Taking Undaria pinnatifida (wakame) as a framework for critique of the characterization of species, human and nonhuman, as “non-native” and “invasive,” scientist Danielle McHaskell, artist/writer Joe Riley, and artist Audrey Snyder explore the hydropolitical ecology of a seaweed widely used in the food industry in all of its uncontainable mobility and multiplicity. Ecologists have used the term “passenger” to characterize “nonnative” and “invasive” species as ocean habitat freeloaders. Undaria is one of two macroalgal “passenger” species included among the world’s 100 “most invasive” organisms. The fault lines between invasion and invasiveness and native and non-native are taken as points of conceptual contact for boundary work between artists and scientists in the study of Undaria’s improvisational and historical patterns of colonization. Passengers of Change references the transportation of seaweed biota in contemporary cargo ship ballast tanks as well as the photographic and phycological materials stored in the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Archives. Undaria is viewed in the context of the rapid globalization of postwar shipping and in its “invasion” of foreign bioregions such as Southern California. It is cast as a passenger of change in this project’s production of both an image archive, chronicling Undaria’s history as a change agent, and a living archive, in the form of a “ballast bench” — seating that doubles as an observation tank housing an experimental study of Undaria’s growth.
Background image: Seaweed specimen Undaria pinnatifida in glass container, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, California. Photo: Joe Riley, 2021
