Ask the Wild
Marcus Coates and Fiona MacDonald
ARTISTS | FERAL PRACTICE
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Ask Somerset’s Plants, commissioned by Somerset Art Works for Somerset Art Weeks Festival 2019, aimed to incite and enrich people’s curiosity and appreciation of plants by seeing their struggles as a mirror for our human problems, and their strategies as a practical source of advice. It was broadcast on BBC Radio Somerset and shared as three podcasts, recorded on audio journeys made in three different habitats in Somerset – Cheddar, The Levels, and the Quantock Hills. A core aim was to reach out to people who don’t normally think about the natural world, making radio an ideal medium. Plants were chosen because they are ordinarily silent, thus counter intuitive subjects for radio, and because they are so often ignored. Somerset also offered an extraordinary richness of verdant habitats and species to explore.
Ask the Wild proposes a distributed model of creativity with its audiences as well as its experts. The format challenges conventional epistemological hierarchies. It asks “who has knowledge, what is the knowledge, what can it be applied to?” It brings contrasting systems of knowledge or of understanding the world into direct dialogue, for example finance and botany, or politics and marine science. These juxtapositions seek to challenge and expand the framing view of participants, no matter what their background might be. The art work introduces a productive confusion or uncertainty, the leap into the unknown of imaginative speculation. Ideally, with a diverse audience. For many people, direct engagement with the specificities of plant or animal science is outside their comfort zone. For someone who is comfortable with a scientific framing of the world, it can be challenging to apply this to a non-scientific problem – knowledge exceeding its disciplinary boundaries and being applied in an unusual way can be surprising even to the knowledge holder (the scientist). Science receives significant criticism for distancing, isolating, and reducing our relation to the nonhuman world. With the context and mediation of this project, natural scientists get a chance to show how inventive and curious non-reductive science can be – how it can fascinate, connect, and augment.
© Feral Practice 2020