When the Autumn Leaves Fell: Future Machine Procession in Finsbury Park by Rachel Jacobs

Finsbury Park in North London had a difficult 2021, as did much of the world. As the pandemic continued, the park struggled with government cuts. The impact of a reduced team of rangers was immense. Crime and damage in the park increased. Climate change is manifesting as diseases in trees, flooding in low levels, intense rain swamping the football pitches in Autumn and late Summer. In contrast, Spring and early Summer brought long hot spells, drying out fields and turning sparse grass yellow in the cracked, dusty earth. On the positive side, Weeds and Seeds, the Drumming School and Edible Gardens continued to grow, making things thrive in these miraculous places situated at either end of the park.

Amongst all the park activity, I spent the year preparing for the appearance of the Future Machine. I got to know the committed head ranger, Ricard Zanoli, and built a collaboration with local artist Esi Eshun. I also further developed my alliance with musicians Alexandre Yemaoua Dayo and Dave Kemp, who created the sounds of the Future Machine.

Future Machine is a mysterious artwork that travels across England to the same five different places as the seasons change every year. The plan is to make this same journey every year for 30 years (until 2050). Future Machine appears in each place as a witness to changes that will be visible ‘when the future comes’. The Machine collects and plays back messages to be heard in years to come. It also captures present-day weather, using live weather sensors attached to the back of the artwork. Future Machine sings the sounds of the weather and prints out an invitation to think about the future.

In 2021, Future Machine started its first journey across England. Appearing in Christ Church Gardens in Nottingham, when the trees blossomed, to the River Leven in Cumbria when a small group met up the river as Summer turned to Autumn,

and in Finsbury Park in November as the autumn leaves fell. This journey will be expanded in 2022 to include appearances in Cannington, Somerset and Rotherfield Peppard, Oxfordshire.

Over the course of these journeys, Future Machine has evolved. It’s changed physically as parts of it were rebuilt, improved and refined. But its character and presence have also grown. Future Machine is becoming a being of its own, beyond an artwork. People project their ideas onto it. Myths develop about what it is, where it has come from, and where it’s going. Its presence encourages and embodies people's visions, concerns and dreams of the future. Future Machine’s sounds have also evolved. They’ve become more complex, layered in ways that are different each time. The sounds respond to live data reflecting weather and place, making these elements even more present. Future Machine is creating experiences as it goes. Each appearance, in each place, informs the next.

The human artist/musicians – Rachel Jacobs, Esi Eshun, Alexandre Yemaoua Dayo and Dave Kemp – planned the route through Finsbury Park. Esi devised a route linking seven trees – a willow tree by the lake, a row of silver birches, a eucalyptus tree, an elder tree, a great hornbeam and a mulberry tree. The procession ended where it began, at the London plane tree next to Furtherfield Gallery. Future Machine led the procession, pulled by its companion Rachel Jacobs and others who helped navigate difficult terrain. The seven trees reference the story of the seven sisters star cluster and the seven sisters for whom the road along the park is named – seven elm trees planted in a circle around a walnut tree.

As the procession stopped at each tree, Esi talked about the tree and its history, adding her own reflections. Jo Roach, local poet and founder of Finsbury Park's Pedal Power, a cycling club for people with learning disabilities, read some of her tree-related poems. Ricard, head ranger, spoke of his work in the park. Future Machine also called at Weeds and Seeds to meet May DeGrace, who presented the gardening and drumming projects in her corner of the park.

Many people joined the procession, some coming and going throughout the day, others following all day, some joining in to help push the machine uphill. We stopped along the way for children and adults to turn the handle powering the machine, everyone invited to speak to the future by talking into the small copper trumpet on the side. As Future Machine led the procession, it sang the songs of the weather, changing throughout the day reflecting dry, windy and mild to cold.

The parade ended with a gathering around the London plane tree for a live performance with musicians Alexandre Yemaoua Dayo, David Kemp, Miles NCube, and Terese, along with Rachel and Future Machine. Parakeets sang, their voices echoing from the canopy of the plane tree as they joined the chorus.

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Where the Horses Sing

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Photo by Bear Guerra

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I LIKE TO WALK early and am often alone on the beach, the ocean and the birds my only companions, the tiny sanderlings running back and forth chasing the waves. Some days the sun rising over the headlands makes a pathway of golden light to the shore. Today, the fog was dense and I could just see two figures walking in the distance, until they vanished into the mist, leaving a pair of footprints in the sand until the incoming tide washed them away. It made me wonder what will remain in a hundred years, when my grandchildren’s grandchildren are alive? Will the rising sea have covered the dunes? Climate crisis will by then be a constant partner, and so many of today’s dramas will be lost in a vaster landscape of primal change.

Sensing this reshaping of the seashore, where the waves roll in from across the Pacific, makes my mind stretch across horizons. How this land and our own lives have evolved. One story of science says it was only seventy thousand years ago that humans left Africa on their long migrations across continents, arriving here on the Pacific coast just thirteen thousand years ago, when the Bering Strait was dry land and not ocean; or possibly they came earlier in boats down the coast. But how was life then, long before the written word, when we traveled as small groups, communities of hunters and gatherers?

They may have carried few possessions, but their consciousness contained a close relationship to the land, to its plants and animals, to the patterns of the weather and the seasons, which they needed for their survival. Fully awake with all of their senses, they had a knowing, passed down through generations of living close to the ground, even as they migrated across the continent. Today we are mostly far from the land and its diverse inhabitants. Cut off from these roots, we have become more stranded than we realize, and while our oncoming climate crisis may present us with many problems, we hardly know how to reconnect, to return our consciousness to the living Earth. It is as if, having traveled to the far corners of our planet, we now find ourselves in an increasing wasteland without knowing how to return to where the rivers flow, to where the plants grow wild. And unlike our ancestors, we cannot just pack up and move on, because this wasteland surrounds us wherever we look, like the increasing mounds of plastic and other toxic material we leave in our wake....

Walking the shoreline, watching the little birds searching for insects, my awareness drawn to the sky, the sea, and the shifting sands, I wonder at this gulf between the simple, magical awareness of our ancestors, and our present-day mind, as cluttered as our consumer world. What has happened to our consciousness, now divorced from the multidimensional existence that used to sustain us? Did we need to exile ourselves from this primal place of belonging? And now, as we tear apart the web of life with our machines and images of progress, is there a calling to return, to open the door that has been closed by our rational selves?

When the fog is dense and you can only see a few yards in front of your feet, the world around becomes more elemental. Watching each wave come to the shore is like watching the breath. Sometimes my feet become wet from the rising water, or I move further up the beach. I try to keep my mind empty, part of the sky and the waves, simple, essential. Here nothing is separate, and the inner and outer worlds are closer.

You can read the entire essay at: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/where-the-horses-sing/

Invasives

Unknitting Despair in a Tangled Landscape

by Catherine Bush

Illustration by Lucille Clerc

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IN THE FOUR-HUNDRED-ACRE park a few blocks from my home, I uproot plants: small rosettes of serrated, palm-shaped leaves; slim stalks of jagged-edged green topped with florets of tiny white flowers. It’s mid-morning. I’ve brought garbage bags. I make no attempt to be clandestine. I’m not foraging, like the Polish-Canadian women who come to pluck fresh nettle leaves in the spring, or the man whom I spot cutting orange chicken-of-the-woods mushroom from a decomposing log. Of course you’re not supposed to harvest here. I abandon my stuffed bag by the garbage bins. In clearing the ground around a couple of aged black oak trees in Toronto’s High Park, I’ve stopped perhaps a few hundred thousand seeds of garlic mustard from forming, an infinitesimal drop in the bucket of the invasive plant growth that is spreading through the ravine understory. Futile, likely, but I’m searching to kick-start a response beyond the complicated grief I feel at the sight.

Everywhere humans have traveled, we’ve brought alien species, intentionally and unintentionally. Arriving in a new place, the populations of some such species explode, cause land trauma, displace and eliminate native species, chemically altering the soil to make it inhospitable to other plants.

My parents arrived in Toronto at the end of the 1950s amid the vast, postwar boom of immigration. Both had histories tying them to the city. In the mid-1930s, my paternal grandparents gave up their brief immigrant life in Toronto running a fish-and-chip shop and sailed back to the UK with their Toronto-born, two-year-old son, only to meet the onslaughts of war a few years later. Fearing a Nazi invasion, my maternal grandparents sent my six-year-old mother from their English home to Canada; after five years in Toronto with a foster family, she returned to Norwich an eleven-year-old stranger. History nevertheless entangles us in the waves of Anglo-European invasion that have swept across the continents, including the six centuries of genocidal colonialism in North America.

How can I, child of immigrants, with a long cultural history of colonial extirpation behind me, object to the presence of other invasives, I wonder, as I walk the park’s wooded landscape. Aren’t humans apex invasives, triumphant at eliminating other species and creating monocultures? What I’m trying to figure out is how, in these days of mounting ecological loss, I can love and care for land that isn’t mine, land that I’ve inhabited for years yet where I have no personal ancestry, land historically stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, which has nevertheless become my microclimate.

You can read the entire essay on: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/invasives/