by Gina Badger
Issue#17 No More Potlucks
As research for my recent project, Mongrels, I was fortunate to connect with and interview Dori Midnight. I stumbled across Dori’s work in the way we do the best things—by accident—and was immediately drawn to how she grounds her healing practice in social and environmental justice. What’s more, I had this crazy idea: that through weeds, so-called plant colonizers, we might be able to see our current colonial state as an ecological condition, opening up new possibilities for resistance. If anyone could help me think about this, I thought it must be Dori.
Initially held the weekend of April 16-17, 2011, in Brooklyn, New York, Mongrels is a field botany tour followed by a screening of a short video work and reception. Mongrels calls on mapping, folk herbalism, field recordings, and moving images to conjure the ghosts of a paved-over salt marsh, the ecological feature that dominated the Brooklyn area of Gowanus up until its industrialization. Mongrels urges us to consider the past a key source of information that can help us construct recuperative ecologies in the present.
The walking tour maps the presence and location of weed par excellence, mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), casting it as both witness to colonization and potential agent of social change. During the reception, we ingest mugwort in the form of herbal bitters, consummating our new relationship with this fierce plant. The video mashes up ghostly abstracted images of the Gowanus canal, the sounds of an early spring day in Gowanus, and the words of Dori Midnight as she describes her therapeutic practice, in which the history shared by humans and plants plays a key role. In Mongrels, mugwort becomes a keystone, opening the way for spectral imaginings—a form of time travel.
In preparation for our interview, I asked Dori to select two or three objects central to her practice.
Gina Badger: I thought it would be good to start with the objects, to get a sense of how you practice magic as a craft, and how this is articulated materially.
Dori Midnight: One of the things that’s most exciting and liberating about magic is that I work with things that are invisible, most of all. And so there’s nothing I could actually lay out on a table. I mean I do have tools that I use—but it might be more…[read more]
Listen to an audio clip:
Image Credits:
Image I: Gina Badger, 2011. Mongrels (Trashy Plants I). Digital still. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image 2: Gina Badger, 2011. Mongrels handout 2011. Image courtesy of the artist.
Botanical drawing source: Walter Hood Fitch. 1924. Illustrations of the British Flora. http://www.biolib.de. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this image under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation.
