To celebrate Earth Day, Blum & Poe Broadcasts is pleased to present the online group exhibition Mutter, Matter, Mother, featuring works by Theodora Allen, March Avery, Mohamed Bourouissa, Sam Durant, Anya Gallaccio, Yukie Ishikawa, Mimi Lauter, Dave Muller, Solange Pessoa, Nobuo Sekine, Penny Slinger—artists who imagine an ecofeminist future through materials and thematic concerns in their practices.
“Planting seeds requires medium, soil, matter, mutter, mother,” writes the ecofeminist thinker Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016).* Pairing artworks with selected quotes from this text, the exhibition builds global, cross-species kinships to conjure a flourishing future. This is a speculative narrative and the protagonists are our non-human allies, including plants, stones, and rivers. Holding open space for another, they lead the way to our collaborative survival—a practice of caring.
Mutter, Matter, Mother marks the six-year anniversary of the gallery’s participation in Arts Earth Partnership (AEP), and Blum & Poe’s incentives in becoming one of the first green-certified contemporary art galleries in the United States. Committed to facilitating a more sustainable art world, the gallery also recently became a member of the Gallery Climate Coalition, a collaborative act to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint.
As part of this online exhibition, Dave Muller’s 15-part work Bloom Spiel (2014) will be installed at Blum & Poe Los Angeles. Muller also created a playlist to accompany the exhibition which can be accessed here, and in the gallery via QR code.
A portion of sales from this show will be donated to Sunrise Movement—a youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process.
To accompany the exhibition, curator Stephanie Cristello selected a quote from Theodora Allen's forthcoming monograph Saturnine, written by Cristello and produced on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name at Kunsthal Aarhus, Denmark. Access the reading here, and pre-order the book here.
*Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
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"Terrapolis is a fictional integral equation, a speculative fabulation.
Terrapolis is n-dimensional niche space for multispecies becoming-with.
Terrapolis is open, worldly, indeterminate, and polytemporal.
Terrapolis is a chimera of materials, languages, histories."
"With a shell and a net, becoming human, becoming humus, becoming terran, has another shape—that is, the side-winding, snaky shape of becoming-with. To think-with is to stay with the naturalcultural multispecies trouble on earth."
"Plants are consummate communicators in a vast terran array of modalities, making and exchanging meanings among and between an astonishing galaxy of associates across the taxa of living beings. Plants, along with bacteria and fungi, are also animals’ lifelines to communication with the abiotic world, from sun to gas to rock."
"In the feminist SF mode, matter is never 'mere' medium to the 'informing' seed; rather, mixed in terra’s carrier bag, kin and get have a much richer congress for worlding."
"There are no guarantees, no arrow of time, no Law of History or Science or Nature in such struggles. There is only the relentlessly contingent SF worlding of living and dying, of becoming-with and unbecoming-with, of sympoiesis, and so, just possibly, of multispecies flourishing on earth."
"The devil is truly in the details of response-able naturecultures inhabited by accountable companion species. They—we—are here to live and die with, not just think and write with. But also that, also here to sow worlds with, to write in ant exudates on acacia seeds to keep the stories going."
"Finally, and not a moment too soon, sympoesis enlarges and displaces autopoesis and all other self-forming and self-sustaining system fantasies. Sympoesis is a carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming-with, for staying with the trouble of inheriting the damages and achievements of colonial and postcolonial naturalcultural histories in telling the tale of still possible recuperation."
