Variation From Survival Piece #2: Notations on the Ecosystem of the Cargill Salt Works

Variation From Survival Piece #2: Notations on the Ecosystem of the Cargill Salt Works is the preparatory drawing made by the Harrisons to notate the production process of Shrimp Farm, Survival Piece #2, realized in the gardens of C3A. The drawing functions as a complete instruction manual to build, maintain, and sustain an installation thought as “biologically competent” and “self-regulating.” Each Survival Piece reflects a thoroughly researched proposal for sustainable urban farming in the face of what the Harrisons anticipated will be a future where climate disruption and subsequent food shortages are inevitable. They are based on the following five understandings:

First understanding: Nature’s economic system stores the energy that it does not immediately need mostly in carbon formations.

Second understanding: Nature does not charge a profit as do culture’s economic systems.

Third understanding: All natural systems are dissipative structures with individuals that form them living, reproducing, then dying with indeterminacy as a norm.

Fourth understanding: All natural systems have learned to nest within each other, and, within a context of symbiosis contribute to collective systems survival, sometimes with abundance.

Fifth understanding: Human constructed artifacts particularly legal, political, economic as well as production and consumption systems seek constancy but are often in violation of the laws of conservation of energy pointing toward systems entropy.

(Text written by TBA21 and used as wall label in the exhibition "Abundant Futures", C3A, Córdoba, 2022)