MAAT MODE — THE PEOPLE INTERVIEWS

This series of informal conversations aims to disclose the ideas and research behind a selected number of projects commissioned for maat Mode 2020. Some of these dialogues were recorded during the lockdown in April and May 2020, while others were held live in the maat Media Room, a space designed as part of Beeline, SO – IL’s museum-wide architectural intervention.

maat / Beatrice Leanza

Today we are talking with Dani Admiss a researcher and curator based in Glasgow.

Dani, I understand that the Disturbing Conservation project you are developing with Gillian Russell for maat Mode is in fact part of a longer, on-going research of yours.

Dani Admiss

Well, as you said, I am a curator and researcher so quite a lot of my projects end up being long-term. I see this as a deliberate process of working through and living through projects, something I tend to do in collaborations with various groups of people beyond art and design. A key theme that I’m looking into in terms of seas, is to do with the fields of design, science and technology – the tools, maps and models that these disciplines use to create worlds or bring these worlds in to “being”. In other words, how tracing other “world-making” activities related with the sea might challenge some of the established knowledge systems we take for granted and expand who we include in those stories and how we carry on inhabiting this shared world.

This links to another project I am currently working on titled Toxicities Reach which looks at chemical pollutants in our water streams and how they come to shape and control our bodies. This maps onto what we are doing at maat in the Disturbing Conservation in that both projects recognise a nature that is no longer at a distance to us humans: this new nature entangles us in ways we are only beginning to comprehend, and these projects are trying to find ways to communicate this to larger audiences.

maat

You know Lisbon was supposed to be hosting the UN Ocean Conference in early June 2020 and that was a moment when we were really working with a number of diverse community groups, advocacy groups in the field to co-create dialogue in the cultural field around such topics, and your school was also to be an integral part of that. Of course, the conference is now being rescheduled. Could you tell us a little bit more about the school and its workshops [check links on maat.pt for new dates] and how that will unfold? I am particularly interested to hear how it connects to the practices of world-making you refer to a lot in your projects.

Dani Admiss

The title of the summer school is Disturbing Conservation – Remapping the Avencas Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and the question that Gillian and I are looking at is what is the social role that museums, designers, artists and the general public can play in caring for the marine environment, taking as an example the marine protected area of the Avencas, which is about twenty kilometres away from maat. 

A marine protected area, or MPA, is a specially designated zone, a perimeter zone, that is dedicated to the long-term conservation of a marine environment. In ecological conservation terms, an MPA is valued for its biodiversity, so the water, the animals and the plants that live there are valued because they may be under threat in some way. 

An MPA is also a legal space, so you are not allowed to do any form of extraction in it, be it fishing or farming, or even to swim or sail. As curators, Gillian and I are interested in this kind of negative space that is supposed to be cared for by science and the law, and what sort of things are not cared for in the MPA. What kind of neglected or absent concerns are there? How might designers and museums attract attention to these uncared-for things? How might we add to the existing knowledge and thus challenge how we think about conservation more broadly as a society?

maat

So where does the summer school come into it, given the context? 

Dani Admiss

The summer school is a project in three parts, and we are bringing together a small transdisciplinary group of marine biologists, curators, designers, and artists to conduct field research in the MPA in the Avencas zone. When you are a scientist you carry out the field research to observe, study and collect data and that’s quite an empirical thing, but we are also going to use design methods and curatorial methods to try to understand some of the things that we can’t see, or are not considered, and therefore – oftentimes – we do not respect them. In maat we create an alternative interpretation centre that presents maps of these neglected issues. So, when you visit the museum you will see a series of displays that trace these journeys and sort of give agency to and articulate these different world-making practices. For example, it could be chemical pollution or a microbe that we are chasing, something that is not actively being cared for within the MPA model but is still there. How can we think about and care for these neglected things and how might this help us as a society bring about change or lead to different conservations is what interests us.

maat

Explain a little bit of how this troupe of interdisciplinary forms of knowledge that you have worked into the workshop contributes to the storytelling. One important aspect of how I really hope maat Mode will function for the museum is really to open doors to storytellers in fields that are particularly pressing today, and how the museum can become a platform for these voices and so open up the issues for different type of audiences as well. For those who will come and take part in the workshop, give us a couple of examples of figures that will be involved that are not from the field of design or art.

Dani Admiss

For example, we will be talking with environmental activists that are also marine biologists, who draw on feminist and queer discourse and how they use these approaches to rethink or expand on how we map food webs. If you think about a food chain at the moment it is comprised of different scaled organisms; from phytoplankton to humans. But looking through a queer thinking lens, some marine biologists have started to include plastics or pollution in these food webs. If an animal eats plastic, is the plastic part of the food web? A queer food web would include plastic if animals eat it. Even though we don’t agree with plastic being in the ocean it is already there and it is changing the lives of many things beyond us humans. Looking in this way is about reducing the harm we do through normative storytelling. So, we’ll be asking those kinds of questions, sort of thinking as designers, as curators, about how expanding the kinds of knowledge or the kind of things we take into consideration in the environment might change our practice in terms of designing.

maat

Is there any specific reason why you chose the practice of mapping as a way of weaving together different forms of storytelling?

Dani Admiss

Because we work in a transdisciplinary way, mapping is familiar across both hard sciences and soft sciences. It is a tool that we can use across both areas; and, as we all know, cartographies are a form of colonial world-making. How can we, as curators, start to challenge that and create new modes of mapping that might be more inclusive and less exclusive? For this reason, we are interested in mapping things that have been overlooked. I’m constantly thinking about how we can care for difficult subject areas and objects so that we can really start to push back against the kind of top-down idea of mapping as a way of owning space.
 

Organisms found in the intertidal rocky shore habitat of the Avencas MPA, Lisbon. Image: Benjamin Redgrove, KitMapper.

maat

Considering that you are tackling the contexts of MPAs as a sort of construct of confinement, how does the condition we are currently experiencing raise questions as to how to think through the project? That said, I believe that nothing we are going through now is really surfacing new issues it is just making the “underwater monsters” much more visible. But I wonder if this is affecting your thinking through the project?

Dani Admiss

I completely agree, and I think it makes it more vital and urgent to have these conversations because essentially the last twelve months [editor’s note: this interview was conducted in April 2020] we have lived through a series of crises, whether natural disasters related to the sea or having to do with the global climate, and now this pandemic. These types of crises range from the very large scale to microbiological substrates that are within the sea, within our bodies, within the earth. But they are presented to us, particularly in the media, as if these events were disconnected from capitalist systems of production and that is really dangerous, because we are in a place of inextricable links, and we need designers, artists and museums to start to articulate this is in a way so that we can start to take responsibility, and develop new ways of living and new practices, so that we can inhabit these shared worlds and not be played when there is a crisis.
 

Dani Admiss is a curator and researcher working across the fields of design, art, technology and science. Her approach is framed by world-making practices and community-based research prioritising these as lenses to explore alternative forms of curatorial practice. She is currently a Stanley Picker Fellow (2020) for a project exploring histories of contamination and ideas of purity, through micropollutants caused by the abundant use of chemicals in our daily lives. Her Fellowship project “Cycles of Toxicity” is a collaborative fabulation that brings together various communities to retrace the lives of chemical pollutants as they travel through bodies and ecosystems. Admiss has curated projects across the UK, Europe and internationally.