Pinocchio's Ecological Thought

at NKD, July-August 2018

Reading one through the other

Pinocchio's Ecological Thought

We’re at Nordic Artists' Centre Dale / Nordisk Kunstnarsenter Dale (NKD) to continue to develop an ecologically-attuned art practice, in the sense of being attuned to our relationships with other species, other people, and ourselves as a family. We are doing this through making art, and our work here is also a way to think about how art itself is transformed by ecological thinking.

Our work here starts with reading Carlo Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio (1883) through Timothy Morton’s Being Ecological (2018) diffracting one though the other in the process. We’re doing this as a way to work out how Pinocchio might articulate ecological thinking, given its ability to talk and commune with animals, people, mythical creatures, other stories, and so on. Some of the key themes that we’ve gleaned from our reading, and which have emerged through our conversations about the process so far, have been: inter-connectedness (as an ecological principle), anthropocentrism (and ways beyond it), an attitude of care and attunement (to other species and ecologies), and the importance of attending to the specifics of relations (that foot on that moss, that bee in that foxglove, that soapy water into that pipe into that stream, into that Fjord, and so on).

Drawing spruce trees

Ecological ways of learning

Part of our ecological thinking is to pay more attention to the specific relationships that we have with each other, to other people, to other species, to “natural resources” like the water and firewood that we use, the food that we consume, the texts that we read, the art education that disciplined us, and so on. An important aspect of this is our parental relationship to our children. One of the things that we are doing here is and to see how we can introduce them to ecological thinking through art, in ways that provide us all with opportunities to learn, and to transform the way that we live our lives.

An "unstable mobile"

We were thinking of making a mobile that would hold several of Collodi’s Pinocchio characters in a fragile but balanced relationship with each other; by coincidence, the ‘unstable mobile’ is also mentioned by Morton (2018, p. 173) as a metaphor for ecological relations. This image shows a detail of the first mobile that we made to explore a 'loose, wobbly system of connections,' as Morton puts it. We've also been looking at Bruno Munari's 'Macchine Inutili' (or 'useless machines') as an example of how the mobile was developed according to Modernist principles – more on that later.

Detail of first mobile

Pinocchio mobile, with branches, and roots.

One later version of the mobile came from thinking about the limitations of narrative storytelling using European theatrical conventions from the Commedia dell'Arte (see below). We mapped V & K's puppet ensemble onto a simple diagram of Commedia characters' relationships, and then turned this into a mobile. Formally, this version was constructed in a way that resembles some of Munari's (more static) Macchine Inutili. The next step is to build another version that will move more freely, shifting the otherwise static configuration of "characters" by enabling each section of the mobile to rotate.

Commedia character-relationships mobile

It's a puppet (and it thinks ecologically)

Enrico Mazanti’s illustrations for the first book edition of Collodi’s Le Avventure di Pinocchio provide us with the basis for the puppet that we are carving, out of the birch logs that are provided here for firewood. When finished, our wooden companion will accompany us on our various walks and forays into the woodland and mountains that surround NKD, when we’ll ask Pinocchio’s about how to think ecologically with other species, other people, with mythological creatures, and more.

Pinocchio, almost finished

Pinocchio, with scale-drawing

Sketch for puppet's head

Pinicchio's limbs being tied together

Face painting

P. searching for fungi

Pinocchio, on the workbench

Pinocchio, taking shape

Almost finished

Sitting next to Peter Wohlleben's Hidden Life of Trees

A nose for mushrooms?

Living Things

V: “We’re making what’s around us. We could have done a tree. We could have done a Foxglove – we haven’t done the whole plant. We could have done the house. It will be like we’re playing a game with the people. And we’re talking with them, like we’re playing with them. We’ll be talking about puppets. And ecological life.”

V: “Wood can burn. This house can burn.”

K: “Because it’s wood.”

V: “Wait, this has to be more about ecological things.”

K: “Like meat-eaters.”

V: “Some of these animals are meat-eaters. The wolf. The fox.”

V: “We could have made a crab. We know there are crabs here; and owls. That would be so ecological. That’s living things.

K: “It’s about living things.”

The Living Things puppet ensemble

The stage for V & K's Living Things

The Wolf puppet

Poster announcing Living Things event in studio 4

Later, while looking for references to Pinocchio and the Commedia dell'Arte, we stumbled upon video-recordings of the UK National Theatre's Commedia workshops from 2014. Our attention was drawn to Ninian Kinnier-Wilson's diagram, used by workshop leader Didi Hopkins, and which sets-out the relationships of the characters as distinct, inter-related groups – of 'masters, servants, and lovers' as Hopkins states. We set to work trying to re-organize our set of puppets – the ensemble featured above – according to this schema, and quickly ran into questions about the application of these stereotypical human character-types onto our nonhuman kin when devising 'ecological' tales.

Yeasty microbial ecologies

Everyone's at it of course, making sourdough bread "from scratch." For our starter, we used sammalt rugmel finmalt flour – the kind that's used to make the very thin Norwegian flatbød – with equal measures of tap water and apple juice, (from the next Fjord south of here) to speed up the fermentation.

We kept the jar-lid loose to help introduce passing yeasts, as well as to let out the carbon dioxide and allow oxygen in.

After three days it had begun to ferment, as expected. Within six hours of "feeding" the yeast for the first time, with more flour and water, it had bubbled out of its jar. It's now in the fridge so as to slow down the ferment.

Why are we doing this? The process of making sourdough starter relies on recruiting air-borne yeasts that live in the place that you make the mixture, and from the flour that you use. Mixing by hand also introduces players in your own microbial ecology into the mix. Our first starter was made in the cabin where we're staying. Tomorrow we'll make a batch in the studio. At the end of the week we should have enough starter to bake bread made with the help of the microbial cultures that live with us here.

Our lively, yeasty companions doing what they do best

Fresh out of the oven

Ingredients, and the jar

All's well with the ferment

Dough, kneaded

Studio-sourdough, on the go

Pulped Fiction: fashioning a wasp nest from 'Being Ecological'

What do you get if you take a stanley knife, a copy of Timothy Morton's book Being Ecological, and a bowl of water? Well, we hope, after an overnight soaking and some manual agitation, to have enough pulpy material to make an approximation of a wasp nest – not any old wasp nest, but the one that hangs above the paint store at the NKD studios, whose inhabitants have been our neighbours, and source of fascination in recent weeks.

We presume them to be 'eusocial' Dolichovespula norwegica wasps, and their workers were seen on most chewing the weathered wood from the exterior walls of the cabin where we are staying. More recently, since the queen stopped laying eggs and the workers no long have the lavae as a sugary-food source, they have been on the bringebær (wild raspberry) that we've been picking. We've seen less of them in recent days, so they may now have ended their individual life-cycle.

We took a knife to all pages up to 147 (where we met Sarah's bookmark – she's still reading) cutting them from the spine. Tearing each page into strips, then rough squares, we added small amounts of cold water and left them to soak. After a couple of hours, we started to make the base of the "nest". Tomorrow we continue, chewing and adding more paper-mash to the structure, and adding more pages as Sarah finishes reading them. As we transform printed matter into pulp, we think of John Latham's chewing and distilling of a copy of Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture in 1966, and wonder whether next year's wasps use this papery, woody material for their own nest.

The papery nest of our neighbours, Dolichovespula norwegica

This first attempt at making the nest collapsed after a week or so of adding gobs of soggy paper. For the second attempt, we pressed clumps of paper-mash into two glass bowls, then sealing each hemisphere together and continuing to add pulp to form a lantern-like structure. This was hung from the studio ceiling, accompanied by the shell of Morton's paperback which sat on shelf below.

The first cut

Just add water

Up to page 147, pulped

The base of the first "nest"

Second version, nearly finished

Hanging from the studio ceiling

After the Open Studios event, we transported the "nest" to the roof of the NKD studios, where we hung it under the eaves. Will it survive until next summer, perhaps to be colonized, perhaps to be chewed and repurposed by the next generation of wasps?

In the eaves

(It's at the top, above the pipes.)

View from the corridor

Once the small amount of left-over pulp was dry, we pushed it into the gaps between the wooden slats that clad the outside of our hytte – the same cladding that the wasps eat in mid-summer – as another option for our nest-building neighbours when they look for building materials next year.

Papery wall-filling

The Mother Tree

Originally published in 1978, Bruno Munari's book, Drawing a Tree, offers a series of exercises that explore the morphology of trees. Early on, Munari establishes the principle that 'when drawing a tree, always remember that every branch is more slender than the one that came before' – a principle that holds even when the individual tree is subject to less-than-ideal conditions, shaped by wind, and changes in the availability of sunlight or nutrients. Munari's concise and immaculately designed book gives us the principles to work with to draw a generalized form of a tree.

We ordered a copy of the book while here at NKD, and have been wondering about how we can work with his various exercises and instructions in light of also reading Peter Wohlleben's Hidden Life of Trees (2016), and some of the literature that informs it. In an interview, ecologist Dr. Suzanne Simard introduces the concept of highly-connected "mother trees," and their importance for forest ecologies. We wondered how Munari's book and its exercises might be adapted to include a such an idea – of trees communicating through their root systems, and connected through fungal networks.

We made a small "ideal" tree from Munari's instructions (see images), and then worked on a larger-scale "mother tree" version – a tree that is more connected, more social, than the individualized than the ones imagined when Munari's book was first published.

The Mother Tree was made following Munari's instructions for an individual tree, with the addition of a root system attached to two smaller trees. These were cut from a roll of brown paper, and mounted on the wall – the dimensions being 4.85m x 3.55m. As per Munari's suggestions, we also asked V & K to draw living things that live with trees – mice, moles, fungi, and worms among the first to be drawn, painted, and then added to the Mother Tree's community.

Tree model in the studio

Working from Munari's book

The Mother Tree and kin, with roots, in the studio

Coincidentally, as we were working on this, the British Library opened Remarkable Trees, an exhibition of 'tree portraits.' These paintings from the 1800s present individual trees, as 'natural temples and emblems of aristocratic lineage.' In contrast, we wonder whether ours is a contemporary 'tree portrait,' suggestive of a life lived collectively, and through cooperation.

Shelter Ecology

Next to where we're staying there's an area of woodland that schoolchildren from Dale use to practice building traditional wooden "lean-to" shelters. Close-by, right next to our cabin, we constructed a basic frame, based on the ones that the children make, and added a silnylon tarpaulin as a roof. During the first weeks of August, the rain, high-humidity and warmth of the air brought the fruiting bodies of fungi to the surface. We noticed that our shelter afforded them an ideal microclimate, with many springing up within its perimeter.

Recently, we moved the shelter further into the woodland, among the spruce trees. This week we'll spend time there, seeing what else thrives under its canopy, who or what we live among – the ecology of the Oikos, or 'living place' as Peter Van Wyck puts it in Primatives in the Wilderness (1997, p.51).

Local "Nature Beings"

Our local troll

When we first arrived at NKD we discovered a carved face with a long stick nose on the side of a shelter built for the children who play in the neighbouring woodland. It's protruding nose, of course, reminded us of Pinocchio. M, one of our NKD neighbours, who hails from Sweden, pointed out to us that the face is, likely, that of a troll – one of the mythological creatures of the Nordic forest. We walked the woods, attuning ourselves to the rocks and tree stumps which we presumed are either hidden trolls or their hiding places. We wondered what a belief in such supernatural beings can afford us as we try to tune in to other species, and ecological processes. What does this kind of personification of other living things enable us to imagine, to think, to experience?

We're reading John Lindow's Trolls: An Unnatural History as a way to get a better understanding the cultural history of this Scandinavian 'nature being' who are 'not just found in books, they were also part of the landscape, to be glimpsed from time to time' (Ludlow, 2014). We're tempted by the book's introduction, which talks of the ways in which we, as "modern" people, can carry these "folk myths" with us, and how they can inform our 'existential experience' alongside other, scientific explanations of our relationship with "nature".

WE DREAM OF FUNGI

Last time we were here it was during September, and the chanterelles were incredibly abundant. We could smell them in the air. So, ever since we arrived in early July, we've waited, with expectation, for the many species of fungi that we suspect are here, to burst through the thin soil in the woodlands and mossy banks around NKD. Our imaginations ran wild for a while, after reading Peter Wohlleben, and then more detailed research – The good, the bad and the tasty: The many roles of mushrooms by de Mattos-Shipley et al., 2016 in particular. The sheer mass of the fungi beneath us was palpable, weeks before their fruiting bodies began to emerge. Even though we intended to work with these thoughts, and these uncanny feelings, a more fully-formed work eluded us. All except V that is, who made this drawing of the mycorrhizal web, drawn for the Open Studio exhibition (see below).

Some of the fungi fruiting bodies that pushed their way into the daylight during August.

Mushrooms on toast

We picked chanterelles, which also inspired V to make Norwegian brown goat-cheese versions, on crispbread for our lunch.

OPEN STUDIO

Thursday 23rd August sees an Open Studio event at NKD. We're taking the opportunity to present some of the things that we've made here, including the puppet ensemble, our Pinocchio figure, some prints, Mother Tree, mobiles, and the "wasp nest".

Pinocchio takes pride of place, sitting atop a stack of logs in the centre of the room. The stack corresponds to a woodpile just outside of the studio, near which the whittled "nose" stick will lean against a tree. Inside, a tree, root, and Pinocchio figure mobile hangs beside the puppet ensemble and V's poster. A mobile using the Commedia dell'Arte diagram hangs alongside. The "wasp nest" made from a pulped copy of Being Ecological hangs above the studio door; below it, the book cover stands on a shelf attached to the wall. A felt-tip pen drawing of trees connected by a network of fungi, by V, is pinned nearby. Above the workbench are prints made by baking the first sourdough loaf, and a drawing of a figure into a wooden block print. On the cork noticeboard, a boughten Pinocchio puppet hangs beside a flowered, paper dress. Munari's Drawing a Tree is accompanied by a black tree model, and the Mother Tree adaptation of his brown-paper tree exercise is on the rear wall of the studio. A new batch of sourdough buns, with yeast fed over the past month, tumbles onto the work bench, alongside a dough hat for the Pinocchio figure and a copy of Collodi's book in paperback. V's drawings were hung at he eye-level.

Munari's Drawing a Tree, and model

Photos from the studio.

List of Work

MOTHER TREE – brown paper mural, with watercolour and pencil drawings (after Munari).

V's WOODCUT – hand-drawn felt-tip on print.

BREAD PRINT – on brown parchment paper.

COLLODI'S LE AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO – English paperback edition.

BRUNO MUNARI'S DRAWING A TREE & MODEL – book, and black cardboard model.

DOUGH HAT FOR PINOCCHIO –of unleavened bread dough.

HYTTE ECOLOGY BUNS – thirty sourdough buns in a bowl.

FLOWERED SHIRT FOR PINOCCHIO & PINOCCHIO PUPPET – watercolour on paper, based on flowers in meadows at NKD.

WELCOME – hand-written poster.

V's MYCORRHIZAL WEB DRAWING – black felt-tip on paper.

PULPED PAPERBACK WASP NEST – book cover on shelf, and pulped-paper "nest" hanging from ceiling.

PINOCCHIO, TREE & ROOTS MOBILE – of black card and wire.

PUPPET ENSEMBLE – on card, with bamboo stick.

COMMEDIA RELATIONSHIPS MOBILE – card, gold thread, bamboo stick, and stone.

(OUTSIDE, NEAR WOODPILE) PINOCCHIO NOSES STICK – carved spruce branch.

PINOCCHIO THINKS –birchwood puppet, sat on stack of birch firewood logs.

Some ecological thoughts

We wondered what Pinocchio made of our time at NKD. What's the story that he can tell, now that we've reattached the metaphorical strings between Pinocchio and "nature"?

We've followed him, alongside our kids, on his adventures: He's been re-introduced to his firewood kin, the birch trees, and the commensals that they live with at Dale; the fungi, moss, beetles, birds, people, and insects. In this time of mass extinction, does Pinocchio work as a device to repair the link between humans and non-humans, as Tim Morton would have it?

So much effort has been made on the part of humans to disentangle ourselves from our non-human (or more-than-human) kin. Arguably, Collodi's original story also attempts this, cutting the strings that bind Pinocchio to supposedly unruly, wild aspects of "human nature" and to nonhuman "nature". Our time at NKD has reminded us that there are "strings" between all things – that they are interconnected. Our work has been to live among those webs of connections – to be readmitted to them – with Pinocchio as our guide. Admitting to complex interconnectedness and extended temporal processes is never going to be easy. As far as the aesthetics of this goes, we've learned that it's like holding it all together in the shape of one of Morton's wonky, 'unstable mobile'.

Reading Tim Morton, we wondered about the kinds of 'tuning' or attunement that we perform as parents, once we live and think 'ecologically'. The way that we make art, the ways that we live that process, is driven by a 'tuning' into these rhythms of our children's lives; and the waveforms of our everyday lives became tuned, (and chimed) with our "work lives". As a family, living and working in this way, we also worked alongside our kids to 'tune' with other species, and to the earth. Where once we might have swatted wasps away, we consciously nurtured an attitude of care to them, and to the other species with whom we share ecological relationships.

We learned that our art practice never reduces things to one. When we are attuned, we never come alone. Our lives are connected; Life is collective.

Where we stayed, among the trees.

This project was made possible with the generous support of the following organizations:

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