A thick slug sits on a deer heart leaf in Tiger Xu’s hands. He holds the leaf up to a large window misted with creek water. Petting it with his pointer finger, Xu tries to coax the slug onto the glass.
“I can name him Franklin,” Xu says. “I like that. It’s an arbitrary name.”
Xu is wrapping up a summer seminar called “The Art of Noticing in Multispecies Worlds.” This was a three-week course for high schoolers through Outer Coast, an undergraduate liberal arts program in Sitka.
Instead of papers or exams, students created art to showcase what they learned in an exhibition called “It’s Literally About Everything.” And they used just about anything to prove it.
Xu is using Franklin’s goo. As the slug slides across the window, its trail of slime will be the art on display.
“I’m putting it on a vertical surface that’s moist because we could never adhere to a surface like that, right?”
During the seminar, the students helped rehab sections of Sitka’s trails as a service project. Xu noticed how classmates would nudge slugs with their boots or chuck them to the side of the path. And that attitude is something Xu wants to change.
“How do you empathize with a mollusk that has a face very different from yours?” asks Eben Kirksey, an anthropology professor at the University of Oxford who led the seminar.
Kirksey says Xu’s art aims to create a greater sense of “slug empathy” by spotlighting the creature’s curiosities, like its slime.
“The idea is to teach students to pay attention to creatures in our shared environment, and especially notice what get called the ‘unloved others’ that share the world with us,” Kirksey says.
Taking a closer look could lead to new discoveries. It did for Zoe Cole who stumbled across some scraps when scavenging for salmonberries. At first, she noticed discarded bathroom tiles scattered outside of a campus residence hall. The closer she looked, and the deeper she dug, Cole realized they were entangled with metal and cement.
“How can I make this art? How can I make this actually meaningful and not just a bunch of garbage?” Cole wonders.
Her moss-covered findings now sit in the center of the exhibition. Rusted wires, chunks of concrete, and broken tiles sprawl across a folding table draped in an inside-out emergency blanket.
“When I first found it,” Cole says, “I was like, ‘Whoa! This reminds me of an ecosystem and how everything is connected in ecosystems.’”
The more she thought about it, the more it symbolized. She says it looks like a galaxy or a family tree.
“It can be life with all the moss that’s growing on the pieces, or it can be death with all the rust that’s on the wires. It’s everything,” Cole says.
Kirksey says it was Cole who came up with the exhibition’s name: “It’s Literally About Everything.”
“It’s been all about hope. It’s been about love. It’s been about how to undergo symbiogenesis, which means becoming symbiotic. So this is what the students have done together socially, and also with the art that’s on display today,” Kirksey explains.
That idea is best represented by a branch hanging on the wall. Mariia Hryhurko wanted to literally intertwine her classmates into her art. So she twisted tendrils of moss and lichen together with their human counterpart.
“We took moss and lichen, and we weaved some braids with the hair of our participants,” Hryhurko says.
One strand is nearly a foot long.
“It’s one of our co-creator’s, and she contributed a lot, as you can see,” Hryhurko says. “She’s very dedicated to this artwork.”
Kirksey says the seminar’s 12 students came to Sitka from all over the world with their own values and perspectives. AnnaMae Owen and Annmarie Sakar collected heart-shaped leaves, shells, and bark they found in the forest. Owen says nature is full of hopeful symbols.
“A late night that’s full of stars with the northern lights or the early morning sunrises or the sunsets, the birds chirping in the early mornings or in the dawn,” Owen says, “those are the kind of things that bring me hope for a new day and a better tomorrow.”
Kirksey says the course has been about that kind of observation, and thinking more about the creatures around us. He wants the students to ask: What’s the world like as a starfish without eyes? How does human infrastructure change where a plant might grow?
Or what’s it like to be Franklin? Empathizing may have been tough before. But as people peer at the slug leaving a trail of ooze across the glass, they now have a mutual interest: art.
