Scientists are interested in how the marriage of alga and fungus occurs and so they’ve tried to identify the factors that induce two species to live as one… It was only when they severely curtailed the resources, when they created harsh and stressful conditions, that the two would turn toward each other and begin to cooperate. Only with severe need did the hyphae curl around the alga; only when the alga was stressed did it welcome the advances… When times are easy and there’s plenty to go around, individual species can go it alone. But when conditions are harsh and life is tenuous, it takes a team sworn to reciprocity to keep life going forward. In a world of scarcity, interconnection and mutual aid become critical for survival. So say the lichens.[1]
I invite you to imagine together the different ways in which plants participate in the aesthetic and ‘poietic’ processes. Serving as materials for an artwork, pigments, paper, canvas or wood not only receive the sensuous image of the artist’s idea but also offer the sort of resistance that bends the initial blueprint. In their own existence, plants engage in aesthetic play and, by maximizing their exposure to the outside, display themselves. Plants also create and recreate themselves all the time, growing new limbs, shedding leaves, putting out new sexual organs (the flowers) They are the artists of the atmosphere, synthesizing breathable air, and of the world itself, bringing together the organic and the inorganic realm and articulating creatures from various biological kingdoms.[2]
Recent changing climate conditions have impacted many regions of our planet in unprecedented ways, affecting human and non-human life and non-life alike. As consequence contemporary international artistic and curatorial practices have been urged to get involved, thoroughly and rapidly, with rising ecosocial issues.
Where to start and what might this ecosocial stewardship be composed of? Following the decolonial feminist scholar Paola Bacchetta, who has written about the importance of situating oneself before beginning to write or talk,[3] I will briefly situate myself: I am a white, Eastern European, cis, heterosexual woman and mother, originating from a mixed working- and middle-class family, born in what was then known as Yugoslavia. I am able-bodied, but have had an autoimmune disease since childhood and have recently been diagnosed with another chronic illness. I have a university degree and have been working in the arts for many years. As a child growing up in Slovenia—the most northern of the former Yugoslavian republics—I was affected by the racist remarks children or adults and seemingly reasonable people would say about the people from the countries from which my father’s family originated (Bosnia and Ukraine). Today, by the white European imaginary, these and many other neighbouring regions are subjected to processes of racialization. aligned with the racialized territories of the Global South. In the Global North, I constantly receive comments about the Slavic accent noticeable in any of the foreign languages I speak. These comments range from exoticizing to degrading. Throughout my self-education, I had to undo the overwhelming Western narrative which I was brought up with in the Slovenian educational system. This led me to work as a curator and writer working at the intersection of social and political practices of art in relation to ecology, feminist activism, environmental racism, as well as on the transformational impact of climate and social conditions in the new geological era that some call the Anthropocene and others the Capitalocene,[4] Plantationocene,[5] or Negrocene.[6] In doing so, I feel indebted to the intersectional feminist thought that, according to Sara Ahmed, is a lived and embodied theory.[7]
Many existing artistic and curatorial practices in the Global North have been suffering for too long from the consequences of their deep embeddedness within capitalist and neoliberal dictates. Institutional critique, arte povera, expanded practices of sculpture and choreography, decolonial feminist artistic practices, to name but a few forms of resistance, have all being a persistent killjoy[8] as well as a form of caretaking of alternative modes of being and doing. If we look to the elevation of discourses on care and caretaking in recent artistic practices, one can see how taking and slowing down time can lead to a more attentive present; and how paying attention shows respect, which leads to enabling in a more consequential way both human and more-than-human voices that can be listened to. The caretaking of inspirations, production of relations, transmission of ideas and values, could then all compose an understanding of an artistic practice as a sustainable, socially responsible practice of exchange among humans and other critters, as Donna Haraway would put it, rather than as an accumulation of marketable, product-oriented work(s).
Elisio Macamo wrote in the midst of the global lockdown in April 2020 that ‘Covid-19 is a cruel reminder that crisis is us’. ‘As we brace up to look the pandemic in the eye, we would be well advised not to forget what our normal is, namely crisis. History has taught us that you do not master a crisis by setting the return to normality as your goal. You master a crisis by enabling yourself to act whatever the circumstances.’[9] At exactly the same time a working group set up in Paris by the philosopher Bruno Latour organised an open forum around the question, ‘What protective measures do you think of, so you don’t go back to the pre-crisis production model’. Quite surely, a possible reply would be to immediately rethink and reappropriate the methods and ways of working, producing, curating and instituting, so that they become common and shared values. As Isabelle Stengers writes in her recent book In catastrophic times: resisting the coming barbarism, from the point of view of fast science, paying attention is equated with a loss of time; but from the perspective of slow science, paying attention can teach research institutions and researchers to be affected and to affect the creation of the future. In opposition to accelerationism and in favour of slowing down, Stengers has been a fervent opponent of globalization and neoliberalism, especially in her support of the anti-GMO struggle. In many of her writings in recent years, she has underlined the fact that the new politics of public research promotes only the potential for research to generate profit in the competitive academic marketplace.[10]
Between 2018 and 2019, I curated the Contour Biennale 9, which borrowed its title Coltan as Cotton from a poem by Saul Williams.[11] Coltan, short for columbite-tantalite and industrially known as tantalite, is an irreplaceable component in nearly every cell phone, laptop and electronic device, making the Global North and Global South’s access to be connected possible. More than 60% of global extraction of coltan, which is an established major conflict mineral, comes from Congo and Rwanda, and is extracted by hand and through use of hand tools. In large majority, the conditions of its extraction are not controlled by any government agency, and its mining involves child labour. The title of the biennale l was thus a means to evoke the catastrophic outcomes of the interdependence of the Western history of technologies, the myth of the progress, and the materiality of the Congo Basin, which has long been a site of extraction for multiple resources including rubber, uranium, copper, coltan and, today, lithium, used for tires, atomic energy or bombs and electrical equipment for wiring, engines, communication devices and batteries.
Together with the artists and the team, we extended the biennale’s duration to one year and organised three major moments according to different lunar phases. Our intention was to imagine ways to slow down our methods of working and to work in an interdependent way with artists, addressing how structural racism inherited through colonial and imperial politics has become a public health issue. This was underwritten by a belief that art is a space for radical care. I initially posed a question on how to enable an environment that would take care of an international biennale of contemporary art and its ecology, and how to undo art’s ongoing contribution to a late capitalist and unsustainable cultural tourism; as well as socially, racially, gender-wise and class-wise unjust field of intervention.
Within the biennale, we initiated a pedagogic project, a transnational alliance of different schools and academies, focused on discussing artistic, institutional and curatorial practices with an emerging generation of cultural and social producers and artists. The alliance, called We Cannot Work Like This: Decolonial Practices and Degrowth[12] (borrowed from the title of Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s seminal installation I cannot work like this), brought together over the course of one academic year several departments of academies and universities from Belgium, France, England and Hong Kong, and enabled students to work together in each of their schools on practical and theoretical proposals devoted to care, sustainability, decoloniality and inclusive practices in relation to, on the one hand, cultural institutions, and on the other, their own professions (artistic, architectural, design or research-related). The students were invited to look at sustainability through a self-reflexive, intersectional, feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-racist lens. Prompts included thinking about materials to substitute with more environmentally and ethically equitable ones, which materials to produce on their own, how to resize travel plans, in what ways we can be mobile, and how to think about ethical ways of collaborating within art institutions with humans and more-than-humans alike.
In summer 2022, while the deadly war started by Russian imperialist desire has been ravaging Ukraine for months, and while throughout Europe one continued feeling ever more serious climate deregulation, I organised a series of five online workshops which brought together the core team of the Perennial Biennial project.[13] The aim of the workshops was to collectively reflect, explore and think through existing sustainable models for perennial practices in the biennale field. These five institutions have formed alliance at a time in the Global North when cultural workers within the contemporary art sector have faced the fact that neoliberal as well as extreme right wing parties become increasingly interested in contemporary art practices and funding, which, for the few last decades, was more or less a field of progressive leftist and socialist minds.
In relation to the Perennial Biennial alliance, whose members conducted common research in situated curatorial research, writing and the formulation of new narratives in the biennale field through collaborative work, staff exchange and the sharing of expertise and models of sustainable practice, the five workshop sessions brought together artists, cultural workers and some staff or board members of the biennale institutions as workshop participants. At the beginning of the workshops, in an effort to atune, the participants checked on each other by expressing about their inner weather and describing the external one, and then listened to the experiences of the invited guests. Among them, Stéphane Verlet-Bottero conducted a session on material accountability, on reducing a carbon footprint, tracking materials and their production, new formats of mobility of subjects and objects, the artist residency and other forms as the answer to the during- and post-pandemic condition. Verlet-Bottero presented an ongoing body of research on what he has coined “the permacircular museum”. This museum revolves around gestures of object maintenance, looking at expanding the field of museum care practices to ecosystems and non-human collectives. Two field experiments were presented: in Karlsruhe, with ZKM museum of art and media, the regeneration of an abandoned fruit orchard in the framework of the exhibition Critical Zones, by the team of the ZKM itself; and in Taipei, with Taipei Fine Arts Museum, an urban reforestation action is taking place in partnership with Taipei Forestry Technologist Association and Geotechnical Engineering Office.
In the session entitled ‘On residing with the others’ led by Shela Sheikh, questions about witnessing and testimony as practices against institutionalisation were central. For Sheikh, paying attention to humans and non-humans alike, talking to and with trees, funghi, animals, rivers, spirits, stones, soil or ghosts, creates an expanded sense of sustainability. Actions leading to more social, ecological, climate, economic, racial or migrant justice are all related to reparations as, according to Sheikh, there are no innocent institutions.
In her session, Pauliina Feodoroff, the Sámi artist and theatre director, shared her concepts of rootedness, interdependence, and the concept of locality, describing her bonds to land, water and other beings. Feodoroff’s family members are Skolt Sámi reindeer herders who were pushed into Finland after the Second World War, into a toxic area eroded and ravaged by mining and fallout from Chernobyl. For Feodoroff, relations between land and people are connected by language, customs, spirituality, animals and nature. In Northern Europe, the question of Indigenous land rights and its understanding of living, permeable, flexible borders is constantly interrupted, neglected and disrespected, leading to more violence, suicides and depression in Indigenous communities. Feodoroff ended her session by showing concretely how a body feels the environmental change and disconnection from the soil and the waters.
I strongly encourage that, even without institutional support, artists, curators and other cultural practitioners should share more than ever their tools and exercises, failures and lessons learnt, ongoing struggles, ancestral knowledges and vulnerabilities, as well as reflections on sense and ethics of working within the contemporary art system and its environments. In a similar way, I hope this compilation, assembled from my various curatorial experiences, will continue contributing to the further expansion of thinking about how to go on with more awareness and responsibility.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer , Braiding sweetgrass : Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants, Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013
[2] “What is non-humans and humans became mutually included within art practices? A conversation between Agency and Michael Marder”, Bulegoa, 2017
[3] Françoise Vergès, Paola Bacchetta, ‘Who is Speaking?’, KASK School of Arts, Gent, 2017, in the frame of the opening of the exhibition Show me your archive and I will tell you who is in power, Kiosk Gallery, 2017, curated by Wim Waelput and myself. See L’Internationale Online for a recording of the conversation: https://www.internationaleonline.org/dialogues/11_who_is_speaking
[4] Jason Moore (ed), Anthropocene or Capitalocene: nature, history and the crisis of capitalism, Oakland, PM Press, 2016.
[5] Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 2015, vol 6, no 1, pp 159–65.
[6] Malcom Ferdinand, Une Ecologie décoloniale. Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen, Paris, Editions du seuil, 2019, p 103.
[7] Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist life, Durham, Duke University Press, 2017, p 10.
[8] Sara Ahmed, ‘Feminists at work’, posted 10 January 2020, https://feministkilljoys.com (3 September 2023)
[9] Elisio Macamo, May 2020, https://www.coronatimes.net/author/elisio/ (3 September 2023)
[10] See Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, ‘For slow institutions’, e-flux journal no 85, 2017, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/85/155520/for-slow-institutions/.
[11] Hack into dietary sustenance
Tradition versus health
Hack into comfort compliance
Hack into the rebellious gene
Hack into doctrine
Capitalism, the relation of free labor and slavery
Hack into the history of the bank
Is beating the odds the mere act of joining the winning team?
Hack into desperation and loneliness
The history of community and the marketplace
Hack into land rights and ownership
Hack into business, law of proprietorship
Hack into ambition and greed
Hack into forms of government
The history of revolutions
The relation of suffering and sufferance
Hack into faith and morality
The treatment of one faith towards another
Hack into masculinity, femininity, sexuality
What is taught, what is felt, what is learned, what is shared
Hack into God
Stories of creation, serpents and eggs
Hack into coincidence
The Summer of ’68
The 27th club
The number of people with Facebook profiles
People who choose to share
People who share too much
People who seem lonely
People who want to connect
People who want to uplift
People who need uplifting
Three simple copper wires coiled around an orb
Parked in an orbit
Equatorial landmines, useful and precious metals
Coltan as Cotton
Coltan as Colton as Cotton
Saul Williams, The Bear / Coltan as Cotton, 2016 (excerpt)
[12] https://www.contour9.be/en/contour/transnational-alliance/ (3 September 2023)
[13] The Perennial Biennial project is a partnership between five European contemporary art biennale focused on the development of sustainable models for perennial practices in the biennale field. Liverpool Biennial, Berlin Biennale, Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts (International Centre of Graphic Arts) and Bergen Assembly collaborated on the four-year programme from September 2018 to September 2022. See their website: https://www.perennialbiennial.com/workshops (3 September 2023).
