10 Questions with miguel costa [maarqa]

miguel costa [maarqa] is an artist/architect based in Porto, Portugal. His practice has been developed through interconnected strategies between art, landscape, and architecture. He works individually or in collaboration under the name 'maarqa — micro atelier de arquitectura e arte' and divides his professional activity between public space projects and installations, artistic research, and teaching. He has been carrying out artistic research work on the relationship between colonial botany and the landscapes of everyday places (abandoned, devalued, or unused urban spaces). He holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture and Urban Ecology (ISA — University of Lisbon); and a Master's degree in Art and Design for the Public Space (FBAUP — Fine Arts Faculty, University of Porto).

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ARTIST STATEMENT

“The works and experiments I’ve been developing between fieldwork and the studio aim to bring forward a set of invisible stories about vegetation. They seek to embody and rethink the undervalued landscapes near the places where we live (the everyday landscapes) through the lens of colonial botany — places like vacant lots, hillsides, roadsides, or ruined structures. These other stories of vegetation are also the stories of disputes between imperial centers, invasions, occupations, scientific explorations, exploitation of human resources, slavery, and raw materials, which intersect with the history of landscape transformations, the history of gardens and parks, or the history of ornamental preferences.”

— miguel costa [maarqa]

INTERVIEW

First of all, introduce yourself to our readers. Who is Miguel Costa in 3 words?

I would say: someone in between. The distribution of my work between architecture, art, landscape, and urban ecology, has left me in this space in-between. I usually don't work directly with architecture, although I occasionally collaborate with friends or do small consultancies and small projects for friends and family. I'm also not a landscape architect, although I'm obsessively involved with this practice. And for several years, I've been working as an artist but many times without taking on the role as an artist. This just began to make more sense from the moment I started working and investigating a set of personal concerns that seemed to have no place in other categories of my work. But everything turns out to be connected. As I also teach, my time has been divided among several activities in accumulation and overlapping. This was the main motivation for creating maarqa — micro atelier de arquitectura e arte, a wider operational umbrella that allows me to work individually or in collaboration, testing different approaches and outcomes.

How did you get involved with art and architecture? And how has your artistic practice evolved over the years?

Already as an architect, I became aware that in most of the urban surveys that support the design project, many layers of information remain devalued or invisible and that good design alone will not be enough to face the unpredictable cultural, economic, or political conditions that shape places. This made me more interested in what happens in the gaps between the unbuilt and the built urban landscape. Consequently, I've been exploring this in-between condition in many ways, from small temporary installations to performative fieldwork and mapping processes. On the one hand, to test different public activation and engagement methodologies. On the other hand, to map and research the negotiation processes and forces that shape the territory. These spatial practices and research approaches have become crucial to explore the different relationships between people and urban space and, during these last few years, many hidden negotiations between the planned and the unplanned or unexpected landscapes.

Let's talk about your work. You specialize in Landscape Architecture and Public Art. Why did you choose these fields? And how do you work around those themes?

All these themes have public space in common. When I started my research in landscape architecture, I was trying to investigate a better disciplinary articulation between landscape, art, and architecture. This was motivated by my interest in some of the European Landscape Convention concerns and implementation guidelines. Every landscape was considered, whether outstanding, everyday, or degraded. The underlined importance of citizens' active role and responsibility in decision-making related to the places where they live. And the need for a greater diversity of cross-disciplinary approaches. At the time, I wanted to bring forward the long history of experiments from socially engaged art and critical spatial practices and how they could contribute to a greater public engagement, enabling a more active role and people's voice in participation processes. In this sense, more performative and playful approaches could break prejudices or resistances to engage and, at the same time, place people at the center of the experience and discussions that one intends to start. This is particularly relevant when trying to activate or reclaim some specific places, such as misused urban spaces or vacant lots. However, in recent years, I've been moving my work beyond activation or reclaiming these places. I'm also interested in other narratives that these vacant lots contain from their vegetation stories. These are invisible micro-stories but intimately intertwined with macro-narratives that contributed to these landscape fragments, placing them at the center of a global network of relationships between colonial powers.

A recurring concept in your work is that of "colonial botany." Can you tell us more about it?

Colonial botany is the term used by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, in a book they edited, to outline a set of practices developed in colonial contexts: the study, naming, cultivation, and marketing of plants. Plants were always exchanged since the old empires due to many uses and interests, contributing to their dissemination and naturalization. But these exchanges remained for many centuries, mainly rooted in the medicinal, culinary, or ritual traditions of plant use. From the beginning of the 16th century, frequent transatlantic crossings gradually brought new knowledge and information about the existing biodiversity and productive soils that began to change the global agricultural economy map. But it was mainly from the 18th century that this biodiversity became more strategically relevant as an economic engine for the expansion, dominance, and strengthening of the European colonial enterprise. It was also the time of the great scientific expeditions. Plant naming as classification and dissemination of botanical knowledge, as well as experimentation and transferring of useful plants to places where they could grow and be strategically profitable, are all part of the same practices associated with the concept of colonial botany. 

Through your projects and installations, you reflect upon concepts strictly related to key issues of our times, like postcolonialism or environmental issues. What other themes do you want to explore? And what messages are you trying to convey with your art?

Recently, I've been working on border crossing issues. But everything is still part of the same "Vegetation stories: reflections and speculations on ruderal vegetation" project. It is something still progressing, and it will lead to other themes or perspectives to explore. The main goal has been to make visible a set of conditions and associations related to the production of landscapes, or more specifically, related to the unplanned landscapes and spontaneous urban vegetation or ruderal plant species, often also called weeds. Some are indigenous plants already known since ancient times, and others arrived from transatlantic exchanges. Either way, they are under the spotlight from the moment they start disturbing the existing biodiversity or many human agricultural activities and economies. 

The first scientific missions and expeditions in the 18th century increased the circulation of plants through large networks of correspondents between colonial powers and their expanded territories, but whose results changed the landscapes, both in 'explorer' and 'exploited' countries. Among the so-called 'useful plants' and 'exotic' curiosities, many escaped these circuits, acclimatizing themselves, appropriating and contributing to the creation of landscapes other than the planned or designed ones. Resulting from intentional or accidental transfers, some of these plant species have been classified in their new territories as 'invasive'. But, whether indigenous or introduced species, their adaptive and resilient characteristics place them at the top of the dominant species in appropriating terrains disturbed by human action. Yet, these are also some of the everyday landscapes near the places where we live and to which we are often so indifferent: vacant lots, hillsides, roadsides, or ruined structures. At the same time, it is a coexistence that has become difficult given the risks of ecological imbalance and loss of biodiversity materialized and amplified in the sharpening of discourses and expressions of combat and exclusion. And, in the context of climate change concerns, some discussions have become even sharper. Weeds, invasive, noxious, or eradication targets, are combined with citizen mobilization programs against a public enemy. Discourses and terms so often carrying a sense of premeditation as if these species had engineered the destruction of the ecological balance. But this condition is part of a larger constellation of entities and associations that created favorable conditions for their broader biological range, later expanded through favorable soils, winds, and watercourses. 

In short, this is an artistic research work that tries to embody and make visible the human and non-human mechanisms that have contributed to the production and reproduction of these 'lesser' fragments of landscapes and their plant species. It is closely related to disputes between imperial powers, invasions, occupations, or exploitation of raw materials and human resources through slavery, which intersect with the histories of landscape transformations, gardens and parks, and ornamental preferences.

Climate changes are an urgent issue we need to address globally. Do climate changes and environmental issues influence art, in your opinion? What can be done more, and how can we raise awareness through art?

Artists react to conditions and expose those reactions in a unique, assertive, and often provocative way. The environmental crisis is one of those emergencies mobilizing not only artists, scientists, or philosophers. Many other disciplinary fields and generations in civil society are also mobilized. However, there are still difficulties communicating and engaging the wider public to reach global public awareness and agreement. Scientific facts exist and are available, but even so, the environmental crisis still seems far removed from everyday life, or too shrouded in indifference, skepticism, or denial. Art has a decisive role in raising questions, making them visually relevant and provocative, and returning them to the public. But art alone it is not enough. There is still a need for a larger interdisciplinary strategy of penetration into daily life, a convergence of movements, and a greater public engagement that could lead to a more active, collective, and decisive voice to choose political representations more committed to the environmental issues.

What is your creative process like? Could you walk us through a day in your studio? 

I think everything can trigger imagination. For example, the idea to include wind in the "Lesser landscapes" installation was first triggered by researching the transatlantic travel routes and the map of the trade winds by Edmond Halley. But the use of an electric wind fan, or the way the wind was made for the landscape photos, are direct references to the making of a particular film scene from The Mirror by Andrei Tarkovsky; the cardboard models from "Traveling natures", together with some seed exchange experiences made for this series, have been a way of reacting and experimenting the conditions related to global plant transfers. It is directly associated with the research of several travel ship logs, books and articles containing instructions for transporting and packaging plants, and many other relevant documents published between the 18th and the 19th centuries. As I print many parts of these old books, manipulated or shredded paper pages also became part of these experiments as a raw material; and the first performances from "Narratives of disturbance and provocation" were triggered by the motivation of working on the relationship between body and disturbed soils, on plant transfer experiments, on botanic knowledge production and its dissemination, relating it to the act of gardening as an act of violence and plant selection. 

Usually, I work by reacting or trying to embody what I read and research. It has been a fragmented and messy process, growing from the first mappings and plant collecting of "Vegetation stories...", from where I extract and edit some key images. These images crystallize key moments of research and experimentation. But, at the same time, they are part of an accumulated process of written observations and texts, photos, diagrams, drawings, cardboard models, old books printed from available pdfs, and so on, which always result in something more. 

As for the studio, most of these processes take place there, but a full day of work is hard to accomplish. Although it is where I live and work, many of my daily activities take place outside the studio. And some others, like working with larger elements, cannot be done entirely there. The studio was initially a space for making architectural models and drawings. As it was not intended to be a workshop, this led to significant work limitations. As my work evolved, the space was adapted to the new circumstances. Today, architecture material samples are kept side-by-side with fieldwork collections, soil samples, plants, seeds, resin, beeswax, cardboard models, and other items, including many failed and successful experiments conducted with these materials. It is closer to a research laboratory than to a workshop. Even so, all ideas are always developed there but adapted to the scale of the space available. After that, they will be tested and produced on other scales. Whenever I have to work with larger structures, I have to use the workshops of other friends.

Over the past 12 months, we have witnessed a growing number of online exhibitions and live events. What do you think of the recent changes in the art world? Do you miss the art world as it was before the pandemic, or do you see more opportunity now?

With the pandemic, information and people became much more accessible and available. Thousands of conferences, interviews, debates, presentations, or exhibitions were posted on websites and streaming platforms and are still available for free. Of course, you still need at least an electronic device and internet access. But accessibility to this knowledge and events from all over the world has massively increased. Of all my friends, I am perhaps the least active person posting work online. Yet, I managed to organize a series of online talks for students with several international artists that would not have been possible otherwise. The flip side is that we have become more accessible, and our personal space has diminished. The living room, kitchen, or bedroom may still be used as another working meeting place under the motto of easiness and time-saving. 

Nevertheless, the bodily experience over the artwork is still crucial in the process of raising awareness, in engaging with the public, as well as in the questioning processes that art can provoke. Online accessibility still cannot replace that experience over mind and body.

What are you working on right now? Do you have any new projects on their way?

Right now, I am preparing the first issue of a magazine that I hope will come out in mid-2022. And I am also preparing a collaborative extension of the "Lesser landscapes" project.

And lastly, what is one lesson you learned in the past year?

People easily forget. I guess that was more of a confirmation amplified from the context of the pandemic than a learned lesson. But, when facing the growth of so many extreme positionings, the act of remembering must be constantly performed in people's minds.