Saturday Sessions

12–4:30 PM

Video Screening: There Are Things in This World That Are Yet to Be Named

Erin Johnson’s There Are Things in This World That Are Yet to Be Named (2020) will be shown at the Triennial Hub throughout the day. This video focuses on Solanum plastisexum, an Australian bush tomato whose reproductive system defies fixed categorization—even by the fluid standards of the plant kingdom. For this reason, it was not classified by botanists for decades. Footage of the botany team who named the species is intercut with voiceover excerpts from love letters; the video is a meditation on the limits and biases of scientific language, reimagining how we relate to the natural world through a queer, biocentric lens.

2–4 PM

Community Planting on Floating Garden

Join us on the Erie Canal behind the Medina Triennial Hub for a hands-on planting day aboard Floating Garden. Together with artist Mary Mattingly and the Triennial team, community members will help establish a living ecosystem on the barge, contributing to a shared artwork. Please bring hand tools and gloves and come ready to dig in and take part in creating a garden that will grow throughout the Triennial. Plant donations are also welcome.

4:30–6 PM

Material Affairs: From Weaving to Future Materials with Kärt Ojavee

Estonian artist and designer Kärt Ojavee will give a talk and screening exploring how emerging technologies intersect with traditional craft. Her research examines the evolving relationships between people, tools, and materials, proposing ways to imagine the future while sustaining tactile connections to hand-crafted objects. Equally at ease handweaving carbon and Kevlar—materials engineered for permanence—as she is creating sea-sourced biomaterials valued in food and medicine, Ojavee’s approach to textiles is conceptual, exploring their historical meaning and possibilities for future development. In recent years, she has expanded her experiments to include limestone, oil shale ash, and extracted scents.

Participant Biographies

Erin Johnson is an artist and filmmaker based in New York. She received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from the University of California, Berkeley, and has participated in residencies including the Jan van Eyck Academie, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Her work has been exhibited or screened internationally at venues such as e-flux, MOCA Toronto, Munchmuseet, Times Square Arts, and REDCAT. Johnson is the Undergraduate Director and a faculty member in the Studio Art Program at New York University.

Mary Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans large-scale public sculpture and collage-based photography, imagining adaptive futures shaped by ecological interdependence. Best known for sculptural ecosystems that inhabit civic space—from floating food forests to tidal water clocks—her work brings attention to water, food, and shelter. In parallel, her photographic collages offer intimate, symbolic reflections on these same questions, transforming documentation into speculative diagrams and visual poems.

Kärt Ojavee is an artist and designer who combines new technologies with traditional craft. She is interested in the transformation of materials over time, and the ways in which materials are in symbiosis with their environment. Ojavee creates experimental materials and has recently been working with various surplus materials and seaweed biomass, focusing on the value of matter. She is a professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts’ textile department and head of the Craft Studies MA programme together with Juss Heinsalu. Together with Reet Aus, she founded DiMa lab that focuses on sustainable design and materials development.