The Drowned World
The Drowned World
An artificial forest assembled from plants closely related to those of the Carboniferous Period grows from the industrial ruins of a gasworks. These plants once formed swamplands that stretched across the globe. Over millennia, their buried remains hardened into the very coal used at the gasworks. As this coal was heated and burned, carbon captured from the air 300 million years ago was again released, and an ancient atmosphere in part restored.
A decorative pool glows blue-green, a living monochrome. The pool is colored by cyanobacteria, ancient organisms that were the first chlorophyll photosynthesizers: the first green. Their emergence over two billion years ago set in motion the biological process by which light and air could be transformed into organic materials--the basis, also, of fossil fuels. This process released oxygen into the air for the first time. Toxic to nearly all life that had evolved until that point, atmospheric oxygen triggered a mass extinction of a scale perhaps unmatched in earth's history.
First Forest, 2018. Polypodiopsida, Cycadopsida, and Araucariaceae species installed in coal gas plant; irrigation system; steel viewing platform. Dimensions variable.
Cyan Sea, 2018. Cyanobacteria, water, LED lighting, air pump, mineral and nutrient media in decorative fountain. Dimensions variable.
The Drowned World was included in Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Italy.
