ANT FARM BUENOS AIRES
participatory performance and installation

I will build a large scale multi-colored map of the city of Buenos Aires made of translucent ‘agar-agar’ – a vegetarian gelatin substitute, combined with sugar, food coloring, tea tree oil, weeds, soil, black ants, and Fernet. The installation functions as an ant farm with the agar-agar serving both as habitat and nutrition for the ants. This allows the viewer to watch the ants turn the map into a colony around which they organize their lifecycle. The agar-agar is cooked on site and upon the successful completion of ‘Ant Farm Buenos Aires’ – the installation will succumb to the process of decay.

This project is inspired by ‘Ant Farm Lagos’ commissioned by the 2019 Lagos Biennial in Nigeria and goes back to an ‘ArtSchool Palestine’ residency.  In Nablus I mapped remnants of ‘inverse geometry’, a so-called ‘high concept spatial technique’ used by the Israeli Defense Forces in their 2002 offensive against the Palestinian resistance, and described by Eyal Weizman in his ‘Walking Through Walls.’ 

For BIENALSUR, I will center my research around ‘Desire Lines and Defensive Architecture in Modern Urban Environments’ a recent paper by Naomi Smith and Peter Walters in which they introduce the concept of ‘desire lines’ as a means of overcoming or re-imagining defensive architecture which serves to ‘discipline’ city inhabitants into primarily consumption based modes of interacting with and in the city.