Tidal time and the mud archive

Tidal time and the mud archive

Mangroves are different worlds at different times during the tidal cycle. Each turn of the tide shifts the processes, relations and behaviours here, re-mattering the estuary in a lunar metamorphosis. The mangrove world lives by tidal change and regularity, incorporating it in a literal, embodied sense. The urban mangroves I have been working with accumulate much of the detritus of the city, and mix it, rhythmically, with unravelling stories from the sea. The mud here is an archive of the city, but undone and reorganised through a more-than-human sorting by tide, flood, gravity and life’s movements. Bodies and stories from the city and from the sea transform as they move through the bodies of filter-feeders and are gathered up by crabs and tree roots, becoming undone from their prior meanings. If before these things achieved meaningfulness through their usefulness to human thriving, now new stories emerge from tidal sortings as silica is sucked into clam, microplastic comes up against oyster, petrochemical nudges mangrove root. This paper explores a more-than-human, semioticmaterial ontology that traces the becomings of criteria through the filter-feeding of oysters.