DECOLONIZING NATURE:

MAKING THE WORLD MATTER

T. J. DEMOS

Mastery and possession: these are the master words launched by Descartes at the dawn of the scientific and
technological age, when our Western reason went off to conquer the universe.¹ Michel Serres

Living at a time of ecological tipping points, accompanying the 2014 exhibition World of World of Matter is one such platform, generating techniques of domination, including “forced labor,
resource over-consumption, widespread environ- Matter: On the Global Ecologies of Raw Material, research that reinvigorates the longstanding envi- intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft,
mental degradation, and runaway climate change— and Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan’s ronmentalist urgency of inventing a new approach rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arro-
some twenty-five years after Michel Serres made notes on their cinematic essay Monument of Sugar: to finite resources and exploring proposals for gance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless
the above observations—we are more than ever How to Use Artistic Means to Elude Trade Barriers creative sustainable options.⁵ Indeed, they provide elites, degraded masses.”⁶ Writing more recently,
conscious of the disastrous effects of that scien- (2007)—it also proposes a useful entry point in a place for contemplative speculation, researched the Johannesburg-based theorist Achille Mbembe
tific and technological age of post-Enlightenment considering the projects of the collective as a analysis, and pioneering aesthetic articulations argues that colonialism constitutes multiple forms
Western modernity, now increasingly global in its group. For these all variously operate on the dual regarding different ways of defining and organ- of violence: an inaugural violence, whereby it
reach. For the philosopher of science, the origin registers of critical documentary analysis of the izing our relation to the natural environment. As creates and defines the terms of its own existence;
of the crisis is located in our fundamental rela- present order of things and speculative modelings well, they critically approach the question of how a second violence, where its authority asserts its
tion to the material world around us: “We domi- of alternate possible worlds, which echoes the cen- we might “decolonize nature”—as poignantly ex- exclusive power in terms of law, right, and legiti-
nate and appropriate [nature]: such is the shared tral terms of Serres’s writing. Bringing together pressed in Tavares’s video—in ways that directly macy; and a third violence, where its control is
philosophy underlying industrial enterprise as ecological research, social justice activism, and reference or indirectly resonate with Serres’s maintained, spread, and made permanent.⁷ If
well as so-called disinterested science, which are environmental humanities research, their efforts terms. Generating critical documentary research we accept this admittedly schematic definition
indistinguishable in this respect. Cartesian mas- could not be more relevant to our current world via a diversity of videos, photographs, presenta- stretched across half a century of anti-colonial
tery brings science’s objective violence into line, of global crisis. As the group explains in one of tions of material evidence, and analytical and theory and practice, then to “decolonize nature”
making it a well-controlled strategy. Our funda- their recent collective statements: speculative texts, their work investigates how the would suggest the cancellation of this subject-
mental relationship with objects comes down to current regime of resource colonialism, industrial object relation between humans and the environ-
war and property.”² If environmental matter has Humans have exhausted virtually all known ecocide, and the neoliberal agroeconomy is social- ment, the removal of the conditions of mastery
been treated historically as an external thing to be resource deposits on the planet with heightening ly and environmentally destructive, economically and appropriation that determine the connection
used, exploited, commercialized, fetishized, and efforts geared toward locating yet undiscovered and politically unequal in the distribution between the two, and the absolution of the multi-
colonized by humans—long recognized by many and untapped reserves. Large-scale mining is of its negative effects, and historically rooted in ple levels of violence that mediate the relation
Marxist critics and indigenous peoples alike³— penetrating ever deeper layers, multinational land paradigms of imperialism that go back centuries. of human power over the world.
then what we need, Serres proposes, is a “natural grabs are advancing to remote corners, and the What would it mean to decolonize nature? Considering the diverse projects of World of
contract,” one that will bring about a new concep- race is on for the neocolonial division of the sea- Colonialism, at its most basic, imposes a subject- Matter allows for further and more precise
tualization of our relation to material objects and bed. ". . . With growing consciousness about global object relation of power, defined by mastery and approaches to what the process of decolonizing
nonhuman life forms. While Serres’s prescient environmental limits, there is urgent need for new appropriation, to reiterate Serres’s terms. For nature might mean, beginning with those that
analysis has been taken up specifically in different discourses and modes of representation that shift the Martinican author and thinker Aimé Césaire, present us with critical analyses of the destruc-
works by the participants in World of Matter—in- resource-related debates from a market-driven writing in the mid-twentieth century, the colo- tive industrialization and domination of nature
cluding Paulo Tavares’s research video Nonhuman domain to open platforms for engaged and decen- nial relation (as between European colonizers in Brazil. Tavares’s Field: Amazonia (2012), for
Rights (2012), Emily Eliza Scott’s Audio Tour tralized public discourse.⁴ and Afro-Caribbean colonies) involved manifold instance, offers a photo-essay travelogue of his

14 WORLD OF MATTER 15 DECOLONIZING NATURE: MAKING THE WORLD MATTER

 recent trip across the country investigating the analysis, which, like Huber and Martin’s, connects terms of visual approach. The most notable is Earth’s systems as much as nonhuman life—
socioenvironmental disaster zones of Brazil’s diverse regions and complex Earth systems, show- a collective investment in documentary video resonates as well with the aims of forensic science
modern ecopolitical history, from the regime of ing the human costs of industrial development, practice, realized through a variety of individual (as developed conceptually, technologically, and
state-supported deforestation, ranch and farm among them the monumental effort carried out by inflections, among which the employment of practically in the Research Architecture program
development, oil exploration, and resource colo- Bangladeshi collective labor to reinforce embank- the researched video essay ( joining audio-visual at Goldsmiths¹³). In sum, World of Matter defines
nization between the 1960s and 1980s to the sub- ments and protect against catastrophic submer- moving images and essayistic narratives to create a cutting-edge mode of collective artistic and
sequent wave of IMF-supported privatization and sion—a disavowed, if distant, externality of the oil complex, hybrid aesthetic constructions¹⁰); inter- interdisciplinary research, mediated through
neoliberalization of the 1990s. In the wake of this industry in Canada that translates into backbreak- view-based portrayals of diverse stakeholders; constellations of texts, images, and videos, which
development, the Amazon lies depleted and de- ing toil and increased environmental risk borne by the use of contextualizing video footage delivered shares the imperative to explore how the world
graded, even as it submits to a continued conflict the multitudes, many from the underclasses in the with sociopolitical analysis and historical investi- matters—how it enters into both materialization
between resource grabs for global markets and global South. gation (often as voice-over or explanatory titles); and conflicted forms of valuation.
social movements struggling for democratic, local, Consider as well Uwe H."Martin’s White Gold and the presentation of philosophical speculative
and indigenous sovereignty.⁸ Complementing (2007–14), another comparative model of North– narration. The latter resonates in particular with If World of Matter aims to question the main-
Tavares’s overview, and focusing on agrobusiness South and East–West ecocultural geographies, recent developments in New Materialism and stream governmental policies of “sustainable
in Western Brazil’s Mato Grosso, Frauke Huber here joining agriculture, land-use policy, advanced object-oriented ontology, creatively engaging growth” as embedded in a generally unsustainable
and Uwe H."Martin’s video LandRush: Frontier technology, and neoliberal economics. The ten- the work of assorted theorists such as Serres, neoliberal economy, then it joins a long history
Land (2011–14) portrays large-scale commercial part video project presents a documentary ethno- Bruno Latour, Karen Barad, and Graham Harman, of environmentalism going back to the “Limits to
farms that use chemical pesticides and consid- graphy of family farmers in Texas, who explain among others, in addition to connecting to the Growth” discourse of the early 1970s. In 1972 the
ers their socio-environmental impacts. Research how corporate agriculture has brought financial climate-justice activism of figures like Vandana Club of Rome commissioned their eponymous
footage presents indigenous activists explaining pressure to buy commercialized GM seeds, flood- Shiva and formations such as the Landless Work- report, which deployed computer modeling to
that such development comes “without limits” ing the market with cheap products and making ers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores forecast the negative effects of growth on Earth
and fouls traditional farming lands with agrotoxics organic cotton production ever precarious as Rurais Sem Terra). The group’s approach to ethno- systems, chiefly in relation to world population,
and transgenics, forecasting a dark future of con- a cooperative industry. White Gold develops this graphy and field research, far from exhibiting a industrialization, pollution, food production,
flict over quickly vanishing clean water supplies.⁹ analysis further by comparing the Texas cotton naive unawareness of power relations between and resource depletion. It concluded that only
In further sections that compare Brazil to other industry to the ruinous situation in India, where subjects of knowledge and objects of observation, by reducing growth could humanity save itself
geographies, they track farming developments in farmers have received none of the subsidies is critically experimental, involving theatrical from the collapse of those global systems by
Ethiopia, where small-scale growers have been en- granted to their counterparts in the United States, reenactments and collaborative, self-reflexive the end of the twenty-first century.¹⁴ This “limits”
gulfed by debt owing to the high costs of chemical leading to debt (owing to rising expenses of chem- knowledge production (especially in the case of approach defined the first wave of postwar en-
inputs and the environmental stress of climate- ical inputs, farming technology, and WTO policy the films of Van Brummelen & De Haan).¹¹ In ad- vironmentalism and was superseded by the “green
change-induced drought. that drives down cotton prices) and, tragically, dition to these various models of ethnographic capitalism” of the 1980s and 1990s, which, as
With similar attentiveness to the industrial farmers’ suicides on a massive scale. Activists see and documentary practice, the group also offers policy analyst Richard Smith observes, wanted to
mastery and appropriation of nature, Ursula the cycle as repeating an old colonialist relation multiple forms of mixed-media installations, “"‘align’ profit-seeking with environmental goals,”
Biemann’s video Deep Weather (2013) depicts of power. Indeed, for the scientist and ecoactivist pedagogical presentations (some drawing from so that restoring the environment and growing
the exploitation of the Albertan tar sands, where Vandana Shiva, interviewed extensively in this the natural sciences), and informative critical the economy were ideologically reconciled.¹⁵ Now,
corporations extract dirty, hard-to-access hydro- video, these agrobusiness arrangements consti- cartographies and computer-generated diagrams at the tail end of that eco-economic compromise,
carbons, in the process devastating this biodiverse tute “economic genocide”—a deliberate program, (as in the work of Ursula Biemann, Elaine Gan, corporations commonly advertise “green business
environment in Northern Canada. Portraying she contends, to eliminate the seed sovereignty and Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer), practices” and model “sustainable development,”
the befouled oil fields in the Athabasca River and economic independence of Indian farmers, all of which demonstrate a shared investment supported by most governments and organiza-
region, her footage, complemented by the artist’s just so corporations like Monsanto can expand in interdisciplinary research, bridging fields as tions like the World Bank and the WTO, where
whispered voice-over speculation, also depicts their markets worldwide. diverse as cultural geography, chemistry, visual what is to be “sustained” is most of all economic
the socioenvironmental consequences of fossil- These diverse presentations evidence a collec- culture, agriculture, political science, and—par- “development.”¹⁶
fuel development in such far-away places as tive commitment to bringing investigative analy- ticularly in the case of Emily Eliza Scott—an eco- As such, the logic of mastery and appropriation
Bangladesh’s delta, suffering from the threat of sis and visual documentation to bear on industrial logically concerned model of eco-art history, and that Serres identified as the founding episteme
rising sea levels owing to melting polar ice brought modernity’s colonization of nature. While they more broadly, environmental humanities.¹² The of the present ecological crisis has only been exac-
on by the anthropogenic warming of the planet. do so in aesthetically singular ways, there are none- group’s investment in developing ways to mate- erbated with contemporary approaches to climate
The video is exemplary of a relational geographical theless several shared areas of concentration in rialize and translate the language of things—the change, especially where current environmental

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 calamity is viewed principally as a market failure, new possibilities for alternative resource By exploring the political, social, and economic that mark the uneven developments of global
the solution being to integrate nature (including ecologies.²¹ dimensions of land use in the global field, with neoliberalism.²⁶
natural disaster) ever more fully into global finan- The diversity of the projects, moreover, specific attention to areas in the South such as This observation regarding the participants’ post-
cial systems. According to the tenets of the current radiates out into shifting constellations of prac- Bangladesh, Egypt, Ethiopia, Brazil, and Ecuador, colonial sensitivities and their global field of
mainstream approach, nature should be valued tice brought together for the different occasions World of Matter overcomes one limitation of operations points as well to the significance of
economically if we are to protect it globally.¹⁷ Yet it of specific exhibitions, publications, and web- past environmentally concerned artistic research, social ecology in their collective practice, commit-
is now clear that green capitalism—including ini- site presentations²²—for instance, the website which is to focus primarily on the developed ted to portraying the concerns of a range of stake-
tiatives such as carbon taxes, dematerializing the platform currently includes artistic researcher North, and in particular the United States, as with holders—for instance, the challenging circum-
economy, cap-and-trade schemes, debt-for-nature Nabil Ahmed’s video-based project on the the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) stances of women miners in Brazil (in Mabe
swaps, market-based green design, hybrid cars entanglement of natural and political violence and the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE).²⁴ While this Bethônico’s Mineral Invisibility); former subsist-
and biogas—has completely failed. As critics argue, relating to the history of arsenic poisoning in is not to dismiss the significance of the work of ence farmers in Egypt driven out of business by
we are destroying the environment and its life- the Bengal Delta (Earth Poison); sound artist CLUI and CAE, World of Matter’s areas of concern government policy favoring monocultural cash
support systems so quickly that, in the words of and acoustic ecologist Peter Cusack’s investiga- arise from an additional genealogical connection crops (Biemann’s Egyptian Chemistry); the plight
the environmental activist and founder of 350.org tion of post-disaster soundscapes (Chernobyl: to postcolonial critiques of what Ramachandra of small-scale Indian farmers suffering from
Bill McKibben, “we’re running Genesis backward, Sounds of Contamination); photojournalist Ed Guha and Joan Martínez Alier term the “ecology growing debt and suicides among their numbers
decreating,” and bringing about a substantial re- Kashi’s documentation of oil industry pollution in of affluence,” an ecology attentive primarily to in a climate of high-tech, chemical-intensive
duction in biodiversity, even a global mass species Nigeria’s Niger Delta (Black Gold); and artist Judy environmental conditions in developed nations corporate agrobusiness (Martin’s White Gold); and
extinction event, from which there is no return.¹⁸ Price’s examination of the neocolonial geopoli- and generally invested in conservationism and fisherfolk in the Netherlands’ coastal area of Urk
Or as Smith puts it, “for all the green initiatives, tics of Israeli resource extraction in the quarries recycling rather than in social justice, poverty struggling with increased global competition and
corporate business practices have changed little— of occupied Palestinian territories (White Oil). alleviation, and combating corporate ecocide in the threatened viability of their regional identity
or the little they’ve changed has had no great Particularly in its online media appearance, the underdeveloped areas of the South.²⁵ These lat- (Van Brummelen & De Haan’s Episode of the Sea).
effect.”¹⁹ With increased devastation to land and group’s extensive geographical range parallels ter areas, as is commonly acknowledged, are also By depicting the devastating results of global agri-
water and uncontrolled growth in greenhouse the expansiveness of its open-access sharing of most prone to the negative effects of climate cultural policies on those with the least means to
gases, green capitalism has only brought us ever knowledge. And just as World of Matter’s media change—including sea level rise, desertification, resist, by interviewing people at the lowest orders
closer to an irreversible ecocatastrophe.²⁰ network extends its distribution internationally, deforestation, and biodiversity loss—and possess of the sociopolitical and economic scales, who live
It is here that World of Matter intervenes as its trans-disciplinary research enlarges the disproportionately less ability and fewer mate- in diverse and often interconnecting geographies,
a collaborative project dedicated to thinking collective’s “matters of concern,” moving beyond rial resources to confront the resulting crises of the group proposes additional ways to bring about
beyond the dead end of green capitalism and the exclusivity of specialist debate or hierarchical environmental degradation, which is of course a decolonization of nature—in this case, the de-
reinventing a “limits to growth” discourse, but modes of disciplinary authority and inviting caused historically by fossil fuel development in colonization of human nature, which, as Vandana
one shed of both its erstwhile neo-Malthusianism diverse stakeholders to the discussion and deliber- the North. As such, World of Matter breaks the Shiva suggests, might start by reclaiming the seed
(as it connects degrowth imperatives to social ation of the politics of ecology. Its participants, in familiar cycle of artists and collectives based in commons as part of our collective heritage and
justice considerations) and its former provincial- other words, develop a new media ecology as much the West that investigate primarily the environ- growing a “living democracy” against global capi-
ism (exchanging a Western top-down approach as an innovative collaborative and transdiscipli- ments of developed nations, gaining high visibility talism’s genocidal economy—goals her own orga-
to governance for a sensitivity to the global nary social practice—one that, as Scott proposes, for their studies of land use within those regions, nization, Navdanya, pursues.²⁷
South, including the democratic participation of intends to contribute to an emergent “knowledge but thereby inadvertently perpetuating the In this sense, World of Matter’s diverse prac-
indigenous peoples). As such, World of Matter commons,” pitched against the ongoing privati- general blindness to non-Western transnational tices are attentive to an environmentalism of the
positions ecology and sustainability beyond the zation and surveillance-equipped mechanisms of geographies, social movements, and environmen- poor and the “slow violence” inflicted on such
automatically assumed, cynical, and paradoxical the Internet’s corporate-governmental technos- tal politics. In its non-Western commitments, people—those forced to endure the protracted
assumptions of free-market capitalism and its cape. Theirs is a globalized research methodology World of Matter shares a research framework temporal effects of oil industry devastation on
financialization of nature. To further these goals, as much as an expanded interdisciplinary plat- sensitive to postcolonial globalization with collec- rainforest land and fragile deltas, or the multi-
World of Matter groups diverse practitioners and form, which addresses what for Bruno Latour is a tives like Platform in London and Sarai in Delhi— generation scale of economic attrition imposed by
demonstrates transnational reach, thereby con- key contemporary imperative and fundamental ecopolitical formations that are still too few—and corporate agriculture on village farming commu-
tributing to the momentum around the formation element of an emergent political ecology—to carry thereby proposes a new comprehensive model of nities.²⁸ As such, they resonate with the approach
of new modes of widening social organization, out “the progressive composition of a common what counts as “common,” even while attentive to social ecology that sees the destruction of
and joining global social movements, networked world.”²³ to forms and histories of inequality and conflict the environment as mirroring exploitation and
activism, and online communities in search for

18 WORLD OF MATTER 19 DECOLONIZING NATURE: MAKING THE WORLD MATTER

 inequality within human relations and there- a social ecology, while valuable for its political the participants’ experimentation constitutes a whom are interviewed in her video). The result
fore considers that to repair such destruction expediency of generating greater democracy and transitional move from considering nature as a brought cuts in local food production, which led
necessitates addressing and rectifying forms social equality of participation within the debates “natural resource” to viewing the world of matter in turn to food scarcity, unemployment, and social
of social violence and inequality.²⁹ But to repair around land use, nonetheless remains contained variously as an “aesthetic-philosophical arena,” conflict, in many ways forming a familiar cycle
such violence and inequality, one must first un- within the anthropocentric dimensions of human- a field of material processes carrying social and unleashed by corporate neoliberalism as mapped
derstand them, and herein lies the importance of based social composition. Indeed, it is among the political effects on human systems, and a realm also in Tavares’s Nonhuman Rights, Martin’s
researching and representing forms of life that are collective’s goals to surpass that limitation and of nonhuman subjects requiring public debate White Gold, and Huber and Martin’s LandRush.³⁵
often invisible, and kept so at times by corporate explore the possibilities for a social composition outside of market-based assumptions or financial Biemann shows how the global economy has priv-
and governmental design. Bethônico’s research that extends beyond human agents alone (even priorities.³² As Jane Bennett observes—develop- ileged corporate profits over local need, propelling
into the conditions of women laborers in mining while the group resists subscribing to the mis- ing certain of Serres’s earlier thoughts—“modern urbanization, with multitudes thrown into pre-
operations in Brazil unravels one such area of anthropic proclivities of “deep ecology,” with its selves are feeling increasingly entangled, cosmi- carious labor and informal architecture, creating
institutionalized invisibility, and her contribution dismissal of human exceptionalism altogether³⁰). cally, biotechnically, medially, virally, pharma- slum-like conditions in Cairo and setting the
of new archives of documentation (as part of Drawing on Latour, among others, the group’s cologically, with nonhuman nature. Nature has stage for the Arab Spring, which brought down
Mineral Invisibility) aims to enable public debate work also explores ways to conceptualize and ma- always mixed it up with self and society, but lately the Mubarak government. She thus maps a com-
on the environmental impact of this industry, but terialize an inclusive field of collectivization, pos- this comingling has intensified and become harder plex chain of relations, a “cooperative of things”
also on the need for workers’ rights and gender iting what Mörtenböck and Mooshammer term to ignore.”³³ World of Matter investigates precisely that comprises an assemblage of aquapolitics and
equality—subjects that have been impossible to a new “cooperative of things,” which surpasses this comingling. social revolution introduced by neoliberal macro-
address until now owing to the absence of pub- the assumptions of anthropocentrism, whether Consider in this regard Ursula Biemann’s economic policy, which—with some degree of
licly available documentation. The case is similar understood as positioning humans as sole agents recent projects, particularly Egyptian Chemistry, poetic justice—ended up destroying that system’s
with World of Matter’s focus on village-based within systems of material causality or as central which investigates the world of watery matter very basis of governmental legitimacy (even if the
subsistence farmers in India, members of Brazil’s subjects of politics and legal standing. Avoiding as in Egypt, its recent transformation being cause revolution remains unfinished).
landless peasants, and indigenous tribal people well the reduction of nature to inert matter—to a and consequence of geoengineering interven- In Biemann’s model, while nature appears
in Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest, each group passive object awaiting human instrumentaliza- tions, aquaculture innovation, and revolutionary far from an isolated or pure category, separate
variously impacted by corporate industry. At the tion, mastery, and appropriation—World of Matter politics. The project engages a postanthropocen- from human activity, it is neither positioned as
GENETICALLY MODIFIED SEEDS, P. 137, P. 152

same time, World of Matter’s research enters proposes a further way of decolonizing nature by tric methodology of new materialism and spec- an inert object of human instrumentality or
into those fields of corporate practice within de- recalibrating ways of composing the commonality ulative realist philosophy while also drawing on passive screen of financial speculation. Rather,
veloped countries. Consider Huber and Martin’s of which Latour speaks.³¹ chemistry, demonstrating an aesthetic sensitivity Egyptian Chemistry moves us toward a com-
LandRush, especially the video interviews with This returns us to the debate over the value to the agency of objects, both beyond the sover- plex dynamics of causality and “inter-agential
diverse agents, including a commercial farmer of nature and the nature of value. How does the eignty of human determination and intertwined becoming,” in feminist science theorist Karen
in Brazil who commonly applies chemical inputs world matter? As we have seen, there are different with human systems in unexpected ways. In her Barad’s terms.³⁶ (In this vein, Biemann’s focus
such as pesticides and fertilizers to his crops, a bio- forms of valuation, some normally covered up related photo-essay, which articulates the piece’s on such hybrid Earth objects is shared by Elaine
technologist in a Texas university who describes by the economic dominance of neoliberalism. concerns, Biemann describes the Nile as a “ hybrid Gan, whose Rice Child (Stirrings) comprises a
his research into genetically modified cotton and One model that World of Matter rescues as a interactive system that has always been at once wall-sized map including text, graphics, and
argues for the value of such agricultural science, resource is that of scientific methodologies in- organic, technological, and social. . . . The question documentary images charting the global history
and a Brazilian farmer engaged in business trans- quiring into the biophysiological workings of is how we can conceive of a reality indifferent to of rice cultivation, development, and biotechno-
actions in Sudan to develop greater efficiency in natural systems and science studies approaches humans.”³⁴ Egyptian Chemistry is a case in point. logical modification, where diverse rice varieties
production and profits. These examples demon- establishing the intelligibility of those systems It explains how, during the 1990s, institutions like emerge through a nexus of human, nonhuman,
strate how World of Matter investigates a diver- via various sorts of mediation, deciphering, and the World Bank and the IMF, in conjunction with environmental, and technological interactions
sity of concerns, leaving it open to viewers to interpretation. Things, of course, have their economic policies pushed by the United States and temporalities.) The dispersed consequences
form independent views and political opinions own material circuitry, modes of reproduction and the European Union, guided President of the human–nature assemblage envisaged in
on how the world does and—perhaps all the more and interaction, and chemistries of material- Mubarak’s government to move Egypt increas- Biemann’s project are beyond what could be
importantly—might matter differently. ization that are independent of human mean- ingly toward an export-based agroeconomy that blamed moralistically on a single individual (such
The extension of representability to the widest ing, intentionality, and causality—but how to prioritized state funding of monocultural farm- as Mubarak),³⁷ and instead her narrative posits
range of social groups in diverse geographical track, translate, and understand them outside of ing (with many leading corporations owned by a human–nonhuman multi-causal network. That
regions, however, still fails to capture the full ex- human-centric systems? Such a question is central Egyptian MPs and military officers) and defunded network allots agency to nonhuman matter—
tent of World of Matter’s conceptual reach. Such to World of Matter’s collective project. Broadly, small-scale subsistence farmers (a number of a non-intentional agency,

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 to be precise, constituting a subjecthood of bio- shared by all life forms and their life-sustaining protecting the larger biodiverse environment on that decenters human views of the environment,
chemical causality modeled on scientific para- biosphere that is legally recognized, one that pro- which tribal life depends. In this regard, granting exceeding the multiculturalist understanding of
digms, as when the Aswan Dam project effectively poses a “decolonization of nature” from centuries nonhuman legal agency extends from indige- multiple cultures sharing a single nature. As such,
changed the biological conditions of the Nile of domination and a further conceptualization of a nous biopolitics. Many Amerindian cosmologies the Ecuadorian case—and by extension Tavares’s
(favoring fish like the tilapia), demonstrating what postanthropocentric commonality.⁴¹ recognize a shared subjecthood among all living work—forms part of an international movement
Biemann calls chemistry’s “ontology of internal Tavares contextualizes this development things (and even some inanimate things), which for an ecocentric paradigm of law (including “Wild
relations.”³⁸ More, matter is endowed with politi- further with references to current conflicts over informs indigenous political struggles and finds Law” and Earth Jurisprudence⁴⁷), moving beyond
cal implications beyond human control, as when deforestation and environmental despoliation a certain affinity with Serres’s call for a natural the market-based legal relation to nature that has
Egypt’s state agricultural policy introduced a new in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where, for instance, contract (though he doesn’t discuss indigenous dominated law in the past.
material environment that created the social peasants and indigenous communities (including philosophy).⁴⁴ Of course, such developments are With so many apparent connections between,
conditions culminating in profound social trans- the Sarayaku) have successfully sued the state not limited to the Ecuadoran context, and this and singular characteristics within, the disparate
formation.³⁹ Biemann’s is a politico-ecological over the destruction carried out by oil companies commitment to natural rights represents a politi- geographical studies of World of Matter, is it
analysis of networked causality, dispersed agency, that operated in Ecuador between the 1960s and cal priority for social movements worldwide who possible to have a planetary overview, one that
and multiple effects. 1990s, leaving waste pools of toxic petrochemicals are fighting against green capitalism’s incursions. transcends the specificity of micro-level analyses
Biemann’s attention to a postanthropocentric over 200 square kilometers of the rainforest.⁴² “It This convergence was affirmed, for instance, in of particular places? As Scott asks in her Audio
world of matter complements radical new juridi- is genocide in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” argues the recent Kari-Oca II Declaration, agreed in Tour, “How to picture globalization—including its
cal developments in relation to the “rights of activist Donald Moncayo in the video, as Tavares’s Rio in 2012 (in parallel with the Rio+20 meeting complex networks and dizzying temporalities—
nature,” a concern also addressed by the World handheld camera shows areas of sludge still lying of the United Nations Conference on Sustain- in a way that does not generalize or flatten? In a
of Matter collective. For example, Tavares in- on the surface of the forest floor. His point echoes able Development, generally seen as one more way that attends to the hyper-local while keeping
vestigates such discourses in Nonhuman Rights, Shiva’s indictment of corporations operating failed attempt by global governance to introduce larger geopolitical and Earth systems in view?
which posits the revaluation of nature in ways that in the Indian countryside, pointing to the global effective solutions to avert climate change) and That considers how global forces hit the ground,
exceed the framework of not only anthropocen- scope of such ecocide, which is simultaneously signed by over five hundred grassroots indigenous unfolding and mutating as they interact with
tric epistemologies, but modern capitalism itself. a form of human genocide, as we have seen.⁴³ peoples from many countries: “We see the goals particular contexts?”⁴⁸ This too represents a
Tavares finds a promising resource for natural Ecuador thus provides a legal laboratory for the of UNCSD Rio+20, the ‘Green Economy,’ and its broadly shared concern of World of Matter. While
rights jurisprudence in Latin American indige- implementation of natural rights law and, as such, premise that the world can only ‘save’ nature by Mörtenbock and Mosshammer’s wall-sized map,
nous rights claims. His video’s theoretical point offers a test case for one possible approximation commodifying its life-giving and life-sustaining A World of Matter (2014), might not address
of departure is once again The Natural Contract of the natural contract that Serres called for more capacities as a continuation of the colonialism that all aspects of Scott’s complex series of inquiries—
and Serres’s observation that after centuries of than twenty years ago. Indigenous Peoples and our Mother Earth have and in this regard it would be best to consider
abuse, when humanity has assumed the power In his video, Tavares interviews numerous faced and resisted for 520 years.”⁴⁵ the group’s work collectively as addressing such
to transform the planet, the Earth is no longer in stakeholders, including Alberto Acosta, a politi- It is noteworthy that Kari-Oca adopts the questions—it does chart the system of maritime
a position to be ignored: “Global history enters cian and former president of Ecuador’s Monte- Quechua word Pachamama, meaning “Mother and overland trade routes that is global in scope.
nature; global nature enters history: this is some- cristi Constituent Assembly (responsible for Earth,” a term common among Andean Indians Modeled after the Dymaxion Map designed
thing utterly new in philosophy.”⁴⁰ Serres’s pres- writing the 2008 Constitution), who explains that and also used by the Ecuadorian Constitution— by Buckminster Fuller in 1943, which shows the
cient observation is driven home by the recent Ecuador’s recent legal changes originated in the a choice, as Macas explains in Tavares’s video, planet as a single landmass in one ocean without
legal revolution in Latin America, particularly in struggles of the country’s indigenous people dur- that reaffirms indigenous understandings of a visually distorting relative geographical sizes
Ecuador, where the government rewrote its con- ing the 1990s. As he is shown speaking, Tavares’s common world infused with interconnected life, or fragmenting continents, the expansive carto-
stitution in 2008 so as to grant rights to nature. By video intermixes historical TV footage covering inseparable from humans, and contests the sep- graphy notes the sites of rare earth and oil deposits,
extending legal standing to mountains and seas, several of these protests. The connection between arateness of nature, as some conceptualizations the “choke” points of trade congestion, and bor-
rocks and rainforests, the novel ecocentric law dis- social and natural rights is also reaffirmed by Luis have had it.⁴⁶ As the ecologist and activist ders of transportation and immigration controls.
solves the boundaries between worlds of matter Macas, a Quechua politician, scholar, and found- Esperanza Martínez explains in Nonhuman Rights, Reproducing the research of the Social and Spatial
and cycles of life, human subjects and nonhuman ing member of the Confederation of Indigenous Pachamama discourse constitutes a process of Inequalities (SASI) group at the University of
objects, agents of law and resources of industry. Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), who notes “opening to diversity,” building an episteme in Sheffield and of Mark Newman at the University
As Tavares notes in his video, this legal transfor- that when these past struggles for collective rights which multiple worlds coexist, against the hege- of Michigan, additional diagrams visualize the
mation represents nothing less than a “radically to ancestral land are taken to their logical conclu- mony of Western modernity’s domineering and world’s “economic center of gravity,” calculated by
new universalism”—initiating a new subjectivity sion, they cannot but reaffirm the rights of nature, appropriative relation to nature—in other words, translating regional GDPs into the respective sizes
we approach the conditions of multinaturalism of nation-states. The map thereby offers a visually

22 WORLD OF MATTER 23 DECOLONIZING NATURE: MAKING THE WORLD MATTER

 striking demonstration of the disproportionate 1 Michel Serres, The Natural Contract [1990], trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William 24 See Emily Eliza Scott, “Relational Research: On Building Ecological Knowledge
Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 32 – 34. Commons,” in Provisões, 258 – 83, although my analysis draws some differences
wealth and corresponding ecological footprints 2 Ibid. between World of Matter and the collectives she identifies as important precursors.
3 Frederic Jameson writes that “multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being 25 See Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martínez Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism:
of countries such as the United States, member inconsistent with Marx’s great nineteenth-century analysis, constitutes, on the Essays North and South (London: Routledge, 1997), xxi.
contrary, the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of 26 On globalization and uneven development, see David Harvey, Spaces of Global
states of the European Union, China, and India, capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This purer capitalism of our own time thus Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso,
eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and 2006) and Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production
whose relatively weighted shapes balloon outward, exploited in a tributary way. One is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
historically original penetration and colonization of Nature . . .” “Postmodernism, or 27 See Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (London:
while areas such as Africa and Central and South The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review I/146 (July – August 1984), South End Press, 2005) and http://www.navdanya.org.
78. On Marx(ism) and nature, more broadly, see John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: 28 See Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA:
America dwindle to mere slivers, identifying a sys- Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). For indigenous Harvard University Press, 2011).
critiques of this episteme, see the latter part of this essay. 29 See Murray Bookchin, “What Is Social Ecology?,” Environmental Philosophy: From
tem of eco-economic and politico-environmental 4 Mabe Bethônico et al., “From Supply Lines to a World That Matters,” in Provisões: Animal Rights to Radical Ecology, ed. Michael E. Zimmerman (Englewood Cliffs:
Uma Conferência Visual [World of Matter], ed. Mabe Bethônico (Belo Horizonte: Prentice Hall, 1993).
disparity. As Mörtenbock and Mooshammer ob- Instituto Cidades Criativas, 2013), 11. See also the special issue of Third Text 120 30 For a critique of deep ecology, see Murray Bookchin, “Social Ecology versus Deep
(January 2013), which I guest-edited on the subject of “Contemporary Art and the Ecology: A Challenge for the Ecology Movement,” Green Perspectives: Newsletter of
serve in the map’s annotations, “resources” func- Politics of Ecology,” and to which World of Matter contributed a portfolio of essays. the Green Program Project, 4 – 5 (Summer 1987).
5 These new proposals include recent ecosocialist ones, such as Chris Williams, Ecology 31 See Latour, Politics of Nature.
tion as “a mechanism aimed at the manipulation and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis (London: Haymarket, 2010); 32 See Bethônico et al., “From Supply Lines to a World That Matters,” 11.
Richard Smith, “Green Capitalism: The God That Failed,” Truthout (January 9, 2014), 33 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
of social and political climates, the regulation of http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21060-green-capitalism-the-god-that-failed; University Press, 2010), 115.
and Naomi Klein, “Capitalism vs. the Climate,” The Nation, (November 28, 2011) 34 Ursula Biemann, “Egyptian Chemistry,” in Provisões, 31 – 35. There is also a connec-
civic anxieties, and the creation of order based on http://www.thenation.com/article/164497/capitalism-vs-climate. tion here to “hybrids” (the construction of systems that mix politics, science, techno-
6 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism [1955], trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: logy, and nature) as theorized in Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine
narratives of technological mastery and environ- Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42. Porter (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) and Timothy Morton’s discussion
7 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), of “hyperobjects” in Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
mental control”—familiar terms from the perspec- 25. (Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 2013).
8 See Paulo Tavares, “Field: Amazonia,” in Provisões, 72 – 97. 35 On the logic of corporate neoliberalism, see John Cavanagh et al., eds., Alternatives to
tive of Serres. 9 See for instance Vandana Shiva, Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible: A Report of the International Forum
(London: South End Press, 2002). on Globalization (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002).
Moving beyond the visualization of real-world 10 On Biemann’s use of the video essay, see T. J. Demos, “Video’s Migrant Geography: 36 On “intra-acting agencies,” where the being and meaning of things is contingent
Ursula Biemann’s Sahara Chronicle,” in The Migrant Image (Durham, NC: Duke upon their relation to other things, see Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway:
economic and environmental dynamics, the map’s University Press, 2013), 201 – 20. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke
11 For a recent contribution to the discourse around art and ethnography, see Okwui University Press, 2007).
text calls for “intervening in the geopolitical cir- Enwezor, ed., Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far: La Triennale 37 As Bennett notes, “The tendency to define social problems as moral failures, exclu-
2012 (Paris: Centre national des arts plastiques, 2012). sively the doing of individual or collective human agents (and the implicit assumption
cuits of value production via the development of a 12 For more on the emerging field of the environmental humanities, see the Trans- that we are in charge of nature) prevented us from discerning the real locus of
atlantic Research Network in Environmental Humanities (http://environmental- agency—the assemblage of human and nonhuman actants—and attempting to alter
democratic politics,” inventing a new and different humanities-network.org) and the recently inaugurated journal Environmental the configuration of that human–nonhuman assemblage.” See Klaus K. Loenhart,
Humanities (http://environmentalhumanities.org), which released its first issue “Vibrant Matter, Zero Landscape: An Interview with Jane Bennett,” GAM 7 (2011),
sort of “ecological capital,” which, reiterating the in 2012. http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2011-10-19-loenhart-en.html.
13 See Forensic Architecture, ed., Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: 38 Biemann, “Egyptian Chemistry,” 49.
conclusions of much of the research that consti- Sternberg Press, 2014) and http://www.forensic-architecture.org. 39 Egyptian Chemistry also includes one intriguing passage, titled “Speculative realism,
14 See Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s object-oriented ontology: Tahrir Square,” where she interviews the theorist Graham
tutes World of Matter, shows just why we need to Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972). Harman, who discusses his critique of the privileging of human access to the world,
15 Smith, “Green Capitalism.” rather than considering the world itself. During a tense moment when the Egyptian
bring together “a new ecological understanding” 16 See T. J. Demos, “The Politics of Sustainability: Art and Ecology,” in Radical Nature: military is putting down a demonstration with tear gas in Tahrir Square, just outside
Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet, 1969 – 2009, ed. Francesco Manacorda the walls of the American University in Cairo, Harman explains his resistance to
with “the call for a new political economy.” Theirs and Ariella Yedgar (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2009), 17 – 30. grounding philosophy in politics, as it might reinforce precisely the “correlationist”
17 See for instance The Natural Capital Project (a new ten-year partnership between thinking that reaffirms human-centric knowledge; yet one might wonder if this
is a further justification for the definancializa- The Nature Conservancy, WWF, and Stanford University), http://www.naturalcapital position directs speculative realism toward a problematic depoliticization of philo-
project.org; Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism: sophy, loosing sight of the connections between political analysis, object-oriented
tion of nature, for considering the environment’s Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown and Company: 1999); ontology, and postanthropocentric philosophy, which Biemann so innovatively
Lester R. Brown, Eco-Economy: Building an Economy for the Earth (New York: Norton, develops.
sustainability as a source of intrinsic value and as 2001); Jonathan Porrit, Capitalism as if the World Matters (London: Earthscan, 40 Serres, The Natural Contract, 4.
2005); Frances Cairncross, Costing the Earth: The Challenge for Governments, the 41 The quotes are from Tavares, Nonhuman Rights. See also Serres, The Natural
integral to the biosphere’s life-giving capacities, Opportunities for Business (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1992); and Contract, 37: “Objects themselves are legal subjects and no longer mere material
Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: for appropriation, even collective appropriation. Law tries to limit abusive parasitism
which matters in ways infinitely more significant Cambridge University Press, 2007). among men but does not speak of this same action on things. If objects themselves
18 Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Henry Holt, become legal subjects, then all scales tend toward equilibrium”; cited in Tavares,
than economic wealth. As resource scarcity, over- 2010), 29 (my emphasis). On biodiversity loss, see Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth “On the Earth-Object,” in Savage Objects, ed. Godofredo Pereira (Lisbon: INCM,
Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Henry Holt, 2014); Thom van Dooren, 2012), 228.
consumption, and environmental destruction Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (New York: Columbia University 42 On the case of the Sarayaku, see Tavares’s project, Against the State (2012–14),
Press, 2014); and the website of the Extinction Studies Working Group, http://www.paulotavares.net/NHR/AS.html.
become increasingly visible realities, Mörten- http://extinctionstudies.org. 43 See the work of the UK-based environmental lawyer Polly Higgins, who argues
19 Smith, “Green Capitalism.” that creating a law against ecocide is the necessary complement to natural rights
bock and Mooshammer argue, we will encounter 20 On the potential future of ecocatastrophe, systems collapse, societal breakdown, legislation, as it extends the force of governance to Earth law and the rights of nature
and rampant militarism, see Michael Parenti, Tropics of Chaos: Climate Change and (i.e. making ecocide an international crime), http://eradicatingecocide.com.
greater stimulus to envision alternative worlds, the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011). 44 See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Perspectivism and Multinaturalism in Indigenous
21 See Peter Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, “Of Multi-Directional Forces: America,” in The Land Within: Indigenous Territory and The Perception of Environment,
including those that will transcend the logic of Interdependencies between Material, Social, and Other Resources,” in Provisões, ed. Alexandre Surrallés and Pedro García Hierro (Copenhagen: International Work
99 – 125. Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2005). De Castro argues that the anthromorphic
mastery and appropriation to which nature has 22 During the developmental phase of World of Matter, between 2011 and 2013, projection of legal subjectivity onto nonhumans is far from a reassertion of an anthro-
the core group included Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Uwe H. Martin, Peter pocentric logic, and that the former can actually contest the latter.
so long been submitted. As we have seen, environ- Mörtenböck and Helge Mooshammer, Emily Eliza Scott, Paulo Tavares, Lonnie 45 See http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/06/19/kari-oca-2-declaration.
van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan. Thereafter, World of Matter considers itself 46 In this sense, Morton’s emphasis on “ecology without nature” could, in my view, be
mental and social devastation have already in- to be a collaborative platform and temporary constellation of diverse practices reconciled with indigenous, Pachamama discourse that extends rights to nature, as
addressing the subject of ecologico-political matters in the global field and operating both usages of the term nature reject the Western conventional understanding of
spired the introduction of a contract inaugurating between institutions, academic disciplines, and non-academic fields, as well as an isolated realm apart from human activities. See Morton, Ecology Without Nature:
between art, architectural research, and visual culture. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
an emergent age founded on the universalism of 23 See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, 2007). On Amerindian approaches to nature and culture (fundamentally different
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 18. from European colonial models), see De Castro, “Perspectivism and Multinaturalism
rights-bearing subjects, and it is this very move- For Latour, by replacing “matters of fact” with “matters of concern,” certainty with in Indigenous America.”
contingency, and well-defined essences with entangled hybrids, scientific discourse 47 See Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice (White River Junction:
ment that World of Matter advances. is opened to a newly inclusive community of participants and stakeholders that Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011) and Peter Burdon, ed., Exploring Wild Law: The
proposes a new ecology of politics, which, for him, holds unprecedented democratic Philosophy of Earth Jurisprudence (Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2011).
potential (see Politics of Nature, esp. 24 – 25). 48 Emily Eliza Scott, Audio Tour, audio guide for the exhibition World of Matter: On the
Global Ecologies of Raw Material.

24 WORLD OF MATTER 25 DECOLONIZING NATURE: MAKING THE WORLD MATTER