Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center was a part of "Liveable Worlds" October 6 - December 15 2023 at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art and Design curated by Julie Poitras Santos and Sabine Malcom.


By most any measure, the world is becoming less liveable. Climate breakdown undermines ecosystems and ways of living, paralleling crises in social life. These disruptions reflect long-standing patterns rooted in the inseparability of settler-colonialism, anti-blackness, and environmental destruction. Whether under political occupation, psychic pressure, or environmental duress; artists, designers, and filmmakers have long found ways to create in what are otherwise unlivable conditions. Liveable Worlds takes as its point of departure the notion that there are multiple “worlds”— material, psychic, and communal—and opens space to envision new forms of visualization, survival, collaboration, and community.


Artists include: Futurefarmers, Sky Hopinka, Athena LaTocha, Patte Loper, Mary Mattingly, Pamela Moulton/Posey, Oscar Santillán, Cauleen Smith, Will Wilson

Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center
2023
Materials: Eastern Hemlock logged in early 20th C and salvaged from 108 Willoughby St in Brooklyn, NY, oat grass, potting soil, plastic, air dry clay, plaster, found wood, video equipment, lamps, paper mache, salt marsh sedimentary core sample, biological compound microscope, slide, various species of foraminifera
10’L x 9’W x 7’H

Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center has been developed as part of Laboratory for Other Worlds, an ongoing research project and exhibition series on climate and the potential impacts of global warming on urban sea levels in the U.S. Northeast, based on climate science by researcher Andrew Kemp. This study center focuses on local salt marshes and their unique position at the edge of the sea and the land, and their history of rich ecologies buried within thousands of years of sedimentation. These marshes provide climate researchers with an understanding of ancient biomes, which are accessed via sedimentary core samples and used to reconstruct deep time habitats, and therefore ancient shorelines. This helps us understand the characteristic fingerprints that will affect future sea level rise. Salt Marsh Deep Time Study Center invites viewers to contemplate the complexity of salt marsh ecologies and their great value to human knowledge construction and more than human lifeways.

 

Thank you to Dr. Andrew Kemp of Tufts University Department of Earth and Climate Sciences, Yaqi Cai, Ceci Carchedi, and Sawkill Lumber Company for their invaluable contributions to this project