of the oldest plants that still exist on Earth. They go back before the dinosaurs to the Permian period and interestingly they know from the fossil record that Cycads have changed very little since they first evolved and this species is one that is virtually unchanged. They are also one of the first seed plants and are extremely resilient. The seed pods can float thousands of miles across the oceans.

Interspersed amongst the Cycads I proposed six very large tall thin Obelisks?. that went up about four meters - higher than the top level of the Cycads. One for each of the geological periods since the Cycads evolved, from Permian through the Jurassic and beyond. The form of the Obelisk is a structure that is used a lot in European gardens and is historically seen as a memorial - something like a grave marker. A memorial was quite appropriate for Eventus Crops Science I thought.

Not long after my design concept had been approved, I heard that Eventus Crop Science Division was going to be sold off by the parent company, so the whole thing is on hold and will probably never happen.

I thought I should mention this experience because of a comment I heard yesterday by Sue Rowley that GM companies would look to artists as the go-betweens to make their products seem acceptable to the general public. I'm not so sure about that - so thought this would be an interesting episode to talk about in the context of this Ecology panel. Thank you very much.