ANOTHER EARTH:
WHAT MAKES A LAKE? 

The earth communicates in the presence and absence of lakes.

A lake is a large body of water surrounded by land. Lakes are formed by preceding natural events–glaciers, earth faults, the movement of tectonic plates. The craters of dormant volcanoes may fill with rain or melted snow, creating a lake. Sometimes the top of a volcano can collapse during an eruption, leaving a caldera which may also fill with rainwater and become a lake. Oregon’s Crater Lake was formed when the ancient volcano Mount Mazama’s cone collapsed.

Oxbow lakes are created when, during periods of flooding, a wide meander of a river is cut off, leaving a body of standing water. Its shape resembles the frame that fits over an ox’s neck when it’s harnessed to pull a wagon or a plow.  Lakes are also created by landslides and mudslides. The debris that collects at the foot of hills and mountains create natural dams that block the flow of water, thereby forming a lake. Trees collected by beavers plug up rivers and streams creating large ponds and marshes. Habitat building creates lakes and new ecosystems.

A lake is what is left behind, a response, an imprint, a historical document of what came before. While lakes communicate the past, they also represent the present health of the planet and its communities. In a sense, lakes keep time. They are portals, storytellers, mirrors. Lakes are not simply bodies of water. They embody in implicit and explicit ways all of Earth’s ecosystems. They are the melted glaciers, the buckling and folding of the Earth’s crust, volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides. They are also what surrounds them: land, wetlands, bogs, floodplain forests and their respective flora and fauna. They are carnivorous plants and fungi, rocks that line their shores. We are the lake: our gaze, our histories, and memories.
 - Abbey Meaker 

What Makes a Lake? Tracing Movement began as a project about Lake Champlain–the lake that two of the publishers currently live near. We wanted to collect documentation around the lake’s health, history, stories, and imagery, to find a bridge between what we feel when we visit this grandiose body of water and what science warns us of the health of the lake itself. As time makes spaces for water to fill, we wanted to make a book that can capture a moment in this time, of our own filling.

It quickly became evident that to consider Lake Champlain, we must consider all the ways in which water flows in and out beyond our arbitrary borders. The body of water quickly turned into the veins extended into the wings of birds, minerals of stone, roots of plants, and stories told. We knew in order to talk about Lake Champlain, we really needed to open this up to other lakes around the world.

While we could never include every lake on earth, we submitted to the game of chance when it came to which lakes we did include. Through our open call, we received compelling work that opened the veins of the world to us and expanded the conversation into bigger questions around how we are all connected through these flowing currents and our natural tendency to seek water in moments of quiet meditation.

This publication is a collection of reflections when we consider how water affects our past, present and future. During our time here on earth, can we hear the water speak? More urgently, can we listen?
- Estefania Puerta 

ANOTHER EARTH / BROTHER OF ELYSIUM:
FLOODPLAINS BY ABBEY MEAKER

ANOTHER EARTH:
SIGNALS

ANOTHER EARTH:
LAND CHAPTERS

ARTIST FIELD: 
LAND CHAPTERS

When we set out to organize Land Chapters, we knew we wanted to explicitly address the human relationship to nature. Immediately that intention unearthed a large and murky web of the ways in which we categorize human, nature, and relationship.

Instead of trying to constrict a boundary around these terms, we welcome their impossibility of being tamed into a cohesive experience. In fact, the need to categorize these terms has historically erased many peoples’ and species’ stories, experiences, and complexities of survival and continuation. It has silenced the small creek into a roaring paper mill, it has given European names to mountains that were given names by their protectors and story keepers.

Here in Vermont, one of the region’s greatest mountains known today as Camel’s Hump was given the original name of Tawapodiiwajo, Abenaki for “mountain seat,” alluding to traditional stories of the hero Glooscap using the mountain as his personal seat. Tabaldak gave Glooscap the power to create a good world. Glooscap learned that hunters who kill too much would destroy the ecosystem and the good world he had sought to create and went on to seek the advice of Grandmother Woodchuck (Agaskw) who then plucked all the hairs out of her belly (hence the lack of hair on a woodchuck's belly) and wove them into a magical bag for Glooscap to use and eventually learn the lesson that they needed to hunt to remain strong.

What other stories and histories are layered in these names, re-namings, un-namings? How do we resist adding a new boundary to the terms that have spliced our lives into multitudes of subjugation? What if locating yourself in nature is not about place at all but about memory, perception, sound, proposals, movement?

Echoing the first generation of land artists who used earth matter to make their work, we have invited artists to consider the ways in which we influence and are influenced by “the land.”

Rather than impose an intervention, we encouraged an anti-heroic response: an embrace, dialogue, and open exploration, not just of this particular piece of land with its own storied history, but to all natural environments that keep us in the mire of speculation when it comes to what we deem natural environments. The work included in this exhibition is on unceded land of the Abenaki Nation and also brings into focus territories across North America and abroad including the Mexican-US border, Puerto Rico, and Italy.

There is no fixed sequence to this exhibition to guide you from one point of experience to the next. Rather, each work included is to be viewed as a point on a map that unfurls itself into different responses to our curatorial prompt; a map with no one name but many names, lands without borders, experiences without dogma.

We live in a different era of earth collapse than the land artists who preceded us. Romanticizing our connection to nature can feel patronizing to a dying earth and species. In place of romance as an answer, we believe this work offers nature as a question. We believe this work pushes against the instinct to other and fetishize nature, that it instead engenders curiosity, posing a question rather than an answer.

We hope this project finds its way into your own relationship with the world(s) around and within you.

Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, 2021

LAND INSTALLATIONS 

Artists from across the U.S.  installed pieces that were a direct response to the land they inhabit, then installed within the 40 acres of land in Richmond, Vermont. The land itself is a dense forested area that has been logged and is wet so ferns, brambles, young trees, fungi, porcupine, deer, coyotes, salamanders, and many species of birds have all found a home here.

Ranging from interactive experiences (Contact Kit) to proposals for collaboration with our natural resources (Sun Belly), the work in the exhibition opene up different possibilities for how we encounter our natural surroundings and a built environment (Four by Eight, Old Bones That Turn to Ziploc Bags and Sewage Tubing). While some of these works briefly inhabited the Beaver Pond Hill property during the duration of the exhibition, other works have truly become a part of the environment and beckon us to question the long term effects of moving earth matter, beings, and histories into new lands (Transplante, Cascara de Cascabel). 

Devin Alejandro-Wilder

Jordan Rosenow

Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri

Ruben Ulises Rodriguez Montoya

Angus McCullough and Ashlin Dolan

Chief Shirly Hook

Alan Huck

Wes Larios

Sonia Louise Davis 

Travis Klunick

Rachel Vera Steinberg