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Antennae Issue #60-Earthly Surfacing

2023, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

The first in a trilogy -- 'Earthly Surfacing' focuses on questions of epistemology and representation of the land. Seen by who? Seen how—through which institutional or other lenses? Represented with what materials? Rejecting or embracing the aesthetics of whose ideological traditions and cultures? This issue features contributions by: Janine Antoni | Diane Burko | Thomas Busciglio-Ritter | Sophie Chao | Assaf Evron | Shambhobi Ghosh | James Kelly | Victoria King | Lisa Le Feuvre | Laura Malacart | Joey Orr | Cindy Qiao | Miriam Seidel | Frances Whitehead | Derrick Woods-Morrow Front cover image: Janie Morgan Petyarre, 'Bush Orange Dreaming',1998, Utopia, 59 x 45 cm, acrylic on canvas

antennae THE JOURNAL OF NATURE IN VISUAL CULTURE SPRING 2023 earthly surfacing antennae THE JOURNAL OF NATURE IN VISUAL CULTURE edited by Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief Giovanni Aloi – School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art Academic Board Steve Baker – University of Central Lancashire Melissa Boyde – University of Wollongong Ron Broglio – Arizona State University Matthew Brower – University of Toronto Eric Brown – University of Maine at Farmington Carol Gigliotti – Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver Antennae (founded in 2006) is an independent, hybrid, peer reviewed Donna Haraway – University of California, Santa Cruz journal. We are free to the public, non-funded by institutions, and not Susan McHugh – University of New England supported by grants or philanthropists. The Journal’s format and contents are Brett Mizelle – California State University informed by the concepts of ‘knowledge transfer’ and ‘widening participation’. Claire Parkinson – Edge Hill University Independent publications share histories of originality, irreverence, and Cecilia Novero – University of Otago innovation and Antennae has certainly been an important contributor to Jennifer Parker–Starbuck – Royal Holloway what will be remembered as the non-human turn in the humanities. The Annie Potts – University of Canterbury first issue of Antennae coincided with the rise of human-animal studies; a Ken Rinaldo – Ohio State University field of academic inquiry now become mainstream. Our independent status Nigel Rothfels – University of Wisconsin has allowed us to give a voice to scholars and artists who were initially not Jessica Ullrich – University of Art Münster taken seriously by mainstream presses. Through our creative approach, we Andrew Yang – School of the Art Institute of Chicago have supported the careers of experimental practitioners and researchers across the world providing a unique space in which new academic fields like Global Contributors the environmental humanities and critical plant studies could also flourish. Sonja Britz / Tim Chamberlain / Conception Cortes / Amy Fletcher / Katja Kynast / Christine Marran / Carolina Parra / In January 2009, the establishment of Antennae’s Senior Academic Board, Zoe Peled / Julien Salaud / Paul Thomas / Sabrina Tonutti / Joanna Willenfelt Advisory Board, and Network of Global Contributors has affirmed the journal as an indispensable research tool for the subject of environmental studies and visual culture. Still today, no other journal provides artists and scholars with an opportunity to publish full color portfolios of their work or richly Advisory Board Rod Bennison / Helen J. Bullard / Claude d’Anthenaise / Lisa Brown / Chris Hunter / Karen Knorr / Susan Nance / Caroline Picard / Andrea Roe / David Rothenberg / Angela Singer / Snæbjörnsdóttir/Wilson illustrated essays at no cost to them or to readers. A markedly transdisciplinary Copy Editor and Design publication, Antennae encourages communication and crossover of knowledge Erik Frank and Giovanni Aloi among artists, scientists, scholars, activists, curators, and students. Contact Giovanni Aloi, the Editor in Chief at: [email protected] Visit our website for more info and past issues: www.antennae.org.uk Front cover: Janie Morgan Petyarre, Bush Orange Dreaming,1998, Utopia, 59 x 45 cm, acrylic on canvas Back cover: Tommy Jones, Men’s Ceremony, 1999, Utopia, 91 x 61 cm, acrylic on canvas Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (ISSN 1756-9575) is published triannually by AntennaeProject, Chicago. Contents copyright © 2020 by the respective authors, artists, and other rights holders. All rights in Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and its contents reserved by their respective owners. Except as permitted by the Copyright Act, including section 107 (fair use), or other applicable law, no part of the contents of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture may be reproduced without the written permission of the author(s) and/or other rights holders. By submitting your article for publication, you grant Antennae the right to reproduce the work and associated images in electronic format or on paper format derived from the on-line work. If the work has been solicited or commissioned by Antennae, the intellectual property of such contribution rests with Antennae. If such category of work is published in Antennae, and this also represent the first published instance for the work, a written request for a re-print needs to be forwarded to the Editor in order to obtain authorisation for partial or full reproduction of the work. Interview questions written for Antennae and relative answers supplied by interlocutors become, upon publication, intellectual property of Antennae and a written request for a reprint needs to be forwarded to the Editor in order to obtain authorisation for partial or full reproduction in other publications. earthly surfacing contents 48 Behold the white storm 71 A place called Utopia text: Thomas Busciglio-Ritter in conversation: Victoria King and Giovanni Aloi Thomas Busciglio-Ritter examines the entanglement of weather, physicality, and racial discourses in the early- 19th-century landscape paintings of British-American artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Contrary to studies framing Cole as a “proto-environmentalist”, this essay argues that the artist’s long adherence to the sublime as a pictorial mode. A Place Called Utopia, at Saul Hay Gallery in Manchester, is an exhibition of artwork by noted contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists curated by Victoria King, including Emily Kngwarreye and Minnie Pwerle. The collection celebrates art from the remote Aboriginal outstation of Utopia, 270 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s semi-arid, red centre. 109 127 An ecocritical reading of the folktales from the sundarbans text: Shambhobi Ghosh The Sundarbans Archipelago is known for its fragile ecosystem. Mainstream literature and media often hold local people responsible for the islands’ ecological decline, or ‘erase’ human presence altogether. However, Sundarbans’ folktales tell a different story. 6 Where we find ourselves in conversation: Janine Antoni and Joey Orr This conversation between artist Janine Antoni and curator Joey Orr took place at the end of a site visit and long installation process. Antoni brings her long artistic commitment to embodiment into the context of a biological field station, inviting the public to return to the body through intimately relating to the land. 152 89 161 Our land The land next time in conversation: Sophie Chao and Giovanni Aloi text and images: Cindy Qiao text and images: Derrick Woods-Morrow Centered on Sophie Chao’s new book, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua this conversation considers the empirical and intellectual context and contributions of the work, its ethical and conceptual insights into the moral subjectivity of plants as actors and resources, and forms of radical imagi- nation, hope, care, and justice. Our Land by Cindy Qiao is a series of portraits of the fleeting layers of leaves, fruits, seeds, and twigs on the ground in the area between two steps in urban green spaces. It’s the soil that one walks upon without seeing it. It’s the remaining earth in public parks, botanical gardens, and sidewalk tree beds in manmade cities. Who owns land and by what means? Derrick Woods-Morrow’s The Sand is Ours compiles an archive of reflections during a summer on Fire Island – a cascading paradise of boardwalks, utopian ideals like no other, romantic hope for inclusionary spaces – none of which actually exist. 193 211 In the shadow of the palms 141 From sea to source: The journey of the Biobío River text: James Kelly A travelogue following the course of the Biobío river in southern Chile from its mouth in the city of Concepción up to its source in the Andes, the homeland of the Pehuenche indigenous people, superposing the physical journey along the length of the river with a temporal journey through the geological evolution of the landscape. Phytophiliac Beyond land art in conversation: Frances Whitehead and Giovanni Aloi in conversation: Lisa Le Feuvre and Giovanni Aloi Questions of participation, sustainability, and cultural change animate Frances Whitehead’s work as she considers the surrounding community, the landscape, and the interdependency of multiple ecologies. Whitehead’s practice integrates art and sustainability, traversing disciplines to engage other communities. Committed to communicating and testing ideas, Lisa Le Feuvre has curated exhibitions in museums and galleries across Europe. Here, Le Feuvre talks about the work and legacy of Holt/Smithson and the future of Land Art in the Anthropocene. 175 Collaborative Toponymy: street names as linguistic fossils text and images: Laura Malacart London-based artist Laura Malacart focussed on a plot of land and researched its histories, ecologies, industries, arts, languages and spirituality and, in collaboration with a range of local communities and individuals, she created an ethically grounded narrative. 223 Painting the anthropogenic landscape in conversation: Diane Burko and Miriam Seidel Diane Burko’s concern for the future of our environment and issues of climate change led her to develop series of ongoing projects, developing visual strate- gies in paintings and photography that use historical comparisons of global glacial change through. 7 contents 243 Collages for Mies text and images: Assaf Evron Assaf Evron discusses his largescale photographic intervention with Mies Van Der Rohe designed high-rises in Chicago. In 2019, following Mies’ own collage work, Evron installed a massive cliff photograph onto the windows of the iconic modernist building evoking the complicated relationships between modernist architecture and the natural world. Nancy Petyarre Arnkerrth Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming I, 1998, Utopia 50 x 35 cm acrylic on canvas © Nancy Petyarre 8 9 editorial Giovanni Aloi Nothing. A pale blue sky? A sheet of paper covering the windowpanes? What do we see when we look outside Mies van der Rohe’s windows at S.R. Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago? These are the questions raised by artist Assaf Evron’s life-size photographic interpretation of van der Rohe’s windows that he photographed in 2015, over sixty years after the building was originally designed. The image was included in Earthly Observatory, the exhibition I co-curated with artist Andrew Yang for the galleries of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. It was situated towards the end a section that questioned the legacy of modernism. Earthly Observatory was an exhibition about aesthetics and epistemology, the outdatedness of natural history taxonomies, and the urgency that climate change imposes on ethics. It was an exhibition about representation and authorship. Who is in charge of representation? Who is allowed to see what? What can we see from certain institutional lenses and what is left out? Who holds epistemological authority today? Among other aspects of art making in the Anthropocene, Earthly Observatory acknowledged the impossibility of claiming any kind of objectivity in the production of knowledge and it emphasized the rhetorical and political currents that always define the representation of the natural world. Nature is political. It is especially so after the colonialist epistemological hegemony of natural history has run its course and new nature, or ecologies without nature, are needed in order to address the challenges of climate change in effective ways. To me and co-curator Yang, Evron’s windows represented all of this and more. Van der Rohe’s distinctive steel and glass architectural style is recognized today as the quintessential manifestation of Modernism: the late 19th to the mid-20th century movement that aimed at radically breaking with the past in order to envision a more rationalized, efficient, and functional world. Evron’s minimalist photographs of van der Rohe’s windows allude to an impossible promise of a brighter future for the city of Chicago and by extension, the world. The Illinois Institute of Technology was originally founded in 1937 as “The New Bauhaus” by László Moholy-Nagy who, like van der Rohe, who fled Germany during the ascent to power of the Nazi party. However, the institution failed to strike a sustainable balance between creative exploration and the pressing demands of capitalism. Evron’s photograph, with its too-serene and almost eerie, perfect skies, alludes to the failure of Modernism as a pivotal moment of reckoning between idealism and reality in the history of the West. What do we see from van der Rohe’s windows? Nothing? A post-apocalyptic world? A fictitious serenity that equates to blindness? The total alienation of human race? This issue of Antennae, titled Earthly Surfacing is the first of a tryptic centered around the pressing epistemological questions that were foregrounded by Earthly Observatory. It is no coincidence that Earthly Surfacing should also be Antennae’s issue number 60. The idea is to celebrate this moment in the life of the journal with a year-long project dedicated to the Earth and the many conceptions that the word earth mobilizes from cartography, to landscape, soil, lands, and beyond. Earthly Surfacing, the current installment, Earthly Mattering which will follow, and lastly, Earthly Observatory—a catalog of the 2021 exhibition featuring all works included in the exhibition as well as transcripts of the three panel discussions that expanded the displays. 'Earthly Surfacing' focuses on questions of epistemology and representation of the land. Seen by who? Seen how—through which institutional or other lenses? Represented with what materials? Rejecting or embracing the aesthetics of whose ideological traditions and cultures? In this context, the term surfacing reflects the notion of representing or teasing out externality; the act of surfacing as a process of giving an outward finish to something as well as the idea of emergence, in this case of ideas and ideologies that the act of surfacing always entails. Surfacing thus works as an umbrella term for a range of practices and approaches to the representation of the land as conceived from multiple cultural standpoints. To emerge, to bring to the surface, to make something previously hidden appear in plain sight. The earth's surfaces are essentially interfaces, and negotiating our engagement with them might at times entail a level of implied and inescapable superficiality and fictitiousness. At others, reaching deeper into these surfacing processes might reveal entanglements and ecologies that have often been side-lined and overlooked by the institutional gaze. The result is a diverse range of perspectives all committed to represent the earth beyond the strictures of the landscape painting construct that since the 17th century has defined our conception of the planet, and that of nature alongside it, more than we sometimes acknowledge. As always, I am extremely grateful to all the contributors, Antennae’s academic board for their help with peer-review and other matters, and to anyone else involved in the making of this issue. Giovanni Aloi Editor in Chief of Antennae 10 11 Assaf Evron Untitled (S.R. Crown Hall), 2016 Pigment prints and aluminum frames © Assaf Evron 12 13 Surfacing verb or noun 1. - rise or come up to the surface of the water or the ground. - come to people’s attention; become apparent. INFORMAL - (of a person) appear after having been asleep. 2. provide (something) with a particular upper or outer layer. A close-up view of the Babylonian map of the World. This partially broken clay tablet contains both cuneiform inscriptions and a unique map of the Mesopotamian world. Probably from Sippar, Mesopotamia, Iraq. 700-500 BCE. The British Museum, London. 14 15 Joseph Graham, William Newman, and John Stacy The Geologic Time Spiral-A Path to the Past, 2008 16 17 Front side of a map titled in black ink Map of the Thirteen Provinces of China. [Reverse separately titled in red ink The World. China.]The left map shows the Ming Empire; the right, the world. Pen-and-ink and watercolor. c. 1800 but possibly based on an earlier map (date unknown) with addition of up-to-date place names. 18 19 Jedediah Hotchkiss Sketch of the battles of Chancellorsville, Salem Church, and Fredericksburg, May 2, 3, and 4, 1863 Museum Collection. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20 21 Martin Waldseemüller Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomæ tra ditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorv. que lustrationes, 1507; 1989, American Geographical Society Library - Maps 22 23 24 25 The Sigüenza Map, 15001599. Mexico--Distrito Federal--Mexico City This map is a cartographic history of the migration of the Aztec from Aztlán to Tenochtitlan. Created in the pictographic style typical of the central Mexican and Puebla valleys during the Post-Classical period, it is the only map of its kind known to exist. It is thought to date from the 16th century. The map shows the path of the migration, along with the story of the places passed and of the migration itself. Alongside the glyph for each location are symbols representing the amount of time spent in each location. A trail of footprints connects these locations. The original migration of the Aztec from the mythical Aztlán to Tenochtitlan marks the historical and symbolic evolution of the Aztec people: their blessing by the gods, founding events in their history, their heroes and leaders, and finally, their settlement on the island of Tenochtitlan, from where they eventually dominated their world. The community that produced the map has not been identified with certainty, but scholars believe it most likely was Chapultepec. The document has been in the possession of historians in Mexico since the 17th century, and is named after Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645-1700), a Mexican scholar and government official who was an early student of Aztec history. 26 27 Victor Temprano Native Land Digital Map, 2020. An increasing number of states now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day either concurrent with or in place of Columbus Day, on the second Monday in October, which might motivate you to learn more about the Native Americans who originally inhabited the area you call home. Victor Temprano, CEO of mapping software developer Mapster, is also the founder of Native Land Digital, a Canadian not-for-profit organization. While working on resource development projects mapping out pipelines in British Columbia several years ago, Temprano began to 28 wonder whose territories they originally were. As he started to research various tribes, he mapped the geographic data he discovered and it grew from there. With an Indigenous Executive Director and Board of Directors who oversee and direct the organization, Native Land Digital has made its data public. You can access the map to learn about territories, languages and treaties of Indigenous Peoples associated with virtually any address. 29 Nasa Global Climate Change map, 2015. The new NASA global data set combines historical measurements with data from climate simulations using the best available computer models to provide forecasts of how global temperature (shown here) and precipitation might change up to 2100 under different greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. 30 31 Alighiero Boetti Mappa, 1989, embridery © Alighiero Boetti 32 33 Unknown A Renaissance woodcut shows a man breaking through the “crystal spheres” part of classical cosmology, to a new concept of the universe. 34 35 The Islamic World Map of 1154 Early in the 12th century, King Roger II of Sicily commissioned Arab Muslim geographer and cartographer Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Idrīs al-sharif al-Idrīsī (or al-Idrisi) to produce a book detailing the geography of the known world. Over the course of nine years, and drawing on earlier works by Ptolemy, Arabic sources, firsthand information from world travelers and his own experience, al-Idrisi in 1154 completed what became one of the most detailed geographical works created during the medieval period. 36 37 Dai Nihon Kaigun Suirorryō, Meiji 6 Chōsen zenzu, 1873, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650 38 39 40 Great Britain. Directorate of Colonial Surveys, cartographer East Africa, 1954, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650 USA dcu 41 António Holanda Nautical Atlas of the World, Folio 6 Recto, North Atlantic Ocean, 1519, 1954, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division Washington, D.C. 20540-4650 USA dcu 42 Produced for King Manuel I of Portugal in 1519 by cartographers Pedro Reinel, his son Jorge Reinel, and Lopo Homem and miniaturist António de Holanda, the atlas contains eight maps on six loose sheets, painted on both sides. This map (folio 6 recto in the atlas) shows the coast of Europe from Holland to Malaga and the African coast from Melilla (a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco) to Cape Palmas (present-day southeast Liberia), as well as the British Isles, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde Islands. 43 44 45 Vladimir V. Kavrayskiy Kavrayskiy VII projection of the Earth. Source image is from NASA’s Earth Observatory “Blue Marble” series. 2007 46 47 Behold the white storm Thomas Busciglio-Ritter examines the entanglement of weather, physicality, and racial discourses in the early19th-century landscape paintings of British-American artist Thomas Cole (1801-1848). In particular, Cole’s picture Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga (1826-29) reveals how his use of violent phenomena such as storms as compositional elements resulted from environmental aesthetics that framed the encounter between man and weather as a White experience of sublime terror. As such, contrary to studies framing Cole as a “proto-environmentalist”, this essay argues that the artist’s long adherence to the sublime as a pictorial mode, manifested in works like Gelyna, actually undermined the relevance of his many commentaries about environmental destruction. The full title of this essay is ‘Behold the White Storm: Sublime Weather, Body, and Fictions of Race in Thomas Cole’s Gelyna (1829)’ text: Thomas Busciglio-Ritter Amidst these horrible reflections, came on a violent storm of wind and rain, and as Cuyler felt it drive in his face, he shuddered at every drop to think on what his poor friend was exposed to. […] He called, but with a faltering voice […]. No answer. A bloody track caught his eye – he followed it round the cliff – a few hasty steps led him on to a bare, open space of high and solid rock, near the extremity of which lay a British officer. It was Rutledge – he was dead.1 I n Gulian Verplanck’s (1786 – 1870) short story “Gelyna: A Tale of Albany and Ticonderoga Seventy Years Ago”, weather plays a crucial role. Set in the Hudson River Valley, the text offers a fictional account of the 1758 Battle of Ticonderoga, an episode of the French and Indian War that pinned Britain and France against each other over the control of Lake George and Lake Champlain, in present-day Upstate New York. Participating in the engagement, British officer Edward Rutledge, whose affair with the wealthy Gelyna Vandyke constitutes the main plot of the story, is wounded and forced to retreat. After a violent storm prevents his friend Herman Cuyler from bringing help to a bleeding Rutledge, the latter climbs to the top of a cliff only to be found dead by Cuyler as the gusts and showers finally subside. Symbolically, and discursively, the soldier dies as the storm dies away. As for Gelyna, the narrative implies that, following her lover’s passing, she spent the rest of her life as a recluse, hiding from the outside world inside her nephew’s house.2 The various entanglements of body and weather manifested in Verplanck’s story suggest a broader relation between the fiction and its environment than what may seem like a saccharine wartime romance. Not only do the parallels drawn between Rutledge’s death and the havoc wreaked by the storm call to attention the enmeshment of human and nonhuman forces in the landscape, but the story also implies discrepancies in the ability of various protagonists to literally weather such phenomena.3 Verplanck, as such, entirely sidelines Indigenous characters, 48 reducing them to an indiscriminate mass of screaming warriors heard from deep in the forest, and whose appetite for blood is only matched by their uncivilized appearance.4 That they should withstand the battle, or the formidable storm following it, does not serve a plot primarily interested in “whitening” both weather and nature through historical invention. The intertextuality and intermediality of Verplanck’s narrative, published in the literary journal The Talisman in 1830, was reinforced by the existence of a corresponding painting, completed by his friend the artist Thomas Cole (1801 – 1848) at the time of the publication. Along with a number of Cole’s compositions, Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga (1829) illustrates the entanglement of weather, physicality, and racial discourses in early-nineteenth-century conceptions of nature in the U.S. Northeast. As this article will explore, Cole’s use of violent phenomena such as storms as compositional elements in several of his paintings, including illustrations for pieces of literary fiction like “Gelyna”, exposed environmental aesthetics and politics that framed the encounter between man and weather as a White experience of sublime terror. As such, contrary to studies framing Cole as a “protoenvironmentalist”, this research argues that the artist’s long adherence to the sublime as a pictorial mode of expression, manifested in works like Gelyna, actually undermined the relevance of his now-famous commentaries about environmental destruction and his lament of a disappearing wilderness.5 Sublime feeling was, in great part, steeped in racial anxieties and helped shelter Euro-American settler colonialism from environmental guilt in New York and New England. Meant to illustrate the moment when Cuyler finds the body of Rutledge, Cole’s landscape picture, which he actually started in 1826, was conceived as a view of the surroundings of Lake George, which appears in the background.6 The ulterior addition, in the foreground, of two figures identified as British officers enabled the painter to adapt his visual discourse to fit Verplanck’s narrative. A version of the image, printed by Francis Kearny (1785 – 1837), was even reproduced with the text.7 Cole’s involvement with the Sketch Club, an artistic association founded in 1827 whose members assisted in the production of the journal, clearly influenced his aesthetic choices, especially as his original oil picture, retitled Gelyna, was eventually purchased by The Talisman’s main publisher, the author Elam Bliss (1779 – 1848).8 The importance granted by Cole to the weather itself in his composition actually reflected both his desire to remain true to Verplanck’s narrative and to his own conceptions of nature, expressed in his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery”. In it, the artist described an array of feelings about visual dramatizing, based on the pictorial depiction of landscapes of the United States. Addressing the apparent lack of history and legendary tales able to populate such spaces in North America, in contrast to the antique fables of Europe, Cole’s essay vindicated intersections between literature and painting as a means to transcend time and speak as much of the past as of the present.9 To him, though nature itself should suffice to excite the imagination of artists, myths could be employed to increase the awe-inspiring character of landscapes too often seen as inferior to the scenery of Western Europe. The difficulty of reading Cole’s art through the lens of postcolonialism or ecocriticism (which would affect, in return, the status of his storm paintings) is in great part due to the overwhelming sublimity of his works.10 Embraced by Euro-American painters at the turn of the nineteenth century, the sublime as a discursive and visual mode was intrinsically linked to disruptive weather events from the early days of 49 Thomas Cole Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga, Oil on panel, 24 x 34 ½ in. (61 x 87.6 cm), 1826-29. Ticonderoga (NY), Fort Ticonderoga Museum Collection. 50 51 threatening weather patterns mask the erasure of human acting forces, obfuscating traces of violence behind the pure awe of untamed elements. The artist vividly recorded the almost mystical personal experience of a thunderstorm in the Catskills during one of his sketching trips, sometime in the 1830s: The scene was changed. […] I was amidst the clouds; I saw no sky, no earth; my imagination took wing. I thought myself far from the earth careening through a permeable waste into some outer void, beyond the grasp of gravitation or attraction. With no law but my own will, I guided my chariot of rock through trackless regions. […] I entered a region where was neither height not depth; it was a chaos like the primeval one. […] There was no rest, no fixedness; all things were left unfinished, mingled in mysterious confusion. […] Suddenly a thicker darkness came on, […] and instantaneously tore the grey scud from the mountains, and rolled the cloudy curtains from before the golden sky. […] I pursued my way down the mountain’s side with a heart filled with delight.14 Francis Kearny After Thomas Cole, Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga. Etching and engraving on paper, 2 15/16 × 4 ¼ in. (7.5 x 10.8 cm), 1830. Baltimore, Baltimore Museum of Art, Garrett Collection. its definition. Philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) used the example in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764) to distinguish between aesthetic values: Finer feeling, which we now wish to consider, is chiefly of two kinds: the feeling of the sublime and that of the beautiful. The stirring of each is pleasant, but in different ways. The sight of a mountain whose snow-covered peak rises above the clouds, the description of a raging storm, or Milton’s portrayal of the infernal kingdom, arouse enjoyment but with horror. […] The sublime moves, the beautiful charms.11 The sublime deeply permeates the visual narratives of Cole, himself a transatlantic artist familiar with British landscape painters and their embrace of the aesthetic.12 Evoking the sentiment of sublime literally in his “Essay on American Scenery”, Cole also insisted on select natural features as particularly suitable to trigger a similar impression on viewers of painted pictures, such as dark skies.13 In his case, however, sublime depictions of 52 A later work by Cole, Tornado in an American Forest (1831), looks like a perfect visual translation of this episode. Making a pair of broken tree trunks the focal point of the composition, Cole turned the weather, in this instance, into the sole actor and subject, beyond the need for human myths like the tale of Gelyna to inhabit the space. The trunks stand like the wounded bodies of a nature profoundly disrupted by a violent occurrence. A tiny White figure, however, is seen holding on to one of the broken trees, venturing into the freshly upended order of the landscape, as it to survey a new perspective. The individual in question is likely the artist himself, self-inscribed into the space.15 Though nature acts according to its own laws, White presence still affirms itself, as if the only witness to its might, and the only one capable of resilience in the face of weather and human catastrophes. As such, actant storms in Cole’s rhetoric also betray a parallel process at play: the notion that the landscape could be erased and replaced, offering a potentially blank slate for a human society to start anew in nature. This metaphor has been aptly laid out by art historian Alan Braddock when examining one of Cole’s most famous works, equally centered on a dramatic weather event: his 1836 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, also known as The Oxbow. The composition exemplifies what Braddock sees as “directionality” in Cole’s art, whereby the apparent movement of storms across a given landscape in his paintings can be equated to processes of colonial transformation and environmental politics undergone by the space.16 In The Oxbow, the passing storm exists the field of view to the left, an area corresponding to a dense and wooded wilderness. In contrast, the corner of sky already cleared of ominous clouds illuminates a tidy area of deforested farmland, stretching all the way to the banks of the Connecticut River. In the foreground, a painter (Cole himself, again) has propped up his artistic equipment on a ledge, as he witnesses the changing atmospheric and environmental conditions. Through visual composition, The Oxbow aligns the horizontal progression of the storm with the advance of so-called civilization and agriculture on a supposedly untouched nature, as if the storm’s violence could clear the terrain, or wipe it clean for Euro-Americans to occupy it. A similar promise transpires in both Tornado in an American Forest and Gelyna. As sunlight pierces through scudding and disaggregating clouds, the vestiges of a destroyed nature already contain the possibility of renewal and replacement. While Herman Cuyler makes his way up the ledge toward his friend’s lifeless body, for instance, 53 Thomas Cole Tornado in an American Forest. Oil on canvas, 46 3/8 × 64 5/8 in. (117.8 × 164.2 cm), 1831. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Corcoran Collection, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund. 54 Thomas Cole Tornado in an American Forest. Oil on canvas, 46 3/8 × 64 5/8 in. (117.8 × 164.2 cm), 1831. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Corcoran Collection, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund. the battle they took part in is already over and a new political order is on the way. The prior French (and Indigenous) control of the region has been washed away with the rain, and the fire of artillery has blasted the land. British colonial forces are now in charge. Cole’s concerns about the natural damage brought by human activities, whether conflicts or economic settlements, have long been known to scholars, and his quote about the “ravages of the axe” has been used in a number of environmental studies of American Art.17 Yet his preoccupation with man-made impacts on ecosystems was paradoxically counterbalanced by his use of violent weather imagery in another, lesser-studied context: the rise of landscape tourism in the U.S. Northeast. The role of landscape art in tourist promotion was in full swing during the 1830s 56 and 1840s. Artists like Cole purposefully or inadvertently helped bolster the public’s interest in American nature and scenic sites, especially along the Hudson River Valley.18 Some even cleared the way for new forms of natural sightseeing, the most striking being a so-called “disaster tourism”, which the painter contributed to with compositions like Crawford Notch (1839). Located in New Hampshire, the notch of the White Mountains had been the theater of a deadly landslide on August 28, 1826, triggered by torrential rainstorms. Resulting in the death of all members of the local Willey family, the weather-induced tragedy triggered intense media coverage. Both artists and writers quickly turned the event into an expression of nature’s sublime strength, motivating the birth of a morbid form of landscape tourism. In the following years, thousands of curious visitors flocked to the site of the ruined Willey House from several regions of the United States and from abroad.19 By the time Cole completed his painting, tourists were charged an admission fee to access the site and a hotel had sprung up to accommodate those who wished to remain there for more than a day. The sublime dread of the mountains gradually became a mass marketing instrument, fictionalized in popular stories such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 The Ambitious Guest, which reimagined the unfolding of the landslide. The novella circulated on both sides of the Atlantic.20 Thus, the United States invented its own natural mythology, imbuing the land with a mystique comparable to the folk tales of Europe. Crawford Notch also featured prominently in the first volume of American Scenery published by George Virtue in London in 1840, with illustrations by the English engraver William Henry Bartlett (1809 – 1854) and texts by the American author Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806 – 1867). This popular portfolio recounted the Willey catastrophe in vivid detail to British readers, perpetuating its storytelling.21 The morbid curiosity for disaster landscapes affected the site of Fort Ticonderoga in an equal manner. This dimension was hinted at in a second landscape of the site that Cole completed two years after his Gelyna painting. Known through subsequent engravings, the composition presents the ruins of the Ticonderoga military fort, once again paired with a raging storm. In that case, stormy weather may reflect the idea of a human storm, that of technological progress and political conflict, evoking ideas of the rise and fall of civilizations. Swept away by colonization, the former army outpost stands hollow, exposed to the elements, as a flurry of lightning seems to descend directly on the derelict structure. The fort presents the dead body of a former Euro-American presence, draped in a sentiment of dread inspired by uncontrollable natural forces. Cole’s image catered to a market of tourists attracted by the violent history of the site, especially episodes of the French and Indian Wars and the American Revolutionary War. Cultural productions such as Cole’s images and romanticized stories like Gulian Verplanck’s largely contributed to making the place attractive to visitors in search of a sublime experience.22 In that context, the visual trope of stormy weather became a promotional tool among others, adding to the thrill of an emotionally-charged space that had been reshaped for White leisure around historical myths. The influx of visitors altered, in turn, the infrastructure of the site itself, with lodging and transportation reinforcing the human imprint on its surroundings. Faced with this array of sublime images, philosophers like Timothy Morton have repeatedly stressed the problematic relationship between aesthetic and natural discourses about the weather or, in our time, climate change. The sublime, according to him, infused these discourses with a type of terror implying passivity in the face of nature’s untamable might. As he concisely put it, “the aesthetics of Nature truly impedes ecology”.23 Literature scholar Louise Economides has underlined a further 57 Thomas Cole View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow. Oil on canvas, 51 ½ x 76 in. (130.8 x 193 cm), 1836. New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908. 58 issue: the sublime does not merely invite passivity, it encourages unaccountability.24 Resorting to this aesthetic allows individuals to distance themselves from the negative impact they may have on environments. Cole’s position as a champion of the American wilderness in a society otherwise engaged in highly-disruptive economic development makes his denunciation of the “ravages of the axe” a more delicate credo to sustain. If Cole’s sublime, and the Romantic literary pieces it sometimes illustrated, aimed to convey warnings about natural destruction, it framed ecological destruction through longing for a past natural balance never to be recovered. That environmental upheavals brought about by human exploitation should be paralleled with outbursts of violent weather reinforced their association as two sorts of interventions over which present viewers would have no influence or control. Ecologist and writer Aaron Ellison summarized this aspect in a masterful essay by stressing that “the suffocating embrace of romantically-infused notions of landscape has cut humans off from nature and from the world”.25 Cole’s artistic exploitation of the landslide of 1826 at Crawford Notch, for instance, foregrounded discourses of divine punishment and unfathomable nature instead of interrogating how human settlement in the area may have led to detrimental deforestation, eroding soils in return. Cole’s painting of the locale happens to record the latter aspect: a number of stumps and seemingly dying trees dot the landscape, a situation that would actually worsen during the nineteenth century with the expansion of lumbering activities in and around the notch.26 As art historian Nicolai Cikovsky bluntly (though somewhat categorically) expressed in a seminal 1979 article on the subject: The settlement of the wilderness was in fact generally conducted with little regard for the preservation of natural beauty. The urgent need to clear land for immediate cultivation and habitation vastly outweighed considerations of beauty and made destruction of forests inevitable. The urgency was so great, and the obstacles so many, that Americans looked upon trees as their enemies, took positive pleasure in destroying them, and were not content until they had denuded the land.27 Often concealing these debates, an aestheticized vision of nature, and weather, also invites to consider questions of colonialism and the ecological challenges faced by Indigenous peoples at large in the US Northeast, the space of Cole’s nineteenth-century narratives. Historian T. J. Demos has posited that the recognition of environmental or climate issues faced by nonWhite people in the present needed to result from the acknowledgment of a diversity of cosmologies applied to weather, including in the past.28 In dealing with real or fictitious storms in New York and New England, Euro-American audiences resorted to different interpretation lenses than those used by the Native peoples whose lands they had set out to appropriate. Employed by writers like Gulian Verplanck as a dramatic element for their stories, storms served the narratives of White characters. Translated as godly manifestations in Euro-American discourses, surges of violent weather served as pretenses to symbolically dispossess Indigenous people of their agency on the surrounding environment. In Gelyna, the storm, equated with the death of Rutledge, only admitted one possible function within the narrative, rendering Indigenous environmental cosmologies de facto invalid. 60 Rest Fenner After Thomas Cole, Ruins of Fort Ticonderoga, New York. Engraving and etching on paper, 3 15/16 x 5 ¾ in. (10 x 14.6 cm), 1831. New York Public Library, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library Digital Collections, accessed January 11, 2023 Cole’s beliefs in the necessity for anthropocentric stories to inhabit landscapes and confer a degree of sacredness on them did betray an approach guided by racial bias. His depictions of landscapes are that of White interaction with the environment of the upper Hudson River, erasing, just as Verplanck’s story did, the traces of Indigenous presence in the region. Marginalizing Native American figures in his compositions, Cole naturalized and minimized their eventual replacement by Euro-American populations.29 In that sense, he echoed already extant Euro-American reinterpretations of the Hudson Valley as a space of racial fantasy, including through the visual arts. Accounts like the death of a White woman, Jane McCrea, at the hands of two Huron individuals in the vicinity of Ticonderoga during 61 Thomas Cole A View of the Mountain Pass Called the Notch of the White Mountains (Crawford Notch). Oil on canvas, 40 3/16 x 61 5/16 in. (102 x 155.8 cm), 1839. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Andrew W. Mellon Fund. 62 John Vanderlyn The Murder of Jane McCrea. Oil on canvas, 32 ½ x 26 ½ in. (82.6 x 67.3 cm), 1804. Hartford (CT), Wadsworth Atheneum, Purchased by Subscription. 64 the Revolutionary War illustrate how indigenous populations would have been perceived by many White settlers at the time and why Euro-American civilization had to supplant their supposed barbarity.30Cole operated along a similar mode. His View Near Ticonderoga was inspired by another oil painted by the artist a few weeks earlier in 1826, as part of a series commissioned by a New Jersey patron to illustrate James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans.31 Set in 1757, or one year before the plot of “Gelyna”, Cooper’s story gave Cole his first opportunity to exploit the landscape and weather of Lake George for narrative purposes. Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” centers around the murder of Cora Munro, a White woman, and of her Native guide Uncas at the hand of Huron chief Magua, as a storm looms. The two paintings are strikingly similar, their landscape serving as the malleable support for the Eurocentric literary narratives that they were meant to accompany. And while one inscribes a fantasized Indigenous presence on the landscape, the other obliterates it completely, neither option proving satisfactory to address issues of non-White resilience. Even when Cole happened to visually superimpose the death of an indigenous character like Uncas with an ominous surge of natural force, this connection remained mediated by the presence of White figures and confined to the boundaries established by Cooper’s original text.32 While White people’s lives were enmeshed with the weather, Indigenous people’s stories seemed superimposed onto weather patterns, never truly occupying the space. Not only did such cultural productions allow for Native populations to be stripped of their connections to nature, but their erasure from the story posed the question of their very capacity at surviving both human disasters like colonial wars and weather disasters, two events simultaneously affecting the region in the time frame of a story like “Gelyna”. Suffering, in Ticonderoga, was reserved for Euro-American characters. The battle of Ticonderoga itself, which both Verplanck and Cole were supposedly referring to, had involved numerous Native American warriors bound by an alliance with the French armies led by the Marquis de Montcalm (1712 – 1759). Yet in a scathing letter sent to his wife a few days after the event, Montcalm himself had refused to acknowledge the toll the conflict had taken on Indigenous peoples, calling them “savages” and pretending to have warded off British assaults without their assistance.33 The unequal distribution of suffering in these past depictions echoes present-day preoccupations by Indigenous populations about their resilience to sometimes violent weather events having struck the region. Responses to hurricanes Irene and Sandy, in 2011 and 2012, have been impeded by EuroAmerican modes of thinking. In the absence of a federal recognition as a tribe, the Shinnecock Nation of Long Island was, for instance, not eligible for disaster relief following Hurricane Sandy’s damage, prompting local groups to restore the landscape themselves.34 In spite of the passing of the 2013 Sandy Recovery Improvement Act, signed by President Barack Obama, which aimed at reinforcing Native sovereignty in the face of emergency, the particular impact storms may have on Indigenous groups throughout the Northeast, in contrast to consequences on White communities, has not been thoroughly addressed.35 A heritage to the partial conception of weather violence developed by Euro-American thinking and manifested in Cole’s sublime suffering, the aftermath of twenty-first-century hurricanes has been viewed solely through a Western lens. In 2011, the winds and rains of Hurricane Irene unearthed bones from a burial ground of the Totoket Quinnipiac Band in Branford, Connecticut, posing different issues of resilience.36 Just like Irene, it is highly probable that the violence of Thomas Cole’s storm would displace the dead bodies of the fallen indigenous warriors of the Battle of Ticonderoga. Their whereabouts are however obscured by the prominence of White characters in subsequent narratives, the fate of their remains 65 Thomas Cole Landscape with Figures: A Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans”. Oil on panel, 26 1/8 x 43 1/16 in. (66.4 x 109.4 cm), 1826. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1993.2. Photography © Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. 66 67 being the only one to apparently matter. Cole’s paintings nonetheless offer an interesting case study for contemporary ecocriticism. In spite of their racial bias and problematic environmental consciousness, it is even possible to envision some of them as a form of “meteorological art”, to reprise the concept used by New Zealand artist Janine Randerson. Cole’s images conjure fears about weather and integrate, in spite of themselves, a plurality of agencies. What if, following Randerson’s conception of weather as a medium, the storm could be considered a co-participant in both Verplanck’s narratives and Cole’s images rather than a passive tool? Cole himself may have developed an awareness of the agency of weather through his practice of outdoor sketching, which he conducted around Lake George before producing his paintings of the Mohicans, Gelyna, or later storm themes. The artist’s proximity to the environment could constitute what Janine Randerson defines as a “social encounter[…] with live weather”, an intrinsic component of meteorological artmaking.37 As mentioned earlier, the vivid depiction of the weather in many of his pictures was the direct result of Cole’s first-hand experience of similar storms while travelling through the land, or a way for the weather to influence, and sometimes impede, the painter’s attempts at conducting his work on site. In that sense, weather would indeed be co-performing in the painter’s artistic process, revealing its politics. Looking back at Cole’s own theories in his “Essay on American Scenery,” his awareness of a changing nature might also have led him, to a certain extent, to produce weather-driven pictures. Yet his adoption of the sublime as a prime aesthetic language to transcribe nature inadvertently weakened his discourse about links between human greed, environmental destruction, and weather patterns.38 The artist’s various paintings also bolstered the importance of White actors in cultural considerations of landscape and weather. The war wound inflicted on Rutledge remained the centerpiece of the narrative offered by Cole, just as Verplanck’s storm only served as the allegorical background to the British soldier’s heroic sacrifice. Weather, in this Eurocentric sense, has been subjugated to the colonizer’s desires, histories and designs, acting like a prop behind tales of love and death, and barring any element, human or nonhuman, unable to befit the narrative. Echoing the contemporary practice of naming hurricanes, from Irene to Sandy, Verplanck’s storm, materialized through Cole’s painting, only became apprehended and identified through the title of the fictional story it helped circulate. Therefore, whether as text or as painting, the storm did not just appear in Gelyna. The storm became “Gelyna”: a metonymy of Euro-American fantasies of nature, with everything that they implied for the environment of North America. Endnotes [1] Gulian C. Verplanck, “Gelyna: A Tale of Albany and Ticonderoga Seventy Years Ago,” The Talisman (December 1830), 325-326. [2] Verplanck, “Gelyna,” 334. [3] Here, weathering can be understood as a description of “socially, culturally politically and materially differentiated bodies in relation to the materiality of place, across a thickness of historical, geological and climatological time” and of “how bodies and places respond to weather-worlds which they are also making”, according to the definition proposed by Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton, “Weathering,” Feminist Review 118 (2018), 80-81. [4] Verplanck, “Gelyna,” 320-321. [5] Debates over the definition of Cole as a proto-environmentalist and of his art as an environmentally-conscious practice have been aptly summarized by Peter Fedoryk, “The Origins of the American Environmental Movement: Hudson River School Naturalism in the 19th Century,” New Errands 6, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 5-16. [6] On Cole’s sketching trip to Lake George and Ticonderoga in 1826, which resulted in the first version of his painting, see Georgia B. Barnhill, Wild Impressions: The Adirondacks on Pa- 68 per, Prints in the Collections of the Adirondack Museum (Blue Mountain Lake, NY: Adirondacks Museum, 1995), 41. [7] Verplanck, “Gelyna,”, 302. [8] Letter from James A. Hillhouse to an unknown recipient, New Haven, December 2, 1833, Thomas Cole Papers, Box 2, Folder 3, New York State Library, Albany, New York. [9] Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine 1 (January 1836), 11. On that topic, see also Matthew Baigell, Thomas Cole (New York: Watson-Guptill, 1981), 15. [10] On the sublime dimension in Cole’s View Near Ticonderoga, see Angela Miller, “Nature’s Transformations: The Meaning of the Picnic Theme in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 24, no. 2/3 (1989), 116. [11] Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764), trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 46-47. [12] Elizabeth M. Kornhauser and Tom Barringer, “Catalogue: American Wilderness,” in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, eds. Elizabeth M. Kornhauser and Tim Barringer (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018), 127-130. Cole’s vision of the sublime applied to a specific North American context is also the subject of Marek Wilczyński, “The Americanization of the Sublime: Washington Allston and Thomas Cole as Theorists of Art,” Polish Journal for American Studies 11 (Spring 2017): 19-27. [13] Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 10. [14] Thomas Cole, “The Storm,” undated manuscript no. 90467, Cole, Thomas, 1801-1848, Notebooks, Sketchbooks, etc., Thomas Cole Papers, Special Collections, New York State Library, Albany, New York. [15] For a recent identification of the figure in Tornado in an American Forest as Cole himself, see Alexander Nemerov, The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 7. [16] Alan C. Braddock, “Directionality in Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow: Ecocritical Art History and Visual Communication,” in Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication, eds. Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran (New York: Routledge, 2019), 157-159. [17] For the original mention of the phrase, see Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 12. For a concise but rich summary of past literature on Cole and environmental approaches to his works, see Robert Sayre and Michael Löwy, Romantic Anti-Capitalism and Nature: The Enchanted Garden (New York: Routledge, 2020), 41-62. [18] This process has been examined by Kevin J. Avery, “Selling the Sublime and the Beautiful: New York Landscape Painting and Tourism,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, eds. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000): 109-133. [19] The most comprehensive resource on the subject is Eric Purchase, Out of Nowhere: Disaster and Tourism in the White Mountains (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). [20] On Hawthorne’s story and the impact of literary or artistic productions on the development of tourism in the White Mountains, see John F. Sears, Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth-Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 72-86. [21] Nathaniel Parker Willis and William Henry Bartlett, American scenery; or, Land, lake, and River Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature, Vol. 1 (London: George Virtue, 1840), 76-77. [22] Thomas A. Chambers, Memories of War: Visiting Battlegrounds and Bonefields in the Early American Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 54-55. [23] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 105. [24] Louise Economides, The Ecology of Wonder in Romantic and Postmodern Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 115. [25] Aaron M. Ellison, “The Suffocating Embrace of Landscape and the Picturesque Conditioning of Ecology,” Landscape Journal 32, no. 1 (2013), 87. [26] The impact of the lumbering industry on deforestation in Crawford Notch and nearby Franconia Notch towards the end of the nineteenth century is explored at length in Kimberly A. Jarvis, Franconia Notch and the Women Who Saved It (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 56-75. [27] Nicolai Cikovsky Jr., ““The Ravages of the Axe”: The Meaning of the Tree Stump in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” The Art Bulletin 61, no. 4 (December 1979), 612. [28] T.J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016), 22-23. [29] Nancy Palm, “Thomas Cole’s Indian Subjects, Racial Politics, and the National Landscape” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 2011), 132-133. [30] On that painting, see Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr., “The Murder of Jane McCrea: The Tragedy of an American Tableau d’Histoire,” The Art Bulletin 47, no. 4 (December 1965): 481-492; David M. Lubin, “‘Ariadne’ and the Indians: Vanderlyn’s Neoclassical Princess, Racial Seduction, and the Melodrama of Abandonment,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 2-21; and William H. Truettner, “Picturing the Murder of Jane McCrea: A Critical Moment in Transatlantic Romanticism,” in Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790-1860, eds. Andrew Hemingway, Alan Wallach (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015): 229-258. 69 [31] On the relationship between the two pictures, see Elwood C. Parry III, “Cooper, Cole and The Last of the Mohicans,” in Art and the Native American: Perceptions, Reality, and Influences, eds. by Mary Louise Krumrine and Susan Clare Scott (University Park, PA: Penn State University, 2001), 154-155. [32] On the status of Uncas’s death in Cooper’s narrative and Cole’s painting, see Kenneth John Myers, “Thomas Cole, Landscape with Figures: A Scene from ‘The Last of the Mohicans’, 1826,” in Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, eds. Peter John Brownlee, Valéria Piccoli and Georgiana Uhlyarik (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 120-121. [33] Document quoted in a research folder, Object File PEM 90 FT-38.76, Fort Ticonderoga Museum, Ticonderoga, New York. The letter is also quoted in “Marquis de Montcalm to His Wife, July 14, 1758,” Bulletin of the Fort Ticonderoga Museum 8, no. 4 (Summer 1949): 129-131. [34] Anuradha Varanasi, “The Tribe that Brought a Damaged Shoreline Back to Life,” State of the Planet – Columbia University, accessed November 5, 2022, https://blogs.ei.columbia. edu/2019/09/18/shinnecock-coastal-habitat-restoration-project/. [35] On the act, see Heidi Adams, “Sovereignty, Safety, and Sandy: Tribal Governments Gain (Some) Equal Standing Under the Hurricane Sandy Relief Act,” American Indian Law Journal 2, no. 1 (May 2017): 376-387. [36] LeAnne Gendreau, “Irene Unearths Bones Believed to Be from Native American Burial Ground,” NBC Connecticut, accessed November 5, 2022, https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/Irene-Unearths-Bones-Believed-to-Be-from-Native-American-BurialGround-130351998.html. [37] Janine Randerson, Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), xvi. [38] Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” 12. A place called Utopia A Place Called Utopia, at Saul Hay Gallery in Manchester, is an exhibition of artwork by noted contemporary Australian Aboriginal artists curated by Victoria King, including Emily Kngwarreye and Minnie Pwerle. The collection celebrates art from the remote Aboriginal outstation of Utopia, 270 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs in Australia’s semi-arid, red centre. It is home to the Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people, and in 1981, was the first outstation in Australia to achieve Land Rights, when the original indigenous owners’ land was finally returned to them. in conversation: Victoria King and Giovanni Aloi U Thomas Busciglio-Ritter, Ph.D., is the Richard & Mary Holland Assistant Curator of American Western Art at Joslyn Art Museum (Omaha, Nebraska). His research focuses on nineteenthcentury American art, landscape painting, race representation, and transatlantic circulations. A graduate of the University of Delaware, Busciglio-Ritter previously earned master’s degrees in Art History from the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the École du Louvre, in France. Some of his publications include articles for the Revue de l’Art, the Oxford Journal of the History of Collections, Panorama, and Early American Studies, as well as an essay for the recent Rosa Bonheur (1822-1889) exhibition catalogue published by the Musée d’Orsay. 70 topia is a remote Aboriginal outstation in the semi-arid centre of Australia, approximately 300 kilometres northeast of Alice Springs, where sixteen small, family-based Anmatyerre and Alyawarre language-speaking communities live on 3500 kilometres of land. In the 1920s, two British settlers took the land by force from their ancestors, made it a cattle station, and called it Utopia because of the abundance of rabbits, an environmentally disastrous introduced animal. In 1978, Utopia became the first Aboriginal outstation in Australia to have a successful Land Rights claim. In 2013, filmmaker John Pilger made a documentary called Utopia that highlighted historical and current issues there. Aboriginal Australians have the longest, continuous land-based culture in the world, over 65,000 years. They are custodians for specific places that they call ‘country’ and particular plants and animals. They have extraordinary ecological knowledge and experiential, embodied wisdom that they pass on to each new generation. This site-specific knowledge is essential for the nurturance of the land, and for cultural continuity, survival, and well-being. They do not see land as a generic commodity, nor simply as a ‘view’, but the source of spiritual and physical sustenance. For them, Australia is a complex energetic web of criss-crossing, interconnected Dreaming paths which connect their mythic and ancestral past with the present. They receive Dreamings from both parents. These creation stories are sung in elaborate song cycles that tell of ancestral mythological spirits who during epic journeys in the Dreamtime created the natural world’s flora, fauna, landforms, and elemental forces. The stories and songs are oral maps that give knowledge and direction. As Utopia artist Barbara Weir once said, “If you know the songs, you’ll never get lost”. The women of Utopia come together for awelye ceremonies to reanimate the land, ensure perpetuation of plant and animal species, and for the people’s health and happiness. Over many days and nights, they ‘sing up’ 71 country, ‘paint up’ their bodies with ochre designs, do ritual dances, and tell Dreaming stories to new generations of young girls. Aboriginal people have long painted ochres on their bodies and drawn in the sand during separate men’s and women’s ceremonies, yet the contemporary Aboriginal art movement only began during the 1970s. Utopia women began making silk batiks in 1977, and even though it was labour intensive, it became a popular communal activity. Using tjanting tools and hot wax melted on open fires while collecting bush tucker, they depicted their Dreamings and body painting designs. In 1988, acrylic paints were distributed at Utopia, and they immediately became popular because they were an easier and more versatile medium to use. Giovanni Aloi: Victoria, can you tell us how the idea for A Place Called Utopia came about? Victoria King: During the 25 years I lived in Australia, I became passionate about Aboriginal art and culture. When I returned to live in England in 2018, I realized that very few British people had ever seen contemporary Aboriginal art, or, if they had, knew very little about the depths of meanings that the dots and lines convey. I proposed the idea to Ian Hay, director of Saul Hay Gallery in Manchester who shows my paintings, and we both became enthusiastic about an exhibition of my collection of Utopia artists’ artworks. GA: How did you become interested in Aboriginal art? Barbara Weir, OAM Grasses, 2001, Utopia, 55 x 55 cm, acrylic on canvas, (detail) © Barbara Weir, OAM VK: In Australia, the power of the land and Aboriginal art both enchanted me. The mesmerizing shimmer of the paintings’ dots and lines were literally stunning. They often resembled Minimalist or Abstract Expressionist art, yet they clearly did not come from a European or American cultural tradition. The paintings of Emily Kame Kngwarreye particularly fascinated me. She was an elderly Anmatyerre woman artist from the Aboriginal outstation of Utopia in the country’s arid red centre. At the time, very little was written about the contemporary Aboriginal art movement. In 1998, I met the Utopia artist Barbara Weir who told me how, at the age of twelve, she became an unwilling member of the Stolen Generation. In addition to the shameful injustice of stealing the land of its indigenous people, the Australian government carried out a White Australia policy from 1850 to 1973 to forcibly remove mixed race children from their Aboriginal families. Officials took Barbara while she was collecting water for her Aunt Emily Kngwarreye and placed her on a harsh mission 1000 kilometres from her family simply because her father was white. Forbidden to speak her native language, it took her twelve years to find her family again. They thought she had died and had done ‘Sorry Business’ death rituals for her. Many other members of the Stolen Generation were never reunited with their families because government records were often not kept. Barbara’s harrowing story deeply moved me, and I said to her that if I could ever do anything to help, to please let me know. I told her that I had writing skills that might be useful. A month later she phoned and asked me to write the story of her life, but days before I had an unexpected diagnosis of ovarian cancer. Six months later, after my chemotherapy ended, we began a five-year collaboration of my volunteering to record and publish her stories and those of twelve other women in her extended family. My hair had not yet regrown when I arrived at Utopia, but I didn’t feel out of place as many of the women had shaved their heads for ‘Sorry Business’. I immediately found myself on a very steep learning curve about cultural difference. I had read widely, but my ignorance was profound. I realized that my culturally ocular-centric, aesthetic gaze had limited my perception and directly affected how I viewed the world. While walking with the women as they 73 engaged in hunting and gathering, I often felt blind. The land disclosed so much more to them than it ever would to me. Being at Utopia disrupted my perceptions of time, the land, art, and of myself. GA: What have you learned while working at Utopia with Aboriginal artists that cannot be learned from the outside? VK: Utopia is a sublimely beautiful place where survival is a fine art. I would not have survived a day without the women’s care. I will be forever grateful for the patience and kindness they showed me. They taught me an embodied way of being on the land. Quite simply, I discovered the ground beneath my feet. I also discovered the enormous complexities of the people’s lives. Aboriginal outstations are closed communities and a permit is required to enter. They are culturally rich but impoverished regions within a relatively affluent, primarily White country that is still largely in denial of historical and present-day injustices. Being at Utopia was life-affirming and heart-breaking. There are far too many early deaths, and the people suffer greatly from trans-generational trauma. Culture, spirituality, land, kinship relationships, and art are not separate for Aboriginal Australians. They have the longest, continuous land-based culture in the world. For more than 65,000 years, they have been custodians for specific places, plants, and animals. They have extraordinary ecological knowledge and experiential wisdom that ensures cultural continuity, survival, and well-being. The people live traditional lives of hunting and gathering, and hand down their oral culture and knowledge to new generations in ancient rituals. For Aboriginal people, Australia is a complex web of criss-crossing Dreamtime paths that connect the mythic past with the present. These paths form the basis of their art, creation stories, and song cycles that tell of mythological spirits that brought into being the flora, fauna, landforms, and elemental forces. Through paternal and maternal lineages, Aboriginal people receive totemic Dreamings which bestow custodial responsibilities. Their main Dreaming comes from their father, while the mother bestows a Dreaming from the place of the child’s conception. GA: How is A Place Called Utopia different from previous exhibitions of Aboriginal art and why is it relevant now? Johnny Jones Men’s Ceremony 1999, Utopia 60 x 45 cm acrylic on canvas © Johnny Jones 74 VK: While post-modern theorists see cultural difference as potentially challenging universalist, Eurocentric, ethnocentric aesthetics, too often old visions remain intact in commercial Aboriginal art galleries. This exhibition displays a wide range of paintings by artists from Utopia and allows people to better understand not only the rich diversity of visual interpretations of Dreamings, but also the complex cultural, sacred, and political significance of the work. The paintings are fundamentally documents of Land Rights. Utopia is the ancestral home of Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people. They, like all traditional Aboriginal Australians, are custodians for specific places they call ‘country’. In English, the term doesn’t convey the profound connection they have to land on which they lived in harmony until 1788 when British colonisation catastrophically disrupted their lives. When the British claimed Australia and named it Terra Nullius (no one’s land), an estimated 750,000 indigenous people lived there. The British took the land by force, often in massacres, more passively through introduced diseases. They actively suppressed them speaking their 250 native languages and 800 dialects. The people’s past and present suffering is almost inconceivable. Susan Sontag wrote in Regarding the Pain of Others of the consequences of inuring ourselves to the reality of suffering: “Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy.” 1 Opening our hearts to a deeper understanding allows us to counter a cult of forgetting. Aboriginal paintings contain an uncanny 75 76 77 echo that shudders within a gap of disturbance. They carry a plea to the beholder to see and act with more than visual perception. Knowledge, empathy, ethical perception, and action are all required, otherwise, they will continue to be objects of desire in a field of optical pleasure. These hybrid paintings have a crucial message for all people about the importance of environmental custodianship and the fundamental relationship between kinfolk and country. All around the world, past and present injustices and genocidal policies meet with inaction and denial. The legacy of those actions in Australia is visible in shocking Aboriginal health statistics, short life spans, high levels of unemployment, and still endemic racism. Aboriginal art has the power to speak to contentious issues, but its capacity to bear cultural witness is too frequently undermined. GA: What stories do the paintings in A Place Called Utopia tell? Minnie Pwerle Awelye Atwengerrp Bush Melon Dreaming 1999, Utopia 97.5 x 60 cm acrylic on canvas © Minnie Pwerle Myrtle Petyarre Arnkerrthe Awelye Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, 1999, Utopia 82 x 56 cm acrylic on canvas © Myrtle Petyarre Tommy Jones Men’s Ceremony 1999, Utopia 91 x 61 cm acrylic on canvas © Tommy Jones 78 VK: The Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people’s name for Utopia is Ankerrapw. The word means ‘water soakage’ and comes from two words: ankerr for emu and apwa for emu feathers. In the 1920s, two European settlers brutally displaced their ancestors and turned the land into a cattle station. They called it Utopia because of the abundance of rabbits, a familiar European food source that has had enormous negative environmental impact. Australia is an ancient island continent and the land is extremely fragile; its native animals are soft-footed marsupials. Cattle’s hard hooves changed Utopia’s once rich bio-diversity into semi-arid terrain and destroyed many of the traditional food plants that Aboriginal people relied upon. In 1978, thanks to the efforts of the artists involved in this exhibition, Utopia became the first Aboriginal outstation to have a successful Land Rights claim and set a precedent for other Aboriginal outstations throughout Australia. Barbara Weir was fundamental in that long battle through her determination, sense of justice, and ability to speak English. The contemporary Aboriginal art movement began in 1971 when Geoffrey Bardon, a kind school teacher, gave acrylic paints and small boards to a group of men at Papunya, a mission near Utopia where several different tribes had been forced to live together. He recognised how traumatised the men were from being displaced from their ancestral land. The men first painted the designs of their secret/sacred men’s ceremonies, but when they realised that uninitiated boys and women might see them, they covered them with dots. These dot paintings became highly sought after. In 1977, the women of Utopia participated in a batik workshop, and had their first exhibition in 1980. They continued making batiks until 1988 when acrylic paints and canvas were distributed at Utopia, and it is still predominantly women who paint there. It is against Aboriginal Law for an Aboriginal person to paint another person’s Dreaming, yet within that seeming restriction, they create extraordinary stylistic variations. These vibrant artworks appear modern, yet they are a contemporary hybrid of an ancient culture that has used visual gestures and ochre pigments for thousands of years in body painting, rock art, and sand painting. At Utopia, the women come together for awelye ceremonies to re-animate the land, ensure perpetuation of plant and animal species, and for their health and happiness. Around blazing campfires over many days and nights, women grind natural ochres, then paint dots and lines specific to each woman’s Dreaming on their breasts and upper bodies. The stories are sung as bare feet dance upon the sensuous red sandy land for which they are custodians. Ground and body are one. Sand is a perfect medium for expression and contiguous with bodily experience: they walk long distances to hunt and gather bush tucker, sit, sleep, cook, and eat meals upon it, draw maps in it, and now paint canvases laid flat upon it. The Utopia women’s paintings in this exhibition are mainly of their Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming, Yam Dreaming, and Bush Melon Dreaming. The Petyarre sisters’ Dreaming for Arnkerrthe, Mountain Devil Lizard, is particularly 79 fascinating. Arnkerrthe are small, fierce-looking lizards whose tracks are frequently seen in the red sand. This Dreamtime creation story tells of the formation of Utopia’s typography. In the Dreamtime, mythical Mountain Devil Lizard women walked upright across the land carrying small bags of red sand on their shoulders. In each place they stopped, sand trickled from their bags and formed the low-lying sand dunes of Ankerrapw, Utopia. Their journeys and interactions link Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people’s land. As Barbara Weir once told me, “If you know the songs, you’ll never get lost”. The dots and lines of the Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming paintings represent those on the back of arnkerrthe, the paths the Dreamtime Mountain Devil Lizard women took, and ceremonial awelye body painting designs. They are maps of experience, place, and culture with extraordinary layers of meanings. GA: The last essay titled ‘To See the Frame that Blinds Us’ in the book Art is Not What You Think It Is (2012) by Donald Preziosi and Clare Fargo states: “Once they enter the art system, objects in which the artists adapt imagery from actual ceremonial practices of their own culture may signify no differently from art that imitates the ceremonial objects of other cultures – or abstract art in general for that matter. The “spiritual value” attributed to the object depends greatly on the collector or other spectator who, in the paradigmatic case of Aboriginal art, does not have easy access to much of that meaning”. What curatorial measures have you adopted in order to avoid the objectification of Aboriginal art from a Western standpoint while granting access to the narratives and stories embedded in the paintings? Violet Petyarre Arnkerrthe Awelye Mountain Devil Lizard Dreaming 1999, Utopia 82 x 56 cm acrylic on canvas © Violet Petyarre VK: The fact that the appreciation of indigenous artworks in Australia and internationally does not extend into meaningful action has not gone unnoticed by the artists. Distanced from the reality of Aboriginal people’s lives, the paintings’ shimmering surfaces can mesmerize us, and the dots and lines remain our blind spots. Cultural differences and suffering disappear in a celebration of surface beauty. Artworks are re-contextualized into interior spaces where they become symbols rather than indexes: generalized notions of the spiritual and icons of Australia that do not reflect that country’s shameful past and present history. Australian historian and philosopher Paul Carter recognized that “In transferring the iconic signs from the performative context of the ceremony – where singing, groundmarking and body painting combine to evoke complex abstract concepts – to the permanence of the painting board [or canvas], the marks risk growing disembodied”.2 Thankfully, traditional culture is still strong at Utopia. Yet trauma anaesthetizes, permeates, and restricts lives; activities become dissociative, obsessive, monotonous, and repetitious. I began to wonder if the dotting that Aboriginal people make on their canvases could reflect not only their Dreamings, but also the trans-generational trauma they suffer. There is basically no employment on the outstations; painting is one of very few activities that provides financial agency. I witnessed the difference between when the people painted on their own and the joy they manifested when they came together to paint. It is wonderful that there are now more Aboriginal art cooperatives which makes this increasingly possible. During the exhibition, I spent time at the gallery speaking with people and gave public talks about the culture and artworks. My wall texts specifically addressed the political and spiritual aspects of the work, and, quite pointedly, asked people to be aware that while these are exciting hybrid works of art, they are receptacles of a sacred culture. The wall text also requested non-indigenous artists viewing these canvases to be respectful and not appropriate the dots and lines into Western artworks as a style or technique. Aboriginal people have already had far too much taken from them. GA: In the same essay Preziosi and Fargo also argued that “the socio-economic 81 82 situation of the Aboriginal population continues at a level far below that of their white counterparts and even shows signs of worsening, despite the heightened awareness of their plight and new appreciation for indigenous traditions as a rich, complex cultural heritage. It appears that such recognitions collapse in upon themselves in the face of an unregulated art market, but the more general problem is coming to terms with what self-determination for a formerly colonized indigenous minority entails: even when money and social services are not in short supply, effective communication with and understanding of people who may not want to join the neo-liberal middle class are”. How do you think the situation has changed since 2012, when the book was published? sites within empty space. A worldview that privileges ceaseless property development and the exploitation of natural resources is at extreme odds with that of indigenous people whose connections to the land are central to their very being. The political and ethical dimensions of this difference have haunted Australia since the first fleet arrived in 1788. It was in British interests to wrongly declare the continent Terra Nullius. Seeing the land as infinite, without particularity, or only having real estate potential with no intrinsic significance as opposed to indigenous ways of seeing and experiencing the land as sacred reveals a fundamental difference of perception that continues to undermine mutual understanding. VK: The largest change is that the Australian Aboriginal art market has become regulated, although there will always be individuals and dealers who take advantage of artists. I once overheard a conversation in an Aboriginal art gallery in Alice Springs between the gallery owner and a local man. They were standing before a very finely dotted painting by an Aboriginal man as the owner bragged that he’d bought it for a crate of beer. It had an AU $12,000 price tag. Aboriginal people are in an enormous transitional period in their lives. Having money to buy cars makes it easier for men to hunt kangaroo together across the vast distances at Utopia, and for families to take their canvases to sell in galleries in Alice Springs, 262 kilometres away. There are no paved roads at Utopia. Barbara Weir told me that a new 4-wheel drive vehicle rarely lasts longer than three years in the harsh, sandy conditions. Emily Kame Kngwarreye sat cross-legged in the middle of large, unstretched canvases to paint linear awelye body painting designs and dotted celebrations of her Yam Dreaming. Her name, Kame, means yam. She was a custodian and ‘boss lady’ for Alhalkere, land stolen from her people which is still a non-indigenous cattle station adjacent to Utopia. She began painting in her late 70s and rose to meteoric fame for her bold, brightly coloured paintings, yet she continued to live in a ‘humpy’ made of three sheets of corrugated iron. She shared all the money she received from her paintings with her large extended family. There are no Dreamings for money or alcohol or cars or kidney disease or diabetes, all are relatively recent introductions into Aboriginal people’s lives. The Anmatyerre and Alyawarre people’s cultural traditions bring them contentment despite the daily adversities they face. They do not want to join the madness they witness in neo-liberal, White middle classes. In their writing on “close vision-haptic space”, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe how indigenous people are in a deep relationship with the ground: ‘on’ it, not ‘in front of’ it.3 Phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty laid the groundwork for that recognition. Heidegger realised that our elemental relationship with the soil goes beyond philosophy and is concerned with our very being. Merleau-Ponty contended that our perception and exchanges in the world occur through the simple yet profound fact that our bodies are in contact with the ground. He recognised the importance of the intricate relationship between our body and our perception of the world, and called it “the knowing touch”.4 Touch is our most intimate and essential sense, and involves our whole body through the properties of our skin. It is an active and a passive sense: to touch is to be touched. Merleau-Ponty wrote: “The presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh”.5 This is deeply understood by indigenous people and could be the foundation for non-indigenous people for an environmental ethic through attentiveness, what ecologist David Abram called a “carnal, sensorial empathy”.6 Since the 1970s, a growing number of ecologists, geographers, philosophers, architects, artists, sociologists, feminists, anthropologists, theologians, and ethicists have taken place seriously and exposed the dangers of post-modern, post-capitalist societies that construct the world as a series of manipulable GA: Are institutions in the UK and Australia changing their approach to Aboriginal art and artists? What’s new? VK: During the years I was in Australia, I saw a very slow shift towards more equity for Aboriginal artists and less exploitation. Aboriginal art cooperatives allow artists to work together on remote outstations and receive fair prices. Australian museums now provide more contextual information when displaying Aboriginal artworks, although that is an extremely unusual occurrence in commercial galleries. In the UK, it is rare to see Australian Aboriginal contemporary art. The Tate Modern in London currently has a small exhibition that addresses the political aspects of Aboriginal artworks rather than simply celebrating the paintings’ remarkable aesthetics.7 Ultimately, the Modernist strangle-hold on how Westerners view the world is still strong. In 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that “The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception being unchanged”.8 He explored the implications of a new vision that appeared in the field of vision, one that was half visual and half thought, an “echo of a thought in sight”.9 That change of aspect occurred for me at Utopia. In the 1960s, modernist art critic Clement Greenberg maintained that abstract art demands and creates certain spatial relationships between a viewer and an art object. He believed that paintings had become objects of the same spatial order as our bodies: “It [a painting] has lost its ‘inside’ and become almost all ‘outside’, all plane surface”.10 This interpretation of a surface ‘skin’ resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the phenomenology of perception: “In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it – and even when it appears devoted to something else – from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility”.11 Modernism has only relatively recently become the focus for accusations of essentialism in its attention to how we see rather than what we see, that is, difference and specificity. Such a celebration of vision does not allow for cultural difference or artists’ intentions. Deleuze and Guattari recognized that art galleries are by their nature ‘striated’ spaces, places of commodification that provide a particular kind of space where viewers come into close contact with artworks while at the same time are distanced from them. Striated spaces relate to distant vision and the optical spaces where people view artworks, whereas artists create within the ‘smooth’, haptic space of close vision.12 Since the Renaissance, there has been an autonomy and secularisation of art that has made it conducive to external valuation. In Australia, I discovered that what seemed straightforward in European and American galleries was far more complex when applied to Aboriginal art. When these paintings are displayed out of context on the walls of a gallery, home, boardroom, or government department far from the place of their creation, the artists’ long struggles for Land Rights and their past and present suffering become invisible. 83 84 85 GA: You are also a painter, sculptor, photographer, and poet – does Aboriginal art influence your practice? If so, how? Emily Kngwarreye Yam Flower Dreaming 1996, Utopia 62.5 x 47 cm acrylic on canvas © Emily Kngwarreye Glady Kemarre Bush Plum Awelye 1999, Utopia 25.5 x 25.5 cm each acrylic on canvas (detail) © Glady Kemarre VK: Before I went to Australia, I was an exhibiting artist and a senior university Fine Arts lecturer in England. I had been immersed within the ideology of Modernism since art college. The art and spiritual practices of other cultures had always fascinated me. I recognised the power of indigenous art and yearned to find that immediacy and congruence in my own artwork. After my first visit to Utopia, I became so ashamed of my white skin and so unhappy being so far from my son in England that in my art studio I could barely make a mark upon my canvases without erasing it. Long before African sculptures influenced Picasso’s 1907 painting Demoiselles d’Avignon, Western artists have ‘borrowed’ the styles of past and present artists of all cultures. My respect for the people of Utopia made it essential for me to find an appropriate gesture in an appropriated land, and not let the appearance of their paintings influence my own. It was an extremely difficult process. Previously in England, I had long searched for a meaningful subject matter for my paintings and found it in a ’secret’ profusely flowering herbaceous garden I created in the north of England. In Australia, I lived for twelve years on three acres adjoining the Blue Mountains National Park, and although surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty, I felt displaced and unhappy being so far from my son. In 2005, I was canoeing along the shore of Bruny Island, a small island south of Tasmania, and came across an isolated waterfront house for sale on 55 remote acres. It somehow spoke to me, and I impulsively bought it as a holiday house. The following year I moved to ‘Blackstone’ full-time. The sublime beauty and wildlife were intoxicating, and with volunteer help I planted over 4000 native trees on the overgrazed pastures to restore the land and create a wildlife sanctuary for the many endangered species. Yet after my experiences at Utopia, I still had difficulty making art that felt congruent. That changed when I discovered Blackstone’s history and the long-lost remains of the Sod Hut, the place where in 1829, George Augustus Robinson met the Nuenone tribe and began his so-called ‘Friendly Mission’ which led to the genocide of nearly all Tasmanian Aboriginal people. I had the site listed on the Tasmanian Heritage Register to protect it from future development. My sculptures became more shamanic, and my bird paintings morphed into traumatised ‘Angels of History’.13 I made pigments from native plants and wood ash, the latter being in plentiful supply after the neighbouring grazier set fire to my land when I complained about his shooting wallabies on my land. In 2018 when I returned to England to live near my son and granddaughter, I made another ‘secret’ garden and colour returned to my oil paintings. They were celebrations of returning to my European traditional artistic roots, and more importantly, to being ‘home’. Yet I am again searching for a congruent subject matter that feels true to where I now live. The phrase ‘sense of place’ is ubiquitous in Western culture, as is the presumption that having a deep connection to where we live comes easily, but too often we underestimate the power of place in our lives. Indigenous cultures do not make that mistake. At seventeen, I was cavalier about moving further and further from my dysfunctional American home and didn’t look closely at my failure to thrive in far-away places. I yearned to feel at home in the three countries I’ve lived, yet the reality has been otherwise. Freud and Heidegger recognized that displacement was endemic to the human condition and elicited feelings of unbearable emptiness as well as a sense of the unheimlich. My life experiences added to my empathy for the suffering experienced by Aboriginal people. GA: Do you see important aesthetic evolutions in recent Aboriginal contemporary art? Can Aboriginal art be political in a sense that contextually parallels a western conception of the political? VK: The highly sophisticated compositions and shimmering, unexpected colour juxtapositions that are continually emerging from artists on Aboriginal outstations and cooperatives delight and astound me. As I mentioned, the artworks, even at their most aesthetically beautiful, ARE political, an affirmation of the people’s ownership of specific places, ancestral ‘country’ for which they are custodians. GA: What are you currently working on? VK: At the age of 71, I feel quite ruthless when I am in my studio, and my editing process has again become extreme. Yet I persevere, inspired by nature’s beauty and by remarkable works of art. I was delighted when I discovered I am one of those who suffer from Stendhal’s Syndrome. When I came to live in England at the age of twenty-one, I became passionate about early Renaissance frescoes and made annual artistic pilgrimages to Tuscany and Umbria. Like Stendhal, I felt overcome with emotion as I gazed at sublime 14th century frescoes. In nature and in front of exceptional artworks, I feel surreal, unsettling sensations of pure awe that turn into rapture. So many tourists viewing artworks in Florence reported feelings of rapid heartbreak, dizziness, fainting, confusion, sweating, terror, and even hallucinations that in 1979 the phenomenon was named Stendhal’s Syndrome. A sense of engulfment occurs when our sense of self becomes submerged in the focus of our gaze; we temporarily lose the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. May I never recover… Endnotes [1] Sontag, Susan. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Hamish Hamilton: 7. [2] Carter, Paul. 2000. ‘The Enigma of a Homeland Place: Mobilising the Papunya Tula Painting Movement’ in Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius, Perkins, H. & Fink, H., eds., Sydney: AGNSW: 255. [3] Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Massumi, B., trans., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota: 492-500. [4] Merleau-Ponty, Marcel. 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. Smith, C., trans., London: Routledge: 315. [5] Ibid.: 127. [6] Abram, D. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Pantheon Books: 68. [7] https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/year-art-australia-1992 [8] Wittgenstein, L. 1921. Philosophical Investigations in Elderfield, J. (2001) ‘A Change of Aspect’ in Elderfield, J., ed, Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance. Exhibition catalogue. Dia Center for the Arts: New York: 11-53. [9] Ibid.: 53. [10] Greenberg, Clement. 1986. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 3, Affirmations and Refusals: 1950-1956, O’Brian, J., ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 19. [11] Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964. ‘Eye and mind’ in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Arts, History, and Politics. Edie, J.M., ed., Evanston: Northwestern University Press: 165-66. [12] Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. Ibid: 493. [13] https://www.victoria-king.com/angel-of-history [14] https://www.victoria-king.com Victoria King is a painter, sculptor, photographer, essayist, and poet. She is a former university lecturer whose writing is published in specialist books and journals. King’s paintings are celebrations of the extraordinary life force in nature and the power of colour to communicate space and emotion. She has had 14 solo exhibitions, including 25-year and 40-year curated retrospectives. King has spent extensive periods in Australia volunteering with Aboriginal women artists at Utopia in the Northern Territory, and received a doctorate for her thesis, ‘Art of Place and Displacement: Embodied Perception and the Haptic Ground’. King lives in the north-west of England. 87 In the shadow of the palms Vembri Waluyas Remains of a cassowary salvaged from a monocrop plantation by Marind villagers, photograph, 2021 © Vembri Waluyas Centered on Sophie Chao’s new book, In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua, this conversation between the author and Antennae Editor Giovanni Aloi considers the empirical and intellectual context and contributions of the work, its ethical and conceptual insights into the moral subjectivity of plants as actors and resources, and the forms of radical imagination, hope, care, and justice offered by Indigenous philosophies, practices, and protocols of interspecies relationality in the midst of plantationocenic disruption and planetary unraveling. in conversation: Sophie Chao and Giovanni Aloi 89 P alm oil is the world’s most ubiquitous and versatile vegetable oil, present in over half of all packaged goods on supermarket shelves. It is also one of just four commodities driving the majority of tropical deforestation and the second largest driver of global warming after beef production. Across the Global South, oil palm plantations dramatically reduce biodiversity, threaten endangered species, and undermine critical ecosystem services. The adverse consequences of monocrop expansion on the livelihoods, food security, and land rights of Indigenous Peoples and other local communities have also been widely documented. These impacts are particularly pronounced in Indonesia, the world’s top palm oil producing country today and home to the first oil palm monocrops, established in the early 1900s. But how is oil palm, as plant and product, understood by Indigenous Peoples in the places where it is introduced and industrially cultivated? How might Indigenous views of this proliferating plant shed light on larger questions about the relationship between human and other-than-human life? And how can Indigenous epistemologies inform scholarly attempts to grapple conceptually and empirically with the lifeworlds of more-than-human entities, like oil palm, whose ontologies are both lively and lethal? Drawing on eighteen months of fieldwork in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua, In the Shadow of the Palms explores how oil palm’s arrival reconfigures the landscape, interspecies relations, notions of time, and dream experiences of Indigenous Marind communities. The book examines the conflicting moral, symbolic, and political meanings that Marind attribute to the introduced oil palm, and how these contrast with the form and attributes of the native sago palm. It situates the social and environmental transformations wrought by deforestation and monocrop expansion in the context of West Papua’s violent and volatile history of political colonization, ethnic domination, and capitalist incursion. Working with and across species categories and hierarchies, the book analyzes how the proliferation of industrial monocrops subverts the futures and relations of some lifeforms while opening new horizons of possibility for others. By approaching cash crops as both drivers of destruction and subjects of human exploitation, In the Shadow of the Palms makes a compelling argument for rethinking capitalist violence as a multispecies act. Its empirical grounding in Indigenous experiences and modes of analysis offers a critical counterpoint to the primarily Western-centric and technoscientific focus of posthumanist studies to date. Taking oil palm as its central protagonist, the book makes a timely contribution to our understanding of changing humanenvironment relations in an age of planetary unraveling. Giovanni Aloi: Sophie, your extremely timely and thought-provoking book titled In the Shadow of the Palms examines the multispecies entanglements of oil palm plantations in West Papua, Indonesia, showing how Indigenous Marind communities understand and navigate the social, political, and environmental demands of the oil palm plant. Can you tell us how the idea for this book came about and what you hope the book will do? Duke University Press In the Shadow of the Palms, cover art, 2022. © Sophie Chao Sophie Chao: Firstly, immense gratitude for being in conversation with me, Giovanni, and for engaging with my work. The idea for In the Shadow of the Palms germinated over the course of long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the Indigenous Marind People of West Papua whom I have had the immense privilege to think with and learn from this last decade – first in the capacity of human rights advocate for the UK-based NGO Forest Peoples Programme and subsequently as a doctoral and postdoctoral researcher. My initial engagements with the Marind communities whose experiences and theories are centered on the work brought to the fore how industrial oil palm expansion is undermining Indigenous Papuans’ rights to lands, resources, and livelihoods. And 91 yet over time, as I shifted positionality from activist to ethnographer, I came to realize that this story of Indigenous dispossession under the plantation regime was also a story of more-than-human loss, endings, and violence. Plants and animals mattered to this story because they too were caught up in chains of living and dying that were being radically reconfigured by the introduction of oil palm monocrops into Marind’s customary forests and groves. Marind thus brought me to expand my understanding of the animacies and actors who affect and are affected by large-scale agribusiness developments, in ways that I had not anticipated. In foregrounding these more-than-human dynamics, as they are lived and understood by Indigenous communities themselves, I hope the book can invite readers to reimagine themselves within broader, multi-scalar systems of violence and power, within which non-human entities play important if often under-acknowledged, roles. These entities might appear remote or out-of-theway and yet they are very much present in our own everyday lives. Oil palm, for instance, might be grown in distant resource frontiers of the Global South like West Papua – and yet it is found in over half of all goods on our supermarket shelves. This substance, together with its systems of production and labour, thus connect us to people like the Marind in all kinds of destabilizing and therefore consequential ways. Staying with the trouble of these partial connections matters, I think, in reimagining more-than-human relations in this age of ecological unravelling, when industrial activities are undermining conditions of life at a planetary scale. Another related aim of the book is to foreground the complex, creative, and critical ways in which Indigenous Marind themselves understand and theorize the socio-environmental transformations reshaping their more-than-human worlds. This is as much a conceptual as a political move. It seeks to push away from a theory-ethnography divide, and instead acknowledge Indigenous People as active producers of knowledge – as people whose ways of knowing and persist despite the attritive effects of global industrial capitalism and its entrenched colonial genealogies. GA: What does it mean to be an environmental anthropologist today and to write from “a place of grief and loss”? SC: There are so many ways to approach these two important questions and their equally important interconnections. For me, being an environmental anthropologist today involves attending to the specificity of everyday social life and ecological relations, as apprehended through immersive ethnographic fieldwork, in their relation to broader processes and forces across disparate scales and locales. One such broader force is, of course, the Anthropocene – this epoch of intensifying industrial activity that is reshaping the Earth at geological and planetary scales. An environmental anthropological approach to, and in, the Anthropocene, seeks to think-with the universal or planetary, but without sacrificing the granularity of situated biocultural lifeworlds and their equally situated human and more-than-human actors. Thinking across different scales of matter and meaning is challenging, but necessary. It works hand in hand, in my view, with the need to acknowledge critically one’s own positionality as dwellers of a wounded planet, and also in the case of anthropologists specifically, as the inheritors of a discipline that has itself been instrumental – or instrumentalized – to serve the ends of racial colonial capitalism and its enduring social and environmental impacts. This means studying and writing from a place of non-innocence and impurity – not as realities that pre-empt the possibility of meaningful anthropological research or engagement, but rather as realities that invite, or rather demand, an explicit recognition of the kinds of complicities that make this research and engagement all the more necessary. Grief and loss are important starting points in the practice of envi92 ronmental anthropology, because they are so much part of the lived experience and everyday dynamics of the communities and peoples whom many of us study. The Marind People of Merauke, for instance, know deforestation and oil palm expansion through their devastating impacts on sentient forest ecologies, whose destruction gives rise to profound sadness and desperation among those who have traditionally sustained and lived from them. To write from a place of grief and loss forces one to stay with the enormity of what Anthropocenic ruptures mean for communities who are most deeply and directly mired in the fraught predicament of interspecies violence and loss. At the same time, other kinds of affective dispositions animate the story of loss in places like the West Papuan oil palm frontier. Rage. Anger. Frustration. But also refusal, resistance, survivance, and wonder. Together, this affective weave serves as the grounds for action and protest, alongside mourning and grieving. The biggest challenge in writing In the Shadow of the Palms was to strike a balance between narratives of destruction and defiance, and suffering and survivance, because both are equally central to Marind ways of being and knowing and acting in the plantation as a necropolitical assemblage. The question then arises: how do we do justice in our scholarly writings to the ravages and ruins produced by industrial activities, while also bringing to light the possibilities for more-than-human caring, coexisting, and coalition-building that endure despite everything working to undermine these possibilities? In what ways can loss and grief be harnessed in anthropological narratives to activate ways of being in the world that are more just, accountable, and responsible? And just as importantly, whom are we undertaking these intellectual and engaged projects in the pursuit of environmental justice about, with, and for? GA: Which researchers and books have come to define your professional positioning and authorial voice? SC: I cannot presume to do justice in my answer to the astoundingly rich and diverse ecology of scholars and scholarship that have and continue to inspire me, but let me name just two. Anna Tsing’s call for critical descriptions of morethan-human sociality, and in particular, her monograph Mushroom at the End of the World, helped me immensely in trying to craft narratives that made space for vegetal and animal beings as fleshly, consequential beings, caught up in often uneven relations with their human counterparts.1 Anna’s more recent collaborative work on the plantation as a “patchy landscape,” replete with ecological simplifications but also feral proliferations, was also incredibly useful in moving away from black-and-white representations of the monocrop as a space of extraction and extinction only. This work further helped me approach the topic of more-than-human relations through a phenomenological, or multisensory, methodology – one that is invoked and invited by other scholars including Thom van Dooren, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Donna Haraway, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. I’ve also been hugely inspired by the work of Māori political theorist Christine Winter, whose latest book, Subjects of Intergenerational Justice, is anchored in the lived and embodied intergenerational coexistence of humans and nonhumans.2 In this work, Christine invites crucial reconsiderations of some of the most fundamental elements of social flow and flourishing – from personhood, time and subjectivity, to groundedness, relationality and morethan-human dignity, all within a totality that includes more than the now, more than the individual, more than the human and, indeed, more than the living. Subjects of Intergenerational Justice, to me, is vital in the way it powerfully and poetically dismantles entrenched assumptions within Western justice theories, both delegitimating and undermining these theories’ presumed universality. Such assumptions include exclusionary and hierarchical ideologies of individu93 Sophie Chao Oil palm concession in rural Merauke, photograph, 2019 © Sophie Chao 94 95 it may or may not align with current trends in the mainstream field of plant studies. I am more specifically referring to the anthropomorphic poeticizations of some books like The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben and other authors who are trying hard to cast plants as wholly benevolent beings. In your book, you propose that “we take seriously the possibility of plants [...] as immoral subjects”. Can you tell us more? Sophie Chao A group of young Marind men in the sago grove of the Basik-Basik (pig) clan, photograph, 2018 © Sophie Chao ualism and anthropocentrism, reductionist and instrumental understandings of materiality and property, and linear and progressivist logics of temporality. But rather than simply reversing the power asymmetries at play between Western and Indigenous theories and practices of justice, Winter makes the compelling argument that all members of settler societies can benefit from embracing aspects of Indigenous philosophies and values that push against the fictive and impoverished separation of the human from the non-human, and of the individual from its constitutive relations. As for my own authorial voice, I think this is something I’m still working on! In one sense, the way in which In the Shadow of the Palms is written, and the way I present this work in talks and conference, is inspired first and foremost by the ways in which my Marind companions themselves narrate and story their rapidly changing lifeworlds. These narratives often involve repetitions, rhythms, and refrains – a kind of incantatory style that is at once poetic and political, conceptual and impressionistic, critical and creative. These are narratives that would often begin strong, but then trail off into silence and uncertainty, and that therefore remained in many ways open-ended and speculative, rather than conclusive or final. They are narratives that bring to life forest worlds not just through their ideational meanings, but also through their sounds, sights, smells, and textures – through the practice of being there and in the process, possibly becoming otherwise. I tried to do justice to these Indigenous modes of expression in the work, while also weaving into the fold the ways and words of scholars like Tsing, Winter, and others, who are revitalizing environmental knowledge in distinct yet complementary ways. GA: I am particularly interested in your conceptual approach to plants and how 96 SC: This invitation – or perhaps, this provocation – stems from the ways in which my Marind companions in West Papua understand the being of oil palm, an introduced cash crop that is proliferating across their lands and forests in the guise of mega-scale, industrial plantations, to the detriment of native human, plant, and animal communities of life. While Marind are well aware of the human actors and institutional forces driving agribusiness expansion, their understanding of the plantation form often centres on oil palm itself – a plant that, like the organisms it displaces, Marind consider to be a sentient, agentive being, endowed with its own particular dispositions, desires, and effects. Yet unlike native forest beings, who know how to live symbiotically with each other and with humans, oil palm is often described by Marind as a destructive, greedy, and foreign entity. The plant devours land and drinks up rivers, its insatiable appetite obliterating the ecologies necessary for Marind and their nonhuman kin to thrive. It is these and many other experiences that bring Marind refer to oil palm as an immoral “assailant”, a “killer”, and an “enemy of the forest” – one who, alongside the Indonesian state, settlers, and soldiers, perpetuates the colonization of West Papua in a vegetal guise. To take seriously the notion of oil palm as an immoral actor, as I do in the book, invites us to reconsider violence as a multispecies act – one in which, as I write, “humans are not always the perpetrators, and non-humans not always the victims”. As the experiences of Marind with oil palm poignantly convey, not all plants are necessarily good to live with. In staying with this claim, the book aims to push against uncritical celebrations of interspecies entanglements as necessary life-sustaining and mutually beneficial. It holds back from dressing these relations in the warming aura of emergence or generativity. Rather, it highlights the importance of distinguishing wanted from unwanted relations across species lines, both imposed and impossible, loving and unloving, and loved and unloved. At the same time, it’s important to note that the framing of oil palm as an appropriative and immoral being is only one part of this story. Marind resent and fear this plant for its destructive effects, but they express pity and compassion towards oil palm in light of its own subjection to industrial and human control. Oil palm’s existence, my friends often reminded me, is regulated through countless biological and technological manipulations that dictate its development, form, and uses from seedling to commodity. It is artificially bred through controlled pollination, with seeds stored in plastic bags in urban laboratories, far removed from the plant’s native soils. The plant’s oil is forced out of its body through high-heat, high-pressure processes of mechanical extraction, which people would list to me and describe as forms of “violence” – sterilization, threshing, steaming, mulching, boiling, cracking, filtering, stripping, winnowing, crushing, diluting, purifying, clarifying, fractionating, churning, pressing, and more. Marind’s animosity towards oil palm as an immoral plant-being thus works hand in hand with a recognition on their part that oil palm, too, has a fleshly, storied existence—with other beings, in other places, and at other times. Rather than “either or” between different states of being, oil palm exists to Marind as a series of opposite yet accretive “ands” – assailant and victim, plant and person, alien colonist and potential near-kin. There is something immensely powerful in the way Marind refuse to reduce oil palm to any one 97 Sophie Chao Oil palm seedlings ready for transplanting into an oil palm concession, photograph, 2019 © Sophie Chao 98 99 identity. It constitutes a form of resistance to the simplifying regime of the plantation itself – a material formation and enduring logic that is rooted in the pursuit of homogeneity, singularity, and mastery over plants as resources and plantations as systems. GA: Your book offers an important methodological blueprint for the foregrounding of the chain of interrelations between more than human beings, humans and land. I am particularly interested in the opportunities this model may bear. I understand your book in the context of contemporary multi-species ethnography, and I think that it is extremely successful in that context. The assimilation of information often results in a process of fetishization that other than western cultures are very vulnerable to. I say this in relation to a review I read last year of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass that I found heartbreaking. The reviewer admitted that Kimmerer’s book made her feel a sense of irreparable loss in the sense that her western/capitalist focussed upbringing had led to a radical distancing from nature that impoverished her life. It was clear that she could get a sense of the gravity of her loss through Kimmerer’s words and yet it was not quite clear how she intended to make up for that loss in her own life based on what she had learned. If we can’t extract life-changing tools from the books that currently recover histories of interconnectedness then there is a serious risk that these histories will remain stories—fables of a better world that exists or existed for someone else in a remote place to which we have no access. SC: I want to go back to the very first thing you said about the story being heartbreaking. I was discussing this book recently with Craig Santos Perez, a brilliant Chamoru (Chamorro) poet, activist, and scholar from Guåhan/Guam, who talked about how stories can be heartbreaking, but not hopeless. At the time, I couldn’t figure out what Craig meant – I couldn’t quite wrap my head around how stories of destruction and loss could be devastating, but nonetheless still hold an aura of possibility. As you rightly say, so many of these narratives can end up having a paralyzing effect when they bring to the fore the often quite impoverished ways in which dominant ways of knowing and being shape how we interact with the more-than-human world. In that respect, I can totally relate to the reviewer’s point. I do however think there is the possibility of transposing or bringing in Indigenous concepts or analytics to other sites and scales and subjects. I’m thinking, for instance, about Marind theories of skin and wetness, which I explore in the book. This is the idea that all beings, including elements like earth and water, partake in a shared surface of the skin and that their survival and thriving is enabled through the transfer of life-sustaining wetness. Wetness takes all kinds of different forms – from blood, tears, sweat, and grease in humans and animals, to sap, starch, and resin in trees and plants, and also the wetness of raindrops, clouds, rivers, and mud. Taken together, skin and wetness are substances that connect us all. They are central idioms within Marind culture – but they are not limited to the Marind lifeworld in terms of their stretch, both literal and semantic. Skin and wetness, then, are good to thinkfeel with as we attempt to navigate changing realities and relations in the midst of planetary unravelling. They speak to ideas of embodied relationality that are at the core of so many Indigenous worldviews. They invite us to consider: how might we take on ideas of skin and wetness to rethink and rework our everyday material and bodily relationships to each other, within, across, and beyond species lines? Fetishization is always on my mind in thinking through these questions, in particular, the risk of essentializing or romanticizing - and therefore reducing in a very plantation logic sort of way - the modes of being and of knowing 100 Sophie Chao A group of young Marind men in the sago grove of the Basik-Basik (pig) clan, photograph, 2018 © Sophie Chao of Marind people. But I think it’s important to remember that romanticization can also constitute a political tool. Some Indigenous scholars, for instance, have argued that the perceived romanticization of Indigenous lifeways has to be situated and understood in contrapuntal relation to the attritive violence of settler-colonial rule, as a form of refusal and resistance.3 The question then arises as to how nonIndigenous scholars like myself should approach the question of romanticization. I’ve always found it most generative to consider this issue in conversation with my Marind companions, and also with Indigenous scholars whose works continue to challenge and nourish my thinking in equal measure. And yet still, it’s always difficult to find a balance between acknowledging the differences that matter between Indigenous and Western worldviews and seeing the possibilities for coalitional thinking that exist across distinct cultural, historical, and social divides. Ultimately, we all inhabit this one Earth – and therefore all earths are rare earths. So again, we’re back to the ethos of thinking through relations, connections and situatedness, and of acknowledging the genealogies of thought and action that undergird whatever philosophy or theory we draw on in this thinking – whether it is Indigenous onto-epistemologies, post-humanist approaches, or other intellectual and engaged currents and attendant communities of practice. GA: Yes, I agree with you. What was heart-breaking to me about your book, especially in the introduction, was the sense of irremediable loss of so much. I think that what you capture extremely well in the introduction is a web—parts of which material and others that are invisible and yet extremely charged in an agential sense. Biological or ecological, these webs are all overlayed and intertwined, and once they are gone, they’re gone. That’s what I found particularly terrifying about your introduction, the way you described the sounds and smells of the devastation and loss. It reminds me of other minor, if you like, in comparison, moments of destruction that I have experienced in my life where I felt something of value was gone forever and that there was nothing I could do to change that. This is a very different story, but I think it’s part of my interest in how we 101 felt like so much was lost for no good reason and that the loss was irreversible. Of course, there is no comparison between the devastation that you describe in your book and the oleanders that once grew on the Calabrian highway, but learning about this event while reading your book allowed me to think about scale, destruction, and the importance of destructions of all scales. Sophie Chao Marind villagers listening to the multispecies sounds of the sago grove, photograph, 2015 © Sophie Chao somewhat align our sensitivities, again, in my case not as an Indigenous person, but as an LGBTQI+ migrant from Italy. To me the question becomes about the possibility to read your experience not as simple information but so that I can partake in your experience in a way that can help me to better understand mine too. While reading your book, I suddenly thought about this experience as a child when my parents would travel to the south of Italy in summer where they were born. We would drive from Milan to the southern tip of Calabria and at one point, on the freeway, a few miles of the highway’s median section was planted thick with oleanders of different colours. They were huge—large shrubs covered in blooms. My mum would always say: “look, look—the oleanders!” It was a landmark moment that signalled the end of our trip and the true beginning of our holidays. The other day I asked my parents if they remembered those beautiful oleanders. They haven’t driven south for many years now because, of course, they’re elderly and my dad can no longer drive, 16 hours straight. But it prompted me to do some online searching. I quickly found an article that was condemning the destruction of the oleanders in 2018. They were all cut down and replaced with a concrete wall. The author of the article claimed that there was absolutely no need for it, that it was an expensive thing to do that was probably motivated by some political/financial speculation. The article pointed out that the oleanders provided an important base for a unique ecological niche essential to pollinators in otherwise arid and flower-poor area. The plants also helped with water absorption in ways a concrete wall never could. Reading the news was a blow—it 102 SC: Thank you so much for sharing that, Giovanni. If the book can spur this kind of response for one out of every hundred readers, if it can resonate with something personal that they’ve experienced, and even if it does mean taking the reader into the often harrowing spaces of finality and endings, if it can do that, then that’s already something. In many ways, your anecdote conjures to me the Anthropocene as an epoch of loss and of the destruction of loss. By this I mean that loss in this era has become so generalized – indeed, planetary – that we can sometimes lose sense of its specificity because it is happening everywhere, everyhow, and everywhen. Our capacity to mourn particular, situated, and meaningful losses is undermined in the face of the seemingly unfathomable and insurmountable scale of destruction rippling across the earth. And this, as we discussed earlier, can be deeply paralyzing. I was really marked by what you said about the beauty of these oleanders and the fact that they too are conducive to more-than-human thriving in all forms. The enormity of the destruction of these life-sustaining beings reminds me of the ways in which Marind speak about the importance of mourning the untimely death of non-human beings. The rubble of a felled forest, for instance, is something that Marind mourn through all kinds of emergent practices that have, paradoxically, flourished in the wake of the plantation.4 These practices include weaving sago fibre bags together in the forest, planting bamboo shoots on the outskirts of oil palm monocrops, singing the storied pasts and relations of roadkill, and offering these animals some kind of dignity and peace through ritualized burials and regular pilgrimages. Each of these acts of collective remembrance constitute forms of reckoning with death and loss, at the same time as they constitute forms of active resistance. By this I mean that in refusing not to grieve plant and animal deaths, Marind are also refusing a possibly even more tragic kind of death – the death of mourning itself, or the inability to mourn things deemed ungrievable under technocapitalist regimes. So perhaps there’s something to be said about the power of mourning as form of resistance in an age of ecological endings. Another thing that struck me when you were talking about the oleanders is the question of what multispecies violence looks and feels like, and for whom. Because I’ve spent so much time trying to understand Marind eco-philosophies and eco-praxiologies through long-term participatory immersion, I have come to perceive and respond to oil palm plantations through what they have destroyed and replaced – that is to say, a multitude of shared human and otherthan-human skins and wetnesses, now substituted with the deadening and silent singularity of an industrial monocrop. But of course, not everyone perceives plantations in this way. For instance, I remember flying into Kuala Lumpur next to a group of British tourists who were coming to visit orangutans in a national conservation zone in Malaysia. Looking down below during the last stretch of this flight, one beholds a sea, an ocean of oil palm for miles on end. My companions exclaimed with admiration how incredibly neat, orderly, and beautiful the forest below appeared – so green and lush and vast. I had to break it to them that this wasn’t in fact a forest at all, and instead an industrial oil palm plantation. I could read the shock on their faces. They became flustered, then a bit annoyed. Eventually, one of them responded, “Okay, sure, it’s not a traditional forest – but it’s still trees. Lots of trees. It’s a modern forest”. This powerful and troubling statement – “it’s a modern kind of forest” – got me wondering, are plantations the forests of the future? Clearly, these individuals 103 were reading a different kind of aesthetic in the regimented landscape below – one that spoke to orderliness as a kind of beauty to be valued and celebrated, even if that orderliness was replacing biodiverse lifeworlds. This was vastly different from how I or Marind would have read this landscape. It reveals that what counts as multispecies violence is, in many ways, perspectival. GA: You say at the beginning that climate change, according to Indian novelist Amitav Gosh, is “nothing less than a crisis of culture and thus the imagination”. Then you disagree with that point. You say that it’s “not the failure of imagination itself that is the issue”. So, there is something of a deeper problem in this context. And you go on to say that “rather the problem lies in the exclusionary scope of voices and being needed and represented by current dominant climate imaginaries. Imaginaries that remain firmly anchored in and perpetuate the logic of human mastery over a nature recast as a passive material substrate meaningful only to the extent that it is useful to certain humans”. This is very beautifully and sharply put. And I think there’s an interesting question here about imagination and imaginary. The idea of what we can imagine is really interesting to me. I feel like there’s enormous potential there. But there’s also an authorial pressure. It’s that who am I to imagine? Where can I imagine? And I don’t mean that as necessarily a dismissive, self-reflective form of punishment or self-censorship or self-regulation, but also, as in part, questions of what are these imaginaries that are useful and productive that are essential to this future? SC: You reading that sentence made me realize once more that I need to write shorter sentences! Thanks for picking up on this. As a bit of context, the quote comes from an article that was published in 2021 in the interdisciplinary journal e-Tropic and that I co-authored with a wonderful Indigenous Samoan colleague, Dion Enari, who is a lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa/New Zealand and who holds the Ali’i Tulafale (High Talking Chief) title Lefaoali’i from Lepa, Samoa. Writing this piece with Dion in itself was a really wonderful apprenticeship for me.5 It meant having to learn how to weave our respective insights as Pacific scholars together, with the aim of coming up with a toolkit of sorts for reimagining the imaginary and the kinds of methods that we can use to that end. Central to this toolkit towards decolonial imaginaries are the principles of relationality, beyond-humanness, storytelling, multisensoriality, emplacement, reflexivity, transdisciplinarity, and radicality. One thinker whom I cite in the article, and who has helped me think through the powers and perils of the imagination, is the critical race scholar Ruha Benjamin, who describes in a podcast the imagination as a kind of battleground.6 Ruha cautions against understanding the imagination as a lovely, rosy vision of what might happen next, and that will be better than what is now. The imagination, she notes, is also and often a space of conflict, violence, and friction where different imaginations and imaginaries vie or compete with one another to assert their relative supremacy or primacy. So, I suppose what the article was trying to do in relation to that was to point to the ways in which imaginaries are always accompanied by oft-neglected exclusions, erasures, and omissions. In other words, we need to ask ourselves not just what and why imaginaries matter, but also whose imaginaries matter. Here, I’m thinking of course with long-standing Indigenous and Black genealogies and visions of decolonial, anti-colonial, and anti-racial futures and presents. But I’m also thinking about more recent policy, legal, institutional, and judicial imaginaries that are calling for the recognition of rights beyond individual human subjects, to encompass plants, animals, ecosystems, and nature itself as a rightful beare of rights. These imaginaries are shifting some of the most fundamental premises of Western ontologies of the subject and of the rights-bearer. The idea of taking seriously a plant or an animal or a river as a subject of justice is 104 Sophie Chao An anti-oil palm land rights reclaiming protest in rural Merauke, photograph, 2018 © Sophie Chao powerful. We’re talking about more than just care here. I don’t have to care for or about a river or a bug to treat it justly. Justice, then, goes beyond the bounds of the capacity to love and care. It demands more of us. It calls for other kinds of recognitions and reckonings, and more expansive accountabilities and obligations to our other-than-human co-dwellers. This being said, there’s also a lot of critique of the idea of the imagination and of imaginaries as potent political tools. The Anti-Futurist Indigenous Manifesto, for instance, calls out the future and hope (itself an inherently futureoriented disposition) as objects of co-optation and exploitation under colonial nomos that can effectively pre-empt the possibility of just and reparative ways of imagining times and relations to come.7 We can also think about the future as something that has, in some ways, already happened – of the future anterior, if you wish. Actions we take today are already exerting a kind of latent force on futures to come, that may thus already be set in stone. I’m thinking here of the long-term impacts of chemical toxins, plastic pollution, and climate change. There is a politics of temporality involved in imagining what comes next which demands that we remain attentive to the ways in which the future is already here. As Dion and I tried to convey in our article, reimagining imaginaries could thus benefit from challenging the assumption of a linear past, present, and future arrow of time, and instead think-with Indigenous notions of time as cyclical or spirallic. This kind of temporality, I think, changes how we understand what time is across situated and interconnected sites, species, and subjects. GA: Yes, absolutely. And the idea of the imaginary is being defined by legal boundaries as well as very pragmatic parameters. I think that’s also very important. There’s some imaginaries that reminds me a little of Donna Haraway’s Fabulations. It’s not necessarily about just forgetting and departing, but it’s about staying with the trouble, quite literally. And staying with the trouble poses important questions about care. SC: Yes, it does. In the book, I also talk about the sago palm, a plant that is intimately and ancestrally cared for and revered by Marind and whom they very much talk about as a victim of the impacts of monocrop expansion. I’m hearing 105 the birds in the sago grove as I say these words, because that was always what my Marind friends would tell me – that I needed to stop thinking and start listening, stop writing and start walking to the encounter of this deeply cherished and celebrated vegetal kin, spirit, and being. The sago palm exemplifies in all kinds of powerful ways the forms of interspecies care that persist in the Marind lifeworld despite the deleterious effects of deforestation and industrial oil palm expansion. Sago is a plant with whom Marind children share growth and often also the same name when they’re born at the same time. For this reason, children and sago are said to follow each other’s lives. The sago palm is also a plant that is said to be nourishing and feeding, not just because it provides sago starch – Marind’s staple food – but also because its presence sustains all kinds of avian, mammalian, and insect communities in the rainforest. Marind talked about sago as a plant that knows how to share space and time with others, in ways that contrast starkly with the introduced oil palm. Care is absolutely central to Marind-sago relations, and it’s a very particular kind of care that I gloss over in the book as “restrained care”. It is restrained in the sense that Marind do not domesticate or cultivate sago palms. In fact, Marind are morally averse to domestication of any kind because it is said to undermine the autonomy and freedom of sentient plants and animals. Instead, restrained care means taking part in activities that will indirectly enhance the growth of sago palms, but that don’t entail direct forms of control or manipulation. These activities include, for instance, transplanting sago suckers to give the plants more space, churning soils in particular areas to aerate it so that the palms can grow better, occasionally thinning the canopy to allow more sunlight to reach the palms in the undergrowth, or redirecting streams to irrigate them. This kind of care isn’t about totalizing mastery or manipulation. Instead, it’s about making the environment itself more conducive to palms’ sympoietic growth, in the company of their own, diverse other-than-human companions. These forms of care bring to mind María Puig de la Bellacasa’s notion of care as a practical labor, ethical disposition, and affective stance.8 It also conjures care as a relational and reciprocal practice – one in which caring for plants is also caring for humans, and vice versa. One context where this mutuality of care comes to light is conservation.9 In recent years, several oil palm corporations in Merauke have set up conservation zones as part of their efforts to offset the adverse environmental impacts of their industrial activities. But Marind are forbidden from entering these conservation zones because they are privatized and accessible only to plantation personnel and conservation experts. The sago palms within these conservation zones may be protected from destruction, and yet they are a source of constant sorrow and frustration among my companions. Why? Because these palms are no longer able to be cared for by Marind and Marind are no longer able to be cared for by the palm in return. This artificial severance of plants from people thus goes against the ethos of co-becoming that undergirds Marind relations to more-than-human beings, vegetal and other. Instead, it entrenches a mode of “conservation capitalism” that is itself premised on a nature-culture binary - one that is alien and incongruous to many of my Marind friends, and in some ways, just as violent and dispossessory as the plantation model that conservation projects purport to offset. GA: Finally, could tell us briefly about the other book that came out this year, The Promise of Multispecies Justice, which you coedited with Karin Bolender and Eben Kirksey? SC: Thanks for bringing this volume into the conversation, Giovanni. The Promise of Multispecies Justice brings together fourteen contributors from the fields of Indigenous studies, environmental justice, postcolonial studies, anthropology, theology, science and technology studies, feminist studies, philosophy, as 106 Vembri Waluyas A juvenile sago stand in the rubble of a forest cleared to make way for oil palm, photograph, 2021 © Sophie Chao well as less conventional producers of knowledge – from slime mold whisperers and activist-poets to science-fiction writers and artist-architects. Together and differently, we are trying to think about the ways in which multispecies relations in the Anthropocene can be decolonized through a reimagination of what justice is, feels like, tastes like, and sounds like, and a recognition that other-than-human beings have worlds that count and count in the world. Just as important as the human thinkers and tinkerers involved in this project are the array of non-human protagonists who animate it: from pesticides, stray dogs, and viruses, to rivers, nuclear waste, rodent traps, prison gardens, and more. Together, we ask: Who are the subjects of justice in our shared worlds? What is at stake when they are captured by juridical-legal systems and social movements? Who has claimed a monopoly over justice in the past, and in the present, and how might we contest their sense of propriety in the future? What comes out strongly from the volume is the notion that justice is situated and specific, rather than universal or scalable. Justice is of and for some worlds more than others. It is partial, patchy, contingent, and in flux. In recognition of this situatedness, the project does not offer an exhaustive or prescriptive concept of multispecies justice. Indeed, the horizons of justice represented in the collection are often themselves in generative friction with one another. Some authors, for instance, call for justice through mundane ev107 eryday acts of care, others through radical and sweeping structural reforms, others through the transformation of legal paradigms, and yet others through micro-biopolitical modes of bettering, rather than ending, interspecies conflicts. In staying with this complexity, we’re trying to forge what Marisol de la Cadena calls “ontological openings” that unsettle assumptions of secure intelligibility, of and between more-than-human worlds.10 Taken together, then, the essays and poems in this collection offer stories of multispecies justice that jumps scales and domains. They move from abstract speculation to situated political action and material intervention, and then back again. They explore tactics for achieving multispecies justice in polymorphic situations where calculations are never perfect, and instead always open to reinterpretation. They also reveal that it is possible to care for particular forms of life and biocultural communities, while at the same time holding onto promises of sweeping change on future horizons. This is an approach to multispecies justice that is grounded in the ongoing practice of remaining open and alive to the generative possibilities of each and every more-than-human encounter – even if those encounters, as with oil palm and Marind in Merauke, can be deadly and diminishing. It is an invitation to imagine a field of justice where the oikos of the household is in dynamic equilibrium with interlocking ecological systems and economic circuits. Perhaps more than anything, it is “an invitation to renew our commitment to love, to live, and to fight for the possibility of flourishing in more-than-human worlds present and yet to come”.11 Acknowledgement: This interview draws on a ‘Botanical Speculations’ conversation held online on 28 September 2022, hosted by Giovanni Aloi and featuring Sophie Chao as guest speaker. Endnotes [1] Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. [2] Winter, Christine. 2022. Subjects of Intergenerational Justice: Indigenous Philosophy, the Environment and Relationships. London: Routledge. [3] See, for instance, Coburn, Elaine, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, George Sefa Dei, and Makere Stewart-Harawira. 2013. “Unspeakable Things: Indigenous Research and Social Science.” Socio 2: 331–48; LaRocque, Emma. 2010. When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press; Stewart-Harawira, Makere. 2007. “Practicing Indigenous Feminism: Resistance to Imperialism” in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, edited by Joyce Green, 124–39. London: Zed Books. [4] Chao, Sophie. 2022. “Multispecies Mourning: Grieving as Resistance on the West Papuan Oil Palm Frontier.” Cultural Studies, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2022.2052920. [5] Chao, Sophie, and Dion Enari. 2021. “Decolonising Climate Change: A Call for Beyond-Human Imaginaries and Knowledge Generation.” ETropic: Electronic Journal of Studies in the Tropics 20 (2): 32–54. [6] Benjamin, Ruha, and Eddie Glaude. 2018. “[AAS21 Podcast] Episode #12: Reimagining Science and Technology.” Princeton University, Department of African American Studies. https://aas.princeton.edu/news/aas21-podcast-episode12-reimagining-science-and-technology. [7] See http://www.indigenousaction.org/rethinking-the-apocalypse-an-indigenous-anti-futurist-manifesto/. [8] Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2012. “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care.” Sociological Review 60 (2): 197 – 216. [9] Chao, Sophie. 2019. “The Truth About ‘Sustainable’ Palm Oil.” SAPIENS. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/palm-oil-sustainable/. [10] de la Cadena, Marisol. 2014. “The Politics of Modern Politics Meets Ethnographies of Excess Through Ontological Openings.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, January 13. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/the-politics-of-modernpolitics-meets-ethnographies-of-excess-through-ontological-openings. [11] Chao, Sophie, and Eben Kirksey. 2022. “Introduction: Who Benefits from Multispecies Justice?” in The Promise of Multispecies Justice, edited by Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben Kirksey, pp.1-21, quote pp.16–17. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sophie Chao is Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow and Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Sophie previously worked for the Forest Peoples Programme, supporting the rights of forest-dwelling Indigenous peoples to their lands, resources, and livelihoods. Her publications include Conflict or Consent? The Palm Oil Sector at a Crossroads, Divers Paths to Justice: Legal Pluralism and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Southeast Asia, and Oil Palm Expansion in Southeast Asia: Trends and Experiences of Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples. For more, visit www.morethanhumanworlds.com An ecocritical reading of the folktales from the sundarbans The Sundarbans Archipelago is known for its fragile ecosystem. Mainstream literature and media often hold local people responsible for the islands’ ecological decline, or ‘erase’ human presence altogether. However, Sundarbans’ folktales tell a different story. This study critically reads these tales to examine the possibility of an alternative conservation approach. Conversation with fishers from Dayapur and Jamespur in Satjelia island revealed that their belief in the protective powers of Bonbibi (a guardian spirit of the forest) co-exist with scientific understanding of the forest. The folktales, likewise, show that conservation can be human-inclusive. text: Shambhobi Ghosh T he Sundarbans, a cluster of forested islands at the southern end of the Bengal Delta, is known for its unique and fragile ecosystem. While there is pre-historic evidence of human presence in this area, large-scale conversion of forests into agricultural fields and increase in human population peaked during the latter half of the twentieth century, resulting in rapid deforestation and depletion of natural resources.1 Some scholars view the increasing human pressure as a major threat to the area.2 Others like Annu Jalais argue that both environmentalists and governments throughout history have sought to ‘erase’ human presence on these islands.3 Folklore of the Sundarbans has evolved through oral narration over the past two or three centuries. Most of these stories have originated in verse — later adapted into musical plays — and are collectively known as punthi or “manuscript literature”. These stories frequently depict ‘gods and goddesses of woodcutters, honey gatherers, beeswax gatherers, boat builders, and the most desperate cultivators,’4 and portray local perceptions of the landscape and biodiversity of the Sundarbans. Whereas scientific ecology frequently relies on abstraction, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) leads to management based on locally formulated and implemented rules, and flexibility in adapting to the changes in resource use patterns.5 Rist et al. agree that TEK can be capable of adapting to ecological surprises, but also warn against unconditionally valorizing this system of knowledge on its own.6 These studies infer that in certain cases, TEK and scientific methods of forest resource management can be combined to form a more inclusive approach to conservation. Reading the folktales of the Sundarbans, then, becomes important to access the local ecological knowledge of its people. The Sundarbans: an overview The Sundarbans archipelago is the largest continuous stretch of mangrove ecosystem in the world, and the only one that houses tigers. The region (10,200km) is shared between India and Bangladesh, the Indian territory constituting roughly one-thirds of the total area (9,630km).7 The Indian Sundarbans contain 102 islands (52 of those populated), interconnected by at least 31 tidal rivers, numerous creeks, and estuaries. Mangrove forests cover 109 Shambhobi Ghosh The Indian Sundarbans. Map rendered on Google Earth, 2023 © Shambhobi Ghosh around 4,266.6 square kilometers, of which 2,585.10 square kilometers are part of the Sundarbans Tiger Reserve.8 The region hosts over 100 species of vascular plants, nearly 250 species of fish, 300 species of birds, and various mammals, reptiles, amphibians, arthropods, and other faunal species. Basic services such as electricity and fresh water supplies, medical facilities, infrastructural development, and educational services are still inadequate in the region. The lack of sufficient connectivity with the mainland compels a large section of the population to rely on forest resources for livelihood. Some of the predominant forest-based occupations include fishing (Figure 2) and honey collection. Methods This study analyzes two verse narratives, namely Bonbibi Johuranama by Munshi Muhammad Khater, and Raimangal by Krishnaram Das. The former is a mythical account of Bonbibi (literally, “the woman of the forest”, or even ‘Ms. Forest’), believed to be a protector of forest-resource collectors. Raimangal eulogizes Dokkhin Ray (literally, “the ruler of the South”), a personification of the Royal Bengal Tiger and a malevolent guardian spirit of the forest. The essay uses an ecocritical framework, which acknowledges that literary representations of the environment are “not only generated by particular cultures, [but also] play a significant role in generating those cultures”.9 The study, therefore, also seeks to understand how, besides reflecting local perceptions of the forest and its conservation, the stories in turn have also helped in shaping such perspectives. The field study was conducted in April, 2019, at Satjelia Island in the Gosaba 110 Shambhobi Ghosh Fishers entering a creek near Pirkhali Island, Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary, Sundarbans. Digital photograph, 2019 © Shambhobi Ghosh Block of the Sundarbans. The island lies adjacent to the Sajnekhali Wildlife Sanctuary, bordering on the buffer zone of the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve. Within the island, the villages Dayapur and Jamespur lie across the river on the north of the Tiger Reserve. The Forest Department provides limited access to the buffer zone for resource collection to fishers and honey-collectors with official permits.10 Informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with local people (with predominantly forest-based livelihoods) in Jamespur and Dayapur revealed their social construction of the forest and its resources. History of the Sundarbans Although a popular perception of the Sundarbans today is that of a once-pristine forest people have recently encroached to exploit its natural resources, historical findings suggest that “this territory had been settled, destroyed, abandoned, and then resettled, for thousands of years”.11 Early Settlements The earliest evidence of the existence of life in the region can be traced to around 12,000 years ago,12 although the Ganga-Brahmaputra Delta that exists today in its present form is estimated to be 2,500 to 5,000 years old.13 Neolithic tools (~10,000 y.a.) have been discovered from both the western and eastern sides of the deltaic basin.14 Other archaeological findings in the region include coins, terracotta figurines, and ornaments from the pre-Mauryan and the Mauryan period.15 Ptolemy mentions a sophisticated civilization named “Gangaridai” in the 111 Shambhobi Ghosh Study areas in the Sundarbans and their proximity to the Sajnekhali Tiger Reserve. Map rendered on Google Earth, 2023 © Shambhobi Ghosh deltaic region in his account of India (second century AD), which “occupied all the country about the mouths of the Ganges”.16 Archaeological findings at Chandraketugarh (North 24 Parganas) also suggest that the region was a “flourishing coastal town from the fourth century BC to the post-Gupta era (fourth–sixth century AD), having trade contacts with foreign countries”.17 Thirteenth Century Onward The thirteenth century witnessed a rising Islamic influence in the region after the military general Bakhtiyar Khilji invaded Bengal in 1204 AD. Following his conquest, Sufi saints or Pirs arrived at the delta, many of whom were among the first people to convert the forests in its northern and eastern parts into agricultural land.18 Several Pirs eventually became part of the region’s folklore due to their humanitarian work and their reputation as healers.19 Historian Niharranjan Roy cites Ralph Fitch’s travel account in 1586, who described the deltaic tract as fertile land, with sturdy houses built on it that could resist tides and storms.20 Many scholars believe that natural disasters and continual pirate attacks were instrumental to the change in the landscape.21 Accounts of Francois Bernier and James Rennell confirm that the violent Arakanese and the Portuguese turned these prosperous settlements into desolations.22 The Colonial Period Current settlements in the Sundarbans are the result of mass-scale clearing initiatives between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. General Claude Russell, the collector of the 24 Parganas, initiated this drive in 1770 to 112 Ptolemy Gangetic map of Asia from Ptolemy’s Geography depicting the kingdom of Gangaridai at the five river mouths. British Library Harley MS 7182, 15th century, Public Domain (https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ptolemy_Asia_detail.jpg) increase company revenue. On December 21, 1783, Tilman Henckell, the first magistrate of Jessore (now a part of Bangladesh), submitted a project titled the ‘Sundarban Plan’ to Warren Hastings, the Viceroy of India. The plan sought to reclaim forest lands and distribute them as agricultural plots among tenants. The Viceroy granted lease of land between the rivers Haringhata near Calcutta, and the Raimangal near the modern India-Bangladesh border, on the condition of raising a revenue of seven lakh rupees within seven years.23 Although land reclamation brought in people from outside the region, the Sundarbans would not be significantly populated until the middle of the nineteenth century. On his journey to Calcutta from Madras in 1831, Thomas Bacon recounted viewing the Sagar Island from his ship which, despite attempts of reclamation, did not have permanent residents due to “the descent of tigers and other wild beasts, which abound on the island”.24 The Sundarbans did not generate revenue until 1886, when Port Canning bought the lease for 8000 rupees per year. In 1902, Sir Daniel Hamilton leased 9000 acres of land in the Gosaba and Rangabelia region, and also acquired Satjelia in 1909. By 1939, the islands Sandeshkhali, Kakdwip, Canning, Sagar, Namkhana, Patharpratima, Basanti, Mathurapur, Kultali, Gosaba, and Hingalganj had turned into settlements.25 Throughout this period, people from various districts of Bengal and other provinces, and even other countries such as Myanmar arrived and settled down in the newly reclaimed areas.26 Migration continued well after Indian independence and rose sharply after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. In the aftermath of the civil war, thousands of refugees crossed borders and entered the Indian Sundarbans. 113 Contemporary Environmental Issues At present, several ecological crises threaten the Sundarbans. The water temperature has increased at a rate of 0.5°C per decade between 1980 and 2007 (as opposed to the 0.06°C of global sea surface temperature). The sea level has been rising almost twice as fast as the global average, disrupting the aquatic life and the mangrove ecosystem.27 Excessive salinity in the water and the soil has hindered several mangrove species from thriving, and the new higher salinitytolerant species that have emerged are not suitable food sources for the herbivorous wildlife.28 Increased salinity has also affected agriculture, and the rising pressure on the freshwater-fish habitats has posed challenges to the livelihoods of the local people.29 Despite being a Protected Area, the Sundarbans has lost about 5% of its forest cover between 1989 and 2009, increasing the risk of cyclones and related natural calamities. Folktales of the Sundarbans Folklore is a vital source of culture in its expressive, discursive, and developing form, especially in institutionalized and increasingly homogenized societies. Studying the folklore of a particular group, therefore, can give us access to a dynamic and unstructured body of their cultural knowledge that is a product of observation and informal modes of diffusion.30 Debabrata Naskar defines folklore as a source of “the geographic, social, economic, anthropological, and religious identities of a particular place”.31 Studying the folklore of the Sundarbans, then, may also help us in identifying the ecological identity of the place by understanding the local people’s value system, especially in relation to their environment. The Sundarban Deities Bonbibi embodies both Hindu and Muslim traditions of belief, and is often viewed as a counterpart to Hindu forest-deities such as Banachandi and Banadurga.32 Most forest resource collectors in the Sundarbans, regardless of their religion and caste, worship Bonbibi before and after a trip to the forest. Bonbibi is usually accompanied by her brother Shah Jongoli, and Dukhey, her young devotee. Munshi Mohammad Khater’s Bonbibi Johuranama (1880) has become the basis for various palas and jatras33 that are typically staged after Bonbibi’s worship, but also by way of entertainment.34 Dokkhin Ray’s tiger form evokes the ancient tradition of worshipping zoomorphic deities.35 Like Bonbibi, Dokkhin Ray is popular among people with forest-based livelihoods. He is worshipped across the southern parts of 24 Parganas and Hughli, Jessore and Nowakhali in Bangladesh, and in the Sundarbans.36 Several poems in the Mangal Kavya37 tradition eulogize him. Among these, Krishnaram Das’s Raimangal (1686) is considered one of the earliest. Other notable deities featuring in these tales are Bara Khan Gaji and Narayani. Both are forest deities and command hostile animals, including the tiger. While in Raimangal, Bara Khan Gaji mobilizes an army of tigers against Dokkhin Ray,38 Bonbibi Johuranama portrays him as Dokkhin Ray’s friend. Narayani is Dokkhin Ray’s mother.39 Unknown Sculptor Community idol of Bonbibi and Shah Jongoli seated on Dokkhin Ray, with Dukhey at their feet. Digital photograph of clay idol, 2019 © Shambhobi Ghosh 114 Ecological Knowledge in the Folktales Landscape In Bonbibi Johuranama, Bonbibi and Shah Jongoli travel from Medina to India following a divine command to take charge of the Sundarbans. Upon crossing the river Ganga, the siblings reach Bhangar, where they meet Bhangar Shah, the guardian Pir of the region. Shah instructs them to conquer the land between Chandkhali (most probably in the modern Satkhira District in Bangladesh) to Juri (probably Sylhet in modern Bangladesh).40 As Bonbibi conquers the land, Dokkhin Ray and Narayani challenge her 115 Shambhobi Ghosh Bonbibi’s kingdom according to Bhangar Shah. Map rendered on Google Earth, 2023 © Shambhobi Ghosh Unknown Sculptor Community idol of the tiger god Dokkhin Ray. Digital photograph of clay idol, 2019 © Shambhobi Ghosh 116 to a battle. This conflict could be read as a metaphor of humans reclaiming land from the older guardian of the forest — the tiger. However, Bonbibi also creates forests in the areas she claims from Narayani, which evokes historical findings about the changing land covers of the region. Figure 8 shows that several parts of Bonbibi’s mythical domain (such as Bhowanipur and Rajpur)41 are now densely populated parts of Kolkata. This description harks back to a relatively recent past (probably the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries) when the areas were still forested (rather than an earlier past before the Arakanese and the Portuguese invasions, when there might have been settlements). A song in one of the play-texts based on Johuranama depicts the route of the merchant Dhona’s journey to the forests from Hasnabad to Debhata (in modern Bangladesh), to Hingalganj to Madhabkati.42 The Johuranama text depicts a slight variation in the route.43 The mapped route (Figure 9) based on both the descriptions in the poem and the play-text indicates that the textual landscape was much more interconnected with waterways than the actual landscape is today.44 Other significant places include Kendokhali (Figure 10), the domain of Dokkhin Ray.45 The island is currently part of the core area of the Sundarbans National Park, West Bengal, and a well-known tiger habitat. However, the recent rise in the sea level and increasing salinity of the water and soil are forcing tigers to migrate northward.46 The folktales, therefore, indicate animal habitats that may either be threatened, or no longer exist today. Raimangal was written approximately in 1686, and its textual landscape evokes an even earlier period.47 The poem describes the merchant Pushpadut 117 Shambhobi Ghosh Bonbibi’s mythical abode. Map rendered on Google Earth, 2023 © Shambhobi Ghosh Shambhobi Ghosh An estimated route of Dhona’s journey to the forest. Map rendered on Google Earth, 2023 © Shambhobi Ghosh ta’s voyage. In contrast to Bacon’s account of Sagar, Das describes the island as a renowned pilgrimage, and the other places as prosperous villages along the river banks, indicating a time before the Arakanese and Portuguese invasions.48 Like Johuranama, this poem also suggests that the region had a much larger network of waterways.49 Biodiversity The tiger’s presence is pervasive in both poems. As Dukhey and his uncles Dhona and Mona enter the forest of Garkhali, Dokkhin Ray observes the group behind the scrubs lining a creek, accurately evoking tiger behavior.50 In Raimangal, 122 tigers and tigresses participate in the battle between Bara Khan Gaji and Dokkhin Ray.51 Their names are indicative of their respective physical attributes and habitats. For example, ‘Fetanaka’ indicates a wide nose, and ‘Nadapeta’ signifies a bulging stomach. ‘Kashua’ refers to a tiger that lives among Kash bushes, and ‘Bilkandha’ suggests the tiger lives near ponds.52 The tigers in the poem list their prey, which includes poultry, fish, buffaloes, cows, oxen, deer, wild boar, and rhinos53. Honey bees are an important species in these folktales, since honey is one of the most valuable forest resources. The Johuranama accurately mentions the ideal time for honey collection (the month of Chaitra or late spring, roughly from the middle of March to April). In the play version of Bonbibi Johuranama, resource collectors fell Goran Anna Dumitriu and Golpata trees.54 Raimangal describes woodcutters felling Kirpa, Pashur, SunCommunicating Dress, 2011. Image dari,Bacteria and other trees to build boats for Pushpadutta’s voyage.55 courtesy of the artist © Anna Dumitriu 118 Resource Use and Conservation Bonbibi Johuranama portrays the forests as rich sources of wood, leaves, salt, wax, fishes, and honey. Dhona’s team collects seven boatloads of wax and honey from Garkhali.56 A team of woodcutters in Raimangal collect enough timber to build several boats for Pushpadutta.57 The texts also feature people with diverse forest-based livelihoods, such as malangis (salt-makers) bauliyas (woodcutters), and mouleys (honey-collectors). Dependence on these resources (especially non-timber products) in the texts reflects the current reality of the Sundarbans.58 Bonbibi is perceived as protector of humans and non-humans alike. Hence, at the end of Johuranama, the tiger god Dokkhin Ray, the Pir Bara Khan Gaji, and Dukhey embrace each other as brothers.59 Bonbibi also introduces Sheko the crocodile as Dukhey’s brother, who carries him home at the end of the story.60 Johuranama depicts an eco-centric world, where humans have neither isolated themselves from their environment, nor are they at its center. This world instils camaraderie between humans and non-humans. Both stories are also cautionary tales about the consequences of greed. Dhona decides to venture into the forest even though he has no wants.61 As a result, he falls prey to Dokkhin Ray. In Raimangal, the moment Ratai the woodcutter and his brothers attempt to cut down a sacred tree, tigers appear and kill Ratai’s brothers.62 In these stories, any attempt to take more than what is needed results in mortal danger. Both tales acknowledge Dokkhin Ray’s guardianship over the forest resources. In Johuranama, the Pir Bhangar Shah informs Bonbibi and Shah Jongoli that all forest resources belong to Dokkhin Ray.63 Even after his defeat, Dokkhin Ray receives a clearly demarcated domain of his own.64 His presence in the forest compels resource-collectors to exercise caution and restraint. At the end of a jatra version 119 Shambhobi Ghosh Kendokhali, Dokkhin Ray’s abode. Map rendered on Google Earth, 2023 © Shambhobi Ghosh Shambhobi Ghosh The red cloth wrapped around the prow indicates that the boat has been worshipped. Digital photograph, 2019 © Shambhobi Ghosh of the story, Dokkhin Ray assumes the responsibility of protecting the forest by punishing tax evaders.65 Field Study Most residents of Dayapur and Jamespur depend on the forest for livelihood. Many are fishers, and some also collect seasonal honey. The fishing season lasts between the Bengali months of Shraban (middle of July to middle of August) to Falgun (middle of February to middle of March), and the honey harvesting season lasts between the months of Chaitra to Ashar (Early June to July). The Forest Department issues fishing passes for two months, and provides a fifteenday honey collection pass once a year.66 The interviewees were generally in favor of regulatory laws such as the prohibition of tree-felling, restrictions on the size of the fishing catch, etc. However, almost everyone complained about corrupt Forest Department officials.67 According to an interviewee, officials would often harass forest-goers with intense cross-questioning and nit-picking, eventually imposing a hefty fine, or canceling their forest passes.68 Only one among the five interviewees felt that strict regulations are necessary to prevent poaching and smuggling, and that fishers with 120 legal permits had no reason for fear.69 None of the interviewees disagreed with current conservation laws, but felt that these laws were poorly implemented, and were used as an excuse to oppress forest-goers. All the interviewees worshipped Bonbibi, particularly before and after trips to the forest. Witnessing accidents and deaths in the forests have not challenged the interviewees’ faith in Bonbibi’s divine power. Most interviewees blamed accidents on individual failings. An interviewee, who was also a gunin,70 reported that prayers and enchantments, while useful during a crisis, were not always effective. Being sensible and alert, and refraining from immoral activities such as theft or overconsumption were the most important factors to survival.71 All interviewees acknowledged that protection of predators is crucial to preserve the forest. They were aware of the various ecosystem services offered by the forests, and understood that the loss of biodiversity would destabilize ecological balance. They also asserted that their visits to the forest was only for subsistence, and due to the lack of other livelihood options. An interviewee perceived the tiger as a highly intelligent animal (‘pundit’) who observed resource-collectors to judge whether or not they adhered to the rules of the forest.72 Another interviewee believed that the tigers and the crocodiles are of121 fering a service to the people by guarding the forests, and the forest-goers are able to live off its resources by their permission.73 Social Construction of the Sundarbans While ecological damage is caused by people across the hierarchical chain, the social construction of nature allows powerful groups to place the responsibility of the damage squarely on the less powerful. Such constructions are created by deploying various discourses on the environment, such as the ‘wilderness’ discourse that propagates the notion of ‘pristine’ natural landscape untouched by human activity.74 In the previous decade, Sahara Company’s pitch for its mega eco-tourist project within the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve as the creation of a ‘virgin’ forested space with large-scale infrastructure (accessible only to affluent tourists) prove that the mainstream, urban construction of the Sundarbans has always excluded local human inhabitants.75 In contrast, the Sundarbans’ folktales reflect how local people have socially constructed the forest. Through the depiction of people’s complex relationship with the forest, the stories have avoided being anthropocentric narratives of conquest over nature. In fact, nature has far greater agency in these tales. The power to decide the fate of the humans within the story almost entirely resides with the elemental deities. However, these deities are not above negotiation; humans regularly gain their share of resources through prayer, pleading, and often hefty personal cost. In this sense, the folktales differ from early colonial accounts of the forests that have described them as dark, fearful breeding grounds of ferocious animals and diseases.76 While the forests in the folktales are certainly dangerous spaces, their central image is that of a place for fulfilling needs. Finally, since the forests are the abode of deities, they are also sacred places — to be revered and protected. The sacredness of the forests is not determined by its lack of human disturbance unlike other sacred groves in India.77 Rather, it is due to their bounty and in their role in determining the fates of its human dependents. The folktales, then, resist simplified representations of the forest and its dependents. Folktales as a Body of Ecological Knowledge While analyzing ecological elements in the folktales is important to discern the extent of local people’s understanding of their environment, this body of knowledge cannot be pitted against scientific knowledge. As Saberwal and Rangarajan have argued, making distinctions between ‘local’ or ‘indigenous’ knowledge systems and ‘scientific’ knowledge systems, and arguing on one’s superiority over the other is problematic in more ways than one.78 In any case, the study conducted among the local people revealed that such duality between knowledge systems need not exist. While most people in the Sundarbans believed in the ‘reality’ of the Sundarbans’ deities, they also displayed scientific knowledge of the ecosystem they inhabited. They showed awareness of ecological concepts such as food chains, ecological balance, and stability, and knew that species diversity was a key requirement of a healthy ecosystem. Conservation is often perceived to be in direct conflict with forest dwellers, especially under the dominant Western model of conservation.79 Sen and Pattanaik discuss how the Forest Department has weaponized the ‘non-indigenous’ identity of most local people in the Sundarbans to practice coercive and exclusionist conservation measures.80 However, the folktales of the Sundarbans show that conservation need not happen at the cost of livelihoods. Bonbibi’s tale supports the idea of subsistence, while acknowledging that resource collection must be regulated.81 Both Bonbibi and Dokkhin Ray make equally compelling cases for the need to use, as well as preserve resources. Ultimately, the message that emerges from this contention is a warning against greed. Thus, Dukhey, the poor son of a helpless widow, is made prosperous by the abundant blessings of Bonbibi, Dokkhin Ray, and Bara Khan Gaji. On the other hand, Dhona receives his comeuppance for 122 visiting the forest despite possessing more than enough wealth. Local people’s views on conservation resemble those underlying the tales. They believe that protecting the forest and its wildlife is essential. While they are open to learning new ways of using resources judiciously, they do not agree that conservation should entirely exclude people from the forests. The purpose of reading the Sundarbans folktales was to understand how local approaches to forest resource use and conservation varies from the global, centralized, and more visible model of conservation. This study suggests that the folktales offer a complex representation of the Sundarbans both as a forested and a peopled landscape. It addresses the challenges as well as the benefits people receive from the forest, and makes a case for both human and non-human stakeholders. The stories unequivocally condemn greed for excess and only a person with genuine need is rewarded with resources.82 Local people of the Sundarbans also seem to share this worldview. Perhaps one way of finding a middle ground to the problem of conserving the Sundarbans is to revisit its folktales and local beliefs, and explore whether building a model of conservation based on the local perception of the forest (instead of the global) is more feasible for the longer term. The social construction of the Sundarbans by non-resident, largely urban groups have been widely disseminated. Perhaps understanding how the local people have socially constructed the Sundarbans will lead to conservation methods that are better suited and more effective for this unique ecosystem. Acknowledgement: This essay is an extract from a dissertation of the same title by the author, submitted as partial fulfilment of the requirement for a master’s degree at Nalanda University in 2019. The research was supervised by Dr. Sayan Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor at the School of Ecology and Environment Studies (SEES). Endnotes [1] Rashmi Dutta Dey, “Sundarbans and Conservation: Historical Perspectives and Contemporary Challenges,” Sahapedia (2018), accessed April 10, 2019. [2] Brij Gopal and Malavika Chauhan, “Biodiversity and its Conservation in Sundarban Ecosystem,” Aquatic Sciences 68, no. 3 (2006): 338–354, accessed October 9, 2018, doi: 10.1007/s00027-006-0868-8 [3] Annu Jalais, “The Sundarbans: Whose World Heritage Site?” Conservation and Society 5, no. 3 (2007): 335–42, accessed November 5, 2018, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26392892 [4] Sutapa Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans: Folk Deities, Monsters and Mortals (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010), 30. [5] Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding, and Carl Folke, “Rediscovery of Traditional Ecological Knowledge as Adaptive Management,” Ecological Applications 10, no. 5 (2000): 1251–1262, accessed December 19, 2018, doi: 10.1890/1051-0761(2000)010[1251:ROTEKA]2.0.CO;2 [6] Lucy Rist, R. Uma Shaanker, E. J. Milner-Gulland, and Jaboury Ghazoul, “The Use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Forest Management: An Example from India,” Ecology and Society 15, no. 1 (2010): 3, accessed December 11, 2018, doi: 10.5751/ES-03290-150103 [7] Anamitra Anurag Danda, Gayathri Sriskanthan, Asish Ghosh, Jayanta Bandyopadhyay, and Sugata Hazra, “Indian Sundarbans Delta: A Vision,” World Wide Fund for Nature — India (2011), accessed February 5, 2019, https://www.wwfindia. org/?6362/Indian-Sundarbans-Delta--A-Vision [8] Prabhudan Haldar, “Sundarbaner Jangal Hashil,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 24–28. [9] Ken Hiltner, “General Introduction,” in Ecocriticism: The Essential Reader, ed. Ken Hiltner (New York: Routledge, 2015), xiii. [10] Anshu Singh, Prodyut Bhattacharya, Pradeep Vyas, and Sarvashish Roy, “Contribution of NTFPs in the Livelihood of Mangrove Forest Dwellers of Sundarban,” Journal of Human Ecology 29, no. 3 (October 2017): 191-200, accessed January 14, 2018, doi:10.1080/09709274.2010.11906263 [11] Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 3. [12] Subhash Mistri, Sundarbaner Mangrove Udvid (Kolkata: Pustak Bipani, 2017), 10. [13] Danda et al., “Indian Sundarbans Delta: A Vision,” 1. [14] Animesh Sinha, “Sundarbaner Aranya Itihash,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 6–11. [15] Krishnakali Mondal, “Sundarban Anchaler Kayekti Samriddha Pratnasthal,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 29–33. [16] Ptolemy, Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy, trans. J.W. McCrindle (London: Trubner & Co., 1885), 31, https:// archive.org/details/dli.pahar.1072 [17] Chatterjee Sarkar, The Sundarbans, 21. [18] Jalais, Forest of Tigers, 3–4. 123 [19] Wakil Ahmed, Banglar Pir Sahitya o Sanskriti (Dhaka: Baipatra, 2016), 12. [20] N.R. Roy, Bangalir Itihas (Kolkata: Book Emporium, 1949), 104. [21] Ranjan Chakrabarti, “Local People and the Global Tiger: An Environmental History of the Sundarbans.” Global Environment 2 no. 3 (2009): 72–95, accessed January 10, 2023, doi: 10.3197/ge.2009.020304 [22] Soumen Dutta, “Bhatir Deshe Magher Muluk,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 40–44, accessed January 9, 2023. [23] Haldar, “Sundarbaner Jangal Hashil,” 25. [24] Thomas Bacon, First Impressions and Studies From Nature in Hindostan. Vol. 1. (London: W.H. Allen & Co., 1837), 121. https://www.rarebooksocietyofindia.org/book_archive/196174216674_10156670270456675.pdf [25] Haldar, “Sundarbaner Jangal Hashil,” 27. [26] Jalais, Forest of Tigers, 3. [27] Kanksha Mahadevia and Mayank Vikas, “Climate Change — Impact on the Sundarbans: A Case Study,” International Scientific Journal Environmental Science 2 no.1 (2012): 7–15, accessed December 22, 2018, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3389022 [28] Sayan Bhattachayra, “Sundarbane Bishwa Ushnayan Ebang Samudrataler Briddhi — Sambhabya Prabhab Bisleshan,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 34–35. [29] Jayanta Kumar Mullick, “Sundarban Jeeb-parimandaler Banyapran Baichitra,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 64–78. [30] Lynne S. McNeill, Folklore Rules: A Fun, Quick, and Useful Introduction to the Field of Academic Folklore Studies (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2013), 16. [31] Debabrata Naskar, Sundarban Savyata o Loksanskriti Anveshan (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2017), 11. [32] Sujit Kumar Mandal, “Bhumika,” in Banabibir Pala, ed. Sujit Kumar Mandal (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2010), 42. [33] Palas and jatras are popular forms of folk-theatre in Bengal, featuring varying degrees of extempore acting and improvised dialogue. These plays typically last for several hours (sometimes overnight) and are interspersed with songs. [34] Sanatkumar Mitra suggests these plays be treated as ‘functional’ rather than ‘ritualistic,’ although the interviewees during field visits reported to staging these plays mostly after a puja. [35] Pallab Sengupta, “Sundarbaner Myth-katha: Johuranamar Bahu Bishay,” Jara Jajabar (December–February 2018–19): 60–62. [36] Satyanarayan Bhattacharya, “Bhumika,” in Kabi Krishnaram Daser Granthabali, ed. Satyanarayan Bhattacharya (Kolkata: Calcutta University, 1962), K64. [37] The Mangal Kavya is a tradition of panegyric poems in Bengali that eulogize folk-deities. The tradition emerged during the fifteenth century. Some of the better-known poems in the Mangal Kavya cycle are the Chandimangal and the Manashamangal. [38] Bhattacharya, “Bhumika,” K61. [39] Munshi Muhammad Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” in Banabibir Pala, ed. Sujit Kumar Mandal (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2010), 77. [40] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 78. Bonbibi’s kingdom roughly extends to Chandkhali along the Raimangal River, and further north. [41] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 75. [42] Surendranath Gharami, “Bonbibir Pala,” in Banabibir Pala, ed. Sujit Kumar Mandal (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2010), 146–147. [43] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 73. [44] While major rivers from Barijhati to Hasnabad are absent, the textual route suggests an interconnected waterway. From Hasnabad, the boats probably sailed through the rivers Ichhamati and Kalindi. After reaching Madhabkati near the Raimangal, the party likelyy took another (now absent) creek to Herobhanga, and finally to Garkhali. [45] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 75. [46] Bhattachayra, “Sundarbane Bishwa Ushnayan Ebang Samudrataler Briddhi,” 35. [47] Bhattacharya, “Bhumika,” K4. [48] Krishnaram Das, “Raimangal,” in Kabi Krishnaram Daser Granthabali, ed. Satyanarayan Bhattacharya (Kolkata: Calcutta University Press, 1962), 203. [49] Das, “Raimangal,” 203–204. [50] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 73. [51] Bhattacharya, “Bhumika,” 60–61. [52] Bhattacharya, “Bhumika,” 61. [53] Javan Rhinos and wild buffaloes are known to have existed in the Sundarbans, but are now extinct. [54] Gharami, “Bonbibir Pala,” 151. [55] Das, “Raimangal,” 169. [56] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 70. [57] Das, “Raimangal,” 169. [58] Singh et al., “Contribution of NTFPs in the Livelihood of Mangrove Forest Dwellers of Sundarban,” 191–200. [59] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 65. [60] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 62. [61] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 75. [62] Das, “Raimangal,” 169. [63] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 78. [64] Khater, “Bonbibi Johuranama,” 75. [65] Anonymous, “Dukhey Jatra” in Banabibir Pala, ed. Sujit Kumar Mandal (Kolkata: Gangchil, 2010), 200. [66] Interviewee 1, interview by the author, Satjelia, April 15, 2019. [67] Interviewee 3, interview by the author, Satjelia, April 15, 2019. [68] Interviewee 5, interview by the author, Satjelia, April 15, 2019. [69] Interviewee 1, interview. [70] A magician considered to have powers to prevent tiger attacks, and protect the team from harm. Many forestgoers have a gunin on their teams. [71] Interviewee 1, interview. [72] Interviewee 5, interview. [73] Interviewee 3, interview. [74] Paul Robbins, John Hintz, and Sarah A. Moor. Environment and Society: A Critical Introduction (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 127. [75] Archives, “A Study on Corporate Abuse in Sundarban,” Society for Direct Initiative for Social and Health Action (DISHA), accessed April 5, 2019, https://dishaearth.org/archives/ [76] Daniel A. Friess, “Ecosystem Services and Disservices of Mangrove Forests: Insights from Historical Colonial perspectives.” Forests 7, no. 183 (August 2016): 1–16, accessed January 10, 2019, doi: 10.3390/f7090183 [77] Rajasri Ray, M.D.S. Chandran, and T.V. Ramachandra, “Biodiversity and ecological assesments of Indian sacred groves,” Journal of Forestry Research 25, no. 1 (February 2014): 21–28, accessed January 11, 2019, doi: 10.1007/s11676-0140429-2 124 [78] Mahesh Rangarajan and Vasant K. Saberwal, “Introduction,” in Battles Over Nature: Science and Politics of Conservation, ed. Vasant K. Saberwal and Mahesh Rangarajan (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), 1–30. [79] Vasant K. Saberwal, Mahesh Rangarajan, and Ashish Kothari, People, Parks & Wildlife: Towards Coexistence (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2001), 44. [80] Amrita Sen and Sarmistha Pattanaik, “How can traditional livelihoods find a place in contemporary conservation politics debates in India? Understanding community perspectives in Sundarbans, West Bengal,” Journal of Political Ecology 24 no. 1 (September 2017): 871–880, accessed February 9, 2019, doi: 10.2458/v24i1.20971 [81] Sen and Pattanaik, “Traditional Livelihoods in the Sundarban,” 877. [82] Annu Jalais, “Bonbibi: Bridging Worlds,” Indian Folklife: A Quarterly Newsletter from National Folklore Support Centre 28 (January 2008): 6–8, accessed December 24, 2018, https://www.academia.edu/4730568/Bonbibi_Bridging_Worlds_ in_Indian_Folklife#:~:text=National%20Folklore%20Support%20Centre%20(NFSC,training%2C%20networking%2C%20 and%20publications Shambhobi Ghosh is an Indic language translator at AI4Bharat, a centre at IIT Madras, Chennai. She has more than ten years of experience in creative, academic, and business writing, editing, and translation. Her fiction, poetry, reviews, and essays have been widely published across India and the UK. Having trained in English Literature and Ecological Studies, she specializes in the niche domain of ecopoetics, and other interconnections between literature and the environment. Shambhobi translates academic and literary work from Bangla into English, and vice versa. Her latest work of translation is a collection of Jean Lorrain’s short stories titled Krishna Ether. 125 Where we find ourselves Ryan Waggoner Participants walking the path © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas This conversation between artist Janine Antoni and curator Joey Orr took place at the end of a site visit and long installation process. The site of Antoni’s most recent work, here-ing (2022 to present) is the Kansas Biological Field Station at the University of Kansas. She brings her long artistic commitment to embodiment into the context of a biological field station, inviting the public to return to the body through intimately relating to the land. This work is facilitated by Arts Research Integration at the Spencer Museum of Art. in conversation Janine Antoni and Joey Orr 126 127 Keith Van de Riet Composite image of a sketch of the artwork and an aerial view of participants walking in the path. A rtist Janine Antoni’s most recent work, here-ing (2022 to present), attempts to transform a field by giving it a gentle and encouraging nudge toward a healthier grassland while inviting people to walk a labyrinth in the shape of the anatomy of the human ear. The work is a new commission by the Spencer Museum of Art and is embedded in the Field Station at the University of Kansas, where Antoni is working with researchers at the Kansas Biological Survey and Center for Ecological Research and with the help of the Designbuild Studio in the School of Architecture & Design. The Field Station offers more than 3,700 acres of diverse native and managed habitats available for emerging research. For the project, Antoni is particularly focused on the prairie ecosystem, one of the most diverse and endangered ecosystems outside of the rainforest and one that has nearly disappeared across the United States. Antoni, whose artistic practice actively engages the body, is working with researchers to make connections between the intricacy of the prairie environment and the human body. At the heart of this environmentally embedded work of art is an invitation for the public to return to the body through intimately relating to the land. The process began in March 2022 with a prescribed field burning, a natural process that rejuvenates the prairie, with the support of Field Station researchers. Antoni joined this important ecological remediation with a ritual experience for the public that allowed them to relate to the land through acts of personal healing. When humans form a relationship of reciprocity with the earth, both humans and the environment can flourish. At this writing, the outer ear has been walked into the field like a game trail and plans have begun for the middle and inner ears. After the design for the outer ear was realized through individual walks and ecology tours, Curator for Research Joey Orr sat down for a conversation with Janine Antoni about the project. Exhausted 128 Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli The site of here-ing © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas. from intense work over two weeks of long, hot, late summer days, they sat under a tent on the edge of the field at dusk, reflecting on their work and some of the participants in this unfolding project. The only gauge for how long to talk was the setting sun. Janine Antoni: It feels great to be outside every day. Joey Orr: Especially now that it’s breezy, and our labor is behind us. JA: When [artist] Mona Cliff walked the path with me earlier, she really made me think about why many rituals align with the seasons. She was saying that in her Indigenous tradition, the fields are burned in the fall, which is more connected to the intention of letting go. In her experience, our fire ritual seemed to be happening at the wrong time. This makes so much sense in terms of connecting to the land because it brings one into alignment with the seasons. I didn’t grow up with seasons. In the Bahamas, everything is always the same. Even if it rains, it rains for five minutes, and the sun comes back out. So, my first seasons were miraculous. I was in complete awe. My first fall, I couldn’t stop collecting leaves as if they were shells. JO: Out here, it’s almost a minute-by-minute thing. Remember what it was like trying to bring you out for the prescribed burn and how many times we had to postpone? Even when you were here, there was a snowstorm that very night. Weather can seem so banal in many ways, but when you are out in a field, it is non-negotiable fact. JA: It asks us to stay present and in the moment. I remember what Mona told you, too, that she’s always trying to ask why, why, why. And someone, one of her elders said, 129 Mike Gunnoe Part of the prescribed burn from March 2022 © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas 130 131 Mike Gunnoe Janine Antoni operating a drip torch during a controlled burn led by KU Field Station Manager Sheena Parsons A basket woven from Eastern red cedar by KU Field Station Manager Sheena Parsons after a Sheen Parsons © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas snowstorm after the controlled burn Well sometimes you don’t need to know. I feel guilty that I don’t know enough, but you can never know everything so knowing how to be present is a good antidote. JO: I have been witnessing you walk around the bowl of the ear with people from the University that I associate with different modes of knowing. I was thinking about what it means to receive everyone like this. The only way to have a good complex picture of what is going on in the field is to receive all of that, not just knowledge, but feeling, intuition, experience, and embodiment. It can’t just come from one source if we’re going to encounter place in all of its complexity. That is something I’ve been thinking about. JA: I agree. There are so many ways of knowing. Bringing in a wide variety of perspectives has been an important goal for here-ing. Another goal is to be open to hearing from the field itself. To do so, we need to listen with our whole body. I have noticed how different people walk. When we get to the woods, I always ask, Do you want to walk back in silence? Some people just can’t: we’re here, we’re together, so why not talk. But then with others, it’s actually more comfortable to be together with the field in silence. I find it to be a very moving experience. But it made me think, What are you here for? I started to understand that I’m using my presence as a draw. At what point can I release the work? When can the ear be ready to be the draw? I also realize how important this tent that we are in right now has been for people to hang out in. It’s been our basecamp during installation, of course, 132 but there is something that is happening here. It seems just social, but it’s both setting the stage for the experience and a kind of weird closure on it. There is a community built around the experience and the place. And as people come back to experience the field as it transforms, they form a relationship to place. There are some who experienced the burn, and then helped me walk the path in, and then came back to take the tours. These people are really making the artwork. It is curious how people ask me, Why the ear? or, How did you come to this? or, How did you get invited to do this? JO: When you first told me about the idea of the ear labyrinth, it seemed bizarre to put an ear in a field. And now... JA: It seems so normal. [laughs] JO: Well, the fact that it’s unusual that it’s there is one of the beauties of it. But it makes so much sense when you walk it. The way you’ve described the ear as an organ of receptivity and your desire to create a slippage between inner and outer landscapes and that the world is coming into you through this organ...you actually can’t really know the world without your body. JA: When people say, Why an ear? I usually just say, Well, let’s go inside and see if we can answer that question. I chose the ear because it’s a little bit like when I used the tightrope to make works. Balance is such a beautiful metaphor that the 133 Mike Gunnoe Participants entering the path © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas Mike Gunnoe KU Field Station Manager Sheena Parsons holding the Eastern red cedar basket for the ritual ceremony prior to the prescribed burn © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas audience can immediately connect to it. The ear is similar in that way. We can all understand how important the role of listening is in communication. The symbol of the ear is an excuse to get them out there. And then the field takes care of the rest. JO: The harder part of answering that question is when someone is not here. If someone asks you here, the most beautiful answer is, Let’s go out and find out together. That’s what the piece needs right now...to be walked. And it’s ready for anyone to walk even now. But people will often say, I don’t understand why this person did this, or Why did they even think to do it? It is a sincere and legitimate question. Maybe the response to Why an ear is really about why an artist does their work and how. JA: Yes, for those who can’t walk the path, they come to the piece through a story. Everything I make refers back to process; process as meaning, as opposed to a means to an end. And so I always go back to just explaining the process. And the process in this case is walking. People are offering their steps to the piece. They are giving them to the land. But when we step, we allow others to follow. The path itself is the mark made through the process of participation. If the piece is not walked, the land takes it back. Then all that will be left is the story of what once was. JO: Walking the ear labyrinth is for me very much about being able to inhabit 134 the path without concern for the beginning or the end...to be comfortable in the path without the goal, without the end...to be where you are in your path. That is a nice thing to say, but it’s not easy to do in one’s life. JA: That’s a practice. You have to be quiet to listen. And to do so, you must slow down. That is the challenge. I can tell a lot by people’s pace. Letting go of the goal also allows you to really hear. Listening may be too broad a term. Maybe we’re talking about ways of listening. There are so many ways to listen, and we don’t realize how much the way we listen reflects our perspective. You can enter an artwork from any point and sometimes arrive in a place that you didn’t know you even wanted to be. As the artist, I must meet you at your entrance. People need an anchor. And if I give them the right anchor, they will feel safe. It’s only when you feel safe that you can open up to find connection. Remember the art historian, David Cateforis, who came to walk? He asked me that question [Why an ear?] and before I knew it, he was licking the plants. I’m like, You’re so much more in it than me right now. JO: I wasn’t comfortable the first time we walked into the field. Snakes? I don’t know, whatever. I don’t walk into fields. JA: I have been concerned about how to care for people who feel tentative. I want it to be an inviting experience that makes them feel comfortable instead of 135 work, she always has to be in a responsive mode. There’s this leap she’s making to the art process that is seamless. Sheena making the basket for the burn ritual is infinitely more interesting than me making the basket. I loved hearing about her process. She first got the Johnson grass...it did not weave well...then she realized that the Eastern red cedar worked. The basket is very beautiful. She is comfortable with material, and she is working with the materials that she has dedicated her life to. Sheena has this physical relationship with what she’s doing that is very much like an artist. I get the sense that she wants to protect the creative process. JO: And at the same time, she’s also very reluctant to acknowledge her position in the process. JA: She is creating the conditions and nurturing the process. I think she is protecting the work in ways I probably don’t even understand. You work in collaborations all the time. I am interested to know your experience of watching people come together around an idea or around an idea taking form. The other day when [Field Station Director] Bryan Foster had the revelation that the path was being made by people’s steps, I felt something click in his understanding of the ethos of the project. I felt like it was a real coming-on-board moment. JO: In many ways, the intention often is a coming together, or an exchange, or a meeting of the minds, or some type of give and take about how we understand ourselves and the world, and the apparatus by which we accomplish that is, you know, an ear. [laughs] Mike Gunnoe Participants walking the path © Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas just throwing them out there. This is why at the beginning I went with them. I explained what we will do, and there is a kind of agreement: We’re going to commit to doing these things together. I’m going to take you through, and we’re going to talk, and I’m interested in what you’re thinking. And then, when we get to the other end, we’ll come back together but in silence. The whole thing is a commitment of care. JO: I work with a lot of collaborations, and they’re all really different. We have an amazing project team. Keith Van de Riet brought his Designbuild class out to grid the field so we could place the ear in it. Then they returned to walk the path into the field. Another collaborator we should talk about is Sheena [Parsons]. Since she‘s the Field Station Manager, our conversations, as I recall, began with her about logistics because she represented the fact that we were collaborating with the Field Station. But Sheena became a driver. Of all the important people, forward players in the making of the piece, there is no one more important than Sheena. JA: No. And it is more than just giving us her expertise. I mean, she drew the ear into the field, and we did what she told us. It seemed right for her to be the one to translate my drawing onto the land. That was exciting for me. JO: Me, too. JA: I do feel like she is really making the work with us. Because of her training, she understands impermanence and that things are always in process, and that you cannot control everything. She is a good collaborator because, in her line of 136 JA: Right. It’s so simple. [laughs] Not the work, of course, but listening is such a simple metaphor. It’s a good point of entry. Do you know what I mean? I think there would be few that wouldn’t get behind the importance of honing our ability to listen. We could use the ear as an opportunity to ask deeper questions. That seems particularly important right now. JO: You know, one of the things artist Julie Ault has said about research is that it ebbs and flows. It’s complicated, and it does all these crazy things. But when we bring it out to a point so that people can interact with it, that’s a contrivance. JA: So contrived. Although maybe that has bad connotations. Maybe we should say it is so generous. JO: Great. It makes it visible so that you can bring people in, but it can never expose the entirety of the process. JA: Right. So let’s go back to one of our initial questions: how does here-ing bring people into this field? All of this ornateness just to go for a walk. I mean, that’s enough, because the land is phenomenal. I guess we have to have faith that it’s going to do its job. You know, I often find myself in an area of study or production that I know little about. It could be neuroscience or rope engineering or arachnology. When I do this, I need to find someone who will help me with some unusual idea or question. I have to keep researching and probing. When I finally find someone who is really intrigued, it is usually because I am approaching something that they do every day from a different angle. I did this piece with a two-ton wrecking ball (Tear, 2008) that I made as a sculpture...and I was looking for a place to use it. I found this 85-year-old guy that had a demolition company, and he’s like, Take it to Pittsburgh, and get the guys there to use it. We are demolishing a cement factory. When the project was over, I asked him, Why did you say yes? And he said, 137 Well, in all my years of working, nobody has asked me to do such a crazy thing. When I find the person who is captivated by this new perspective, then all the doors open. Sheena is a really creative person. There is not as big of a leap between science and art as we think. At their core, they both require questioning and imagination, it is only the form of the inquiries that diverge. Sheena sees some potential for the Field Station that we don’t see. Maybe? I don’t know, we have to ask her that question. JO: In our application for research to the Field Station, we described here-ing as place-based, artistic research, but what is our personal investment in these research ideas? I remember you were asking about childhood memories of nature earlier. JA: I’ve been asking others and myself this question of what experiences connect us to nature. The reason I’m here actually, or the reason I’m able to be here, is because my dad used to take me to this place he called Lovers Lane. It was an inlet in the mangrove. We would go handline fishing, and then afterward he would take me up this creek in the mangrove. He would turn off the engine and let the current pull us out to the ocean. We would sit on the sides of the boat and push off of the big arching roots. He would tell us to stay really quiet. It was Lovers Lane because all of the breeding happens there in the swamp. It was a potent stew of mangrove leaves that protected all the babies that would later become some of the deep-sea life. And if we stayed quiet, we could see it all come to life. This is one of my childhood memories that sticks, and it taught me how to tune in to nature. I am sure that is why I am here in this field. I believe that most people have a moment like this. Something that touched them emotionally or inspired awe. I imagine for many it is also from childhood. This leads me to memories of learning to walk. Are we learning to walk again, or learning to listen again? But the thing about walking is that we are actually falling with each step, and we’re catching ourselves with each step. I’m really into that idea. When you watch a child learning to walk, you can completely see it. But I never put that idea together with here-ing. JO: This whole thing about learning to walk, it’s not that we are not always walking. It’s just that we’re not given the luxury of being present for it. Like this scholar, Kristin Ross, who has made the kind of historical observation that we’re kept so busy, we don’t have time to be citizens. It’s that sort of thing. It’s not that we’re not performing all of the time. It’s that we’re unaccustomed to having the time to inhabit and value our performance. JA: I was just watching the way people walk. Some people hold the ribbon that is presently outlining the path. Some people are touching the grass. Some have their arms folded to their bodies. And some people can’t stay on the path. They’re wobbling in and out. And I don’t know what to say about that, but I have noticed that people walk back in a different way than they walk in, as though it takes time to get to know the field and to trust it before settling in. It is not any different from meeting a new person. It takes time to connect. It is funny when I use my camera to take footage, the delineation of the lens makes me aware of the perspective from which I am looking. I thought, Can we look at the field from the perspective of the plants, thinking about how they look at us? Can we document from that perspective? Then I made a video of myself walking the path. I could really feel the rhythm of the steps and how they punctuated my looking, not to mention the sound of the crunching under my feet. As our friend and collaborator Theo [Michaels] says, the making of soil. How do we even look at the landscape? When do we look up? How do we walk with reverence? 138 Janine Antoni Leaving the KU Field Station at sunset JO: And this has all been in preparation for the path of the outer ear, but there’s more to come. JA: I keep thinking about my inner ear. I really love to take people to the edge of the woods and explain that the inner ear will be the next part of the path. I wonder what is happening in their mind. We are standing on the threshold of our imagination. This part of our body is not visible. And that is how I feel about what’s under our feet. A big thing with embodiment is being grounded, and I am thinking a lot about where we meet the ground. That is really important. And as we know, the prairie roots go down 15 to 20 feet. There is so much going on under there and inside our bodies. Things we cannot see but can sense. Our culture treats the body as a mere vehicle for our thinking minds. If we exploit our bodies for the sake of our thoughts and desires, it is not a great leap to exploit other bodies, not to mention the environment. A lot of my embodiment work has been about diving inside to touch on a kind of intelligence that resides within the soma of my body. But this piece has made me realize that the body does not exist in a vacuum. When the inside meets the outside, 139 one finds oneself in place and feels a sense of belonging. I feel like we just have to wait to see. The piece will call people to the land, and I am trusting that the land will speak to each person’s body uniquely. JO: You said something earlier about how you know when a work is done... JA: The work is complete when we find ourselves in it. JO: I think that speaks very well to the intentions for here-ing. I promised myself when the sun dipped below the horizon, we would break the tent. JA: OK, because we could go on for hours. From sea to source: The journey of the Biobío River JO: And that would be a pleasure. here-ing is located at the KU Biological Field Station in Lawrence, Kansas, which is open to the public from sunrise to sunset. This collaborative, environmentally embedded project is supported by a partnership among the Spencer Museum of Art, the Kansas Biological Survey and Center for Ecological Research, and the Designbuild Studio in the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Kansas. All are welcome. This piece follows the journey of the Biobío river in southern Chile, from its mouth in the city of Concepción up to its source in the Andes, the homeland of the Pehuenche indigenous people. Written in the format of a travelogue, the piece is the first part of a larger work that reflects on the position of humans with respect to the different rhythms inherent to the landscapes we form part of. This part deals specifically with the geosphere, superposing the physical journey that follows the course of the Biobío river with a temporal journey that traces the geological evolution of the landscape. text: James Kelly The landscape is like a multiple and sensitive body, laden with mysterious energies and rolling over us fatally with the key to our own destiny. – Jorge Oteiza O Janine Antoni was born in Freeport, Bahamas. She earned her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MFA from the RISD. Antoni is known for her unusual processes, using her body as both a tool and a source of meaning. Antoni’s early methods involved transforming unique materials such as chocolate and soap through habitual, everyday processes like bathing, eating, and sleeping to create sculptural works. Antoni carefully articulates her relationship to the world, giving rise to emotional states that are felt in and through the senses. In each piece, no matter the form, a conveyed physicality speaks directly to the viewer’s body. Joey Orr is Curator for Research at the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas, where he directs the Arts Research Integration program. Previously he served as the Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the MCA Chicago. His writing has appeared in edited and juried publications, including a chapter in the volume Rhetoric, Social Value, and the Arts (Palgrave Macmillan). His first book, A Sourcebook of Performance Labor, is out with Routledge Press. He holds an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD from Emory University and serves as a contributing editor for Art Papers. ur journey, the journey of the great Biobío River, which for centuries marked the boundary between Chile, first as a colonial possession and then as a republic, and the unconquerable lands of the Mapuche south, began in the city of Concepción. Standing in the evening sun, the immensity of the Pacific Ocean at our backs, we felt the expanse of the estuary around us, a sense of mystery lying in wait in the landscape stretching out before our eyes. Far off in the distance lay the mountains and volcanoes of the Andes, rising up abruptly, marking out the border with Argentina, where the land decompresses into wide open spaces and from whose direction the sun would rise in around twelve hours’ time. To our left, perpendicular to this primordial vector, sprawled the city of Concepción itself, built on the shifting sediments of the Quaternary. Beyond, some five hundred kilometres away, was Santiago, the Chilean capital, where the vegetation starts to decline, steadily petering out with the sweep of the Humboldt current until all that is left is an epochal silence: the deserts of Atacama and Tarapacá — arid, immobilised in time, or at least time as we know it as human beings. To our right, in the other direction, flowed the rivers of Toltén and Calle Calle, and beyond them the city of Puerto Montt, where the highway stops and the land begins to break up into a ragged patchwork of islands and fjords — a dialogue, also epochal, between rock, sea and ice. We had soon left the estuary and its urban sprawl behind us, following the broad sweep of the river through the coastal mountains of the Cordillera of Nahuelbuta, whose name means the Great Stone Tiger in the Mapuche tongue. By no means the highest reliefs in the region (an accolade reserved for the Andes), those vestiges of Palaeozoic times were nonetheless home to some of its oldest rock: metamorphic strata returned irre141 vocably altered from inside Earth’s crust hundreds of millions of years ago. We imagined the landscape around us, once one of many formless lumps of land, great stone islands adrift for ages on the surface of the globe before coalescing into a single mass whose separation would eventually give rise to the continents we know today. A forebearer of the Andes, the spirit of this rock had been silently contemplating the world around it for hundreds of millions of years. From the valley floor, we gazed across at the hillsides: their lush forests of oak, coigüe, ñirre and lenga beech. Somewhere among that labyrinth of gullies and summits, we knew there would also be pehuen, or Araucaria araucana, standing tall and proud on the ridges of the highest ground, clinging to the contours of the rock. We knew that once, long ago, when the ice gripped the Andes and extended down across the Central Valley, that vast depression that separates the parallel chains of Nahuelbuta and the Andes, the pehuen forests had retreated to seek refuge in the former. When the trees returned to the Andes, a few had stayed behind on the higher ground, remnants of that Pleistocene redoubt, which can still be seen to this day. Here in the valley of the Biobío, however, over ages and epochs, the land created conditions favourable to human habitation. Settlements and villages sprung up on the rich sediments and deposits of the riverbanks and alluvial plains, cultures and agricultures emerging slowly as expressions of the land. We watched the river broaden out into a large floodplain as we passed the town of Santa Juana de Guadalcazar, its imposing fort built in 1626, long before the birth of the Chilean republic, to thwart attempts by the Mapuche as they sought to defend their condition as the people (che) of the land (mapu) and to protect the landscapes that had sustained them for thousands of years. As the sun dipped lower, we pressed on past the fort, on up the river, its course narrowing again, tacking right until almost parallel to the coast where we had started out. As we emerged on the other side of the mountains, the last rays of light spread out golden across the fertile plains of the Central Valley. It was there that we decided to stop for the night, at the confluence of the Biobío and the River Laja. The following day we would resume our journey across the plains and up into the Andes in search of the river’s source in the heartlands of the forests of pehuen. As the light faded, by the warm tungsten glow of an old torch, we surveyed one of the maps we had brought with us for our trip, tracing the distance we had covered that evening and scanning the route we had marked out for the following day. The map itself was dated 1974, a declassified Joint Operations Graphic drawn up by the U.S. Department of Defense and the Chilean Army shortly after the military coup the previous year. Its logic was impeccable: the river’s curve; the contour lines that described the forms of the cordillera; the network of longabandoned railways that criss-crossed the Central Valley, their cast iron rails, once laid to tame the land and bring raw materials down from the mountains, now lying disused and forgotten, overgrown with weeds and shrubs. Yet for all the map’s detail, for all its accuracy, on the ground the terrain remained wild and intractable, its sum infinitely greater than the parts of those codified lines. Some three hundred and fifty years separated the printing of the map from the founding of the fort of Santa Juana de Guadalcazar we had passed downstream. Yet between the two events lay a fundamental continuity: a logic of pillage and exploitation that for the same three hundred and fifty years had been pitted against the Mapuche logic of reciprocity and belonging. Perhaps, watching the construction of the fort from a distance, already the best part of a century after their first encounters with the Europeans, the Mapuche had intuited the tragedy that was about to unfold, the struggle that would ensue, the forests cleared, the rivers damned, the people confined in reductions and estranged from their land. Nearly four centuries on, that struggle continued, with no end in sight. As night fell, we thought of the city of Concepción, now far downstream 142 David Waters and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford Rocks under the Microscope, Schist (folded), photomicrograph, 2004 © David Waters and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford behind us, of the estuary and the immensity of the Pacific Ocean. There, on the other side of Nahuelbuta, the mouth of the river already seemed a world away, separated as we were by the Great Stone Tiger, dormant, at least in human time, while in another its spirit was alert, silently contemplating the tremors and movements beneath the surface of the earth. *** The earth shook that night: not much, but enough to wake us all the same; enough to remind us that somewhere, several kilometres below, one of the giant tectonic plates that covers the surface of the globe was slowly sinking into the mantle, its rock melted down; reclaimed and recycled by the incandescent mass whence it came. It was a reminder of the colossal forces at work around us, forces that 143 David Waters and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford Rocks under the Microscope, Sandstone, photomicrograph, 2004 © David Waters and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford continued to shrink the Pacific Ocean, where we had begun our journey the previous evening, and to sculpt the mountains and volcanoes that lay in wait ahead. There was something perplexing about the fact that the landscape of which we now formed part, which at first seemed so solid and immutable, immense and frozen in time, was actually in motion, twitching and sighing, its reliefs shifting gradually, almost imperceptibly, as the crust digested the movements of the molten currents deep down below. Once the tremor had subsided, we had lain awake for a while, watching the river in the moonlight, until eventually its sound had lulled us back to sleep—a shallow sleep, haunted by the aftershocks of that telluric movement reverberating in our minds. The following morning, we resumed our journey upstream, skirting the flanks of Nahuelbuta and following the course of the river to the town of Nacimiento, where the Biobío and Vergara rivers meet. The day was clear and fresh. The trees dotted along the banks stood tall and still. As we reached the 144 confluence, we could see the town spread out across the floodplain on the other side, the corrugated metal roofs glistening in the morning sun. In the distance, we could make out the reddish brick ramparts of a fort like the one we had passed at Santa Juana the previous day. To the left was a concrete bridge across the Vergara, leading over to the cellulose plant on the other side. The redand-white-tipped chimney stacks stood out from the landscape, their plumes of steam rising up crisp against the morning sky. The plant had been in operation for decades, turning wood from the surrounding forests into pulp and churning out the giant reels of newsprint that fed the voracious appetite of the press and greased the wheels of commerce and politics in far-off Santiago. Acre after acre of autochthonous forest had been razed to support production, replaced by serried ranks of more utilitarian species like Monterey pine, introduced from abroad as the forests’ spaces were gradually subjugated to the rationalism of modern production instilled by the colonisers who settled on the land. It was there at Nacimiento that we were to leave behind the Great Stone Tiger, that epochal memory bank of living rock in whose shelter we had slept the previous night. Passing the confluence of the two rivers, the Biobío began to change course in a sweeping meander, leading us out into the plains of the Central Valley. We pushed on upstream, passing a giant sandbar the size of a small island, following the path the water had dug across the plains stretching around us in all directions. After being surrounded by the mountains, the flatness of the horizon took us by surprise. The sense of openness was such that, despite being able to see the parallel chains of the coastal mountains behind us and the Andes in the distance, it was hard to imagine we were in fact traversing the floor of what was once a giant U-shaped valley, a depression—long since filled by layers of sediments—that separated the two chains of mountains and ran almost the length of the country. Like so much of that incommensurable past, there is much we do not—and will never—know, lost to the fragile representations of the rock, of the forests, of our own human species. We do know, however, that like siblings, the two chains of mountains visible in the distance rose successively over time. We also know that some 20 million years ago, around the time our ancestors the apes were staking their claim to a branch in the evolutionary tree, the sea had returned to flood the land around us. The intrusion of its waters had reduced Nahuelbuta to an archipelago, much like its continuation in the island of Chiloé, further along the chain, today. This would have left the incipient Andes cut off from their elder sibling. When the briny waters had finally retreated, exposing the valley floor once again, they left behind layers of sandstones and fossils, visible today in the banks of the many streams that flow down from the snow-capped volcanoes up on high. The sediments were now being gradually eroded, washed out by the meltwaters, carried downstream by the tributaries of the Biobío, some deposited in sandbars and floodplains, others—the finest grains—carried on down to the estuary and back out to sea. Thinking of those streams dislodged us from our present. For a moment, we wondered if particles of those sediments—remnants of that Miocene sea— were there in the waters around us. There, on the floor of the Central Valley, for the first time since setting out on our journey the previous day, we began to feel lost in the immensity of the landscape. Not in its space—for here the river’s path was unequivocal—but in something whose vastness was of an altogether different nature; in that infinite continuity that contained all of space in all its versions: past, present, and future. In short, we were becoming lost in time. As we passed the town of Negrete on our right, its fort long since buried under the sediments of the floodplain, the river began to spread out across the land, forking into serpentine braids that weaved between islets of landscapes past. We strained to follow the map; not the topographical map of the previous day but this time a geological map, a preliminary study of the region printed in black and white 145 from 1981, which we had picked up from a second-hand bookseller in Santiago before setting off. We scrutinised the land around us, trying our best to match up the petrified representations of its past with the map’s monochrome schema. We passed the rich sedimentary terraces deposited during the Holocene, perhaps the only part of that landscape coetaneous with its human settlement. We passed through bands of lavas left by ancient volcanoes whose eruptions predated the flooding of the valley by the sea. Eventually, almost imperceptibly at first, we felt the level of the land begin to rise. As we pressed onwards to San Carlos de Purén, we found ourselves entering million-year-old deposits of coarse volcanic rock, of the drift and till laid at the height of the Patagonian glaciations. With the moraines and coarse sediments came the realisation that we were in fact traversing the remnants of a giant ice field that had once extended all the way up from the tip of the continent. For a moment we saw the ghosts of the ice around us: the blue of the glaciers that had once stretched all the way down from the Andes to touch the Great Stone Tiger on the other side, the mass of frozen water creaking and groaning under the immense weight of that solid flow. We could feel the solitude of that landscape, desolate and forlorn, the mountains and volcanoes shrouded in cloud, without a living soul as far as the eye could see. The discovery of that ice shattered any illusion of the permanence of the river whose course we were following, dispelling at once the myth of its eternal waters, with their fixed, immutable path across the valley floor. Any river that might have existed before the ice would have been not the Biobío but another, traversing a different landscape with different terrain, much of which had been irretrievably lost to the scouring of the glaciers. As for the Biobío itself, for all we knew, its path could have changed a thousand times since first being etched by the retreating ice, like a line written and rewritten on the surface of the land. We imagined that landscape of glaciers and volcanoes, reshaping and remodelling itself over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years, selecting that path from an infinite number of such paths. For a fleeting instant, we realised we had been able to glimpse a minuscule part of that great telluric being, to intuit the expressiveness of that line. When we reached the town of San Carlos de Purén, we paused for a break, weary from our journey so far. We still had ground to cover before reaching Quilaco, where we planned to rest for the night. We sat by the banks of the river, our consciousness massaged by the sound of the water, looking up at the bridge. San Carlos had a long history as a crossing point. According to chronicles, around 1660, some eight hundred Spanish soldiers had rafted across the waters at a spot nearby to raid their enemy’s terrain. Now, some three and a half centuries later, the concrete spans of the Pan-American Highway stood overhead, vibrating as the vehicles rumbled back and forth. We thought about the incremental rise of the mountains, the subsidence and erosion of the Central Valley, the coming and going of the sea, the volcanoes, the ice… in short, the myriad processes that underpinned the genesis of the river as we know it today. Its waters, sparkling in the late afternoon sun, were the sole reason for the town at our backs, for the system of forts strung like beads along the course of the river, from the estuary of Concepción all the way to Santa Barbara. The river had been the defining feature of the peoples who had inhabited the landscape around us for thousands of years: it had checked the advances first of the Inca’s push south and then of the Spanish until finally it was breached by the Chilean republic. We spent the remainder of the afternoon following the rest of the route we had mapped out for the day, stopping to observe the changes in the land as we made progress. At some point, we became aware of the presence of the hills on either side, the subtle rise in elevation as we entered the incipient valley. From time to time, a bend would reveal the snow-capped volcano of Callaqui in the 146 distance, its summit towering some 3,150 metres high. It was a reminder that the foothills of the Andes were finally upon us. When at last we reached Quilaco, it had been growing dark. We considered trying to find a vantage point, somewhere to look back and take in the Central Valley in the gloaming, but tiredness won out. Instead, we found a spot by the river and lit a small fire. We sat watching the darkness descend, subtly, imperceptibly. We thought of the clusters of lights of the towns we had passed, dotted along the river’s course. We thought of the valley: the palimpsest of its infill, layer upon layer, accreted, deposited, eroded, erased, again and again; a story—the story of the land—recorded in a strange, intractable language. And for a moment, we had the feeling that we had been able to make out a few words or phrases of that language: not much, but enough nonetheless to reveal to us a landscape whose rhythms ran deeper and were vastly larger than our own. And as the stars came out, we felt ourselves enveloped by the rhythms of that whole, peering out from the thin slither of human time. *** Having traversed the Cordillera of Nahuelbuta and spent the night in the Palaeozoic shadows of the Great Stone Tiger, and having traversed the sedimentary fills of the Central Valley that separates the coastal range from its more youthful sibling on the other side, the following morning, we set out early from Quilaco on the third and final part of our journey up into the heartlands of the Pehuenche, the people of the pehuen. Our first stop that day was the reservoir of Angostura, at an altitude of 300 metres above sea level. Together with Pangue and Ralco, which lay further upstream, it was the first in a series of three reservoirs built along the narrow corridor of the Biobío that would lead us up into the mountains. First conceived at the end of the 1950s, the scheme had faced fierce local opposition, which had delayed its completion until the start of the following century. We stopped at that first reservoir and sat for a while, enjoying the stillness of the morning, the glint of the turquoise waters under the boundless Chilean sky, watching the small concentric ripples made by jumping fish from time to time. Yet there was something troubling about that scene, despite all its apparent beauty. We knew from the research we had conducted before our trip that beneath that apparent triumph of material and industrial progress, beneath the quest to domesticate the river and tame its forces, lay a long history of deceit and usurpation that had left in its wake a fractured community, divided and conquered by a blind logic. We knew that under those trapped waters lay the ecosystems and ceremonial grounds that had formed an integral part of the culture of the Pehuenche. We knew the territories and traditions they sustained to be irretrievably lost, submerged by the flooding of the valley whose course we were following that morning. As we left the reservoir and moved on up the river, we felt ourselves leaving the foothills behind us and before long the smooth planes of the Central Valley felt a world away. The 1,850-metre summit of Cerro La Pepa loomed large ahead and the forested slopes of the Cordillera Pemehue could be seen on our right, lush and implausibly green. We felt the breadth of the valley narrowing slightly. In an instant, the rock returned us to the Cretaceous: to a time when the South Atlantic Ocean was opening up and South America was detaching from the African continent, setting out on its westward drift across the eons; to a time when the mountains around us had first begun to rise in an initial episode of uplift that spanned tens of millions of years. Tracing our route on the geological map, we realised ourselves to be surrounded by a patchwork of volcanic debris, rendered all but invisible by the dense deciduous forests. The mountains around us were the expression of those tectonic forces, whose energy lived on in the relief of the land, echoing in the river’s flow. The percolation of the water down through the mountains, deposited on high from clouds drawn by the volcanoes’ 147 magnetic pull, nourished the landscapes and agricultures further downstream. It was this vital force that the giant concrete dams and turbines installed along the river’s course sought to tap to meet the country’s rapacious thirst for energy. We passed a waterfall on our left, pausing for a moment, mesmerised by its silky continuity as it tumbled endlessly over the rocks and into the river. The mountains and the Biobío had been a constant for the Pehuenche, who for thousands of years had lived with the landscape around us. Yet one morning, towards the end of the twentieth century, not far from where we were now stood, the water had stopped. Suddenly, without any warning, the river had disappeared, leaving the rocks and pebbles on its bed exposed for the first time. An eerie silence hung in the air. Some said it had been stolen, bought and sold by the men in suits as part of the construction of the reservoirs and dams. This was not far from the truth: hours before, some twenty-five kilometres upstream, a small crowd had gathered expectantly, a Chilean flag fluttering proudly in the breeze, waiting for the dam’s floodgates to close to fill the reservoir for the first time. It was an aberration that did not pass unnoticed: for the Pehuenche, the freedom of water was an important principle, a condition for its gift of life and fecundity. They even had a special word—dawüll—for water that had become trapped, rendered inert and stripped of its vital force. And indeed, when the gates were opened, the river that returned to the valley was already different, dispossessed of its mineral-rich sediments, henceforth to be settled by the reservoir, accumulating imperceptibly on its bed. The Biobío re-emerged another, its flow changed and erratic, carefully measured and meted out by the floodgates, subjected to the whims and abstract logic of demand. We continued upstream, deviating from the course of the river shortly before we reached the second reservoir to enter the village of Alto Biobío, where we had read there was a small museum dedicated to the Pehuenche. As we made our way along to the plaza, we found the streets deserted. The small wooden houses showed no signs of life. The museum itself, a modern building, whose site offered a fine panorama of the valley and the surrounding mountains, was closed. The only information we could find was on a small panel affixed to the wall by the entrance. The text provided a brief description of the Pehuenche and the museum’s vision of preserving their memory in the face of what it called globalisation. Yet equal space was also given over to acknowledging the benevolence of its patron: a self-professed “admirer of the Pehuenche” whose ancestors had emigrated from Europe in the eighteenth century and whose family—any admiration towards the Pehuenche notwithstanding—had amassed hundreds of thousands of acres of forests, systematically razed to create the plantations of pine and eucalyptus that fed the papermills of a prosperous multinational business, the very same business that owned the plant we had passed the previous morning. Dispossessed of their lands, deprived of the ecosystems that had sustained their culture, in a final act of humiliation, the Pehuenche had been consigned to a museum, domesticated and interpellated as an anachronism left behind by the inexorable march of modernity. The words of admiration rang hollow; the panel read like a eulogy to a culture buried alive. Troubled by this discovery, we turned to make our journey back down to the river. Suddenly, however, we realised we were being watched. Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, the museum had been built opposite the local police station. We saw the duty officer peering out at us as we crossed the road, dressed in his dark green uniform, the shield of the Carabineros de Chile displayed proudly on the wall behind him, with its motto of “order and patria”. Outsiders—gringos to some and winka to others—it was then that we realised the incongruity of our presence. As we made our way back down the street, we could feel his eyes burning into our backs. Resuming our course upstream, we felt the pinch of the valley as it narrowed once again. We could see the dam of Pangue in the distance, revealed every now and then at a bend in the river. Yet nothing could prepare us for 148 David Waters and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford Rocks under the Microscope, Granodiorite, photomicrograph, 2004 © David Waters and the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford the sense of scale we felt when we finally came face-to-face with the immense structure, towering a hundred metres high. From the valley’s floor, it was hard not to be struck by the power and permanence projected by that solid mass of concrete, strong enough to hold back seventy-five million cubic metres of water on the other side. However, it was equally true that, seen from above, spanning a point where two mountain ridges converged in a V on the valley, the straight line that cut across the river’s course looked thin and flimsy, its strength unequal to the body of water stretching back up the valley behind it. We thought of the youthful vigour of that volcanic landscape, of the ductility of the concrete, of the potential for those seventy-five million tonnes of water to alter the delicate 149 seismic balance of the bedrock. To be sure, the calculations performed by the engineers would have taken all this into account. Yet their provisions remained vulnerable to the whims of the surrounding volcanoes, whose snow-capped cones were a reminder of the dam’s transience, regardless of how permanent the structure might seem from down in the valley. No matter how solid the construction, no matter how rigorous the calculations, the part played by that line could only ever be temporary: the spirit of the water—trapped, dawüll—would one day break free. The reservoir of Pangue took us to 500 metres above sea level. We rounded its body and followed its tail back up the valley until once again we could hear the sound of the river rushing over the stones. They had grown bigger: the small, rounded pebbles were now mixed with larger, more roughly-hewn rocks. Although we could not see its peak, we knew ourselves to be skirting the base of Callaqui. That immense volcanic structure had been present in our minds since the start of our journey, visible in snatches on the horizon, the white of its summit melting into the clouds, a constant whose magnetic power drew us inexorably towards the living present of the Andes. Now, the time had come: deep in the groove of the valley, we felt ourselves surrounded by the mountains rising up on either side as we traversed the base of that giant edifice, its chaos of pyroclastic flows frozen in time, the magmatic plumbing of its sills and dykes hidden deep inside, pipes and vents that could release pressure enough to expel incandescent blocks of andesite the size of houses high into the air. We felt ourselves crossing an invisible threshold, one defined by the arc of magma that connected Callaqui to the neighbouring volcanoes of Lonquimay and the Sierra Nevada, of Llaima, and of the many others—gatekeepers of an enormous field of energy. The road, which until then had largely run in parallel to the river, had narrowed. No longer able to mimic the contours of the Biobío, it now seemed to be perched with increasing precarity on the forested slopes, twisting and turning in a series of bends that sought a path of least resistance through the terrain. The mountains around us were taller, their reliefs more abrupt. We followed the river first right, then left, then right again, until it swan-necked 90 degrees in a final bend that led into a narrow corridor strewn not with pebbles but with rocks and boulders. A small shadowy cliff bore down on our left, punctuated only by the silky flow of another waterfall. As we neared Ralco—the third and final dam in the series, whose reservoir would take us to 700 metres above sea level— we thought again of the relief of the landscape around us, the subduction taking place deep below Earth’s surface, of the molten currents of the mantle and their tectonic forces, of the successive episodes of contraction and distension in which the land had folded and crumpled over hundreds of millions of years. We thought of the periodic eruptions of the volcanoes around us, which continued to add fresh rock to the land; of the magmatic arc that ran the length of the country and comprised the backbone of the Andes; of the volcanoes themselves, which communicated Earth’s incandescent mantle with the world outside. And as we made the final zigzagging climb that would take us up to that final reservoir, we thought of the ice atop the volcanoes’ cones, the faint echoes of massive glaciers whose advances and retreats had played out over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years, whose immense pressures had carved and sculpted the valley around us, the same ice that had once extended all the way down to touch the Cordillera of Nahuelbuta on the other side of the Central Valley. As the vista of that final flooded valley opened up before our eyes, we realised that ever since the first metamorphic rocks of the Great Stone Tiger had been returned irrevocably altered from the depths of Earth, long before the emergence of the narrow strip of land we now call Chile, long before the forests and the peoples they sustain, long before even the continents themselves had begun to take shape, the land around us had been contemplating that myriad composition of repetitions, its rock accreting in time. The strata and the shapes 150 of the mountains and valleys were epochal habits formed by that silent contemplation, the same contemplation that had registered our footsteps, each and every one, since we had set out on our pilgrimage up the valley to the river’s source, specks in that vast ocean of time, fleas on a dog, tiny dots zigzagging slowly and erratically across the surface of the land. *** The reservoir stood still in the afternoon sun, the mountains reflected on its surface, its water fed by the confluence of five tributaries to the mighty Biobío. At the far end, we would find the tail that would lead us out of that labyrinth of valleys and into a depression among the volcanoes, a sanctuary of calm between the chain we had just crossed and the more arid slopes that marked the Argentinean border on the other side. There, that first stretch of the river would lead us slow and meandering along that depression, along into the forests of pehuen, past the town of Lonquimay, where the waters gently polished the pebbles of the riverbed, along to the crystalline lake where the Biobío is born. There, in a few hours’ time, watching the penumbra creep gradually up the sides of the mountains, the forests of pehuen that clung to their crests and slopes slowly submerged in the fading twilight, we would recall the sun setting over the Pacific at the river’s mouth. The first stage of our journey had reached its end. James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. His work explores interactions between different timescales, from the human to the geological, and how they manifest in landscapes, and is informed by what we can learn from the cosmovisions of other peoples in our relationships with the land. 151 Our land Our Land by Cindy Qiao is a series of portraits of the fleeting layers of leaves, fruits, seeds, and twigs on the ground in the area between two steps in urban green spaces. It’s the soil that one walks upon without seeing it. It’s the remaining earth in public parks, botanical gardens, and sidewalk tree beds in manmade cities. text and images Cindy Qiao T he fallen foliage, flowers, and fruits turn the land into an ephemeral canvas that documents the ongoing negotiations and reconciliations between humans and the forces in nature: gravity, wind, and rain. There are traces of activity and hints of the time of the year and places, a nibbled acorn from a squirrel, a leaf blown from across the field, or a layer of industrial mulch. Throughout the series, the topology of the ground shifts in tonality, structure, density, and luminance, mirroring the paradoxical feelings I have about land: feeling displaced geographically, culturally, and emotionally, and at the same time, feeling grounded, at awe, and uplifted by the nurturing power shared by all land. In looking at the nature that has been stripped away of all of its danger and threat as it once did, it’s evidence of human dominance, echoing a long-lost power. It’s also a reminder that geography still matters. It determines the water, air, and food one has access to. It determines what kind of law one lives under. It determines what kind of worldview one has. It determines how far one has to and will travel. The images are captured on an iPhone camera and are presented larger than life to invite viewers to immerse themselves in the complex dynamics of our living systems and of one’s internal emotional landscape. 152 153 154 155 Hanna Paniutsich and Saša Spačal MycoMythologies: Shiro’s Carrier Bag, Belarusian Mushroom Picker, 2. Photographic manipulation, 2021 © Hannah Paniutsich and Saša Spačal 156 157 Images p.106-Cindy Qiao, 7, 2018, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper p.107-Cindy Qiao, acorns and a gold leaf, 2018, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper p.108-Cindy Qiao, floating, 2019, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper p.109-Cindy Qiao, oak and roses, 2019, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper p.109-Cindy Qiao, white petals, 2018, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper p.110-Cindy Qiao, shooting stars, 2018, 2019, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper p.111Cindy Qiao, oaks and hydrangea, 2019, 40 x 30 in, pigment print on paper Cindy Qiao is an artist-gardener who explores the theme of human/nature relations. Her images are close observations of nature in urban environments where reality verges into abstraction as they become objects for contemplation. Her works have been exhibited in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. Most recently, Our Land series was featured at the 2020 Urban Soils Symposium/ Symbiogenesis. She has a BA in Philosophy and lives and works in Long Island City, New York. 158 159 The land next time Who owns land and by what means? Derrick Woods-Morrow’s The Sand is Ours compiles an archive of reflections during a summer on Fire Island – a cascading paradise of boardwalks, utopian ideals like no other, romantic hope for inclusionary spaces – none of which actually exist. The boardwalks are broken, the utopia is dystopian. And so, the work developed within The Sand is Ours focuses on struggling to locate a sense of selfhood, a community voice, and a way of being beyond those expectations. text and images: Derrick Woods-Morrow Recalling the classical contrast between praxis (or work on the self) and poiesis (or work in the world), the critical poetics of afro-fabulation… can be well thought of in the performative sense of a doing. But what do the blank spaces in discourse do, exactly?1 Tavia Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (conclusion) [on genocide and slavery] …Their force is particular yet like liquid, as they can spill and seep into the spaces that we carve out as bound off and untouched by the other.”2 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals (introduction) The Sand is Ours The Sand is Ours originated as a performance-based reclamation project where at once: (i) - I had sex with various men in Fire Island in 2016, tautologically bound by contract in a New York State, then and now, lacking in protection for sex workers. I initiated contact with the others on the beach, in various bars, and through the application Grindr, and proposed sex (in all its varieties) in exchange for access to their cellphones and the ability to use their personal images in my work – the resulting body of work debuted in the solo exhibition The Sand is Ours (2017) held at the Lesley University Gallery. (ii) - I documented the various BIPOC fol(x) occupying Fire Island during the summers of 2016 - 2019. This practice continued for 4 years until the Covid-19 pandemic stopped me from traveling in an attempt to stay safe. (iii) - I collaborated with other Queer Folx of Color as we mailed thousands of pounds of sand from the Fire Island Derrick Woods-Morrow Honey on the Racks (from the Meat Rack to the front steps of my studio on the Northside of Chicago. Furthermore, we co-authored ethnographic-centered performances in museums and ‘Fire Island Archives 2016 galleries as art happenings that stretched between Chicago and Fire Island. 2019’), 2018, Piezographic This practice continued until 2019, when I was blacklisted by the USPS for sendCarbon Print ing sand coming from the National Park Service FIMI project to myself.3 © Derrick Woods-Morrow 160 161 Derrick Woods-Morrow Box of 64 Acts of Boyhood Divination(Activation i) performed at Museum of Contemporary Art Derrick Woods-Morrow Box of 64 Acts of Boyhood Divination (Activation I) | collaboration with zakkiyah najeebah du- Chicago, promotional photograph for durational performance/happening, 2019. Photography mas o’neal, Darryl DeAngelo Terrell & Charles Long, durational performance, 2019. Photogra- credit: Nathan Keay © Derrick Woods-Morrow phy credit: Nathan Keay © Derrick Woods-Morrow A Beginning (i) It was 2016, July, in Fire Island, my soul un/imaginably weary – living for and giving life in the drenching summer heat, each night, all six feet, and five inches of me covered in sand later washed down the drain and out to sea – I was an artist in residence, hard at sex work for the first time, no different than any other form of labor, but this sex work was in fact for and for the sake of art. I saw myself black in Fire Island, staring at a night sky star-filled and reflecting itself sharply back at me. And yet people had promised me the magic of sunsets that would extend my shadow, a shadow that could tattoo the Fire Island coastline, blacken it too. So, there I was, one night – afloat a bed of sand, dredging deeper into blackness. Between my thighs he laid, displacing the mattress of earth beneath me. It was almost romantic underneath the star-filled sky, where waves crashed dully and water slinked into all but familiar crevices. Each night, bodies atop one another, thrusting deeper into an erosion that perhaps only I felt, as together we (me and the other) eased into dripping wet or sticky sensations. Shortly thereafter contracts were fulfilled, and rummaging around the inner workings of once private cellphone archives (no longer) had been completed, I’d slink back to the 162 Fire Island Artist Residency4 rental property, my home for the summer, and chucked polaroids into a black box beneath my mattress. And having placed different tricks’ cellphones underneath the lens of an instant lab machine, an apparatus capable of, and with great immediacy, translating the digital into the analog – I’d made some art.5 The Passage (The Middle) (ii) The fungible qualities of blackness and queerness are mutable and opaque, particularly in locations where the boundary between land and sea is shoaled, where entrances and exits explore bordering identities, sexualities, various forms of neurodiversity, and understandings of race. These same places are where slaves entered the United States, or where black folks settled during Jim Crow and thereafter, until FDR’s administration ran highways through the coast, and stole land from its inhabitants – Maroon colonies filled with creative vibrant, and diverse black folks were dispersed for time-shares and colonies of white folks who polluted the land.6 163 Derrick Woods-Morrow Installation View: Thanks for Not Breeding Exhibition (Aspect/Ratio Gallery), two person exhibi- Derrick Woods-Morrow Acts of Boyhood Divination: Southern Seas, 2019, 8-hour durational Hybrid performance, sculp- tion with Laura Davis & Derrick Woods-Morrow 2019, Installation © Derrick Woods-Morrow ture, and movement © Derrick Woods-Morrow I look back on my time at Fire Island and see a mostly well-preserved island, the ancestral land of the Secatogue, and Unkechaug people,7 now primarily stewarded by the non-indigenous, a few but mighty are queer descendants of slaves, who in my photographs protect the island as watchful guardians at the entrance and exits to its boardwalks. They are the bridge and the passage; they are queer shoals, (un)gendered, full of sexual proclivity and endless possibility. I was struck by this. How many queers, trans and gender non-conforming Black folx drowned as they crossed the Atlantic? How many of my queer-kin haunt the crevices, the shadows, the liminalities of our lives? How many of them would come ashore stunned by their visions of fleshings (and instead return to more fluid shoals. Back into bodies made of water, instead)? This displacement of Black Fol(x) navigates both spiritual and physical bodies and brings to mind, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage8 in which Tinsley speculates on the middle passage as a queer space of arousal, conception, with various immaculately conceived offspring adrift in the Americas. In recent years, this text and a few others (Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-Fabulations, Adrienne Marie Brown’s Pleasure Activism, and Tiffany Lethabo King’s Black Shoals) have become the foundation, the praxis for thinking about, and giving language to various aspects of the Sand is Ours. Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life9 builds 164 on Jose Esteban Munoz’s seminal Disidentifications by disidentifying with the notions of an unfettered gaze Black Folx must perform for, instead, Nyong’o queerly suggests a subjective permeable identity aware of, but not subject to merely the white gaze as the cornerstone of an Afro-fabulated futurity, a necessary cornerstone of survival for Fabulous Black Folx seeking a future community is also performance. What would it mean to exist within a vernacular space without acute definitive walls, but definitive actions – a body mindfully occupied, a space willfully embodied, a space to do, and to be – us. An Afro-fabulated future doesn’t then give an out, it gives an in. In my photographs, I created spaces where black folks returned their gaze toward me, not the viewers of the photographs. At once, we are alive, performing for each other versions of ourselves, and are seen in each other eyes as whole – fabulous subjects of each other’s pleasure, arousal, and joy. Adrienne Marie Brown’s Pleasure Activism,10 which references Audre Lorde’s: Uses of the Erotics as Power11 has pushed me to reclaim the Erotic. Although Lorde speaks of this reclamation primarily for women, for queer Black men occupying white homosocial spaces it helps offer an alternative way to connect to one’s pleasure and ecstasy away from the purely pornotropic and purely sensational. Brown asserts that the pursuit of pleasure, must not only be for sexual means but also joyous, playful and indulgent, multi-faceted, multi-accessible means, both sexual and non-sexual. An offering particular to the individual seeking it. 165 Furthermore, the pornographic is condemned in favor of the erotic by Lorde as reductive. However, when embodied through individual or collective agency, I would argue that territories deemed unsavory, and frankly hedonistic have the ability for Black Folx to embody Afro-fabulation, or to shoal the space and perform within/between the erotic and pornographic. Particularly, if we consider that marginalized pleasure is highly policed and should be absolved completely of respectability politics. Lest we remove the agency of sex workers or those finding pleasure and intentions to seek pleasure in a world built on anti-black capitalism and imperialism. I could do sex work by night, fulfilled on my own terms, create meaningful interactions where I felt whole, and by day, at dawn or dusk, communally, and intimately photograph Queer kinfolk on the shoals of Fire Island. Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies pedagogically overlaps with the essence of my work within the Sand is Ours, which originally came to life after a conversation with a black gender non-conforming drag-performer at ‘Cherries’, a bar known for erotic presentations. Therewithin and with much shade she assured me, “you won’t see many of us here, but if tips are any indication...”, looking longingly down their brow,“… then surely we own the island”– ‘the marginalized performer’. Who else could the island belong to except for the indigenous, and who may they want to help steward the land? If not the original stewards, who may lay claim to this land mass eroding into the sea at variable speeds. The tide receding, the sun going down, and the music starts – what beauty remains as black tattooed on the brown umbra of sunken shores. The tide returns, the sun rises, and the music trails off, camera in hand, deeply searching for the penumbra. The Sand is Ours was an attempt to ascertain and come to terms with the sensual pleasure and alterity I was denying myself, alongside a growing knowledge that people who currently inhabited the land known now as Fire Island hadn’t always been – and neither had the bodies of my black queer-kin – but of course, queer folx of color had always existed here, long before western colonization – although that truth too struggles not to be eroded by histories’ opportunistically kept by persistent timekeepers.12 We (Black Folx) must also remember that time, our ultimate resource has been colonized, and choose for ourselves, and alongside our communities, our obligation to use this resource on our own terms, for good, or for bad; for the sake of better; for our own pleasure. Derrick Woods-Morrow Frederick on Lake Pontchartrain | After Lincoln Beach, 2019, Piezographic Carbon Print © Derrick Woods-Morrow 166 An Afterlife (iii) In 2019, I was blacklisted by the Fire Island National Park Service and the United States Postal Service from continuing my practice of shipping sand to my studio. The beaches had been rebuilt, with years of imported sand, a restoration initiative for the dunes, which protect the island from sinking but also shields cruisers from being seen quite so easily. As a result, in various parts of the country beginning in Chicago, I used the remaining sand in performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Engage Projects (formerly known as Aspect/Ratio Gallery) as stolen land imbued by performances where we reflect on how its spatial configurations evoke exclusion, protection, conquest, and fantasy. Within these doings, consisting of black pleasure dwellers, our seats face inward, our backs 167 Derrick Woods-Morrow Sand Harvesting (preparation for Flat Rate Shipping), 2017, Photograph as Document, © Derrick Woods-Morrow 168 169 Derrick Woods-Morrow Untitled / Guardians of the Grove Derrick Woods-Morrow Untitled / Guardians of the Grove Piezographic Carbon Print, 2017 Piezographic Carbon Print, 2017 © Derrick Woods-Morrow © Derrick Woods-Morrow 170 rrow rrow 171 Derrick Woods-Morrow Fire Island Polaroids, Instant film (I-type), 2016 © Derrick Woods-Morrow © Derrick Woods-Morrow to the museum’s visitors. Decompressing and checking in with each other constitutes a direct form of activism. We talk to each other, for each other. Together, as performers, we question how BIPOC performance in a museum context might sidestep or complicate voyeuristic spectacle. Instead, through touch and voice, we carve out space, first for ourselves before sharing it with others, and then later the audience is allowed in. The sand acts as a place of protest, reclamation, and mutable pedestal of the co-creation of black queer spaces, islands of blackness adrift in white-ness, as we discuss fungible ways to see ourselves as whole and above all else, fabulous. Folx = a world used used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly, but also in lineage to texts like E.Patrick Johnson’s Quare studies to acknowledge the Southern hemisphere and its dialectics as intrinsically. Blackness is queerness. Endnotes [1] Nyong’o, Tavia. 2020. Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life. New York, NY: New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479856275.001.0001. [2] King, Tiffany Lethabo. 2019. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [3] The LiRo Group, “Fire Island Stabilization Project/ Fire Island Inlet to Moriches Inlet Stabilization: Planning for a More Stable Coastline” History, accessed January 11, 2023, https://www.liro.com/projects/fire-island-stabilizationproject-fire-island-inlet-to-moriches-inlet stabilization. [4] Fire Island Artist Residency, “THE FIRST LGBTQ RESIDENCY IN THE WORLD”, History, accessed January 11, 2023, http://www.fireislandartistresidency.org/history [5] Openly, this practice became exhausting and only continued for the duration of my 2016 Fire Island Artist residency. A total of 46 I-Type Polaroids remain in the black box still under my bed (2 have been collected by a friend of mine). [6] Kahrl, Andrew W. 2012. The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South. London, England: Harvard University Press. [7] Fire Island Artist Residency, “ON THE SITE: INDIGENOUS LONG ISLAND, AN ART-BASED INTERACTIVE MAP OF LONG ISLAND (by Jeremy Dennis),” accessed January 20, 2023, https://www.jeremynative.com/onthissite/map-2/ [8] Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 14, Number 2-3, 2008, pp. 191-215 (Article) [9] Nyong’o, “Critical Shade: The Angular Logics of Black Appearance”,27. [10] Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2019. Pleasure Activism. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press. [11] Lorde, Audre. 1978. Uses of the Erotic. East Haven, CT: Out & Out Books. * This pamphlet was first published in a private edition of 250 copies for distribution at the Conference on Feminist Perspectives on Pornography, San Francisco, November 1978. [12] King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Introduction. Derrick Woods-Morrow engages in process-oriented collaborative projects with Queer Black Fol(x) across a wide variety of media. His work has been presented across the United States including at the 2019 Whitney Biennial (in collaboration with Paul Mpagi Sepuya), The Contemporary Art Center (New Orleans) the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Smart Museum (Chicago) and internationally, in Sweden, the Netherlands, and Berlin. Woods-Morrow is a member of the Chicago-based collective Concerned Black ImageMakers and serves on the Board of Directors of the Fire Island Artist Residency. He holds an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago and completed a Post- Baccalaureate at the Massachusetts College of Art Design. He is the 2021 Edith and Philip Leonian fellow at the Center of Photography Woodstock and is Assistant Professor of Sculpture, Painting & Textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design where he holds a Schiller Family Assistant Professorship in Race and Design. Originally from Greensboro, NC, he splits his time between Chicago and Rhode Island. Collaborative Toponymy: street names as linguistic fossils London-based artist Laura Malacart focussed on a plot of land destined to be redeveloped into a new village and created all its future street names by researching its histories, ecologies, industries, arts, languages and spirituality. In collaboration with a range of local communities and individuals, she produced a narrative for this land that is ethical and multilayered, reflecting the nature and demographics of the place. text and images: Laura Malacart C ollaborative Toponymy features the entire compendium of street names for a new village yet to be built. Dunton Hills in Essex, UK, belongs to a new group of fourteen garden villages announced by the government in 2017 in an expansion of the ongoing garden town programme. The land to be redeveloped is currently agricultural land, ancient ponds and woodlands, a family golf course, and a listed farm inhabited by the landowner. I co-created the names following an open call for a public art project asking artists to respond to a village not yet developed, ideally via a digital/ immaterial art work, because, at this stage, the location could not accommodate the installation of any material interventions. I found these parameters stimulating and laden with potential: such as the possibility to create permanent land references in the guise of addresses that in turn reflected the actual demographics of the place. When it comes to the identity of public places, a wave of revisionism is underway in several European countries with the re-naming of buildings and streets associated with the slave trade, clamorously epitomised by the case of the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and subsequent acquittal of those responsible. When names are imposed by the elite, naming can be an act of erasure. [...] By celebrating slavers and colonisers as heroes, these naming practices had written enslaved and colonised people out of history. Further, official place names, once imposed, were exceedingly difficult to change [...] For some alumnae of the Colston School, for example, the notion of being ‘Colston girls’ was a significant part of their identity.1 When considering my intervention, I opted out of the verticality of statues, and chose a horizontal approach using language. Authoring addresses via an aesthetic project offers the unique opportunity 175 to introduce permanent references in the landscape that are ethical and diverse and can work against dominant white European patriarchal and colonial biases. My engagement with research and the communities followed three strands - histories, ecologies, and community values. Research of the histories and ecologies of this land was integrated with the input of local contributions groups and individuals from the age of 8 to 90, sea cadets, young performers, a multi-faith women’s group, paramedics - resulting in a narrativisation of the land that reflects a diverse set of references and an inclusive sense of agency. The project demonstrates that naming practices can amplify the lived experience of ordinary people, and it provides a template for an alternative way of situating communities in space.2 The ‘harvested’3 names were eventually categorised according to nine broadly conceived topics (Water, Language, Arts, Jobs, Qualities, Folklore, Plants, Animals, Homonymy) and each name is tagged using these topics. For example (pic A) the topic tags for Agnes Waterhouse are J, Q, W, F. The purpose of these tags is functional as it is designed to enable future urban planners to shortlist name selections according to topics, should they wish to plan and map thematic areas. Authoring street names via a creative practice introduces an alternative process, ethos and research method to what would otherwise be a standardised process, where the power of naming remains the exclusive domain of council officers and developers, whose practices might respond to standard systems of memorialisation, or are motivated by marketing targets. In this sense, rather than being an add-on to the landscape, Collaborative Toponymy inserts itself within official legal practices that generate the street names and as such it operates as an artivist work or a gesture of cultural activism. Since permanent references in the guise of street names, in turn, become bound to our legal identities, in bills, deeds, passports and driving licences, they are regularly ‘performed’ whenever we are asked to supply our address. By extending the naming agency to collective local participation and artistic research, the project ‘interferes’ with standard legal practices whilst contributing to a re-narrativisation of the territory that in turn becomes embedded in the practice of daily lives. It is interesting to consider that when it comes to toponymy, street and place names are assumed as an ‘always already’, since, in our conventional experience, we are likely to inherit them rather than author them. Yet, in spite of the assumption that the street and place names precede us, we need to remember that they are references created by people at different times for different reasons. The historical and chronological span of the street names collected in Collaborative Toponymy starts from the Iron Age to the present. Its compendium of over 300 names showcases the breadth of naming practices: from place names originating as functional tools to navigate the landscape, to name distortions following the linguistic diversity and overlap of different settlers, to systems of memorialisation to mark specific histories. For example, The Flowing One is thought to have been the name of the Thames in 700 BC and was recorded from spoken Celtic in Roman characters and therefore witnesses the animistic spiritual nature of the land. Leghorn, a notable breed of chicken, is a corruption of the Italian port of Livorno from where the poultry was originally exported to North America in 1828. Aanchal Malhotra is an author and historian known for her work on the oral history of the Partition in India in 1947. The thought that place names precede us as ‘always already’ along with the notion that, in some cases, their origins even pre-date written lin176 guistic expressions - as in the case of The Flowing One - hints at the idea of place names lodged in the landscape as ‘linguistic fossils’. There is something paradoxical in creating the entirety of the street names for a new place in the present, just as it would be paradoxical to think of the creation of instant fossils. Yet, the alchemy of an aesthetic project can make it possible and also infuse the process with ethics and interdisciplinary rigour. And just as temporalities intersect in geological fossils, they also do in linguistic ones, as witnessed by the names bearing linguistic corruptions, memorialising specific events or practices. For example in names beginning with G: Godgifu is a Saxon name meaning ‘good gift’, Gorgjies from Romani ‘gadje’ indicates ‘nonGypsies, outsiders’ and Grace Chappelow was a notable suffragette (1884-1971). The multilingual and interdisciplinary nature of Collaborative Toponymy is expansive and multilayered when we consider the broad realities featured. Anchored as they are in a relatively contained geographical area, these names demonstrate the nature of globalisation not in a capitalist but in an ecological sense. A notable case is Windrush, a familiar term to UK audiences and scandalous for the UK Government. The Empire Windrush was a ship that in 1948 carried the largest contingent of Caribbean immigrants to the UK: they had responded to an invitation from the UK government to settle in the 1940s, then in 2018, they found themselves suddenly unlawfully deported with their legal Status to Remain in the UK questioned. The full story of this term was further unveiled as in my research Windrush is originally the name of a Cotswolds river but the ship Empire Windrush, prior to being captured by the British, was a Nazi ship deployed for Nazi package holidays and subsequently a carrier for Jewish prisoners to the camps. What next? In waiting for the new garden village to emerge and allegedly embrace our choices, just as with other bodies of research generated in my practice - such as The Little Book of Answers - the content is to be activated and interacted with rather than archived. Collaborative Toponymy is now published independently as a reference guide with an essay by sociologist Meghan Tinsley, a collaboration with improvisation singer Iris Erderer created vocal scores of the street names, and individual names and their definitions as silkscreen print have made an appearance in public spaces on a London area with an immigrant connection to Essex. Endnotes [1] Meghan Tinsley, “The Radical Promise of Toponymy” in Collaborative Toponymy, reference guide, Laura Malacart, 2022 [2] Ibid [3] I called my process of name gathering “harvesting” as a metaphor acknowledging the fact that my point of departure was a plot of arable land; at the same time, I used “harvesting” as a trope to describe a process of information gathering echoing data mining. In harvesting and mining, we take from the land but if the former follows a benevolent natural course (except industrial farming) mining comes with aggressive industrial connotations. 177 Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy (The Site), pinhole photography, 2021© Laura Malacart Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy (The Site), pinhole photography, 2021© Laura Malacart Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy (Windrush), silkscreen print 25x35 cm, 2021© Laura Malacart Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy (Conundrums), silkscreen print 25x35 cm, 2021© Laura Malacart Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy, selection, silkscreen prints, each 25x35 cm, 2021© Laura Malacart 184 185 Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy, reference guide, sample page, 2021© Laura Malacart 186 187 Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy, reference guide, sample page, 2021© Laura Malacart 188 189 Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy (The Site), pinhole photography, 2021© Laura Malacart 190 191 Phytophiliac Questions of participation, sustainability, and cultural change animate Frances Whitehead’s work as she considers the surrounding community, the landscape, and the interdependency of multiple ecologies. Whitehead’s practice integrates art and sustainability, traversing disciplines to engage citizens, municipalities, and other communities of practice, in order to hybridize art, design,science, conservation, and civic engagement, for public and planet. in conversation: Frances Whitehead and Giovanni Aloi F Laura Malacart Collaborative Toponymy, (Contributors at an interfaith cricket game), film photography, 2021© Laura Malacart Laura Malacart’s practice uses video, text, collaborations and participatory performance to explore contemporary questions on power, ethics and social justice. Research forms the basis of each project and aesthetic practice can thus be conceived as a strategy contributing to an ecologic, inclusive and informed world view. Malacart has engaged with audiences in museums and non-art spaces alike with projects such as The Little Book of Answers on citizenship praxis (Tate Modern, Turner Contemporary, Oval Cricket Ground, Brixton Market) YES! Onomatopoeia on neurodiversity (Science Museum), Speak Robert on botany, racial travesty and mercantile trade (Venice Biennale, Tate Modern). She holds a PhD in Fine Art (UCL) on the politics of the voice in moving image and has worked as a writer and educator in London. rances Whitehead is internationally known for her cutting edge work integrating art and sustainability, making her a leader in this emerging field. She has pioneered new practices for including artists on multi-disciplinary teams, demonstrating that the vision and cultural literacy of artists can contribute to these collective efforts. is a civic practice artist bringing the methods, mindsets, and strategies of contemporary art practice to the process of shaping the future. Connecting emerging art practices and the discourses of climate change, post-humanism, counter-extinction, and culturally informed sustainability, she develops strategies to deploy the knowledge of artists as change agents, asking “What do Artists Know?” Questions of participation, sustainability, and culture change animate her work as she considers the surrounding community, the landscape, and the interdependency of multiple ecologies. Whitehead’s cutting-edge work integrates art and sustainability, as she traverses disciplines to engage citizens, municipalities, and other communities of practice, in order to hybridize art, design, science, conservation, and civic engagement, for public and planet. Whitehead has worked professionally as an artist since the early 1980’s and has worked collaboratively as ARTetal Studio since 2001. Part critical practice, part zone of investigation, ARTetal—art and everything else—augments Whitehead’s individual art practice, broadening the intellectual and operational possibilities for engagement and experimentation, modeling future practices. Whitehead is Professor Emerit of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she founded the SAIC Knowledge Lab. She has also published essays and interviews exploring placemaking, civic practice, experimental geography, and other trans-disciplinary topics that engage the aesthetic, technological, and geo-political dimensions of contemporary practice. A long-term resident of the Great Lakes region, she has recently relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to focus on xeric landscapes for the future. Undertaking the Casa de Agua, a home/studio demonstrating water conservation strategies, 193 spheres of operation. My interest in artifacts developed alongside investigations into biological and chemical entities and processes. This dichotomy of the natural and the artificial was set in play in the mid-1980s when I moved to a postindustrial Chicago to teach in a museum-school, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and simultaneously began developing my first garden. From 1987 to 2007, I transformed a derelict city lot into an urban laboratory—but it also transformed me. It pulled me from studio practice into public practice. It pulled me into site design and land reclamation. It enlarged the scale at which I worked. It forced me into collaborations with living cooperators. It brought me into dialogue with neighbors and partners. But perhaps most importantly, it turned me towards the future, towards climate change, and the challenges ahead. The laboratory garden was enclosed, walled, a classic paradise garden. All walled gardens reflect the parable of Adam and Eve: inside one inhabits a paradise, the illusion of control. Real knowledge of the world is outside. So eventually, the garden, like the studio before it, became too circumscribed, “knowledge” won out— expulsion was inevitable. You see there was “trouble in paradise.” Like most urban sites, this garden was actually an un-intentional reclamation project—I was gardening inside a building foundation. Every spring, the freeze-thaw cycle pushed detritus up out of the soil. This underlying contradiction worked on me and eventually I abandoned the private enterprise of the paradise garden, jumping the fence into the public realm. GA: How did you become involved in eco-art? Frances Whitehead Miguel Gonzalez Virgen, Jorge Corcega, Artist researching at Ruta de la Milpa Nopalera, Milpa Alta, CDMX, Field of Nopal, edible Opuntia ficus-indicia cactus, 2022 © Miguel González Virgen she is establishing a xeric laboratory garden, The Future Garden, and in 2022 earned a Master Gardner certification for New Mexico. Giovanni Aloi: Frances, before we get deeper into a conversation about your career as an eco-artist, I would like to share with our readers a passage from an interview you gave in 2014 to the Public Art Review. In it you say: The post-industrial just was knocking the stuffing out of any pretense I made at meaningfulness. I knew the gallery was a bankrupt metaphysic for me. […] my studio practice kind of went black. I walked away from a very vigorous gallery career. One day I woke up and I had stopped believing. Can you tell us more about this realization and how it changed your practice? Frances Whitehead: The realization came because I had begun to garden. As a young artist, I was drawn to the relationships between art and science, undertaking epistemological investigations into the status of things: their origins and 194 FW: This first lab garden (I have now made six) afforded a wide variety of investigations. For a decade, my work consisted of installations, gardens, and drawings using living plants. I unpacked the Linnaean naming conventions and there discovered ethnopharmacology and the bio-chemistry of plants, critical for subsequent projects. One focus was the Solanaceae, the so-called “deadly nightshades” which contain important food plants such as potato, but also the notorious hallucinogenic “witching herbs” including Atropa belladonna. From these “bad” plants, their chemistries, and cultural histories, emerged important themes, such as “good and evil” which gave me a critical understanding of how culture inflects our understanding of the nature of nature, land, and place. Linking culture and the biochemistry of plants turned me into a systems thinker, seeking a more integrative paradigm. I grew more politicized and also impatient with what could be achieved through existing art practices. The scale of environmental impacts is largely beyond the scope of art—even most public art. Sensing these limitations, I began to ask myself, what do artists know that can possibly make a difference? A breakthrough came in 2001, when I was invited by the U.S. Office of Surface Mining and the National Endowment for the Arts to lead a team that developed a major scientific and social proposal for Acid Mine Drainage remediation for the village of Murray City, Ohio. This project was catalytic in focusing my attention on water, and also on working with real science, at the scale of the impacts. Working in true transdisciplinary collaboration, I was challenged to contend with the complexity of the site, not a manufactured complexity of my own making. There was no going back. 195 Frances Whitehead Platonic Solids, Lagenaria siceraria gourds grown in moulds on trellis at Huron Street Lab Garden,1991 © Frances Whitehead Based on this model, I became subversively “embedded” into a planning process for a greenway in the industrial core of Cleveland, Ohio. I began a dialogue with two high-level regional planners about the potential for artists to contribute to civic processes. By 2006 we had produced the “knowledge claim” document What do Artists know? (WDAK) which articulates the tacit and methodological knowledge deployed by contemporary artists. Referencing the Murray City and Cleveland projects as case studies, WDAK became the foundation for the Embedded Artist Project,1 a platform for placing artists in city workgroups alongside other worldmaking agents. GA: SLOW Clean-up, a Chicago-based project that ran between 2008 and 2012 focussed onsite remediation and it was designed to harness plant-based remediation processes to regenerate the contaminated land left behind by abandoned gas stations. You referred to this project as “designed civic experiments”. In some instances, you have referred to yourself as a “civic practice artist”. Can you tell us more about this project; how it came about and how in your opinion it helped reconfigure the boundaries of contemporary art? 196 FW: Reconfiguring contemporary art is actually where we started. In order to make space for emergent paradigms we shifted the focus from “art” as outcome to “artist” as agent. This opens space for the proposition that a project, an instantiation, might be BOTH art AND2 something else at the same time. SLOW Clean-up models both of these propositions. The Department of Cultural Affairs was confounded, but the new Director of Innovation embraced Embedded Artist, and a formal program launched in 2008. I was embedded in the Department of Environment, teamed up with the senior brownfields engineer. We reviewed the geotechnical characteristics of Chicago’s 400+ abandoned gasoline stations to identify good candidates for a new approach. After a review of the technical literature, one key fact stood out. Technically, petroleum remediation is performed by existing soil microbes attracted to phenols, sugars, exuded by some plant roots but not others. The microbes eat the petroleum. Since this technology has been developed by soil scientists who are part of agriculture in the modern university, most testing has been performed on agronomic plants such as corn, alfalfa, and switchgrass, which have 197 Frances Whitehead, Dave Graham, A.P. Schwab Next page: SLOW Cleanup Program – Civic Experiments in Phytoremediation, (Clockwise from upper left) Digital map of gas station sites, Purdue University soil testing, Rootmasses of native species, Field trials site, 2008-2012 © Frances Whitehead + City of Chicago, Prairie Moon Nursery. 198 Frances Whitehead, Dave Graham, A.P. Schwab SLOW Cleanup Program – Civic Experiments in Phytoremediation, Road tool tilling field trials soil insitu, 2012 © Frances Whitehead limited landscape value. Surprisingly, very few other kinds of plants had been tested including the native prairie forbs, famous for their extensive root systems. Also, it was well known that adding compost and aerating soils revs up the microbes, but no one knew how to till at the depth of the leaky petroleum tanks. By ignoring “best practices” I found a road-building machine that could serve as a giant rototiller, and we prepared the soils in situ. Working with Purdue University soil scientist Dr. A.P. Schwab we established a field trials site, designed for both beauty and function, and also for maximum legibility as a form of environmental education. Schwab lab tested 80 species and found 12 new native, ornamental, petroleum remediators. Ten phytoscapes were planned based on these new remediators. Schwab noted that our radical approach “wiped the whiteboard clean and started over”.3 Even so, the program was prematurely ended in 2012 when newly elected Mayor Rahm Emmanuel closed Daley’s flagship Department of the Environment. GA: What challenges have you encountered along the way? FW: Two challenges consistently arise with these projects and both stem from incommensurability—things that are assessed with differing frameworks and metrics. The first challenge is legibility, which directly affects the reception of multivalent projects, and the second is heteotemporality, operating in multiple timeframes. BOTH/AND projects like SLOW Clean-up or later the Fruit Futures Initiative Gary (FFIG) lose legibility the more “entangled”4 they become. Constituent 200 groups, the art world, the scientific community, urbanists/land use planners, and the general public are often missing key understandings needed to fully comprehend the work. There is also a disciplinary dimension of this illegibility. Sacha Kagan, sociologist of art+ sustainability, has theorized about creating change through “Entrepreneurship in Conventions”5 …to play “on the rules” not “in the rules” .6 Embedded Artist is a clear example of this change strategy. Kagan proposes that artists must also perform “Double Entrepreneurship in Conventions”7 if they hope to succeed. He describes how art practices lose legibility (as art) the farther they move away from the mainstream. This loss (of power) is a kind of undertow, pulling artists back towards convention, away from the experimental. Kagan promotes a reflexive or “double” process where the artist moves outward toward the experimental edgework and then doubles back to change the art world itself. We have often doubled back with language. For example, one critic asked me if my work was art or urbanism and I immediately coined the moniker “artist urbanist” legitimizing the work. Similarly, I coined “civic art practice”, and “public artist” modelled on the idea of the “public intellectual”. I have called Embedded Artist a “double agent”8 operating both inside and outside art, both inside and outside civic structures, a kind of double change agent. The problem with timeframes is similar. We frequently utilize “time” as an active element, working in “long time” durationally, which is not the same as “slow” or “deep “time. Biologic and remediative processes can take months or decades, fruit trees take years to produce fruit, phenomena like temperature sensitivity are seasonal, and climate change is (arguably) in geological time. The art world on the other hand is driven by institutional time and media time. Cities are on civic time, where cyclically-elected officials often abandon a prior administration’s signature projects and begin their own. The resulting heterotemporality contributes to the complexity of these projects and creates a time lag between when the projects are done and their comprehension. GA: Can you describe your relationship with plants? FW: Plants have become the center of my life. I am interested in plants botanically, metaphysically, historically and culturally. I suppose I was genetically coded for these passions. While I grew up in a family of modern artists, my mother’s extended family were all professional botanists and agronomists: seed analysts, hybridizers of jonquils and sweet potatoes—and discussions about plants were always happening around the edges of the heady intellectual milieu of mid-century art discourse, including Beat poetry, Zen Buddhism, expressionism, and pop/op art. I was also part of the generation known as “Sputnik kids”,9 and was schooled in the “New Math”,10 a very abstract approach to teaching math, what today we would call STEM/STEAM learning. The result was that I completely accepted a worldview where art, science, math, plants, poetry, mysticism, and philosophy were one. While I work with many other topics such as water, soil, insects, and microbes, plants have evolved into a wonder-filled nexus, linking all of the human 201 Frances Whitehead + Jim Elniski Modest Modernism - Plant Mansion + Inventory, Hacked hoop house, inventory of conserved food produced 2015-2018, stainless steel, glass shelves, digital print, 2019 © Frances Whitehead + Jim Elniski activity to the natural world. Plant communities reflect the specifics of a geo-location, deeply linked to “place”.11 Through plants, I have been able to connect to many aspects of contemporary discourse including multi-species consciousness, representation, classification and taxonomy, beauty, biotechnology, cultural identity, environmental justice, placemaking and food security. Plants satisfy my scientific curiosity and have provided me with the only glimpse I have ever had into the divine. They also serve a very practical purpose. When you finally get a seat at the collective table you better have some new ideas, and all of mine come from plants. GA: In 2014, you became a Lead Artist on the Design Team of the 606 linear park redevelopment project in Chicago. This was a massive undertaking with a $90 million budget aiming to turn a nearly three-mile-long abandoned, elevated rail spur into a mixed-use walking trail that today connects five parks in four neighborhoods. Today the 606 is the longest greenway redeveloped from a former el202 evated rail line in the Western Hemisphere, and the second longest in the world, after the Promenade plantee linear park in Paris. How did you become involved in the project and what insights, challenges and opportunities did you encounter along the way? FW: I was invited to be Lead Artist for The 606 as my extensive work with the City of Chicago was well known. The complexity, politics, and speed of The 606 matched its scale, and I could not have withstood the demands of this project without that prior experience. The complexity of The 606 was breathtaking and exhilarating. As Lead Artist I was the principal interpreter of a community vision that the project should become a “living work of art”.12 I operationalized this vision and linked it to well-established sustainability rubrics13 creating a cultural plan for the project. There were many art “rule books” at play, however, the vision of “living” evolved 203 Frances Whitehead/ARTetal Studio, Collins Engineers, Van Valkenburg Landscape Frances Whitehead/ARTetal Studio, Collins Engineers, Van Valkenburg Landscape Opening day bike parade at The 606 Observatory, Chicago, Seasonal solar observatory created from trail con- Environmental Sentinel, Citizen Science phenological observation planting of 453 Amelanchier grandiflora x struction soils, 2015 © The Trust for Public Land. autumn brilliance trees along 3 miles of The 606, Chicago, 2016 © Frances Whitehead + The Trust for Public Land into a focus on temporary, performative, and participatory approaches which, in turn, suggested ideas for park amenities and material re-use strategies. The engineers and I advocated for a “zero net spoils”14 approach—re-use everything— an idea I recently took with me to Santa Fe. The multiple art worlds reflected the politics in general, a daily collision of top-down vs. bottom-up forces. Started as a neighborhood initiative by Friends of the Bloomingdale,15 developers envisioned The 606 as the new Millennium park, a tourist destination. We feared it would produce gentrification, (a reality that eventually drew me to Gary, Indiana.) Fortunately, the directors of the project were experimental, and not sympathetic to conservative thinking. They stopped calling me Lead Artist and started calling me Embedded Artist, there to make Embedded Artworks, large-scale features that were BOTH park elements AND artworks at the full scale of the trail. Three participatory works supported community engagement of different kinds: a 3-mile planted floral line became a 204 citizen science laboratory for phenology/climate change observation; a convex solar observatory was made from construction rubble on the west end; and a concave, glow-in-the-dark skatepark + jazz club was designed for the east end. I was very excited about the skatepark as an example of “radical multi-functionality” but it fell victim to the speed of the project. The design, the ideas, the fundraising, and the public engagement were all happening simultaneously at the speed of light. At some point Mayor Emmanuel announced unilaterally that The 606 would be finished by the end of his first term, pushing the project into fast forward. On the one hand, it ensured The 606 was built, but projects like the skatepark were never funded, and the concrete re-use program was too time-consuming to execute. GA: What is your opinion about eco-art today? Ecology has finally become central to contemporary discourses. What are the main challenges and opportunities at stake? 205 Today, we may say that experimental art is that act or thought whose identity as art must always remain in doubt. As soon-and it is usually very soon-as such acts and thoughts are associated with art and its discourses, it is time to move on to other possibilities of experimentation.­ -Allan Kaprow (1997)20 In this case, the question is whether “art” as currently constituted is in any position to make a difference. Do we need to re-invent “art” altogether? GA: What irritates you the most about the contemporary artworld? FW: The selective amnesia. GA: Until recently, you taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. What advice would you give to today’s art students who want to engage with ecological themes? Frances Whitehead/ARTetal Studio + Gary Commons Orchard Collective Fruit Futures Initiative Gary- Planting Day at the Emerson Community Lab Orchard, Experimental land use and redevelopment program linking capacity development and food futures for Gary, Indiana using fruit, 2018 © Frances Whitehead FW: I try not to think too much about art world isms but the label “eco-art” is tricky. It places ecology at the service of art and not the other way around. I bring this up now, just to point out that the art world really needs to do its homework and realize that other disciplines have evolved highly advanced lexicons to explore the nature of the problem and the pitfalls of superficial solutions. Escobar’s Pluriverse,16 and Mignolo’s Epistemic Disobedience,17 calling for a wholesale abandonment of the entire western episteme (why would Art be left standing?) come to mind, and of course sustainability theorist Tony Fry, Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and sociologist Sacha Kagan. Artists need to stay vigilant—these are not merely new topics to represent, and there can be an over-reliance on “raising awareness”.18 That being said, I believe in artists’ ability to contribute—artists everywhere are sending up trial balloons, demonstrating possibilities. In my experience the art world is especially slow to address its role in the problem, and is very behind on change theory, clouded by economics and western individualism. I seem to be running a decade or so ahead of the art discourse (a terrible way to advance a career) but it’s finally catching up.19 Funny, Kaprow’s famous admonition concerning the experimental comes immediately to mind. 206 FW: Back in 2012, I wrote a piece 51 Declarations for the Future: A Manifesto for Artists.21 This piece was meant as both a challenge to other artists and also my best advice about how to get started. One of the most important declarations is: “Get comfortable being uncomfortable” a result of the uncertainty that is a constant condition in this work. The other is a bit of practical advice “Start where you are”. This means: do your homework, work at any scale, tune into place, join an existing effort, and learn from those around you. I still think this writing has all my best advice. GA: You have relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and have been working on a xeric garden. Can you tell us more about this project? What took you there? FW: Moving to Santa Fe was a way to beam into the arid future. Living in Chicago is anachronistic because one does not “feel” the present reality that one “knows”, that the Great Lakes are 20% of the world’s freshwater, a fragile global resource, not available elsewhere. I wanted to step outside that ecology and its idea shed. When people ask me why move to Santa Fe, I respond “new plant palette”! Of course, that’s both true and a provocation, the real reason is water. Over the last twenty years my partner, artist Jim Elniski and I have been collaboratively creating a series of “Dwelling Projects”, demonstration live/work spaces exploring aspects of sustainable living, BOTH architecture AND art. This includes the energy-generating Greenhouse Chicago22 and the edible landscape of Modest Modernism in ex-urb Gary, Indiana. Each has had a lab garden. In Santa Fe, we are creating Casa de Agua to explore and demonstrate water conservation strategies along with a xeric laboratory garden. With Casa de Agua we continue our focus on the adaptive reuse of existing structures, following our guiding principle: “reuse everything”. Choosing a common type of post-war ranch house known locally as a Stamm,23 we began by flipping up the garage roofs into a “butterfly”, creating a studio, and capturing rainwater into a galvi cistern visible on the street. The residence was re-plumbed to send our greywater to the adjacent landscape. 207 Frances Whitehead + Kei Uta Collective Frances Whitehead + Kei Uta Collective Drawing With/ Walking With – Eco-Hikoi Context Map1, GIS map with GPS tracking of collective hikoi marches, Drawing With/ Walking With – Plant Pigment Project, Studio view of botanical drawings of NZ native plants made 2019 © Frances Whitehead with their own pigment, 2019 © Frances Whitehead Remembering the “zero net spoils” approach, the site soils and hardscape became a giant cut-and-fill operation, moving soil and masonry around for reuse. Most ambitiously we cut up the concrete driveways, reducing the parking spaces and producing thick rustic concrete blocks for terracing. All water capture and distribution is passive, including cisterns, swales, and retention basins, and the planting design is driven by water availability and site grade. Rules for plant selection are simple. They must be native, edible, or existing. All are low water (xeric) natives except the fruit placed near the greywater. Planting zones include a micro-orchard, a Pinion/Juniper savannah (the Present Garden), and the xeric demonstration garden attached to the studio, (the Future Garden.) Santa Fe straddles the border between the montane forest above 7000 ft elevation and the shrubland below, affording a striking aesthetic contrast between evergreens and succulents including the extremophile bristlecone pine and the sculptural tree yucca. These larger native species form the backbone of our 208 xeric garden, which also hosts smaller native shrubs, cacti, and agave. This dramatic planting is public-facing, rhetorical, and accessible for small events and discussions. Another galvanized tank retrofitted with a door sits near the garden gate, and a project and event space, The Tank, is a strategy to invite others into the conversation. GA: What are you currently working on? FW: I am currently working on several initiatives linked to the nexus of water, xeric plants, pigments, walking, and food futures. Partnering with Monterrey Tec University, and the owners of Ruta de La Milpa in Milpa Alta outside Mexico City, we are researching the future of Nopal, the edible prickly pear cactus. This magnificent plant is central to the identity, cuisine, and food security of Mexico and may also be useful for climate adaptation in New 209 Mexico, where elevations are similar to Mexico City and warming is predicted. This line of inquiry is directly linked through the cochineal insect which lives on Nopal, and is a source of carmine red pigment, to “Drawing With/Walking With”, an investigation began in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, where the direct experience of a site through walking, is translated to other forms of multi-species solidarity, creating maps and botanical drawings with pigment from the plants themselves. Working with the “We Are Ocean”24 project in Pézènes-les-Mines, France, we will continue the Aotearoa strategies by “Walking the Ocean” here in Santa Fe, traversing current waterways that overlay the vast ancient seabed lying underneath the xeric landscape of New Mexico. Endnotes [1] Whitehead, Frances. Embedded Artist: Opting IN, A Blade of Grass Foundation: Growing Dialogue April 6, 2016 [2] Stengers, I. (2005). ‘Introductory notes on an ecology of practices,’ in Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), pp. 183–196 [online]. Available at: https://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/csrj/article/view/3459 (Accessed: 12 April 2020). [3] A.P. Schwab (2011) in conversation with the author. [4] https://scienceexchange.caltech.edu/topics/quantum-science-explained/entanglement [5] Kagan, Sacha. Art effectuating social change: Double entrepreneurship in conventions. In: Sacha Kagan & Volker Kirchberg (Eds.), Sustainability: A new frontier for the arts and cultures (pp. 147–193). Frankfurt am Main: VAS (Verlag fuer Akademische Schriften), 2008. [6] ibid. [7] ibid. [8] Whitehead, Frances. 2nd Interlude Chapter: Chicago’s Embedded Artist as Double Agent: An interview with Frances Whitehead in Culture and Sustainable Development in the City: Urban Spaces of Possibilities, Dr. Sacha Kagan, Ed., Rutledge, 2022. [9] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/05/nyregion/05nyc.html [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Math [11] Whitehead, Frances. Embedded Artist Project: Epistemic Disobedience + Place, The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking, Dr. Cara Courage Ed, Chapter 22, pg 247-257, Rutledge, 2020. [12] https://www.the606.org/final-design-plans/the-framework-plan/ [13] Agenda 21 for Culture, United Cities and Local Governments, 2004. (accessed January 30, 2023). https://www.agenda21culture.net/documents/agenda-21-for-culture [14] Stan Kaderbeck PE, in conversation with the author, 2016. [15] https://www.bloomingdaletrail.org [16] Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics: The Real and the Possible, Duke University Press Books, 2020. [17] Mignolo, W.D. (2010). ‘Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom’, Theory, Culture and Society, 26(7–8), pp. 159–181, p. 18 [online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276409349275 (Accessed: 12 April 2020). [18] Christiano, A., & Neimand, A. (2017). Stop Raising Awareness Already. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 15(2), 34–41. https://doi.org/10.48558/7MA6-J918 [19] https://www.creativecarbonscotland.com/new-publication-culture-shift-methodology/ [20] Kaprow, Allan. “Just doing.” TDR [Cambridge, Mass.] 41, no. 3 (1997): 101+. Gale Literature Resource Center (accessed January 30, 2023). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A19806721/LitRC?u=anon~195edcb7&sid=googleScholar&xid=21d0328f. [21] Whitehead, Frances. 51 Declarations for the Future: A Manifesto for Artists, The New Earthwork: Art, Action, Agency,” ISC Press, (Fall 2011). Edited by Twylene Moyer and Glenn Harper. fig. pg 16-20. [22] Reed,Mimi. New York Times, In Chicago, An Art Project Tinted Green/ Carbon Thrifty, 3.13.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/13/garden/13chicago.html?_r=1&ref=garden [23] https://sflivingtreasures.org/index.php/treasures/132-stamm-allen-.html?showall=1&limitstart= [24] https://weareocean.blue/ Frances Whitehead is a civic practice artist bringing the methods, mindsets, and strategies of contemporary art practice to the process of shaping the future. Connecting emerging art practices, to discourses of sustainability, heritage, just-transition, and remediation, she works as a Public Artist, expanding the role of artists in society and within multiple ecologies, asking, What do Artists Know? Whitehead has worked professionally as an artist since the early1980’s and has worked collaboratively as ARTetal Studio since 2001. She is Professor Emerit of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Beyond land art Lisa Le Feuvre, the Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, which she has led since 2017, is a curator, writer, editor focusing on art as a powerful force to retune perceptions. Committed to communicating and testing ideas, she has curated exhibitions in museums and galleries across Europe, published her writings in international publications and journals, spoken in museums and universities across the world and has played a pivotal role in shaping academic and arts organizations. In this conversation with Giovanni Aloi, Le Feuvre talks about the work and legacy of Holt/Smithson and the future of Land Art in the Anthropocene. in conversation: Lisa Le Feuvre and Giovanni Aloi H olt/Smithson Foundation exists to continue the creative and investigative spirit of the artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-73).Holt and Smithson developed innovative ways of exploring our relationship with the planet, expanding the limits of artistic practice. Through public service their Foundation engages in programs developing the artists’ creative legacies, continuing the transformation they brought to the world of art and ideas. Giovanni Aloi: Let’s start with one of those nearly impossible to answer questions… If you had to choose one work of Land Art on the grounds of how much it speaks to you or because of its cultural importance, which would that be? Lisa Le Feuvre: Impossible questions are always the most interesting ones. Today, as favorites can change like the weather, I would say Robert Smithson’s “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill,” which he made in 1971 in Emmen, The Netherlands. This is Smithson’s most complex earthwork — it explicitly works with so many layers of time and, importantly, with the time of industry. We, humans, speed up the time of landscape with our processes, and Smithson wanted with “Broken Circle/ Spiral Hill” to make us stop and think, stop and look, and then, perhaps, rethink our relationship to the surface of the earth. GA: Time… this is an interesting starting point for a conversation on Land Art. I agree with you that this work, like others by Smithson, is designed to alter our perception of time and to align the present with different time scales. This is one of the interesting aspects of Land Art, its conversation with the land, the inscriptions into the rock, and the intervention upon the presumed timelessness of nature. In relation to this work, I am specifically fascinated by the glacier boulder Smithson placed at the center of the interlocking canals and jetty that constitute the piece. 211 Nancy Holt Sun Tunnels, Sun 973–76. Great Basin Desert, Utah. Collection Dia Art Foundation with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 212 Photo: ZCZ Films/James Fox, courtesy Holt/Smithson Foundation 213 The Anthropocene has brought the notion of time-scales and deep time to the fore. It has invited us to rethink our centrality, and with it, our anthropocentric obsession by juxtaposing the quasi-imperceptible glimmer of the now to the fossilized stratification of the planet’s age. Does the boulder at the center of Smithson’s piece herald these ideas? LLF: I am so pleased you mention the boulder. “Broken Circle/Spiral Hill” is a twopart work. “Broken Circle” is made half of sand and half of water, and the form of its title is best seen by climbing up “Spiral Hill.” The location of the mine is right beside a terminal moraine, and this idea of, as you say, different registers of time fascinated Smithson. The boulder, that you can see in the image, was an annoyance to Smithson. In fact, he did not choose it: the massive rock was just there, in the way. He wanted it to be moved, but it was just too expensive to do so. For him, the boulder was a ‘cyclopean dilemma’, and he came to see it as serving as a reminder of the Ice Age. Smithson understood so well that geological time precedes human time, and saw himself as a kind of geological agent. GA: How interesting! This detail makes me like the work even more. I love it when artists work within the limitations of space and other constrictions; when they embrace things instead of thinking through the purity of the white cube even when outside. I am very interested in instances in which artists demonstrate an early appreciation of deep time and other concepts that philosophy finds very exciting right now. At times I get the impression that some contemporary thinkers claim to have discovered something science has known for at least two hundred years or more. It seems like a substantial amount of knowledge produced through the ontological turn in the humanities is roughly twenty to forty years behind other disciplines, art included. Just yesterday I have been looking at this painting by Caspar David Friedrich called Dolmen in the Snow, from 1807 pursued a rare and instinctive single-mindedness into the spiritual significance of the landscape. Friedrich’s landscapes are imbued with existential loneliness, in this case, heightened by the candor of snow, and invite a sense of spiritual communion with the purity of the natural world. Scale has often played an important role in his paintings. In this painting, this concept is here subtly underlined by the dolmen situated at the center of the canvas. A Neolithic stone formation consisting of a horizontal stone supported by several vertical others and thought to be a tomb, the dolmen reaches far into the depths of a time scale we can barely imagine nevermind fully comprehend. Friedrich was mainly responding to the industrial revolution, which can be seen as a starting point of our anthropogenic awareness. To what extent was Smithson concerned with environmental decay? LLF: This connection is super interesting - I wonder if Smithson knew the painting? I want to answer your question, but I have one for you first. What do you mean by ‘purity of the natural world’? A ‘pure nature’ is one uncontaminated - and to address that we need to think about what is contaminating nature. The simple answer is humankind - but I wonder if we can look to a more complex answer. We humans are nature, and we humans adulterate nature - which is to make ourselves impure, as we are nature. But none of those words sit well with me. So. . . what is your understanding of the purity of nature? GA: This answer could become an essay, so I’ll try to keep it as short as I can. Friedrich was concerned with a simpler notion of purity than the one we are considering today. His response was a combination of religious feelings propelled by the industrial revolution and the trauma it caused. Towards the end of “Teddy 214 Nancy Holt Sun Tunnels, 1973–76. Great Basin Desert, Utah. Collection Dia Art Foundation with support from Holt/Smithson Foundation © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo: Nancy Holt, courtesy Holt/Smithson Foundation Bear Patriarchy”, Donna Haraway well expresses the importance decay played in the 19th century, in the emergence of natural history museums, and in the context of sprawling urbanization. She saw an important correlation between arresting decay (which in the 19th century was simultaneously performed by taxidermy and photography) and a religious desire to prevent material as well as ethical corruption and thus preserve purity in multiple forms. This cultural framework, which I am here oversimplifying, reiterated our distancing from 215 practice, we are often responsible for destabilizing biosystems to the point of no return. So, in brief - yes, we humans are nature — when convenient — I would add. Despite the widespread scientific evidence and the popularity of philosophies of interconnectedness ideas of pure nature still, define our conception of nature. I also think in this context about Timothy Morton and his Ecology Without Nature in which he claims that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself. LLF: What, though, happens if we do break down the distinction between humans and nature? What if the stumbling block is not the image of nature, but the very act of thinking that such an image can exist? To make an image one needs to separate oneself from the subject — in a very basic way, this is one of the things that makes self-portraits and biography so fascinating. There is a separation of subject and image-maker that is always fuelled by fiction. I wonder if Rosi Bradotti’s thinking can help me think this through. She calls for an approach that does not prioritize the human over the world - which is of course really impossible for us humans to do. But what if we could, what would our human systems look like? And what does this bring to Land Art? For me, which comes back to your first point, the importance of Land Art is that it is in and of the world, not about the world. It changes as the world changes, and rather than being an image-artwork it is an embodied-artwork. I think Robert Smithson does not present nature in its anthropocentric form, instead, he works with nature, understanding that has been formed first by geological history and second by human history. He does not present, rather he points to the ever-changing present in an endless series of chapters . GA: Indeed, I agree that “separation of subject and image-maker that is always fuelled by fiction”. Yes, the kind of fiction one weaves in that space can at least set the tone for the relationship between the two. You made me think of indigenous approaches to the land, the trees, and the ecosystems. The fiction of capitalism has created an abyss between us and nature. This is also visible in many of the representations of the land in 18th-century landscape paintings, how they embody the gaze of the landowners and their power over the land. People rarely appear in those paintings. Instead, Aboriginal Australian paintings are more like maps of lived experiences among the many actants of biosystems. The composition tends to be non-hierarchical, and humans are represented by “u” shapes that intertwine with the rest of the motives. So, back to Land Art, Smithson and the Anthropocene… How would you characterize Smithson’s engagement with the ecological landscape of Land Art? Robert Smithson Broken Circle, 1971, Emmen, The Netherlands © Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York nature, the nature/culture divide at the same time Darwin was telling us we are apes. The contradiction is glaring, but the rhetoric that was mobilized in order to preserve the “purity of nature” as a moral and ethical reference point for wholly human affairs became more and more powerful. So, yes, I agree with you that we should be seen as contaminators or corruptors, at least philosophically. But in 216 LLF: : Smithson proposed that the artist had a unique ability to open a dialogue between the ecologist and the industrialist. In 1972 he declared that “the artist must overcome the inequities that come in the wake of blind progress. There should be artist-consultants in every major industry in America.” He felt that an artist-consultant might encourage those invested in accumulative ideas of progress to think on a longer time-scale to think about past and future Ice Ages. I think we can in the ecological landscape of his works the desire to give time to time - or, in other words, to let the elements exert progress on the works, and this is likely to be decumulative as it is accumulative. GA: That’s interesting. The idea of “the ecologist and the industrialist” sounds like a very 1970s polarity. It reminds me of the preoccupations of Art Povera and their responses to an unprecedented and seemingly unstoppable degradation of the environment. I am intrigued by the sensitivities that spurred Land Art works during the 60s/70s and the approaches of today. How do you think Land Art has changed over time? How have agendas shifted ? LLF: I really like thinking about Land Art in relation to Arte Povera - it is a useful 217 Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson Still from Breaking Ground: Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971-2011) . Duration: 20:45 min Film footage: Nancy Holt (1971), Benito Strangio (2011) © Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York GA: I’m interested in your idea that “Land Art was of a particular period”. Can you say a little more about that? What period are you referring to more specifically and in relation to your last point, do you see “older” Land Art as less rhizomatic and more binary? If so, why do you think that might be? LLF: You are right to pick me up on that. I think the term Land Art seems so limiting for art while being useful for art history to tell a story of how art progresses. Art historical terms are useful as they enable us to contextualise art in the present, but such structures can collapse productive discourse. Let’s take an example - Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels for one. Is this work made between 1973 and 1976 that sits in the Great Basin Desert an example of Land Art? Probably, because it engages with the surface of the earth; also definitely because it has been written into art history that way. It also speaks to sculpture, art history, film, and maybe even painting. What is most interesting is what the work does. What happens, then, if we think about Antonioni’s 1970 film Zabriskie Point as Land Art? Well, that does something useful as it enables vibrations between discourses to open questions. And then, to look to something more recent, does that same collision of ideas work if we apply Land Art conversations to the work of Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, Anders Sunna who will be showing at the Venice Biennale in 2022 in the Sámi Pavilion? Yes absolutely, and this brings an important critical perspective to Land Art: the overlooking of indigenous perspectives. Robert Smithson Broken Circle/ Spiral Hill, 1971, Emmen, The Netherlands © Holt/Smithson Foundation/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York collision in terms of media and materiality, and in terms of historical periods. Arte Povera has — in my understanding — a clear historical timeline, yet Land Art is much more elastic. Was Land Art of a particular period? To me yes, and somehow as it becomes stretched it loses its charge. Terms are important because they create a framework — and I think this is my wobbly-ness about ‘Land Art’. To wobble is interesting as it finds limits – to be useful I want the term to reclaim its porosity, its openness. Would ‘earthworks’ be better? Such a term links to ancient history, to henges, to barrows, to peoples, to non-human beings, to construction, to engineering, to military architecture, to a novel by Brian Aldiss, to landmark exhibitions in 1968 and 1969. Or ‘ecoart’? That seems too narrow. To your question about how agencies have shifted, I wonder if the answer lies outside of the definition of Land Art. The concerns raised by Holt and Smithson that art history sets within the bailiwick of Land Art have rhizomatically grown. Think about the work of Lise Autogena and Rayyane Tabet, Annicka Yi and Katie Paterson, Kapwani Kiwanga and Mark Dion, Maria Hupfied and Oscar Tuazon, Regina Jose Galindo, and Simryn Gill… I could go on! These are all such important artists who are wrestling with the questions of the agency of nature and humans outside of a simple binary relationship. 220 GA: Yes, I see what you mean — the label has now become so loaded that it precodes the work as well as our expectations. I often think of early Land Art (in the Art Historical conception) as somewhat hubristic, masculine, and monumental. The conceptions of interconnectedness that have become so central to contemporary philosophical and artistic discourses don’t seem to be the starting point of many “canonical land art works”. I might be drawing a sweeping generalization, but it seems to me that earlier land art from the 1960s and 70s was centered around a pronounced anthropocentrism that ultimately defined its discourses. I guess that following this line of thinking we can envision an agential shift from human to land and ecosystems in which the label Land Art can diffract in new and exciting ways. This makes me think about the political dimension of what this “expanded conception of Land Art” can encompass. I am thinking specifically about Forensic Architecture or the work of indigenous art collection Postcommodity. LLF: There is most certainly a political dimension to Land Art. I find Jean Luc Nancy’s distinction between the political (the realm of discussion) and politics (the administration of that glorious space of productive disagreement) really useful when thinking about this dimension, as well as Elizabeth Grosz’s thoughts on why art matters. In her 2008 book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth she describes that “Art is intensely political not in the sense that it is a collective or community activity (which it may be but usually is not) but in the sense that it elaborates the possibilities of new, more different sensations than those we know”. I love this articulation so much. This thing art historians call Land Art, and the very focus of Antennae’s debates, vibrates with possibilities of new, more different sensations than those we know. I wonder – and hope – that if we think beyond an anthropocentric understanding of our planet we can open more productive ways of being. Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, editor, and public speaker. She is inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation dedicated to the creative legacies of the artists Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson. Between 2010 and 2017 Le Feuvre was Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute, where she directed the research component of the largest artist-endowed foundation in Europe, leading a program of education, research, collections, publications and exhibitions. 221 Painting the anthropogenic landscape Diane Burko’s concern for the future of our environment and issues of climate change led her to develop series of ongoing projects, developing visual strategies in paintings and photography that use historical comparisons of global glacial change through repeat photography, Landsat maps, and other visual data to help explain Earth science to the public. Her work confronts issues of geological and chronological time —past, present, and future. in conversation: Diane Burko and Miriam Seidel Diane Burko Left: BLM Covid, 2020, Mixed Media on Canvas, 20” x 20” © Diane Burko Following page: Summer Heat 1 and 2, 2020, Mixed Media on Canvas, 84” x 162” overall © Diane Burko D iane Burko has become known for her commitment to depicting issues around global climate change in her artwork, which includes paintings, photographs, and time-based media. Since the early 2000s, she has created several major art series focusing on the retreat of glaciers and the loss of coral reefs to warming seas. This work draws on, and often includes, climate data in the form of official graphs, maps, and aerial or satellite imagery showing the 224 progressive effects of climate change. Burko has also joined research expeditions to Antarctica and Greenland; the Patagonian ice fields of Argentina; the glaciers of New Zealand; the reefs of Hawaii and American Samoa, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, in the process creating her own body of documentary photography of stressed ecosystems. Her work has been covered in Scientific American, Glacier Hub, the Washington Post, and other publications, and has been exhibited 225 Diane Burko Coral Triangle, 2020, Mixed Media on Canvas, 72” x 204” © Diane Burko at the National Academy of Sciences, the Walton Art Center, and the Michener Museum, among other venues. Burko’s awakening to climate issues grew organically from her previous period as a landscape painter. Part of her practice included gaining direct aerial views of snow-covered mountain peaks, volcano fields, and river valleys, leading to a heightened awareness of how the landscape below could change. From the 1970s on, she was also part of the growing community of feminist artists who saw their work in terms of an evolving political consciousness. This allowed her to act in a way that integrated her studio work with speaking out on issues and political protest when called for. Since turning her attention to climate change, Burko has continued this interweaving of art and praxis. She has spoken widely, creating an unusual bridge between the art world and the specialized world of climate science, most recently at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall Conference on the intersection of art and science related to climate change, and delivering the keynote at the Climanosco conference, Dear 2050, in Zurich. 226 She has also taken part in grass-roots activism, including the Women’s March of 2017, several climate marches, and most recently, vigils to mark losses from COVID. I’ve followed Burko’s work for several decades, and was particularly excited as an art critic to see her take on climate change, at a time when it often seemed to fade into the background among competing issues. In 2014, we bonded during a daylong trip to the New York Climate March, which marked the beginning of an ongoing conversation during studio visits and Climate Strike rallies. Over the past year as the world endured another global stressor—the COVID pandemic—Burko found herself dealing with that subject as well, in a new series of paintings that draw on her artistic approach to climate change, and call these two massive events into dialogue. Last winter we spoke remotely about this latest development and more. Miriam Seidel: I’ve heard that, since the COVID pandemic began, many artists and writers have been having a hard time keeping up their creative work. But you 227 Diane Burko World Reef Map, 2019, Mixed Media, 50 x 88” © Diane Burko 229 Diane Burko Reef Map 1, 2019, Mixed Media, 50 x 88” © Diane Burko 230 231 am a news junkie) and it’s all very upsetting and perplexing. And I just had a canvas and I started playing around with red paint. I had no idea what I was going to do. I had just finished two big pieces which were all about climate change, in March. MS: You started with that color red—the red of disease, and inflammation, and higher risk. DB: Yes. I threw some red acrylic paint on this canvas, and then I just got into the materiality of the paint—I was using thick paint, thin paint, and beads. I was just playing around, and I kind of liked it, even though I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with it. But once I hook onto an idea, in the most abstract, amorphous non-verbal way, it can move me. And after I got started, then I moved into a more analytical, planning kind of working. It’s more problem-solving. How can I make this, how does it work? There’s a lot of prep, as you saw with this big painting I’m working on now, Unprecedented. And I’m not impatient while I’m working, maybe because it’s this amorphous time that we’re all living in. Diane Burko Glacier Map 1, 2019, Mixed Media on Canvas, 50” x 88” © Diane Burko have been very productive this year. Diane Burko: A lot of artists have said, and I agree in a way, it’s been easier for artists because we are isolated a lot of the time anyway. We’re in our studio. We’re used to being alone. The difference for me is that my pace and my focus have been much more erratic, more staccato, and less flowing—just the way it feels like the whole world is out of control, full of turmoil and unknowns. But a studio is a nice place to feel safe—like you have some control. Maybe that’s part of what keeps bringing me back. And I’m always craving that feeling of flow and getting lost in your work. All artists know what I’m talking about. MS: So you’re saying that sense of flow has been harder to get to this year? DB: No, I’m just saying you never know when it’s going to happen (laughs). MS: So actually, even if your working rhythm has been affected by all this turmoil, you can still find flow within that. DB: Yes. Sometimes. MS: And during this time, you’ve actually been tackling COVID and the pandemic as a subject. DB: I didn’t consciously say, “Now I must make art about COVID.” I’m in the studio, I’m upset, I’m looking at all the charts and getting the news constantly (because I 232 MS: And we should acknowledge that this new work is taking place in the context of your work on climate issues, which has been your primary subject over the past fifteen years. Your climate-related paintings show this really interesting back and forth, juxtaposing the climate data, which comes in the form of graphs, maps, and texts, with powerful imagery that pulls people in and helps them to encounter this very complicated subject. So you already had this skill set when you got to the pandemic, that would allow you to tackle it in a more holistic way than someone else might—combining information and imagery. DB: That’s a good point. I had been using similar graphics as part of my paintings. And I did instantly glom onto the graphs showing the spread of the pandemic. And of course, I love using maps! MS: That really runs through your career, doesn’t it? DB: Throughout my career, the aerial view—looking down—has been my favorite way of viewing the landscape. That started even before my first flight with Jim Turrell in 1977. In the early seventies, I did a series based on black and white US Geological Survey aerial photographs. It’s about cartography and geography. In my image-making, it’s a way to combine fact with metaphor. Certainly with the World Map Series, which is featured at the American University exhibition,131 I took this interest to its logical conclusion. In the final painting, mapping the spread of COVID, you can see how it spread just like the maps showing global flight paths. The pandemic requires maps to understand because it involves the whole world. That really was the hook for me that said, you can do this. Because I didn’t think that I was necessarily personally qualified to make paintings about the pandemic; it was so similar to the work I’ve been doing, in the sense that it encompasses the whole world. MS: Right. The climate crisis and the pandemic are both global phenomena. DB: Yes. And that means we’re all in this together. We’re all in climate change together—what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic, and what happens 233 Diane Burko Diane Burko COVID Spread Map, 2020, Mixed Media on Canvas, 50” x 88” © Diane Burko Unprecedented, 2021, Mixed Media on Canvas, 96” x 180” © Diane Burko in China, didn’t stay in China. It’s the same. And that’s the lesson that I don’t think humanity as a whole has gotten yet. What ecosystems are, that we are all interconnected, and the planet is all interconnected. You know, you would think that image of the blue marble that first appeared back in the last century,132 would have been enough for people. But it’s not. MS: So, you tackled this new subject with a feeling that, Yes, I can speak this language. You’ve already been working big; this year your large-scale painting, Unprecedented, is 8 feet by 15 feet. I wonder if this coming together of a new subject and your own artistic language gave you the confidence to pull your scale higher. the forest fires in the west—yet still holding on to hope for the future, in the open sky views. And the circles then became crucial. In part, they’re another way to refer to the virus, and to the globe. Somehow, I think Hilma Af Klint’s work was also in play. It’s really hard to analyze how ideas come together. MS: It seems to make the virus feel not just like a global-scale infection, but like an infection of the globe. DB: Right, and that harks back to the way I see climate change. MS: In terms of scale, you’ve also been doing smaller work alongside these largescale pieces. DB: Well, it’s another challenge. And I like challenges. But I think the fact that there was so much unknown, and the arbitrariness of what was going on, also somehow gave me license to do whatever I want. So there’s a lot of experimentation, a lot of different materials. I had moved from oil to acrylics when I started the whole ocean/coral reef series in 2018. But I’ve taken it further. You know, let me try this or that, what does this look like? DB: I’ve been doing these small square paintings forever, in this 20-by-20-inch module, even before I started painting about climate change. They sort of cover everything I’ve done along the way. MS: Can say more about this big painting, Unprecedented? It feels different—fully abstract yetHu heavy with meaning. Microbial Mask/Passport, 2020 © Yimei MS: They’re divided into two parts, and seem to make room for two things to coexist. Like this one, Glacier/Covid. The imagery suggests a fragmenting glacier, but the title asks us to consider it alongside the pandemic. Yimei Hu DB: Clearly, I was charting the horrors of 2020 that fall and winter. The mounting deaths, the surreal political situation, social unrest—the Black Lives Matter issues, 234 MS: But these newer ones are each a kind of diptych. DB: Oh, because they’re split. Yes. DB: Yes, because it’s all done during COVID. Maybe it was a way for me to say 235 Diane Burko Diane Burko CA Burning, 2020, Mixed Media on Canvas, 20” x 20” © Diane Burko Carbon Covid, 2020, Mixed Media on Canvas, 20” x 20” © Diane Burko 236 237 visually, that COVID and climate change are the same things. Throwing them together, because it’s all the same. MS: Somehow those small-scale juxtapositions hit me in a very poignant way. DB: I’m glad to hear that. MS: It seems like they’re both things that are very hard to wrap your mind around, and our human tendency is to turn away, you know, go back into comfortable denial. And here, in a way you’re saying, Well, let’s try looking at two of them at once! DB: And when you put them all together in a series, then you can get even more things going at the same time. In my exhibit at American University, the curators are planning to put up a whole wall of 20-by-20-inch paintings, forty pieces in all, from different series going back to 2002 when I was in Iceland. MS: I loved the ones you did that had this sort of craquelure—the layer of cracking paint that beautifully conveyed the breaking up of the ice sheets. Could we talk a little bit about the difference between using your art to communicate about climate change, as opposed to communicating about COVID? With climate change, there was always this inherent tension between the enormity of the change, and the change being too slow-moving to perceive without help. Although at this point it looks like we may be hitting the point where the hockey stick pattern is more visible, and extreme effects are harder to ignore. But I was struck that a lot of the images you used from COVID—we’ve seen them already. We’ve digested them through the media and social media so much, as opposed to the signage and symbology of climate change. DB: Right, the climate data is just not as known. Maybe that’s why I feel freer with the COVID paintings because I’m using symbols that are in the visual vernacular. MS: I did notice that there seemed to be a kind of freedom in your most recent painting. That you’re kind of letting loose in a way. DB: I am. It is funny. I mean, I’ve let loose before at times. Early on, when I was doing representational painting, it was more a question of, Can I draw this, can I make this or that? And now I do feel freer that I don’t have to do that. MS: In some of this work, like where you represent that microscopic image of the coronavirus—not the usual sphere with the little protrusions—you’re doing some subtle draftsmanship there. And in other places, it feels like there’s a kind of directness in the work now, which you express through a sense of freedom in the brushwork as well. It’s like you’re getting more direct in a number of ways. DB: Yeah, I didn’t want to lean on the coronavirus image everybody knows. But I am using circles, as in the big painting [Unprecedented]. And I think I’m using them more referentially, more metaphorically, rather than descriptively. But they certainly hark back to what we know about the virus. Now it’s imprinted, we’ll never forget that image. The circles connected to a lot of things I’ve been doing. One is my lenticular work, an older animation technology that I started working on when I was doing work about the coral reefs, with to suggest the movement of water. 238 Diane Burko Stressed Coral, 2018, Lenticular Print, 13.5” x13.5” © Diane Burko 239 And I worked with the artist Anna Tas to make the image round. When you walk by it, it moves. And it also brings up an image you’d see in a microscope. I had just gone to a lab where they were using a con-focal microscope, which provided a close-up view in real time of a polyp—the animal part of a coral. So I’ve taken that and pushed it to a more metaphorical dimension in these new paintings I’m doing. MS: I did want to talk about the connection between your art and your, what we might call activism, which includes all of the very large amounts of speaking that you’ve done. But then I saw that you also were out there in the streets recently with a group of women documenting the deaths from COVID. DB: Well, I’ve always marched. I marched against the Vietnam War… When Trump was elected, I was on the Women’s March. And I’ve been on all the climate marches—we’ve been on some together. MS: Yes! Can you talk a little bit about the connection between your art and the more directly activist things that you do? DB: Sure—actually, I was on a recent CAA panel, about climate activism in the context of ecofeminism.133 And I talked about my journey from feminist activist to environmental activist, and a parallel evolution from being an observer to becoming an investigator and communicator. I was there at the beginning—I witnessed the beginning of the feminist art movement in the seventies, with the Women’s Caucus for art. That’s where I became friends with Mary Garrard and Norma Broude, I met Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, who wrote Women Artists, 1550-1950. Miriam Schapiro became my close friend, Joyce Kozloff, Arlene Raven, Cindy Nemser—all these different feminist artists and writers. But while I was an active member of the women’s art movement, I was painting large-scale landscapes, which wasn’t something many people were doing then. When I received a lifetime achievement award from the Women’s Caucus for Art in 2011, Mary Garrard described my landscape work as a kind of reimagining of the panoramic landscape of male artists like Frederic Church and Thomas Moran, claiming the heroic, monumental aspects of nature as not something other, but as part of myself as a woman artist. 134 So in a way, my feminist activism, my environmental activism, my painting, and my feminism were always on a concurrent track. But they didn’t merge until the early 2000s when the activism that I had sort of got melded with my commitment to climate change. All along, I’ve tried to actively communicate what I’ve learned. I am a teacher. I’ve been a college professor.135 I’ve always been good at talking (laughs). And particularly, when I started intersecting my practice with science and the environment, I leaned into trying to communicate what I’ve learned. And I realized that public engagement was another way for me to talk and reach people about this issue I feel so passionately about. MS: But the art is always the crux of it for you. DB: Sure. Usually, when I’m talking, I start by talking about my art, and my journey as an artist, that’s the way in. But it’s a bit subversive, I can lead from 240 that to talking about other things. What made me do these images, did you know that this piece broken off the Petermann Glacier is four times the size of Manhattan? And, see it coming down from the west side of Greenland? Did you know one of those icebergs in my Ilulissat paintings sunk the Titanic? I put in facts like that. It’s another way of informing. MS: Right. So you’re a bridge between the scientists and the regular folks. DB: Yeah. I’m a populist in the sense that I think you talk plainly and simply, and that’s how you get through. That’s the way to reach people, you know? Endnotes [1] Seeing Climate Change, Diane Burko: 2002-2021, American University Katzen Center Gallery, August 18 – December 12, 2021. Curated by Drs. Mary Garrard and Norma Broude. Catalog with essays by curators and Bill McKibben [2]The photograph known as “Earthrise,” taken by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, has been called the most influential environmental photograph ever taken. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Earthrise [3] Ecofeminisms, a series of panels presented by The Feminist Art Project as part of College Art Association 2021. https://feministartproject.rutgers.edu/calendar/view/14775/ [4] Mary Garrard, an idea further developed in an essay for catalog, Seeing Climate Change, Diane Burko: 2002-2021, American University Katzen Center Gallery, August 18 – December 12, 2021. [5] Burko is a professor emeritus of art at the Community College of Philadelphia. Diane Burko’s practice lies at the intersection of art, science and the environment, with a focus on climate change. Her work is informed by regular collaboration with scientists, and by expeditions to witness the effects of climate change in such locations as Greenland, Iceland, Svalbard (Norway), Patagonia, American Samoa, and the Atacama Desert. Burko’s art has been included in over 100 exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work is found in such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, Denver Art Museum, Hood Museum, Michener Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Tucson Museum of Art, and the Zimmerli Museum. Miriam Seidel is a writer, critic, and curator. Her writing on the arts has appeared in Art in America (as Corresponding Editor), ARTnews, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Dance magazine and other publications, and in exhibition catalogues for the Delaware Art Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Museo del Chopo (Mexico City), and other venues. Her curatorial work includes directing the Galleries at the Gershman Y (Philadelphia). She wrote the novel The Speed of Clouds (New Door Books), and was the librettist for the operas Violet Fire, about Nikola Tesla, and Judgment of Midas. 241 Assaf Evron Collage for S.R. Crown Hall (Vermillion Cliffs), 2022, Solvent Print on Perforated Vinyl © Assaf Evron Collages for Mies Assaf Evron discusses his largescale photographic intervention with Mies Van Der Rohe designed high-rises in Chicago. In 2019, following Mies’ own collage work, Evron installed a massive cliff photograph onto the windows of the iconic modernist building evoking the complicated relationships between modernist architecture and the natural world, landscape and identity and the histories of vernacular architectures. text and images: Assaf Evron 242 243 W hen living in Chicago, it is hard to pay no attention to the iconic glass and steel modernist architecture of German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies made Chicago his American hometown where he extensively built and educated generations of architects. Collages For Mies is a series of photographic interventions with Mies van der Rohe–designed buildings across Chicago. Based on Mies’ own concept collage strategy, and his approach and use of landscape photographs in his preparatory work, I installed my own landscape photographs on the exterior of his actual buildings. A particular photographic intervention was installed on the Esplanade Apartments. Overall, the project proposes a dialectic approach to the relationship between architecture and its representation, and between modernist architecture and the natural world, as it is mediated through the glass window. In designing the German Pavilion for the 1929 International Exposition in Barcelona, Mies (together with Lily Reich) mastered the use of glass. The pavilion, not intended as an exhibition hall, but rather a representative space, is a spectacular combination of spatial glass partitions and walls. Mies’ use of different colors and finishes for the glass (from clear to translucent, from green tint to black) interact with, reflect, and refract the rich materiality of the building (onyx, travertine and Tinos green marble), behaving much like a cinematic screen. The multiple views created by the glass are not directed toward the exterior world as much as they are directed toward a playfully indulging surface, emphasizing the pavilion’s clean, spare architecture and rich materiality. In 1937, Mies emigrated from Germany to the United States, with the support of his friend, architect Philip Johnson.1 At this time Mies’ use of glass shifted—not in its architectural utility, but conceptually. It moved from being a mere material to a window, looking outward at nature, to interacting with the landscape. It transformed from behaving like a cinematic screen, with reflections and projections, to acting as a photographic still frame.2 Mies’ first commission in the United States, in 1937, was to design a vacation home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for Helen Resor, a trustee of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and her husband. Though the home was never built, Mies’ architectural concept collages, preserved in the MoMA collection, reveal the shift in his use of glass.3 Until this point, concept collages, including Mies’, traditionally consisted of renderings of a proposed architectural object in a possible environment. The collages included a combination of cut-and-pasted photographic materials that illustrated one, coherent visual environment. Mies’ collages for the Resor House were antithetical to this tradition, though. They were introverted. They did not represent an architectural object. They were, instead, a conceptual exercise in understanding the interior. Rather than address the question of objecthood (What does it mean to look at a building?), they focused on the question of dwelling (What does it mean to be in architecture and to reflect on the environment?). Mies’ collages for the Resor House set a new language for the representation of architecture.4 In his collages, Mies depicted glass operating not as a partition or a cinematic screen but as a window: more particularly, as a seamless medium be- 244 tween an architectural interior and the natural world outside. Mies’ collages also depicted glass functioning as a reverse Albertian window, behaving as a viewing device through which the outside world can be gazed upon as a work of art.5 The collages reveal that to achieve this effect, great significance is focused on the position of the structure in relation to the site and the landscape around it. But they also reveal Mies’ search for emotional landscapes in the United States that resemble his lost German Heimat.6 In his designs for Resor House (as well as for later commissions), Mies reduced almost the entire structure to a window, except for the floor and ceiling planes, the slender cruciform columns that span between them, and portions of the exterior cladding. Through the design, Mies, on a minimal, gridded conceptual stage, negotiated the spatial relationships between the Resor House’s building materials, artwork, and landscape as seen through the glass. In his concept collages, Mies depicted this glass conceptually and pictorially by inserting cut-and-pasted landscape photographs into the window frames. It is this inter-relationship between window and landscape photographs in Mies’ collages that captured my imagination and inspired me to develop photographic interventions for a number of Mies-designed buildings. Collage for the Esplanade Apartments was realized in September 2019. Using commercial window-wrap technology, I installed a 60-foot by 30-foot photograph of a Carmel Mount cliff face on the Esplanade Apartments. The photograph was printed on perforated vinyl and mounted to the glass and into the window frames on the first three floors of the east façade of the South Building, edge to edge. In many ways, the Esplanade Apartments reinvented mid-century dwelling. The iconic high-rise buildings, constructed in 1955 at 900 and 910 Lakeshore Drive in Chicago, ushered in a new way of living—in vertical, glass architecture. Mies’ concept collages for the project, featuring landscape photos as placeholders for windows, were instrumental in marketing the apartments as well as marketing the overall new idea of dwelling. In using the commercial window-wrap technology, I employed Mies’ own collage strategy for the exterior of one of his buildings. The gesture was not only about collapsing architecture and its representation, but also presenting what I consider to be a dialectical compromise between the natural world and so-called rationalist Miesian architecture, complicating the perceived twentieth-century dichotomy between nature and culture. The image installed on the Esplanade Apartments was taken at Nahal Me’arot, part of the Carmel Mount in Israel and a UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) site of human evolution.7 The cliff, in fact, is found vertical architecture. It is the site of a cave-dwelling where Neanderthals and early humans found shelter and created culture for half a million years. It is a site where nature and culture cannot be separated from one another. Like the physical cliff, where nature and culture cannot be decoupled, the image of Carmel Mount anchors the Esplanade Apartments, acknowledging their objecthood, while simultaneously anchoring them in the natural world. Facing Lakeshore Drive and Lake Michigan, the photograph, when in245 Assaf Evron Untitled (Collage for the Esplanade Apartments, Nahal Me’arot), Solvent print on Perforated Vinyl, 2019, Image: Curtsey of the Artist © Assaf Evron 246 247 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Resor House. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. 1937-1938. Unbuilt. Interior perspective of living room (view through north glass wall). Pencil, photograph on illustration board, 30 x 40”. © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 248 249 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Resor House, project. Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Perspective of living room through south glass wall. 1937-1941, unbuilt. Graphite and collage of wood veneer and cut-andpasted reproduction and photography © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY 250 251 Endnotes [1] Hochman, Elaine S., Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich, New York : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989. [2] Papapetros, Spyros, “In Tangent with the Structure of Plant Growth, The Resilient Margins of the Barcelona Pavilion,” Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona—1929. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2018, p. 134. [3] Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig at the Museum of Modern Art New York, https://www.moma.org/artists/7166, Accessed Sep. 8th, 2020. [4] Levine, Neil, “The Significance of Facts: Mies’ Collages Up Close and Personal.” Assemblage, No. 37 (Dec., 1998), pp. 70–101. [5] Alberti, Leon Batista, On Painting, Trans. Cecil Grayson, London: Penguin Classics, 1991. [6] Stierli, Martino, “The Visuality of Space and the Space of Vision: On Mies van der Rohe’s Late Photocollages,” Mies van der Rohe Montage Collage, London: Koenig Books, 2017, pp. 126–139. [7] Site of Human Evolution at Mount Carmel: The Nahal Me’arot / Wadi el-Mughara Caves, https:// whc.unesco.org/en/list/1393/, Accessed Sep. 8th, 2020. Assaf EvronCollage for S.R. Crown Hall (Vermillion Cliffs), 2022, Solvent Print on Perforated Vinyl © Assaf Evron stalled, had an illusive effect in which it merged into the glass. As a result, the printed cliff appears as a reflection of an absent topography in the flatness of the Midwest. An imaginary mountainous landscape Mies left behind in his homeland of Germany and replicated again and again in his American works. Assaf Evron is an artist and a photographer based in Chicago. His work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. Looking at moments along the histories of modernism Evron questions the construction of individual and collective identities. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches. 252 253 255