Over three weeks in late summer 2023, the Franco-American collective Le Ratoire canoed the length of the Hudson River — the Mahicannittuk — from Troy to New York City, filming on 16mm and developing each night’s footage using invasive plants foraged along the banks: mugwort, Japanese knotweed, wood ash from bonfire, and the river’s own water. The resulting images carry the ecology of the Hudson within their emulsion — processed by the very organisms whose presence marks this landscape as a site of colonial transplantation and ecological transformation. Sediments makes the invasive plant not a nuisance to be eradicated but a collaborator in the archive, folding together questions of movement, belonging, and what gets to leave a trace. Launched at Media Sanctuary, North Troy.
Sediments is perhaps the most direct entry point into M2Lab’s core dialogue between media and migration. The journey down the Mahicannittuk is inseparable from the colonial history of that river’s renaming and the ongoing dispossession it indexes. The invasive plants that develop the film are themselves migrant organisms, their presence in this landscape a consequence of the same colonial and commercial networks that structured human migration to and through this region. By making these plants co-authors of the archive, Le Ratoire refuses the clean separation between the human migration story and the ecological transformation that always accompanies it — proposing instead a sedimented, layered understanding of what it means to move through and leave a mark on a place.
–SG
Further Reading:
https://www.mediasanctuary.org/event/le-ratoire-sediments-canoe-journey-launch/