Tuning Towards Species Citizenship

»There was a lot of walking, drawing, talking. Forest walks in the extensive woodlands around the Schloss were ideal for meandering and probing conversations while exploring new terrain.«

Attention is more than a skill; it is an art form – and never more vital than now, with our lives increasingly dominated by phones, laptops, and portable screens, all weaponized as tools of mass distraction. Attention requires a commitment to a particular space. A generosity of time. A porosity of approach – to be willing to focus fiercely while keeping your senses open, extending those tendrils of awareness out to the periphery while encompassing everything in between. It takes practice.

Tuning is an almost inevitable by-product of attention. You start to notice resonances, identify clear notes, nodes, connections within your field of consciousness.

Tuning is the name Mo Langmuir and Samuel Collins have developed for their environmental, artistic practice, which has evolved significantly over their 2022–23 residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. Given that this is the first time they have worked together, there has been a tuning in to each others’ approaches, born of different disciplines – Mo as an artist and environmental biologist, and Sam as an architect and land artist. Also, over the six-month residency, an understanding has grown of how these diverse skills and sensibilities can inform their collaborations. For their first collaborative project, titled Towards <Species> Citizenship their objective is: »Expanding the scientific definition of species to seeing life in all forms,« while articulating how that life is impacted by current political frameworks. But at the start of their residency, they had few ideas of what shape or form this practice might take.

Speaking a short time after the residency ended, but reflecting back on their original aims, Sam explains that »we were looking at different species and their place within hierarchies – how they’re perceived and what role they play within a community. We wanted to try and frame them in relation to political frameworks that we know and understand, to try and reassert them into western popular political discourse. That was the idea – to use those understandable portals as windows to introduce knowledge systems that have either fallen by the wayside or deemed heretic by certain power systems. We were feeling frustrated or restricted by the traditional disciplines of environmental biology and architecture, wanting to more freely explore a lot of conversations, a lot of discourse around environmental ecology and how that relates to politics.«

The conditions were optimal for a sustained period of exploration and enquiry, not just geographically but intellectually, socially, and practically: a fascinating new place offering a rich landscape of both natural and urban environments, new people, not to mention six months of freedom from the burdens of salaried work and the daily grind of paying the rent.

The first three months were spent scoping out their surroundings. There was a lot of walking, drawing, talking. Forest walks in the extensive woodlands around the Schloss were ideal for meandering and probing conversations while exploring new terrain. But so was the city. Sam says: »At the start we were quite aimless in our travels. Getting absorbed into the city, we’d go into Stuttgart and be captivated by certain things.« Sam describes this as »nesting – nesting into the place that we were in.«

There were fruitful encounters with locals, such as Heidi, who runs a local stonemasons. »We met Heidi quite early at a graveyard site. We asked her: what do you think about rock being alive?,« says Mo. »And she said – oh yes, I get that so much, of course it’s alive! As we talked, she got more and more animated. Just having those conversations and building that community was great. And that was both with people in the city or things in the forest. We were also taking photos, quite freely documenting. That’s how, in an embodied way, we find the space between us. The way we are talking and observing, we (now) do that very differently from the way that we’ve been trained.«

After the first few weeks of explorations followed by a couple of weeks of retreating and contemplating their surroundings from the warmth and security of indoors as the weather became more hostile, the pair decided to throw themselves back out into the landscape in the second part of the residency, January to March. They resumed regular walks, but this time invited other Schloss Solitude residents to show them their favorite paths or places. This resulted in a series of collaborative land art works, tuning into the other residents’ practice and their relationship with the landscape as well as the seasonal shifts in the land itself.

In January, walking with Sara Bédard-Goulet, they observed one of the local BMX riders raking fallen leaves. Enjoying the contrast between piles of dry, brown leaves and the wet, dark earth that was being revealed underneath triggered inspiration, although Mo explains that there was »also something really nice about the domestic brooming of a forest.« The two created Anechoic – a circle of bare earth fringed by leaves, with a large green, moss-covered stone at its center, framed by a circle of white, smaller stones. The title Anechoic emerged from their conversation with Sara on the walk, says Mo: »We were talking about anechoic chambers, when you go into a place where you can’t see anything and what that does to your senses.« The glowing green and white stones against the dark earth, in a flat winter light, speak to that darkness of winter; speak to the earth, punctuated by those moments we crave, and to luminosity and vibrant color.

They were fascinated by other walkers’ reactions. »When it snowed, because the earth was warm, the snow melted on it, so then the snow was all around this black hole,« says Mo. »And when people walked towards it they walked around it; even dogs wouldn’t go in the middle.«

Snowfall inspired another work, called Treeline says Sam: »Mo had this idea of drawing a line of the horizon on the trees, with the snow. With gloves on, we just stroked the snow up the tree. It fills the bark, and over time you compact and compact. One of us stands in one place to track the horizon, and directs the other so you are following the line on the horizon. In that one spot, the horizon line will hold itself but when you walk away, everything shifts.« Moving around this space, with these demarcated trees, would make you intensely aware of perspective, and the shifting levels of the earth beneath your feet.

Mirroring, another work, was a performance as well as an intervention. Made with Neda Kovinic, Carlos Gutiérrez, Monika Czyżyk, Binghi Isheja and Neil Luck, it arose from a walk deep into the forest, to Neda’s favorite spot, rich in mosses. Carlos brought his flute and – led by Neda – the group danced and drew and moved to his improvisations, a spontaneous forest choreography. Following on from this, Sam and Mo had the idea of bringing bowls from the Schloss, and nestling them into the moss-scape then filling them with water, to act like tiny ponds or puddles, mirroring the space around them.

Although some works lasted longer than others, the point was for them to be ephemeral. Says Sam: »We’re not trying to make anything that needs to last.«

However, they did accept an invitation from a local gallery – a former furniture store turned exhibition space – to create a piece for one of the shop windows, for an ongoing Wunderkammer Naturalia/Artificialia series. Mo and Sam chose to make a Moss Monument, a kind of terrarium celebrating the heroic role of moss in earth’s ecosystem: 450 million years old, it cools and stabilizes the planet. Endlessly adaptable and resilient, it plays a key role in regenerating soils after deforestation and fire. For its base, they drew on the plans of the now ruined Schloss Solitude Pleasure Gardens, transforming it into a 100:1 map. Around the base they placed ceramic tiles they had made by taking impressions from local Baden-Württemberg state architecture, anchored on four corners by impressions of mossy bark they had taken from trees at the north, south, east, and west of the woods. They filled its crevices and its surface with moss taken from these woods. An aquarium lid was found locally and transformed into an appropriate terrarium vitrine, which also referenced its history as a device of colonization – the terrarium was invented to transport plants to and from the colonies in a practice that, ultimately, altered the local plant ecologies irreparably, and all for the sake of imperial expansion. However, here, Mo and Sam have inverted the perceived hierarchy of Western science, by placing the moss on top, as the dominant species.

The living moss community on the monument was linked to a sound piece (created in collaboration with Eva Dörr and Neil Luck) which communicated its levels of hydration via continuous livestream, interspersed with Mo’s voice, reading extracts from bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s seminal book Gathering Moss.

The moss blossomed over the weeks it sat in the gallery’s window, facing onto the street. »When we went back, after installing it, first one huge white flower appeared and by the end it was almost a meadow in there,« says Mo. »It was really thriving, which we didn’t expect.«

How did locals respond to this unusual exhibit? Community engagement was anticipated: as the shop is surrounded by a diverse range of migrant communities – primarily Greek and Arabic – any text or caption was translated by friends from within the cohort of fellow residents at Schloss Silence, so it was multilingual. The gallery director reported many people hung around and engaged with it; she also declared it the most beautiful work he had exhibited in that space.

True to their principles, however, this work was dismantled. Says Sam: »We deconstructed it, because we didn’t want any of it to go to waste. We put the moss back into the forest, then put the tiles where we originally made the (impressions). There are these little boxes where you can place pamphlets in the forest, and we have put some in there so you can do a trail.«

»We talk a lot about intersectionality, and the richness of what that means within this artistic community and the space it can occupy and how it morphs and can be constantly enriched. That’s a really big aspect of the political ecology.«

There was another intervention with the local community, which grew out of a collaboration with students at the local art school – Marcela Majchrzak and Veronika Schneider – and a local refugee meeting space, Begegnungsraum. An exhibition emerged, evoking their spirit of community and friendship. The refugees and students who regularly met there made some ceramic mugs at a workshop. These mugs were offered on shelves, by tea and coffee-making facilities, beside a coffee table which Sam made, and whose surface is filled with sand (to anchor the mugs but also provide a soft, tactile surface for drawing or sculpting while talking – it is often easier to discuss difficult subjects while your gaze is averted). The space was framed by a soft, orange curtain Mo made by dyeing fabric with local madder root.

»This was a homage space to the community center,« says Sam. »We will give them back the mugs, the shelves, lighting, and the coffee table. We also made these cards containing conversation starters, and put in an Uno deck.« Adds Mo: »Everyone was obsessed with Uno in the community center, and it’s a disruption of the gallery space to have Uno there, it breaks down that formality.«

Through all of these rich interactions, born of close attention, of tuning, the pair now has a set of tools for engagement, which can enrich the next project and expand as their practice evolves. »We like this idea of tuning, which is borrowed from (writer and philosopher) Timothy Morton. We see how it can be a way of getting to know the place you’re in, and the people that are in that place at the time and how that … creates a constellation of influence and community,« explains Sam.

Mo agrees. »I think tuning will always be part of our process, our method. We talked about tuning and nesting. Both are key parts of arriving in a place that you have never been to before. We will always work site-specifically and site-responsively, and maybe creating work at the end and maybe not.«

In the meantime, they have a whole new constellation of artist associates and friends from their residency. »We’re picking up a lot of pollen on our backs,« says Sam. »The cross-pollination is really rich, coming across artists from all over, all of whom have a very strong sense of their direction, of what it is that they’re doing and why they’re doing it. We talk a lot about intersectionality, and the richness of what that means within this artistic community and the space it can occupy and how it morphs and can be constantly enriched. That’s a really big aspect of the political ecology.«

Tuning is certainly a way of identifying connections within your field of attention. But it is also a way of changing, shifting, and orienting yourself to the priorities you would like to see reflected in the wider world. Tuning in, as an antidote to turning off: We could all do with more of that.