Mother%#?!ing Nature
A group residency at Salem Art Works culminating in a site-specific roving performance
Moheb Soliman organizer/curator/artist, with Ximena Holuigue, James Irwin, Maya Kuroki, Victoria Stanton
Generations ago there was a widely known Mother Nature in popular culture. As this personage must have aged, our perception of it has changed also, so that we no longer see a many-faced subject but a plane of objects. With environmentalism now as the predominant framework for relating to nature, asking “who” it is to us has become impossible. But how can we imagine this estranged, still living relation, always just out the door? Do we "belong” to each other in some way? What relationship does nature have to us, in a post-natural world?
The idea of post-nature, like post-human, imagines nature as forever changed from some pristine original form yet still holding a palpable life and identity. What kind of subject can nature be, if not a romantic ideal or a priceless commodity? Who or what is wilderness and wildlife, if they are alive in the modern—the post-modern—age with us? What adequate figures can we manage to scare up for nature now?
Beyond philosophizing about “nature as other,” this residency asked these basic questions about how nature and culture orient each other, how we identify with place, and the challenge environmentalism faces in restoring nature in our personal and social lives. Motherfucking Nature is a provocative call to deconstruct nature; an emphatic naming of it; and a playful gesture at attending to all it has been and may be for the human being, as both subjects work at their “posts.”
