IN TRANSIT (Botany of a Journey)

2020

Produced and commissioned by Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai

Curated by Dawn Ross with the curatorial assistance of Nadine El Khoury

Developed with support and advice from Dubai Municipality, American University of Sharjah, Sia Landscaping, Al Zahra Farm, horticulturist Kumar Palanisamy and Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).

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Art, Science and Ecology combine in this site-specific installation consisting of a global garden grown from the seeds that have travelled in the intestines of Dubai’s diverse population.

Tomato, eggplant and okra are some of the crops we eat which seeds are ingested without mastication. They have fleshy mesocarps and digestive enzymes cannot damage them and are excreted intact, so they are still able to germinate.

The work is conceived as a ruderal garden that reflects on the ideas of globality, interconnectivity, mobility and cohabitation. Ecologists defined ruderality as the ability to thrive in spite of challenging conditions.

Dubai, as a global city and the business hub of the Middle East, receives an average of 90 million passengers a year, coming from 270 destinations, across six continents. Additionally, the resident population is extraordinarily diverse. The culinary habits of such a heterogeneous population are incomparable; all of the seeds ingested by Dubai’s fluid and transient population make their way to the same location — the city’s main sewage treatment plant in Al-Aweer. 

With the advice of agricultural engineers and horticulturists, two cubic meters of dehydrated faecal sludge have been cultivated at Al Zahra farming facilities. They have been provided with adequate irrigation, light and temperature and thousands of plants have germinated from it from 11 different species.

A selection of these plants was transplanted to Jameel Arts Centre and grew at the Artist’s Garden, including tomatoes, watermelon, chilies, eggplant, muskmelon, zucchini, amaranth, mustard, citrus, sunflowers, pomegranate and pumpkin. Once the plants were ready for collection, they were harvested for seed saving and research by the artist’s fellow scientists and researchers. 

This garden aims to challenge hardwired ideas on the romantic concept of nature and to sum up on Timothy Morton’s concept of the ‘mesh’. In his writings, Timothy Morton alerts us over the dangers of understanding human activity as a separate category from other natural phenomena. He highlights the importance of dismantling the Nature-Culture divide that reduces the concept of nature to plants, animals and geological processes.

Morton stresses the idea of interconnectedness of all living and non-living things, in what he calls the ‘mesh’. All life forms are the ‘mesh’; with no central position that privileges any one form of being over the others, and thereby erases definitive interior and exterior boundaries of beings.