Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen: In the flow

A video installation and artist talk at The Luminary. In the flow is a video installation and artist talk by artist collaborators Nina Barnett and Jeremy Bolen that considers St. Louis as a site shaped by overlapping histories of material, environmental and human movement. In tracking evidence of flow, this work engages with languages of containment, sediment, channeling and circulation that structure the city, from water infrastructure and the Mississippi River to the intersecting movement of industrial materials, nuclear waste, petrochemicals, and people. The artists consider how these contemporary flows echo earlier ones: ballast transported from Africa to the United States on transatlantic voyages, the movement of plant species and other materials across colonial networks, and the circulation and containment of nuclear waste in St. Louis. Drawing on Sylvia Wynter’s thinking around the construction of the human and post-human, the work asks how human bodies—understood simultaneously as biological, racialized, and material entities—participate in and are transformed by these histories of flow. Moving between exterior and interior spaces, visible and invisible materials, and past and future trajectories, the artists invite viewers to consider these large-scale systems sensorially: to move one’s own body through the same pathways as ballast, to inhabit landscapes marked by radioactive and industrial residues, and to imagine futures in which the materials of our environments—mine dust, petrochemicals, contaminated water—become increasingly inseparable from our own bodies.