The Bridge (you are defined by what you walk between)
“You are Defined by What You Walk Between” was produced in association with Latteral Lab as part of the group show “Ways of Thinking” which took place in various galleries across, Japan and Scotland and represents the first phase of an international project The Bridge: Cultivating the Arts of Noticing by Russell A. Beard in which multitudes of Matsutake-like steel sculptures salvaged from Edinburgh’s North Bridge restoration project will sprout up across Scotland and Japan at specific sites of resilience, resurgence, creativity and collaboration.
“THE BRIDGE: You Are Defined by What You Walk Between”
Russell A. Beard, 2020
29cm X 25cm x 25cm
Salvaged
Concrete, steel rivets, 39m3 CO2
Like artists, the Matsutake fungus is able to thrive in inhospitable and disturbed terrain and acts as a kind of intermediary translator
or currency converter – capable of redefining ‘waste’ - converting it into usable energy and information and redistributing it via world-making interdependent; collaborative networks across cultural and geographic boundaries.
The work combines the spontaneity and accessibility of street art with an ecological sensibility and due to the entropic process of oxidation or “slow motion fire” of the rusting iron components it is in constant transformation; Imbued with a vital temporality and dark materiality that speaks to the profound societal, environmental and economic changes currently underway.
The work is composed of a fragment of concrete aggregate salvaged from the demolition of a sports stadium built to celebrate
the Commonwealth Games – formerly known as THE BRITISH EMPIRE GAMES while the steel rivets were once key components of the NORTH BRIDGE – an iconic structure
in Edinburgh originally built during ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ when advances in ethics,
philosophy, science, economics and engineering were being developed and
disseminated across the world and would go on to drive the industrial
revolution with catastrophic consequences for life on earth.
FROM
‘ENLIGHTENMENT TO ENTANGLEMENT’…
By re-using waste material from the wreckage of imperial projects the
work is both representational and a living example of that which is
represented.
The work serves as a metaphorical bridge from a socio-economic paradigm characterized by
centralized production and hyper-consumption based on colonialism, exploitation
and extraction, to a more decentralized model that emphasizes networked
creativity and a true-materialism defined by circular-economies founded on
re-use, recycling, mutualism and collaboration.
“EVOLUTION OF AN ARTWORK”
(or)
“CHANCE MUTATION, COLLABORATIVE ADAPTATION AND THE SACRIFICE OF COMPLEXITY FOR 39m3 CO2”
Russell A. Beard, 2020
15cm x 15cm x 10cm
PLA 3D printed resin
This piece was originally conceived out of a desire to conserve energy and avoid the carbon emissions associated with flying a ten-kilo sculpture over five thousand miles from Edinburgh to Kyoto. However technical constraints and cross-cultural collaboration has resulted in an artwork that is not a simple reproduction or clone of an original concept but a new species altogether.
THE BRIDGE was scanned, encoded and digitally transmitted to Japan in a chain of processes that resulted in a loss of complexity and the introduction of novel artefacts. The transmogrification of the original form is somehow analogous to chance-mutations during reproduction and adapttion whilst the materialisation of the concept via imperfect, technologically-mediated interdisciplinary collaboration has resulted in a 3D print manifesting further transformations in a process comparable to the collaborative evolutionary mechanism known as ‘Symbiogenisis’ [1].
From the soil-making associations of trees and fungi to the life-sustaining bacteria in our guts, This multi-species ‘symbiogenesis’ or ‘becoming-with’ is now widely accepted as a key component of evolutionary development and an essential element of Life’s capacity to successfully adapt to a changing world.
In a post Covid 19 world of alienation, social distancing and self-isolation we might do well to remember that we have never been individual.
[1] The ‘ becoming-with’ of symbiogenesis is the theoretical upgrade to the Darwinian /Mendelian ‘new synthesis’ theory of evolution (which privileged chance-mutation and competition as sole-drivers of evolutionary adaptation). Thanks to Lyn Margulis et al; evolution in the 21st Century can be thought of as a more creative and collaborative process.