The blobarium of Mary Harris
terrarium, gelose, mud, blob, oat
2024
«On 26 May 1973, in a Dallas suburb, Mrs Mary Harris found a pale yellow, foamy organism the size of a cookie in her garden. She tried to get rid of it and cut it into small pieces. Two weeks later, reconstituted, it had grown to the size of sixteen cookies. Herbicides, beatings with sticks, the fire brigade’s hose, nothing helped… Then, one day, it disappeared. People thought it was an extraterrestrial visitor – it was the 1970s. The thing was nicknamed «blob», in reference to Irvin Yeaworth’s 1958 science-fiction film The Blob, in which Steve McQueen struggles with a creature made up of a gelatinous mass that grows at the rate of the humans it devours». Tobie Nathan Mary Harris’s Blobarium is an installation-performance in the form of a scientific experiment. It attempts to answer the question: how can we rethink the encounter between a human and an extraterrestrial? The work is made en- tirely of organic matter: blob, agar and plants. The terrarium reproduces the ideal environment for the development of a blob, the only unicellular species visible to the naked eye. The Blobarium questions the impact of man on an ecosystem. The laboratory gloves seem to invite spectators to come into contact with this environment. This seemingly innocuous act has a major impact on the life that develops there. By touching the agar, the spectators alter the biotope, accelerating the process of decomposition and even destroying living things.
The work is inspired by an anecdote from the 70s in the USA about the first encounter between a human woman – Mary Harris – and a blob, which she thought was an extraterrestrial.