Narendra Haynes and Joshua Simon

“We are Just One Form of Intelligence Amidst Many Forms of Intelligence”

April 2023

Narendra Haynes’ work seems to hold both the problem and the solution — his work is definitely concerned with the collapse of the biosphere, but his means of addressing it already suggests ways towards solutions. In his practice, Haynes combines sculptural and performative drivers that work in parallel. He brings in several elements and lets them play out — say, Styrofoam and mealworms — and with these sculptural gestures, he produces actual objects for viewers to engage with. Interconnectedness stands as a value in his work — this is not the paranoid hermeneutics of online conspiracies, but the humility of questioning human exceptionalism. Haynes’ work offers a pinch of a temporal scale beyond the mesochronic, the time we experience, and a glimpse at a visual scale beyond the mesoscopic, the field of vision we can see in. 

The irony of the cosmos as both infinite, and at the same time, a finite resource for life. The way becoming is dependent on being interdependent, and is reliant on hapticality. The mystical understanding of the one being the whole — the trees being the forest. The failure of an unmediated experience in the machinic worldview, and the direct encounter with the world through all iterations that mediate its vitality, in Indigenous traditions. In Haynes’ work, all these and more come together in direct and indirect ways.

Throughout the early spring of 2023, we conducted a series of conversations and written exchanges, discussing the practices Haynes has developed in recent years, leading to his RAIR residency, and following his experience in it.

Joshua Simon: You have developed forms of working that point to optional directions for interspecies collaborations. Can you say what the impact of the residency was on the development of your practice?

Narendra Haynes: The residency was a very important step for me and my work. But, like so much of what I do in life, I didn’t really understand what I was doing until after I had done it.

The interspecies collaboration I have engaged with for the past four years has been with mealworm beetles (Tenebrio molitor). In grad school, I discovered that this common insect has the capacity to metabolize and decompose Styrofoam. Since then, I have built my practice around this phenomenon, incorporating this material process into time-based sculptures and paintings. I usually work with “givens,” which generally is a source for collecting Styrofoam, a source to which that Styrofoam is materially and functionally bound. In the past, these sources have always referred to specific institutions and systems of abuse. The mealworm’s habitation and decomposition of this material enacted a critique of these problems, while providing a nonhuman “natural” solution.

When I came to RAIR, I was drawn to the meadow that sits between the recycling center and the Delaware River. I was fascinated to learn that this ecosystem-starter was growing on a polluted and terraformed Superfund site that had transformed a native marshland into an artificially sealed embankment engineered to protect seepage from entering the river. This was my “given,” and I spent much of my residency in this meadow. Soon I began collecting Styrofoam scraps that had blown from the recycling center, and with the help of my lovely wife Kimberly, I sculpted them into a life-sized representation of a small meadow. When I exhibited this work last fall at the Asian Arts Initiative, I released 5000 live mealworms into the piece, who, over the course of the five-month exhibition, did a lot of munching. 

The show ended in February, but the mealworms and the darkling beetles they have since turned into, are still going at it in my basement. Once the decomposition is complete, I plan to return this “newly minted” earth to the meadow that I collected it from, or perhaps use it to plant some wild grasses? I am really interested in what it means for this pollution from a meadow, to become a dead representation of that meadow, to become alchemically transformed into the earth that sustains a living meadow. I titled the piece Field of Preflection because I thought of the Styrofoam sculpture as a kind of negative image of the positive reality to come; a sterile preflection of its future vitality; a conjuring of what could be, here in the transformative present.

But it wasn’t until later that I realized the deeper significance of this work, and what it means for my development. A couple months ago, I was listening a session from the 2013 Bioneers Conference, addressing the ecological crisis, and the Aleut teacher Ilarion Merculieff asked the following question: “Are we focusing on what we are trying to move away from, or on what we are trying to move towards?” — the latter being the only way to effect change. This question really struck a chord in me. I felt like it named something that I knew, but didn’t know how to say. Ultimately I think this is the shift in orientation that the residency facilitated for me, and I think the work embodies this shift. The focus is no longer on critiquing the abusive practices of existing institutions — it’s on building a living and livable future.

JS: How do you then approach this shift? In a previous conversation we had, you described it as a move from critiquing to healing.

NH: I am still feeling my way through it, but my sense is that it has to be an active process, one that involves deeper immersion within my local environment and community. Part of the process are the workshops I am continuing to give at RAIR on plant kinship, and perhaps a working group I am starting with my friend Will Owen. But I think this shift can also be simple everyday practices, like establishing a meaningful relationship with a tree in my neighborhood, or volunteering for park cleanups at Cobbs Creek.

JS: What will this working group do?

NH: I think that depends on who ends up joining. I don’t want it to have a prescribed agenda, though my personal interest is still on the meadow and possibilities for remediating some of the heavy metals and PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) that are in its soil. Will and I would like to run some mycoremediation experiments, utilizing techniques developed by Danielle Stevenson, to see if we can learn how to remove some of these pollutants. Beyond this, I think the group will generally be about rootedness and stewardship on a local level, connecting with the land through habitation, study, story, creativity — maybe activism?

JS: In your practice, you have sculptural and performative drivers that work in parallel. Where do you put the emphasis these days?

NH: It’s funny you point out the “sculptural” and “performative” drivers, because until four years ago, I was actually a painter. But yes, these are important aspects that evolved within my earlier work. I became very interested in mark-making as a record of movement, contact, energy, materiality, et cetera. And over time, my paintings became more and more gestural, sculptural, and embodied. I also came to reject the idea that I should be in control as the autonomous author of the work. I developed a sense that I was always in dialogue with the tools, materials, and processes I employed, and that I had to “listen” to the paintings instead of trying to tell them what to do. I would sometimes simultaneously cocreate paintings with other people, so that we were instantaneously influencing and responding to one another’s agencies. I always found these results far more interesting than when I tried to impose some preconceived form or meaning onto a canvas.

JS: When was the change, then?

NH: This work grew into my current practice when I went to grad school at the University of Pennsylvania. Orkan Telhan’s courses provoked me to think seriously about ecology and, once I started delving into the issues, all my prior interests made sense. It was like I had been priming myself for ecological consciousness all along, working through questions of embodied intelligence and relationality, cultivating a posture of listening, and granting the agency of others — now, these “others” refer to nonhuman lifeforms, all the diverse agents and personalities that make up our biosphere. When I started collaborating with mealworms to decompose Styrofoam in 2019, things just clicked. It distilled everything I was feeling and wanting to express into a simple, concrete gesture that is felt in a deeply embodied way.

So, to answer your initial question, I think my emphasis is on aesthetic apprehension, communicating on a concrete and embodied level, welcoming the vital agency of nonhuman life, questioning cultural attitudes toward nature, and exploring restorative knowledge. I think the last is starting to come to the forefront now that I am focusing on “what I am trying to move towards.”

JS: In Jean-Luc Godard’s 1962 film Vivre sa vie, Paul (André S. Labarthe) recites to Nana (Anna Karina) a child’s description of her favorite animal, in the class Paul’s father teaches: “A chicken is an animal with an inside and an outside. Remove the outside, there’s the inside. Remove the inside, you see the soul.” I was reminded of this quote when experiencing your work, which connects artistic practices, Indigenous knowledge, and the sciences of life, wherein things do not exist by themselves but are always-already, as the saying goes, in relation to other things. 

NH: Yes, reciprocity has become a first principle for how I understand and strive to be in the world. Nothing could exist that did not take/make itself from something else. Life is sustained by life. Sometimes this can be a predatory or parasitic relationship, but there is a lot of mutuality happening too. There is a deep mutualism at work in the ultimate giving back of the body — its microbiomes, its flesh, and its excretions — to support other life. So-called advanced human societies have largely forgotten this giving back part, and so much of what we call progress involves taking more and giving less. In this hour of crisis, though, our culture is finally waking up to our interdependence. We are just beginning to appreciate how trees share resources and communicate through mycelium networks underground; or how our bodies are integrated with bacteria, relying on them to turn our food into our flesh, even as they influence our moods and cognitive capacities. Survival of the fittest and rational control was a convenient narrative for European cultures hellbent on taking all the natural wealth of the Earth for themselves. We are finally waking up to what Indigenous cultures have always known: that we are inside and part of nature, totally enmeshed and dependent on its wellbeing, for our own. Furthermore, we are just one form of intelligence amidst many forms of intelligence, and we need to respect that. So, I try to make my work from a place of humility, and I hope that it can open people up to this feeling — maybe through a bit of wonder.

JS: If landscape were still a stable category, we could say you make landscape sculptures. At its core, they offer a perspective onto the surrounding as a picture — claiming a break between the “natural” and “manmade,” allowing the viewer an out-of-body experience, in the sense that she is perceived to be outside the intricate biomorphic existence depicted in the picture. A very short, and granted, limited history of the collapse of this form of scenery depiction: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) depicts a dominating human figure against the undiscerned view under his command; Friedrich’s Great Enclosure (1831) seems to propose no point of view on the already postindustrial marshlands outside Dresden; Paul Cézanne’s thirty paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire (late 19th century to early 20th century) depict the mountain looking back; Robert Smithson’s Asphalt Rundown (1969) outside Rome employs conceptual pictorial action, and his Spiral Jetty (1970) prefigures the Palm Island in Dubai; Ana Mendieta’s Imágen de Yágul (1973–1977) shows embodied land-scapes; Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons (2013) proposes a notion of “the surround,” where there is no perspective but a place outside — inhabited yet deserted, no plan just survival. How do you see your practice in relation to this history?

NH: Wow, that’s a big question. Fortunately this is a written exchange and I have some time to ruminate on it! Well, for starters, I’m glad you brought up “landscape,” as problematic as the term is. Even when my work is picturing something quite different from a landscape, it is still a central theme. This is because the decomposition of the Styrofoam by the mealworms is a process of earthmaking, a literal creation of “land” from that which resists decay and refuses to become land. Furthermore, I think “landscape” is a concept and genre that embodies historical perspectives and attitudes toward nature as a whole. Many of these attitudes are, unfortunately, still dominant. I also understand the nature/culture divide implied by the term to be tied not only to a long history of ecological abuse, but also to racist and sexist ideologies that equate womanhood or Blackness with nature, deeming them other and inferior. So, for me, this term is enmeshed in a white patriarchal hierarchy that really needs to be undone. I see the mealworms’ decomposition of Styrofoam as an erosion of this nature/culture boundary, undermining the presumed separateness and superiority of human culture.

But thinking about your description of the undercommons as a “place outside — inhabited and deserted” reminds me of something I learned on a podcast recently. In Imperial Rome, the words for “forest” and “desert” were interchangeable. They just meant all the Emperor’s land outside of what had already been developed for human purposes. I think this shows how deeply these othering mechanisms — and the conceit of separation and superiority — are rooted in Western culture. For me, uprooting these assumptions is another practice of decomposing toxic elements in the landscape.

So, I am very interested in this history, and the lineage you traced out is always close and relevant for me. It informs my evolving understanding of “landscape” or “wilderness” or “surround” or “other.” I address these excluded spaces by trying to denaturalize any notion of separation, control, dominion, superiority, et cetera. Instead I favor a living relationship and interchange, with as many meanings as there are agencies to shape them.

JS: With regards to this notion of “the surround,” there are two fables that come to mind when thinking of your current works — Silvia Federici tells the story of the Taíno meeting Christopher Columbus, who is looking to register the “New World” and everything in it as an inventory owned by the King of Spain. Federici explains that for the natives, owning land was as ridiculous as owning a cloud. The other story is by Bruno Latour, explaining how the conquistadors were asking themselves whether the natives had souls — with a whole theological conundrum that brought about modern slavery to the Americas — this, while the natives asked themselves whether the Spaniards actually had bodies. How to be in the world is a real concern in your work — we are part of “one big soul,” as Father Casy says in Grapes of Wrath, as bodies sharing microenvironments of interdependency. Together, we form a place which cannot be claimed, and yet is constantly being claimed as territory, property and landscape.

NH: I am only familiar with the first of these two fables, but I love them both. They bring together two aspects of the colonial project that I think are completely entangled: the ownership of land and of people. More interestingly they provide the Indigenous retort to these attitudes. I love that the natives asked whether the Spaniards actually had bodies! That is so insightful and rich with implication. It speaks to the long tradition of mind/body dualism and body-denialism in the West, or what Timothy Morton calls our attempt to “achieve escape velocity from our physical and biological beings.” Our culture has a long history of pejoratively associating our bodies with animals, and instead identifying with some superlative notion of a transcendental self, be it soul, mind, or consciousness. Technological progress amounts to so many attempts to reify this attitude, to overcome our embodied limitations and achieve omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality — what Yuval Noah Harari calls “Homo Deus.” Harari also talks about how modern society reifies particular views of reality through legal fictions, like the Corporation, or ownership in general. These are just stories we have collectively agreed to live by, but they also happen to cause us to pull the whole show down around us. I think it’s time we start listening better to stories.

JS: Georges Bataille has shown that there is no balance in nature — in the simple sense that the sun is totally oblivious to us while it is giving us life. Whatever I do, there is no feedback that returns to it, it just gives. Moving away from notions of equilibrium, in your work, there is an interplay of tensions — between general and specific, finite and infinite, detail and whole, mediated and unmediated, gradual and enhanced, meaning and enchantment. The filmic quality of your work operates like a timelapse: the Styrofoam decomposing in a matter of weeks. The mealworms are collaborators on the work, and meaning is literally being proliferated by other beings.

NH: Yes, meaning is proliferated by other beings, not necessarily in balance, but still in relationship and in dialogue. I think this is one of the big lessons I have been learning. That meaning comes from all of life, not just human life. Our bodies and senses have evolved so that we can participate in this world. We can see, hear, touch, taste, smell, and navigate the meanings around us, produced and communicated by other bodies, human and beyond. I went to undergrad in the early 2000s when Postmodernism was still the norm (even though by this point it felt like it was on its last legs). It was assumed that we, as artists and humans, are responsible for constructing meaning; we are meaning-makers and no meaning exists outside of what we produce. Much of my work with mealworms aims to undermine this idea. Once meaning is opened to other beings, we can start thinking about how life is experienced in many different forms, scales, and rhythms. We gain some sense of how the individual and whole, the micro and macro, are related. Trees, forests, critters, rocks, mountains, rivers, and oceans all have their own scales of existence, their own pace of growth and change, yet they cannot be isolated from one another. Just like our breath cannot be separated from the breathing of plants, and the breathing of the planet. 

For me, Styrofoam is a kind of denial of breath, a choking of the planet, and its decomposition creates breathing room. The mealworms also provide an experience of deep time, breaking down substances that would otherwise take hundreds to thousands of years, like a time lapse, as you aptly suggested.

JS: The healing practice you have enacted has social and political implications. How do you view the discussions on returning National Parks to the native peoples of this land?

NH: It’s one of the most sensible things I’ve heard in a long time. A glimmer of hope in a pretty dire situation. It seems like it has been as positive for the tribal communities as it has been for the often stressed and sometimes really degraded environments that they are reclaiming stewardship over. And it finally starts to acknowledge that the tens of thousands of years of ecological knowledge embedded in these cultures have a lot to teach us. But I think it’s just a first step in what needs to be a much broader recognition of colonial ignorance and violence enacted against native peoples and ecosystems. The “rights of nature” movement also comes to mind as a hopeful sign of a cultural transformation. Aligned with an Indigenous understanding of nature, this legal movement aims to invest the status of personhood to nonhuman lifeforms and even entire ecosystems, while divesting these rights from corporations attempting to exploit these resources. It’s unlikely we will be able to undo all the harm already inflicted, but it’s certainly worth working towards. I hope dedicating my art practice to these issues can contribute in some capacity.