Meadownlands, an ecosystem of wetlands, a few miles to the west of New York City, used to be associated with vast and often unregulated landfills, polluting industries and other unbridled environmental abuses. The Meadowlands are located in New Jersey, the small but densely-populated state that counts the most Superfund sites in the US.

Jon Cohrs, Back Water (trailer)

Artist Jon Cohrs first started canoeing through the area a few years ago as he was investigating the artificial flavouring industry in Northern New Jersey. At some point, his interest broadened and the project turned into a film about how the local landscape is slowly recovering from decades of toxic industrial assaults. It might seem almost impossible but in spite of all the chemical contaminants in soil and water, the Meadowlands is inhabited by many species of fish, crustaceans, mollusks, birds, reptiles, amphibians, small mammals and of course fungi and plant species.

The area, which started to recover in the late 2000s following the decline in manufacturing and a number of programs to restore and preserve ecosystems, offered the artist the perfect backdrop for a reflection on the changing nature of wilderness.

Jon Cohrs, Back Water, 2020

Jon Cohrs, Back Water, 2020

Jon Cohrs, Back Water, 2020

Cohrs asked a cook, a writer, a hunter, a lawyer, a sound engineer and a cameraman to accompany him on a canoe trip along the Hackensack river. The expedition lasted 10 days. They canoed the post-industrial waterway, camped in the Meadowlands (which involved sleeping on top of an old dump buried under vegetation and a perhaps not so impermeable liner) and battled against uncooperative weather.

The film, however, is not about their adventures but about the strange hybridity of wilderness and industrialisation that never seems to welcome these seven human beings. Despite the ubiquitous signs of modern life, despite the power lines, the highways, the factories and all the garbage floating around, the group felt very isolated from the modern world. The only people they met along the journey were a series of overweight police officers and intimidating men asking them more or less politely to go away because they were too close to a gas pipeline, trespassing on “private” property or simply because a canoe trip in this almost post-apocalyptic nature looked rather odd and suspicious.

Jon Cohrs, Back Water, 2020

Jon Cohrs, Back Water, 2020

With its quiet pace, its not very stunning landscape views and its heavy clouds of smoke that might or might not indicate that the methane created by decomposing garbage is burning off, Back Water manages to encapsulate all the drama and dilemmas of the Anthropocene in a film. One moment the group is set to visit a site contaminated by a manufacturer of Agent Orange. Next, they are freeing turtles from a cage probably installed by poachers.

The alienation is at our doorstep. It is both enticing and deeply troubling.

Jon Cohrs, Back Water, 2020

The film is out on Apple TV, Amazon Prime and Vimeo.

Related stories: The Spice Trade Expedition – In pursuit of artificial flavoring, From animal sensors to Monet as a painter of the anthropocene. 9 things i learnt on the opening day of the HYBRID MATTERs symposium and HYBRID MATTERs exhibition: when biological and technological entities escape our control and transform the planet.

Mainstream media like to tell us how people are getting ready for a post-collapse future. Some buy properties in New Zealand, some go all bunker bliss, others believe that all they should do is escape and colonise another planet (because humans have such a great track records when it comes to colonisation.) Details differ but the spirit is the same: everyone for themselves! Survival of the fittest! Or rather the richest.

Another possibility, albeit a less headline-grabbing one, is that we’ll do what we’ve always done throughout our evolution: we will keep on being a social species, we will cooperate and learn from each other.

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

Artists Alex Hartley and Tom James have experimented with the collaborative doomsday scenario. Back in 2017, they built a geodesic dome on the grounds of Compton Verney, an 18th-century country mansion in England. Then they invited members of the public as well as various experts to join them and learn together how we can survive in a world that global warming, economic collapse and political unrest have made alien.

Most of the workshops organised in and around the dome involved learning again the kind of skills that modernity has rendered obsolete: making booze or coca-cola, filtering water, harnessing wind power for electricity, making a foxhole radio, foraging for something edible, finding your way by looking at the night sky, etc. A couple of workshops however, had more ambitious objectives: rebuilding democracy or living and dying.

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

The artists wrote a report in the spirit of the project. It was typed on MS Word; printed out and photocopied by hand; and bound in covers made from discarded cardboard boxes. They’ve recently scanned the publication and made it available online for free. From what i could see and read, the low-tech, low-cost, high-collaborative post apocalyptic option is far more enjoyable than the lavish bunker ones.

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing. A Report from the Future, 2019

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing. A Report from the Future, 2019

Alex Hartley‘s work destabilises ideas of both iconic architecture and nature by exploring our understanding of utopian ideologies. Tom James creates artworks and publications that aim to change the way people think about the structures, places and ideas around them. I recently got in touch with them to know more about The Clearing:

Hi Tom and Alex! I’ve been encountering more articles and podcasts about preppers and bunker buildings than usual over these past few weeks. They suggest that in order to survive you need to be a hoarder, be afraid and be very selfish. The Clearing offers an entirely different vision of survival. Could you tell us what the project might or might not have in common with these doomsday bunkers in terms of way of thinking about the future?

TJ: From the start, I think we were both really conscious of this understanding of ‘survival’, and wanting to explore the other side of it. There are so many preppers on youtube, always hench guys in full camouflage and wrap-around sunglasses, squatting in a forest and talking in a deep voice about knives or something, into a go- pro. And that whole thing is just so lonely and depressing – imagine actually surviving, on your own, in such a bitter way?

What’s always been interesting to both of us is the other side of the end of the world – could it actually be a chance to live in a simpler, slower way? Could it be good? Chopping wood and building a cob oven and keeping chickens – with other people – is far more enjoyable than sitting on the sofa scrolling through instagram.

AH: I’m assuming the preppers are hugely disappointed that society hasn’t collapsed, like a doomsday cult when their long awaited deathdate passes. The Clearing was always ‘pretend’ – but all the things it did achieve came through the community it built, and the collective learning and endeavour that took place there.

Apart from the geodesic dome, what or who were your guides and inspirations for The Clearing?

TJ: For me, the one big inspiration was Ursula le Guin. Her book Always Coming Home totally changed my life – it’s about a community who live in a valley in what is now California, thousands of years in the future, after some kind of unmentioned apocalypse. It’s this incredible study of their whole (imagined) lives, including their stories and dances and what they eat and what they wear, all told in their words. And it’s good! Really slow and soft and peaceful. It’s the only ‘collapse’ book I’ve ever read where I’d like to live in the community. And I just wanted to carry that feeling into the project, really.

I also think Alex’s work itself was a big inspiration – I remember very vividly standing on the banks of a canal in London in January 2012, looking through the door of the knackered little dome he’d built for his show at Victoria Miro, and seeing this thing that was scruffy and foreboding, and at the same time warm and inviting and soft. That duality about the future really inspired me in all the work I’ve done since – and was what made me get in touch with him and suggest working together for The Clearing in the first place.

AH: Photos of the late 60’s hippy community of Drop City have been pinned on my studio walls for many years. The domes themselves manage to be magically both futuristic and nostalgic at the same time and they seem to carry so much hope for an alternative future. The Drop City story is well enough known that the photos resonate a great melancholy. I always hoped that we could convey some of this naive optimism into The Clearing.

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

The Clearing is a wonderful experiment and it looks rather nice. It is less grandiose than the gallery and parkland of Compton Verney though. Was there ever any suggestion that it needed to be glammed up in any way?

AH: We were always very surprised that Compton Verney were happy for the whole encampment around The Clearing to be such a mess. Stores and piles of materials, outbuildings and space for experiments were crucial elements of the work. We would tidy up regularly, but in truth the contrast between the manicured stately home and our much less certain, imperfect structure was the best part of its location. There was some initial discussion about the effect on wedding venue bookings…

TJ: At one point a happy couple actually did come and stand in front of The Clearing in their wedding outfits, during one of our workshops. I suppose it made for a nice apocalyptic shot for their album.

We were very lucky in that the curator Penny Sexton was amazing from the start, in terms of protecting it, and carving out a space for this weird, scruffy thing. We were also lucky that this guy called Nick Molyneux from Historic England was at the interview – he was really into the project, and told us about the history of stately homes installing their own hermit in a cave in their grounds, as a curious folly for their guests to peer at. So there was this real precedent for living in the grounds in this way.

And ultimately, Compton Verney really wanted a ‘talking point’ in their landscape – and what else is there to talk about at the moment but, as Helen Nisbet puts it, ‘the end of this world and the beginning of the next’?

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

I was reading an interview with you and you said “We’ve tried to create a place for people to come to learn how to live in the collapsing world that we think is coming our way.” Are you familiar with the field of collapsologie the “applied and transdisciplinary science of collapse”? It grew quite popular in France but I haven’t heard about that concept (at least not in the “French sense”) being debated so much in the UK. How invigorating and empowering (i wish i could find a synonym to that word!) is your vision of the collapse?

TJ: The thing about ‘collapse’ is that it’s easy to think about it when you’ve got a full belly and gas and wifi – but hard to imagine what it might actually feel like. Even when you’re reading all these things in the Guardian about sea-level rise and extinction and mass migration, on the next page it’s still tennis and luxury watches and Cara Delevinge. It’s impossible to get outside of the world. So I suppose that’s what we were trying to do, to let people step outside the world and feel what a different way of living might feel like, with all the different emotions that entails.

AH: All this seems so much closer now. I’m sure The Clearing would take a very different direction in a post Covid world. I’d not heard of ‘collapsologie’ (or Cara Delevinge), but a large proportion of both of our work involves imagining how we might live in and occupy a world with radically changed priorities. I try to hold onto the possibility that this collapse doesn’t have to be entirely dystopian.

TJ: This is the way you have to see it! That’s the big lesson from The Clearing – you need other people, and you need to make it happen for yourselves. I read a thing somewhere translated from French once, which I’ve never been able to find again, called ‘Another End of The World Is Possible’. And that’s just it – don’t believe the apocalypse porn! Don’t let them tell you it’s going to be like The Road! It’s also going to be a chance to build a new, better, slower world in the ruins of the old. It’s not like there’s going to be much else to do, anyway.

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

The Clearing also involved a series of workshops around themes as diverse as soap, rebuilding democracy, growing food, keeping chicken, building a toilet or how to die in the future. Now that we’ve had 2 full months of living a life we were not prepared for, do you feel that there are workshops in there that make more sense than others in the current circumstances? Or new workshops that should be organised because you might now have realised that new problems have emerged during this pandemic?

AH: Self-sufficiency for me – or self-reliance. Definitely how to survive in your own company.

TJ: I think this links to the last question in a way – we’ve all still got running water, there’s still food coming into the shops (from whichever mysterious place it comes from) so we’re not quite in the collapse yet. But what it’s shown we do need is better ways to come together and talk and agree to act – and to avoid going down the route of stockpiling and hoarding. The Rebuilding Democracy workshop is really the most valid, I think.

The really interesting thing about this pandemic is that it’s shown that all the things we were told were facts of life (austerity, cuts, long lines of toxic cars with one person in them, cheap flights to weekend break destinations) were all actually choices – and that the government, and by extension society, can make different choices if we think it’s necessary.

I think what we really need now is workshops on community organising and local power, so we can carry on these discussions, and make sure we put alternatives in people’s heads and in their hands. I don’t want to go back to normal, normal was shit.

The Clearing was located in a park. Could a similar project be implemented in urban areas? Do you need this distance from the crowd? Wouldn’t you have access to more resources in a city?

AH: The question of where to make The Clearing was always a huge one for us both – some of this revolved around where we could find the production budget, but also how ‘real’ to make the experience. The first dome I made in 2010 went to Occupy after its initial incarnation as part of an artwork. It immediately created a hierarchy of architecture amongst the soaking-wet tents (it rained non-stop and the dome was waterproof). It was intended to be used as a group meeting space, but quickly became a shelter/drug taking space – underlining separate issues but undermining the solidarity of the Occupy camp. Undoubtedly the project could be much more ‘real’ in an urban setting, but it could also so easily lose any experimental nature and quickly become social support.

TJ: I think it needs to happen in the city! It would be a lot harder, of course. It’s much easier to build a vision of the future in the countryside – you have fuel, water, space, and it’s easier to get rid of your compost toilet, etc etc. But at the same time, it’s probably more urgent to try to build it in a city. At the start of the pandemic, I think the thing I was most worried about was people losing faith in ‘society’ and starting to steal food, etc. If you can help people in a city to believe in each other, to rely on each other and build structures we might need – for instance, turning food waste into cooking gas, and cooking communally – it would probably be a lot more useful long term.

Apologies for the probably very stupid question but why did you call it The Clearing?

TJ: No such thing as a stupid question. It’s partly because that’s what it is – a clearing in the woods – and partly from a book by Wendell Berry, called ‘Clearing’. It’s a book of poems about a piece of land, and staying where you are, and the power of that, and it just moved me. His poems are very much like the ones the people write in Always Coming Home, to be honest.

Alex Hartley and Tom James, The Clearing, 2017

What is the state of The Clearing dome now? Who looks after it?

TJ: It was only ever going to be in Compton Verney’s landscape for three years. We both wanted it to be useful afterwards, so we organised an open call to give it away to someone who wanted it, provided they had the land for it, the people to take it down, and a non-commerical use for it (no glamping). In the end Compton Verney were keen it stayed in the local area, so it went to a branch of the scouts in Coventry, to use on their campsite. Hopefully it will still be there in a few years, rotting into the landscape, becoming something completely different.

AH: I went up for to disassemble the structures with the scout volunteers, and to explain how it rebuild it. We got the dome down and loaded into a truck in an impressive two days. We’re so distanced from the building experience by modern house building techniques, that making a decent size shelter with only hand-tools and a few ladders is a super satisfying collective achievement.

Have you heard from the caretakers or from the participants to the workshops since the coronavirus lockdown?

TJ: Yes a few of them – lots of people are thinking about it, now that we’re all outside the world in some way. I think quite a few people who couldn’t really imagine ‘the future’ before are now seeing The Clearing in a slightly different light. There were also quite a few people asking to do some sort of on-line reading group with the book we made, which, as we only made 500, was quite difficult. Hence the idea to scan it and put it online. Hopefully it will be helpful or useful or interesting, in some way.

Thanks Alex and Tom!

Race After Technology. Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, by Ruha Benjamin, Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University.

Publisher Polity writes: From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity.

Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life.

This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture.

Hyphen-Labs, NeuroSpeculative AfroFeminism (NSAF)

The subtitle of the book, Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, openly refers to Michelle Alexander‘s 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (check out two interviews with the civil rights advocate on NPR and WNYC) which investigates how the war on drugs and the increasing imprisonment of black and brown men in the U.S. constitute a new incarnation of the kind of negative stereotypes and caste-like system enforced by the Jim Crow laws in the south of the country before the civil rights movement. But what then is the New Jim Code?

The New Jim Code is a series of techno-mediated mechanisms that replicate or even aggravate social divisions, inequities and hierarchies. More or less openly and consciously. Their allure of being scientific, neutral and objective makes it difficult for civil rights advocates and ordinary citizens to challenge their discriminatory designs and hold the individuals and institutions behind them accountable.

The content of Race After Technology concerns each and everyone of us. No matter our skin colour, gender, sexual orientation or socio-cultural background, we can all enjoy the writings of a scholar who casts such a critical, witty and penetrating eye over the social dimensions of technology.

Whether Benjamin denounces the glitches in an otherwise benign system that hide systemic racism, exposes the troubling niche approach that claims to tailor experiences but delivers stereotypical containment and misrepresentation, questions the empathy woven into the marketing of VR, navigates between technologies that fail to see Blackness and technologies that single out Black people and expose them to racial surveillance, she never loses sights of what is at stake: the technological “solutions” that claim to fix complex social problems don’t work. They might even do more harm than good.

What makes Benjamin’s approach so invaluable is the way she never isolates technology from its societal context, history and culture. Technical design, she reminds us, is built on social norms, ideologies and practices that tend to reinforce white privilege.

The first 4 chapters of the book dissect the New Jim Code. The last one goes even further by delineating the different types of “abolitionist tools” necessary to build solidarity and “coutercode” tech-mediated inequities. She does so by highlighting the work of practitioners, scholars, activists, artists, film makers and students who are demystifying technology and challenging the production and deployment of the New Jim Code.

If you can’t get a copy of the book, you might be interested in the video recording of Black Skin, White Masks: Racism, Vulnerability & Refuting Black Pathology, a talk Ruha Benjamin gave a couple of weeks ago.

ODB, Digital Defense Playbook

Data for Black Lives (image)

Related stories: Algorithms of Oppression. How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Curatorial Activism. Fighting sexism, racism, homo/lesbophobia and western-centrism one exhibition at a time, Drones, pirates, everyday racism. An interview with graphic designer Ruben Pater, “Universalization is a colonialist heritage.” An interview with video game curator Isabelle Arvers, Artists explore the ethical aspects of commercial DNA ancestry testing, The Museum of NonHumanity, The House That Herman Built, etc.

Photo on the homepage: March on Washington. Civil rights supporters carry placards at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Warren K. Leffler (digital file: cph ppmsca 03128.)

Lawrence Abu Hamdan is an artist and a “private ear”, a kind of counter-state actor whose practice consists in trying to give a space and meaning to different types of listening.

Operating both in gallery spaces and in human rights contexts, a number of his works make emerge the value of ear witnessing, a form of testimony that is increasingly being exploited in court. In fact, a number of high profiles cases in recent years (Oscar Pistorius but also Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and other racist murders in the US) have relied on ear witness testimonies.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, 2018

The validity of ear witnessing is exemplified and made more concrete in Abu Hamdan’s Walled Unwalled, a work i discovered last year at Biennale of Moving Images in Turin. The 20 minute video examines a series of legal cases in which evidence was obtained through walls. The work evokes some of the technologies used to make walls -and private life- penetrable. Starting with thermal imaging used to detect heat radiating from a house (an indication of the possible presence of marijuana cultivation indoors) to invisible cosmic particles called muons which can pass through surfaces previously impervious to x rays. Walls are no obstacle if you have the right technology.

Most of the video, however, investigates the architecture, peculiar acoustics and living conditions inside a prison we know very little about.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, 2018

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, 2018

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, 2018

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Walled Unwalled, 2018

Saydnaya prison is a high-security military prison located 30km north of Damascus and operated by the Syrian government. It has been used to hold, torture and kill thousands of prisoners, both civilian detainees and, especially after the 2011 pro-democracy protests, political dissidents.

In April 2016, Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture teamed up to digitally reconstruct Saydnaya, a space no one but the prisoners and their guards has ever been allowed to access. Any knowledge we can gather about what happens inside Sednaya or what the place looks like derives from the memories of the detainees. Unfortunately, none of them has ever seen the prison. They enter blindfolded and have to keep their eyes closed when moved from one space to another.

Held in darkness and constrained to silence (even when submitted to violent beatings), the men developed an acute relation to sound. Over time, without ever speaking or being able to see anything, they learn to distinguish the types of beatings taking place behind cell walls, the type of instrument used to torture, the footsteps of the guards, the doors opening, slamming or locking, etc. The fact that the whole prison experience was designed so that the prisoners would see nothing but hear everything was in itself a form of acoustic torture.

A detainee works with FA researchers to reconstruct Saydnaya prison. Photo: Forensic Architecture, 2020

Reconstruction of Saydnaya prison. Photo: Amnesty International/Forensic Architecture

In 2016, Abu Hamdan met five Sednaya survivors as part of Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture‘s investigative collaboration. The researchers used architectural and acoustic modelling to reconstruct the detention centre and the survivors’ experiences. The “ear-witness testimony” of the ex-detainees was solicited through a series of techniques that included “echo profiling” to determine the size of cells, stairwells and corridors as well “sound artefacts” to simulate prison sounds such as doors, locks and footsteps, which helped to trigger further acoustic memories.

Some of the information thus collected was invaluable for Amnesty International’s investigation. Some of these testimonies, on the other hand, were the result of a distortion of the memory, they were more emotional than purely factual and as such were inadmissible in a legal and human rights context. Yet, this material still spoke volumes about a level of hunger, hyper vigilance and distress so high that it distorted their senses. Its value cannot not be appreciated in court but it can still be articulated through the space and language of Abu Hamdan’s art.

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Earwitness Inventory

Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Earwitness Inventory

I’ve never actually seen Earwitness Inventory but it deserves a mention because it constitutes a companion work to Walled Unwalled. This collection of 95 custom designed and sourced objects are all derived from legal cases in which acoustic testimony had to be solicited. These mnemonic devices range from shoes to flatbreads, from silver trays to a small inflatable swimming pool or a pile of sand with a wheel.

More information about the project in the video below…

International Conference 2018 – Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Walled Unwalled

as well as in the Talk Art and the WNYC podcasts.

Related stories: Book review: Forensic Architecture. Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, Forensic Oceanography, investigating the militarised border regime in the Mediterranean, The System of Systems: technology and bureaucracy in the asylum seeking process in Europe.

Artist and cultural anthropologist Leone Contini has been collecting seeds for over 10 years. Preferably seeds that were given to him by members of the foreign communities who have migrated to Italy in recents years, bringing with them seeds to grow familiar fruits and vegetables on unfamiliar land.

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers, 2018

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers, 2018. Photo by Can Aksan

For the Manifesta biennial in Palermo back in 2018, Contini collaborated with migrant communities to plant the cucuzza (a type of pale, ultra long gourd sometimes nicknamed Serpent of Sicily) as well as similar types of squash that had traveled as seeds in the pockets of migrants from African and Asian countries. They grew together on a pergola in Palermo’s Botanical Garden. The work would be little more than an edible metaphor for harmonious coexistence if it didn’t allow for discussions about local food resilience in the face of the climate crisis.

One of the most interesting things that emerge from Contini’s work is that freshly arrived farmers have to revise their know-how and adapt it to the local climate and soil. They become pioneers of “displaced” and confused agriculture. Their resourcefulness and the knowledge they accumulate with each experiment might even turn useful to Italian farmers. As Contini notes, traditional local farming is challenged by an environment in constant mutation: unseasonable weather, soil erosion and other disruptions have turned local farmers into migrants onto their own land.

Leone Contini, Hǎocài, Carmignano, 2015

Leone Contini, 2009-2019

The artist’s interest in food and agricultural practices is rooted in long-term fieldwork across Italy. His inquest started when he moved to Prato, a city in Tuscany which hosts the second largest Chinese immigrant population in Italy. The majority of Chinese people in Prato work in the textile and fashion industry. During the financial crisis, a number of them started growing their own food, planting seeds from China and enriching the “biodiversity” of culinary ingredients available in the area. Having spent time with the Chinese farmers in Tuscany, the artist met other communities who use their spare time to grow food: the Senegalese gardeners in Veneto, the Bengali farmers living at the outskirts of Palermo, etc.

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers – Cucuzze a mare, 2018

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers – Translations, 2018

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers – Krela, 2018

Contini’s work makes it clear that seeds, plants, culture, animal and people that migrate towards new lands are not threats to local ecosystems, they can also offer solutions to the challenges that await our planet, a planet that looks increasingly alien to its own inhabitants.

I interviewed the artist and anthropologist over email:

Hi Leone! You studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at Università degli Studi di Siena. How much of your background as an anthropologist do you bring into your projects?   

Of course my artistic practice is shaped by my background but I try to avoid the “discourse about the other”, the original sin of anthropology. Nevertheless this is also a concern of many anthropologists since cultural studies have finally deconstructed the colonial pillars of the discipline. Maybe I can rephrase my answer by saying that my practice takes place on the crossroad between art and anthropology, but faraway from both the academic shelter and the art market.

Moreover, the post (?) covid immobility revealed to me that I feel more (and more) comfortable here, in my neighbourhood, instead of working abroad, “in residency”, like I often did in the last 10 years. Maybe it’s because here I cannot escape the responsibility of representation, I cannot run away with the stories of the people in my pocket, as (we) artists-in-residency tend to do when, the day after the final exhibition-presentation, we jump on the first airplane toward the next site. This hectic appropriation is a consistent mode of production of contemporary art nowadays, a behaviour that seems rooted in the ethnographic practice – although ethnographers usually appropriate with less rush. We are all trapped in the same big game (unless we produce artefacts buried in a studio to be sold in galleries, then maybe we are part of another game), but how to inhabit this pattern is our challenge as cultural producers.

But as I said, for now I’m happy to work in my region-neighbourhood… “locals” and “migrants”, “us” and “them”… all these terms tend to lose their meaning, since here we are all part of the same, variegated community. No “informants” anymore, just neighbours.

Folclore Tosco-Cinese / TuscanChinese Folklore, 2013

Folclore Tosco-Cinese / TuscanChinese Folklore, 2013

You’ve spent several years interacting with the Chinese community in Prato. Your work explores how much these families of migrants have transformed local agriculture. Could you give us a few examples of these transformations?  

Local agriculture was transformed in terms of a huge injection of new varieties, and this is important and desirable, at least in my perception, after a century marked by a constant erosion of biodiversity. Even though I don’t live in a cosmopolitan city I can access a wide range of vegetables from different origins, at a convenient price. My food choices at least doubled in the last 10 years, thanks to the Chinese farms.

In the long term this biodiversity will also transform the Italian cuisine, but so far the Italians are reluctant to try new vegetables, and if they approach them, it is only occasionally, out of a curiosity for the “exotic.”

While we, Italians, struggle around the topic of cultural mutations, these agricultural activities have already transformed the distribution chain, making it very short and directly connected with the territory: an “Italian” tomato on a supermarket’s shelf travelled hundreds of km after having probably been collected by an exploited worker in Apulia, while a dōng guā or any other “Chinese” vegetable was grown locally, in a family-based farm.

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers – Germinability, 2018

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers – Harvest, 2018

Leone Contini, TuscanChina, 2015

You write in the description of your work Km0: “Within the context of the Chinese Diaspora these gardening practices are crucial in terms of cultural identity, belonging and self-representation, the regional wenzhounese vegetable varieties being a sort of umbilical cord with the motherland.” I was very moved by that sentence because I grew up in Liège (Belgium) where there is a big community of families whose roots are in Italy. When their grand-parents arrived, they brought herbs, veggies, cheese, all sorts of knowledge about wild mushrooms and good coffee that must have looked very suspicious to Belgians back in the 1950s. Indeed there were tensions and unpleasant moments at the time but that seems to be so long ago now. Belgium recently had a Prime Minister (Elio di Rupo) whose father was from Abruzzo. So I see parallels between them and the communities that your projects talk about but am I a bit naive here? Are there limits to making these optimistic comparisons?    

You are not naïve, on the contrary! My mother’s family is originally from Sicily, and in the 80s we used to grow Sicilian vegetables in the outskirt of Florence. Especially the “cucuzza”, a snake-shaped bottle gourd, unknown in Tuscany. By coincidence the owner of the first Chinese restaurant in town (the Chinese migration was still a small phenomenon) had a little garden near our cucuzzas: he cultivated Chinese cabbages and spring onions. All over around us the black Tuscan cabbage was ruling the fields.

When in the 2000s the first Chinese farms appeared on the plain between Florence and Prato… I think I “recognized” this bio-diversity as an archetype of my childhood. And I vividly remember when, for the first time after 20 years, I saw again a cucuzza, that I still regarded as strictly Sicilian: it was on the shelf of a Chinese shop, named pú guā, in Wenzhounese dialect, and as delicious as in my memories.

Thanks to Chinese farmers a dormant family tradition was therefore reactivated, and the trap of “otherness” defused. Like for the urban gardens of Villeurbanne (France), Solothurn (Switzerland) and Folkestone (UK), where I recently developed my projects, here the Sicilian snake cohabits with bottle gourds from Indochina (I was surprised by the use of this term), bitter melons from Nepal or Turkey, okra from Senegal… I feel comfortable in such places, where different origins interweave and prosper.

For a performance at Centro Pecci in Prato, you involved directly the Chinese community, transforming Chinese farmers into advisors for Italian people. Could you tell us how you got them on board and what happened during the performance?  
 
The exhibition was financially supported by the Chinese Buddhist temple of Prato.

My project consisted in a display of Chinese vegetables, a sort of baroque natura morta, the mise en scène of an unknown local treasure of biodiversity. Among the audience many people were from the Temple, I was familiar with some of them. The Museum, as an institutional location, was answering their expectation to be recognised as part of the social fabric, and the beautiful vegetables were something to be proud of. These factors, I think (but we should ask them!), created a bond between them and my installation, aesthetically and emotionally, until the very
moment when they appropriated it. It was unplanned! And what happened exceeded my most optimistic expectations: they started distributing the vegetables to the audience, explaining how to process and cook them, but also what their healthy properties were.

Leone Contini, Foreign Farmers, Workshop, 2018

Your practice is also looking at the circulation and exchange of seeds between countries from all over the world. Is there any official regulation around the importation of seeds from abroad? Can people plant whatever they want wherever they want?  

Italy is a strange country, we accept the role played by organised crime in the food production and the exploitation of migrant labour, but if a Chinese family creates a little farm to fulfil the local demand… then all the rules are back, to be respected.

The repression of Chinese agricultural enterprises is a recurrent phenomenon in Tuscany, often resulting if the confiscation of the farms.

The irony of such policies is that, in an abandoned field, the plants can often manage to accomplish their reproductive circle, while usually they would be collected in an earlier stage, to be eaten. A confiscated farm is therefore able to spread in the environment millions of seeds, paradoxically self-fulfilling the xenophobe prophecy of the foreign invasion declined in botanic terms. Beside this, such varieties are perfectly legal in Italy.

My impression is that these campaigns are driven by demagogic tactics, to achieve political consensus. The message is “we keep the decency of our territory”, to quote a local magazine. It is a racist message, within a racist set of mind. The outcome of this attitude is an attempt to froze the vital forces of human societies, and more specifically the becoming both of agriculture and food, which is also a way to deny Italian history. A little anecdote to make this more clear: the bean “Fagiolo Fico di Gallicano” is now a pillar of the food industry in the area of Lucca. But this beans variety was informally introduced in Italy by a migrant, returning back home from the Americas: he crossed the borders with few seeds hidden in his
hat.

I love how, during your talk at HKW in Berlin two years ago, you talked about the fact that climate change had made us foreigners in our own house and how we might need to rely more on knowledge coming from the other side of the world than we’d like to admit. Could you develop on that? What can these “foreign farmers” you met in Prato, Palermo, Piedmont and elsewhere teach us?  

Climate mutations have turned all of us into sort of foreigners, whether we stayed home or fled. What I learned from the farmers is that we need new types knowledge to be created with the scattered fragment of others’ experience. In Palermo, my garden suffered an unusual humid and cold springtime and a tropical storm at the end of the Summer, also unseen. For the pergola to survive, including the eradication of diseases without using chemicals, I had to combine information from different backgrounds, as if every traditional set of knowledge taken separately was not able to “solve” this type of vegetal entanglement. Each plant embodied a different degree of adaptation to a new environment, which was meanwhile undergoing a process of mutation: some seeds that I planted in the botanic garden of Palermo had arrived in Tuscany in 2005 from the rural areas near Wenzhou; a Senegalese hibiscus had been growing near Venice for 5 years, while bottle gourds from Bangladesh had already made Sicily their home, interweaving their vines with the local cucuzza, landed from Africa a long time ago.

There were no landlords in my shelter, and there was no room nor logic to deploy a useless dominant knowledge.

Leone Contini, Confiscated Chinese farm in Tuscany, Springtime 2020

Leone Contini, Confiscated Chinese farm in Tuscany, Springtime 2020

I’d like to come back to the Chinese communities in Prato for a moment because I suspect they’ve been terribly hit by the coronavirus crisis. From what i could read in local news, they quarantined very early and counted very very few cases of COVID19 but I suspect that many people in Prato might have resented their presence and held them responsible for the pandemic. Do you know something about how things are going for the community over there? Are they resorting to farming like they did during the financial crisis of 2008?
 
At the beginning of the epidemic populist propaganda blamed the Chinese community in Prato, spreading the fear of a potential COVID outbreak in the city. Very soon, however, it appeared that the infection in Prato was lower than the average numbers in Tuscany, and this narration was defused. A surreal if not ridiculous event was reported by local news a few days before the lockdown: the local police was preventing the quarantine of Chinese people who had returned home from China, blaming that this behaviour was “not regular”.

To answer your second question, the way COVID has transformed this local system of production would deserve a proper survey. I can only answer about a specific farm, near my house, which was confiscated in January and totally abandoned during the lockdown. I was there a few days ago: what was a flourishing family-based enterprise and a site of food production is now a neglected space. I walked across overgrown vegetation and destroyed greenhouses like in a post human scenario, until I met an old Chinese man, collecting the native plants, unknown to me, which had taken the place of the Chinese vegetables. Then I saw another man, bent under the weight of bag full of herbs. In the COVID aftermath the farmers turned into foragers, out of necessity, in order to eat. The general impoverishment has hit the community violently, especially the elders, especially in this rural context. I was admiring their strength and capability to put in place strategies and unexpected knowledge about the native flora, but I was also sad.

What have you been working on recently? And where can we learn more about what you’re up to?  

I was always interested in our relation, as humans, with the wild flora. But during the lockdown this topic became central, since I started sourcing my daily food in the nearby forest (and just a few days ago I realised that, during these harsh months, my Chinese neighbours were doing the same). I would never have suspected the presence of such an amount of food in the radius of 500 meters around my home; moreover the herbs that I was able to recognise are just a fraction of the edible ones, since apparently the Chinese are collecting varieties not used in the local tradition. Unlike the seeds of a domesticated variety, which can cross the borders out of the human agency, the wild flora often travel despite the humans, or at least despite their intentions, proving that migration is an primal pattern of life.

Last summer I developed a project in a village near Matera, in the region of Basilicata (southern Italy). The village was founded centuries ago by refugees that fled the West Balkans: their descendants preserved their culture and language through many generations, until today. My project focused on the local wild flora, entirely named in an ancient Albanian dialect. Also here, like for the Chinese in Tuscany, the native-migrant-plants reconnect a scattered community with their home, by revealing that home is everywhere.

Thanks Leone!

Related stories: The Seed Journey to preserve plant genetic diversity. An interview with Amy Franceschini, Vegetation as a Political Agent, The ‘farmification’ of a joystick factory, The Manifesto for Rural Futurism, Super Meal, etc.

Public announcement!

In July, I’ll be giving online classes on the theme of Art & Animals in the Age of CRISPR, Cloning and Cellular Agriculture with the School of Machines, Making & Make-Believe. A first edition of the class ran back in April. This one will be a bit different. First, because I learnt so much from the fantastic group of participants in April that I’d like to feed all their ideas, links and feedback into the new classes. Second, because I wanted to slightly adjust the content of the course. OUT are the plants (they’ll get their revenge in the future) and IN are the marine animals and the birds that I had neglected in Spring.

Brandon Ballengée, DFA136: Procrustes, cleared and stained Pacific tree frog collected in Aptos, California in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions (from the series Malamp Reliquaries), 2013

Agnès Villette and Emmanuelle Foussat, Alien of the Species

For the rest, the class will keep on reflecting what I care about: socially-engaged creative practices but with a stronger focus on non-human life. Microscopic and massive. Extinct, endangered, wild, familiar, lab-grown or “tech-augmented”. And because -as we are painfully learning right now- everything is connected, the classes will also be looking at the world that animals inhabit and where they encounter fungi, viruses, bacteria.

During the classes, we’ll be looking at taxidermy, de-extinction programmes, genome editing, bestiaries, farming, “invasive” species but we will also discuss the ethics of working with animals (including dead ones) and more generally of exhibiting life inside museums and galleries. The main objectives will be to investigate the shifting paradigms of the living world and to reflect on the possibility of co-evolving in a more sympathetic and mutually beneficial way with other living entities.

The full description of the classes is here.

The online classes will be taking place over the course of five weeks, two hours each week. The first session will be an informal “getting to know each other” event during which i will also be taking notes of any special curiosity and interests participants might have.

If you feel extra studious, extra self-isolated or if you prefer to learn about something else, I’d also recommend having a look at Marisa Satsia‘s online classes on Medical Bodies; Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan, Lorenzo Pilia and Bahiyya Khan‘s Hands-on guide to making personal games; Ela Kagel‘s Tools for reimagining. Better worlds through cooperation.

Classes are live meaning that you can directly interact with the instructor as well as with the other participants from around the world. Classes will also be recorded for playback if you are unable to attend that day.

The school is offering a limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets to take part in this class. Preference given to women, POC, LGBTQ+ and persons from underrepresented communities who would otherwise be unable to attend.

This way to join!

Image on the homepage: Bryndís Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson, Nanoq: Fat Out and Bluesome, 2001-2006.

Africa State of Mind. Contemporary Photography Reimagines a Continent, by writer, curator, journalist and broadcaster Ekow Eshun.

Description by publisher Thames & Hudson: Africa State of Mind gathers together the work of an emergent generation of photographers from across the continent, exploring Africa as a psychological space as much as a geographical one. Both a summation of new photographic practice from the last decade and a compelling survey of the ways in which contemporary African photographers are engaging with ideas of “Africanness,” Africa State of Mind is a timely collection of those photographers seeking to capture the experience of what it means to “be African.”

Jodi Bieber, Maria (from Real Beauty), 2014

Dawit L. Petros, Act of Recovery (part I), 2016

If you have to pick up one photo book to spend the Summer with, make it Africa State of Mind. Bringing together images taken over the past decade, the publication shakes off any tropes and presumptions we might have about the African continent. The result is eye-opening, dramatic and joyful.

The photographers selected for the book take a firm hold on the narrative around Africa. They picture the fertile clashes between the exciting life in ever-spreading metropolises and the ingenuity of people who manage to keep on doing business despite regular power cuts in poorer neighbourhoods; the not so subdued Islamic women and the communities who challenge an heteronormative society; the petroleum-fuelled economy and the opportunistic models of street commerce; the tribe in Kenya threatened with disappearance and the student protests against rising tuition fees; the many dimensions of belief in the supernatural, of feminism, beauty, imperfections.

Pieter Hugo, Chris, Nkulo and Patience Umeh, Enugu, Nigeria (from the series Nollywood), 2008

Nobukho Nqaba, Untitled, 2012

This generation of photographers also defies the representations of the continent and the ideas of ‘Africanness’ created in the previous centuries, when Africa was portrayed chiefly through Western eyes. Ekow Eshun follows 4 main threads to illustrate how these artists expand the narrative around Africa: Hybrid Cities explores the rapid urbanisation of the continent; Inner Landscapes articulates personal visions of Africa; Zones of Freedom is dedicated to the depiction of sexual identities that are violently rejected in some parts of the continent; more than the previous chapters, Myth and Memory looks beyond the legacy of European colonialism, it subverts Western clichés of the exotic and redefines the many African identities experienced by people living on the continent and in the rest of the world as children of the African diaspora.

Here’s some images and commentaries only when I couldn’t help it:

Hassan Hajjaj, Kesh Angels, 2010

Zina Saro-Wiwa, Holy Star Boyz, 2018

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Egoungoun – Adé I, 2017

Thabiso Sekgala, Haddon and Sly (former glory), Bulawayo, 2013

Thabiso Sekgala, Tiger (Second Transition), 2012

George Osodi, HRM Pere Donokoromo ll JP The Pere of Isaba Kingdom (from the series Nigerian Monarchs), 2012

In 1963, Nigeria became a republic and the regional kings and queens who ruled over hundreds of ethnic groups in the country were stripped of constitutional power. Their descendants, however, still play a role in Nigerian society. They not only are the custodians of the diversity of the cultural heritage of the country but they also settle land disputes, matrimonial issues and other local-level disagreements among their people. In 2012, George Osodi travelled across the country to photograph them in full regalia.

Musa N. Nxumalo, This is how you start a party!, 2017

Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou, Citizens of Porto-Novo, 2018

Filipe Branquinho, Cine Theatre Scala, Annex, 2013

Edson Chagas, Cheick F Ouattara, 2014

Edson Chagas, Marcel D. Traoré, 2014

Omar Victor Diop, Jean-Baptiste Belley (1746–1805), 2014. From the series Diaspora

In his Diaspora self-portraits series, Omar Victor Diop poses as Africans historical figures of the colonial era. In the photo above, he recreates a portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley by Anne-Louis Girodet. At the age of two, Belley was sold to slave merchants sailing for the French colony of Saint-Domingue. He later bought his freedom, fought in the Haitian Revolution and became the first black deputy to take a seat in the French National Convention. Belley returned to Saint-Domingue in 1802 as an officer of gendarmes, but he was arrested and died in prison in 1805.

The references to football in the photo series suggests the difficulty experienced by black people then and now of living a life of glory while facing the challenges of being framed as the ‘other’ in a white society.

Kiluanji Kia Henda, The Last Journey of the Dictator Mussunda N’zombo Before the Great Extinction: Act II, 2017

Sethembile Msezane, Untitled (Heritage Day), 2014

Leila Alaoui, Water-seller in Boumia souk, Atlas mountains, 2011

Another reason to applaud Africa State of Mind is that it gives more space to women photographers than most publications of the kind. I particularly loved the work of Zina Saro-Wiwa, Nobukho Nqaba, Phumzile Khanyile, Nontsikelelo Veleko, Atong Atem and Leila Alaoui.

Guillaume Bonn, After two decades of war and destruction, the Italian colonial architecture of Mogadishu is barely surviving, 2013

Kyle Weeks, Kauyu Tjiambiru, Kunene Region, Namibia, 2015

Previously: Kinshasa. Always on the move, Delta Nigeria – The Rape of Paradise, Bamako Encounters, the Biennial of African Photography, Figures & Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography, etc.

Cultural space are slowly reopening to the public here in Italy and I’m taking advantage of the very very quiet touristic season to drag my collection of face masks around art cities. First stop: Rome for the unexpected joy of visiting the Vatican museums without the need to queue and a discovery of the exhibition REAL_ITALY at MAXXI, the national centre for the contemporary art and architecture.


Danilo Correale, Diranno che li ho uccisi io / They Will Say i Killed Them (video still), 2017-18


REAL_ITALY presents the winning works of a competition held in 2017 by the MiBACT Italian Council General Direction for Contemporary Creativity. The result is a brutally honest display of social exclusion in suburbs, prisons and refugee camps, colonialist heritage, censorship, public spending scandals and fight against underworld crimes.

The works draw a uncompromising, haunting and somewhat melancholy portrait of Italy as it is today. It is dark but never hopeless. The exhibition demonstrates that in spite of all its shortcomings, the country still manages to nurture lucid, sensible and talented artists.

Here’s some of my favourite works in the show:

Alterazioni video, Incompiuto: La nascita dello stile/Unfinished: The Birth of a Style, 2017-18


Alterazioni video, Incompiuto: La nascita dello stile/Unfinished: The Birth of a Style, 2017-18


Alterazioni video, Incompiuto: La nascita dello stile/Unfinished: The Birth of a Style, 2017-18


Alterazioni video, Incompiuto: La nascita dello stile/Unfinished: The Birth of a Style, 2017-18. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini


Alterazioni video, Incompiuto: La nascita dello stile/Unfinished: The Birth of a Style, 2017-18
. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini

Alterazioni video, Incompiuto: La nascita dello stile/Unfinished: The Birth of a Style, 2017-18
. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini

Half of a viaduct, a swimming pool with weeds growing between the tiles, rows of pillars that do not support any road nor bridge, walls in the middle of nowhere, etc. So much concrete poured, so many unfinished structures decaying in otherwise stunning landscapes.

Over the past 10 years, Alterazioni Video has crisscrossed Italy to document, map and reflect upon unfinished public works in Italy. Having collected over 750 works on the whole Italian territory (including 350 in Sicily), they’ve declared that the phenomenon is so widespread and had such an impact on the appearance of the Italian landscape that it constitutes the most important Italian architectural style of the last 50 years. They call it the Incompiuto (the Unfinished.)

The series both denounces and celebrates this strangely appealing mix of ruin porn and Mediterranean scenery. Under their critical eye, these symbols of waste of public resources and environmental crimes are turned into savage monuments, crude markers in the landscape.


Yuri Ancarani, San Vittore (video still), 2018



Yuri Ancarani, San Vittore (video still), 2018



Yuri Ancarani, San Vittore (video still), 2018


When children visit their parents at the San Vittore prison in Milan, they’re subjected to a thorough security check. Their bags are searched, their shoes and toys are checked, they have to go through a metal detector, a security guard pats them down. They are then lead by the hand along long corridors to the visiting room where their father awaits. No matter how gentle the guard, the violence of the procedure is upsetting.


Yuri Ancarani not only filmed the arrival of a child inside the San Vittore prison in Milan, he also shows drawings made by children of inmates during workshops run by an NGO which mission is to protect the rights of prisoners and their families. There are drawings of prison bars, bloodied dolls, figures of authority and many castles. The prison is like a formidable fortress to them.

The way the artist conjures up the prison regime through the eyes of children is poignant and hypnotising.

While doing some research to write this review, I realised that Yuri Ancarani was the artist behind one of my favourite video artworks. Il Capo (The Chief) was shot in a marble quarry in the Apuan Alps as Il Capo guides his men through the extraction process. I didn’t write down the name of the artist at the time and couldn’t find any trace of the video again. I’m glad I’ve finally found him/it.

Eva Frappicini, Il pensiero che non diventa azione avvelena l’anima/Words Without Action Poison the Soul, 2017


Eva Frappicini, Il pensiero che non diventa azione avvelena l’anima/Words Without Action Poison the Soul, 2017 ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini


Eva Frappicini, Paolo Borsellino. Personal agenda, 1992. From the project Il pensiero che non diventa azione avvelena l’anima/Words Without Action Poison the Soul, 2017


Eva Frappicini, Paolo Borsellino. Personal agenda, 1992. From the project Il pensiero che non diventa azione avvelena l’anima/Words Without Action Poison the Soul, 2017

Eva Frappicini, Rocco Chinnici. Folder containing Report dated 25.08.1978 on Riina Salvatore and others. From the project Il pensiero che non diventa azione avvelena l’anima/Words Without Action Poison the Soul, 2017

Words Without Action Poison the Soul is an ongoing research that documents in photos the everyday “tools” used by magistrates, journalists, trade unionists, police inspectors and private citizens who fought the mafia from the 1970s to the 90s. Some of them are famous: Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Libero Grassi, Boris Giuliano, etc. Others were equally brave but their name has travelled far less.

Eva Frappicini hunted for manuscripts of the speeches, sketches, notebooks, agendas and other notes that belonged to these courageous men and women. She photographed the objects front and back and in 1:1 scale which gives an intimate feel to their work. This sense of having a private encounter with the documents is reinforced by the way the photos are exhibited. The public can navigate the photos through a searchable structure, with vertical drawers that you can pull out as individual photographic racks.

Over the course of her research, the artist found out that this precious historical documentation, these very objects that bear witness to the fight against the mafia are not archived in an organised and systematised way. Some are kept in archives but stuffed randomly inside big paper envelopes. Others remain in the hands of families who are not sure what they ought to do with them. What will happen to these documents in the future? Don’t these traces left by people who took a stand against the Sicilian Mafia deserve to be preserved and shared with greater care?

Margherita Moscardini, Inventory. The Fountains of Za’atari, 2017. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini


Margherita Moscardini, Inventory. The Fountains of Za’atari (video still), 2018

Margherita Moscardini, Inventory. The Fountains of Za’atari, 2017. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini


Opened in 2012 to welcome Syrians fleeing the civil war and located in a semi-desert area of Jordan, Camp Za’atari is one of the largest refugee camps in the world.

Margherita Moscardini mapped all the fountains built by the residents in camp courtyards. She then produced a catalogue of the fountains, with the name of their author, the materials used, the year they were made, etc.

The artist went further. She suggests that the fountains could be copied and adopted in cities across Europe, as sculptures for public space. An official system of acquisitions would enable the designer of the fountain to benefit directly from the sale, thereby creating a system that supports the camp’s economy.

In Moscardini’s scheme, the sculptures would also receive special jurisdiction that includes elements of extraterritoriality, turning them into spaces where the law does not apply. Like offices of the United Nations, embassies, the high seas or even the outer space.

Inventory not only highlights the role that cities can play when national states fall short, it also point to the need to rethink refugee camps as urban areas destined to last, and even as models that could potentially be exported.


Leone Contini, Il Corno Mancante/The Missing Horn, 2017-18
. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini

Archivio Fotografico castello Sforzesco. Photo: That’s contemporary


Leone Contini, Il Corno Mancante/The Missing Horn (video still), 2017-18



Leone Contini, Il Corno Mancante/The Missing Horn (video still), 2017-18


Monte Stella is an artificial hill created using the debris from the bombings of Milan during WWII. The ethnographic collections of the Castello Sforzesco were destroyed by the attack. Some works were recovered and moved to the Mudec Museum of Cultures. Many others remain buried in the artificial mountain. Among the works of art recovered and restored is the sculpture of the buddhist deity Yamāntaka (the Death Destroyer). Its left horn, however, is now lost. It is probably still buried somewhere in Monte Stella along with several other fragments from the sculpture. This representation of a divinity is a museum object for most of us but for the Buddhist communities living in Milan, the sculpture is still imbued with spiritual life. The Yamāntaka is one of the many “exotic” artefacts that were removed from their original contexts during the colonialist period, with the promise that Europeans would take “better” care of them. And yet, it became one of the casualties of a war between European powers.

The video and the pile of rubble in the exhibition space evoke Contini’s impossible search for the missing horn in Monte Stella, using the small artificial mountains as an archeological site. Il Corno Mancante/The Missing Horn is part of a series of performances that act as healing gestures and symbolise opportunities to bring together not only fragments of artefacts but also different cultures and memories.

More images from the REAL_ITALY exhibition:


Nicolò Degiorgis, Le Baron Chéper, 2017



Nicolò Degiorgis, Le Baron Chéper, 2017. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini


Flavio Favelli, Serie Imperiale (Zara e RSI), 2018
. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITALY. ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini


Anna Franceschini, CARTABURRO (video still), 2017


Anna Franceschini, CARTABURRO, 2017. At MUSEO DEL MAXXI. Opening of the exhibition REAL_ITAL ©Musacchio, Ianniello & Pasqualini

REAL_ITALY was curated by Eleonora Farina and Matteo Piccioni. The exhibition remains open at the MAXXI in Rome until 26 July 2020.

Related story: Future farming. How migrants can help Italian cuisine adjust to climate disruptions.

Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium by Lucy Jane Santos.

Publisher Icon Books writes: Of all the radioactive elements discovered at the end of the 19th century, it was radium that became the focus of both public fascination and entrepreneurial zeal.

Half Lives tells the fascinating, curious, sometimes macabre story of the element through its ascendance as a desirable item – a present for a queen, a prize in a treasure hunt, a glow-in- the-dark dance costume – to its role as a supposed cure-all in everyday 20th-century life, when medical practitioners and business people (reputable and otherwise) devised ingenious ways of commodifying the new wonder element, and enthusiastic customers welcomed their radioactive wares into their homes.

Shortly after radium was isolated, an atmosphere of enthusiasm and inventiveness took over Europe and the U.S. It was the early 1900s, radioactivity was revered, radium was celebrated in poems. Scientists, medical practitioners and entrepreneurs -some well-meaning other totally unscrupulous- launched treatments and products that now sound hysterically dangerous. Radium could do anything. It could enhance sexual virility and conquer baldness. It was in condoms, toothpaste, corsets, hair tonics, infant food, creams that gave you a glowing complexion, products that provided “abundant physical fitness” (whatever that meant) and fluids that promised to cure cancer “in all forms, locations and stages.” In the early 20th century, New Yorkers could even buy golf balls filled with radioactive materials that ensured a “high degree radiant energy” and a longer ball fly (the idea of radioactive golf balls was resurrected the 1950s with atomic golf balls that were easy to locate with the help of a Geiger counter.)

I’m particularly fond of William Thomas Green Morton’s early 20th century “liquid sunshine therapy” which combined radium, water and light, a distant precursor of Trump’s light and disinfectant coronavirus treatment.

Radithor, an early “energy drink” containing radioactive radium. It was advertised as a cure-all medicine for fatigue, arthritis, neuritis and other ailments. John B. Carnett/Bonnier Cor/via Getty Images

NUTEX Radium Condoms, 1940’s (via)

Most of those quack remedies and bizarre objects were readily available. You could buy them at your local chemist, in department stores or even order them by postal mail. Unsurprisingly, there was no safety regulation regarding the transport of radioactive material. Good thing then that due to the prohibitive cost of radium at the time, most of these products contained neither radium neither any of its weaker derivatives.

The first radon spa in the world opened in 1906 in St Joachimsthal, now Jáchymov in Czech Republic. St Joachimsthal was the number 1 source of radium in the world. And radon, a decay product of radium, was a cheap way to get a bit of that radium magic.

Realising that the water surrounding the mine could be radioactive, the town capitalised on the interest of the use of radium in medical treatments and started promoting its water cures. The Radium Palace Hotel offered treatments using water pumped directly from the mines. Elsewhere in the city, you could buy radium soaps, radium cigars and radium pastries. Other towns across Europe soon followed suit. In Bath, for example, you could drink radioactive water, find radium bread in a bakery and bring home bottled mineral waters.

Radium therapy was hailed as a medical wonder. Scientists experimented on themselves, demonstrating that “if radium could burn or kill skin it could destroy tumours”. Burns from radium healed quickly. It made operations superfluous, eliminated tumours, solved all sorts of dermatological problems, could cure blindness, impotence, arthritis, depression, insanity. A wife-beater was said to have been cured of both cancer and violence. In 1896, some breast cancer patients were being offered a course of 18 x-ray treatments. Unfortunately, neither the doctors nor their patients knew about the long-term damage of repeated or prolonged exposure to radium.

Man with neck cancer receiving radiotherapy treatment from a Flint radium “bomb”, designed in 1934 for four hospitals in London, England. Photo

Caradium Hair Restorer. Photo: Medium

After a series of scandals, a steady stream of dying radiologists, a couple of atomic bombs and efforts by medical associations to warn against quack treatments, radioactivity started becoming a subject of community alarm. It was not immediate in the US which remained enamoured with all things atomic for a while after WWII but science fiction books started featuring irradiated monsters, Hollywood movies began to reflect on the destructive side of the substance, companies closed, fashion changed, medical thought moved on and by the end of 1940s, radioactivity became associated with toxicity.

Half Lives is both joyful and harrowing. Throughout its pages, Lucy Jane Santos gives life to a rich material panorama made of adverts, objects, miracle cures and the interplay between scientific discoveries and popular culture.

In the epilogue, the author explains the many ways that radium is still haunting us. Buildings and production sites associated with radioactive elements are still in use. Their occupants often unaware of the prior use of the edifices. In 2010, The Guardian revealed that portions of the 2012 Olympic park in London built on land used to be occupied by companies producing glow-in-the-dark paint for watches and clocks during WWII.

And low-level radiation still has supporters who believe in its health benefits. Jáchymov, for example, continues to offer radon cures. Elderly people still bathe in the spa waters at Schlema, which contain low levels of radon, convinced that it can cure their rheumatisms. And if you’re not inclined to travel, then you can buy a small bottle of a Radium Bromatum homoeopathic remedy.

And then, of course, there’s the fact that pretty much everything and everyone is naturally radioactive.

More images, objects and facts I discovered in the book:

Women painting alarm clock faces at the Ingersoll factory in January 1932. Known as the “Radium Girls,” these workers were putting their health at risk by lip-pointing the brush and ingesting radioactive radium. Daily Herald Archive/SSPL via Getty Images

By the mid-1920, the popularity of radium was beginning to wane. Glow-in-the-dark wristwatches, however, were still very fashionable. Women hired to paint the faces and dials on glow-in-the-dark wristwatches used their mouth to get a fine point. Because the radium paint was tasteless and odourless, the Radium Girls didn’t suspect how dangerous their job was. Until many of them started suffering from anemia, bone fractures and necrosis of the jaw. Some even died. Amelia Maggia was one of them. When she died in 1922, at 24 years old, her death was attributed to ulcerative stomachitis and syphilis. The U.S. Radium Corporation had insisted that its product was safe. Her body was exhumed in 1927 to be autopsied. Her death was confirmed to be radiation poisoning. Meanwhile, employees were asking for compensation for their medical and dental bills. Many court cases later, the Radium Dial was finally forced to pay compensations.

The scandal of the Radium Girls led to the scientific understanding of the way radium accumulates in organs. It also led to better health and safety standards for workers inside and outside the radium industry. Furthermore, the right of individual workers to sue for damages from corporations due to labor abuse was granted as a result of the case.

The hand of Clarence Dally, Thomas Edison’s assistant, was covered in lesions after countless hours of intense X-ray radiation experiments. He died of a cancer caused by radiation exposure at the age of 39. Edison wouldn’t have anything to do with it when he realised what happened

Wilhelm Röntgen developed the first X-ray photograph in 1895. As he was experimenting with a cathode tube that emitted different frequencies of electromagnetic energy, the physicist noticed that some appeared to penetrate solid objects and expose sheets of photographic paper. He called the strange rays x-rays and used them to photograph his wife Anna Bertha’s hand. His discovery revolutionised the diagnosis and treatment of injuries and illnesses.

Velvet-lined case of an radiendocrinator, which was intended to be placed in a special jockstrap. Photo: Carl Willis

Marie Skłodowska Curie, the Polish-French chemist discovered both radioactivity and the radioactive elements radium and polonium, achievements that won her two Nobel prizes. Time Life Pictures/The LIFE Picture Collection/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

One of Curie’s mobile units used by the French Army. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie (via)

The musical play Piff! Paff! Pouf! on Broadway featured a piece of music called the Radium Dance played in the glow-in-the-dark atmosphere. The production probably used phosphorescent paint rather than the very costly radium. Photo via The Society for Theatre Research

I finally found the time to catch up with the recordings of the MoneyLab conference weekly stream of panels, conversations and presentations. MoneyLab, an event usually held in Amsterdam, gives the stage to critical thinkers, artists, researchers, activists and tech-enthusiasts in search of other economies and financial discourses for a fair society. This year, Aksioma held an extra edition of the event in Ljubljana. I was watching the video recordings one after the other, learning something new and interesting from each of them. And then I reached episode 6: Tax Havens: Normalized Grand Theft. That one was so engrossing and informative that i started to scribble snippets of the conversation. The frantic writing quickly turned into a blog post. Obviously, I’d recommend you stop here and watch the video. Come back if you fancy a (slightly!) more condensed version of the exchange, plenty of links and a few photos.

Tax Havens: Normalized Grand Theft

For this dive into new forms of financial delinquency, investigative artists were talking to Anuška Delić, an investigative journalist and the founder of Oštro, Center for Investigative Journalism in the Adriatic Region. As for the artists they were the Demystification Committee who set up their own global corporate structure with offshore ambitions and RYBN.ORG who make it possible for members of the public to explore the physical and mundane dimensions of offshore finance in their own neighbourhoods.

Delić explained how difficult it is to write about tax haven. Members of the media often believe that the public will find the issue too complex to understand, that they’ll dismiss the problem as just another form of tax optimisation or as a tedious issue that doesn’t concern them. Many of the industries running this planet are based on tax havens, transnational crime relies on them, even politically exposed people use them. It feels like the whole tax haven network is “too big to fail.” Tax havens are often supported by a web of services (legal services, company registration offices, etc.) that not only normalises tax havens but also widens the conceptual gap between the public and the problem. The consequences of tax havens, however, are real and far-reaching for each of us: millions of euros evaporate and never contribute to public services, healthcare and a country’s budget.

Even some of the transparency mechanisms put into place after the scandal of the Panama Papers are often little more than rubber stamps that further obfuscate the tax evader behind a simulacrum of transparency. COVID-19 has brought to light how companies in many EU countries are benefiting from the effects of the pandemic, selling goods to governments, receiving help from governments, offshore companies popping up everywhere. Some countries are trying to curb the phenomenon by making a list of the tax havens. If a company is linked to one of the tax havens on the list, it is not eligible for COVID-19 government financial assistance. However, as Delić added, the European tax havens are not on that list. Which, again, is normalising the problem.

Can art expose and disrupt these mechanisms? Can it contribute to the public debate? That’s what RYBN and the Demystification Committee set up to do:

Demystification Committee, Offshore Spring/Summer 2018

Demystification Committee, Offshore Investigation Vehicle, 2017-2018

The Demystification Committee is a group of artists whose work “studies the intensities of late capitalism, engaging with its networks, interfaces and excesses.”

The Offshore Investigation Vehicle, on view at Aksioma until a few days ago, was a small but functional international corporation structure they set up to explore offshore practices from the inside, by directly engaging with the service providers and other actors across a number of tax havens.

The “vehicle” consisted of a company in the UK, a company in the Seychelles and a bank account in Puerto Rico. The artists were the official directors of the UK company. Once it was set up, they ran a series of focus groups and performances to explore different uses of it. Members of the public were also offered the possibility to become shareholders of The Offshore Investigation Vehicle. 53 people joined in. At the first general meeting, the shareholders and the Demystification Committee agreed to initiate two operations: set up a tax avoidance scheme through the online sale of a collection of beachwear (a reference to the visual tropes of offshore practices) and launch The Offshore Economist, a digital publication focusing on the tricks involved in the practice of offshore corporate finance.

Demystification Committee, Offshore Matters. Exhibition at Aksioma Project Space. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma

Demystification Committee, Offshore Matters. Exhibition at Aksioma Project Space. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma

Demystification Committee, Offshore Matters. Exhibition at Aksioma Project Space. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma

The project played with aspects of the otherwise inaccessible world of offshore corporate finance in order to challenge the narrow tax justice discussion and the usual imaginary of offshore finance.

As the artists had a small budget for the project, they could not afford to hire a law firm to help them set up the company. Instead, their main “consultancy” was the OffshoreCorpTalk forum where they found a provider that offered a cheap combination of offshore company and bank account. The first documents the artists received from the provider contained a number of spelling mistakes, an incorrect address and other errors. It turned out that issuing certificates with errors is standard practice, it’s a precaution to protect the actors involved.

They gave the example of Arron Banks. During an investigation related to Cambridge Analytica, the founder of Leave EU was questioned about the multiple versions of his name appearing in legal documents. He claimed that the misspellings and wrong names were a matter of simple mistakes. It was just a bit sloppy.

The Demystification Committee wanted to explore the scope of making these mistakes…

In order to have credit cards they could use to operate their offshore activity, the artists opened a company bank account in Puerto Rico. They took advantage of the confusion between minuscule L and capital I in Helvetica and wrote their names Francesco TachLmL and OlLver SmLth on the documents. They assumed that there would be some checks and basic forms of validation but the bank sent them bank cards were their names were spelt Francesco TachLmL and OlLver SmLth instead of Oliver Smith and Francesco Tacchini.

Demystification Committee, Offshore Investigation Vehicle, 2017-2018

In the documents submitted to Companies House (the UK’s registrar of companies), they explained that they would be using various loopholes to minimise the payment of their taxes. The artists wanted to see how the official organisation would react to that admission. Companies House wrote back saying they were unable to accept their documents. Ironically, the reason for the refusal had nothing to do with the content of the letter. Company House had simply found that the text was not legible enough. DC resubmitted the same document, this time with more legible text and the registrar accepted it. No question asked.

The whole offshore operation cost the artists a grand total of 2000 euros.

The DC also published a hardcover book that documents the process of setting up The Offshore Investigation Vehicle. The volume is accessible online.

RYBN, The Great Offshore, Basel, 2018

RYBN, The Great Offshore: Offshore Tour in Marseille

The second collective invited to share their investigation into offshore finance was RYBN.ORG. Their extra-disciplinary investigations explore the complex relationships between technologies and economics. RYBN’s talk focused on The Great Offshore, an ongoing inquiry into offshore banking networks and the offshore phenomenon.

The project started as a field investigation. The first step was to make a list of notable tax heavens to visit: The City of London, Jersey and Guernsey, Dublin, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Bahamas, Caymans, Delaware, Malta, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Singapore and Hong Kong, maybe Jakarta.

RYBN then built an open source situationist prototype to conduct their research: the Offshore Tour Operator, a portable GPS fuelled by the offshore leaks data. Armed with this tool, they (and anyone who participates to their workshops) visit the physical locations associated with leaks in order to confront them with the database and visualise what offshore activity looks like from the ground.

The project adopts several forms. I’m particularly fond of the Offshore Encyclopedia, an online index of the singular manifestation of offshore banking. Its folklore, narratives, figures, companies, icons, etc.

Other related phenomena that the project investigates include golden passports, seasteading, Freeport and other transformations of the art market, the Luxembourg space resources program and other space extractivist initiatives popping all over the world and the Virtual Financial Assets, the rebranding of cryptocurrencies within the institutional spheres, etc. There’s a book in preparation and i can’t wait to get my hands on a copy!

RYBN, The Great Offshore, Basel, 2018

RYBN, The Great Offshore, Basel, 2018

The findings of RYBN research have examined 3 assumptions about offshore practices:

First assumption: Offshore = secret
Since the 2008 crisis, many studies, articles and books have cast aside the veil of secrecy around offshore practices. RYBN mentioned books such as Offshore: Tax Havens and the Rule of Global Crime by Alain Deneault, Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson and The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens by Gabriel Zucman.

Various scandals, affairs and trials have also played a role in making the problem more conspicuous: the US vs UBS in 2009, the Wildenstein trials in 2017, the Cahuzac affair in France, Europe vs Apple in 2016, etc. Leaks and whistleblowing have brought further scrutiny: Bradley Birkenfeld (UBS), Rudolf Elmer (Julius Bär), Stéphanie Gibaud (UBS), the Offshore leaks in 2013, the Lux leaks, Swiss leaks, Panama Papers, Malta Files, Paradise Papers, Daphne Caruana Galizia‘s investigation, the Daphne project and many more.

A number of art projects have further contributed to exposing the problem: Taxodus and Liquid Citizenship by Femke Herregraven, Citizen Ex by James Bridle, Loophole for All by Paolo Cirio, Duty Free Art by Hito Steyerl, etc.

From all these leaks, works and reports, the public has learnt who the architects of the offshore banking are: UBS, Crédit Suisse, Société Générale, BNP, Deutsche Bank, KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Ernst & Young. We’ve also learnt the identity of the beneficiaries: Amazon, Apple, Fiat, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Donald Trump, Starbucks, etc.

Offshore banking is not a marginal, secret system. It is at the heart of global capitalism.

Second assumption: Offshore = elsewhere
There is a gap between the phenomenon and its representation fuelled by the colonial imaginary. The word “offshore” evokes images of palm trees and beaches. RYBN see it as their job as artists to close this gap of representation and challenge the way we represent the offshore phenomenon. As their Offshore Tour Operator workshops and exercises demonstrate, illegal offshore “optimisation” is also rooted in the streets of Basel, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels, etc.

Third assumption: Offshore = complex
RYBN quoted a passage from Gabriel Zucman‘s introductory text of The Hidden Wealth of Nations:

“If we believe most of the commentators, the financial arrangements among tax havens rival one another in their complexity. In the face of such virtuosity, citizens are helpless, nation-states are powerless, even the experts are overpowered. So the general conclusion is that any approach to change is impossible.
In reality, the arrangements made by bankers and accountants, shown in the pages that follow, are often quite simple. Some have been functioning unchanged for close to a century.”

RYBN agree with the economist. For them, the model is fairly simple, it’s a matter of adding layer upon layer of obfuscation. Some models of tax avoidance are well documented too: there’s the Dutch Sandwich, the Double Irish, the Singapore Sling, the Bermuda Black Hole, etc.

Offshore is “the new normal”. RYBN believes that offshore is an embodiment of neo-illiberalism, a regime working from the offshore structure and transforming into something that is not neoliberalism but has become much worse.

Notes from the Q&A that followed the discussion:

Maruša Babnik, a corporate tax advocate, observed that when we report on these practices we also unintentionally promote them. Secret tax deals increased dramatically in Luxembourg after the Luxleaks scandal broke.

Lawyer and cryptocurrency specialist Žiga Perovič asked about the technical side of the problem and how much technology is making it easier and cheaper to set up a tax evasion scheme. RYBN answered that there are patents for automatic systems of tax avoidance which were, ironically, validated by various state institutions. They also explained how some companies like KPMG and E&Y hijack the blockchain and sell it as a solution for future greater transparency when in fact they are using blockchain technology against its initial purpose, deepening opacity and paying no mind to public social good. The links between technology and banking are made even more tangible at the Museum of Business History and Technology in Delaware there is a museum of Technique in business.

I’ll close this report with The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, a documentary recommended by the Demystification Committee during the exchanges:

The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire, 2017

Previously: Staying Alive. A “wunderkammer” of disaster solutions, César Escudero Andaluz. So many ways to mess up with surveillance capitalism, Offshore tour operators, lithium landscapes and other things i discovered at MUTEK_IMG, Economia, a festival on economy without the economists, Flash crashes. Glitches in the trading system, Dataghost 2. The kabbalistic computational machine, etc.

Check out also ML8: Offshoring and Other Magic Tricks of Global Finance – An Interview with RYBN.

Last week, i published my notes from Tax Havens: Normalized Grand Theft, the sixth episode of the MoneyLab online conference organized by Aksioma in collaboration with Kino Šiška and the Institute of Network Cultures. I’m back with a summary of episode 8: Value extraction and the workforce of the cryptocene.

MoneyLab gathers thinkers, artists, researchers, activists and geeks who question mainstream financial discourses and share their ideas about how other economies could contribute to a fairer society. The report of the whole conference is already online and i’ve enjoyed every single episode of the event but the two sessions that featured only artists were always going to be my favourite.

The episode dedicated to the workforce of the cryptocene was orchestrated by writer, researcher and curator Aude Launay. As for the artists she had invited to the discussion, they were: Martín Nadal and César Escudero Andaluz who talked about their intricate and fascinating Economy, Knowledge and Surveillance in the Age of the Cryptocene diagram; Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb from Telekommunisten put a Marxist spin on Bitcoin; Sašo Sedlaček introduced us to a cryptocurrency platform that celebrates idleness; Paul Seidler and Max Hampshire from Nascent presented a blockchain-based economy platform designed to reward the reading and commenting of critical content.

𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗲𝘆𝗟𝗮𝗯 #𝟴. 𝗠𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗙𝗮𝗶𝗿 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆. Value extraction and the workforce of the cryptocene

In her brilliant opening of the session, Aude Launay reminded us that “in the Western European region, work doesn’t seem to have been socially valued until relatively late—around the 18th century—but has then been largely glorified by the nascent modern education system of the 19th century. An activity traditionally devalued, or even at times condemned, since antiquity, work was then opposed to the spiritual meaning of life (and actually, to military activities too). Human beings were to find self-fulfilment with otium (meditation, reflection, poetry and politics…)—or war­—, and not with its negation, negotium (trade, business…).

After centuries of direct workers exploitation, the late 20th century saw otium and negotium merge in a new knowledge economy that extracted value from intellectual and cultural work. What some view as a path towards a sort of ‘dotCommunism’ unfortunately mostly led to a ‘data is the new oil’ state of mind.”

Martín Nadal and César Escudero Andaluz, Economy, Knowledge and Surveillance in the Age of the Cryptocene (detail)

Martín Nadal and César Escudero Andaluz, the first artists to take the web-stage, walked us though some of the sections of Economy, Knowledge and Surveillance in the Age of the Cryptocene, a historical diagram published in APRJA, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal about machine research. The work looks at how crypto surveillance, mass intellectual property and behavioural algorithm are constantly counterbalanced (and vice versa obviously) by hacker culture, crypto-anarchism, free p2p movements, cypherpunks & bitcoin. The work also exposes the consequence of mining processes: ecological footprint and crypto colonialism.

The document is dense in facts, milestones, protagonists and connections. Once you’ve entered its maze of information, it’s hard to extract yourself from it.

Nadal and Escudero Andaluz‘s artistic practice is not interested in creating works that exploit blockchain mechanisms in order to add layers of speculation and mercantilisation to the technology. Instead, they use art to open up critical debates about the blockchain, point to the different paradoxes and interpretations of mining processes and study how natural resources can be transformed into value.

Nascent with Penny Rafferty, Ishtar Gate

Nascent with Penny Rafferty, Ishtar Gate

Nascent is “an EXIT TECH production studio investigating alternative infrastructures.” The EXIT TECH idea is inspired by Albert Hirschman’s
Exit, Voice and Loyalty, an essay that describes the conceptual ultimatum that confronts consumers and citizens in the face of deteriorating quality of goods or service: either exit or voice.

Last year, the artists collaborated with Penny Rafferty to launch Ishtar Gate, a platform that featured a series of critical texts written by the critic and theorist. Readers were invited to respond, comment and further contribute to Rafferty’s thoughts. In exchange for their participation, they were rewarded with Ishtar tokens that could be redeemed at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. The tokens gave them access to studio visits, entry tickets, gallery dinners, etc.

The work intended to build new forms of engagement with institutions but also to remove the cognitive overhead that is associated with people interacting with novel crypto-economic projects, by allowing the crypto element to become passive and non-intimidating and thus facilitate a new type of cultural microeconomy.

Nascent also presented Sprawl System, a gamified exercise based upon mathematician John Horton Conway’s Game of Life (1970), a zero-player zero-interaction game determined by its initial state. 

Sašo Sedlaček, Om for Coin at Aksioma Project Space, 6 November 2019. Photo: Domen Pal / Aksioma

Sašo Sedlašek: Oblomo. Artist talk by Sašo Sedlaček at Moderna galerija, Ljubljana, 15 January 2020

Artist and professor Sašo Sedlaček gave a very entertaining analysis of the value of human idleness.

COVID-19 gave/gives some of us a bittersweet taste of what forced human inactivity is like but, whether we liked the experience or not, it was a godsend for the environment. Even before the lockdown, projects related to the demise of human labour were doing the rounds: universal basic income, shorter working hours, human obsolescence caused by increasingly smarter and cheaper machines, etc. But how about wealth? How do we maintain local and global exchange of goods when no one is working? How do we buy stuff from robots and AI? Sedlaček doesn’t believe it can work without some sort of market economy. His new work suggests that since all aspects of our lives are now monetisable, then maybe our free time can be too and that’s exactly where Oblomo comes in! The web application rewards you for doing nothing.

Sašo Sedlaček, Oblomo

The Oblomo adventure started in November 2019 when the artist set up an Om for Coin performance at Aksioma. Three performers meditated in front of a live audience while an AI rig recorded their meditation into the blockchain. That evening, they created first block of Oblomo coins. That amount is now stored in a public wallet where it is reserved for everyone to start mining. The longer you stay idle in front of the webcam of your phone or computer, the more coins you amass. Next month, the Oblomo market place will also give you the opportunity to spend your sloth coin for items and services. The crypto mining method adopted is eco-friendly: instead of using the classical proof of work, Oblomo uses machine learning detection to prove the users’ total lack of activity.

The name of the cryptocurrency is inspired by Oblomov, a Russian novel published in 1859 by Ivan Goncharov. The main character of the novel is Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a young nobleman who raises his indolent attitude towards life to an art form, conducting his daily business from his bedroom.

The last speakers of the evening were Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb from Telekommunisten (best name ever for an artist/hacktivist collective.) Kleiner is a software developer and the author of The Telekommunist Manifesto. Gottlieb is an artist, thinker, curator and the author of Digital Materialism.

Their latest project is The Haket, a Marxist-inspired cryptocurrency. This piece of software art is intended to insert the importance of the labour theory of value into the cryptocurrency space. 200 years ago, classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo established that all value comes from human labour. According to their theories, Bitcoin has zero value because it is not a claim on anything. You can’t pay your taxes with it, it doesn’t bear interests, it’s not a claim to the profits of a corporation, it is not securitised with anything… As a financial instrument, its value is thus zero. Even the Austrian economic school, which tends to inform the Bitcoin community, agrees that the value of Bitcoin is also zero because it has no collateralised value.

In his article titled The Face Value of Bitcoin: Proof of Work and the Labour Theory of Value, Kleiner discussed how the true value of bitcoin is zero because it is decoupled from the amount of labour that goes into producing bitcoins:

Bitcoin can not be rational. Its face value can not be expressed as a consistent ratio with a supply of useful commodities. It is irrational by design, just like Bitcoin would have zero value from the point of view of modern finance, it would also have zero value from the point of view of Austrian theory. Both views consider the entire exchange rate of Bitcoin to be a speculative bubble, but neither can elaborate on how this bubble came to exist.

The only school of economics in which Bitcoin doesn’t have a zero value is the Marxian one. According to its theory, value comes from the amount of labour embedded in the cryptocurrency. In this case, it’s the computing power of the resources used to produce the block. Another condition for value is that there is a demand and there clearly is a demand for Bitcoin.

In the Haket, the amount of hashes produced is a direct ratio of the number of hashes required. In that sense, the Haket is a rational cryptocurrency.

The coding part of the Haket, the artists explained, is dramatically simple because the bitcoin algorithm already gives you an approximation of the computing power used: it’s called the difficulty. The amount of Bitcoins created when a block is mined is the block reward. The block reward in the Haket model mirrors the difficulty, which is the opposite of what the Bitcoin algorithm does. By driving the block reward directly from the amount of work being done, the Haket will act like other commodities. If more miners enter the system, they will create more supply which will bring the price down and the market will regulate the price like it regulates the price of any commodity on the market. Again, this is the exact opposite of what Bitcoin does.

Telekommunisten is not a fintech startup and they have no intention to operate a currency network. The Haket is an art project that attempts to illustrate how a cryptocurrency tied to material conditions would work and how it could offer a solution to the problem of the volatility of the price. They are also working on a Haket version for Ehtereum. The principles are the same: forking Ethereum and removing arbitrary distortions.

Previously: Value extraction and the workforce of the cryptocene and César Escudero Andaluz. So many ways to mess up with surveillance capitalism.
Conference report.

The Contamination of the Earth. A History of Pollutions in the Industrial Age, by historians Francois Jarrige and Thomas Le Roux.

Description by MIT Press: The authors describe how, from 1750 onward, in contrast to the early modern period, polluted water and air came to be seen as inevitable side effects of industrialization, which was universally regarded as beneficial. By the nineteenth century, pollutants became constituent elements of modernity. The authors trace the evolution of these various pollutions, and describe the ways in which they were simultaneously denounced and permitted. The twentieth century saw new and massive scales of pollution: chemicals that resisted biodegradation, including napalm and other defoliants used as weapons of war; the ascendancy of oil; and a lifestyle defined by consumption. In the 1970s, pollution became a political issue, but efforts—local, national, and global—to regulate it often fell short. Viewing the history of pollution though a political lens, the authors also offer lessons for the future of the industrial world.

John Bulmer, The Black Country

Société de St Gobain. Sept usines. Engrais chimiques. Atelier Hugo d’Alési (photo: BNF)

How about a harrowing but incredibly interesting book to start the week?

The Contamination of the Earth chronicles almost 300 years of environmental crime, as well as the resistance to it and the industrial efforts to make acceptable and -in some cases- conceal toxic abuses.

There used to be a time when public health came before economic development. If you were a tanner and threw waste in the river, you’d get a fine. If your workshop filled the neighbourhood with “miasmas”, it would be pushed outside of the town.

In the early 19th Century, under the pressures of the nascent industrialisation and the wonders of its achievements, attitudes changed and pollutions became a necessary evil. Chimneys, machines and chemicals were not just nuisances, they also denoted prosperity, progress, employment. As for nature, it was boundless. Up for conquest and plunder.

As a result, pollutions became constituents elements of modernity. Its ills on water streams, landscapes and atmosphere, however, were getting increasingly decried. Factory neighbours, workers, thinkers, doctors and scientists raised their voice in protest of the number of toxic substances released. So were artists. Romantic writers, impressionist painters and poets denounced and represented the extent of the damage.

Ernest Jean Delahaye, L’usine à gaz de Courcelles (Gas factory in Courcelles), 1884

William H. Rease, Harrison Brothers’ White Lead Works and Chemical Laboratory, Philadelphia, 1847 (photo: WDL)

20th would have to reckon with the increase of contaminants as a result of wars, globalisation and mass consumerism. The chapters on the effects that WWI, WWII, the Cold War and the Vietnam War had on ecosystems were particularly distressing. Each conflict brought more disinhibition, more reasons to unleash chemical, explosive or nuclear weapons. The war had become industrial and so was the scale of its destructions. At the end of hostilities, the infrastructures and weapons didn’t fall into obsolescence, they were converted for civilian use. Chemical gases used in fighting, for example, would reinvent themselves as tools to sanitise material, to disinfect, control pests, etc.

With every protest and damning medical repost, industrialists’ strategies to deny and obfuscate reality become shrewder. Industrial nuisances were blamed on weather, topography, people’s sensibilities. Problems were outsourced to poorer countries, waste was dumped in high sea. Powerful lobbies emerged, close relationships were weaved with local authorities. Technical improvement became the modus operandi to manage nuisances. Sometimes, the innovations did wonder. More often than not, however, any reduction achieved in one form of pollution produced secondary effects: either displacing the source of nuisance or producing the dreaded rebound effect. The most revolting strategy employed by the heavy polluters was acquired directly from the tobacco industry: generating scientific ignorance in the mainstream discourse about the deleterious effects of smoking. They hired their own experts to spread doubts about the certainty of scientific research and challenge evidence. I learnt in the book that there’s a name for discipline that studies this phenomenon of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt: it’s called agnotology.

The book stops its historical research into industrial depredation in the early 1970s. After the 70s, everything accelerated and all the phenomena the authors describe look like a long rehearsal for what we live today. We still fail to see the world as a holistic unit, we still see technology as the best path to salvation and, as concepts such as “sustainable development” demonstrate, we’re still not ready to challenge the very heart of the productive system. As for yesterday’s persistent organic pollutants, they are still widely present in our environments but hundreds of thousands of new, often more insidious ones are being developed with the help of bio and nanotechnology.

Defoliant spray run, part of Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War by UC-123B Provider aircraft, 1960s

Pasha Cas, Dance, in Temirtau, Kazakhstan. Photo: Olya Koto

There are many reasons why I’d recommend you get this book. The first one is that The Contamination of the Earth convincingly demonstrates that environmental hazards not only threaten the health of our planet, they also deepen inequalities and disparities between North and South, between richer and poorer communities.

Reason number two: instead of focusing on the usual polluting suspects (Western Europe and the United States), the book attempts to give an overview of the history of pollutions across the world, drawing parallels between what happened in France or the UK and what happens in China, Russia or Japan.

Reason number three: although the authors paint a rather bleak picture of what we’ve inflicted on this planet over the past few centuries, they articulate with great clarity the political, social and economic processes that have paved the way for this rush into the abyss. If we want to get out of this mess, we need to understand how we got there in the first place and ensure that we don’t reproduce the same mistakes and adopt the same inadequate solutions and fatalism again and again. Pollution is a violent monster but it is a monster that can be tamed with the help of new imaginaries and new alliances with the living.

One last reason I loved this book is that it’s very well written. The authors juggled with an impressive amount of data, papers and studies. Yet, their text remains compelling and pleasant to read.

When the heart of the Potter rejoices! Factory chimneys and pottery kilns belching pollution into the skies over Stoke on Trent, UK (photo: Dwyne)

Richard Jefferies, After London; or, Wild England. London: Duckworth & Co, 1905

After London is regarded as an early example of what we would today call the “eco-apocalyptic” novel.

John Bulmer, View over the Potteries, Stoke on Trent, 1963

Camille Pissarro, The Pont Boieldieu in Rouen, sunset, foggy weather, 1896

Related stories: Paleo-energy: a counter-history of energy, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, The Shock of the Anthropocene. Or what does it mean to have the future of the planet into our hands?, Paula Humberg: making visible the unseen victims of climate change, Back Water: What should be classified as “wilderness” in a post-industrial world?, Plastic Capitalism. Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste, etc.

We’ve been processing, refining and commercialising it for hundreds of years. We’ve turned it into a key actor of our nutrition, binged on it and used taxes to reduce its consumption. But what if sugar actually had the upper hand over us? What if sugar had domesticated us? This is the kind of questions that Nadine Botha asks us to consider. Her project Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness takes us on a journey across history, cultures, economy, geopolitics, bodies and minds with sugar as our guide. Or rather as the grey eminence that stealthily engineered much of the world as we know it today.

Nadine Botha, Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness (screenshot of the website), 2019-2020

Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness “aspires to develop an alternative history of the rise of modernity and the spread of colonialism from the perspective of sugar itself.” Because Botha’s radically non-anthropocentric exercise allows us to understand how sugar has not only materially built today’s reality but also neurobiologically ­shaped our perception of it, it fits perfectly into the research behind (UN)REAL, an exhibition curated by William Myers for Science Gallery Rotterdam. The show challenges our understanding of what is real when so much of what we experience is digital or influenced by the changing chemistry and architecture of our brain.

I spent half an afternoon clicking all over the Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness website. Going from “Triangular Trade” to “Deep Decolonisation” and meeting Adam Smith, Charles Manson and Pharaohs in the process. I learnt a lot but I still wanted to know more about the project. So I contacted Nadine Botha. She is a research designer preoccupied with how unseen systems are shaping important aspects of our daily lives and she kindly answered my questions:

Nadine Botha, Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness, 2019-2020

Hi Nadine! Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness attempts to re-imagine human history from a non-anthropocentric perspective. What does the sugar-centric perspective bring to our understanding of history and society?

The intention behind looking at human history from the non-anthropocentric perspective of sugar is to invite an awareness of reality and knowledge as being designed paradigms in which we operate.

Sugar is a particularly unique substance. On the one hand, the industrialised farming of sugar since the 15th-century has changed what we eat and how we enjoy it, as well as completely restructured our society, economy, ecology, culture, and even bodies and minds. On the other hand, it is the basis of carbon-based life — defined as a sugar metabolising organism. Given these two sides, sugar has very explicit and demonstrable material and abstract affects in the present-day modernity/coloniality designed environment, as well as being so microscopically and omnisciently vast as to baffle comprehension.

In other words, humans think we control it, but it could very well be that sugar controls humans. But what is human even?

Given that sugar production and consumption has grown exponentially over the past 500 years, concomitant with colonialism and the intellectual project of defining some organisms and people as human and others not, I got to wondering how much of this definition of what is “human” is based on sugar’s impact on increasing brain function and the senses, and the historical decisions that were made out of what appeared to be reason but might have been sugar addiction.

These days we are becoming more aware of the impact of sugar on our moods and mental capabilities, and slowly also how the big food and pharmaceutical industrial complexes rely on people — often people who because of coloniality are most socioeconomically disadvantaged — developing a sugar addiction to the detriment of their health. How does our perspective on history, the present and what is human change when we consider that sugar may have been the engineer behind this all?

By clicking through the website of the project, I encountered many terms, historical facts and ideas (deep colonisation, plantationocene, etc.) I didn’t know about. But you’re a designer, not an historian. So what made your approach to collecting and presenting information different from the one that an historian or sociologist would have adopted?

History is a designed narrative — perhaps it could even be argued that history is essential to the notion “human”. Out of an infinite set of occurrences, a specific set of occurrences are spun together through a seemingly linear, causal narrative that serves the interest of those who are constructing it. The project considers how the historical narrative that we take for granted as the factual reasons for present conditions could be completely different if we look at it from another perspective, that of sugar’s. Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness is an inquiry into how we can redesign our knowledge structures and lenses of reality, and how if we think differently about our past, new ways of thinking about the future can emerge. If we consider design to be a hinge between our material environment and the intangible realm of ideas, politics, beliefs, relations and emotions, could a different medium of conversation and knowledge building be designed? One of the biggest opportunities for a research designer is to bring knowledge that is otherwise academically silo-ed into conversation, so for instance while the research started in existing historical and sociological literature, it expanded to the realms of biochemistry, evolution, religion, folklore, philosophy and memes. A lot of things also cropped up through side projects — plantationocene I came across through Donna Haraway, and the link between happiness and Adam Smith through Sara Ahmed.

Once one starts looking, it can feel like everything can be traced back to sugar — even COVID19 has 10x higher change of adverse effects in people with Diabetes 2, caused by sugar addiction. This research was packaged in “granules” — the pink ones that you see on the website, and the posts shared on Instagram. These granules formed the basis of workshops in which people were invited to link granules by spinning their own historical yarns. These yarns — like deep colonisation — are the white granules on the website. At this stage the sources have been left ambiguous, to create an interplay between the believable and fanciful in the construction of a speculative alternative history. The yarns — like deep colonisation — are the white granules on the website, which has been conceived as a growing rhizome that represents an inconsistent, contradictory, wildly imaginative alternative history. Acting as a mirror, this speculative history demonstrates the inconsistent contradictory nature of our dominant narrative of history on which reality is based.

The information on the project page is organised in small clusters. What is the logic between and inside these clusters. Why not organise the information chronologically for example?

There’s a lot of revisionist historical work going on at the moment, to reposition people who by virtue of race, gender or sexuality have been written out of history. This is essential, however this project is less interested in maintaining the dominant historical narrative and filling in gaps, than in questioning the premises and structure of the dominant historical narrative. Why do we think history runs linearly from the past to the present? In physics the “arrow of time” states that the theoretical statements that describe events on a microscopic level remain true even if time is reversed, however what remains unsolved is why it appears otherwise on the macroscopic level. For many non-Western cultures, however, this is not an issue: history and time do not only run in one direction. When information is presented to us in a chronological linear format, we tend to assume that events act causally on each other, and that it is inevitable that one follows the next. Such a construction can very easily leave out key counter events and make events look more or less important than they were, and it is disempowering as it makes the present and future seem inevitable. The website hopes to jar people’s expected order of events and invite them to make their own interconnections between events.

Nadine Botha, Sugar A Cosmology Of Whiteness (screenshot from the instagram feed of the project)

Nadine Botha, Sugar A Cosmology Of Whiteness (screenshot from the instagram feed of the project)

I love the Columbus and Castro swap. How did you get to associate these two in this type of story? What is the name of this type of playful manipulation of history by the way? Retro speculative history? Alternate fiction?

The Columbus and Castro swap was one of the yarns that emerged from the workshops. In cinema, this genre might be called alt history. In design I like the term speculative alternative history as it plays into the speculative and critical design paradigms of inviting us to become more conscious of our present, and unlike cinema, not only proposes an alternative narrative but also explores an alternative methodology.

Nadine Botha X Neuhaus Sugar: A Cosmology at Hew Nieuwe Instituut

Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness also forms the basis of workshops. What happens during these workshops? What do participants get to do? What kind of futures do they imagine?

In the workshops, we start with becoming aware of sugar’s impact on our bodies and experiences, then expand that to our environment through somatic activities, automatic writing and discussion. People then use these insights to spin a yarn connecting a couple of granules. For me, the workshops are the project. The initial research into literature gives the workshops a starting basis, but it was very important to open up the research and conceptualisation process as soon as possible. Otherwise it’s not really imagining history from sugar’s point of view, it’s just imagining history from Nadine’s point of view. While the website rhizome presents an archive of the results, the real rhizome is the one that spreads between participants and their families and friends, and how they become aware of the ubiquity of sugar and coloniality, and designed nature of narratives and history.

Nadine Botha, Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness at Science Gallery at Erasmus MC in Rotterdam. Photo: Lisa Eileen

What do we see in the works you are exhibiting at the Science Gallery in Rotterdam? What do these images represent?

Three of the sugar granules have been materialised as windows or lenses. What seems like glass, is in fact sugar cooked and cooled in the same way that Hollywood makes special effects glass. The lenses are cracked and broken, just as what was perceived as modernity and reality is revealed to be coloniality and construction. The first one on the left shows the veins of a leaf or tree transposed on a cross-section of the brain, to evoke how sugar is the basic energy unit of life. The second one, in the middle, shows an Islamic pattern and a tea/coffee pot, pointing to how originally sugar came from the Middle East before being taken to the Americas by Columbus, where it met its beloved companions tea and coffee. The third one is a microscopic view pointing to the ubiquity of sugar: there is sugar in every (carbon-based) living being on the planet.

Nadine Botha, Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness, 2019-2020

How do these works (and Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness in general) fit in the theme of the exhibition (UN)REAL?

If fish can’t see the water, then for most people we can’t see the sugar. The world that we cannot imagine without capitalism is less than 500 years old — a blink of the eye for the 4.5-billion-year-old planet — and to a much larger degree than we realise, built on sugar. Sugar as a political motivation, bodily fuel, cultural concept and social aspiration. But what makes sugar so fascinating, is that it is not only “real” as in functioning in the objective plane, but also a genetic predisposition to seek out sweet food and a psychoactive substance that affects the functioning of our brain and body: enhancing our senses to make the external seem more real than the internal and as inducing responses like anxiety to this untethering, but also giving our brains the energy required for the incredible intellectual advances of the past 500 years. “Real” and “reality” are words that date back to the 15th-century, when the systems and arguments used to substantiate colonialism were being made. The common understanding of real is that it is objectively verifiable by an independent observer, but what that actually it is a social construct of agreeing to see the same thing. What if what we see is co-created with sugar? What if what we see is not only co-created with sugar, but also with all the other critters that make up our microbiome? What is real? What is unreal?

What’s next for Sugar?

The project is certainly a long-term project, and I would like to present the workshops in as many places as possible around the world in order to let the rhizomatic alternative history grow beyond the Western-centric realm. I’m particularly interested not only in taking the project to countries that were previously sugar colonies, but also back along the pre-colonial Silk Route through the Middle East to sugar’s origins in India and China to uncover the sugar history that has been erased by the colonial narrative. Until travel opens up again though, I am refiguring the workshop for the Zoom era and exploring institutional partnerships.

Thanks Nadine!

Sugar: A Cosmology of Whiteness is part of the exhibition (UN)REAL, an exhibition curated by William Myers for Science Gallery Rotterdam at Erasmus MC.

Cultures of Violence. Visual Arts and Political Violence, by Professor of political philosophy Ruth Kinna and Senior Lecturer in visual and material culture Gillian Whiteley.

Publisher Routledge writes: Investigating art practitioners’ responses to violence, this book considers how artists have used art practices to rethink concepts of violence and non-violence. It explores the strategies that artists have deployed to expose physical and symbolic violence through representational, performative and interventional means.

It examines how intellectual and material contexts have affected art interventions and how visual arts can open up critical spaces to explore violence without reinforcement or recuperation. Its premises are that art is not only able to contest prevailing norms about violence but that contemporary artists are consciously engaging with publics through their practice in order to do so. Contributors respond to three questions: how can political violence be understood or interpreted through art? How are publics understood or identified? How are art interventions designed to shift, challenge or respond to public perceptions of political violence and how are they constrained by them? They discuss violence in the everyday and at state level: the Watts’ Rebellion and Occupy, repression in Russia, domination in Hong Kong, the violence of migration and the unfolding art activist logic of the sigma portfolio.

Artur Barrio, Defl … Situação … +S+ … RUAS, 1969. In Brazil, over the course of six months, Barrio placed hundreds of bloody bundles of rotting flesh in public locations for people to discover, with a view to provoking outrage at the military regime’s brutal elimination of political activists

Cover of the United Kingdom edition of Sroja Popovic’s ‘handbook’ Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World

How could I resist a book that scrutinizes cultural interactions with social and political violence?

The artistic and intellectual practices investigated in the various essays not only decry forms of violence that might not always be visible but also respond to them with strategies that range from poetical hijacking of public space to backing of wider grassroots movements, from playful collaborations with migrant workers to utterly bonkers performance that stunned passersby. By engaging head-on with the work of activists, with the struggles of fragilized communities and more generally with a broader culture of violence, the initiatives explored in Cultures of Violence have the potential to re-shape social dynamics.

The book contains only 5 essays, plus the introduction by the editors but it covers enough ground to trigger the curiosity of readers who might not be familiar with the topic and the surprise of those who might already have a strong interest in it. The quality and style of the essays is a bit unequal but I liked the balance between contemporary practices and dips into past moments that echo some of today’s most pressing issues (African American movements with a potential to transform a wider social infrastructure, inability to envision a future that isn’t dystopian, commercialisation of shock, etc.)

The essay that, by itself, makes it worth getting the book is the one in which researcher Amy Corcoran examines artistic interventions designed to reveal and challenge the state violence implicit in bordering and migration. I found that the style and the content of her text mirrored the commitment of the visual practices she describes as attempting to foster intuitive connection and encounters with broad audiences.

Kennard and Phillipps, In Humanity, 2016

Corcoran identifies 3 main artistic strategies to contest state-led political violence, connect with activism and bring about social transformation: (de)legitimation, education and empathy or emotional connection.

I found the paragraphs on (de)legitimation particularly interesting. She convincingly argues that legally sanctioned state actions -from police violence to government inaction, from enforcement of national borders to forced deportation of asylum seekers- can be regarded as acts of violence and as such, are morally reprehensible. Accordingly, it is legitimate to denounce and resist such state violence, even using defensive violence.

Her essay highlights a number of artistic interventions that push back against state-endorsed violence and connect with grassroots resistance. I’m listing a couple of them below:

Public Studio and Adrian Blackwell, Migrant Choir, 2015

Migrant Choir: migrants stuck in Italy sang the French, British and Italian national anthems outside the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale. Information booklets distributed to visitors explained the wider situation but did not promote any particular campaign or course of action. The intervention was designed to generate an affective tension between the feeling of ‘home’ generated by the anthems and the situations of the singers.

Tammam Azzam, Kiss, 2013. Photo via ISIS

Tammam Azzam digitally laid Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss over a bombed-out building in Damascus, poetically depicting physical state violence and the structural forces that fuel it. The work breaks the barrier of attention fatigue and turns what has become a favourite museum postcard into a powerful plea for empathy that unsettled Western audiences when they first saw it.

Center for Political Beauty, Eating Refugees, 2016

Center for Political Beauty’s Eating Refugees contested a law that prohibits refugees from flying into the EU without a visa. Through its use of various provocative stunts (including a Roman-style arena for refugees to be devoured by tigers), the work generated debates among members of the public who might otherwise not be willing to engage with performance art or politics.

Manaf Halbouni, Monument, 2017. Photo: David Brandt

Different audiences will respond differently to a socially-engaged work. In 2017, Manaf Halbouni installed three upturned buses in Dresden’s central square, referencing a well-known photo from Aleppo where a community had used bombed-out buses as a barricade. The statue, erected to mark the anniversary of the Allied aerial bombing of Dresden during World War II, attempted to establish “a connection between the people of the Middle East and Europe and our shared destinies” and alluded to “the suffering and unspeakable losses as well as the hope for reconstruction and peace.” Unfortunately, the artwork was met with protests by right-wingers who claimed the installation represented an abuse of artistic freedom and a ‘snub’ to the views of Dresden residents.

Dr Martin Lang‘s essay also looked at how cultural resistance responds to political violence. His approach, however, is more historical. First, because his text spans fifty years of transatlantic activism, from the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles to the global Occupy movement of 2011, his examination of activist struggles. Second, because he examines this political violence through the lens of Situationist International, an organisation of social revolutionaries that started with a predominantly artistic focus in 1957 but moved gradually towards revolutionary and political theory. Born as a mostly European movement, the SI took a keen interest in US race relations and civil unrest, imagining the Watts riots as the first step in a broader struggle in which, they predicted, African Americans might be able to “unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system.”

Oleg Kulik , The Mad Dog or Last Taboo Guarded by Alone Cerberus (with Alexander Brener) Yakimanka Street. Moscow, November 23, 1994

In her contribution to the book, art and cultural historian Marina Maximova explores the most provocative works of Oleg Kulik as well as the strategies of Moscow Actionism, the radical strain of Russian performance art that emerged in the early 1990s in response to the violence prompted by the collapse of the Soviet regime and the transformation of social life under the new capitalist order.

The often outrageous way these artists used public space took advantage of the small window of time between the Soviet period, when public spaces were submitted to strict political control and surveillance, and the emergence of new exclusive hierarchies which from the 2000s onwards resulted in the loss of the ‘publicness’ of space in urban areas. In that short timeframe, artists saw in violence and provocation the only appropriate response to the sociopolitical conditions they were witnessing and experiencing.

E.T.I. Movement, E.T.I.-text, 1991. Photo via Calvert Journal

An example of such urban space intervention was E.T.I. collective’s reaction to the Act on Morality of 1991, which prohibited the use of obscene language in public spaces, the group spell out a Russian swear word with their bodies on the pavement in front of the Red Square. ETI’s action typifies the Moscow Actionists attempts to win back the right to express themselves in the public sphere, often by adopting the strategy of ‘public mischief’.

Oleg Kulik is perhaps the artist whose practice pushed this shock strategy to its most brazen limits. His street interventions became also for him a mode to explore the effect of his actions on audiences that would otherwise never visit his gallery exhibitions. His most famous performance is probably the one in which he roamed the streets naked and played the part of a dog. I had no idea, however, that he founded his own party: Partiia Zhivotnykh (the Party of animals.) During his political campaign, the artist ran on a central Moscow street wearing a muzzle and a chain, howled in front of journalists at a dog show and used the slogan ‘being a homo sapiens is like being a fascist!’ in his election campaign.

Interestingly, Kulik found that even though his work responded to the specific Russian context, its violence was very well-received in the West and he was invited to do similar performances in various European and U.S. cities.

In their joint text, researcher, lecturer and curator Vlad Morariu and artist and curator Jaakko Karhunen discuss sigma, a network of writers, artists, scientists and psychiatrists active between 1963–1965. Their most tangible achievement was the sigma portfolio, a collection of texts, ‘part manifesto, part manual’ for art activism. Their writings explored, for example, how architects could use their skills to redesign spaces for creative sharing, education and knowledge production or how cultural practitioners could develop new means of distribution for art and literature that would break through traditional media and even mainstream consumer goods.

The most fascinating part of the essay dives into Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Mark Fisher‘s perspective on the shifting vision, visuality and ideology of possible futures. The first part of the 20th century was characterised by unwavering trust in the future. In the aftermath of 1968, however, utopian imagination and ideology of progressive future turned into dystopia, and cyberculture, the last utopia of the twentieth century slowly died of mental exhaustion. Berardi calls it a ‘paralysis of the will’, Mark Fisher ‘the slow cancellation of the future’.

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009. Photo: Hong Wrong

Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Hong Kong Intervention, 2009. Photo: Hong Wrong

Lecturer in Visual Communication Jessica Holtaway considers Sun Yuan and Peng Yu‘s Hong Kong Intervention, an artwork that invited 100 migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong to place and photograph a plastic toy grenade in their employers’ homes. The image was accompanied by a photo of the participants with their back to the camera to preserve their anonymity. The work drew attention to political issues surrounding the working conditions and rights of migrant domestic workers who make up nearly 5% of the local population.

Holtaway analyses how, by staging the scene the work through the eyes of the migrant worker, the artists challenge the viewer to become an accomplice in the intervention. By involving so many participants -the audience, the workers, the artists- Hong Kong Intervention flattens out power structures, makes visible the often invisibilised domestic workers and act as a springboard for a broader discussion about the often poorly respected human rights of domestic workers.

Jos Volkers hand-crafted a fourteen meter long replica of a V-2 rocket, the WWII long-range guided ballistic missile developed by the Germans to attack Allied cities as retaliation for the Allied bombings. The purpose of the artist’s weapon, however, is everything but nefarious. Instead of killing civilians and destroying buildings, this gigantic seed bomb was designed to be deployed in case of environmental emergency. “Detonating” it would bring back biodiversity in seriously compromised ecosystems.

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

The artist spent two years creating this Bioremediating Missile: he built it using biodegradable materials such as wood, textile and clay and filled it with seeds, spores and nutrients. He recently hired a truck and took it on a European tour all the way from Romania to various art events in The Netherlands. Its next stop is Zone2Source, an international platform for art, nature and technology in Amstelpark, Amsterdam.

The rocket was developed within the framework of Volker’s fictitious company Ecological Space Engineering (ESE) which brings together reflections related to the ongoing ecological crisis, technological innovations, human interventions and conflicts in order to engage in speculative research about how we can improve the quality of life on our planet.

I liked the sound of that so I emailed Jos and asked him if he had a moment for a few questions…

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Hi Jos! The Bioremediating Missile (Brm. 1) is filled with seeds, spores and nutrients. Are you planning to make it explode? And if you do where would that be and what are you hoping the firing will achieve in the short, medium, long term?  

In theory the Brm. 1. is made to store ecosystem specific seeds and spores from the South-Eastern Carpathians. In case this still pristine ecosystem vanishes because of logging, pollution, nuclear war or otherwise. If this happens, Ecological Space Engineering will have these ecosystem specific seeds and spores stored in the Brm. 1. Ready for use in order to renew, restore and bioremediate this severely damaged area. The Brm. 1. can be dropped out of a helicopter or plane in the near future.

But if we look ahead, E.S.E. will create Bioremediating Missile launch platforms which will float like satellites in Earth’s atmosphere. They will be capable of measuring radiation and pollution, filtering carbon dioxide and methane. Until the affected area is ready to receive seed and spore inoculation.

Where most governmental space agencies spend their money to explore space and to find life on other planets, we as a non-governmental space agency use our finances to support life on Earth. In our perspective life on earth should be nourished and restored instead and, above all, protected against human mismanagement. This is how Ecological Space Engineering and Atmosphere Remediation Centres (A.R.C.) started to collaborate. With the Bioremediating Missile program, we investigate the possibilities to maintain and store ecosystem specifics, like seeds, spores, micro-organisms and minerals.

A.R.C. will develop Nature Oriented Aquatic Hovercrafts (NOAH’s), which will float in Earth’s atmosphere on a high altitude, filtering Co2 and carrying Brm’s. This enterprise is one of the most intriguing developments within the Bioremediating Missile program. By the process of filtering CO2, NOAH’s will produce fuel, mainly this fuel is stored and shipped to outer space docs. A part of the produced fuel stays on-board in case of turbulence or malfunction of the aquatic system which propels these hovercrafts, in this way NOAH’s can be stabilized and brought back into position.

These outer space docs function as hubs for space exploration purposes. With this invention, we are able to finance our Bioremediating Missile program because governmental organisations are mainly focused on exploring the boundaries of space.

The Bioremediating Missile “Instruction Manual”
Jos Volkers, 2020

The above scenario seems very unlikely, so the Brm. 1. will at the end of its lifetime – after its journey – probably decay fully in the garden of Np3 M0Bi in Groningen. If this happens I might need to replace all the seeds for new seeds from the area around Np3. In the case of flora forgery and to avoid global homogenisation.

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

What kind of seeds and spores does the Missile contain and how did you select them? Are they meant to adapt to specific ecosystems for example?  

The E.S.E. Research Group collected the seeds and spores in the Southeastern Carpathians. Of course, some are ecosystem-specific seeds and rare or unable to grow in other ecosystems. We selected them carefully by researching specific areas such as meadows and forests and waited for the right season to collect just small amounts of seeds and spores.

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

I’m very curious about the transportation of the Missile from Romania to several events in The Netherlands. From the instagram images, it appears that its 14 meter long body is traveling in full view (and not hidden inside a big container). Is it because you want to use the transport of the missile as a springboard for conversations? What kind of reactions do you get when you are on the road with it?  

Absolutely!

Ecological Space Engineering plays a vagarious role. Although E.S.E. claims that it manufactures instruments that have the potential to restore polluted, impoverished or damaged ecosystems with natural processes, it must make concessions. The use of burdensome assets such as machinery and transportation are matters that are unavoidable with regard to the manufacturing and presentation of the Bioremediating Missile. The transportation of the Bioremediating Missile serves an important message. Every company that is moving towards the transition to a green economy has to deal with these environmental issues. This dualistic message must nurture a dialogue.

From an artistic point of view, I give my work ambiguity and let the spectator free to interpret it.

Although I present at the same time a context and inform the spectator, the question remains to the audience whether the given context, in reality, is correct or not. The context creates a framework and represents the work, but actually the context does not serve an absolute truth, even though it is based on absolute values.

The artist does not seek for truth, he creates it.
(Maxim Gorky: Literary Portraits, page no. 118)

The transport of the missile caused many different reactions, depending from country to country. In Romania, the reactions were above all the funniest, maybe because people are less acquainted with this type of art or just because we travelled half of the time through villages. In most cases, people just reacted delayed by turning around after it already past. Some did put hands on the side of their hips and gazed after it. Kids, in general, pointed to it, trying to explain to their parents a rocket is passing by, if the parents could get a quick peek they reacted a bit shocked. Cars that drove next to the missile and filmed the missile, sometimes causing some (luckily) minor problems in traffic.

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Jos Volkers, Bioremediating Missile, 2020

Why did you choose to enclose the seeds inside a missile? Why this menacing, war-like image?  

The V-2 rocket was developed by the Germans to win WWII, luckily this didn’t happen but instead the Americans and the Russians took the researchers and technical drawings. This fact caused the weapon and space race between the two nations. This is why the V-2 rocket not only embodies war but also embodies technological development. Without this space technology, we might not have had satellites in space, and without satellites, the world we know would not exist. Many fields of research actually rely on space technology such as meteorology, geography and biology. But space technology is also used for ensuring food security, reducing the risk of disasters, preventing humanitarian crises, monitoring natural resources and reducing poverty, as well as for telecommunications and health.

Another reason is that the shape evokes exploration, admiration and fear. Strangely enough, the V-2 rocket became over time a very strong symbol. Using this symbol, making it the world’s largest seed bomb, fully biodegradable and harmless made a lot of sense to me.

Any upcoming events, fields of research or projects you could share with us? 

In my mind I’m always busy with how to solve environmental issues, E.S.E. is for me a tool to express the concerns I have and I allow this fictional company to over exaggerate these concerns in order to create awareness among people. Since 10 years I’m visiting Romania on a regular basis and I’ve lived here for the last two and a half years, I’m very impressed by the natural wealth and still pristine wilderness. Only somewhere something went very wrong in my perception. In the past – during communism – people only had to deal with materials that were biodegradable, but after the fall of communism, capitalism kicked in and the plastic producing industry caused a huge unforeseen problem. In combination with corruption and mismanagement, this problem became bigger and, to this day, it remains unsolved. Besides, it is affecting the environment. This also gives me a bad aftertaste, which is a huge pity if you just made an incredible and beautiful walk through one of those pristine areas.

Something needs to be done against this mess and people responsible for throwing trash in nature need to get more awareness so they realise what the consequences of their actions are. Garbage is practically everywhere alongside rivers and roads. Of course, some people do clean up garbage, some organise special events, others keep the streets clean in villages. The question only remains whether this garbage will be processed or just dumped back into the river.

So one of my new ideas is to get a garbage truck, paint it all white and write Ecological Space Engineering on it and let specially trained employees clean garbage from hard to reach areas near rivers with special made equipment.

Somewhere I have the need to do something really constructive against pollution.

Thanks Jos!

Bioremediating Missile by Jos Volkers will be at Zone2Source in Amstelpark, Amsterdam and remain on view from 15 August until 5 September 2020.

Previously at Zone2Source: Trust Me I’m an Artist. Ethics surrounding art & science collaborations. Part 1 and Part 2, Machine Wilderness: a world of ecological robotics and Symbiotic Machine, the photosynthetic robot that feeds on algae.

American Zealots. Inside Right-Wing Domestic Terrorism, by Arie Perliger, professor and director of the graduate program in security studies at the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Publisher Columbia University Press writes: In American Zealots, Arie Perliger provides a wide-ranging and rigorously researched overview of right-wing domestic terrorism. He analyzes its historical roots, characteristics, tactics, rhetoric, and organization, assessing the current and future trajectory of the use of violence by the far right. Perliger draws on a comprehensive dataset of more than 5,000 attacks and their perpetrators from 1990 through 2017 in order to explore key trends in American right-wing terrorism. He describes the entire ideological spectrum of the American far right, including today’s white supremacists, antigovernment groups, and antiabortion fundamentalists, as well as the histories of the KKK, skinheads, and neo-Nazis. Based on these findings, Perliger suggests counterterrorism policies that can respond effectively to the far-right threat. A groundbreaking examination of violence spawned from right-wing ideologies, American Zealots is essential reading for everyone seeking to understand the transformation of domestic terrorism.

A year ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray announced that the agency had made about 100 domestic terrorism-related arrests since October 2018 and that the majority of them were tied to white supremacy. A look at recent headlines confirms that the level of far right terrorism has been rising steadily for the last 2 decades. And not just in the USA. But that’s a story for another book.

In his comprehensive and comparative study, Arie Perliger attempts to understand the societal and political factors behind the dramatic rise in far right violence, the new characteristics of its ideological framework as well as the type of strategies society should adopt to counter the growing threat.

The book is based on meticulous analysis of websites, social media platforms, personal accounts, paper and online publications promoting far right ideologies as well as on a dataset constructed by Perliger’s team to document all the violent attacks perpetrated by groups and individuals affiliated with the (very fragmented) American Far Right: the neo-Nazis, the Christian Identity followers, the members of the KKK, of Hammerskin Nation (HSN), of Aryan Nations, etc. The research also looks at paramilitary subcultures hostile towards the federal government and at pro-life organisations whose members are often also members of white supremacy groups. These groups have their own ideological nuances, structures, modus operandi, propaganda, targets, etc.

Their ideologies and rhetoric, however, increasingly overlap with the ones observed in the discourse of mainstream right-wing platforms and leaders. They tend to have similar positions on gun legislation and environmental policies, for example. In fact, Perliger argues, some of the concepts and practices that characterise far right groups are slowly seeping into formal mainstream political processes. He analyses the mechanisms behind this growing tolerance of far right ideas among the Republicans and how this, in turn, emboldens members of far right groups.

American Zealots makes for a fascinating, informative but also harrowing read. I can only admire its author for this in-depth investigation. I don’t think I would ever be able to spend months as he did poring over the abhorrent ideas and discourses professed by the kind of people who think their country needs an NAAWP, a National Association for the Advancement of White People.

The author also looked into a future characterised by the multiplication of environmental catastrophes, further democratisation of information sources, globalisation of political ideas and other dynamics that may provide new avenues of growth for far right ideologies. A pushback against the growing risk of an increase in far right violence lies, he argues, in a series of interventions such as a legal definition of domestic terrorism which would enable government agencies to address adequately groups perpetrating hate crimes, policies that facilitate better integration of minorities living in communities that have had little experience with ethnic and religious diversity, measures to slow the proliferation of White Power gangs in prison, solid tools to counter ideologies that promote hostility and violence towards segments of the population, etc. He would also invite leaders to consider the impact of their rhetoric on the legitimisation of far right narratives.

Even though the book focuses on the United States, it is difficult not to draw parallels with what is happening in Europe today. Not only are there transatlantic links between far right groups but some of the tactics adopted in the US to “recalibrate” their fetid ideological ideas and push them into the mainstream political discourse can also be observed in Europe. Far right Europeans too use civil rights jargon. They too attempt to dilute the ideological framework of their white nationalism with claims that they mostly care about environmental conservation, crime reduction, labour rights, etc. Or the fight against Covid-19.

Image on the homepage: Andres Serrano, Klansmen (Knight Hawk Of Georgia of The Invisible Empire IV), 1990 © Andres Serrano, Courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris/Brussels, THE KLAN SERIES.

Preppers (aka survivalists, although the two words identify slightly different groups) are training, stockpiling and gearing up for the catastrophe that will lead to the collapse of society or make life on Earth unbearable. A massive ecological disaster, a climate shock, widespread riots, an AI gone rogue, a financial crisis worse than the 2008 one or a pandemic. They might not be sure about it is exactly that will lead to the breakdown of civilisation but they are getting ready for it.

The survivalists range from families who amass food and water supplies in their basement to wealthy individuals who buy bunkers and other fortified properties in remote locations. Prepping is a lifestyle, with its own aesthetics, language and market. Its own fairs and camps even.

Loren Kronemyer, After Erika Eiffel, 2019

Loren Kronemyer, Training for True Aim, 2019

It’s very tempting to dismiss this community as a bunch of hysterical worrywarts and machos in search of an opportunity to parade their mettle. Loren Kronemyer, however, looks at this subculture with a critical yet open mind. Together with Guy Louden and Dan McCabe, she has curated a series of exhibitions about doomsday preppers. The shows examine the phenomenon as the expression of wider cultural anxiety and a loss of faith in governments capability to take care of their own citizens. They also explore the nuances of a subculture where sustainability and self-sufficiency rub shoulders with paramilitary tactics and unbridled individualism.

The current iteration of the PREPPERS is touring Australia right now.

Video Documentation of the PREPPERS exhibition at the Fremantle Arts Centre in 2020. Video and editing by Graham Mathwin

Loren Kronemyer is an artist living and working in remote lutruwita / Tasmania, Australia. Her works span interactive and live performance, experimental media art and large-scale worldbuilding projects exploring ecological futures and survival skills. As part of duo Pony Express, she is co-creator of projects like Ecosexual Bathhouse, a touring queer sex club for the entire ecosystem. I asked her to tell us more about her work and her view of prepper culture.



Hi Loren! This is already the fourth iteration of the PREPPERS exhibition. Why did you want to work on an exhibition about doomsday preppers? What can art bring to the discussion around the collapse of civilisation?   



This exhibition was instigated from a conversation between myself and two other artists, Guy Louden and Dan McCabe. In 2016 we ran into each other at the opening of an art school graduate show in Western Australia, where we lived at the time. We struck up a chat as friendly colleagues, but within the space of a few minutes, our conversation devolved to us ranting about the doomsday prepper forums we were reading and scheduling a visit to the shooting range together. It’s an absurd scene, three comfortably emerging millennial artists, sipping drinks in a gallery while exchanging bootleg survivalist jargon, indulging a dire paranoia under the veneer of our casual social context, but I guess that’s exactly what the “discussion around the collapse of civilization” looked like for us at the time. We decided to continue our conversation through a creative project, teaming up as a collective to curate and produce different editions of this show that has progressed and evolved through several iterations now.



In the discussion of collapse, art is a useful way to create nuance, ambivalence, critique, affirmation and play where dominant narratives are subverted. It’s easy to condemn the toxicity of “prepper” culture: its patriarchal violence, its absurd delusions, its submission to the logic of necro-capitalism.

But at the same time, we all hear the same alarms bells ringing. So we set out to make a show that digs into some of the iconography, jargon, materiality and sensory worlds of “prepper” culture, hoping to satiate our own curiosity and examine some of its bizarre contours. For emerging generations, I think it’s important to foster a nuanced discourse around the possible futures that face us. But I am a very paranoid artist by nature. I abide by the notion of the slow apocalypse: collapse has been happening for a long time and is felt most profoundly by those that don’t benefit from dominator culture. Or in other words, the dudes hoarding luxury bunkers and guns probably know the least about how resilience works. 



In making PREPPERS, I approached my body of work with a very selfish methodology. With each iteration of the show, I used my project resources to learn a new so-called “survival skill”, exploring it deeply through research, training and paraphernalia in hopes of achieving some level of expertise, explored through my artistic practice. This has been my pretext to acquaint myself with many skills I was curious about, like water distilling, trap building, marksmanship, etc, honing them through a critical and often collaborative artistic process. By entering a dialogue with these practices, I hope to make space for more people to join in, so we can create our own narratives of collapse.

Guy Louden, Dan McCabe, Loren Kronemyer, E-Waste Barricade, 2019. Photo: Dan McCabe




How has the show (and the public reaction to it) evolved over time?  



From a logistics standpoint, the show PREPPERS has always been collectively run. Guy, Dan and I began by working together to curate, fundraise, design, install, document and administrate experimental versions in artist-run galleries in Fremantle, Sydney and Melbourne. We used these iterations as a basis to pitch the show to a major gallery in Western Australia, the Fremantle Arts Centre, who invited us in for a presentation at the end of 2019, at which point we had the resources to involve more artists, including Thomas Yeomans and Tiyan Baker whom I had collaborated with previously on the work Apocalypse Anonymous.  We used that platform to pitch the show to ART ON THE MOVE, a regional touring initiative, who had prepared us to tour regional Australia at the beginning of this year. That tour was abruptly halted by the global pandemic. During the shutdown, we received an Australia Council Resilience Fund grant to publish the work as an experimental website, so now there is a digital archive of the work that is, ironically, wholly the product of a global catastrophe. As of today, with parts of Australia opening again, the tour is resuming in a far different context than the one in which it was conceived.



Responses to the work have often been polarized, and I honestly don’t feel like I have a good grasp on the spectrum of responses it’s provoked. Over the last 5 years, this show has always been evaluated based on its grim relevance to current events, but the current events in question are always changing. Although the imagery of the show has been pretty consistent, it resonates differently based on the rapidly shifting baselines of the world we occupy.

When PREPPERS was born in 2016, we were intrigued by observations like the emergence of luxury bunkers and survival gear, the integration of technology to stoke and suppress civic unrest, desensitization towards images of catastrophe and upheaval and the emergence of our own demographic of pseudo-doomer millennials. Through our collaboration and conversation, I have seen myself and the other artists lean further into our own fetishes and connections to the subject matter along the way, allowing the work to grow in scope.


It has been a deeply strange experience keeping this project alive in this moment when the subject matter is so urgent and our individual perspectives so irrelevant. Every human on earth knows more about prepping and survival, whatever that means, than they did six months ago. In some ways, the world needs this show and its ambivalent gaze less than ever, so we will see where it goes from here.

Pony Express, Epoch Wars, 2019. Photo: Julian Frichot

Loren Kronemyer, Wounded Amazon of the Capitalocene, 2019. Photo: Dan McCabe



The only preppers I’ve heard about are in the USA. I think that the prepper movement is growing in Europe too. I know very little about Preppers in Australia though. The history, geography and culture in Australia is very different from the US ones. Are these differences reflected in Australian prepper culture? A different sense of urgency? A different type of anxiety or focus?
 



I have lived in Australia for the past decade, but because I am from California I have a particularly American inflexion to my experience. The show riffs heavily on the American cultural narrative of prepping as it collides with global culture, Australian contexts, and each of our experiences and interests. For example, Tiyan Baker’s work Bamboo Paradise documents the way that folks in rural Cambodia are exploiting the Youtube trend of survival building channels, a trend that originated with an Australian creator called Primitive Technology who gained viral popularity and seeded thousands of imitators. The way prepping differs for our generation versus previous ones is that we are articulating our ideations collapse through the intricate tool of the global internet.

Though specific dreams and experiences of doom and survival differ from culture to culture, they intersect in uncanny ways. There’s a story about a wealthy Texan who built a bunker in the middle of lutriwita/Tasmania. Fearing the cold war, he pointed at the island on a map, bought up 18,000 hectares of land right in the middle, and built an underground bunker suitable for several families. When he died, the land was eventually auctioned by his estate. In 2013, it was purchased by a historic partnership between the federal government, the Indigenous Land Corporation and Tasmanian Land Conservancy, with ownership passing to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community and the land dedicated to cultural custodianship. I think that story reflects some interesting collisions between the fantasies and realities of what survival looks like across geographies, generations, and epistemologies.

Loren Kronemyer, After Erika Eiffel


You live in an off the grid situation in Southern Tasmania which I suspect enables you to experiment with self-sufficiency. That’s something that is very appealing, romantic even, to me but also a bit frightening. If a major disaster happened, would it not be safer to be in a city, where you’d get access to more resources, better infrastructures, wider communities? 



Having grown up as a city-dweller in Los Angeles, making the transition to this living situation has been a deeply immersive experiment. I am aware that I closely resemble the exact trope I am critical of: that of the delusional American industrialist hiding in my Australian bunkers to escape my hubris. For that reason I try to avoid romanticising living rurally as any sort of grandiose or individualistic world-building project, it’s just another way to deal with this present moment and stay helpful to the processes that sustain me.

In the major disaster of the pandemic, living in lutruwita/Tasmania, an island within an island, has been incredibly advantageous. We are currently COVID-free, but very vulnerable should a second wave breach the island’s borders. Being here during lockdown meant I had access to plenty of space to exist, with most of my basic needs covered by the circular economy of my agricultural region. It took me a long time to come out again and realize that people had resumed doing things. 

Living out here is a specific aesthetic that doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not worth valorising. It’s possible to live a more ecologically-conscious, socially conscious lifestyle in the city, where you can take up less space on stolen land and pass around communal resources more readily. I have lost touch with how rustic / not rustic my lifeway here is. Some moments it feels like it’s all muck and blood and fire and leaches, but then other moments I am back to being a millennial sea otter…lazing in bed with my laptop on my belly.

I take pleasure in seeing where my water came from, where my warmth came from and where my food comes from, but I also face the consequences when I don’t look after those things. Every activity has a long tail of energy, planning, preparation, maintenance, patience and consequences in both directions. Before work like this interview can happen, I have do to finish the work of pumping the water, tending the garden, shovelling the shit, acknowledging the worms, gathering the wood, starting the fire, turning the compost, maintaining the balance between my dwelling and the forest. But then again, everyone has chores.



Loren Kronemyer, After Erika Eiffel, 2019

Loren Kronemyer, After Erika Eiffel, 2019

Loren Kronemyer, After Erika Eiffel, 2019

Loren Kronemyer, Training for True Aim, 2019

One of the DIY printable targets you designed for the work Training for True Aim bears the text “Soft skills are survival skills.” That sounded curious to me. I’ve always thought that in order to survive in a disaster situation you needed to be robust, well-trained in hunting or gardening, etc. Maybe you need to know something about medicines or technology but soft skills? What type of soft skills is useful in this context? 
 


Learning these practices has taught me how undervalued soft skills are as survival skills. Skills like communication, negotiation, the ability to self-soothe and self-direct, imagination, humour and sensitivity are all survival skills I’ve had to put into practice for a long time, way more frequently than the more aggressive survival tactics I’ve learned. Survival is a practice that happens in lots of contexts other than acute moments of disaster. For some creatures, cuteness is a survival skill. I have something to learn from all the creatures finding a way to survive the 21st Century. 

 



What attracted me to your work is the contrast between the theme which -in my mind- is quite macho and individualist and the way you communicate it. There is something quite inviting, generous and communal about After Erika Eiffel, Training for True Aim and Apocalypse Anonymous. It triggers interest and curiosity rather than panic. I’ve been wondering what engaging with the wider culture of prepping does to your outlook on life and on the future. Does studying the prepper culture bring more reassurance or more anxiety? More desire to collaborate with others or a drive to retreat?


 

I am glad that was your reading of my work, because it’s certainly my intention. I work actively to penetrate the macho veneer of survivalism and make space to insert my own queered, pluralist fantasies. I like the versions of survival that we work on together, or that manifest in absurd or improbable ways. Collaboration is always something I am interested in – my collaborations have done the most to benefit my survival, and I am always looking for ways to extend those in new directions.

When I was a kid, I found this book at my grandparent’s house called Back To Basics from Reader’s Digest. This book illustrated homesteading from harvesting logs to building a cabin to weaving a rug, from cooking with methane siphoned from your shitter to butchering a rabbit to baking a pie. This book is totally the product of white American back-to-the-land romanticism, and now I’ve learned that it’s highly sought after among the prepper communities I follow on the web. Anyways when I was a kid I would obsess over this book, thinking that as long as I kept it with me, I had a manual that would help me survive and fashion a life for myself from scratch. Looking back on that, it’s tragi-comic that a feeble Reader’s Digest book encompassed my entire intergenerational cultural inheritance of survival knowledge. It goes to show how crappy the western, colonial, capitalist epistemology is at conveying any meaningful form of ongoingness. I still open that book all the time when I am looking for inspiration, opening to a random page and thinking of ways to apply or pervert the skill it illustrates.

It’s been beneficial for me to make this body of work and realise I’m not alone in my attraction to survival narratives. I think many young folk today are engaging with and rewriting what the future means to us, what our survival story will be. I remember going to dinner at the home of another urban artist my age; when we got onto the topic of survivalism, their partner revealed that they had printed out a prepper handbook from the web and stored it in the ceiling cavity of their apartment. The dominant version of “prepper” culture is not something I get much reassurance from, but it does form a baseline that I come back to again and again for whatever reason, because like it or not it’s a part of my experience.

Loren Kronemyer and Tiyan Baker, Apocalypse Anonymous, 2017. Photo by Julian Frichot

Loren Kronemyer and Tiyan Baker, Apocalypse Anonymous, 2017. Photo by Julian Frichot

Loren Kronemyer and Tiyan Baker, Apocalypse Anonymous, 2017. Photo by Julian Frichot

Loren Kronemyer and Tiyan Baker, Apocalypse Anonymous, 2017. Photo by Julian Frichot

You developed Apocalypse Anonymous together with Tiyan Baker. What is hidden inside these three containers? Do they provide different experiences or outlook on doomsday preppers?

Apocalypse Anonymous is a work that Tiyan Baker and I collaborated on in 2017. It was born from both of us hanging out in both online and offline prepper communities, dialoguing together about our own experiences of ecological anxiety. The work took the form of a public installation consisting of three shipping containers, each one documenting a different approach to processing the end times through first-hand documents we collected.

The first container was set up as an office. Visitors could sit at a computer and scroll through a custom app that harvested content from a combination of message boards, forming this endless scroll that barraged you with videos and posts that ran the gamut of online doomer content. In doomer parlance, any news item trying to spin progress in the face of climate change is derided as “hopium”. The desk itself was studded with arrows, and when you turned around to leave, you’d see that an aggressive hunting bow was aimed at you, mounted above the door. We wanted to convey the feeling of submerging into eco-anxiety through the web, the obsession mixed with the helplessness that comes from experiencing the world’s crisis unfolding through a scroll.

The second container was outfitted as an actual survival shelter. Based on manuals and field guides from emergency services, we filled it with a couple of weeks of essential goods and recommended tools, including food, gas, water, first aid supplies, a bed, radio, maps, et cetera. Tiyan interviewed survivors of a recent severe hurricane here, and their voices played over the radio, describing what that confrontation felt like and how it impacted their state of mind afterwards. It was my first time going through the process of assembling a survival shelter, and it was great to go piece by piece and actually look at each of the rations that were needed. The third container was set up as a sort of big, encompassing nest of twigs and mulch. There were cushions, and it was possible to lay right down in this soft and earthen smelling place. Woven throughout were family photos from the last 50 years, babies and parents and homes, all composted and mulched right in there with you. In that container, we played a soundscape that featured an interview from Glenn Albrecht, an Australian philosopher who is passionate about coining new words to describe the emergent psychological states associated with climate change. He coined the word “solastagia”, which describes the feeling of homesickness or longing for the ecology we used to have, the earth home that doesn’t exist anymore. He recently released a new book called Earth Emotions, which chronicles his whole lexicon of neologisms building on this idea.

Loren Kronemyer, Mangle Tangle Strangle Dangle, 2017. Photo by Dan McCabe

Loren Kronemyer, Mangle Tangle Strangle Dangle, 2017. Photo by Dan McCabe

Loren Kronemyer, Mangle Tangle Strangle Dangle, 2017. Photo by Dan McCabe

Loren Kronemyer, Mangle Tangle Strangle Dangle, 2017. Photo by Dan McCabe

There’s humour in your work too. For example, the baits and traps you designed “to arm the gallery” are threatening of course but the idea of setting traps inside a safe white gallery space is amusing. They evoke typical contemporary art sculptures too. Can you talk about some of these traps? How you made them and what they mean?  

I am glad that’s something you appreciate. I am always laughing, even (especially) at my own misfortune, absurdity and capacity for contradiction, and I like to make work that comes from a place of pleasure and play even when the outcomes or subject matter are dark.

The origin was this: browsing through a bushcraft guide, I was taken by the fact that, as you describe, some of the hunting traps looked to me like Alexander Calder sculptures. That was such an imperious and silly thought that I decided to learn to make them, to see how my art school brain would handle it. One of the manuals I read summarized the four principles of trapping as “Mangle, Tangle, Strangle, and Dangle”. I tried all sorts of variations of trap and got most excited by the ones that are held in delicate balance or at high tension.

When setting up traps in a gallery, I like to use as much of the gallery’s existing infrastructure as possible, responding to the architecture and raiding the supply cabinet for rope, hardware, blades and heavy objects to use as counterweights. It’s all very Wile E. Coyote. One of my dreams is to build a deadfall trap out of the false wall of a gallery; I still haven’t figured out the engineering on that yet. The most important parts of the trap are the trigger and the bait, so I pay extra attention to those. In one variation I use a diamond engagement ring as the loop for the trigger, held in balance by a nail and builder’s twine. For bait, sometimes I use books, or solar-powered screens that play videos – you must get right up close and into the snare to view them. I think through each trap’s story based on where I am and what material I am using, but those stories usually stay with me. It helps me think about what traps may surround me, and how to stay vigilant for when I am being baited. Sometimes I am the hunter and sometimes I am the prey, of course.

Pony Express, Epoch Wars, 2019

Any upcoming event, field of research or project you could share with us?

Here in Australia, we are in the process of uncancelling and sometimes recancelling things, so I am surfing that pattern as best I can while also gearing up to plant my spring garden.

The gallery show PREPPERS is resuming its tour through ART ON THE MOVE, going to several places in regional Australia:
August 21 – September 26, 2020: Geraldton Regional Art Gallery 
November 9 – December 5, 2020: Katanning Art Gallery 
December 14, 2020 – January 13, 2021: Museum of the Goldfields (WA Museum)
May 21 – June 27, 2021: Albany Town Hall

By late August we will have published a new essay from Cassie Lynch, a writer who is researching Noongar memory of deep time climate events, on https://preppers.gallery. We built this website in collaboration with Xavier Burrow to house a virtual version of the show alongside original text from Bradley Garrett (author of the new book Bunker: Building for the End Times) and our COVID first-wave artist video diaries.

I am currently working on writing my first book, which is going to be published as part of an artist book series called Lost Rocks curated by A Published Event. The premise of the series is that 40 artists are contributing short fictionellas that represent the missing rocks on a mineral sampler the publishers bought from a junk shop; my mineral is Copper. I am a huge fan of this series and anxiously polishing my contribution. I have also contributed to a book that is a collective survival lexicon curated by Grace Dennis which is coming soon.

My live art collaboration Pony Express is busy pivoting ourselves all the way into the core of the earth. We have spent the last few years developing the project Epoch Wars, which is an artist-run Geological Congress convened to search for a better name for earth’s present epoch. Epoch Wars is a participatory symposium that eats itself, built of commissions from diverse artists, thinkers and rock doctors who are reclaiming the power to name the geological age we will die in. This work has been researched and developed internationally via research at University of Tasmania, Chronus Art Centre, Artshouse and ASIA TOPA Festival, but our planned IRL versions are on hold and we are currently building a web archive for the project.

We will also be publishing some playful new work and giving a keynote as part of Adhocracy 2020. Adhocracy is an annual artistic development and experimentation platform hosted by Vitalstatistix. In response to the pandemic, they funded 28 original artworks which will be published across 4 weeks in September, as a sort of artistic catalogue meets festival of ideas meets archive of a wild year.

People can stay in touch with me and my projects through www.rubicana.info and www.helloponyexpress.com.

Thanks Loren!

Related story: The Clearing. How to live together when sea levels rise and global economy collapses.

In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological progress would free us from long hours of labour. We would be working 15-hour weeks and, our material needs satisfied, we’d spend the rest of our life as we please. We do indeed work fewer hours compared to 100 years ago. Yet, it feels like we are more exhausted than ever. Even Covid-19 has given a new flavour to the conundrum. Most of us entered lockdowns thinking we’d catch up on books, films d’auteur and brush up on our Dutch but we soon found that we were as anchored to our desks as ever. Perhaps even more. In fact, it seems that being gifted with unlimited time has made us lose touch with the meaning and measure of time.

Andy Weir, Pazugoo, 2020

Helga Schmid, Circadian Dreams, 2020. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

The Work of Time, an exhibition curated by Ils Huygens for Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture, dissects the relationships between time, knowledge and learning. The artists selected for the show invite us to shift our attention to other dimensions of time such as inner time, biological time, dream time or the deep geological time of the earth. Their works ponder upon questions such as:

In a world that values speed, efficiency and productivity, is there any room left for slow human processes such as doubt, dialogue, democracy or even imagination? And what happens when important issues such as climate breakdown and radioactive waste force us to think on a radically different scale?

The exhibition is articulated around 3 sections. The one I found most thought-provoking, A Time to Expand: Learning from Deep Time, stems from exchanges between artists and Belgian nuclear scientists about the possibility to visualise the inconceivably long lifespan of radioactive waste. The artists explore the (in)feasibility of building eternal infrastructures that will not only stand the passing of time physically but that will also be able to pass on their message of toxicity and danger from generation to generations over thousands of years. The works in this chapter articulate the limits of human knowledge and technology and the need to include cultural, ethical and philosophical points of view into our elaboration of the future.

Maarten Vanden Eynde, Half Life, 2019. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Half-life, in radioactivity, is the interval of time required for one-half of the atomic nuclei of a radioactive sample to decay. Half Life is also a series of copies in baked Boom clay of the storage containers used for nuclear waste in Belgium. The Boom clay comes from a strata of clay, between 200 and 400 metres deep that is being tested as one of the possible geological locations for Belgium to store its radioactive waste.

That same clay is used to make an exact copy scale 1: 1 of the storage container. The next model in the series is exactly half the size. The third is half of the second container. And so on. After nine steps or nine lives, the original size of 1335mm has shrunk to 5.21mm, after which it becomes practically invisible to the human eye.

The decrease in size is a direct echo of the decrease of nuclear radiation. The work visualises both the process that takes place underground and the material that protects it. In a distant future, where languages that we now think of as solid and strong might have disappeared or be understood only by a tiny minority of the human population (think of Latin which used to be widely spoken or at least read in most of Europe), a similar visualization could play a vital role in transmitting information about the perilous material hidden below the ground.

Alexis Destoop, Hourglass, 2019. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Alexis Destoop’s digital composition consists of a series of photographs taken inside HADES, the Belgian underground research laboratory for experimental research on geological disposal for high-level and/or long-lived radioactive waste. The photographs reveal how organic and geological elements are quietly invading man-made infrastructures. Water is seeping through cracks, clay is forcing its way in, concrete is rusting. The images emphasise the impossibility of designing buildings that can last for eternity.

Thomson & Craighead, Temporary Index, 2016 — 2017. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Vertical clocks projected on the wall count down the seconds necessary for a nuclear waste site to be safe again. Each countdown clock refers to a different location. Some are underground repositories of radioactive waste. Others correspond to places hit by nuclear disasters. The latest addition is the clock for the Category A site in Dessel, a municipality near Antwerp which has been selected to host the first shallow land disposal facility for low-level radioactive waste in Belgium.

The data collected by scientists working at each site was used to accurately calculate the half-life of the radioactive materials at the site. The data, which correspond to timescales so overwhelming they become abstract, is made more tangible. Its meaning, so disquieting, is given a hypnotising, almost soothing shape.

Andy Weir, Pazugoo, 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Andy Weir, Pazugoo, 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Andy Weir investigated how we can inform the hundreds and thousands of generations to come that they might find themselves in the vicinity of a repository for nuclear waste. The answer might not reside in monuments and words that become more inscrutable with each passing century. Many myths and legends, however, have stood the test of time. Weir suggests entrusting a new archaeological figure with the mission to carry out a message to intelligent creatures that will/might inhabit the planet in the distant future.

The cautionary figure he proposes is a distant disciple of Pazuzu, the Mesopotamian demon of epidemic, wind and dust. Pazuzu both issued warnings and offered protection. Pazuzu amulets were often buried near entryways or worn as a protective spirit against destruction.

Weir reinvents the powerful demon-gods of the underworld and calls him Pazugoo. Pazugoo figurines, like the myths that accompany them, can be passed down for generations. Used to mark potential repository sites, they are intended as archaeological artefacts that will be studied by generations to come.

The Pazugoo exhibited now at Z33 is a new prototype informed by his research on the nuclear sites in the Mol and Dessel area in Belgium. The winged Pazugoo echoes local elements from the landscape and legends.

Another chapter of the exhibition, A Time to Unwind: Unlearning Clock Time, invites visitors to challenge conventional understandings of time. Instead of focusing on acceleration and productivity, the works highlight other time dimensions, such as non-Western time, biological time, sleep time or dream time.

Danilo Correale, No More Sleep No More, 2014 — 2016

Danilo Correale, No More Sleep No More, 2014 — 2016

In 2014, Danilo Correale started a series of conversations with various experts on sleep and in particular on the dictates of neoliberal capitalism over our sleep patterns. His research led him to interview doctor David M. Rapoport, anthropologist Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, historian Roger Ekirch, sociologist Simon Williams, labour studies scholar Alan Derickson, geographer Murray Melbin, philosopher Alexei Penzin and feminist scholar Reena Patel.

Correale’s 4-hour long video features extracts of these conversations. They reveal the tensions between the unyielding urge to be productive and the impact that sleeplessness has on productivity but also on social life as well as physical and mental health.

Historian Roger Ekirch, for example, argues that industrial capitalism’s relentless need for productivity has shaped our sleeping habits. Not only did we sleep more in the past but we also used to divide our sleep into two shifts. Until the Industrial Revolution which imposed stricter, less intuitive sleep/wake schedules on the workers.

No More Sleep No More suggests a very near future when productivity will not only encroach on every waking hour of the day, as it already does, but will also take control over our sleeping cycles.

The film features a dreamy, sci-fi screening of hypnotizing moving fluids inspired a period of sleep deprivation the artist experienced himself.

I first saw this visual essay on the chronopolitics of sleep and wakefulness at Kunsthalle Wien in 2017. It remains one of my favourite works to date.

Teis De Greve, A Ditto, Online Device, 2020. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Teis De Greve, A Ditto, Online Device, 2020. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

A Ditto, Online Device brings side by side the constantly changing stream of online data and the much quieter flow of print. Two desktop printers were hacked so that they can decipher words. The printers are set to work only with pages that already feature texts. Visitors are invited to feed paper into the printer. Or rather in these COVID-19 times, are invited to ask a member of staff to show them how it works. The installation scans the pages and searches for related content on social media and online news feeds. The printers then spit our a glossary of topics and concepts related to the current time crisis, adding thus an extra layer of data over the existing text and changing according to what is ‘trending’ that day. The printers never issue the same information twice.

Commonplace Studio, Jesse Howard, Tim Knapen, A Commonplace Book, 2018 — 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Commonplace Studio, Jesse Howard, Tim Knapen, A Commonplace Book, 2018 — 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Commonplace Studio, Jesse Howard, Tim Knapen, A Commonplace Book, 2018 — 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Commonplace Studio, Jesse Howard, Tim Knapen, A Commonplace Book, 2018 — 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

A Commonplace Book is an open information machine that stimulates curiosity and knowledge-sharing. The work investigates how we understand, perceive and deal with time. On one side of each table is a selection of time-related objects. On the other side, a mechanical drawing machine produces excerpts, drawings, quotes or anecdotes that make us question our understanding of time. Visitors can compile their own book with the fragments available in the room and later continue filling the blank pages with their own thoughts, notes or discoveries.

More images from the exhibition:

Ecole Mondiale, Fieldstation: Time, 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Ecole Mondiale, Fieldstation: Time, 2020. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, I am not a Monster. Hannah Arendt handmade doll. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Nelly Ben Hayoun-Stépanian, I am not a Monster. Photo by Fiona Briallon

Helga Schmid, Circadian Dreams, 2020. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Alexis Destoop, Untitled (Naji), 2017. Installation view: The Work of Time, Z33. Photo: Kristof Vrancken

Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture has a new exhibition wing created by architect Francesca Torzo and it is stunning:

Wing 19, a new exhibition building for Z33 by architect Francesca Torzo. Photo: Olmo Peeters

Wing 19, a new exhibition building for Z33 by architect Francesca Torzo. Photo: Gion Balthasar von Albertini

The Work of Time was curated by Ils Huygens. You’ve only got a couple of days left to visit it if you’re anywhere near Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture in Hasselt, Belgium.

Previously: Pazugoo, the 3D printed evil spirits of nuclear waste storage; The Nuclear Culture Source Book.

The Photograph as Contemporary Art (new edition), by author and curator Charlotte Cotton.

Publisher Thames & Hudson write: A new edition of the definitive title for students and teachers in the field of contemporary art photography. Updated throughout to reflect contemporary perspectives on the most significant moments in photography’s recent history, with the final two chapters extensively revised to reflect on new technologies, approaches and dialogue with established traditions in photography-as-art.

Photography is by far my favourite art form. It can be easy and immediate. And it can hide multiple layers of meaning and references. Photography also gives visibility to people, practices and places that mainstream visual media fails to notice.

I’ve reviewed a dozen or more books about photography on this blog. What makes The Photograph as Contemporary Art stand out from crowded library bookshelves is its compact format that allowed me to take it on train trips across Belgium last month. Despite its smallish size, the volume manages to explore the work of over 350 photographers, many of them new to me.

Tatsumi Orimoto, Bread Man Son and Alzheimer Mama, Tokyo, 1996

Mona Hatoum, Van Gogh’s Back, 1995


But the reason why I want to recommend this book is that it is a fun one. It targets an audience of art viewers but there’s none of the (stale) arty mumbo jumbo. There’s humour throughout the pages and there’s inventiveness in the categories Cotton chose to classify contemporary photography art. You’d expect these categories to be portraits, landscapes, documentary, abstraction or still life but the author is too farsighted and experienced to comply with readers expectations. Here are photo works and categories I discovered in this little gem of a book:

The first category, If This Is Art, considers how photographers orchestrate performances, scenarios and happenings for the camera. The image is the end goal, the testimony of an action never to be repeated.

Nona Faustine, From Her Body Sprang Their Greatest Wealth, 2013

In her White Shoes series, Nona Faustine visualizes the legacy of oppression, dehumanisation and violence against people of colour. In the image above, she stands on a wooden box in the middle of Manhattan’s Wall Street, a clear reference to the site of an eighteenth-century slave market and to a financial wealth that would not have been possible without the exploitation of enslaved people.

Ni Haifeng, Self-Portrait as a Part of Porcelain Export History (no. 1), 1999–2001

Ni Haifeng painted his torso with the kind of motifs that 18th-century Dutch traders designed to satisfy Western demands for ‘china’. The words on his torso are written in the style of a museum label or a catalogue entry, a direct allusion to the traumas left by colonialism and the commodification and exploitation of human beings.

Tony Albert, Brothers (Our Past, Our Present, Our Future), 2013

Tony Albert portrays Aboriginal men facing the camera with a red target painted on their torso. The motif evokes 
racial profiling and state violence towards Indigenous people in Australia. In Aboriginal iconography, however, red circles represent the emanation of water ripples or sound waves – a depiction of the quality of the men’s inner spirit.

The Once Upon a Time chapter demonstrates how a single photo can encapsulate a complex story. Because of the hours, labour, actors, technicians and skills involved in reconstructing scenes capable of conveying a full narrative, the practice can sometimes take the dimensions of movie-making.

Yinka Shonibare, Diary of a Victorian Dandy: 14.00 hours, 1998

In Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Yinka Shonibare plays the main character in a sequence that depicts five moments in the daily life of an 18th-century fashionable gentleman. The work alludes to William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1732–34), a series of painting that chronicled the decline and fall of the spendthrift heir of a rich merchant. Shonibare’s scenes contrast sharply with the marginalised status of black people at the time as well as with his own position as a creative black man with a physical disability in contemporary Britain.

Wendy Red Star, Four Seasons – Winter, 2006

Wendy Red Star re-appropriates 19th and 20th-century colonialist representations of Native American people and cultures. Her Four Seasons series shows her wearing a traditional elk-tooth dress that identifies her Apsáalooke (Crow) ancestry. Everything around her, however, screams of artificiality. Fake backdrop, synthetic snow, inflatable wildlife and plastic surfaces. Each of these elements hints at the scenographic simulation of “natural habitat” in world’s fair enclosures, natural history museum diorama and other types of colonialist representations.

Cristina de Middel, Susan Morrison, from the series Poly Spam, 2009

Cristina de Middel gives life to some of the spam emails she receives. She stages the ‘authors’ of the messages in scenarios that are based on the description of the desperate situations they claimed to find themselves in. The artist would also sometimes write the scammers to get more details about their circumstances.
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The Deadpan section zooms in on art photography devoid of any visual drama or hyperbole. The images often invite the viewer to contemplate the interconnections between the manmade and natural world.

Richard Misrach, Wall, Near Los Indios, Texas, 2015

In Wall, Near Los Indios, Texas, Richard Misrach singles out a disconnected portion of the ‘border wall’ standing pitifully on a small patch of grass. The image suggests the lunacy of constructing a continuous wall through the 2,000-mile border terrain when the very people that the construction is meant to deter are not discouraged from crossing the border but are in fact taking even more risks to do so.

Something and Nothing shows how contemporary photographers transform the most ordinary objects and spaces into extraordinary, atmospheric images that elicit a sense that the most familiar scenes deserve more consideration.

John Lehr, Neon Rose, 2010

Tim Davis, McDonalds 2, Blue
Fence, 2001. From the series Retail

Tim Davis’s series Retail zooms on the windows of American suburban houses. At night, the glass reflects the neon signs from fast-food joints. Consumer culture quietly invading domestic life.

Intimate Life concentrates on personal relationships. Moving and intimate, they have an air of spontaneity.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Me and Mom’s Boyfriend Mr. Art, 2005. From series The Notion of Family

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s family scenes are subtly exploring the legacy of racism and economic decline in Braddock, a small town in Pennsylvania.

Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. From the series Ray’s A Laugh

Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. From the series Ray’s A Laugh

Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. From the series Ray’s A Laugh

Richard Billingham, Untitled, 1994. From the series Ray’s A Laugh

Charlotte Cotton illustrate each photographer with one photo only. I don’t have to. Ray’s A Laugh is perhaps my favourite photo series ever. I find it moving, brutal, funny, arresting. I’ll never get tired of it. In the early 1990s, Billingham started recording the life of his parents in their tower block home in the West Midlands. His dad drank too much. His mother loved tattoos and jigsaws. She often looks angry. For some reason, I see tenderness in the photos.

The Moments in History chapter propels documentary works into the world of contemporary art.

Sophie Ristelhueber, Iraq, 2001

Sophie Ristelhueber’s images of Iraq in 2000 and 2001 brings the grim reality of war into focus. Post-battle landscapes made of sand and burnt tree stumps act as metaphors for loss of life and ecological destruction.

Patrick Waterhouse, Hip-Hop Gospel and Tanami. Restricted with Athena Nangala Granites, 2016. From the series Restricted Images: Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia, 2018.

Working with members of the Warlpiri language group, in Yuendumu and Nyirripi communities in Australia, Patrick Waterhouse invited his collaborators to “correct” his black and white prints using dot painting traditional to these Aboriginal cultures, symbolically addressing the colonial legacy of photography in the country.

John Edmonds, America, The Beautiful, 2017. From the series Du Rag

John Edmond’s America, The Beautiful is part of a series inspired by the do rags worn by young men of colour in Brooklyn. The image shows the painterly use of light, composition and colour that characterises his portraits of masculinity.

Revived and Remade brings to light practices that build upon and play with well-known codes and icons of photography.

Christopher Williams, Kodak Three Point Reflection Guide, © 1968 Eastman Kodak Company, 1968. (Corn) Douglas M. Parker Studio, Glendale, California, April 17, 2003, 2003

Christopher Williams explores the presence of corn byproducts in countless objects and aspects of our daily lives, including in photography itself: a corn byproduct is included in the lubricant used to polish photo lenses and another can be found in the chemicals used for fine art prints. Corn byproducts were even used to make the artificial corncobs in the image above. Corn and photography are therefore both the subject and the material of his photograph.

Anchored into digital culture, the Photographicness section showcases image-based works that draw upon sculpture and painting concepts.

Soo Kim, The DMZ (Train station), 2016. From the series The DMZ

The DMZ (a name that Demilitarized Zones) is a series of double-sided works that viewers can contemplate from both sides. Soo Kim captured the border of North and South Korea at a train station that was designed to move people between the two States but has never been opened nor used.

A couple more images for the road:

Antoine Catala, Image Families, 2013

Catherine Opie, Flipper, Tanya, Chloe, & Harriet, San Francisco, California, 
1995

Lewis Baltz, Power Supply No. 1 (National Center Meteo, Grenoble, France), 1989–92

Who knew that a printed photograph could be so damaging to the environment? Hannah Fletcher does. A photographic artist and member of the London Alternative Photography Collective, Fletcher is concerned about the litres of water necessary to wash films and prints, the resin-coated paper going to landfill, the harsh development and fixing chemicals as well as the heavy metals polluting soils and aquatic systems, the bovine gelatine coating paper and films, etc.

Hannah Fletcher, What Remains: The Root and The Radical, with London Alternative Photography Collective at Unseen photo festival, 2018

Her own artistic work demonstrates that this toxic assault on ecosystems is not unavoidable. Fletcher is a photographer without a camera who combines techniques from the past and experiments to innovate and improve photographic processes. Instead of the usual image-making tools, she uses light, paper, chemicals but also organic materials such as soils, algae, mushrooms and roots. She even set up The Sustainable Darkroom Project, a research, training and mutual learning programme to equip cultural practitioners with skills and knowledge that will help them develop an environmentally friendly photographic practice.

Hannah Fletcher, Algology: The Art of Scientific Curiosity, 2016

Hannah Fletcher, Algology: The Art of Scientific Curiosity, 2016

Hi Hannah! I was shocked when I read the description of The Sustainable Darkroom Project, the “artists run research, training and mutual learning programme aims to equip cultural practitioners with new skills and knowledge to develop a more environmentally friendly analogue photography / darkroom practice.” I am very interested in looking at the ecological footprint of pretty much everything but I had never considered the footprint of analogue photography. Could you give us an idea of the impact that analogue photography / darkroom practice have on the environment?

I find that the material impact we have as artists is often left by the wayside. We are taught that ‘art has no boundaries’, but if we want to keep working with these processes and materials, then, at some point we need to realise that the planet has limitations and we need to take better care not to overstep those boundaries. If the materials and processes we are using are not sustainable longterm then we need to rethink the way we are doing things.

In Analogue photography some of the issues include the toxicity of the chemicals, the unsustainable silver mining, the gelatine being an animal derived product and therefore helping to fuel the meat industry, the high volumes of water that are used for washing films and prints, the resin coating on papers – deeming them un-recyclable and therefore going to landfill… etc.. I could go on.

What would you say to someone who tells you that if analogue photography has such an impact on the environment, then we should all switch to digital photography and a large part of the problem would be solved? Surely, it is more complicated than that?

We aren’t going to solve the worlds problems by just moving everything digital. Digital photography has its own set of environmental issues and these are actually a very similar set of problems to analogue photography, only the materials are slightly different. Concerns of pollution, toxicity, exploitation, disposal, etc. caused by regular upgrades and the lack of safe disposal of old models; constant unsustainable mining of the rare earth minerals that make up the components of the camera; storing all of the files and images on cloud storage systems, etc. These devour vast quantities of energy and emit enough heat to melt themselves. Cooling systems, using more energy, are used to combat this waste heat. Even when data is not being accessed, they sit idle, ready and waiting for a surge in activity. Consequently, these centres can waste 90% or more of the electricity they pull off the grid.

All these issues and more are just as important to consider in the material relationships that make possible the existence of digital cameras/smartphones.

How did you get into cameraless photographic processes?

At school, when I first started studying photography we had access to a tiny cupboard like-darkroom. Only 1 person could use it at a time, so there was never anyone else there to tell you that you were not dong things the ‘correct’ way. This was where I would spend a lot of my spare time. It was here that I started to play around with the process of developing prints. One afternoon, I noticed a few prints in the bin that had been thrown away before being fully fixed. In their wet state, they had stuck to the plastic lining of the bin, causing an impression of crumpled plastic to be left on the prints as they continued to absorb light and react to their environment. I was so intrigued by the relationship between the photographic surface and this plastic bin bag; a non-photographic material. From there, gradually more and more my practice moved away from taking photographs with a camera.

Some of the techniques you work with (photograms, chemigrams, cyanotype, lumen prints, anthotype, Xerograph, pinhole camera, etc.) are not new. Does this automatically mean that there is no innovation, no research in the processes and material you work with? That if you want to be environmentally-friendly you are bound to look towards the past?

Amongst the techniques and processes I play around with, there is always something new. Many of the processes are near impossible to get the same results twice, it is an unpredictable method of making images. Often the result is haphazard and unsuccessful, as I attempt to control and dictate the outcome, it becomes a collaboration between the materials and me. I am continually thinking about new materials and ways to integrate those materials into the process of photographic print making. I do not see these techniques as individual methods of working, but as a set of knowledge, that I can combine and alter, adapt and morph according to my needs. techniques flow into one another, there is not always a need to categorise and label the way you are making work.

Hannah Fletcher, Circles: A Record of Our Time, 2017

Hannah Fletcher, Circles: A Record of Our Time, 2017

Hannah Fletcher, Circles: A Record of Our Time, 2017

Circles: A Record of Our Time illustrates (as far as I can tell) the mix of old techniques and current scientific research that characterises much of your work. The series is a visual recording of the Anthropocene in tree rings. The work is based on chromatography but you added layers of meaning and modified the traditional technique. Could you explain to us the research process behind the series?

The research for this project started, as you mention, with the Anthropocene. I was researching and considering the visual traces and images that will be left in our environment after we are gone. There are 3 ways in which human behaviour during this time will be visible in years to come: through rocks, ice and trees. Sedimentary rocks layered with indecomposable debris. Chemicals and toxins, we have dumped, absorbed into roots and captured in tree rings. Permanent scarring on rocks showing deforestation and the elimination and disruption to species. CO2 absorbed into freezing waters leaving ice cores; murky and grey.

I choose to focus on the visual representation of tree rings, and began investigating wood and tree rings both in my research and in my practice. Cross sections of wood became my photographic material and image making device. Not only working with chromatography, but also with chemigrams, luminograms, photograms etc.

The chromatographic works in this series were made from soil samples collected from beneath different trees around London. Using filter paper and silver nitrate, I am able to create a photographic record of the components held in the soil, which, if unremoved, would have been absorbed by the tree and influenced the growth of the outer tree ring. Most of the minerals held within the soil are invisible without the use of silver nitrate. By drawing the solution through a central hole in the filter paper, the minerals form concentric circles according to the speeds they are transported at. This organic banding of the soil components imitates the aesthetic of the tree rings, bringing the work in a loop.

Hannah Fletcher, What Remains: The Root and The Radical, 2018

Hannah Fletcher, What Remains: The Root and The Radical, 2018

Hannah Fletcher, What Remains: The Root and The Radical, 2018

What Remains: The Root and The Radical explores the fascinating scientific field that studies the cognitive abilities of plants. Could you tell us how the images you created for this series illustrate or comment on plant intelligence?

Recently, more and more, plants are being described as ‘intelligent bodies’ and ‘social organisms’. In the late 1800s, Charles Darwin was the first to suggest that the tip of the roots in plants is akin to the brain of some animals. Since then, the possibility of mental capacities and cognitive abilities of plants has become an exciting field of research. In his book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben states that the roots of a tree ‘is where the tree equivalent of a brain is located’. The root network is in control of all chemical activity in the plant, they absorb and release essential substances. In a similar way, our own internal processes are too controlled by chemical messengers.

Working in a pseudo-scientific manner, I subjected plants to photographic chemicals, to try and understand what, if any, of the photographic material can be processed. Aiming to some how visualise the unobserved and unseen information contained within the roots. Roots were submerged into photographic chemistry and then reapplied to photographic surfaces, allowing the uptake of the plant to dictate the form of the image. The movement of the roots marking themselves along the paper.

In other works in this series I scored the surface of the paper, as if it was the surface of the earth, encouraging the chemistry to penetrate bellow the resin coated surface, searching for the structure; the root of the paper.

Hannah Fletcher, The Mushroom Book, 2015

Hannah Fletcher, The Mushroom Book, 2015

Has your practice and more generally your interest in the environment altered the way you look at photography? Can you still enjoy a photography exhibition in a museum or gallery and forget what those images cost the earth?

It’s important to be able to look at photography and art in general without preconceived ideas and judgements. I am not thinking about environmental concerns all the time, otherwise I would really struggle to enjoy life. Everything we do has an impact and a consequence on the environment, but that does not mean we should not enjoy what is out there or sit back and watch the fire burn.

This is why I started The Sustainable Darkroom Project, I recognise the importance to empower individuals to make different choices. The more the individual consciousness grows, the more collective power we have. The closer we get to pulling down some of these barriers and opening up the flood gates.

The project is designed to build collective power within and opposing the current photographic industry. I want to encourage and empower you, as makers, as thinkers and as doers to have the knowledge and awareness of the materials and processes you are using. To understand the relationship between the things you use and the planet you live on.

The Sustainable Darkroom is an international project designed to educate, to learn through sharing and collaborative research. To encourage mistakes to be made and crazy ideas and ideals to be tested. With each new residency, workshop, talk or event, we get a little bit closer to understanding this word sustainable and the role it plays in every aspect of the photographic industry and beyond.

I recognise that we still have a long way to go and that a lot of the ideas, recipes and suggestions are not yet rigorously tested or scrutinised. This initiative is open for all to be involved with, all to learn from, all to add to and all to question. We will continue to experiment and adapt as we learn.

Thanks Hannah!