"Over the Air and Underground" 2020

Angelica Mesiti

Born 1976, Gadigal Country/Sydney, New South Wales. Lives and works in Paris, France.

 

"Over the Air and Underground" 2020

five-channel HD video, 10-channel sound, 36:34 minutes each

 

Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Allen, Paris, France, and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne.

 

 

Over the Air and Underground attunes to bee and forest communication transmitted through the air around us, and the living fungal mycorrhizal systems beneath our feet. Realised as a five-channel video installation, plants, flowers, and glistening mycelial threads slowly rotate under a magenta-hued ultraviolet light, evoking what a bee might see as it circles a flower. The score is composed for 10 human voices, each humming an ‘A’ note at the frequency of 220 Hz, mimicking the electrical signals and sounds of plant communication through the crackling of tree roots as they grow. Plants also communicate with their pollinator companions through seductively coloured flowers and scent.

 

Forest ecologist Suzanne Simard coined the term ‘wood-wide web’ to describe the interspecies communication that keep forests alive. Her research into Douglas fir revealed that ‘mother trees’ collaborate symbiotically with microbes and mycorrhizal networks, using these fungal pipelines to transmit messages about threats and pests, while exchanging nutrients and carbon to enable the survival of her saplings, kin trees, and other species across the understory.

 

Forming a vast, interdependent web of relations, forest ecologies resemble a neural network. These multispecies entanglements chart a model for a complex intelligent system centred around reciprocity, mutualism, and the survival of the group. Diversity is vital, and monocultural planting and clearcutting by the forestry industry puts the delicate ecosystem at risk of collapse. Over the Air and Underground changes how we think about forests by tracing more-than-human modes of communication and displacing the notion of human exceptionalism as the only means of intelligence.