CLAUDE ADJIL
We started talking about your project for the Aspen Art Museum last May or June, and thinking about how to move beyond the usual confines of an installation timeline and build something that could grow over 18 months. Can you tell me how you think about time in relationship to your work?
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON
To imagine a future of possible horizons, you need time outside of time. We’re usually confined by how to make something happen quickly so that it can be absorbed. I’m trying to reassess how we think about time and I want everything to slow down a little bit more. We could really allow ourselves more breathing space. That’s why it feels so important to do a garden like this, because it gives me space to build soil, build community. It becomes a ritual and social practice of love. Everything that you put into time, space and air changes its frequency, changes the world. It’s just about how much space we can take up and organize and play in and break and fall and tumble and grow and make all the magic stuff happen.
CA You make magic manifest in many different forms. People are often trying to pin you down. Are they a poet? Are they an artist? Are they a chef?
PO My work is a lived social practice of my everyday, it’s about rituals. I can make an object, but it’s more about the interpersonal relationships I have with people and the food I cook for people I love CA How does it feel to be making it beyond the white-cube walls in Aspen?
PO Oh, I’ve been excited. I’ve been waiting to break out of the room for a while, so it feels nice that I get to see the sky now. I believe that the work should be in places where you just bump into it. These are the first steps to freeing it.
CA Collaboration is always a key part of your work. Can you talk about some of the people that you’re collaborating with on the project for Aspen?
PO One of the most fun parts about doing what I do is getting to play with people I love and make these projects together. You build new worlds with other people by imagining different horizons together. I’m working with my friend Gio from the band Standing on the Corner. We’re going to do a soundscape, because the whole garden is like a soundboard, and as you walk through it, it plays to you. Working with different musicians and poets every season is going to be really special.
CA The garden will be on the roof of this beautiful museum, looking out over the Aspen mountains. Working within this very pristine environment, I feel like you’re building on the themes of your work, which deal a lot with anti-blackness, racialization of the natural world, Christianity, ecosystems, rebirth and growth. How is that going to play out in the garden?
PO I believe that it’s almost like a portal. I want to give a space outside time, because already Aspen feels outside regular time. Being here after New York, it’s almost otherworldly. I’m getting to make this private biosphere on top of the museum, which pulls you into another daydream. I want people to go there and take a break from the world. You can just lose yourself—you can lie there, and look at the sky, eat all the flowers, talk to all the bugs and forget all the primordial fear and anxiety in the world.
CA Can you tell me about some of the plants that are going to feature in the garden and why invasive species are so important for you?
PO Invasive plants are so special —they have become weaponized. They symbolize poiesis. The plants that I’m working with in Aspen are plants and wildflowers that would have been here if it hadn’t been for overpopulation and overcultivation. People like manicured, beautiful things, but there’s just so much organic magic that I want to showcase.
CA The way we survey and police these plants is very symbolic and parallel to how we talk about bodies and viruses.
PO Yes, and how we police things that we can’t control and are afraid of, like Black life. It becomes about ‘how can we destroy this thing or how can we criminalize it to a place where it can’t exist?’
CA I know you’re a lover of TikTok and you have found some great farmers and soil growers there. Can you tell us about some of the accounts that you follow and how TikTok has become this space for queer foraging?
PO Foraging in the US was originally a way that African Americans survived post-slavery because they weren’t allowed to buy food at grocery stores. Then it became criminalized to forage. So I think taking back the ownership of foraging and this return to understanding the land is a movement of survival and building that other world. Everyone’s moving towards their new desired horizons or possibilities because everyone knows it’s not working. I see and talk to so many young, Black, urban farmers and foragers on there. I love that the revolution will be through TikTok.
CA I know it was really important for you to connect to the community of local growers and not bring in plants and species that weren’t natural to the area. How has it been getting to know the different farms in Aspen and why is it so important for you to focus on the local?
PO Building an ecosystem is building a community as well. It’s been so fun to get to meet all of these amazing growers in the valley like Erin at Erin’s Acres Farm and to work with Bluegreen. It’s nice being present and going to see where the soil is being built and meeting these people and learning. It becomes a ritual of its own. I’m learning so much about Colorado’s natural wild plants and what grows here. It’s a very specific climate. It’s not in the desert, but you’re also really high in the mountains. It’s the extremities, which I love to live in, so this is beautiful for me.
CA You’ve been back at Anderson Ranch for the last few weeks, where you are creating these angel-like figures that will be the guardians of the garden. It’s important for you to mark the seasonal transformations. Can you tell us how the sculptures will change throughout the course of the installation?
PO Yes. Right now, what invokes the garden are these angel protectors, and slowly the garden will change. There will be an oven, a little wooden shack and a black, reflective algae pond that houses mysterious bacteria and fungus that will slowly evolve over the two years. It’s a whole entangled story. The worms that will talk to the June bugs and the cicadas that will pop up every now and then. It’s going to be really wild in there. I don’t know how it will end up. In winter I want the oven to be covered in mushrooms so you can go up there and pick, preserve or cook them and send me pictures of what you do. I want it to be a commune where there’s a lot of life and love — for these to be comforting spaces where you can escape from the bullshit of the world. I want to cultivate the space for miracles and hope that they can happen.
CA Can you tell us about the offerings that you want to host in the garden?
PO I want different offerings for the different seasons. Summer feels more abundant, so my collective, Spiral Theory, and me, are going to do a dinner. In winter I want to have a Sunday sermon with Alexis Pauline Gumbs. I want to do a series of poetry readings. People will have the opportunity to come up there and forage and then that will lead into workshops with kids where they can come and press flowers. It’s creating different relationships, it’s not just an exhibition. It’s a practice of ritual and new ways of being in the world.
CA The dinner with your cooking collective Spiral Theory Test Kitchen is going to take place off-site at Pine Creek Cookhouse. Can you tell us about what you are planning?
PO All the Spiral dinners have a theme or vibe. The theme for summer is abundance, and the dinner is under wraps right now, but we’re going back to our gastronomic conceptual roots and using a lot of local Aspen produce. I’m excited to partner with ACES for the next two years on different community projects and to provide donations. This feels like a gateway into that and to getting to know the community.
CA And what’s going to happen after?
PO My fantasy is that the angels I make over these next two years can be permanently installed somewhere. I would love all of the soil I build to be donated to different gardens and for Aspen to be germinated with different types of flowers. I want a lot of the stuff to be donated to local community gardens, and something I’m thinking about is maybe making a little garden at ACES, where things can be transplanted. So, I’m thinking about how things can have a life past the show.
CA Lastly could you tell us about the title for the show, ‘Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty’?
PO How many miracles do you experience a day? Every single day you wake up is like a miracle. Every single day, the beautiful sun wakes up and touches your face. Exponential possibilities of horizons awake. I think we forget that. This time-space we are abducted into living in, constantly tries to make us forget that the miracles are all around us, buzzing. We just have to be in tune to it.
Precious Okoyomon is an artist and poet based in New York City. Recent solo awards and exhibitions include the Frieze Artist Award, supported by Luma Foundation; Performance Space, New York; and MMK, Frankfurt, Germany. Their new commission, ‘Every Earthly Morning the Sky’s Light touches Ur Life is Unprecedented in its Beauty’, opened at the Aspen Art Museum in June and is on view until September 18, 2022.
Claude Adjil is Curator at Large at the Serpentine Galleries, London, UK.