Featured in the journal’s new autumn issue, Ransom’s installation interrogates a complex piece of New Orleans history — the 800-year-old McDonogh Oak — and its cultural and ecological implications in a changing world.
Professor Britt Ransom’s installation Suspended is featured in the Autumn 2024 issue of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. The peer-reviewed, independent journal edited by Giovanni Aloi examines the intersection of art and ecocritical themes, with this issue focusing on “Dataism” — a concept exploring the role of data and technology in understanding and shaping the world.
Suspended shares Ransom’s meditation on the 800-year-old McDonogh Oak, speculated to be the oldest live oak tree in New Orleans, Louisiana. Located in City Park, the McDonogh Oak’s branches are propped up by a series of telephone poles and it sits on top of an ever-shifting landscape embedded with a complex history. This digitally fabricated work is a meditation on commemorative naming structures of non-human species and the attempt to suspend elements of nature through mediated technology-based processes to suspend elements of nature as our climate continues to change.
As Antennae shares: “In 2020, the New Orleans City Council unanimously voted to establish the Street Renaming Commission to run a public process for making recommendations to street names, parks, and places in New Orleans that honored white supremacist histories. While several notable monuments were removed, street and park names were changed, and a broader acknowledgment of the dark past of the city and the nation came into sharper focus, the tree’s dedicatory name still persists.
As a descendent of civil rights activist and founding member of the Niagara movement, Reverdy C. Ransom, nearly 100 years later Britt Ransom questions why this 800-year-old organism falls outside of the parameters of what was considered critical to re-name, or, perhaps more importantly, why it has a commemorative human name at all.”
Read more in Issue 65 – Autumn 2024, available as a free-to-download pdf.