Returning to Algae: Sound Memory, Textures and Colors Translated to Human Senses

By Violeta Bustos Vaccia.

Alien Algae, Generous Algae, Dreaming Algae: When Did Life on the Planet Begin and What Do These Species Have to Do with Human Senses? We Speak with the Artists of the Exhibition They Will Survive the Surges, the Centuries, and the Dreams(1), Elizabeth Burmann, Nicholas Jackson, and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino, about Inspirations, Memories, and Fictions Rendered Sensorially in FMA’s Device, LaCápsula(2).

A metal structure that draws forms and textures of diverse algae; an electronic device that recreates the colors inside a brown algae in the process of drying on a screen; and a sound display with threads and resonances that connect us with what cochayuyos and kelp listen to beneath the sea. The works of Elizabeth Burmann, Nicholas Jackson, and Rodrigo Ríos Zunino in the exhibition They Will Survive the Surges, the Centuries, and the Dreams allow us to approach these beings through our different senses to know algae and their infinite imaginative possibilities.

We spoke with the three artists, who recall their childhood games among ephemeral captures and algae garments, their explorations of themes such as organic intelligence, narratives about the heroic role of these species, and their ways of approaching the algae collection of the SGO Herbarium of the National Museum of Natural History (MNHN) through haptic, sonic, and technologically programmed approaches.

Fundación Mar Adentro: How were your first approaches to algae? Memories, visions, aromas or sounds of the sea…

Elizabeth Burmann (EB), who presents Chimeric Algae / Algamated / Algotic / Algose, Approach from Touch: I don’t have many photos from my childhood, but in one of them I’m in a tidal pool covered in algae. The degree of approach to nature when you’re younger happens on a more creeping scale. In pools, or where these types of creatures adhere, that is, play on terrains at a child’s scale. When I was six years old I accompanied my mom, because she was filming a movie in Tierra del Fuego. In the Strait of Magellan I became obsessed with some algae that had a liquid inside, like a little sack with water. The ocean has a very familiar side, but at the same time it’s impossible to possess. What happens in a pool will never happen again. Back then you would do things you wouldn’t do today, like taking a starfish or a little crab. That time I took some of those algae with little sacks and left them in the bathtub, that is, absurdly and humanly I tried to domesticate them.

Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (RRZ) exhibits Sensory Approach from Sound: My first approaches were in adolescence when I came to Chile—before I lived in Ecuador—at Algarrobo beach, where I noticed the algae. Later I approached the Durvillaea incurvata or cochayuyo (3), so present on the central coast. Its dance with the waves was the first thing that caught my attention. I also got to eat cochayuyo at a Krishna restaurant, ceviche and charquicán.

Later, a dancer friend made a dance piece with cochayuyos, covering her body and using the algae as hair. I began to integrate these ideas for the purposes of artistic interaction in January 2023, in a residency with Tsonami, together with Rodrigo Arteaga, at the Institute of Marine and Limnological Sciences at the Austral University of Chile (UACh), in Calfuco, Los Ríos Region. I hung intervened cochayuyos with a feedback system that was heard in a radio transmission inside the algae, which gave a sound effect of sea monsters. It happened that when we stumbled upon these algae at night we saw mysterious beings, due to pareidolia effects(4). The whistle of the strings—of waxed thread—also contributed an interaction generating sorts of grunts.

Nicholas Jackson (NJ), exhibits Brown Algae, Approach from Color: I spent my childhood in Viña del Mar and La Serena. My grandfather and my dad were very beach-goers and we always vacationed near the sea, mainly in the third region, from Puerto Viejo southward, at deserted beaches. While my dad fished, my sister and I stayed playing with shells and algae, which were like toys. My second memory is that on one of those trips, my dad woke us up and the entire beach was shining, they were noctilucent organisms(5). Also, I ate algae because my sister was anemic and the iodine in algae makes iron adhere better, so they were something everyday.

FMA: Why is it important to put forward a sensory and socio-ecological approach to these species, and if you can tell us what experiences or investigations nourish your works in the exhibition?

EB: These algae that seem alien are intimately related to our own biology and to how everything that surrounds us has unfolded. Approaching algae is turning toward having more empathy and attention to the delicate lines that interweave our own existence. These are the first photosynthetic organisms (6). Their photosynthetic capacities made our life possible. This is important when talking about the socio-ecological crisis. Returning to these organisms is connecting us with the origin of vital processes. Likewise, algae filter pollutant emissions from anthropogenic interventions and in that sense, they are generous organisms that not only sustain food chains and oxygen, but warn us when something is wrong, they are guardians. That’s why it’s nice to pay them tribute, because among everything they do, they absorb emissions daily as mitigators of climate change.

NJ: I’ll take a bit of what Niní (Elizabeth) said before, in the sense of the haptic (tactile) qualities of algae, which are outside the ordinary among everyday textures. This also occurs in the aromatic and visual aspect. They are ductile, viscous, and when they dry, they are brittle. I think of brown algae that have one color when clinging to rocks, but then change as they dry. They color the beaches from black to orange, and when they rot they have a characteristic smell. They also have intense qualities at a food level. They are mysterious and are sometimes compared to the alien, and therefore they are stimulating because they deviate from the norm.

My first works with algae are related to these ideas. I started exploring ductility, what happens when they dry, then I explored the edible or gustatory qualities. When this line of work on 21st-century nature opened up from a critical, social, and political sphere, linked to climate change, I learned that algae are a privileged link in the sciences investigating the effects of the crisis on ecosystems. Thus, I joined something that was already underway. You can make a small contribution from art, but I try to take it with humility.

RRZ: I have been nourished by approaches inscribed in multiple cosmovisions and cosmo-existences, such as the Vedic current, Buddhism, and meditation practices in Japanese culture, which has a powerful connection with algae. It makes sense to me above all the notion of non-separation, of knowing ourselves as part of the whole, that I am one with the algae and with each species, that I can understand the wind as an animated being.

This paradigm leads me to question the hegemony of human intelligence over others. Last year at Tsonami we made a call around organic intelligence, that is, what will not disappear due to the existence of artificial intelligence. Thus, algae have their own intelligence that couples with their habitat and processes; there are dry algae that we see vibrate in my installation, connected to a sound that is a memory and archive of something that was alive and remains there: the sea. We see an algae detached by the marine torrent toward the coast and we reanimate it, bringing it back to communicate with its life through sound memory. This can be something unsettling, perhaps especially for children, who might experience something different when they see a cochayuyo again.

The sensory is broad, our organs are memory interconnectors that transport us to a memory or longing for the future, that is, they have an evocative power. Managing to translate this is relative, because it depends on what people perceive. We have a device with which we link to the simulation of reality, in our case five senses, but there are also gray layers of heightened or diminished senses. Connection with algae through art leads us to forge knowledge through our sensory device, which is limited, therefore nothing allows us to say that algae or plants don’t think or dream, perhaps they do so differently.

FMA: How have your perceptions of algae been transformed through the works inserted in LaCápsula, that is, in dialogue with the digitization project together with the Algae Archive (ADLA) and the valuing of the collection journey carried out by biologist María Eliana Ramírez?

NJ: From the moment I received the invitation, this archive struck me as so well-articulated around the visual. When you open these cards, everything is flat, it exalts a modern obsession with the superficial nature of the medium, of paper, of the embossed surface of a dried algae laminated linearly, preserving its form, its color together with a color chart to respect the appearance of the organism. The visual marks or delimits the scientific way of approaching the organism, it’s an ocular classification. I was interested in mediating from something that is at an epistemic level to something material, with a system that translates an organic and physical color through a language and technologically programmed apparatus; a system that through a sensor and cables tries to translate the color of the object, with all its limitations, finitude, and differences. On the other hand, the relationship of algae with metals becomes present, because in sacrifice zones or where there is metallurgy, algae absorb heavy metals. So in the work this is exaggerated through the structure and the copper wire, to account for this somewhat sinister relationship of algae with metals.

EB: When confronting the algae collection and its state of oblivion, I thought about certain contradictions. On one hand, there is an alarm about the planetary crisis and at the same time, a bombardment of beautiful images of the ocean, a hyper-aestheticization of nature parallel to the process of extinction of various species. There’s a sort of media delirium, and it can be a way to generate awareness, but seeing this collection—which is research on endemic algae from Chile—in oblivion and not digitized, I thought about this. This heritage generates certain tensions, because it’s categorized with parameters that minimize or restrict the breadth of these organisms. Taxonomy that seeks to grasp nature is interesting, but at the same time it forms a sort of ruin.

At the same time, it’s important to recover biocultural heritage and to know approaches to algae, to think for example, why María Eliana Ramírez cared about this legacy and also to embrace narratives that, while humanizing these organisms, we don’t have to deny. So my proposal was to bring these contradictions to the surface and manifest a furniture structure that is not an algae, but a domesticated version in a module that becomes invaded with characteristics of the collection, a translation of the algae in its habitat.

RRZ: There is a process. My previous connection with algae was at the Institute of Marine Sciences, as I mentioned. Later, this invitation to LaCápsula deepened contact with these beings. I think there’s a call to continue with algae. In fact, later I’ll be at a meeting in Punta Arenas called LiquenLab, where I’ll do an algae concert. Thus, the algae integrates into my want-to-do. Also, I’ve sought to know more, understand the distant past, think about the future of algae when we become extinct, probably. Another interesting avenue emerged at the Biennial of Media Arts where I was with Elisa Balmaceda and we encountered Tomás Egaña, who was studying a certain type of algae that could replace human skin: he suggested that perhaps we aliens are ourselves in the future, when we have photosynthetic skin.

FMA: What has it been like to exhibit at the MNHN and what potential do you see in terms of installation in this space?

RRZ: It has been a unique experience, since apparently there aren’t many contemporary art projects that enter these types of museums. It’s a good invasion, so to speak, to infect people with concerns. It’s a meeting point between art and science that expands, as the museum is perhaps more linked to taxidermy, among other formats. People may come for other reasons and run into this and that can be refreshing. Being present at the MNHN allows weaving museographic bridges that is more interesting than leaving a work adrift. It’s good to have mediators and for a whale, a tactile panel, brown algae, colors, and sounds to converge in the same place. Taking the archive out of the drawers and putting it on digital monitors is giving it life. This is important, as is highlighting the work of María Eliana Ramírez, since perhaps many didn’t know about her work. That encounter is well done.

NJ: Personally, I wasn’t interested in adopting art as an autonomous discipline, but putting it in service of something else, a machine that would hopefully work in tune with the interactivity of institutional mediation. I lowered the volume on art and turned up the volume on mediation, on the instrument and the tool, and that can complement what I was already doing, but it’s been different because this time I thought according to the limits of the device in the context of a mediation.

EB: The collection is born at the MNHN, so it is an ideal place, especially because it stimulates dialogue about this dichotomy of generating archive and taxonomizing, as well as delivering to the public an idea of what the nature of the country is, and on the other hand, how that is thwarted by nature itself. The exhibition does very beautiful work by creating a sort of hinge with these institutions that in a way are framed in earlier thinking by generating an exhibition project. LaCápsula updates this, problematizes it, and brings it to a contemporary context, without criticizing it negatively, but rather fostering current discussions.

I was interested in seeing this as a strange seed within the museum, that dialogues with what is seen there, like dioramas, the idea of freezing a moment, but where what is represented is not nature at all, but a scene of fiction or artifice, something very much of art. I took it from there, from observing taxonomic categories and mixing them up. Thus, the structure I made mixes various algae without apparent order, what could be an incorrect diorama, but really no diorama is correct.

About the artists:

Elizabeth Burmann (CL, 1992), visual artist and sculptor, presents an installation that investigates the textures and compositions of algae, inviting us to traverse an algae-filled module invaded by metallic growths. Her work explores the reactions and forms of decay that arise from encounters between nature, industry, bodies, and the environment, interweaving socio-ecological knowledge with the application of techniques such as glass and metal.

Nicholas Jackson (CL, 1983), artist and teacher, presents an electronic colorimetry system of algae that translates chromatic variations to a digital device. By observing algae in different environments, their colors change according to factors around them. His work addresses the material relationship that exists between algae and anthropogenic waste dumped into the sea.

Rodrigo Ríos Zunino (CL, 1977), media artist dedicated to sound, invites reflection on the effect of sound waves through algae, and to speculate on possibilities of listening to the question: how will algae feel the sounds of their environment? His work is inspired by practices such as feedback, transduction, transmission, rituals, migration, phenomenology, and perception.

References:

1. Exhibition co-curated by Maya Errázuriz, director of Art and Publications at Fundación Mar Adentro and Javiera Gutiérrez, strategic designer and director of the Algae Archive (ADLA) project. Exhibition open to the public until October 6 at the National Museum of Natural History, Tuesday to Saturday from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

2. Itinerant device of Fundación Mar Adentro, whose purpose is to share natural history stories about Chile’s biodiversity through narratives, sensory experiences, archives, imaginaries, flavors, memories, sounds, and diverse approaches. Created together with artists, scientists, and curators.

3. The cochayuyo, for a long time had the scientific denomination of Durvillaea antarctica, but now this and Durvillaea incurvata are two distinct species. The first is found in the austral zones of the country, and the second, from the north to the Guaitecas archipelago.

4. The mind’s ability to recognize concrete figures in abstract forms.

5. Noctiluca is a genus of dinoflagellates that are part of plankton. There are species of Noctiluca that can contain photosynthetic symbionts, such as a bacterium and an algae.

6. That is, they are capable of producing organic matter and oxygen thanks to solar energy and inorganic matter, such as carbon dioxide and water.