Marius
Andre
Homecoming (2024)
Materials: Grass root mat, soil, various native plants, coconut fiber basket, manila fiber rope,
Materials such as the grass roots present in “Homecoming” prime viewers to engage with issues, such as biodiversity, that threaten our world including us. Like the grass roots, all the materials in this piece will decay including the coco fiber baskets, returning the soil, plants, and organisms they held to the earth. Using living materials and through site-specific interventions my pieces evolve into decaying and dynamic systems, echoing the natural world. By interrupting our expectations of nature, art can rekindle our sense of wonder and enchantment with the entangled world we are a part of.
Much of the human experience consists of our relationships with the external world beyond our interiors. Our continued isolation from and exploitation of the natural, external world has prevented us from connecting with and valuing the life around us. We have untangled ourselves from our regional environments, our biota, resulting in direct and patchy changes in our global and regional ecology and, through constructs such as suburbs, become untangled and isolated from each other. Like the soil isolated from its larger self in baskets, maybe we need to let some things, like our unsustainable grass lawns and the alienating suburbs where we grow them, decay.
This project has been presented twice with slight variations. The first iteration was installed in February 2024 at Big River Managment Area (West Greenwich, RI). It presented three baskets of soil suspended above the site where they were dug from. Isolating the soil and process of decay within the leaf litter. The second iteration was installed for Dartmouth College’s 2024 Climate Change Biennale at the Fomer Golf Course by Pine Park in Hanover, NH. The baskets contained soil from various sites including a swamp and river bank in Bear Brook State Park. They fell right on top of the grass the former golf course is still covered in.
Interation One (RI)
Iteration Two (NH)