Tabaci Memoriae
Tabaci Memoriae (Memory Tobacco) (2017)
On a residency at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ, in a former Lorillard Tobacco factory, I began by trying to "resonate the building" literally using microphones and speakers. As I continued to research the history of the location, another sort of 'resonance' revealed itself and the possibility emerged of using the labor of growing tobacco as an activation of the past, much in the same way that a clapper activates the potential resonance of a bell—causing the history of the site to sound aloud in the present. In this way, the poetics of soundscape are at work, despite having no aural presence.
This work, as a piece of site-specific, critical intervention, could not possibly have been created without extensive cooperation and collaboration between myself and the administrators and staff of Mana Contemporary as well as the other artists in the building. I invested a lot of labor into growing the tobacco plants and doing research and contextualizing the process, however, the planting ceremony and the symposium were co-created with the community that was present in the building during my residency.
The public also plays a crucial part in the creation of this piece as it is their attention to the ideas and participation in the events that complete the work. Each visitor took away with them seeds from the plants I grew and so the potential for this type of reflection to occur elsewhere goes with them. The work is about resonating the past through attention to relationships and those relationships are a crucial component of the work.
