Supermrin and
Jessica Fertonani-Cooke
FIELD: Dwelling Landscape
November 2022

For its 12th hosted residency, lower_cavity is pleased to present an exhibition-performance by FIELD, an ongoing collaboration between artists Supermrin and Jessica Fertonani-Cooke. Referencing Tim Ingold’s conception of landscape as a ‘dwelling perspective’ in their exhibition title, both artists consider the manicured lawns of North America as a biological archive in which accumulations of labor, capital, and subjectivity lie enmeshed. In the geological era understood as the Anthropocene, they ask, in what ways have lawn grasses, the single largest irrigated crop in the United States, functioned as a proxy for a colonized conception of Nature?

The sculptural works in the exhibition, composed of FIELD’s unique grass-based bioplastic, embody this alienated relationship with the natural world, staging it within the context of the post-industrial city of Holyoke and the 19th century mill architecture housing lower_cavity’s project space. Over the course of the exhibition, a series of collaborative performances, “Braiding FIELD,” will develop between the sculptures and the space, serving as psychomagic rituals channeling the legacies of women's labor. Employing simple, repetitive prompts, these performances are designed to re-focus the body on its interiority and encourage deeper listening to the land.

Together, Supermrin and Fertonani-Cooke articulate a reimagined understanding of landscape that reorients us towards nodes of origin and cycles of life and death. Operating at an intersection of sculpture, performance, bioethics, and the fraught arenas of urban space, FIELD offers approaches for navigating the politics of control perpetuated by the infrastructures of our cities within a globally interconnected and shrinking world.

FIELD [(lilac) We are scarecrows hanging on a line. We are bursting tires that fire through a still, dry air. We are farmers en route to the fields that direct us through our unpaved trails. We are sizzling overhead cables; we are running milestones. Atop our flyover we are the oversized truck that has crashed into us, a gang of buffalos, and we lie stinking and dead, not buffalo, but corpse. We are large sacks of fly ash scattered across the highway, interspersed with our broken, flailing bodies.]

2022. Grass-based bioplastic, lilac trees, natural pigments, 9’ x 5’ x 5’

FIELD [(birch) Prove it, day said to night. And night succumbed to the heat of day. There were months where she could not speak on her dark grey light. There were months that the sun shone like blazing fire in the dead of night, nightless nights, we experienced. There were nights when we couldn’t dream.]

2022. Grass-based bioplastic, lilac trees, natural pigments, 6’ x 7’

FIELD [(mirror) I saw cattle everywhere in this desert. We were oranges and lemons, the oceans of millions that you touched. We wished you would meet us and greet us and sit by us. We wished you would make us, as yourself, everchanging neon light, and we laughed and hated you for it. We opened our markets, we filled them with the things you might desire, things that we would come to desire ourselves, we filled our pockets with your currency, like pimps we sang and danced.]

2022. Grass-based bioplastic, turmeric, performance remains, 3’ x 10’ x 10’

Documentation of “Braiding FIELD” performance on 11/17/22

Archive of past FIELD site intervention projects & performances

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Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, sculpture, and landscape. Through a research-led, speculative, and site-specific practice, she creates installations that reconsider the values that spaces offer, and the ways through which they mediate human relationships. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Supermrin founded Streetlight in 2017 as a collaborative critical research lab that develops decolonial interventions in public space. Her work with FIELD is informed by the historical vernacular of grass within rural India, tribal (Gond) art, and Indian miniature painting. Her background in architecture informs her analysis of public space. Supermrin is an Assistant Professor of Art at the School of Art, University of Cincinnati. She holds an MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute, California and an undergraduate degree in Exhibition Design from the National Institute of Design, India. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2021, Untitled Art Fair, Miami, 2021, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Old San Francisco Mint Building, San Francisco, The First Presbyterian Church of New York, ChaShaMa, and the India Habitat Center, New Delhi.

Jessica Fertonani Cooke is a Brazilian multidisciplinary performance artist. Her work deals with mixed-blooded identities of the Americas (North/South) decolonial and feminist latinx theory. Her activist background with indigenous communities, primarily Tohono O’odham and Guarani, informs her research on ritualistic space, trauma and erased histories on politically loaded territories. The latest projects navigating the US-Mexico border, began a recent practice utilizing psychomagic techniques as a healing tool between intersectional communities. She has participated in the San Francisco International Art Festival (SFIAF), Discovery Art Fair in Frankfurt, the 55 project in Miami and Nars Foundation in Brooklyn, Backslash performance festival in Zürich, The Lab in San Francisco collaborating with Chicano Artists Cristobal Martinez and Guillermo Galindo, and the Month of Performance Art festival in Berlin, Germany. Fertonani Cooke is currently working on a collaborative feature film called La Malinche, In times of pandemia, with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

FIELD was conceived by Supermrin in 2019 in partnership with Jessica Fertonani Cooke. FIELD’s unique grass-based bioplastic was developed in collaboration with material designer Jil Berenblum in 2020. The project has grown to include collaborators (artists, architects, designers, and performers) from across the world, including Xenia Adjoubei and Ane Gonzalez-Lara; with site-specific projects in Oakland, New York, Massachusetts, Cardiff (Wales), Nice (France), and Boiçucanga (Brazil). Exhibitions include the Venice Biennale for Architecture (2021), Untitled Art Fair Miami (2021), Climate Provocations Pavillion Governors Island (2021), Midway Gallery San Francisco (2022), Tactile Bosch Cardiff (2022) amongst other venues, with support from the Franklin Furnace Fund, British Council, Pratt Institute, and the NYFA City Artist Corps Grant.