Loops

Starting from the geography closest in, I am following a tangle of experiences with seaweed, my interactions with an archive, a place where I’m time travelling. Handling specimens that are 200 years old, fixed, pressed, flattened into neat volumes, where there is little distinction between their bodies and the page, absorbed, inscribed.

In 2019, I was commissioned by Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, to create a new work in response to their collections. Scrolling through their object database, I became bewitched by their seaweed archive, sheets of delicately pressed and dried specimens, reds, greens, browns, vivid in colour and but flat, fragile and brittle, almost disappearing like ghostly watercolour drawings into mottled paper.

After some initial research I noticed that most of the seaweeds were collected by women. Dating from the mid-19th to early 20th century, each specimen bears the collectors’ name in pencil alongside the collection date, location and latin identification. Mrs. Griffiths, Miss Cutler, Miss Mills, Miss Hutchins, Miss Cresswell. The act of collecting and pressing seaweeds, otherwise known as ’seaweeding’, was considered a gendered hobby, and a creative pastime of little importance.

However, many of the collectors made a significant contribution to marine botany, meticulously recording specimens and sharing their findings generously with the (male) scientific community, as they were unable to publish research under their own names.

Image: Film Still from Unctuous Between Fingers, 2019, HD video, 15min

Margaret Gatty described the pursuit of seaweeding as ‘free bold and joyous’ a liberating hobby for middle-class women, allowing for time alone in nature, that was otherwise forbidden. Seaweeding fostered freedom and friendship for a certain privileged class of white women; and allowed others less privileged to work towards financial independence – starting their own businesses collecting and selling pressed seaweeds to those less keen (or able to) adventure into the great outdoors.

I have begun to read these pressed bodies as a kind of writing. Seaweed inscriptions. A Marine Lover’s text that speaks from the intertidal zone with more than human voices. Tangled, multifarious, mucilage-seeping bodies, connected, floating, but tethered. Existing in contradiction, not fixed between two states, but shifting between many – what does it mean to rehydrate the archive? To move between slippery and dry?

Back at the Museum, I wanted to ask the archivist if there is a potential for the pressed specimens to be reanimated, like dried seaweed in broth. Could we take these specimens, so skilfully pressed, so carefully annotated and classified, kept in a dry, temperature controlled storage facility and return them to the ocean? But I swallow my question, as bottled water isn’t even allowed in the collection store, so hypothesising about a mass rehydration seems unlikely to go down well.

My encounters with the seaweed collection were the start of a fascination which would lead me down many different but interconnected paths. The more I looked, the more links between seaweed and gender I noticed. The more I researched it’s biology, the more I realised how complex and beguiling seaweeds are, and how much we can learn from them about multi-species futures and ecologies of care.

Seaweed breathes for us, together with its algae siblings, producing significantly more oxygen than terrestrial plants. It filters, shelters, nourishes and sustains ecologies, coastlines, communities, industries. In the past decades, seaweed and algae have entered mainstream discourse around climate change in both positive and negative lights.

Image: Film Still from Unctuous Between Fingers, 2019, HD video, 15min

Due to rising sea temperatures and changing balances in the oceans, toxic blue-green algae blooms (seaweed’s cousin) threaten entire ecosystems, absorbing sunlight and further heating the oceans. Tides of sargassum (a brown leafy seaweed) off the coast of Barbados are strangling sea life and damaging small scale fishing industries, growing in size each year, covering beaches and offending tourists’ noses. Both instances are described in western media as ‘invasions’, both are indigenous to the areas mentioned and have only become a large scale problem because of human-induced climate change.

On the other hand, seaweed is also often heralded as a tool to mitigate global warming – a way of feeding and powering economies and to even sequester or sink carbon – although this is still only possible in theory and not in practice. Seaweed has life giving, utopian and science fictional qualities, known to indigenous communities for thousands of years, but there is also the very real potential for it to be coopted by late capitalism to enable violent processes of extraction and oppression to continue.

Seaweed and it’s human and more-than-human interactions are a slipperiness of bodies in common and difference. How can seaweeds’ materiality help us to think through our own actions and activisms? What does its qualities lend to a conversation on living and caring together?

For this podcast, I had the privilege of interviewing three people who have found their lives  or research intertwined with seaweed. Through the lens of environmental justice, marine biology, community activism and media theory, these conversations explore seaweed’s slippery relationship to place, identity, community and responsibility.