00.0619
BYRON GAGO
Bodies Farming · 2020
00.0619 is a three-part environment built as a constructed set. A seven-and-a-half-minute video, shot in the dunes of Piscinas in Sardinia, is colour-graded toward science-fiction desert and toward the documentary footage of the 2019–2020 Australian fires, its sound distorted into an immersive ambience. In the gallery, a hydroponic grow-box prototype for leafy vegetables stands beside a metal support holding a plastic bag of organic nutrients and bacteria in active fermentation, an organic membrane made visible to the eye. The three parts are not a sequence but a set: a single environment assembled from a screen, a machine, and a slow chemical life.
Two landscapes hold the work's image. The dunes of Piscinas read as another planet, and they do so because the Mediterranean has been figured for so long as origin and abundance that an arid Mediterranean looks alien; Sardinia interrupts the imaginary of the south as fertile. Against that, the colour of the Australian fires. The two are not equivalent places: they are two visible conditions of one continuous emergency, seen at two latitudes. The work does not claim they are the same; it tries to make legible that the same colour is now appearing in too many places at once.
Inside the gallery the work splits its registers deliberately. The hydroponic apparatus is the spectacle: pumps, lamps, transparent tanks, all the machinery that performs efficiency and control. The fermentation is the background: slow, uninstrumented, uncontrolled, a bag of Acetobacter feeding on a sweet substrate, transforming in plain sight. The argument is in the asymmetry. The visible, managed system depends on the invisible, unmanaged one. And the membrane in the bag makes plain that life is something other, and older, than what hydroponics knows how to manage.
The grow-box calls itself a prototype, which means it is allowed to fail; the vegetables do not need to thrive. What needs to thrive is a single question: what does it cost to keep this growing? The answer is left fully exposed in the audible pumps, the heat of the lamps, the visible plumbing. The work succeeds at the moment the viewer adds up the inputs and feels the math: a small accounting of the energy a controlled environment spends to hold a little life, while outside the gallery the same energy economy is burning the landscapes on the screen.
"The work claims environmental concern, the reference to the 2019–2020 Australian fires, yet uses that crisis as an aesthetic template for colour grading. Is the work mourning environmental collapse or aestheticizing it?"
Critical review, 2026
I can't answer that cleanly, and the work is more honest if I leave both possibilities open inside it. The colour grade is borrowed from science fiction because the fire footage already looked like science fiction when I first saw it. Reality had begun to resemble the imaginary it was producing in us, and I marked the resemblance rather than inventing it. But the critic is right that to mark a resemblance can be to take part in it. So I keep the discomfort rather than resolving it: the same image mourns and aestheticises at once, and I will not pretend the work decides between them.
00.0619
2020
Final work
- Three-part installation — video, hydroponics, ferment
- Video 7'32" · grow-box 170 × 55 × 35 cm
01 / 04
What the work calls a "set" is the whole point. The three elements (screen, grow-box, fermentation bag) are held in a horizontal relationship, none subordinate to the others, and nothing is hidden. The plumbing, the pumps, the tanks and pots are foregrounded as both sculpture and working device; the infrastructure that usually disappears behind a clean result is here the result. The environment is not a backdrop the work happens in front of; the environment is the work, assembled in the open.
The grow-box was not built from scratch. It was assembled from commercial hydroponic components made for indoor cannabis cultivation, modified for leafy vegetables, and that origin is part of the work's honesty. The apparatus comes from a parallel economy of contained, optimised growing that the gallery context does not usually name. Like the growbox of Synthétique Amazonas the year before, it carries the trace of an informal cultivation industry into the institution, and lets that trace stay legible.
In the Bodies Farming series, cultivation is never neutral. It is a question of power, inputs and cost. 00.0619 sets a managed system (the hydroponics that performs control) against an unmanaged one (the bacteria that simply transform), and frames a planet's worth of the same tension on the screen above them. The work farms a little green under lamps while the fires burn elsewhere in the same colour, and asks the viewer to hold both in one glance.
00.0619
2020
Set / process
- Process documentation
- Hydroponic prototype · bacterial ferment
01 / 04
