Over fifteen months of the MA Art & Ecology, this first
cohort have developed compelling bodies of artistic work and deep
understandings of how ecological thought is situated, historical and embodied.
While the ‘Man’ centred within imperial ecology still looms large in mainstream
environmentalism, the sensibilities that emerge here are migratory, queer,
feminist, working-class, butch, sensitive and enraged. There is a striving to
decolonise, to heal and reconnect, grounded in awareness that the commons is
not only that which historically has been marginalised or dispossessed, but
that it encompasses the planetary commons – earth, water, air – that binds us
all. Commoning, therefore, is understood as a fundamentally contemporary
strategy of survival and flourishing – to be found in recipes passed across
generations, in folklore re-animated with a flash of neon, in digital
dissemination and forms of occulture. While informed by a pluriverse of theory,
there is a profound attention to the somatic and the everyday, to fermenting
transformations that hone sensory acuteness and call for new descriptions of
the sensorial world.
The artists gathered here recognise artistic materials not
only as political in relation to the human labour involved in their production,
but also in terms of their sustainability and cultural significance. They have
investigated the extent to which the entities that materials derive from – be
it mineral, animal or plant – are gathered with care and reciprocity, recalling
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s account of the ‘honourable harvest’, or are manufactured
through systems of extraction enabled by a colonial mindset. Material
afterlives is a crucial theme, and understanding how, as Max Liboiron argues,
pollution is colonialism, has been essential.
There are difficult reckonings
with inheritance – who benefits? who is dispossessed? what are the
possibilities for justice given enduring inequities? But afterlives can take
other paths to denaturalise extractivism, with practices of investigation,
attention, gleaning and repurposing that may enact a re-enchantment, focus
attention on what has been lost, or imagine how things might be otherwise.
Might a product made from timber be understood to retain within it the spirit
of a tree? As the sixth extinction unfolds, these artists find themselves using
their creative powers to reimagine relations with the more-than-human world, to
rage but also to organise, to recognise the resistance of matter and the power
of joy, to hold a space for that which does not speak, to whisper with ghosts
and dragons.