A project in collaboration with Alice Brunnquell.
Cake by Mac Sharkey
Poster by Jade Kerremans
Special thanks to Céleste Brunnquell
The Ways We Are it (TWWAI) is a multidisciplinary project by Alice Brunnquell and myself
researching stories about the ways humans, and other beings modify and inhabit the landscape in a
major city. How do we move soil, divert water, and pile up landfill to an extent that we sometimes
build hills and islands, then forget about it? Realized over the course of our residency during
which we had a workspace on Governors Island, TWWAI is an attempt to take a step back and see what
is really here, zooming into the city's everyday and its material reality. Seeing the landscape not
as something external that we inhabit but rather as something that we are intimately a part of and
that we have an influence upon through our daily moves. Water tower, artificial hills and islands,
purposeful explosion of buildings, worms tunneling across mounds of compost, and seafaring mountains
are some of the elements linked into The Ways We Are It.
The scope of our research has a blurry limit. The landscape, understood as the places we inhabit
or as the space where stories of the everyday are staged, is a broad and ungraspable idea. The
defining criteria that they agreed upon to select the stories that we wish to tell is the direct
physical impact of a body on the landscape. This can span from hands moving sand to beaks moving
branches, or microorganisms processing matter.
TWWAI is Alice Brunnquell and I first collaboration as an artistic duo. Or rather, our first
artistic collaboration as a duo of friends sharing visions and thoughts, and, with many others,
working on building a common understanding of our surroundings, and experimenting ways to inhabit
them.
