Knowing Better
In the original iteration of my thesis presentation, I planned to make an ant farm out of a book to illustrate one of my favorite quotes from Barad in “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter” where she states “thinking isn’t the ‘other’ of Nature. Nature performs itself differently.” The piece was meant to challenge the limitations of language and our traditional notions of where knowledge could be found, in a book. Unfortunately, in the chaos of the early days of the pandemic, I had forgotten the small colony of live ants I ordered was still on its way to my address. I wasn’t able to assemble their intended home due to a lack of necessary on campus fabrication resources, but luckily I was able to fashion a home for them from various materials I had lying around. I cared for them and did my best to provide a safe and comfortable home to live out the rest of their ant lives (the colony had no queen as it turns out, it’s illegal to ship a queen ant, so the colony naturally passes as they are unable to reproduce without a queen). I found them to be quite endearing and only recently have seen how they are integral to my project. The ants never ceased to build and expand their complex tunnels, clean and mend their wounded, respectfully bury their dead, and fiercely protect their sisters from potential threat. Once their tunnels outgrew the first home, I crafted a second, larger home connected the two spaces with a straw tunnel. I was excited for them to discover and move to the new home, but initially they were hesitant, and although they were curious, they refused to climb down the tunnel into the jar. How ungrateful. I tried various techniques to force them to move, from enticing them with food to flicking the outside of the straw to get them to drop in with no avail. Eventually I surrendered back to my role as passive observer. Curiously, I watched one ant climb to the top of the bend in the straw with a grain of sand, look down, and drop the grain into the jar. And then another did the same thing, and soon they had constructed, grain by grain, a small mountain of sand for them to climb down on. And just like that, they began the great migration to their new home. They ignored my plan for them to just drop blindly into an undiscovered space and instead built a ramp. Much like manual labor and crafting has been overlooked by many intellectuals, so had the making and crafting genius of the mighty ant colony been overlooked by myself. Nature had its own way of knowing.
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