Frontier Fellow 2022-2023:
Aja Bond
Aja Bond is a double major in Studio Art and the History of Art and Visual Culture. She envisioned a collaborative research-creation project that seeks to make visible the pathways connecting our campus to the land it is on, following food and organic waste systems as a way to investigate its ecology. The goal was to use a diverse array of disciplines, methods, mediums and practices to begin to connect the dots in the web of the University’s relationship to growing, eating and disposing of organic matter and how this impacts the land. The project ultimately created three artistic works:
Aja says: “My project was made possible by the support of the Earth Futures Fellowship, Professor Kyle Parry and Professor Jorge Menna Barreto, with additional support from Professor Edward Shanken, Arts and Humanities Research Librarian Annette Marines and Judit Camacho, Co-Executive Director of Life Labs. UCSC occupies the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi Tribe. The Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to missions Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and heal from historical trauma. It is my sincere hope that this work, in some small way, supports the well-being of this land and all who depend on it. May the Earth and all its Futures be livable and free.”
Landing Loops is an Abecedarium that documents many aspects of her year-long research. An Abecedarium, or ABC Book, is a way to give order and structure to a complex project. Initially catalyzed by questions about the food production and waste streams on the UCSC campus, the project quickly traveled along unforeseen paths into the Environmental Humanities, Posthumanism, AI, Metabolism, Fermentation, Speculative Fiction, Permaculture and other ways of understanding the complex interrelation of land use, the built environment, settler-colonialism, and the climate crisis in the context of the University. These are represented in the Abecedarium with words and images. UCSC Landing Loops Video.
Compost Landing Loops
Site Scents is a series of fragrances archiving microclimates within the bounds of a rough square mile, centering soil as the living substrate from which more pronounced and divergent flora emerge. Geosmin is the base note of the perfume oils, which foresee futures in which our memories of rapidly changing places may be supported by these microbial and botanical essences preserved in a carrier oil. Ongoing and acute drought is changing these ecosystems, and without rain to feed both the plants and the soil, these scents may in time, become an ephemeral object of nostalgic longing, serving as an anchor to memory and place. This work was exhibited in a solo show at Gravy Gallery in Santa Cruz in June 2023.
Site Scents
Finally, Aja volunteered weekly at the Chadwick Garden on the UCSC campus during Fall Quarter 2022, which involved mustering at 8am with the garden interns and staff to hear the Director Orin Martin lecture and teach. This led to research in the special collections archive and the UCSC Oral History Project, photographic documentation of the built environment of the garden, and conversations and interviews about the pathways of nutrients and waste in and out of the garden including composting methods.
Aja’s third work of art is There is a Mind in the Garden, which is a photo book that explores the concept of dispersed intelligence and documents the vast array of Orin Martin’s poetic and philosophic hand-written notes which are found all over the garden, as well as the library sited in the garden structure.
There is a Mind in the Garden
For more information about Aja, visit her website at https://ajabond.com/