Alone or in Mound? LASER PARIS

Marit Mihklepp in conversation with Meredith Root-Bertnstein
Marit Miklepp, Estonian artist and resident with Roots and Seeds XXI, and Meredith Root-Bernstein, ethnobiologist, ecologist, conservation scientist, CNRS researcher at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris.

Mounds and heaps are "treasure boxes" for archaeologists but also for ethnobiologists and conservation specialists. Between "archive" and "instrument of life evolution", these piles and heaps are at the heart of the collaboration between Marit Mihklepp, recipient of the Roots & Seeds XXI Residence - Maison Malina and Meredith Root-Bernstein, researcher at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, who will report about their exploration of the Parisian accumulations, piles and holes.

We will be sharing our impressions of our two-week collaboration while thinking and being with the mounds, heaps and holes of Paris. Mounds, heaps, and piles, and their complements, pits, holes and depressions, are the most primordial form of technique or technology. Accumulations make possible new materialities, affordances, and interactions. The making of concentrations in space is a condition for the evolution of life, and all of ecology can be described as moving and reshuffling piles of things. The mound, heap, or pile, is also an epistemological object: it is an archive. We will be approaching ‘large piles of something’ both with field work practices from both ecological and artistic perspectives. We start with finding and mapping specific mounds, writing field notes, perhaps making our own mound. In the process we will be asking questions from the mounds: what kind of knowledge are you an archive of? What kind of movements are you holding? How did you get here? How would you make me part of you?