CURRENTLY ON VIEW AT WESTBETH GALLERY: To the Core, and for the Record (Redux). 2025 This iteration of To the Core, and for The Record, Romero’s Thesis Installation, includes Descending (2025), the three-channel video installation of scans from the Newark Basin Coring Project. These cores were extracted from Rutgers, Princeton, and Nursery Rd sites and are about five kilometers in depth, showing layers formed in over two hundred million years. With each video, an audio corresponding to data sonification of color and grain size studies of the cores was created in collaboration with New Brunswick-based artist Miguel Romero-Trejos. This research-based project was possible thanks to a collaboration with the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at Rutgers University; Romero was interested in learning about environmental history while engaging with modes of alternative archiving and contrasting ways of relating to the Earth. “ As an immigrant artist living in the state of New Jersey for over fifteen years, I have always questioned a sense of belonging while living in a colonized Indigenous land. Last year, I became a mother for the first time, and this act has been a significant way of rooting. I decided I wanted to learn more about the Earth here and pay respect to the grounds of Lenapehoking. When visiting the Core Repository at Rutgers, I was fascinated by its planetary-looking aspect. I was overwhelmed and humbled, grasping the Earth’s timeline. So wise, so old, so powerful.” —Natalie Romero Channel 1: Hole ID_Princeton_1 Duration: 38 mins. Channel 2: Hole ID_Rutgers_1 Duration: 54 mins Channel 3: Hole ID_NurseryRd_1 Duration: 53mins.
To the core, and for the Record - MFA Thesis Show (2025)
To the Core, and For the Record, is a research-based sound and video installation that uses local geological data and history to create a counter-archive conveying Indigenous history and ways of relating to the Earth. The project is also inspired by philosopher Edouard Glissant's theories of relationality and opacity from The Poetics of Relation.
The record has four songs containing data sonification and sound archives, including data from the Newark Basin Coring Project, sea level variations at Jersey Shore, and electromagnetic plant data from the Rutgers Ecological Preserve. The Sound installation and musical record was produced in collaboration with New Brunswick-based artist Miguel Romero-Trejos and with research support from geologists at Rutgers' Earth and Planetary Sciences Department.
'We are always looking at the Earth.
What if the Earth looked back at us?
Through the drilled land, what does She see?
Over 200 million years of witnessing…everything
storms,
extinctions,
invasions,
extractions
presidential elections.
Layers of Earth
skin and sweat
after dancing to slow songs with the cosmos
becoming dried bloody colors,
ghosts of ancient waters,
calcified fish, radiation,
occasional hematite
Memory itself is the bedrock
a record of time
becoming an edge with the rising waters of the ocean
Waves daring to wash the future off over and over again,
forgetting perhaps,
in tireless attempts to become a new wave,
until the whale breach becomes a flight into the sky
until everything mysterious becomes an old friend.
Natalie Romero
