Volume IV, September 1st, 2022

Laboratory for Heirlooms – A Hybridized Tea Ceremony – 茶道 functions as a nucleus; bearing connective circulatory origins. An exchange of liquid sustenance begins here and courses throughout the installation. Utilizing Japanese tea ceremonies as reference; these introspective spaces are fabricated to contemplate Wabi-Sabi - わびさび, amongst ghostly spirits. Traditional philosophies implement history rooted in commemoration, an eternal cultural discourse beyond life and death. Practices are modified by merging tradition, offering, heirloom, and DNA, to illustrate the passing down of heritage. The ceremony is enveloped by intrinsic lifelines and laboratory apparatuses to signify the systematized collection of both tangible and intangible lineage. Archives are infused within this shared supply of tea, constantly unifying transient bodies and nourishing the exhibition at large, with extracted cultural data.

DNA: Primordial Secretions, Ancestral Entanglements – 温泉 explores the coalescence of art, science, spirituality, and heritage by transcribing genealogical networks through the hybridization of ritual and biology. I navigate transgenerational epigenetics and hauntological ontology by anthropomorphizing diasporic histories. Derived from my ghostly kinships, loss is met with regenerative cultural autonomy.

-Marli Davis

Dad and I talked the entire drive about rust and flesh, I looked out the window into the mirror watching the trees recede into the distance, yearning for their embrace.

My son and I, remembering together, my grandfathers grapevine, in his backyard terrace, when I was 14 / My dad and I, remembering together, my great-grandfathers grapevine, in his backyard terrace, before I was born.

Dad talked the entire drive about cars and sex, his eyes lay heavy on the road refusing to make eye contact, as I imagined their bodies and mine.

-Derek Liddington

you left me in a ditch: unaware, uncared for, unknown 

bunk 

carrot fern 

cigue maculee 

conium maculatum 

deadman’s oatmeal 

fool’s parsley 

hemlock 

kecksies 

poison hemlock 

poison parsley 

poison parsnip 

poison root 

snake-weed 

spotted hemlock 

wild carrot 

wild parsnip 

wode whistle... 

Entangled within the wildflowers, lies an imposter of their beauty and close cousin of our supermarket staples. Remembered through the rigorous research of scientists, old and new, yet remains widely unknown in the public’s eyes. Except for when tragedy strikes a naive forager, or when an eager philosophy student learns about your connection to Socrates, though you are wrongly accused to be the cause of his death. 

For you can bring death to both the ill informed or the expert botanist, due to the labyrinth of misidentification and misinformation which surrounds you. 

We should know that your hairless stems are wine-stained, and that your leaves reek of urine when crushed. That even if the smallest flower, leaf, or seed is ingested; our heart rate will quicken, and body temperature will plummet. Your conine poison will slowly intoxicate our nerves leading to muscle paralysis, respiratory arrest, and finally death. You have no cure that we know of, yet we are no longer taught how to identify you from the crowd. 

How could we become illiterate about what grows within our backyards, ravines, and ditches? We brought you here with purpose, upon our boats as a medicinal remedy, and you have flourished in this new land. We used you for scirrhous, epilepsy, abortions, and asthma until 1934, but after studying your toxicity for hundreds of years, we learned that you could not be our cure. 

Today, you have been left behind to grow wild on the roadside; and we have become unaware of your poisonous presence.

-Sarah Zanchetta