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

Water Boatman Portrait and Micropial Kin Recognition Portraits
2023

Water Boatman are commonly found in the New England Salt Marsh. They spend their lives in the water and feed on algae and plants. Their lifeways are a critical part of the food web of the swamp. Peoples native to New England used swarms of Water Boatman as a food source. They are the loudest animal on earth, relative to their size, and they create song by rubbing their large hind legs along their bodies.  


These drawings imagine what microbes might look like to one another, the ways they might process the existence of their fellow microscopic creatures, and how they might develop kin recognition in their tiny cosmos.