Hybrid Thinking

A couple of weeks ago I organised a brainstorm session with the students of a local elementary school in Alken Limburg. To start the session I showed them some of the vegetable characters that I designed as part of the Cultivating Communities project. I used the characters to explain some problems that are associated with food production. For example showing that food has to travel from the other part of the world, if we want to eat the whole year long, isn’t that good for our global climate.

I was surprised to hear that the students already new a lot about this topic and are starting a project of their own. Apparently one of students parents is setting up a permaculture garden in front of the school. Still, I asked the students if they wanted come up with ideas, besides the garden in front of their school, in dealing with these food problems. All of the proposals were really imaginative. For instance one student wanted everyone to peal union’s that so it would cause everyone to cry. In this way we don’t have to use precious water from the tap. Some students wanted to grow vegetables and trees inside their classroom and on the roof of the school. Others wanted to produce their own energy by making windmills or a bio-gas installation. One students thought his school already did enough to take care of nature. Which is actuality quite true, besides the garden in front of the school, there is also a chicken garden and a compost pile.  And a couple of students wanted to learn how to create and discover new kinds of vegetables and fruits in their biology lessons.

The last proposal really got me thinking about how we could try to do this. I’ve started reading in biology books on the topic of cross breading vegetables and plants and soon stumbled on Gregor Mendel. A Monk born in 1822 in Austria with a love for biology. Mendel experimented with cross breading pea plants in the central courtyard of his monastery, by pollinating the flowers from different kinds of plants. By doing this he discovered the principals of how the different characteristics or gene’s of plants are mixed into new hybrids. His genetic principals, together with the evolution theory of Charles Darwin form the basis of modern biological knowledge. Darwin formed the basis for his theory by setting out on a five year long expedition to discover new kinds of animals, plants and rock formations. It are these kinds of aesthetic experiences of discovering new species and creating new hybrids that really sparkle my imagination. And I’m wondering how this aesthetic process could somehow sparkle the imagination of the students to make their own discovery’s. For now I have tried to capture the biologic adventurous atmosphere into a collage. I added two chickens to the collage that refer to conceptual artist Koen Vanmechelen. In his cosmopolitan chicken project he tries to create the ultimate hybrid or bastard chicken by cross breading different chicken species from all over the world. The chickens tell a story about biological diversity and identity of our human society. By creating a story trough a somewhat provoking art project, thinking about these human problems become a lot more tangible. This something that I also like to pursue with my project.

The collage symbolises fragments of my own ideas and ideas from the students I’m working with. Visualising them into a hybrid image helps me to capture my state of mind. I feel this is an interesting way to organise my thoughts, so I will try explore this documentation method in my future research.