Ophioderma Teres

I was intrigued by the idea of being part of an exhibition in response to a collection outside of an aesthetically based concept. or coming from art history. My first sense of myself growing up as a child was playing in my garden in Tunisia, North Africa, overlooking the Mediterranean, and playing with the bugs and the rocks and the leaves pretending they were other than what they were. My sense of nature was heightened by the historical site I grew up in, the city of Carthage, ancient metropolis of the Roman Empire, with archaeological digs beneath my feet and the vast sweep of nature surrounding me.

Thus, my first understanding of Self was of nature and the myriad of life and fossilized life in my immediate surroundings. Visiting the archives and the back rooms of the Natural History Museum, gave me that same sense of density of natural systems and species, and the same sense of history and time that I had growing up in Tunisia. What impressed me most while visiting the back rooms was meeting and talking with each individual scientist/curator of the collections, and witnessing their passion, dedication and guardianship. Secondly, I was taken by surprise by the collections themselves and the sheer amount of categorized and labeled items. The indexing of what had once been alive, now all neatly and beautifully contained in little boxes or jars and hundreds and hundreds of drawers each with a tag according to species, date and location, enlivened my need for establishing aesthetic order. Each collection I visited not only had rooms full of cabinets and drawers but also spilled over to storage hangars in different parts of the city. It was astonishing to discover that only one to two percent of the collection was exhibited at a time at the Museum. My first desire was to do a documentary of these back rooms, interviewing the scientists, and showing the millions of items in the collection to the public.

I then chose to go back to the habits of my childhood and investigate different items of the collection such as bees, beetles, butterflies, star fish and transform them into other than what they are. I visited the echinoderm laboratory, the entomology, invertebrate paleontology, malacology and mineral sciences departments, met the individual curators and photographed hundreds of specimens as a way of familiarizing myself with the collections.

I had an experience on a first trip to Egypt in which I saw the honey bee, the ancient symbol for lower Egypt, as interchangeable with stars . At the Natural History Museum, I considered creating star maps with bees and scarabs until Ken Johnson, curator of the invertebrate paleontology collection showed me fossilized brachiopods from three hundred millions years ago. They appeared very much like stylized Egyptian sculpture, I saw these brachiopods as ancient remnants of stars, at the bottom of the sea, from a very long time ago, waiting to be transformed back to their stellar origin.

When I visited Gordon Hendler’s echinoderm collection, I became fascinated by brittle stars and learned that many brittle stars exist in the Antarctic and Arctic, and even in the deepest parts of the ocean where there is no sunlight, others have exquisitely developed crystalline lenses, formed from the bone in their skeletons, which focus light inside their body and enable them to see Being interested in the influence of star light on our life on this planet, I decided to solely focus on the brittle star and alter its scale and context to let it represent what my impressions had been of the density of life and the compression of time.

“But this is not blackness, it is full of something from long ago with the potential of something yet to be.”

I became fascinated with the grid on which I was photographing these objects. as a scientific tool of measurement. By altering its scale and its context, the grid became an artistic mode of perception and observation as well; the brittle star, a sculpture within a modernist cube, and by its absence of light, a void within the grid. By blowing up the grid-space of scientific observation, transforming it into an artistic mode of perception and observation, it becomes an art historical reference. Hence the relationship between art and science, between the collision of the artist observing what has been observed scientifically. In creating “Ophioderma teres ”, I was interested in how a shift of scale alters our perception; how the observer affects the object of observation, and notions of time and space. In entering the space, I wonder , “Are we looking at the bottom of the ocean or up at the cosmos? What time frame is this and is the brittle star a creature of the depths of the earth, the bottom of the oceans, or a creature of the cosmos? I feel that Rosanna Albertini’s question to me in preparing for the evenings of “Conversations” was a fitting and poetic entry into “Ophioderma teres”.

Lita Albuquerque
January 2005