Lady Musgrave Reef, AZ Bilbao 2023

Installation view LMR, AZ Bilbao 2023

WHITE REEF part of Lady Musgrave Reef, installation view AZ Bilbao 2022

CIENCIA FRICCIÓN installationview 2022 AZ Bilbao

Architeuthis Dux installationview Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao 2022

Octopus & viewer © Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao 2022

Detail of Lady Musgrave Reef, AZ Bilbao 2022 © CIENICA FRICCIÓN

Detail of Lady Musgrave Reef, AZ Bilbao 2022 © CIENCIA FRICCIÓN

Lady Musgrave Reef, installation view Azkuna Zentroa 2022 Bilbao

SCIENCE FRICTION/CIENCIA FRICCIÓN.
VIDA ENTRE ESPECIES COMPAÑERAS
BILBAO 2022/23

The latest advances in biology and environmental sciences prove all living things on the Earth are interdependent. According to this perspective, life is a single unique fabric comprising links between organisms and ecosystems, living multiplicities integrated in one another.
"Science friction" in Azkuna Zentroa Bilbao explores this change in perspective via the work of two scientists and essential thinkers today; namely biologist Lynn Margulis & James Lovelock, whose theory in the 90 ties on the role of symbiosis in evolution lays the foundations for a new history of life; and philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway, whose work delves into the narrative power of scientific knowledge and its condition as a "story machine" on the world and our place in it. In other words, the title Science friction works in two ways as explained by the exhibition curator, Maria Ptqk. On the one hand, it points out the frictions derived from viewing life as a great symbiotic assembly whilst on the other alluding to the urgency to invent other science f(r)ictions, fables or speculative stories, enlarging the imaginable thereby helping to locate ourselves within the emerging inter-species paradigm. "So if this is true as purported by Haraway and Margulis, and that the entire World is alive, then, now is the time to discard the myth of supremacy of men and renew contact with our numerous terrestrial companions."

In "Staying with the trouble"[1] Donna Haraway gives some examples of self-organized projects that tell stories. One dealing of a farmer family who raises pigeons…the other of the crocheted CORAL REEF. The Call of Haraway "to learn to live and die on a wounded planet" is activated as a call to invent response/ability practices which act through all these interdependencies.

The Lady Musgrave Reef project has to do with the comparison of a natural ecosystem, such as a coral reef, and human work as an integrative social system. The Reef developed as an artwork since 2001, assigning work to people who could crochet the corals. Such people were recruited through ads in the paper and paid for their work. How can a coral reef provide a philosophical platform for discussions of evolution and how can it be a model of complexity concerns? The Lady Musgrave Reef is a network of different levels of information, we can say that the whole enterprise works in the spirit of, and on the principle of, participation of many.
This project enables the understanding of how mankind can intervene in protecting reefs on a level of culture in art/science. The scientific vocabulary is quoted and integrated into an artistic program. The Lady Musgrave Reef is an epistemic model. Lady Musgrave Reef produces a picture of growth in the organic/living sense as a "positive mould" or positive shape. In cooperation between marine- biology on the one hand and the social aspect of job-creating measures in poor economic times on the other hand, the art project Lady Musgrave Reef emerged from a collection of countless crocheted corals. The Lady Musgrave Reef Foundation was incorporated by Petra Maitz in Vienna 2001. The connection of needlework, science (marine biology) and art and the way in which disciplines have already interconnected, becomes apparent.

The Art-Project/Installation 'Lady Musgrave Reef' is exhibited in Museums:
Coral reefs form the largest eco-social unit of species and diverse forms of life. They live from one another and together in an alternating cycle with their environment, an extraordinary example of epigenetic transformations in microbiological terms.
The Lady Musgrave Reef has many followers, increasing its visibility in public spaces also because its imitated by other groups from all over the world. To mention at first the Institute for Figuring from Los Angeles is one of the simplified imitations of LMR. Sorry, the woolen reef from the States is not the Original first one on earth. Lady Musgrave Reef originally born in Vienna 2001 is partly situated in big collections of art museums and keeps being exhibited in many additional shows worldwide. For Science Friccion in Bilbao the LMR was together with Architheutis Dux, a large crocheted Octopus with long tentacles.

And together with an Octopus

It has three hearts, a short life span for an animal of this size and a complex nervous system, albeit very different to the human one. Clever and cunning, it has a remarkable learning capacity, but, unlike other so-called smart animals, it prefers living in solitude. Every day, science brings us new data on the extraordinary existence of the octopus, data that challenge our ideas about what it means to think or feel.
In those points of friction where biology and philosophy inspire one another, both advancing somewhat haphazardly, art plays a key role. Linking disciplines, translating between languages accustomed to not being understood, its methodless method, embracing the process and experimentation, makes it a fertile testing ground to imagine those other forms of life that, like that of the octopus, we can barely manage to conceive. One of the most puzzling aspects of octopus biology is that its nervous system is not centralised in a main organ, like that of humans, but is spread between the brain and its eight tentacles, where the majority of its neurons are located. The tentacles, besides having a sense of touch and taste, show autonomy and the capacity to make decisions. According to cephalopod expert Peter Godfrey-Smith to understand the mind of the octopus you have to imagine it like a jazz orchestra: sometimes the musicians (the tentacles) pull together to play (under the direction of a head conductor), but other times they go their separate ways, improvise and perform their own melodies, beyond the main melody. In his opinion, octopuses live outside the common body-brain divide.

It is perhaps one of the reasons why even today, in the age of pixels, scientific illustration continues to be imperative for the study of living beings. Zoologists, entomologists and botanists make use of drawing, rather than photography or video, to capture the exact colour of a leaf or wing vein. Capture, not only in the sense of expressing but also of understanding.
From Alexander von Humboldt or Charles Darwin to Francis Hallé, it is true to say that the great naturalists have often been skilled draftspeople. Maria Sibylla Merian understood the relationship between insects and flowers by virtue of drawing them, just as, much later, Ernst Haeckel obsessively engaged in making illustrations of radiolaria before concluding that the complexity of life could not be related without coining a new word: Ökologie. The coral drawings and crocheted reefs made by Petra Maitz convey this kind of thinking-doing. Despite being linked to science in a different way, both merge movements, sensations, mental connections and, needless to say, materials (graphite, ink, paper or textile-yarn, with their vegetable, mineral or animal origin) to produce something that is not the mere execution of a technique.

Note: [01] Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway, Duke University Press 2016

Petra Maitz / Maria Ptqk