A fertile mind
I think rewilding might be the solution to a lot of the world’s wicked-seemingly-unsolvable-problems. “Think about it,” I said to Volker. “When we rewild our lands with native species, flora & fauna, nature rebuilds itself, and we that the possibility for us too.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, “rewilding will not solve the housing crisis. Or inflation. Or the war.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure,” I told him.
He wasn’t having it. “Sleep on it,” I said, as I do when I can’t quite explain the reasoning behind the theories I propose, almost routinely before going to sleep.
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“There is a wild self in all of us, a part that longs to be fed by what is untamed and free.”
—George Monbiot, Feral: Rewilding the Land, Sea and Human Life
Monbiot writes about how modern humans suffer from a kind of emotional and ecological disconnection. He says there’s a deep, often unspoken longing to re-engage with the wild, both in nature and within ourselves. Rewilding, he says, isn’t just about restoring landscapes. It’s about allowing ecosystems and people to find their own paths again. It’s not just conservation, it’s emotional restoration, too.
Surely, you’ve heard of how wolves change rivers?
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It’s been over a month since I’ve been back in Berlin, back to the studio, back to building my creatures. And as I build them, I keep thinking about how, in the past few years, climate took quite the back seat in public discourse, especially post-COVID. I’ve heard Bidens’ administration did a lot during his term and China and to an extent even India is really up there in terms of renewable. I know AI might help us speak to bats and we have enough gene data to bring back the wooly mammoth, but still on a world scale, the agenda feels less significant and the voices feel disoriented and unfocused.
I ran into a friend recently at a bar in Neukölln, she works in climate policy. She seemed, well, completely demoralized. A far cry from the person I knew a few years ago, super enthusiastic, energized by sharing the news from the climate lobby.
“No-one-cares,” she said.
“I think climate might be the only thing that could slow down this whole AI acceleration toward AGI.” I replied.
As I said it, I had this weird out-of-body feeling, a déjà vu, while realising also how unrelated my answer was to her remark. I’ve said this before, probably at another bar. And I’m starting to see a pattern: how I wait, actually, that’s not true—I look for any opportunity to drop the AI thing and fuse it with my whole natural-vs-artificial duality forever theme.
Ridiculous, but authentic. Haha.
To be completely honest, I’m not against AI’s or even the tech giants in their mission to create AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). It’s the unnecessary hype in certain spaces, the speed, the strange religious fervour within the tech industry, the insane funding, the energy these systems consume, the slop flooding the internet, the erosion of learning and creativity that gets me. So basically… a lot.
In The AI Con, Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna warn about the dangers of uncritical naming and anthropomorphising the technology. For example, the AI that helped decode the entire protein structure of human DNA and large language models (LLMs) are both lumped under the same umbrella term: "AI." (By the way, the term AI itself was accidental, it was originally meant to be cybernetics.) I don’t think it’s intentional; it’s just hard to de-categorise once a name picks up speed, and in this case, like wildfire.
What I do find creepy is how LLMs, trained on users’ data (often unlawfully!) benefit from the reputation of AI systems that actually advance critical scientific research. Even if both fall under the broad category of software using neural networks, they should be named differently so we can critique specific use cases. One suggestion from the authors: call LLMs synthetic text extruding machines, which, honestly, feels pretty damn accurate.
Another thing that surprises me is how quickly we abandon our morals when big funding enters the picture, as if data exploitation is just a (forced) consent button we all have to click. We desperately need informed skepticism about all this technological grandstanding, especially when it seems like this is where all the world’s funding is going, while being systematically pulled from the things that actually make us human: cultural institutions, NGOs, museums, universities.
The scale of it all is disorienting. It affects everything, everyone, like a full-blown unraveling of the existing world order, unfolding in real time. Are people around you losing their jobs? Or struggling to find any? It’s been happening for the past two years. At first, we thought it was COVID. Then a post-COVID recession. Maybe even the war in Ukraine. All reasonable explanations: slowing economies, tighter budgets, less funding for creative work. But how long can these reasons keep covering up what’s really happening?
And more importantly, what are we doing about it?
Nada.
Which brings me to another thing I keep unexpectedly dropping in every now and then, UBI, Universal Basic Income. I’ve read that a well-designed UBI could cost somewhere between 2% and 5% of the UK’s GDP. Of course, it’s not a complete solution. It’s hardly any money at all in the grand scheme. But it could be enough to offset a huge amount of civil unrest that might erupt from widespread joblessness.
I mean, I am just saying. (insert emoji with hands up in despair)
_
Working for a few months in India allows me to reset for Germany. I am happy to be back, to be reunited with my boo. I feel more zealous, as the tiredness from the physical labour of my work hasn’t set in yet. I even feel motivated to take German classes again. I have a generally positive outlook, ready to face the slow churn of German bureaucracy, even to book a doctor’s appointment I know I’ll only get three months later.
Back in my studio, projects are waiting to begin. Older works are asking to be completed. New ideas rush in, eager to take shape. It’s an optimal creative state. My mind is full, and very fertile. I’m beginning to see that fertility manifest quite literally in my latest works and I try to capture this mental moment, knowing that some of this un-intellectualised, free play of thoughts could be lost later.
Tappan in Los Angeles has commissioned some new pieces, and I’m happy that my creatures seem to speak to people more now than when I first started building them in 2022–23. (Maybe, time is really the trick & maybe repetition: that creates familiarity, which then creates trust). I remember how nervous I was making those first few works. Even though the frenzy overrode the fear, I kept wondering: Will people understand them? Will they like them?
Now, two years later, I’m building my creatures again and very excited to repopulate the world with some more. The three-legged structure of the creature comes easily now, something I credit to muscle memory. The head, or the face which is probably 15% of the entire shape, takes almost the same time as the rest of the body. Though this time it’s taken even longer to build them, because of the natural evolution & addition of some sexual organs. Carving something lifelike, like breasts can be very intitmitdating. It’s pretty much life-size (in one creature 34D to be precise) I couldn’t afford to get it wrong.
I remember when I was new to the art scene in Berlin, I’d joke: It’s all vaginas and penises in the galleries—clits on graffiti walls, boobs in pottery. Now I think: Maybe I’m having my boob moment. Have I arrived as an artist in Berlin? I laugh to myself. And of course, I repeat that obnoxious line to people after a few drinks.
Jokes aside, breasts are a very serious matter. They’re sensual. Lovely to hold. And here I am, touching them as I shape them, spraying water, massaging them. Things are getting a little NSFW in the studio.
And maybe, in that moment, I begin to understand the power of fertile totems.
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You know, sometimes it takes years to fully understand your own work. I feel we try to rush with the whole meaning-making very early on and I think I need to slow down there. Maybe, sleep over it on many nights.
What’s emerging is a beautiful union, something animal, human, and plant all at once. A loud cry for life and reproduction.
Honestly, I don’t like to dig too deep into my subconscious to extract extra meanings for why I build what I build. I prefer to stay with what I’m consciously aware of. But there was definitely a moment when I wondered: Is this that internal biological clock, speaking to me through the work?
My close friends are getting pregnant. Having babies. And maybe something in me is responding, not through words or decisions, but through sculpture.
_
either way, my creatures multiply, repopulate, re-wild the world. I see them as creatures from & for a not-yet-tamed, futurist, or maybe even parallel world. They are my connection to that environment. Or perhaps more like a longing. An invitation to the unknown. To something different. To another language. To the magnifique, to life.
fin
Links
How wolves change rivers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q
Dhun, Jaipur: https://www.instagram.com/p/DKmWS2uPWzM/?hl=en
Rewinding the world, Ben Goldsmith: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/rewilding-the-world-with-ben-goldsmith/id1685196752
Rise of the Toligarchs: https://www.profgalloway.com/rise-of-the-toligarchs/
Expanding morality to the non-human: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/07/books/review/the-moral-circle-jeff-sebo-animals-robots-gods-webb-keane.html
Big Tech’s Hype: https://thecon.ai
Motherfrackers: https://www.monbiot.com/2025/01/20/motherfrackers/
The Ain Sakhri Lovers Figurine: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/H_1958-1007-1
Terracotta Figurines of Asherah: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=Terracotta+Figurines+of+Asherah&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#vhid=kNU2yLm9JnY41M&vssid=_GFL3Z-jAJuCExc8P8MGSyQk_56