The Biocrust Project reveals the importance of protecting the desert’s biocrust in the face of climate change in an immersive collaboration between art and science.
SALT LAKE CITY—Entering the gallery space initiates a tangible contact with the desert’s living skin—that is, the biocrust. At UMOCA, a portion of the biocrust, a community of organisms—lichens, mosses, and cyanobacteria—that form a carpet-like crust upon the earth’s drylands, has been removed from land slated for development, almost like a skin graft, and placed on a custom-made open platform where it continues to be nourished with moisture and light.
There’s a subtle sage aroma dispensed into the air. We can feel the visceral presence of the biocrust breathing and transmitting awareness as it observes itself and engages with viewers. Two channels of diagonal video projections flood the wall space with visuals of the desert from the break of dawn to a stunning timelapse of a starry night.
Graciously invited to take in the expansion and contraction, vast landscapes juxtaposed with moving closeups of all the vibrant textures in the soil, we can sense it all inside ourselves as our own breathing matches that of the earth. No longer simply spectators, we soon embody the revelation shared by the artist and scientist that we are the earth, and what we do to the earth, we do to ourselves.
The Biocrust Project is the result of the Canyonlands Research Center’s inaugural Artist in Residence program conceived by Kristen Redd and supported by the Nature Conservancy as an in-depth collaboration between science and art in a response to biocrust restoration efforts conducted by U.S. Geological Survey scientist Dr. Sasha Reed and her team.
When multidisciplinary artist, educator, and curator Jorge Rojas was invited to participate as the CRC’s first artist in residence, he did so with the mutual understanding that Indigenous voices and perspectives would be included in the collaboration. Nikki Cooley, co-manager of the Institute for Tribal Environmental Professionals’ Climate Change Program, contributed to the installation with audio components that feature her poetic reflections about growing up Navajo and learning about caring for Mother Earth from her grandfather, sharing the wisdom of Indigenous science cultivated throughout her life and profession.
Rojas emphasizes the fact that the project is a full collaboration with an amazing team of scientists and creatives. Recalling discovering Reed’s research, he tells me that “when I began to understand the biocrust as a community, I saw that the mosses, the lichens, the mycelium, all the elements of the biocrust are nurturing each other and working to sustain the desert. Any one of them alone can’t do it. That’s when I realized that here is a language that makes sense to me, a project I can get behind, as my work has often been about community and bringing people together around a cause or an idea to create something bigger than our separate selves.”
The biocrust stabilizes the soil, protecting humans and wildlife from dust storms, and increases the drylands’ capacity to retain water after seasonal rains. The Nature Conservancy reveals that scientists can now restore biocrust by conducting a kind of skin graft for the desert, taking healthy crust from one region, and replanting it in another region where the biocrust has deteriorated. Dr. Reed’s research and bold experiments in farming biocrust with the help of CRC’s Rim to Rim Restoration are now being used to reverse ecological damage, with the potential of protecting drylands across the globe.
Getting out into the desert, trekking and carrying gear, working alongside scientists and filmmakers capturing night footage, laying in the dirt for closeups, and witnessing the tremendous energy of everyone coming together for “something bigger” is what ultimately fueled Rojas’s vision for a compelling installation at UMOCA.
The Biocrust Project serves to make an emotional impact on the viewers, so that an authentic empathy is established. When the land becomes a part of you, there’s a more natural inclination to protect it.
