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.
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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’
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Sophie Chao
Oil palm seedlings
ready for transplanting into an oil palm
concession, photograph, 2019
© Sophie Chao
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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?
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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’
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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Hanna Paniutsich and Saša Spačal
MycoMythologies: Shiro’s Carrier Bag, Belarusian Mushroom Picker, 2. Photographic
manipulation, 2021 © Hannah Paniutsich and Saša Spačal
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Derrick Woods-Morrow
Sand Harvesting (preparation for Flat Rate Shipping), 2017, Photograph as Document,
© Derrick Woods-Morrow
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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
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rrow
rrow
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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
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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.
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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
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185
Laura Malacart
Collaborative Toponymy, reference guide, sample page, 2021© Laura Malacart
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187
Laura Malacart
Collaborative Toponymy, reference guide, sample page, 2021© Laura Malacart
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189
Laura Malacart
Collaborative Toponymy (The
Site), pinhole photography,
2021© Laura Malacart
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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,
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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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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Photo: ZCZ Films/James Fox, courtesy Holt/Smithson Foundation
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Diane Burko
World Reef Map, 2019, Mixed Media, 50 x 88” © Diane Burko
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Diane Burko
Reef Map 1, 2019, Mixed Media, 50 x 88” © Diane Burko
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
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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.
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Diane Burko
Stressed Coral, 2018, Lenticular Print, 13.5” x13.5” © Diane Burko
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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