Andrew Merritt on Usefulness, World-Building and Silent Activism
In this Network Spotlight, Francesca Fantoni joins artist Andrew Merritt to discuss projects from Farm Shop to Slow Disasters and learn about his collaborative, ecologically concerned practice.
Andrew Merritt has been producing work as a solo artist and one half of artistic duo Something & Son since 2010, with a consistent focus on functional art, collaboration and everyday forms of activism. His recent projects focus increasingly on land regeneration and biodiversity, engaging directly with lost biocultures and ecological systems and exploring how these can exist in an industrialised planet. I joined Merritt in conversation to learn more about what drives his commitment to long-term and community-engaged work.
Francesca Fantoni: From co-founding and setting up Makerversity in the basements of Somerset House to working deep in the soil, in wetlands and tidal zones beyond London, your practice moves across very different contexts and scales. Could you introduce the work you do and what underpins it all?
Andrew Merritt: My practice incorporates architectural installation and functional sculptures, with a little bit of activism thrown in there. Whilst the end product might be quite different from project to project, they all provide some kind of foundation for other people and other species to intervene and use in some way. I’m essentially interested in useful art, so I guess it pushes onto the boundaries of design and architecture because of that.
“I’m essentially interested in useful art, so I guess it pushes onto the boundaries of design and architecture because of that.”
FF: How much does your training in design influence your work today?
AM: My work is functional, but it’s not pure design. I studied graphic design but I was always more interested in the communication side. If you look at the work I do, it’s essentially communicating ideas alongside a kind of world building. As part of that world building, you need to build an identity so people can understand how to glue all these different and quite complicated things together, especially when the work involves lots of people from lots of different disciplines.
FF: Collaboration seems central to your practice. How do you approach working with others, whether interdisciplinary teams or broader publics?
AM: It’s a want and a need. The best collaborations are when you need to work with someone as well as wanting to. Bit by design, bit by luck, I would say. You just start, putting it out there, having conversations and eventually you get to the point where you’re working with the right person. But it’s not guaranteed the right person will turn up.
I try to use everyday or ‘pub language’ wherever possible. Pubs are called what they are because it’s easy for everyone to recognise. For example, a Red Lion pub will have a red lion painted on its front, so even someone who’s illiterate knows what it is. I use that same principle, making things immediately approachable and from there you build up a narrative and bring people along with you.
FF: In that sense, Farm Shop seems to have been a turning point in terms of engaging communities. You were growing food on site whilst using the space as a meeting room, shop and cafe. Could you explain how Farm Shop evolved and how it went on to sustain itself?
AM: Farm Shop was my first project as Something & Son. I didn’t even know how the art world worked at that point. We got a small arts grant and opened up a shop in Dalston. We had all sorts of things happening with food growing, but one of the first things my collaborator Paul wanted to do was turn the top floor into rentable desk space to fund the project. We had, like, £5,000 at the start, and it was only supposed to be open for three months, but it ended up being open for ten years. We never applied for any grant after that, which is just ridiculous, considering we were getting a lot of press including in the New York Times. Eventually the project came to an end when we just couldn’t put any more time into it. There was never enough money in the model to support it properly.
FF: From working on a very local scale with Farm Shop, how did you evolve toward current projects Intertidal Allotment and Slow Disasters, that remain crucially site-specific, yet operate across international networks, from Italy to South Africa, Mexico, and Thailand?
“I think there’s something valid in working locally, but also having a global perspective; I don’t think it should be one or the other, it should be both.”
AM: Slow Disasters came out of a residency I was doing at the Delfina Foundation in London. I was coming up with the idea of what a ‘slow disaster’ was, and two of the other people I was most in contact with during the residency were from Mexico and from South Africa. So I was like, okay, I’ll do the project in the UK, and I’ll work with you guys, and we can do the project there as well.
I realised you can do local projects in different countries, and then it’s a case of, how do they sit within themselves, but also how do they support each other? They’re small, essentially, in the grand scheme of things, but by sitting each component in an international context, they suddenly have a power to them.
It gets you out of your own local mindset. I think there’s something valid in working locally, but also having a global perspective; I don’t think it should be one or the other, it should be both.
FF: That makes sense when you’re dealing with concerns like slow disasters and the acts of climate injustice that often go unnoticed. Those are global issues that should be addressed collectively. Is that partly what motivates you to work large-scale and through long-term formats?
AM: Yes. That’s a personal one too, and it’s partly out of frustration. I’m not saying community-driven work isn’t valid, but a lot of it is small. And you’ve got all these small community projects, while massive corporations are building another nuclear plant or knocking down whatever they want. I think there needs to be a step change where we start thinking bigger and raising our ambition. You should still have that small community work at the core, but we need to scale up ambitions, because we’re getting walked all over. That’s also why I like to do long-term projects alongside more gallery or institution based work. Although it’s sometimes nice to work like that, the work that has the most impact tends to be long-term in some shape or form.
FF: Does working long-term and directly in landscapes responding to ongoing environmental degradation necessitate a slower way of working? Is slowness something you consciously build into your work?
AM: It’s more of an impatient slowness. I won’t just sit, I can’t. I won’t research for the sake of research either. I don’t think you can work too slowly in community based projects, because you need to keep energy up. It is about getting a balance between moving forward, but moving forward at a maintainable pace.
FF: I’m thinking about the ‘field kitchen’ model you’re working with for Slow Disasters. This idea of creating a mobile hub where people can come to take part in a workshop, make, eat and learn about land regeneration. And again with Intertidal Allotment; you have designed a community allotment which is essentially a hospitable environment for plants and animals in tidal areas, that’s currently in the Thames estuary but can be replicated across coastlines. In each case the structure is deliberately modular or replicable. Is that about allowing the work to have an afterlife beyond your direct involvement, or making it easier to expand and adapt over time?
AM: The modularity is important. If something’s modular, it’s easier to expand. The idea with the field hospital is that you can just keep adding sections to it. Modular often means cheaper as well, so there’s a bit of an economy-type thinking in it.
With Intertidal Allotment, for instance, we’re hopefully going to get five years’ funding confirmed. By having that kind of longevity, you can start to train people up. And because it’s modular, you can train someone and then leave them to keep working on it. It means you can actually raise people’s skills, rather than everything depending on you being there.
So it makes it easier to involve people, to bring them on that making journey. It all goes back to this idea of world-building and back to Farm Shop as well, where there was a business model in place to keep it open.
“I’m trying to quietly force change through the everyday”
FF: You’ve said your work is driven by activism. Could you give an example of how that manifests across different projects?
AM: It’s across all of them really. When we did A Common Ground at the Tate Britain and set up a working garden in their front lawns, someone called it ‘silent activism’. I quite like that term, because I’m trying to quietly force change through the everyday. It’s all underpinned by environmental activism too. For example, for Coalstore we made a jewellery range out of coal. It was inspired by when the Prussians asked people to give over their gold jewellery to fight Napoleon, and in exchange, they got black iron jewellery. We did the same, but with coal, as a kind of climate movement. And then the Seed Exchange at the V&A was more of a direct protest towards chemical companies like Monsanto and their attempt to control seeds. We created a space where seeds were the shared resource, turning a normally commercialised practice into a communal exchange; again it’s silent, everyday activism, filling the gaps left by over-commercialisation.
FF: How does that activist approach extend to your more-than-human collaborators? For example, when intervening in an environment, how do you navigate ethical multi-species care?
AM: My intention is to give them a place to live. I’m always just putting in the foundation, I’m not over engineering it and then that species will do what it wants, whether it even wants. I’m also aware that I’m an artist and not an ecologist, that’s also where the need to collaborate with other experts comes in.
FF: What do you ultimately hope people take away from these projects, or how do you want different publics to engage with them over time?
AM: To use it, and use it in an everyday way. To the point where they don’t even know they’re part of it.
More information on Slow Disasters is available on the dedicated Looking Forward project page and for more details on Merritt’s upcoming projects, including Intertidal Allotment, see @somethingandson on Instagram.