Martina Duque Arboleda

Angry Roots (2023)

3 ft x 5ft

Wood and Gouache on Plexiglass Panels

A site-specific exploration of the infuriating history of the land surrounding Collect Pond in Mannahatta, NY informed by the centuries of trauma that it has endured. From the genocide of the Werpoes, a “small band of Munsee, the northernmost division of the Lenape Tribe, the pollution of the water and the death of the land and soil ripped and torn for infrastructure at the hands of colonial settlers, and the defacement of an ancient burial site where thousands of freemen (formerly enslaved african americans) had been laid to rest.

The earth remembers, just how we do. It’s roots hold all this anger, all this torment, all this betrayal. The woman screaming is my mother, akin to my mother earth, since both women raised me to be the person I am today. Just how my mother holds generations of frustration in her nerves, mother earth holds trauma in her mycelial roots. Together they scream for justice.

When I was 16 I learned that the forest floor is an interconnected web of mycorrhizal fungi. An organized knot of pulsing electric mycelium string, a line of communication between the trees and plants that line the forest floor. An ancient, buried language that allows the land to feel and to heal itself, the mycelium outstretched like a million helping hands, bridging different species of trees and plants so they can ask for each other’s help in times of need. Twisting and furling through the land, making up our mother earth, reflecting the stringy nerves of a human nervous system that send messages to different parts of the body, making us hurt when something is broken, and making us twinkle like stars when we are happy.

Does this mean every time I step into a forest my foot is met with a thousand little “yelps!” and “screeches”? Do my footsteps hurt? Or are our legs, human, animal, and insect alike, giving the ground prickly little tickles as we run around muddy riverbeds and up the rocky hills?

Does this mean Mother Earth’s fungal nerves hold her trauma, stress, and anger just how we do? Do her hips ache from war and shoulders tense from exploitation and hate? Does Mother Earth scream when we rip apart her grassy flesh and strong alder locks, filling her gaping wounds with heavy concrete? She must be carrying this anger with her. A red hot fire burning in her electric mycelial chest as the silly giggly humans tear apart the mere thing that gave them life.

Photos by Rocky Weinberg