Joella Kiu
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This post is an account of and reflections from a residency I undertook recently. I have to admit that this entry will be written in quite a personal voice. To be honest, I found it difficult to inhabit a more philosophical or objective tone given the subject matter that it will cover. I think often about what Olivia Laing wrote with regard to the fundamental value of art in her book, The Lonely City, which I will quote in full here:
“There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.” —Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone [1]
The inherent value of art and its associated economies is something I wrestle with whilst going through the motions of caregiving where everything can seem so relentless and overwhelming. Laing proffers that whilst it is prudent to acknowledge the limitations of art and the difficult endeavour of labouring within/for it, there is, perhaps, some room to also attend to its affects.
After cycling through a routine punctuated by diapers and milk bottles in the day, my world falls so quiet at night. If I’m lucky, the four hours between 8pm to midnight will be fully mine to call my own.
I’ve entered a new season of life on the personal front: our family grew into a unit of three. Unsurprisingly (though it was surprising to me, still, in some ways), work took a back seat. I remember constantly feeling defeated on both sides – I wasn’t really thriving at home, and I definitely wasn’t keeping up to date with work either.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, social media became a real means of decompressing. It was a good distraction, but this also meant that I was constantly glued to my phone and was scrolling the depths of Instagram – or doom-scrolling, as the kids say – as the baby slept.
I don’t know how the original post for The Greenhouse Residency even popped up on my social media feed. Mendocino, or Mendocino Art Center (MAC), wasn’t on my radar. In fact, I hadn’t even been to the US before. Perhaps there were mutual connections, or maybe I had just gone too far down a rabbit hole. But I don’t think I read much more beyond the first line of the post. It introduced the pilot cycle of the residency as a space to “intuit, research, test, dance, cook, write, forage, film, paint, sculpt, breathe and dig deep into our present moment. The word “intuit” really attached itself to me.
The application process seemed straightforward enough – one just had to fill in an online form with a couple of questions around one’s practice and intentions. I wish I could pull up the words I wrote in response, but I wrote it in a daze and didn’t save a copy myself. Without thinking much about how I could even manage a residency at this point in my life, I simply threw my name into the hat. As they say, you never know if you don’t try.
The next few weeks went by in a blur. Then, an email came through that kicked everything in motion: the application had been accepted.
What started off as a simple thought (“let’s see where this goes!”) had now turned into a full-blown logistics exercise. Between booking flights, making sure the baby had everything he needed for the long trip, and writing myself a laundry list of things I had hoped to get done during the residency, this was all turning out to be way more than I had initially bargained for.
Yet despite all these questions around practicality, and thanks to the incredible support of my colleagues, we managed to make it work and were California-bound.
When we finally arrived in Mendocino after a long drive up from Los Angeles, it was pitch dark. We barely made our way into the apartment by stumbling around in the night. It was at that point that I heaved a sigh of relief – we had arrived.
Whilst many often visit Mendocino in the summer, our residency happened in the winter. The daylight hours were shorter, of course, and there were warnings of coastal floods from time to time as well. That probably made every moment we had outside all the more precious. Over the next few days, we picked up corals by the beach, saw the ocean waves reach great heights (a king tide?), and found mushrooms in the mulch surrounding goat pens.
One of the first few things I noticed when we arrived was just how huge mushrooming is in Mendocino and across the Pacific Northwest. In fact, our time at MAC coincided with Forage Mendocino, a mushroom symposium that gathered mycologists, chefs, photographers, historians and more. It recalled for me Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s narrations of her own experiences mushrooming in Oregon. “It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking,” Tsing wrote. “Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations.” [2] I saw how this boundlessness extended to mycological education in Mendocino. On a visit to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens, I was amazed by the sheer range of mushroom-related programmes and classes that were being offered. One could literally geek out about fungi all through the months of October to January if they wanted to, and still be left with more to uncover.
Another part of MAC’s larger community network is Xa Kako Dile:, an indigenous-led organization whose work is centered around restoratively farming six acres of land in Mendocino. A few of us from the residency programme visited on a balmy Saturday morning to help process produce and seeds for the next growing season. “Rub the quinoa between your hands,” Matilda told us. “The yellow beads at the center are what we’re after.” Matilda is part of the team that works tirelessly on the farm. We all sat cross legged next around a large white sheet tray next to them and we got to work.
We massaged the seeds off the dried stalks and allowed them to pool into the large tray between us. The next step was to separate the seeds from the chaff, and this was done by passing everything through a series of fine screens.
Midway through, someone asked Matilda what the most rewarding part was about working on the farm. Matilda responded that it was the ability to learn from the elders – once again emphasizing Xa Kako Dile:’s commitment towards traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).
At the end of the session, we had made our way through some of the quinoa and others had also worked on separating dried corn kernels from their cobs. I’m not sure how much help any of us city folk were. In some ways, perhaps we even got in the way of them doing their work more efficiently. Yet, that didn’t seem to be the point of this exercise. Unhurried as we were, we were able to share stories with one another and ask about each other’s encounters with the crops we had in our hands.
Despite my best efforts, most of my research hours over the past week still happened between the baby’s naps and after the baby went to bed for the night. Still, it was a luxury to have the time and space to consolidate some stray ideas that had been swimming around in my mind for a while.
This all culminated in a short sharing session towards the end of my time at MAC. Simply titled Patchy, I wanted to use the opportunity to offer some incomplete readings around how one might approach a landscape as an archive. I was interested in questions such as:
- Is forgetting necessarily the opposite of remembering?
- What other states exist in between?
- How can we slip into, reify and enmesh ourselves into the land’s memory of itself?
I had situated my entire sharing on the topic around Singapore and its context within the larger Indo-Malay world or Nusantara, but I came out of the session with a clearer sense of place – particularly that where I currently was.
MAC had been founded by Bill and Jennie Zacha in 1959. In conversations with those who were familiar with MAC and its history, many described Bill to me as an artist with a vision. When the Zachas arrived in the 1950s, “It had an unusual, almost unearthly quality about it -- pure, quiet, unsullied -- but it was dying,” Zacha was quoted saying. [3]
Surrounded by lush redwood forests, Mendocino as we know it today was established around the lumber industry in 1852. Logging activity was on a steady decline by the 1930s, and this led to many leaving the town. Interestingly, a sizeable portion of these early immigrants were Chinese– a fact that I would have loved to have dug deeper into, if only we had more time.
Over dinner with MAC’s new Executive Director, Dav, we discussed the new chapter that the center was embarking on. More than six decades have passed, and things have obviously shifted since the center was founded. The town’s population is still relatively small, but its (and the larger county’s) demographics lean towards those aged 40 and above. [4] The town is also predominantly white. Dav is a Los Angeles-native and ran a gallery there. Los Angeles seemed like a far cry from Mendocino, and I wondered what brought him out here. Our conversation meandered through many topics – the relentlessness of art world, interdisciplinary collaborations, Buddhism and more – but one thing that stood out was how much potential he saw in Mendocino. It was brimming.
In her book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell writes that “context is what appears when you hold your attention open for long enough; the longer you hold it, the more context appears”. [5] I threw my mind back to the moment I chanced upon the residency’s open call on social media, and wondered if there might be some nascent threads connecting the familiar sites I had been researching with where I now found myself, halfway across the globe.
It could’ve been anywhere else, but I’m also sure it mattered that it happened halfway across the world from where we were rooted in. Perhaps one day I will find out why.
“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins. In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of networks without beginning or end, cities in the shape of Los Angeles, in the shape of Kyoto-Osaka, without shape.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [6]
In the meantime, here’s to more patchy plotting attempts ahead.
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