SCOPE COLLECTIVE

April 2024 – April, 2025

Scope Collective is currently comprised of Elizabeth Hénaff, Heather Parrish, Léonard Roussel, and Seth Wenger. Their methods include environmental sampling, bioinformatic analysis, field recording, multi-scale media generation, and waiting for things to grow. Scope aspires to construct spaces of close observation that challenge the incumbent hierarchical relationships of nature and culture.

As artists in residence at BioBAT, they are pursuing ongoing experimentation and artistic production related to their piece CHANNEL, part of the 2024-2025 Water Stories exhibit.

CHANNEL

This work emerges from the remarkable microbiome inhabiting the Gowanus Canal’s contaminated sediment. Over many decades of deposited manufacturing waste, these microorganisms have evolved to remediate our toxic trace. The federally subsidized cleanup plan currently underway is to dredge what toxic sediment can be removed and cap the rest with concrete. This intervention will suddenly disrupt the long evolved metabolisms which led to the microbial remediation.

This piece offers egress from our anthropocentric perspective of contaminated vs. natural environments, a human exercise in channeling microbial life. How might we develop unexpected sensitivities and responsibilities towards the often overlooked actors and agents of our intersecting environments – the microscopic, the nonhuman, the nonliving? Here we construct a space for contemplation of these hard to see but vibrant cohabitants, through slow growth and high-resolution documentation.

Multiple channels of media and materials are imagined around, and accompanied by water and living sediment harvested from the tidal system defined by the ebullient Gowanus Canal as it merges with the Bay Ridge Channel.