Rock Eater
video
3:06
2023
Futility is at the heart of ecological crisis. This work started from a kind of coarse alienation we have come to recognize: the near-daily reminder of the gap between our individual actions and massive, unchecked ecological demise. The difference between what we can do, and what we can’t. The impossible distance looming between bodies in the Anthropocene, and the materials that scale up our impact on the planet. These materials include asphalt, concrete, toxins, and other waste, which accumulate in the earth’s crust to become future strata. They layer into the earth, which has to digest our inputs into deep time.
In the video, the artist attempts to scale giant heaps of gravel used to produce asphalt at a facility in Troy, NY, but struggles to make headway. She then attempts to eat clay rocks (an impulse with a long lineage in human societies, but pathologized in Western society as an eating disorder known as “pica.”) Perhaps in eating rocks, the protagonist might learn to process landscapes with her body, as such landscapes have been digesting humanity’s own inputs. She senses the vulnerability of having to metabolize back the pollutants and toxic materials we have put into the earth. Taste and digestion may become a form of sensing which goes beyond simply “consuming,” and thus, is an alternative to extraction and degradation. In the words of scholar Iemanjá Brown, appetite is an “aesthetic procedure that includes a material desire for intimacy with the more-than-human.”
Allie E.S. Wist is an artist-scholar working on speculative sensory narratives related to environmental humanities, food, and Anthropocene studies. She is currently an interdisciplinary Arts PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an adjunct at NYU. Her work includes edible and olfactory artifacts, as well as photography and video, which come together most often in multi-media installation works. Other formats, including performative dinners, radio shows, and texts, attempt to render challenging temporalities accessible. She has an MA in Food Studies from NYU, and her work and workshops have been exhibited by Honolulu Biennial, The Wellcome Collection, MIT, the Nobel Prize Museum, and Pioneer Works.
@AESWIST
17 Days Video Series 