Cicada Paitings (Prototype)
June 2024
Naturally facened (meaning no glue , no stitch)
just their natural hooking mechanism.
it is quite robust. See video
Emergence Report
by Lazo Gitchos
Zane, spinning his camera and microphone towards me, asked if I thought cicadas are smart. “No,” I said, a reflex. I thought of the thousands of red-eyed insects I’d swatted at, picked up, brushed off, and crushed by accident over the last week. Cicadas have, to put it generously, an underdeveloped predator-avoidance instinct. A cicada is not a smart creature; that’s not what it's here on earth to be. The cicadas in Lisle, Illinois, are here this summer to crawl out of the ground, shed a chitinous amber skin, dry off pearl wings, and go to the canopy to eat and scream for a mate. They crawl up the trees in rivers of clicking hooked feet. They tear at one another for positions in the bark from which to emerge and leave behind a vivid cast of their bodies, and they fall in great numbers back to the base of the trees to rot. The decomposing failures, and the nitrogen-rich exoskeletons, feed the trees what nutrients they may lose by the sap-eating of the survivors. Zane, who grew up in Austin with Diego, drove up for the emergence to get over his fear of bugs, and to document Diego's collection and preservation of one hundred thousand exoskeletons. For eight days, the three of us drove through the Chicago suburbs with the windows down and listened. When the screaming became almost unbearable, we pulled into a cul-de-sac and left the cars to pull the bug-shaped shells from trees and fences. We stacked to-go soup containers in the back seat. Zane labeled them. 300 per tub, 334 tubs total. “Paint,” Diego said, when asked what art they would make. “I’m going to use them like paint.” That’s why we needed them from the trees, where their hook-feet were intact and could cling to fabric.
When I was younger we had carpenter ants in the back forty, and I could watch them for hours. They moved as individuals, with goals and motivations in line with the collective but separate from it. Bees were too hard to observe, and wasps and hornets too dangerous, but in ant hills I saw a great cooperation. Zane told me about the leaf cutter ants in Costa Rica, whose colonies operate as superorganisms and use fungus to turn plant matter into their food source. Is that agriculture? Fermentation? And the army ants that operate like a water-beast and kill animals much larger than their individuals? The cicadas have none of that. They are perfectly competitive dunces, and they will tear down every member of their brood for a chance to fly, bumbling, into the treetop to scream. It is a staggering inefficiency, or at least it smells like one. The birds and dogs get fat when the cicadas emerge, and when all the predators are full and happy there are still one trillion cicadas to lay their eggs. Seventeen years later, it will all happen again. So cicadas are not smart like the robins that eat them, or like ants, but in their chaos-blob, their predator-apathy, their relationship to the trees that support many generations in a row, they are non-offensive. An emergence, especially one in which the 13- and 17-year broods are overlapping in the midwest for the first time since 1803, is an impressive thing. But the bugs themselves, armed with a few million years worth of evolutionary intelligence, are just trying to get born and eat and mate before they die.
Photo Documentation by Zane Giordano