A tree is never going to be a curator, or is it?

The Squirrel’s Heartbeat

Welcome to The Squirrel's Heartbeat, with Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press and Lucia Pietroiusti, Curator of General Ecology at Serpentine Galleries. Fiona and Lucia met recently at Bethnal Green Nature Reserve and talked about stuff. The title of this series comes from a George Eliot quote which Lucia referred to during this conversation, “If we had a keen vision and a feeling of all ordinary human life it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence… As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.” It stuck with Fiona as a meditation on language, the medium of their discussion and also the topic of it... but it is also about naming, and in turn classification, and in turn gender (Mary Ann Evans took the name George Eliot in order in order to create an ambiguity around her gender), and in turn the non-binary nature of nature itself and the conundrums we have in naming it or attributing words to it.

Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press is a visual artist whose work centres on the problems and possibilities of language, both written and metaphorical. For much of 2020 she has been artist in residence at Phytology, a cultural institute based at Bethnal Green Nature Reserve in East London. During her time there she has been making work with the non-human residents, and also talking to some pretty fab humans, in an open sided potting shed, ruminating on the environment, art and activism.

General Ecology is the Serpentine’s long-term and ongoing project researching complexity, more-than-humanism, climate justice and environmental balance. Founded in 2018, General Ecology is a strategic effort to embed environmental subjects and methods throughout the Galleries’ outputs, structures and networks. General Ecology concerns itself simultaneously with environmental and organisational ecologies.

Thanks to The Arts Council England and Bethnal Green Nature Reserve Trust
Host and Recording: Fiona Banner, Producer: Alice Waters, Sound Production: Lucia Scazzocchio