Metabolic Encounters: A Conversation with Artist Asad Raza

Watch the video, or scroll down to read the transcript, to experience a conversation with artist Asad Raza! The conversation ranges across his artistic career with a special focus on his upcoming project for Manifesta 15 Barcelona (opening the 8th of September to the 24th of November 2024). Manifesta is a “European Nomadic Biennial” which moves from city to city promoting positive social and ecological change. This year’s themes include: Balancing Conflicts, Cure and Care and Imagining Futures.

In this conversation Asad talks of hanging fabrics in a Barcelona power station moving in a wind like kelp, the way that water and soil can remake the interiors of a museum space, the enchantment of a grove that would begin in a museum space but take roots beyond it, an outdoor installation that would amplify the sound of the river nearby rather than compete with it, the sublime powers and attractions of natural forces beyond the human.

Moderator : Dr. Kristine Roome PhD., cultural anthropologist & host of the Eco-Arts forum

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Transcript of Conversation

Kristine Roome: Hello. Welcome to the ecological design collective. We are an online space. We meet both online and in person to facilitate conversations around ecology and environmental sustainability writ large. My name is Kristine Roome, and I’m the host and curator of the Eco Arts Forum, which is a subgroup of the larger EDC. Our focus is on visual art and in particular artists who are making an impact in terms of drawing attention to environmental issues, and how we might live better with one another on this beautiful yet vulnerable planet that we all inhabit and whose limited resources we share.

Some of the artists might do this through direct activism. Some may do it by drawing attention and guiding us to think about and experience the world in deeper and more meaningful ways. Sometimes it’s providing a vision for how we might live together otherwise, or some combination of the above.

Today I am delighted that we have an opportunity to talk with a renowned international artist, Asad Raza. He’s with us today, and he and his practice in many ways embody all those ideas we just mentioned. By way of introduction, welcome Asad. I’m going to give a little bit of a background, and bio for you. Asad combined experiences of human and non-human beings and objects in his work, often exploring the idea of dialogue, rejecting interdisciplinary boundaries, and embracing such diverse practices as performance, music, science, and sculpture. With nature being a frequent theme, Asad’s practice is multifaceted, comprising the roles of artist, producer, curator, and writer. He consistently conceives of exhibitions as metabolic entities in which active scenarios must be constructed. He often takes planetary ecologies as a focus with a strong emphasis on the participatory and performative aspects of art as well as engagement with all the senses.

He was born in Buffalo, New York, to Pakistani parents. He now lives in Berlin with many stops along the way in New York City, and even here in Baltimore, where many of the EDC members are based. He studied literature at Johns Hopkins. In many ways, this is a bit of a homecoming for you. Welcome back. Asad also studied film at NYU. His projects have been realized by institutions across the globe, including the Whitney Museum in New York, the Outdoor Public Arts project in Sydney, Gropius Bau in Berlin, Serpentine Galleries in London, Frankfurt, the Lahore Biennale, Bolzano, Tokyo. Most recently he is participating in the Manifesta Biennale, the 15th version of which in Barcelona, Spain, which opened last week and runs through the 24th of November.

To begin, welcome, Asad. Thank you so much for joining us.

Asad Raza: Thank you, Kristine. Thank you so much. And, as you said, nice to be in a Johns Hopkins affiliated space, maybe for the first time since I graduated from Johns Hopkins with my bachelor’s degree.

Kristine Roome: I want to jump right into the current work. Congratulations! I’ve been seeing your images blowing up across social media. And I read recently, in an early Frieze review, that you are one of the six artists to watch at Manifesta. The work is beautiful. To begin with, I’m wondering if you could talk about the work for a little bit. Give us a little bit of a background on Manifesta, and how you conceived of this particular project.

Asad Raza: Manifesta is a nomadic biennial because it changes city every two years. It was started 30 years ago by the current director, Hedwig Fijen. This edition is in Barcelona which just opened last week. I just got back from there, and last year they invited me to participate in in this edition. So I went to Barcelona, and I saw some of the spaces that they had. They had the idea that I could go into this space, which is called the Three Chimneys. You’re looking at the photograph now. The Three Chimneys is a power station that is located on the beach. For me, it was a real monument to the 20th century. It’s gargantuan. It deals with burning fossil fuels, and it also polluted the stretch of beach that it’s sitting on with heavy metals from the discharge of the water that was brought in to cool the station.

 The third floor of it is this very large open space. It’s a turbine hall and that was the space in which they had asked if I could make a new commission.  As always, I’m slow, and it took me a while of visiting and spending time thinking about it. At some point, I think, what triggered this particular piece was when I was having a conversation with the curator of the Manifesta 15, Filipa Oliveira, and she mentioned that the insurance companies were concerned about the windows because some of them were broken, and that they were thinking it might be necessary to remove the windows or some of the windows. That just triggered the idea for me which I thought, that’s great if that happens. I want to encourage you guys to do that because I found the whole space to be a tomb-like space. It was airless, it was dusty. It was just dead inside.

I was struggling, thinking how can we make this space part of the world around it? Link it to the ecosystem, but also the Anthropocene systems that are surrounding it, instead of it just being this giant container that is closed off. The idea of the windows coming out really appealed to me, and I said, I think that would be great if all the windows could be removed.

Because it’s on the beach, I figured that there would be a lot of wind. When I visited the first time, one of the things that struck me was when you tried to look out at the Mediterranean at the time you couldn’t see it from inside because the windows were frosted. I saw it when I was walking up to enter the building, and it makes you think about when you see this beautiful view of the Mediterranean. I had been thinking about, the Sirocco, and this wind that comes from North Africa that blows across the Mediterranean to Southern Europe. That also has a lot of different relevances. This idea of this energy or this force can cross these barriers and cross these human boundaries.

When they told me about the windows, I encouraged them that we could remove all the windows and let the wind actually pass right through the building. I had an idea of trying to visualize that, and to me, the simplest possible way to visualize it was with cloth, because it can respond very well to the fluctuations and uneven currents of air.

I started hanging, testing different cloths, holding them up in that space and outside that space.  I found some cloth which were really able to be responsive, but also move very slowly. I liked the way that it moved, and I worked on this pattern of these cloths that were matched to the architecture – each about 60 feet long and about 9 feet wide.  I started hanging them in a way to try to create a more organic layout.

I think if you would work with cloths hanging from the ceiling in the sixties or seventies, they would probably be in a geometric pattern that would express some structural abstraction. In my case I wanted it to feel more like an organic growth like a kelp forest. You couldn’t exactly see the pattern in which they had been placed, but you could feel some purpose behind it, or some patterning, if not an obvious pattern.

They got a little nervous that there wouldn’t be wind, but of course, there was a lot of wind. With the resulting piece, you can go inside and interact with the wind that blows through the building and visualize it. Someone said to me that these cloths are like a 3D representation, rendering the wind in real-time. I think there’s something about that.

The cloths also touch the visitors from time to time. Two different visitors, said to me last week that usually you’re not allowed to touch art, and that this time, the art, came and touched them. They didn’t even mean for it to touch them, but you can’t always get out of the way.

And finally, the name of the piece is Prehension.

Kristine Roome: What are you implying there?

Asad Raza: I’d been thinking about prehension for this piece, because in my understanding, and I might show myself to be not the most accurate reader of Alfred North Whitehead, but prehension is a concept that comes from Whitehead, from pragmatist philosophy in the early 20th century. My understanding of it is as something like a sensation that you can have with the body that doesn’t necessarily involve the cognitive. Like a baby grabbing at something is a prehension. I like the idea of giving a word that suggests something like a bodily relationship to an artwork that can create that a relationship that doesn’t even in a way, need to pass through this cognitive apparatus. Although, of course, it does once you are in there, and you start to wonder about it or engage with it.

Kristine Roome: It’s not the first time that you have opened up spaces, or engaged with the body and the senses in different spaces. Two works that come to mind as you’re talking about this were works that you did within the past year or so. There is one in Tokyo [Komorebi “Dappled Sunlight” (2024) Mori Art Museum] where you’ve opened up a skylight, you opened up the space to natural light. And another, not too long ago in Berlin, called Mangrove Sunset (2023)Gropius Bau, where you again play with light and reintroduce the natural elements back into a space that had been previously closed off.

When I saw this work it reminded me of sails, of these sailing ships, and here you are on the coast, the Mediterranean coast. You’re thinking about trade, the billowing effect of the sails, and so forth. These works are intellectually provocative. But I just find this piece, just a beautiful piece. And it’s in its elegance, and the way that you’ve aesthetically brought this to life.

Asad Raza: Well, I think what you say is very accurate. I also thought about sails. I thought about bed sheets hanging from laundry lines, especially as you see in Southern Europe, and cities like Barcelona and Venice. You often see sheets hanging above the street. I thought about burial shrouds, which are usually a white sheet in North Africa, the Middle East, and other Islamic cultures. I thought about the use of white sheets as something to cover the ground during religious services in Islam. My idea was to try and escape from all of them, from it being only one of those things, and allow the visitor to come to it. Let it be a little bit undecided by me.

Kristine Roome: I want to take a little bit of a moment to step back a little bit. I wanted to think about this conversation as a chance to talk about current work, and then maybe introduce some of your prior works. In trying to propose, and impose some type of structure, on your very prolific career was not easy, but since we are an eco-group, I conceived of maybe walking through certain natural elements that come into play in the different works that you’ve done.

I wanted to go back to a work you did two years ago. It’s this redirecting nature, into a gallery space, called Diversion (2022). You redirected a river in Frankfurt through a gallery space. I want to ask you two questions: one, in terms of conceiving your ideas, do you typically start with the space, and then the ideas come? Or is there an idea that you’re looking for a space, and you find it? And there’s a part two, because much of your work is very site-specific, but, in some conversations, you’ve drawn a distinction between site and place.

Can talk a little about those two things: the process of this work Diversion, and how the work came to be in terms of finding the space or an idea, and your notion of site versus place.

Asad Raza: The answer is both. Sometimes the piece comes from the space, like, for instance, in the project we talked about in Barcelona. It wasn’t an idea I had before I went there. Sometimes the idea is one I have, then I look and wait for somewhere that it could work. Diversion is one of those. I had this idea of diverting a river through a museum or a gallery for a while, but I didn’t know if I would ever do it, because it felt like maybe it was just an interesting idea to play with in the mind, like a thought experiment. But then I got invited to make a show at Portikus (Frankfurt) by two curators. We had a meeting at the end of 2021, and they told me they were taking over as the curators there, and that they wanted me to do their first show. I visited, and it took me a couple of months of thinking about what to do there before I suddenly remembered this idea again. I tend to be a bit slow. I don’t know why, but I tend to think for a while before.

I always envy artists who just have the idea instantly whenever they have an assignment. But in any case, after a couple of months, I suddenly realized Portikus is on this island. It’s right next to this beautiful river, and I’d been so fascinated by the fact that it was an uninhabited island in the middle of a very, very busy city. You could imagine there being a sort of little uninhabited island in the middle of the Potomac that’s just covered in trees with one art space on it. The river flows within 30 or 40 feet from the building. I suddenly had this idea: “Oh, of course, I could do it here!” If we can get it done. It’s technically difficult. And it’s risky in the sense that you can damage a building if you’re diverting a lot of water flow through a building, if it spills out over the channel and leaks into the floor and destroys the electrical. There’s a lot that can happen. We had to be careful. We had to put in a whole floor, which is a channel to allow the water to flow down and cut into the floor of one side of the space to let it go down to the lower gallery and then out.

Kristine Roome: You invite the viewer in. There is a gallery space where they’re normally a passive observer of the artworks. Here you are inviting them in and not only that, you found, some way to make the water potable, right? Not only could they be walking past this river all the time, but now step in it, and even drink it.

Asad Raza: Yeah, I mean to me, it’s important to create an experience that has multiple senses. Vision, hearing, touch. The sound of the water moving through the space is quite loud and very, very much part of the experience. But also, I had the idea of cleaning and filtering the water, so I consulted with a hydrologist and asked if there was an easy way. I didn’t want to make it about high technology. I didn’t want it to be a display of infrared beams that somehow magically purify the water. My idea was we should clean and filter the water using stuff you have in your kitchen. So that’s exactly what we did. We boiled the water in a kettle in jugs, one jug at a time. We filtered it first through coffee filters, and then we put it in a dispenser, where there are some mineral stones, which you can see on the left of that picture, and just to the left of that, you see these bamboo dippers that we used, which allowed people to taste the water.

That was one of the aspects of the piece that I was interested in – the reaction that was created.  It created more of an emotional reaction than I expected when people would taste the water. I think it was particularly for people who had grown up, or who were from Frankfurt because they’d been there for their whole lives, but they had never tasted the water of their river. It was actually pretty good-tasting water.

But about the idea of bringing the visitor in. To me a video about the river, or photographs of the river, or a painting of the river, those are all interesting things to do, but in my work I tend to gravitate toward this tautological answer. What about the real thing? In our world, almost every city on this planet is built on a river because the river provided transportation. It provided drinking water. It provided laundry facilities. It provided trade. It provided everything that human beings needed to have a settlement. And yet, every one of those cities’ rivers is now polluted. You can’t go in it. You can’t touch it. You can’t drink the water for the most part, with very few exceptions.

That’s an interesting state of affairs that we live in historically, where we’ve accepted that. Our way of engaging with the rivers in our cities, on this planet, is to just look at them from a cafe or a restaurant table on the banks. The rivers themselves have also usually been straightened, concretized, and channeled. They’ve lost a lot of the dynamics and the uneven variations of flow and depth that a river would normally have.

I was thinking, why can’t art be a place to solve problems that you can’t fully solve? To create a temporary or imaginary solution. To bring the actual river to people and allow them to walk in it and allow them to drink. The water was the idea of the piece and so that’s what we did.

Kristine Roome: I think I’ve heard you once say you’re creating conditions for a world to come into being. I see often your work either bringing us to those natural elements or bringing those natural elements back into these spaces. I think a central component that I find compelling in your work is your use of soil. Your use of our use of land. I’ve seen different manifestations of an idea of soil, of land, in these four, that I’m going to highlight now.

You’ll have to tell me if I’m wrong, but the concept was initiated in Sydney, right? Or maybe a little bit prior when you were thinking about bringing soil into these spaces. In something like Sydney, like many places across the globe, this idea of land is not only environmentally compelling but also politically and socially meaningful. Especially the idea of land being contested. But you’ve done these wonderful experiments with soil. And I want to show a few.

[Scrolls through images of : Absorption (2019) Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney, Reabsorption (2021) Essen, Birmingham, The Hague, Pyramid Scheme (2022) Dresden and Plot (Chapters 1, 2, and 3) (2023) Bolzano]

You’ve taken over this place, I guess a commercial space, a clothing store.

Asad Raza: It’s called the Clothing Store, but it had been turned into a part of this art center in Sydney called Carriage Works. Originally it had been a place where clothing was manufactured.  Where, I think, the uniforms of the people working in this large factory district were distributed and cleaned.

Kristine Roome: But to not only fill the whole space with the soil, really the whole space with the soil, as we’re seeing some of these images, but also your custom blend. I understand that you have collaborated with soil scientists and created these custom blends. These chimeric soil combinations.  Could you talk a little bit about that idea of soil, and bringing the different elements together?

Asad Raza: The idea of making soil was really part of the project from the beginning. I started to understand that soil health is not so good in many places and that it’s not always possible anymore to just go get more soil, go dig up more soil from wherever you need. So much of the soil is already either exhausted of nutrients, or polluted, or has other issues. I had this interesting idea to make new soil using waste products and using simple materials that could be gathered in a city or a region.

I owe a lot of this to the scientists who I worked with. I was commissioned to make this piece in Sydney, by John Kaldor who commissioned Christo to wrap the landscape of Australia, off the coast of Sydney 50 years before my project. He has been working with artists for a long time and has good instincts. I was talking to him about my idea, and he said, “Well, you don’t know anything about soil, so we’re going to need soil a soil scientist.” We met with Alex McBratney, who was the director of the Soil Science Program at the University of Sydney, and is a very renowned soil scientist. That’s where I started learning a lot. We started mixing these other elements in like crushed cuttlefish, bones and beer, barley from breweries, and all kinds of things that we could find in Sydney. Creating. Trying to create a fertile soil, using all of this. Some people think that it sounds like compost, but compost is just organic. Material soil is mostly inorganic material. Compost could be a good ingredient of soil.

It was interesting to me, as you said, that the whole project started by thinking about these issues of land and identity in Sydney. The context in Australia, where the ecological health of the land, and who the land belongs to, were both relevant conversations being had. I felt like we could bring these two conversations closer together by trying to make new land, or the basic building blocks of more land somehow.

Kristine Roome: Even more than that, rather than contesting and fighting with one another, that somehow the combination is more fertile, more productive than it would be individually.

Asad Raza: Maybe that’s also the area in the piece. What was interesting to me, though, is that was a case of the piece being generated out of the context. Being there and thinking about the context in Sydney. But then it was invited at the Gropius Bow in Berlin. After that in Essen and Glasgow. We ended up working with these soil projects in quite a number of places. At Grand Union in Birmingham, where you’re showing the image right now. We tried to remediate the toxic soil on site by adding this new soil, which we made, and I call neo soil.

This one was in the Hague. I showed the components separated, then let the visitors walking through sort of slowly, mix them over the course of a show. I was surprised at the interest in showing the piece. The first time we did it again after Sydney, which was in Gropius Bow, I saw that it worked also there, and people engaged with it there. I realized that even if it was generated out of that context in Sydney, it can move beyond that context now. People in other places also respond to it.

Part of that, of course, is because soil is such an elemental thing. You have the real thing. I always have it filling the space in such a way that you cannot enter the space without already being on top of it. It’s always filling other spaces like the bathrooms, or the elevator shafts, or whatever.  It forces you to get into it. Another element of that piece, Absorption, is that the visitors can take it away. They are offered to take it away for free in bags, or they can take larger amounts if they want to bring their own containers.

We’re combining these materials that are being generated in a city, and then creating a fertile soil out of it, and then redistributing that. The piece is really this motion, or this process happening. I think of it like a metabolic process that’s happening. We’re metabolizing these materials and then sending them back out. Rather than the soil as the piece, I think of it more like the circulation of the material is what the piece is actually composed of.

I hadn’t thought of that before this moment, but it’s like the circulatory system, like the heart. The blood is not the circulatory system exactly, but it’s the agent of this circulation, or it’s the subject of this circulation. The soil works like that in this project.

Kristine Roome: There’s an absolutely adorable video of you and your younger daughter making soil together. I think you’re carrying her throughout the city a bit and stopping at a local play playground, which has probably got all sorts of interesting microbial bits in it. So there’s a video that is part of a larger work, but that’s circular circulatory. Here you are bringing your child into that conversation as well. She’s not cognitively thinking about it, but going through the city with her dad, creating this soil That video, which is on YouTube, I think it’s part of a larger work.

Asad Raza: It’s a section of a film that I keep adding sections to. The first section of that film shows the landscape around James Lovelock’s cottage. I was interested in why is it that this guy, who always lived in a cottage on the sea, was able to contribute to this idea of the planet as a living system. Was there something that you could see in the places where he spent time? Like an energy exchange? When we got to the area where he lived, it was really true. You could feel the exchange of energy between the air, the sea, and the land. The wind was whipping, and the waves and the plants were whipping in the wind. You just feel like this is all. This is not just a static situation. Now, of course, that’s my speculation. Or that’s my artistic interpretation of the environment influencing Lovelock, who never really worked in a lab in a university, but tended to work on his own, in Dorset, Devon, and Ireland. I think there must have been some relation there.

Just up the hill from his house we found a neolithic stone circle looking out over this beautiful landscape of Dorset on the coast. I was unsurprised. I often find that where people place things, like the temple of Poseidon in Greece, it spatially just expresses the idea of the mastery of the sea. It tells you who Poseidon was just by where it’s placed. In Sounio, in the southern tip of the peninsula, the stone circle was a place where you felt like this. You were at some active dynamic center of energies between land and sea. There’s something about those places that the segments of that film tend to try to look into.

Kristine Roome: Speaking of influences, you’ve spoken about James Lovelock, but I’ve heard you mention Dan Graham as being an influence in your own development as an artist. What do you see? What do you look towards that has influenced your development?  

Asad Raza: That would be a long conversation. There are a lot of contemporary artists, whom I have learned from, and whose work I enjoy, and I love to look at, Dan Graham being one of them for sure. I was the producer for Tino Sehgal for several years, and I learned an immense amount from Tino. I also worked with Philippe Parreno and learned a lot. Working with him as a dramaturge. I know another artist that you’re close to, Pierre Huyghe, is a very interesting interpreter of a lot of the ideas we’ve been talking about and inspires me.  Judy Chicago’s Atmospheres is a piece that has always been interesting to me.  

When I was about 15 years old, I had two art experiences. Most importantly, I went to see the Jenny Holzer show at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. Something about this artist who could speak directly to you in this oracular fashion, with these digital led screens, saying these messages to you. I hadn’t seen contemporary art before that. My idea of art was paintings. That made a huge impact on me, that art was something that could be really relevant and speak directly to you.

I would also mention Félix González-Torres. When I went on one of my first trips to New York City, by chance we went to the Museum of Modern Art. I got a poster from a stack of posters that you were allowed to take. The freedom of being able to take one and just take it home without paying. The poster was a bit macabre. It was a poster of all the murder victims in one particular year or in one city. I can’t remember exactly. But I went home, and I put it on my wall in Buffalo, and I had this strange macabre poster with murder victims on it by Félix González-Torres. But it was more the free thing, knowing that an artist had said, I want there always to be a stack of these, and the regular person can just take them.

That appealed to me a lot. I’m interested in a person who doesn’t know anything about contemporary art and who is not necessarily a curator or an art historian. I think contemporary art, the arts in general, and academia need to think about that person who doesn’t know but is interested, or curious, or could benefit from engaging with these kinds of things.

 When I was at Johns Hopkins in the nineties, and I was studying with John Guillory, Jonathan Goldberg, Mary Poovey, and a lot of other amazing people, the one critique I had of the field was that it was so directed towards other people who already were initiates into the field. It was an amazing time for me, because I’d never met such intelligent people, and I’d never learned so much. From my very first day reading Eve Sedgwick’s work about homosocial triangles, and Oscar Wilde at Johns Hopkins. This is not just a study of the past. This is about creating a new condition for thinking about how life could be in the future. In queer theory that was very obvious. In art, I think it’s very important to take up an interest in imagining possibilities and helping people.

I think about these things, while we’re looking at these pictures of this show called Plot. I like the idea of involving other artists in the work as well. That’s something I probably got from various places, but most strongly from this show. In 2013, at the Palais de Tokyo, I saw Philippe Parreno. He had a solo show across the whole Palais de Tokyo, but he showed a number of his friends within it to almost show who he was. He also had to show you a little bit about these other people, and I like the intersubjectivity of that. So, in my show Plot, we invited different artists to make interventions within the piece. It started with Absorption, the piece we discussed, and then other artists worked on it for a chapter with Lydia Ourahmane, Alessandro Bava and Fabrizio Ballabio, and then a chapter with Moriah Evans. I think, to work on these kinds of intersubjective forms is also good is a good thing.

Kristine Roome: On the word “plot”, when you’re talking about land, a plot of land. A plot could also be storytelling, a narrative. Or you can plot something together, some type of scheme.

Asad Raza: Exactly conspiracy, a novel, a narrative, and obviously a piece of land.

Kristine Roome: It’s been nice to know how you’ve been making art accessible to people.

I’m going back a little bit further here, showing some images from the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where you brought these lovely trees into the space. They were cared for, and they grew, and it became this beautiful, fertile space. I’m going to show a few images of these.

You said once that the 20th century was when we went through a period of disenchantment. Part of the idea, that you embrace, is the potential possibilities for the 21st century is to reintroduce this notion of enchantment. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I think about it in relation to this piece. I do recall seeing this. Not in this manifestation, but when it was at the Whitney biennial. I recall the sense of light and smell, the possibility, and bringing nature into the spaces.

Asad Raza: I actually have even more recent pictures. Just a month ago I went to see those trees that are now planted in Long Island.

I guess I would say it like this: In the 20th century, the human being became a megastar of the narrative that we tell ourselves. This entire narrative of modernism centers the human being in a very radical way above the biotope, above other organisms, above the geology, and the geography, and the biology of the planet. I see that as a stage that produced some interesting results, but one of the things it missed was a sense that there’s more to be appreciated in the creation of a human. That deliberate human shaping impulse is almost what I would call a collaboration with other organic things, growing and developing entities and forces. To me, the reason that the 20^th century is disenchanting is that when you go look at art, at something that a human being controlled, and is now showing you, it’s okay. But you’re not living in a world that’s somehow bigger than you, because another human being is somehow at the same scale.

For me, putting the trees in the museum is very beautiful, and yet they’re fragile. We must help them stay alive because the conditions of the white cube are so hostile towards them.  And yet when they’re there, these young trees, usually 3 and 4-year-old trees, are in bloom. They exert a different fascination. It’s a fascination with something that I’m not controlling. I’m not choosing exactly what’s happening. They are growing, and we are trying to help take care of them, and then shepherd them into the world beyond the museum after the show where they’re going to be planted and create their own grove. That grove has the potential to stay for many years. Maybe that whole process is sort of larger than one human being’s shaping impulse. In my opinion, there’s an enchantment to that.

That’s a common thread with things, the wind coming across the Mediterranean is more powerful, and in some ways much more interesting than this power station. The energies of the wind and the water dwarf this thing which we tend to get impressed by. If we have our 20^th-century glasses on, we would look at the size of this power station. But I think some other powers are much larger right around it, which we don’t look at, which we don’t want to look at, which we’re used to not looking at anymore, because, for a period of time before the modernist period, we were attempting to shelter ourselves from those natural forces. Hannah Arendt talks about that a lot in an interesting way. I think the idea of defending ourselves against natural forces, and generating our own natural forces, like nuclear power, that effort has ended up in this consequence of really not being able to see those things well anymore. A lot of my work is about trying to put those things back in front of you.

One reason I use the museum, and the galleries, is like a lens. Whatever you put in the museum, in the white cube, it’s as though it’s in front of a lens. You will look at that. By putting these things there, I can encourage you to look at them again. To sense the power and the beauty of a grove of trees, simply being, simply coming to maturity. You could see outside, but in the museum, you’re asked to pay very close attention to it.

Kristine Roome: We’ve talked about your current work and hinted a little at your past works. I want to ask you a little bit about what you’re thinking now. What direction is your work going? Are there some concepts you’re working on, that you might be willing to share and talk about?

Asad Raza: I do have a project I’m working on now. Which is in Cambridge. It’s going to be an outdoor commission, not an exhibition, but a more permanent commission. Although I don’t believe anything is permanent. I’m more like Cedric Price, who thinks something might be around for 20 years and that’s fine. It doesn’t need to be 200 years. But with a little bit longer of a timescale than some of the things we’ve been talking about. Although with the grove, the collector is supposed to take care of the grove for a century, so that also has a longer timescale.  

But in Cambridge, I’m going build what I call it an observatory. It’s a place where you can contemplate as well as study the River Granta, in Cambridge. The idea for the project comes out of listening to the biotope. A river is a very interesting and endangered thing, especially in the UK these days. I had this idea of making an installation that’s about listening to this river.

I hope to build this thing that’s shaped like an ear. There’ll be a path leading to it through the forest, and you don’t necessarily know that you’re approaching this small river yet, but then you come upon this earlike shape. When you walk into the ear it again twists and turns. It opens into a space where the other side is open to the air, that’s where you find the river is flowing.

The idea that we’re trying to work on now is that it will be shaped in a way that will acoustically enhance and amplify the sound of the flowing water. I’m also going to work on making improvements to the dynamism of the river with ecologists and river conservationists.  For instance, making the depth more uneven, adding what they call flow deflectors, which are essentially logs and timber. All those things by chance also enhance the sound. You get more sound from the flowing water. I am going to amplify that sound with this structure like an ear horn, a pavilion that functions like an ear on the river.

Kristine Roome: How much of your work is participatory? How do you think about the viewer participating in that in that space?

Asad Raza: It’s a tool.  It allows you to listen. By being in there and listening to that river, you are participating. But there’s also another level. I’ve started to create a scientific study group who are going to study the microbiology of this river. The river Granta is a chalk stream which is a very rare type of river and has not been so studied in terms of microbial life. This observatory will be a field laboratory for this scientific group that we’re convening. Which will be led by a different person for a 2 or 3-year period at a time. We’ve already started sequencing the DNA of the water gathered from that site. It will be the headquarters of this study.

In addition, I’m trying to create a partnership, with the elementary school in the local village. The children will also be able to use this place as a field classroom, where they can come think about and experience the river, the environment, and the wildlife there. There’s a lot of different wildlife in the river, even though it’s not in its natural state. It’s been also straightened it’s been dug into a deeper channel, but there’s still crayfish and otters, and many, many kinds of birds. It’s an interesting place for children to be able to spend some time. The idea that the elementary school might end up having regular trips there is what I’m hoping to organize.

Kristine Roome: I think you mentioned that Dan Graham said something to the effect that if a kid likes the piece, then it’s a good one.

But I love the idea of the timelessness of the river and the experience of the young children who are going to grow up next to it and experience it over time. It is conceptually, a really beautiful piece.

Asad Raza: I’m enjoying working on the designs. Maybe next year we’ll talk more about this, and I can show you how it’s shaping up.

Kristine Roome: That would be fantastic. We’d love to have you back again.

We could go on for quite some time, but I’m going to pause here, and I would like to open up the Forum if anybody would like to ask a question.

Chris Emdin (Professor of Science Education, Columbia University/Teachers College): I just wanted to begin by saying how much I enjoyed this conversation, just absolutely brilliant. And the way that you operate, I wouldn’t even say interdisciplinary, even in your articulation of your ideas. There’s a sort of continual border crossing across intellectual domains. That was magical. But my question is: How do you navigate the tensions that come when you are asked to come to a place to work? How do you want to engage the folks when your process is equal parts slow, organic, and pulling from things you may have done years past but oftentimes there is a culture of immediacy or production? Is there tension around productivity and operating within your timeline? How do you navigate those tensions? I’m just curious about that process.

Asad Raza: Thank you. You put your finger on something that I deal with a lot. I’m often telling curators who invite me to do a project, “Listen I know it might be frustrating for you, because it’s going to take time, and you won’t know what the idea is at first, and I won’t either. I don’t want to be frustrating. I’m not trying to frustrate you deliberately, but I presume that you like some of the works I did before.” I have to explain that this is how those works came into being. That’s my process.

 I’ve been making my own work for 10 years now. It’s not that long, but over that time I’ve become more comfortable, being in that space of uncertainty where we don’t know what’s going to happen. Good things happen when you stay in that space longer. But, I’ve also found that it’s slow. The more comfortable I get there, the more people want to get me out of there, and into the space where they know exactly what we’re going to do. It’s a push and pull. I think this is true for all intellectual, artistic, and creative things.  It’s good to have some patience for ambiguous situations and uncertainty. Results often come out of those things more than knowing what you’re doing and being hyperproductive.

In some ways I would say, I’m not that productive. But, on the other hand, the projects seem to pile up over time. Maybe it’s okay to be a little slow. I try not to be too frustrating for curators, but by giving them the disclaimer more than by speeding up. I think if I speed up and just try to get a project instantly, it probably won’t be that interesting. That space of uncertainty is very important. I’m just trying to find a way to be allowed to stay there.

Kristine Roome: For the past 10 years you’ve been creating your own works. You’ve also been the producer and worked collaboratively. In producing a lot of other works, how is that process different for you?

Asad Raza: I really enjoy doing that. I think that there’s some shared content, but the key difference is that there is usually a person where the idea initiates. That moment of the initiation, of thinking about the project, is one when I was producing, or when I was working with other artists, that they were having. I was helping them bring it to fruition, and sometimes, adding a twist here and there.

Now it’s a little bit lonelier, because that the onus to have that in initial impulses is on me. But I also enjoy that a lot. It’s more like an ongoing conversation that I’m having with my practice. When I was working with other artists more, it was like many conversations. Each project was a new conversation, where once I heard their initial impulse or idea, the thing that was sparking for them, I tried to help catalyze that. In that sense, each piece was sort of a separate conversation, instead of them all being part of this longer conversation.

Kristine Roome: You’ve created spaces where you had a tennis court in a decommissioned church, inviting people to play. The human element is often very much part of your work. It seems like a natural extension of producing other artists’ works collaboratively. And working with fellow human beings in your own independent projects.

Jessie Croteau: Thank you so much. First, I thought I would read Anand’s chat message in case you wanted to respond to it, and I also have a question for you.

Anand Pandian (Professor of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, and founder EDC, read by Jessie Croteau): Amazing conversation. Thanks so much to Kristine and Asad. The questions and provocations were so rich to think with, and I loved what Asad had to say about the hanging fabrics in that Barcelona power station, moving in the wind like kelp. The ways that water and soil can remake the interiors of a museum space. The enchantment of a grove that would begin in a museum space but take roots beyond it. An outdoor installation that would amplify the sound of the river nearby rather than compete with it. The sublime powers and attractions of natural forces beyond the human.

Asad Raza: All I can say is that I’m amazed that he can write such a beautiful set of phrases instantly on a Zoom chat on a zoom. I’m just happy. I’m going to copy that and paste it somewhere. Those descriptions of what we talked about were very rich, and I think often when you just simply try to describe things a lot of richness comes out. I think there were a lot of interesting implications in how he described what we talked about.

I’d like to hear your question, too, Jessie.

Jessie Croteau (PhD student, EDC coordinator): I want to say thank you so much. This talk has been absolutely brilliant. You spoke of Whitehead’s prehension and the importance of the sensorial and bodily dimensions rather than just the visual register. You also spoke of art as a temporary or imaginary solution, so I’m curious about imagining possible futures as more bodily. Imagining, without, or at least without foregrounding, the image of the otherwise.

Asad Raza: I think you put your finger right on something that I think is interesting. We are surrounded by images and by virtual representations of our world and of many things. Those are very diverting. Those are very powerful. And so sometimes it’s helpful to think about being more engaged proprioceptively with the world of experience directly around us. I think in that sense art can do that.

When you spend time with children, they can be very focused on small things. A tiny thing can become so interesting for them. I think that’s interesting as a way of being in the future. To pay even more attention to even smaller things about ourselves, the body of the things that surround us, and the way that we are part of what Lynn Margulis would call a holobiont.

I recently was able to have a conversation with Karen Barad about a different project tracing light on its journey to your eye. Working on that I was reminded of the power of their concepts like intra-action and others. I think putting your finger right on something I think is very important.

Kristine Roome: Thank you so much. Does anyone else have any questions?

Michael Prodger: (Art critic and Associate Editor of the New Statesman in London via chat): Is science the future of art?  

Asad Raza: I like how the question ended up being quite short and to the point. People often ask me about art and science. I’ve been interested in science for a long time. But I think everybody is interested in science, and so in that sense, I would say, the future of art is tied to science. And the past of art was tied to science too. I would point to the period prior to the 17th century, when art and science were not so easy to discern, and somebody could be assembling their cabinet of curiosities with natural specimens, paintings, and drawings that they did or collected, and all kinds of other human artifacts too. In a way, maybe we are coming to the end of a period in which there was an epistemological division between these two things, which itself maybe was not permanent, and was not necessarily sustainable, into a period in which these two things are bound up with each other again. I feel that people on both sides of the divide of the Two Cultures feel that they should be closer together and that those two things should be interwoven.

One of the things I enjoy doing in my work is coming up with the question where I realize, I’m going to need to talk to a scientist about this. With the piece I mentioned about light recently, I talked with astrophysicists, the projects with soil I talked to scientists and hydrologists, and the river piece, and so on, and so forth. I love that I get the excuse to talk to a scientist, and they’ll talk to me and tell me about the world. I have this excuse of being an artist working on something. It’s something I really enjoy.  

Kristine Roome: Asad, anything you want to add before we bring this to an end?

Asad Raza: I just want to say thanks to you. I really enjoyed talking with you and all the questions. It’s very helpful sometimes for me. I tend to get just sort of really immersed in the latest or the current project, and so having these moments occasionally to reflect on them together is really interesting. I hope we can keep talking, and I can keep you posted on how things are going with the ear project.

Kristine Roome: We can’t thank you enough for joining us. This was a fantastic conversation. I would love to have you back.