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[AUDIO LOGO] GEMMA RODRIGUES: Good evening. My name is Gemma Rodrigues, and I'm the Ames Director of Education and the curator of the Global Arts of Africa here at the Johnson Museum of Art. Before proceeding further, let's take a moment to acknowledge that Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogohono. The Gayogohono are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign nations with an historic and contemporary presence on this land.
The confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America. We acknowledge the painful history of dispossession and to honor the ongoing connection of Gayogohono people, past and present, to these lands and waters.
It gives me great pleasure to welcome you this evening to this much-anticipated event, a conversation between the celebrated Nigerian-American artist and poet, Precious Okoyomon, and esteemed Cornell professors Stacey Langwick and Tony DiTommaso to mark the opening of Okoyomon's solo exhibition, Precious Okoyomon-- The Sky Measures Little.
As curator, it has been an honor and a privilege to work with Okoyomon, as well as so many truly indispensable partners, in bringing this three-part exhibition to fruition, an exhibition that does so much to cause us to reflect upon classifications of alien and native, primarily through the amazing earthwork that encircles this museum with a coplanting of native and invasive of wildflowers.
Some of you may be wondering why this artist, why this project, why now, at Cornell? Okoyomon's extraordinary practice first caught the attention of our curatorial team in 2021, when we learned about Earth Seed, an immersive installation Okoyomon conceived for the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt.
For this installation, the artist filled an entire gallery with abundant, luxuriantly-spreading, yet captive kudzu vine, which created a lush home for a series of towering guardian figures made from lambswool and soil. Known popularly as the vine that ate the South, through this exhibition, Okoyomon offered audiences an alternative and powerful reading of kudzu vine as a metaphor for Black experience in the US, a subject of forced migration and instrumentalized labor, which, despite kudzu's roots binding the very soil, has become surveilled, policed, and its status as belonging thrown into question.
At the time that we learned of Okoyomon's work, the museum had recently received a large grant from the Mellon Foundation through Cornell's Migrations Grand Challenge, a major crossdisciplinary campus initiative to support the study of movement across borders, the interlocking themes of racism and dispossession, and the migration of all living things, and to bring artists to campus who could grapple with such themes in provocative new ways for the broadest possible audience.
So we really just jumped at the opportunity to bring Okoyomon to Cornell as our first Migrations Visiting Artist in 2022, thereby launching engagements that brought Okoyomon into conversation with Cornell students, faculty, and staff really across campus, including soil scientists, botanists, ornithologists, poets, horticulturalists, other artists, and more.
And one result of these engagements is the exhibition opening this evening, which I hope most of you have already had the chance to experience. And if not, you'll discover Okoyomon really has a gift for producing art that delights and pleasure, charms the senses, and can be disarmingly playful yet, at the same time, stirs uncomfortable intimations of life's deeper, darker, sometimes violent undercurrents.
To further our engagement with okoyomon thought, art, and poetry, it's my pleasure to bring them into conversation tonight with two brilliant and generous Cornell colleagues whose work considers the relationships between plants, people, and the ecosystems we rely upon to nourish and protect us.
By way of the briefest introductions-- Tony, perhaps you'd like to come to the front-- Dr. Antonio DiTommaso is professor in the soil and crop sciences section of Cornell's School of Integrative Plant Science. He is also associate director of Cornell's agricultural experiment station, founder of Cornell's Weed Science Teaching Garden, and principal investigator of Cornell's Weed Ecology and Management Lab, where his research and teaching focus upon the biology and ecology of weed species and agricultural and natural systems. He is also most recently the author of Weeds of the Northeast, published by Cornell University Press.
And Stacey, would you like to come up? Dr. Stacey Langwick is a cultural and medical anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Cornell. Her current interests focus upon therapeutic, agricultural, social, and artistic forms of collaboration that help us to rethink health on and off the planet. Language's forthcoming book, Medicines That Feed Us-- Plants, Sovereignty, and Healing in a Toxic World, is based in part upon the Uzima project, a healing garden at a medical center in Tanzania, a research collaboration that she has maintained for years and which asks what medicine can and should be in the face of climate change.
Finally, a few introductory words about our star of tonight, Precious Okoyomon. Precious, would you like to come up?
[APPLAUSE]
A provocative and poetic ever-rising star of the global contemporary art scene, Okoyomon has garnered important prizes, including the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award and the Chanel Next Art Prize. They have been featured in numerous international biennials, including the Venice Biennale, where they represented Nigeria, the Okayama Art Summit, the Thailand Bienniale, and the upcoming Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil.
And they have exhibited their work in numerous major venues globally, including the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, Switzerland, and the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado. Their works are held in numerous private collections as well as the permanent collections of the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany, and LUMA Arles in France.
Finally, they are also a published poet, with their second book, But Did You Die, recently copublished by the Serpentine Galleries in London. Please join me in welcoming our speakers tonight.
[APPLAUSE]
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Hi, everybody. I thought I would start by reading a poem for us.
"The world is breaking and flowers the breath of things.
Our love is a blue, instant, and forward-looking sky.
Every dream is a moment of freedom,
Bliss hovering above the void.
Resonant darkness can't be bound.
It's always being born.
Ash in hand,
Myth arises where it sets.
Knowing there's fire,
Knowing there is war,
Cities rising and falling,
A small black river flowing,
The speed of darkness,
Everything burns repeatedly.
Return back to the umbilical tongue.
The vesicles of present breath,
Swallow bits of tenderness.
Bring yourself back to the Earth."
STACEY LANGWICK: I kind of want us all just to sit with that for one second. But I'm so thankful that you read it because you all will know if you've seen the gallery installation, that it's on the wall of the gallery, and when Precious speaks it, it has a new life of its own. Is this working? Is my mic-- thank you.
SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE] sitting closer to it?
STACEY LANGWICK: Oh, like that? OK, sorry. Precious, thank you for reading the poem, which is also on the wall of the gallery. If some of you didn't get a chance to come early, you should go and see it. But now it has new life from that reading.
And there's so many questions that I have bubbling up. Maybe one just to open up and ask you to talk about where this engagement and project comes from in relation to your other work is that I see so much in that poem about the ashes, and I was so moved by your exhibit in the performance space in which you burned the kudzu, and there was ash everywhere. And I'm moved by the piece in the gallery now, which is a body as ashes falling. And I'm hearing the ashes in this poem. And I'm just wondering how you think about this work as part of a big arc.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Well, it's interesting because here, I have the garden upstairs of native and invasive plants doing their small pollination, and among them, the bells that encircle, and sometimes they ring. And if you find a miracle in there, you do. And then you come downstairs, and it's like, the different fragments of the body.
And I'm always thinking, I think, slowly and softly about being made and unmade. And that's so much of the joy of working with the natural world is learning to see all of the many worlds, and constantly being in and out of them. I don't maybe center the human as the most important-- sorry to Copernicus. There's just so many other realities, and in there, you find different bodies, and you find the different modalities. And I don't know, I'm just interested in the true sociogenic process of that. And in there, there's the self-reckoning.
STACEY LANGWICK: Can I ask another question?
TONY DITOMMASO: Absolutely. Absolutely, Stacey.
STACEY LANGWICK: --how the line should go and with you all. But I feel that in so much of your work, and I also feel that as part of my experience of being with healers in Tanzania who really work with plants, and that neither people nor plants are things as much as they are these sets of relations, and that plants don't become medicinal until they're in relation. And healers are only healers in relation with both living and dead and spirit and embodied. And so I bring that because that's sort of where I come from at this.
But I also noticed, up in your library of pollination, you have Glissant. And that poetics of relation feels to me like your reinterpretation of that exhibit, too. So I think that poetics of relation-- somebody's going to correct my quote-- but I think that Glissant writes, each and every identity is extended through its relationship with the other and that, Precious, your reinterpretation of that even more beautiful because it doesn't distinguish in other. The self goes forward out of its own reference.
And I wonder if there's also-- or if you think about this play in your garden in relation to drawing you-- and Tony-- weeds and so-called alien plants of invasive plants, that they're all only defined by people who are associating their extension and relation. And yeah, I just offer you to speak into that-- what you're thinking with that.
TONY DITOMMASO: So yeah, I think, Precious, when I was looking at the outside, I call it the garden, what struck me was how you had this mix of species there that I spent a semester teaching students how to control some of them--
[LAUGHTER]
--or work with farmers, but also an appreciation for their value as members of this larger plant community, and how, over a growing season, you will see a change in these species. And a good example in there was something we call bull thistle that is a biennial plant. And the first year, it just forms this large rosette and then, the second year, goes through our winter and flowers and puts this amazing flower. Now, to our dairy farmers, that's a concern because the animals don't want to eat it.
But in terms of succession, it's a natural fit. And so what I appreciated was the mixture of naturalized-- what we call naturalized species that have been here a long time and some of our native species, flowering plants, nonflowering plants, foxtails. I mean, this is, like I said, it's a side that I want to explore more. And I think you bring that out. I mean, I'm not the most artistic-- much more of a scientist.
And to see that, I think, when I mentioned, today's presentation to my students, I mean, many of them-- this is what they came to Cornell, not just to get the facts of science, but also to have this broader view. And I'm still grappling with terms like alien, invasive, native. We have some native species that are problematic-- common ragweed, a perfect example, problematic in the sense from a human perspective. Those of you who suffer from hay fever, those of you-- it's an agronomic weed.
But it's got an ecological value-- all of these plants do, all of them. And these are very much human-centered. In Romance languages, for example-- I'm of Italian background-- [ITALIAN] is a weed, a "bad herb." What does that mean? Who came up with? So what I want to-- long-winded here, but I think you pulling this out and showing that you could have this community of plants that naturally evolve in our pastures, in our fields, is really important for not just our students, but for the general public to appreciate all of these plants have a role.
And Waldo Emerson-- "A weed is a plant whose virtues have yet to be discovered." I mean, they have already these values. So I just want to thank you for raising the bar from somebody who's a weed ecologist, that that's-- we should appreciate. And I wish we could impart some of the traits that some of these weeds into our crops because I can walk on tower road and see a pigweed growing out of the sidewalk. You can never see any of my tomatoes doing that. And so a will to live is an amazing trait that I think we cannot forget. And I think you show that. And like I said, it's opened my eyes to a different part. So thank you, Precious.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: And, like, resistance is fragile.
TONY DITOMMASO: Exactly.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: And every day-- and they're popping up and they're making space for themselves and with each other. And the ecosystem that builds may not be one that we, like, know how to cultivate to our own necessary of centering the human. But at least the soil can take care of itself, which is what is incredible.
TONY DITOMMASO: Exactly. And I'll mention that some of these plants, when I'm working with growers that they're trying to control-- you have to remember, every time we till the land, we're really kind of pushing back what we would call succession, a natural way for land to protect the soil, to protect itself by some of these plants that we're trying to control because we're trying to grow a given plant.
But nature has its way of trying to repair itself by the ragweeds, the pigweeds. These are all annual species. We will never see these in a pasture that's not disturbed. So when I tell folks, when you see goldenrod around here, tell yourself that field hasn't been disturbed or plowed for about at least 10 years.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: And what a miracle.
TONY DITOMMASO: And it's a beautiful-- I mean, like I say, I'm torn between trying to manage-- and I don't use the word "control"-- manage, understand these plants, and try to help our growers if they're trying to grow but, at the same time, have an appreciation for this diversity--
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Yeah, because I think there's a way of working together and understanding a new way of working with these plants because it's not about order and destruction and categorization. That's our same problem of our constant-- like the -isms, like, that's the ontogeny. And I'm like, we need to move past that.
STACEY LANGWICK: I wonder if you could talk more about your own ways of working because it seems, in many ways, like they're co-artists with you, the plants, in many of your exhibits. You invite relationship with them, but you don't actually-- you seem to push back against completely controlling or managing. You want them to have their own surprise.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Yeah, that's the miracle is that I usually don't know what's going to happen. I mean, when I planted-- even when I did Venice four years ago, it was like I did kudzu, Japanese knotweed is in there, and then there's sugar cane. So it's like all of these invasives warring together in a space that I didn't know what was going to happen. And I just make space for the conditions for a miracle to happen. But I don't know. So I make the space. I plant. I have hopes. And then we see what happens.
But it's a corelationship and a lot of faith. I mean, that's gardening, essentially. And the real beauty of working with these plants is that they continuously remind me of their resilience. I didn't know it was going to happen. The sugar cane got swallowed up in some parts by the kudzu, and then you had the sugar cane grow really high and helped the kudzu branch up until the ceiling. So, sometimes, it just explodes, and I'm like, whoa. And, in each way, I learn, and it makes me, and I'm unmade by it. And together, I learn something new or something surprises me. Yeah, it's a constant relationship.
STACEY LANGWICK: One of the things that I'm really interested in and that I'm provoked by in your work, is the way that plants remember with us. And I'm just really curious about, as you are working with these plants that are surprising you as colaborers, you're also always working with time and memory, trauma and resilience, and how you think about plants remembering and their capacity to remember or remember in us, or break us down and remake us, remember and remember us.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I'm always thinking about one of my favorite psychoanalysts and theorist is in the library. Her name is Bracha Ettinger, and she has this kind of theory that she works through about fragilization And I'm always thinking through that as a baseline of things of how to also really bridge time and space into slowing down time.
And a lot of my work is time outside of time. That's the joy of working with plants, maybe. It creates a different time-space. Things have to go slower. You can't really rush a garden. You can't force a tree. You don't get to control a seed. And it takes you on its time. And that is like a different rhythm, a different pace.
And then it also accesses a different feel, knowing there's a different type of Earth memory that enters, I think. A lot of where I've been thinking lately is a lot of dreaming, and how you receive information from different things, nonhuman and human, different realms. And dreams are one of those. I think gardening, like planting, being with the soil, plants actually, like trees, these things hold information in different ways that we can't necessarily understand that language. But it is being like received, and it is out there.
STACEY LANGWICK: And breathed in and breathed out.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Continuously.
TONY DITOMMASO: I was just going to say, one of the areas of studying in my discipline that folks are looking at, it kind of plays right into your exhibit outside is this idea that we can have plants even within some of our crops that we're calling them neutral weed community, neutral in the sense that they do not harm the main crop, but they bring biodiversity. They bring pollinators. And this is a very different kind of perspective than-- and you're already on top of it, which is incredible.
From the science side, we've been lacking to move towards that. But I think there's been an appreciation for that. And it kind of plays into your having all these species together. They all bring something to the table. And it's not just one is going to dominate. I think, more and more, that that is starting to be-- and this is particularly true in Europe. There's a big kind of movement to increase that within some of our cropping systems. And it includes many of the species that you've got there. So I just wanted to mention that this is-- what you're doing is already a step ahead of us weed ecologists.
But I guess my question to you is, how did you think about including these plants? Was it when in your walks through the woods or fields, how did you-- would you look at something and say, I wonder what that is? I mean, you didn't have training in weed science, per se, and I am just intrigued by what appeal they had to you.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I grew up in Ohio, and the meadows are very similar, and a lot of-- the plants I've actually-- and I grew a garden in Aspen for two years that was also an invasive and native kind of garden as well, and it had very similar things. So it was just on a rooftop, so it was a bit more isolated from spreading in this way.
So it was thinking these are just plants I love, honestly. Like, milkweed is one of my favorite things to cook and forage, like the pods when you boil them, and you fry them-- I love a crazy meadow. So it's like, walking here, I was like, oh, it's obvious. I have to give space for the unsung here. And they're everywhere. And I was like, what does it mean to just look around and see the thing that surrounds you that is the beauty, and then to just shine a little sun on it?
TONY DITOMMASO: That's great. And, I'll put a plug in for Cornell Weed Science Garden that's up near the Vet College because it's this diversity-- I think, when people visit, they realize-- first, they go, oh, this is what I've got in my backyard. But then just an appreciation for the diversity of these plants we call weeds, but are really just fascinating in their own special way. And that includes giant hogweed, which is problematic species from a health perspective, but just seeing it just towering is impressive. And so having kudzu-- like you said, you will get folks-- whoa, this is the weed that ate the South. It's absolutely true. But purposely-planted.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Purposely--
TONY DITOMMASO: Half of our invasives were purposely brought in.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: And they have a history.
TONY DITOMMASO: There's a reason they were brought. They had-- exactly.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: And the memory that goes with the thing never disappeared.
TONY DITOMMASO: Exactly, exactly.
STACEY LANGWICK: I wonder how you think about that really complex, evolving, multidimensional sense of time that you're working with and living in through dreams and your own dreams, plant dreams, and what it means to create a piece of art in a fixed space for a fixed amount of time. And I'm thinking about that in relation to this exhibit here, which is amazing. And I've enjoyed watching it over the last couple of months. And it feels new compared to, say, the spaces of the wild meadows with the goldenrod that hasn't been disturbed for 10 years, at least.
And it would continue having this conversation. And, ultimately, I feel like it's that long conversation that would really speak to what you're doing. But you may or may not, within the art world, be able to create those spaces in the same way. So I just am curious about the way you grapple with that and think about it.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: For me, right now, I feel like a thing-- I'm always thinking through agential time. Shout out to Karen Barad because it's real. I'm like, there's so many different-- I know I'm going to make so much in the time that I'm in this reality, and I'm going to continuously keep making with people I love. So that's also something I feel really grounded in. And I like being like, there's so many different fragments of things that teach me because I'm constantly learning. And in that is the grace of it all.
So I'm like, OK, I'm working towards the thing where I know I will be grounded. There's always this-- for me, knowing what I want, which one day is the forest-- I want to make many forests around the world, which I think is a very urgent, necessary thing. The seeds for that are constantly being sown. So it's like planting the seeds and softly pollinating, and then the fragments that continuously teach me how to get to the place I'm trying to be. It's like on the road to making the new language forms continuously.
TONY DITOMMASO: So one way is across the many, many exhibits.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Yeah, because things sometimes just pull into each other, which is also like the ash from MMK, [INAUDIBLE] exist unless something was burned. So, sometimes, there's death and decay that makes new life, which became a dust storm in Thailand from the fields that I collected the ash when they burned all of the rice fields. So things kind of pull and pollinate into each other, and I'm like a seed saver. So I save a lot of seeds from my different gardens. So, one day, eventually, one forest will contain all the seeds. So it's continuous work.
STACEY LANGWICK: Beautiful.
TONY DITOMMASO: I guess, one of my questions is kind of more futuristic. And that is how do you see your interest in plants, whether they include weeds, evolve? How do you see that over time based on what you've learned? In five years, where would Precious be? What would she be doing in relation to plants? I mean, I'm sure you'll be doing other amazing things as well, and poetry and otherwise, but I'm just wondering, what have you learned and where would you like to be in relation to plants?
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I think, personally, in my life, I want a really big garden in my house.
TONY DITOMMASO: Fair enough. Fair enough.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Yeah, I mean, the public forest would be nice, but I personally want my own poisonous garden. I've been collecting seeds for a while from-- I made a really great-- I've made now three poisonous gardens, like actually toxic-- ricin-- very serious. This was at the [? Villar ?] in Switzerland over the summer. It's like tiny screaming teddy bear, poisonous garden, ominous music. It was terrifying. But it smelled really good.
TONY DITOMMASO: It puts my weed garden to shame.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: And I dream of one day having my own poisonous garden in my backyard. Hard to do in Brooklyn right now, but envisioning. But really, I think, for me, it's really the relationships I form with people, the friends and landscapers that I've made that have taught me so much, and the relationships I've built with that, and knowing that I'm working towards bigger projects for me, which is like real forest, like real food forest, real invasive-native forests.
The plants are kind of my first love in a serious way. My grandmother kept seeds. And when we moved to the US, she kept all her food seeds. And that's what she planted. And she always had a garden. And it wasn't like one of aesthetics. It was a garden. I'm the oldest child, so I helped her in the garden.
So it just made sense that when I started making art, it would be-- my poetry was the thing I started with, and then the poetry needed to become objects and needed to become spaces. And then I was, like, the thing I make is the thing I know, which is working with plants, working with the soil. Sometimes objects are formed inside of those worlds. But the thing that comes natural to me first is always wanting to make spaces for that. It's like this natural world. I'm pollinating.
TONY DITOMMASO: Yeah, exactly.
STACEY LANGWICK: There was a story you told last time you were here at Cornell, I think it was, that your mother told you if you planted your words that they would grow. And that really stuck with me, this beautiful image that kind of seems to speak to this relationship you have between poetry and the worlds you create-- poetry and plants. But it's not just plants. It's just the way you invite in a whole wild set of emotions in which we can fall apart and be brought back together. And your worlds do the same thing that you create.
But I'm really interested in how you think about that relationship for yourself in life between poetry and making. How often are you pulled into the being with plants before you write the poetry or vice versa? How do you cultivate that dynamism in your own life? And I ask selfishly and intellectually.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I think it's because I say I live in one giant poem. It's really funny.
STACEY LANGWICK: The poem is funny?
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I mean, the world, the poems, everything, how they fall. It's just one big poem. It's like the relationship praxis I have with everybody that I love and how that shapes me. And then, sometimes, they make the worlds I live inside of, and it's like, OK., it's the way I like cook for the people I love, and then that's a poem. And then from there I go out and then I make the garden, and that's a poem. And then the way I get to share just a moment with a friend in the sun, and we read each other a poem, and then that's a poem.
And then I take that, and that moment becomes a poem I write down. And then I remember a memory that I need to create that world. And then I'm back inside of another hole. So it's always falling in and out of holes with each other, with people I love. And then, together, it slows down time. And then maybe it's a new world.
STACEY LANGWICK: I think what I'm drawn into about just the fluidity that it seems to allow is one of the questions that I've been really interested in my own work is how, in the midst of a world that seems profoundly toxic, and that the very ways in which we orient towards living a life and building economies and building liveliness and livelihoods are undermining the possibility of our survival and have been for a very, very long time, that there's a way of thinking about toxicity within medicine and the environmental sciences and its relationship with remedy and memory that is deeply colonial and fits so sweetly with capitalist logics and with scientific logics of what's useful and not useful and what we can capitalize on.
And it seems that some of the people that I'm most drawn to are playing with that. They're fundamentally kind of trying to dismantle that relationship between toxicity and remedy and memory and reinvent it. And when you're speaking of wanting a poison garden as one of your greatest hopes for the next five years, I see a person who really is eagerly wanting to dismantle and remake that relationship between toxicities or poisons and remedy and memory and these dream sequences that don't ever seem to have a linear time frame. I don't really know if there's a question in that-- more of an appreciation.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Yeah, I think it's the grace of being-- the human can only reproduce what the human has reproduced before, and I want to dream outside of that collectively, and wherever we get to next is going to have to think of all the other worlds around us because it's softly-moving Earth needs new soil.
STACEY LANGWICK: And it seems to invite us to think. I mean, I know there's some tension around whether we have invasive-- whether we invite relationship with invasive or alien species that Tony can speak to much better than I can, and that you have dealt with much more than I have just in creating works, like logistically, what that means.
But it does seem, in the face of reckoning with the fact that we have a world that is falling apart and that we're living into it, hopefully with enough compassion and grace, that there's a world after it, that that which was alien and invasive at one moment isn't later. And in these dream sequences, that you're undoing that kind of history for us. And I guess I'm wondering where are the frictions that, in creating your art, you felt like you've been able to undo or the collaborations with landscapers or the way you've been able to rethink policies or spaces or demand new kinds of spaces be created for this thinking.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I mean, I think a big thing has been-- like, working with a plant like kudzu, you have to explain to people the history because people just think, OK, kudzu, the plant that ate the South. Then you never think, how did this plant get here? And you're like, OK, this plant was brought over here after there is no topsoil from years of over planting cotton because of slavery, because of soil erosion, and then there can't be a forced miracle. So, of course, the thing does what it does. It roots in the ground, and it swallows. It does the job of slowly repairing and swallowing. But then there's the consequence that it swallowed everything, and now it's criminalized.
And, I mean, you see the parallel distinctions. And it's interesting because you're like, well, here's the history. Can you criminalize the plan? Or can you just witness it and learn to work with it? And how do you just teach people?
And then I meet so many different amazing people. Like, in Aspen, I ended up working with this amazing farmer in North Carolina who shipped me all of the kudzu seeds. And then she forged a relationship with the landscapers in Aspen that was able to teach them a lot about how to deal with knotweed because they were doing this goat thing. So it was like new relationships are constantly being formed of pollinating. And that's also just a gift in the relationship of being like, oh, that natural thing that forms, which is people meeting people, that's something I don't even get to control sometimes, and it just happens by happenstance. And that itself is joyous.
But even over the summer in Switzerland, wanting to plant this crazy, poisonous garden and working with-- we had to find this like one gardener who would grow us all this like crazy stuff I wanted from seed because I'm like, I want ricin. And everyone's like, oh, we don't have that in the garden center. So it's really making serious relationships with people and building trust, really, and also expanding what the institution is capable of wanting to handle and pushing that relationship and being like, well-- because, a lot of times, you have to be willing to also take care of-- it's work. Taking care a garden is work.
And there's a lot of energy and effort that goes into that, making sure the plants are happy, actually showing up for pruning, and doing all these little things, which then forges relationships with even people at the institutions who are like, actually, I want to be the person who's doing this maintenance with the landscaping crew, which happens a lot of the times, people who are just like Oh, this is what I want to do because I work at the museum and this makes me really happy. And I've never had this before. I'm like, yeah, sometimes, it's just creating different spaces for pollination.
STACEY LANGWICK: I love that phrase-- expanding our capacity for the work or-- what we want to handle, how we can grow towards our discomforts, and that work can be joyous. Yeah, I love that. Would you like us to expand to the other people?
GEMMA RODRIGUES: Can you hear me? So this is such a rich, nuanced conversation going in so many directions, I think it would be great if we can include more voices as well. So any questions from the audience, and I'll bring the mic over. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Thank you so much, Precious. I'm thinking about the-- sorry, my name is Emilio Rojas. I teach in the art department. I'm thinking about-- I was talking to my mother-in-law, who's actually from India, and she's an ethnobotanist, and was thinking about the relationship of plants between India and Mexico, in her case, and where I'm from. But the kind of migration-- the healing that comes with plants, as well as the relationships that you're discussing.
And I saw your piece in Venice, and I'm just thinking about this Nigerian-American or Mexican-American or the way that these migrations also bring within the healing and also the trauma and our relationship to plants and how that, when I enter that space that you created, it feels like a ritual space. It feels like a sacred space. But also, I want it to be drinking the tea from upstairs because it's kind of right above. So we're kind of in the roots of your garden. So that connection between your identities but also the spaces that you create-- there's a lot. That was like seven questions at once.
STACEY LANGWICK: She gets a choice that way.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I think a lot about how I became an artist in this way. My mom always says that she can-- that she feels like she knows things, and I believe she does, like when she calls me, and she's like, don't do that. I'm like, OK.
[LAUGHTER]
I'm like, oh. And my great grandmother was her village's healer. And my mother is-- I believe, deeply, she's a healer. She has healing energy in the way she-- the way she relates with people is a way of witnessing that has taught me to make art. And I think the way that I work with plants and the way that I make art is because I've come from this-- the people that came before me, made me what I am.
And the way I interact with the world can only be the thing that shaped me. So that knowledge that I make with and the worlds I create can only come through this same healing energy. So it's like the knowledge of the plants and the way that I create the world is only-- because it's what taught me to make it. And it's like a feel-knowing deeper than myself.
And that comes through this like deep memory that runs through me. And I'm very grateful for it in this way. And I feel like, yeah, it is that deep, [INAUDIBLE] like remembering. It comes through this long lineage. And I'm like, it's my grandmother's seed saving. That obsessive seed saving that I would sit with her, and she would be like, pick these seeds. I'd be like, why? That taught me to garden. And that's what I did obsessively. Even when I kept my first garden, I was really bad at it, but it was the seeds that she had given me. So these small things really did shape me, and that is what shaped my making and is that knowledge.
And I think a lot about how plants have very deep healing and remembering. I'm constantly thinking about Earth memory. It's that, like, Octavia Butler, it's like Kara Keelings-- this deep knowledge, Earth memory, deep Earth remembrance that runs through all of us. It's very tapped in of how you can get to it, but it's there. I think dreams are the location of everything. And like [INAUDIBLE]. Sorry-- answered the question, like, seven different ways.
[LAUGHTER]
GEMMA RODRIGUES: Are there some more questions? Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Precious, I'm David Fernandez, and I got to meet you during the great gardening installation. And I have a question because having worked with, one, you're so playful and energetic and such a hard worker in the creation of the garden itself and so enthusiastic.
But there's another question here, and that is about the spatial form of the garden. So there's typical ways of landscaping, which plants are set back from edges, and you loved working with the edges very closely, packing plants right to the edges and even obscuring walkways, at times, to create mystery. Could you talk a little about your sense of spatial organization in your work?
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I like there to be like a mixing and smashing into each other and then cracking. So it's like, I'm obsessed with edges because I like things to grow over them and slowly cover so you get a bit lost in it. And there's the joy of having things snaking and wrap each other and help each other because, sometimes, someone's not doing so well-- you need to lean over and help them, just prop them up just a little bit. My garden's all about falling over and helping someone else lean up and then crashing into each other. And, sometimes, flowers poke out, and sometimes, everything is just chaos. And in there, some miracle is born. But I'm mostly about tangle. I love a tangle.
TONY DITOMMASO: I'll just add that reminds me-- I mean, if you look at even some of our natural or even hay fields and so forth, unless we go in, try to map out edges and so forth, it's very much what you're saying. What actually happens is you get this overlay, and unless we cut a path, you wouldn't know where to start and where to go. So it's actually happening right before us, but we like this manicured way of cutting through, and people are like, ah, get those weeds out of there. But they don't function that way. So it's interesting that what you're doing is actually what we're seeing in the real world when we don't touch it, just let it be.
AUDIENCE: I just talk into it? OK, thank you so much. I guess I just want to place an idea before you and ask how you would approach it. So if someone from India said to you, Precious, come to some little place I'm working, Kotagiri in the Nilgiris. And I say, come with me for six months and stay there and do some work. How would you do it? I'm very fascinated by how the art is the growing. That's why I ask. I say, come with me for six months and make art. Where would you start? What would you do?
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I'm like, take me on a site visit.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: I just might but I'm just asking. I couldn't afford it, I'm [INAUDIBLE] sure. But if I could, what would you do? I mean, the weeds are different. The plants are different.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: Well, everything is site specific. Here I came, and I saw the environment. The bells were because the wind blew so much. And I love when the wind blows me and makes music. So I thought, I just want everyone to be encircled with some music. And the plants were everything that I just fell in love with here. The sculptures and the rocks-- it was because me and Ainsley walked in the forest one day, and then I ended up building all these rock sculptures. And then I was inspired by the concrete of the building. So things just happen, really. I'm kind of only like a refractor beam of an environment. I usually have to go to the place, and then I witness, and then I find myself there.
In Iceland, once, I went to the beach, and there was a lighthouse. And I was like, I'm just going to tie, like, 5,000 bells on the string of the ocean, and the ocean will blow the bells. It's like, it really depends where I am and how god chooses to blow me that day. And then there I am-- we find ourselves. Yeah, I don't know. Steal me away.
GEMMA RODRIGUES: I think we have time for one more question.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Thank you so much for coming and sharing more about your practice. When I was just looking at the earthwork, I was first thinking about how much a utopia it felt to me, in the sense where there was this safe space where all these plants come together, and there's no binaries or categorization of these plants. But even when I was almost looking at these works, I felt as if I was a viewer rather than an active participant. And so my question to you is, when we're having a disconnect between the Earth and the land, is there an maybe an active participation we need to take on in stopping and growing the roses? Or is there more a quiet meditation that you think needs to happen where we stop and smell the roses?
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON: I'm really hoping that it can slow down time for you in whatever way you need. The other day, I saw somebody, as I was hanging up the bells, just sitting there in the sun and watching me because it was really nice and sunny. And then they just laid under the tree. And I could tell that they were, like, not even going to class.
[LAUGHTER]
I was like, go off. I'm like, yes. So if that's your time outside of time, wherever you find it, and nature finds you, I'm like, there is no disconnect from human in nature. That's the beginning. We are of the world that is of us, and together, we are unmade and made. So wherever you find yourself some rest, like, amen.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
GEMMA RODRIGUES: Well, that's such a beautiful note to end on. Thank you so much to all our speakers. And there is a reception right outside the double doors. And please continue conversations around drinks and snacks and tea service, and the tea service upstairs as well, which is part of the suite of three exhibitions. And in case you don't know, the tea that's being served is from a special blend that was designed by Precious to have a relationship with the earthwork. All of the ingredients are inspired by wildflowers in the earthwork. And so sip tea and browse the library upstairs as well.
TONY DITOMMASO: Great. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
Great job, Precious. Great job. Great job.
In this conversation, Nigerian American artist and poet Precious Okoyomon discusses their work, on view in the Johnson Museum exhibition “Precious Okoyomon: The Sky Measures Little,” with Stacey A. Langwick (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology) and Antonio DiTommaso (Professor, School of Integrative Plant Science, Soil and Crop Sciences Section and Associate Director, Cornell Agricultural Experiment Station).
