Planting Trees & Building Community with Travis Neel

In episode six of The Vocal Cue, your host Tawny Ballinger speaks with Texas Tech University School of Art Assistant Professor of Art, Travis Neel. 

Travis will take you along his journey through his latest project, The Mesquite Mile. His experience and research goes much deeper than just art and expands across multiple disciplines. Get ready to think about the way you live in your own neighborhood and the relationships you have to everyone, and everything, around you.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Hi, my name is Tony Ballinger. I am going to be your host for today, and today I am here with Assistant Professor Travis Neel.

Speaker 0:08

Oh, hello.

Speaker 1 0:10

I should be looking at So what made you want to be an art professor?

Speaker 0:22

Um my uh path to teaching, um, I I guess it started in my first year experience as a um a student at Massachusetts College of Art. I had um uh some really great uh first year professors who um sort of made me rethink my relationship to um art and um sort of changed my worldview and and the way that they sort of introduced all these approaches to making and thinking that I had never been exposed to before and did it in like a really supportive way that sort of mentored me through some of the challenges of experiencing like performance art for the first you know, like when you first per experienced that, and you know, it can be kind of shocking, but um, I had these mentors that were able to sort of introduce it in a way that felt accessible and also in a way that made me want to try doing things outside of my comfort zone. Um so uh yeah, so and and then the sort of the nurturing experience of that undergraduate program um and building relationships with um lifelong friends and and colleagues um sort of kept me in the sort of realm of uh academia in a way. You know, from that first moment of stepping into a foundations class to when I got my master's degree, I've had lots of mentors that have supported, you know, um this desire to be an educator and have made me rethink my role to education all along the way uh to, you know, I don't know, to the point where I am now. And also students, I mean I've had like the thing about academia is that it's this um you know pluristic place where you're engaging in in dialogue about um sometimes really challenging things and working in collaboration with students is like a really um uh uh generative place, I guess, for me. And also uh so I it's also I think the students have m my engagement with students has been a big part of why I've I've pursued this path.

Speaker 1 2:31

That's awesome. Um so how do you know that you are accomplishing success in your career?

Speaker 2:37

My career? Yes. Uh yeah, so I I think um, you know, I guess that's I mean that's a good question. Uh well I I uh my my idea of of what is success has changed a lot um over the years. Um I was first presented with this like really narrow idea of success, which is around like the commercialization of an art practice or the like participating in some sort of system with galleries and people selling work and all this stuff. And um as I was exposed to alternative ways of thinking about meaning making in one's life, my ideas have shifted. But uh uh how I gauge success now is um whether or not the work that I'm doing is contributing um uh to the flourishing of humans or and non-humans. And um so I so I think about you know um yeah, how we can contribute um in in a um how my art practice or you know teaching practice contribute to um I don't know, a better world for everyone and everything. Everyone. Yes.

Speaker 1 3:52

Okay. Um how do you know you are succeeding and not failing?

Speaker 3:55

I think in the I I can talk specifically about the project that we're doing. Um it's it's very much about our relationships to our neighbors. I I work in the neighborhood that I I live in. Um I work with the people that I live with. I live in a house uh with uh other adults, and we we collectively live together and we've created a set of agreements that um organize our lives and our relationships around principles of environmental and social resilience. And and that sort of like set of values have have expanded beyond the household and are are related to our neighbors, and our neighbors include um the people who live um in the neighborhood with us, as well as the trees and the um uh flowers and um the insects and the animals. So the more that we work um with our neighbors on this project, the Mesquite Mile, the more successful it feels. Um, you know, um, and but it's it's interesting because it's it's it there is like a human timeline to that project, uh which is you know how long it takes to build relationships between people, but then there's like um an ecological timeline, which is maybe more expansive than our lifespans as humans. So gauging success may take, you know, um uh decades or longer. I don't know.

Speaker 1 5:15

You started a project called the mesquite mile. For the people watching, can you explain what it is?

Speaker 5:21

Yeah, so the mesquite mile is it's a lot of things. Um it's it's an interdisciplinary uh practice uh or project that crosses disciplines within the field of art, but then outside the field of art. So uh we work um on uh it's been called a number of things. It's been called an urban affrestation project, so we we plant trees, it's been called a prairie restoration project. Um so we we work a lot with the plant communities of the shortgrass prairie and actually the Tawan Desert as well. Um and then um it's also been called uh well I call it a study in child-friendly urban design. And um what it is is is we work with um uh homeowners and then also the city to um uh redesign public space to sort of honor uh and respect water and respect um yeah non-human life and inhuman life in in our neighborhood. So um what we do is, you know, normally like a city, uh a city is designed to treat water as a nuisance. Like it when it rains, it takes the water and it runs it down a street and it places it somewhere away from everything so it doesn't flood and um and and we have impervious surface lots of concrete, and so it just like you know, when it rains, the streets become, I mean, you've probably seen them in floor uh in in Nobak, they become flooded and um and that water doesn't go, you know, it doesn't it doesn't go anywhere, it's not watering plants. And we live in semi-arid country, right, where we only get 20 inches of rain a year. Uh so to treat the limited amount of water that we get as a nuisance is kind of like a silly thing, you know. So we sort of propose with this project, well, what happens if we think of the water as having an intrinsic value and we try to sort of channel it in a way that can support um like the hydrologic system and and um also life. Uh so we we um build we build basins and we we take trees from places where they're unwanted. So the mesquite tree is sort of the charismatic um thorny thorny and charismatic, it's a thorny bush tree, uh, and it's a charismatic tree, it's the sort of protagonist of this project. So we take trees from where they're unwanted and we put them into yards, and then we design the yards to sort of capture as much rainwater, stormwater runoff into planting basins. Um and then the child-friendly part of it is that we're creating protected pedestrian pathways. So in a lot of neighborhoods in Lubbock, you'll notice there are no north-south sidewalks just because of the way the city was developed and ordinances. Um if um you you know, you if you spend a day on a corner of a street, you'll see that streets are often occupied by uh cars, uh people in wheelchairs, um, children, um, dogs, stray dogs and stray cats, and um, you know, all these sort of actors uh uh um occupy the street. Um, and it's not it's not a safe place for people in wheelchairs or children to be in the street with cars. So, you know, one of the things that we do is we pilot or we show that you know we can redesign our public-facing lawn to have things like um put protected pedestrian pathways. The project does a lot of things, but it's it's been centered around the mesquite tree.

Speaker 1 8:39

Okay, so what inspired you to create the mesquite mile?

Speaker 8:43

Yeah, so um all those things like um uh observe like being uh somewhat new to a place and observing some of the challenges to sort of occupying public space, and then um a belief in um you know uh people um should have uh a role in shaping their city and that like we can um in a participatory way um uh define uh public space. And then with those sort of w we have this like theory that maybe other people felt the same way. So we did a community survey. We distributed like thousands of flyers with a survey around uh community needs, and we we asked people what they wanted and needed in the neighborhood, and and overwhelmingly people said you know they they wanted sidewalks, um, uh they wanted more trees, um, they wanted more green space. Um and and we also asked them about ideas of green infrastructure, so things like rainwater basins and um rain barrels and curb cuts to bring water from the street into the yards, and overwhelmingly, everyone who responded, we had we had over 70 responses, uh, which is pretty good. Uh people were really interested in um uh the green infrastructure part of the project, but also they sort of I think confirmed what we thought people wanted in the neighborhood. Um and and then also a lot of people expressed an interest in being um uh part of the work um and hosting our our work. Um yeah.

Speaker 1 10:21

Did the burning of the mesquite trees also inspire you?

Speaker 10:24

Yeah, so can you tell me about that? I I wasn't familiar with that part, that that story.

Speaker 1 10:30

Um I know people just like burn the trees, like the mesquite trees, because they say that it has no use.

Speaker 10:36

Ah, yeah. That's okay, cool. So yeah, that there is certainly this perception of the tree as a weed or as a nuisance. And that was another thing that really interested us is that there's this tree that, you know, if you if you hit uh Clovis Highway from here to Clovis and you drive 100 miles, you know, you'd be hard pressed to see a mesquite tree. You would um even though, you know, they're they they sort of migrated here uh into this region like 14,000 years ago, um uh in the belly of giant sloth. And um uh anyways, an archaeologist can you know correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think that that's the case. They they migrated north 14,000 years ago, and they've sort of been, they're one of the few native trees that grow on the Ano Estacato, and um, you know, in in many cases they uh uh existed in the Royos and the Canyons. Um and then um, you know, due to sort of like changes in land use, post-colonization and and um um and the sort of ongoing marginalization and um of of an in of indigenous uh lifeways and and um culture, uh this tree which had a very important spiritual and uh human use in in Comanche culture and and uh Kioa and um Apache culture, like it the beans are edible, so you can eat them and you can turn them into a flower. Um and you know, uh, but anyway, so post-colonization um uh there's this like uh ecological forgetting that happens in that like the relationship to this tree is sort of forgotten, and that relationship has shifted to be one where it's perceived as a nuisance because you know it has an economic impact on on agriculture, which if you know if you've you know you take that Clovis Highway, you you notice that the shortgrass prairie has been replaced by sort of um cotton fields and feedlots and and ranching and all these things. And so the the mesquite tree can can sort of quickly infiltrate disturbed landscapes, and um you know big agriculture disturbs the landscape and it and um cows especially they sort of create ripe conditions for mesquite um groves to uh uh sort of colonize a landscape because cows like to eat mesquite beans, they're like delicious beans, and their uh bellies scarify the seeds, and their um their poo is like the perfect place for seeds to germinate. Uh so the cows in time of drought, you know, we work with a rancher just in Tohoka, and in times of drought, the cows eat a lot of the beans because it's one of the few things that is thriving and in um even if there's no water, you know. So uh because of its impact, economic impact on agriculture, it's perceived as a nuisance, and because of this ongoing marginalization of um uh you know um Indigenous uh the indigenous culture that was once here, the Comanche culture. You know, and in maybe one way this this project is kind of about re recovering a relationship to the tree and um telling uh you know from a human our you know a human perspective and of um I guess in my role, I guess if I think of my my positionality here, an academic who's uh with a settler colonial mindset, like I'm like thinking about well, what does it mean to recover a relationship to this plant that has has adorned this landscape for 14,000 years? Um so yeah, anyway, all that's wrapped up into the project.

Speaker 1 14:14

That's cool. Um so you have six sites for the uh mesquite mow. Is Deborah Robinson's site still the latest project?

Speaker 14:23

So yeah, so we Deb Deborah Robinson, um she's actually not so uh, but we're still working with with Deborah and her site. Um a lot of what we do is we we you know redesign the sites and then we garden them and tend for them and and and get them to the point where they're self-sustaining. But Deborah Robinson lives um in this really interesting um space where behind her house is a north-south alleyway, and there are very few north-south alleyways in in Lubbock, they mostly run east-west. And this it this alleyway used to service houses, but now it's sort of just what I guess maybe urban planners would call the space left over after planning, um, uh like a slope is what they call it. So it's unused. So what we did is we we've worked, we're now working in that north-south alleyway, and we've we've um uh turned it into sort of a prairie landscape. And then after that, we uh and we worked with the city to to do that. We've done the southern side of the line of the alleyway, and then um then we're working on a new site uh down down the street um on the 22nd, and uh and it's right outside the flood zone. Um so it'll collect water and sort of prevent it from maybe entering that little floodplain a little bit. Um yeah, so we're on we're kind of wrapping that one up right now.

Speaker 1 15:42

How many sites do you plan on having? Because I know if I'm remembering it correctly, the mesquite miles are on an acre of land.

Speaker 15:49

Well it's a mile, it's a one mile by one mile tract. Um yeah, so and we we've yeah, we've uh at this point we've we've taken about an acre of front yard and alleyway, and maybe a little bit over now, and we've started doing this work of planting flowers and trees and um grass um and and some and some bushes um and cactus. There's cactus there too. Uh and um, you know, that's okay. I don't know how much further we'll go. I mean, we are ambitious in that we're um one of my collaborators is a landscape architect, and he thinks in a systems way. So I'm like, okay, we're doing one one project site at a time, and he's like, well, if we do, you know, a hundred of these, that changes the entire hydrological flow of this neighborhood and can affect a floodplain, and um which is a really big can have a really big impact on you know um not people. So he's thinking in a very big way. So it's possible we'll get to a hundred. I don't know if we'll get to a hundred sites, but you know, at this point we're um, you know, one of the things about the work is we we we need money. So we are always constantly applying for grant funding um to continue the work, and sometimes we're successful and sometimes we're not. So uh, but the one thing that we have is um students who are who are really engaged in the project, and I have students who work for me through work study. I have some students who've been work with me since their first semester, their first year in school, and they've been with me for three years working on this project, and they know how to do everything, everything from start to finish at this point. And each yard, in a way, becomes an archive, like a seed bank, you know, so we can just go to yards and grab seeds, and most of the work we can do is just do with shovels. So as long as I have students who are interested in working with me on the project, um, and as long as those plants keep propagating, we have everything we need to do the work. Um and we've got uh a bunch of trees that were growing from seed. Um so instead of taking trees from ranches and moving them into front yards or taking them from Texas Tech property where they're unwanted and moving them into front yards, now we can just take seed uh baby trees and plant them. Um yeah.

Speaker 1 18:03

That's great. I really hope you all are able to get a hundred. That would be awesome.

Speaker 18:08

It'd be pretty cool, yeah.

Speaker 1 18:09

Um so how many mesquite trees do you typically have growing at a time in the greenhouse here at Texas Tech?

Speaker 18:18

Well, we had over a hundred. There's been a little die-off, and I think that we're around that. Um, but uh I don't know. I don't know. I think around, I would say over 80 and under 100 probably. I haven't counted for a while.

Speaker 1 18:32

That's that's a lot.

Speaker 18:34

Yeah, it's it's a lot. Yeah, so we might do a big tree giveaway of an event of some sort uh this spring. All the seeds for those trees were collected from cow dung, actually. So we went up to the ranch and we collected dung and uh brought it back to the greenhouse and you know planted the seeds from the dung. So in a way it's it's similar to the assistant migration of taking a big tree, but we we get them before they, you know, get to be big. Um yeah.

Speaker 1 19:01

Can students who are not enrolled in the TC VPA college go and help plant these trees?

Speaker 19:06

They can, yeah. I mean, uh we there are different pathways to engaging with the project. Um if if folks uh qualify for for work study, um uh which is like you know, it's an award you receive based on um a financial aid package. I do uh um hire folks. When people graduate and move on, I hire I do hire folks so people can reach out, always reach out if they're interested in that pathway. Um and but if people want to volunteer and just like work on the project, um we are more than happy uh to sort of um uh to to teach folks and um um how how to do the work that we're doing and and to invite people in into the project. They can just reach out.

Speaker 1 19:50

Okay, so I read that the Puffin Foundation funds some of it. Can you tell me who or what the Puffin Foundation is?

Speaker 20:00

Yeah, so it's a it's an organization that I I don't I don't have the whole background uh information of the organization, but they fund they fund art projects in a very small, I mean in a very generous way, but it's you know uh and they uh do it every year, and I they usually have some sort of focus around the types of projects that they fund. And um they've been interested in environmentally based art uh works in the last few years, and last year they they uh generously gave us a grant that has enabled us to do um Deborah's Yard and another yard. And then before that, we were um we got a nice arts grant from um Mid-Atlantic Art Alliance, um, and they had this fellowship for socially engaged art. Uh, I would identify as a socially engaged artist, um, and that funding uh supported a lot of the early work. Um and uh that I believe their funding came from the Mellon Foundation, I believe. So both of those funding bodies have supported us, and then also Texas Tech has been very supportive of the project, um, which has been really amazing.

Speaker 1 21:08

So what is expanding the circle?

Speaker 21:11

So expanding the circle is a group of faculty who are developing um uh curriculum that uh integrate uh indigenous studies into the work that we're doing in our classrooms and developing reciprocal relationships with um indigenous communities of this region. And it's uh it's funded through a national humanities grant. And the idea is that eventually there will be a certificate program in Indigenous studies, and it's a three-year program. So this year we've been inviting um uh leaders from uh various Indigenous communities to sort of talk to us about um indigenous cosmologies and epistemologies and best approaches to integrating Indigenous studies into higher education. And we've sort of been educating ourselves and starting to develop coursework that could be offered across. The humanities in this in um at Texas Tech University. So there's folks from anthropology, history, architecture, school of art, Spanish, English department. I mean it's it's really a great representation. Oh, film studies. Um, there's folks from film studies. So it's a really wonderful representation of humanities across um Texas Tech and folks who are interested in um yeah, developing these relationships and uh these opportunities to broaden uh our curriculum and and make our our our programs more accessible to indigenous students.

Speaker 1 22:37

Okay. While attending college, did you ever think you would start a project or start a research project?

Speaker 22:45

Um yeah, I guess so. Like I guess I started off thinking that I would be uh a cart uh make cartoons. That's how I started. And then then these professors I was talking about that inspired my rethinking of thinking and making, um, showing me that there are other ways of of being in the world as a creative person. And um those alternative approaches to being in the world, sort of um as a creative, um, changed how I thought about what my art practice could be. So then I went from wanting to be an animator and a cartoonist to being a painter. I wanted to be a painter. Then I started having mentorship from folks who had practices that completely changed what I thought art could be. And it was their sort of um leadership and mentorship that I guess I did start to think mostly this is outside of my undergraduate experience and maybe more in my graduate experience, where I started to think about um a research-based practice. And it's not that like my undergraduate professors weren't um like teaching us how to create questions that we would investigate using an arts framework, but um you know, those arts frameworks as an undergrad were very much disciplinary focused. And then as a grad, I had a very interdisciplinary collaborative grad. I went to a very cooperative graduate program, Portland State University's MFA in art and social practice, which is which is a really fantastic and and radical um graduate program in fine arts. Um, it really made me rethink my relationship to art and what a research practice could be. And um yeah, so I I guess I I arrived at where I'm at now um through, yeah, again, that's sort of the mentorship piece. Um and then like a lot of the questions that I think our project raises or our art practice raises, and I say art because it's collaborative. I work with um the artist Aaron Charpentier, artist Kim Carlsrudd, and um Dr. Daniel Phillips from Landscape Architecture on it, those are the main collaborators. But the main questions that our project asks are um questions that can be somewhat answered by the art field, uh they can exist within it, but the but it requires us to expand beyond it as well. And so um yeah, I guess that curiosity also kind of uh created the need for developing a research practice.

Speaker 1 25:20

Okay. So going back to the mesquite mile, have you ever thought about starting a company for the mesquite mile or thought about creating a company to expand it to be nationwide to where mesquite trees grow?

Speaker 25:34

Oh, well, um, you know, the thing about the idea of expanding the way that we're thinking about the mesquite mile um into other places is I think that's it's a totally possible, like maybe not the mesquite tree, although the mesquite tree's geographic range is expanding because of uh global warming and um its range is expanding. And um, so that's going to happen, and it perhaps it's a tree of a future nature where in a warmer planet and a drier planet, this tree that can thrive and with only two millimeters of rain, it might be a very important companion for us in you know in 20 or 30 years. Um, and we may have to rethink our relationship to it as it expands its range. But the the sort of like the idea of um being aware of the plant companions in your community, whether it's a mesquite tree or a eucalyptus tree in California, which is sort of an invasive tree that was brought over, and or kudzu in the southeast. Like maybe you know, if we we we think about these these plant companions and and um we ask critical questions about them, it might enable us to rethink our relationship to them, and um you know, and that new relationship might be less adversarial and more collaborative. I don't know if that's true. But so in terms of the business part, uh, you know, no, I don't I'm really bad at business, I don't have any entrepreneurial spirit at s at all. I'm really bad at it. I just give everything away, but maybe that's just an ethos thing. So I haven't I don't I think I'd be a horrible business person. Yeah, I guess it's a curse and a blessing that that part of my um personality. But yeah, I think the way that we think about the art plant companions can be carried into any sort of space.

Speaker 1 27:26

Tell me about previous projects that you've worked on.

Speaker 27:30

Um I used to be part of this, but I guess we're we might have make a come back, but I'm part of this post-colonial conceptual karaoke project called Weird Alan Capro. And um in that project we do a lot of performative works where we explore many issues like self-care or uh the political history of objects in an art museum, and it's this like participatory performative project that we do. Um I also did a project um with a number of collaborators called uh we uh the radical imagination gymnasium, which was about um people coming together to reimagine different ways of being together in the world and the idea that the radical imagination is this is something that's shared between people as they as they um experiment with being together. And we did a a number of workshops around working out the idea of the radical imagination and an exhibition related to that project. I've also done a number of works that explore the the sort of um the industrial design of American communitarian experiments. So there's a group of folks in the 1800s who were who uh like the Shaker community and the NIDA community who practiced communism and they developed um uh buildings and objects that reflected their value system. So they they lived together collectively, and they built a the NIDA perfectionist built a lazy Susan table so that in in communal meals they could share, um, they could just spin the table to, you know, um uh access food without servants. Servants were a problem in the 1800s for these communal groups. Um anyway, so we did a project exploring the industrial design of these communities, and we we recreated objects from the communities and also um found uh used found objects from the communities to to understand how ideology or the belief systems that we hold can uh uh can manifest as built environment and how our built environment shapes our ideology. Um yeah, those are some past projects.

Speaker 1 29:35

What has been your favorite project you have worked on?

Speaker 29:38

Mesquite mile has been my favorite.

Speaker 1 29:40

Awesome.

Speaker 29:40

Yeah.

Speaker 1 29:42

Um so you had the um School of Art students help design the uh crosswalk. Can you tell me why you created it?

Speaker 29:53

Yeah, that's part of this, like creating a more child-friendly sort of um pedestrian-friendly space. I teach intro to 2D design. Uh we talk a lot about 50-50 contrast and and uh visual acuity as it relates to um design principles. And um I thought uh, well, it would be really great to apply these design principles to physical space. And there's been all this research that if you paint an intersection using art, that it slows down cars and it makes them safer. Um it shows that you know, just simply just painting uh intersection can make our streets safer for for cars, people, dogs, kids. We wrote a grant uh to the city of Lubbock. They had this neighborhood project grants that allowed folks from neighborhoods to propose projects, and they granted us the money to do it. Um, so my design students, we spent um the semester exploring uh native uh flora, so uh plants, um and the designing um doing intersection designs based on those native flora. Then we took those designs to the um Heart of Lubbock Neighborhood Association and got feedback on the design, and and the feedback we got was that the the design that we chose looks like mesquite beans, but in the crosswalk form, and that the some of the older citizens in the neighborhood um felt that that was like a very like it wasn't too confusing and it was still artistic and it sort of talked to this region, regionality, and they liked that design. So we went with that design, proposed it to the city, they painted crosswalks, and um we did the uh my but next year because it this what took a year to do, so I had another class of 2D design students paint it. So I had one design it and one paint it. So over the span of a year, um uh a number of uh students have been involved in the production of that work.

Speaker 1 31:41

Can you tell me what the calming part behind it means?

Speaker 31:45

Yeah, so you know, when you it's sort of like if there's something in the street, it it makes you slow down because you're more aware of the street. Without the crosswalk and the painting, you know, you can just sort of drive through. But so then also the fact that there's a crosswalk makes you as a driver maybe think, well, maybe there's someone that wants to cross you, you you you know, take your foot off the gas, and maybe you're like more aware of your surroundings. So anything you can do to sort of slow the car down um starts to calm traffic and uh calm and uh prevent sort of accidents from occurring. And uh yeah, the Bloomberg Foundation did a bunch of research on painted crosswalks, and uh it seems like from their research that you know these are really simple low-cost ways that cities can redesign the street to make it more human uh and child friendly.

Speaker 1 32:38

Okay. How do you incorporate um the mesquite mile into your classroom work?

Speaker 32:43

Oh, that's that's the thing that I haven't done much of, other than the other than the crosswalk, you know. I think that I I think of that as an extension of the project, but I haven't figured out a way to teach what we're doing in our research. And um so if anyone listening out there has any ideas, please get in touch. But I don't we have I haven't quite done it. But maybe I mean I I think that some of the questions around ecological forgetting and in relationship to place and and and in indigenous cosmology and epistemologies can sort of find their way into some of the classes that I teach, which is the goal of expanding the circle. And some of those sort of frameworks, those those ways of of thinking about the world can influence the way that we make um make artwork. Um but yeah, I I would love to teach a class about all this stuff. I just haven't found space for it in our curriculum.

Speaker 1 33:40

Okay. How is a mesquite mine on artwork?

Speaker 33:45

Yeah, so art is um a very liberatory practice. And the thing about art um is that artists have been um sort of finding the contours of what where art, where are the boundaries of art. You know, and and it and its boundaries are um sort of permeable and um also sort of expansive. So you know, one thing that I like to think about in in regards to the mesquite mile is that it's about relations and relationships between people and relationships between people and plants, and plants and plants, and plants and insects, and plants and water, and people and water. You know, these are we're we live in a world of relations. In art, there is this, there's been a long um sort of examination of of uh art that deals with uh relations. Um feminist uh art practices and performance art practices of the 70s started um raising questions about uh relational practices and dialogue-based practices. Um Suzanne Lacey's a very famous artist who whose work is really about a dialogue between people. Um and she did a work, I believe it's called Code 33, where she worked with police officers and and and youth in the Bay Area. And the work was about the dialogue between these folks, the relationship between these two actors. Um in the 90s, there's this term called relational aesthetics that sort of emerges, and it's about um relationships between people in artworks, and what are the quality of those relationships? Are those relationships antagonistic? So, an example would be like an artist like Santiago Sierra, who um pays folks to um uh stay uh crouched in a cardboard box for eight hours a day in an art exhibition, and he pays them very little money, and he sort of thinks about the exploitation of labor, and he uses exploitative labor practices to sort of talk about that. So, in that way, his relationship to these folks is transactional and exploitative, and what is the quality of that relation? You know, there are other artists whose whose relationships um are more or more positive and and more um and the contours of those relationships or the shape of those relationships are um generous and um uh and so in and uh Rick Rick Terre Genevieve, who's who's an artist who has a show at PS1, is a really good um uh example of this. He he did this project in a gallery in New York where he he, the business side of the gallery, he he removed all the business side of the gallery and put it into the exhibition side of the gallery. And in the business side of the gallery, he set up some tables and chairs for eating and he cooked curry and he gave free curry away, and he said, this is about um, in a lot of ways, is about sort of his uh diasporic sort of experience of coming from Thailand to America and sharing that and and examining that culture in relationship to the art world, but it was also about the relationships that people formed when they came to eat free curry and sat down at a table with a stranger, and and in that way, that is a different type of relationship than the Santiago Sierra. So that sort of idea of relational aesthetics um uh and the relations between people expands to um uh uh other terminology, new genre, public art, um, socially engaged art, art and social practice. And art and social practice, you know, is again about these relationships. And in many ways, it's been uh the exploration has been about relationships between people and our project certainly is that, but it's also about um relationships between our companions that are more than human. So um in that way it it it aligns very much with that history of art and the those ideas of art.

Speaker 1 37:40

Um are there any upcoming projects that you are going to be involved in or that you have created?

Speaker 37:45

Upcoming. No, I mean I'm going to talk at a College Art Association conference about um about the teaching of the teachings of the mesquite tree. That's in February. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's some space um in the project to to do something like a documentary about the mesquite tree where we sort of tell the story of the tree, um and uh we sort of are able to engage with ethnobotanists and um philosopher, eco ecological philosophers and other folks who've had a relationship with the tree, like um Gary Nobhan, who who wrote Mesquite in an arboreal love affair, would be really wonderful to connect with. Um and uh Texas Tech has his archives, actually. We have his archives for his writings. Um he's older now, and um so I think it would be really wonderful to sort of track um this is totally speculative, I'm just sort of um, but um to talk about uh the history of the mesquite tree and its migration um and relationship and how human culture has shaped our understanding of the tree. Um I think that would be a beautiful project to work on, but no big plans to make that happen yet.

Speaker 1 39:01

That would be very beautiful. Well I do think that you should start on that. That would be awesome. Thank you. Alright, that's gonna be all for today. Thank you for watching. My name is Tony Ballinger, and I am here with Charlotte. Thank you, Charlie.

Speaker 39:15

Thank you.