Rudy Loewe, PhD Fine Art Practice student (CCW), was selected for the AER Residency at LABVERDE's Speculative Ecologies 2023 in the Amazon Forest, Brazil. Here they report back to the Post-Grad Community on their experience.
Set up by Professor Lucy Orta (UAL Chair of Art for the Environment - Centre for Sustainable Fashion) in 2015, The Art for the Environment International Artist Residency Programme (AER) provides UAL graduates with the exceptional opportunity to apply for short residencies at one of our internationally renowned host institutions, to explore concerns that define the 21st century - biodiversity, environmental sustainability, social economy, and human rights.
Talking With Spiders
Please note: this text contains photos of spiders.
It feels impossible to talk about my time in the Amazon Forest, the largest area of rich biodiversity on the planet, without talking about colonialism. Before the Speculative Ecologies 2023 residency, the ‘Amazon’ was a place in my mind constructed by the colonial narratives I had absorbed growing up in the UK. I could not have anticipated the realities of Amazonia.
This was the first year that Labverde brought together Brazilian and international artists for a bilingual programme. Conversations with Brazilian artists made it clear to me that in the UK we are taught nothing of Amazonia, its cities and the vast numbers of indigenous communities living there.
The forest made me acutely aware that in Britain, relationships to nature are predicated on it being something to sanitise, or as a site of nostalgia — upholding narrow ideals of Britishness. Amazonia, and the people that I met there, stated a clear alternative — a way to live with and in nature, with respect towards every living being, regardless of usefulness to humans.
In my artistic practice I work with archives and researching histories. I became aware during the residency of the urge to name things, catalogue and preserve. I see this urge, to create scientific taxonomies of the forest, as a colonial impulse. In his lecture, philosopher Emanuele Coccia emphasised that the very construction of ‘ecology’ is built on racist colonial hierarchies.
In Britain coloniality is so deeply embedded in our relationships to nature, it takes on an invisible presence. To decolonise these relationships is to recalibrate them completely. One night at the Adolpho Ducke Reserve, Chico, an Entomology Technician at the National Institute of Amazonian Research, took us on a walk in the forest and found a dead Whip Scorpion (an arachnid that looks more like a spider). I returned to the forest the next day to find it and spent several days drawing and photographing it. I noted my desire to keep the scorpion, to take it back to London. By law, you are not allowed to remove any biological materials from the forest. But more importantly, I understood this desire as a colonial impulse to extract something I had no right to claim. And so, when I left the Reserve, I returned the scorpion to the forest, said my goodbyes and grieved.
My project in Amazonia builds upon an existing body of work about Anansi. In West African and Caribbean folklore, Anansi shapeshifts between man and spider. The smallest animal in the forest, he is often overlooked and so outsmarts others to get his needs met. He is described as a trickster, lazy and unwilling to work. I see Anansi as a gender nonconforming shapeshifter, resonant with those of us who are forced to shapeshift to survive.
Spiders are innovators, often feared and largely misunderstood. I came to Amazonia to understand what trans people, who like Anansi have at times been described as ‘tricksters’, can learn from spider technologies. I am co-creating a symbol-based alphabet with Jacob V Joyce to be used in our practices. By including this in my paintings and drawings, I embed coded messages about what I have learned from the spiders. In the forest I met many spiders that I was deeply moved by, I watched and listened to them. The alphabet’s translation will only be revealed within trans communities to share this knowledge.
Listening, looking and adjusting your spatial and temporal awareness is necessary in the forest. You become connected by the constant need to zoom in and out of your surroundings. It becomes a meditative practice to look at the thousands of creatures on the ground, as well as the wider forest around you. The forest is a multi-sensory experience.
Like all the animals, the spiders that I met were not trying to be found. To meet them requires walking quietly into the dark, finding those places often overlooked. One night another artist and I went into the forest to record the howls of the guaribas, monkeys whose voices ricochet in an eerie surround sound in the dark. I was photographing a spider when we heard a low growl above us. We had been so focused on the spider that we hadn’t noticed the small puma walking across a tree just above our heads. The forest is full of living beings who you mostly will only hear and may never see.
When I left Amazonia, I came to Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire for another residency, continuing this project. Here I have had the space to see how I am transformed by my experiences.
My connection to spiders is a grounding force that has now become a continual part of my practice. I meet spiders, talking with them and learning from them.
Lilian Fraiji, co-founder of Labverde, asked us what we can give back to the forest. I see this as the ongoing need to confront climate colonialism. Our lives in Britain are inextricably linked to the deforestation and climate destruction taking place in Amazonia. Climate catastrophe disproportionately affects those living in the Global South. Although I came to the forest to meet spiders, an unexpected outcome of the residency was the sense of urgency I experienced when seeing for myself the flooded forest at Balbina Dam. Over 300,000 hectares of forest were flooded for a hydroelectric dam that hardly works, people and animals displaced by this disaster. The flooded forest is now a reminder of the harm caused by humans, a tourist attraction, a graveyard. Moving forward, I am developing another project about bodies of water and climate injustices.
Chico said that the forest will change you, it’s impossible for it not to. It’s going to take some time for me to process these experiences, for myself and in the context of what is at stake.
