Mangroves, Mud, Mystery
During the working of project, "Water
is the Barrier" there was a dream secquence of a lone male
figure actively participating in the landscape (where I was working
to photograph "Water is the Barrier".) I saw this figure
walking thru the mangroves and scrub without regard to time and place.
This image stayed with me for six years when I had to opportunity
to recreate this dream. I collaborated with friend, Dan Norton, photographer,
to create this series.
Though performance art was not something I actively
sought out, it has become an integral part of my work.
Mangroves in Florida mark the boundaries
of land and sea. They form a unique ecosystem around bays and estuaries
and are one of the primary ingredients in the life and food chains
that begin there. They provide habitat for a variety of coastal organisms
both in and out of the water. Many times mangrove thickets provide
a perfect sanctuary for birds seeking to safeguard their nests from
raccoons and snakes, and so mangrove islands many times are rookeries.
The mangrove forest as a mesh of both land
and water, and its fluidity and borderless, is open to influence and
change. Yet because of its rhizomatic lateral growth patterns, which
prominently feature prop roots and pneumatophores, it can also contain,
entangle, strangle, and bind, and thus act much like a natural barrier.
It is precisely this constant flow, the intake and
uptake of nutrients, excretion, -- that is, the biological activity
-- that makes the mangrove one of the most vital, successful of all
ecosystems, and thus an excellent metaphor and model for our dualistic
society.
The mangrove forest would of course have
offered a familiar terrain to those slaves brought from coastal West
Africa. While infamous for its impenetrable maze and still considered
by some as "a wasteland of little or no value," the mangrove is in
fact highly valued by natural scientists for its hardiness and great
adaptability to the physical stresses on the system as well as for
offering stability and protection to island and coastal regions against
erosion and storm damage, among other benefits. These plants have
developed physiologically and morphologically in order to survive
environments of high salinity, occasional harsh weather, and poor
soils.
One of the most visible adaptations by mangroves
is their prop roots and pneumataphores, obviously the physical characteristics
that tie them to the Deleuze and Guattari paradigm. But as the two
scholars also suggest, border zones are sites of creation and
challenge. They remind us that the so-called postmodern world has
altered in many ways and places what was assumed to be a "seamless
join" between place and identity.
As Deleuze and Guattari emphasize, the rhizomatic is not amenable
to a structural model, and is a map rather than a tracing: "To be
rhizomorphous is to produce stems and filaments that seem to be roots,
or better yet connect with them by penetrating the trunk, but put
them to strange new uses" (A Thousand Plateaus). Deleuze and Guattari
tell us in theoretical studies that there is a need for looking beyond
roots.
