Tabaci Memoriae
Tabaci Memoriae (Memory Tobacco, 2017) is a work about land use, labor, and colonialism in the art world investigated through the act of growing tobacco in an old cigarette factory.
This work was produced as part of a residency at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, NJ in 2016-2017. It is a piece of institutional critique and the following video documents my process.
It started as a sound project. There were enormous rooms that reverberated so loudly you couldn’t make out the speech of someone standing right next to you. The space itself frustrated speech and so I wondered if it rather wanted to be listened-to instead of spoken-in. It was not an empty vessel; 2 million square feet awaiting a purpose. It was a body with a story.
Sometimes you need to activate an object in order to hear it, like blowing across a bottle, or knocking on piece of wood, or striking a bell. I began to wonder what kind of activation was needed to make an old cigarette factory sound itself and tell its story. After many attempts to resonate the building and only finding my own voice reflected back at me, I ordered some tobacco seeds and planted them in my studio.
And they started to grow…
Tabaci Memoriae Exhibition Booklet (2017)
Tabaci Memoriae Gallery
Photographs from the planting ceremony, the exhibition, and the symposium event at Mana Contemporary, 2017. Special thanks to Rebecca Leopold for taking these beautiful images.
Symposium Participants:
Suzanne Anker
Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Z Behl
Jonathan Durham
Michael Clemow
