The Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm 2020025260, 2020025261, 9781138325302, 9780429450471

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM

This multidisciplinary companion offers a comprehensive overview of the global arena of public art. It is organised around four distinct topics: activation, social justice, memory and identity, and ecology, with a final chapter mapping significant works of public and social practice art around the world between 2008 and 2018. The thematic approach brings into view similarities and differences in the recent globalisation of public art practices, while the multidisciplinary emphasis allows for a consideration of the complex outcomes and consequences of such practices, as they engage different disciplines and communities and affect a diversity of audiences beyond the existing ‘art world’. The book will highlight an international selection of artist projects that illustrate the themes. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, art history, urban studies, and museum studies. Cameron Cartiere is a creative practitioner, writer, and researcher focused on public art, urban renewal, and environmental issues. She is co-editor of The Everyday Practice of Public Art (with Martin Zebracki) and The Practice of Public Art (with Shelly Willis). Leon Tan is an arts, culture, design, and mental health consultant and educator, whose research focuses on cultural expression and the public realm. Dr Tan is an associate professor of design and contemporary arts at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand.

Cover Image: Tania Bruguera. Monument to New Immigrants, 2017, Philadelphia. Credit: Steve Weinik/Monument Lab and Mural Arts Philadelphia.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM

Edited by Cameron Cartiere and Leon Tan

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Cameron Cartiere and Leon Tan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cartiere, Cameron, editor. | Tan, Leon, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to art in the public realm / edited by Cameron Cartiere and Leon Tan. Description: New York : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020025260 (print) | LCCN 2020025261 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138325302 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429450471 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art and society. | Art and social action. Classification: LCC N72.S6 R69 2021 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC 701/.0309051–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025260 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020025261 ISBN: 978-1-138-32530-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45047-1 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by River Editorial Ltd, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

ix xiii xx

PART I

Introduction

1

1 Expanding Our Collective Imagination Through Public Art and Social Practice Cameron Cartiere and Leon Tan

3

PART II

Activation

9

2 Towards a Public of ‘the Otherwise’ Meenakshi Thirukode

11

3 Japan’s Rural Art Festivals: The Echigo-Tsumari Paradigm Justin Jesty

23

4 Shaking the Snow Globe and Changing the City Melissa Laing

37

5 Political Art and Metaphoric Exchange Steven Cottingham

48

v

Contents

6 Gardens and Grains: Design Activations in the Public Realm Gretchen Coombs

58

7 ACT: Activating City Transience Maggie McCormick

69

PART III

Social Justice

79

8 Art as Protest: The Forced Eviction of the Shijhou and Sa’owac Urban Indigenous Tribes in Taiwan Lu Pei-Yi 9 Participation Problematises: Together in Violence Anthony Schrag 10 As If: An Embodied Account Beatrice Catanzaro

81

94

106

11 Quiet Gestures, Gift Exchange, and Public Formations: The Work of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share Lana Lopesi 12 Surviving Institutionalised Care: Accessibility as Social Practice Carmen Papalia

117

126

PART IV

Memory and Identity

141

13 Suspended Memory: Ebbs and Flows in Attempts at Memorialising in Post-Apartheid South Africa Jay Pather

143

14 The Double Act of Flower Time Raqs Media Collective

155

15 (In)famous: Contemporary Lessons from History’s Heroes Jennifer Wingate

164

16 Public Art, Cultural Identity, and the River of Oblivion José Quaresma

175

17 Luanda’s Emotional Geography Fabio Vanin

185

vi

Contents

18 The Imaginary Institution of Place: Notes on Art-led Place-Making as Aesthetic, Social, and Temporal Engineering Giusy Checola 19 The Battle of Public Sculptures: On Three Sculptures in Hong Kong Oscar Ho Hing-Kay 20 Public Art, Gentrification, and the Preservation of Black and Brown Urban Identity: The Case of Little Haiti, Miami – an Interview with Muralist Serge Toussaint Martin Zebracki

196

209

219

PART V

Ecology

231

21 Digging in the World: Art and Emergent Forms for Living Susanne Cockrell

233

22 Landscape, Eco-Arts Practice, and Digital Technology in the Public Art Realm Laura Lee Coles

243

23 Changing Space Lesia Prokopenko

257

24 Ensemble Practices Iain Biggs

269

25 Public Art Visions and Possibilities: From the View of a Practising Artist Betsy Damon

279

26 A Compass Rose for the Anthropocene: New Maps for Old – the Art of Transforming Cultures for Sustainable Futures Beth Carruthers

290

27 In the Time of Art with Policy: The Practice of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison Alongside Global Environmental Policy Since the 1970s Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, and Dave Pritchard 28 The Harrisons’ Practice in the Context of Global Environmental Policy and Politics from the 1960s to 2019: A Timeline Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, and Dave Pritchard

vii

300

315

Contents

PART VI

Mapping Social Change

333

29 Mapping Art in the Public Realm 2008–2018 Cameron Cartiere, Leon Tan, and Elisha Masemann (map design, Geoff Campbell)

335

Index

364

viii

FIGURES

2.1 2.2 4.1 4.2

5.1 5.2 6.1 6.2 7.1

8.1 8.2 9.1

‘I Never Ask For It’ (2017), Blank Noise. Bangalore ‘Khirkee Talk Show’ (2017), Malini Kochupillai. Khirkee Extension Opening night crowds for The Claw by Hanna Shim, Micheal McCabe, and Adam Ben Dror (2018). Northcote Town Centre, Auckland, New Zealand Kids on bikes with a copy of Localise, watching the night performances at the 2015 Whau Arts Festival. Localise was a temporary newspaper publication produced for the Whau Arts Festival 2015, run by Ioana Gordon-Smith and Lana Lopesi. Each issue focused on the subject of community art, exploring how art, and even the newspaper itself, can meaningfully engage with local residents Blackfoot (2015), Brittney Bear Hat. Atlas Sighed: The 2015 Calgary Biennial, intersection of Blackfoot Trail and Glenmore Trail SE. Calgary, AB, Canada Jardin d’explosion (1972), Supports/Surfaces. Saint-Paul-de-Vene, France Flatbread Society Bakehouse (2017), Futurefarmers. Oslo, Norway Civic Center Victory Gardens (2007), Futurefarmers. San Francisco Victory Gardens, San Francisco, CA, USA ‘Cyber Static’ video, SkypeLab: 1000 Pixel (curated by Henning Eichinger, Maggie McCormick, Annie Kurz, and Javiera Advis, November 2019), Fiona Hillary, Zan Griffith, and Susan Maco Forrester. Berlin ‘WE WILL WIN’ (2008), Burak Delier. Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Plant-Matter NeoEden: Born in a Vegetable Patch and Material World in the Amis Tribe of Riverbank (2009), Lu Chien-Ming. Taipei, Taiwan Anonymous artwork as part of Atelier Public #2 (2014), unknown author. Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow ix

14 16 41

44 50 55 59 62

70 85 88 101

Figures

9.2 10.1 10.2 11.1 12.1 12.2 13.1 13.2 14.1

15.1 15.2 16.1 16.2 17.1 17.2 19.1 19.2 20.1 20.2 21.1 21.2 22.1 22.2

Make Destruction, Anthony Schrag. Atelier Public #2, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Bait al Karama (2010–ongoing), Beatrice Catanzaro, Old City Nablus, Palestine Tana (2002), Wurmkos. Museo di Villa Croce, Genova, Italy ‘Smoko Pt. 2’, morning tea event at Well-Connected Alliance, Wiri site tearooms (2016), Public Share. Tā maki Makaurau (Auckland), New Zealand ‘Blind Field Shuttle’ (2012), Carmen Papalia. Site-specific performance, San Francisco, CA, USA ‘Open Access Poster Typeface’ (2015), Carmen Papalia. Poster series produced in collaboration with WePress Collective for Tate Liverpool, Vancouver, BC, Canada Release (2012), Marco Cianfanelli. Nelson Mandela Capture Site, Howick, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa Untitled (Heritage Day), Public Holiday Series (2013), Sethembile Msezane. House of Parliament, Cape Town, South Africa ‘Not Yet At Ease’, still from video. First shown at First Site, Colchester, as part of ‘14–18 Now: A Centennial Commemoration of the First World War Across the UK’ (2018), Raqs Media Collective Henry Ward Beecher (1891), John Quincy Adams Ward. Columbus Park, New York, USA Henry Ward Beecher (1914), Gutzon Borglum. Plymouth Church, New York, USA Tagus River (2010). Lisbon, Portugal Chiado Square (2010). Lisbon, Portugal Comparative axonometry representing, on the left, Kiluanji Kia Henda’s performance Homem Sò (2011–2012) and the statue of Agostinho Netoin Largo da Independencia Map of the central area of Luanda highlighting the spaces that have been renovated by the Luanda Triennial during its first edition (2004–2006) The Golden Bauhinia (1997), unknown creator. Golden Bauhinia Square, Wan Chai, Hong Kong The Flying Frenchman/Freedom Fighter (1993), César Baldaccini. Kowloon, Hong Kong Anpil Min Chay pa Lou (2016), Serge Toussaint. Little Haiti, Miami, FL, USA The Bread Sellers (2016), Serge Toussaint. Little Haiti, Miami, FL, USA Napkin sketch of the Amity pushcart (2004), Andrew Bigler. Oakland, CA, USA Temescal Amity Works opening poster (2004) Technorganic (2005), ecoarttech. Pine Lake Environmental Campus, Hartwick College, New York, USA Living (2013), Sebnem Ozpeta and Sunstorms, Rob Scharein. LocoMotoArt, Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, BC, Canada x

101 110 113 122 132 138 144 153

160 165 167 176 179 190 193 210 214 222 223 237 238 247 249

Figures

23.1 23.2 24.1 24.2 25.1 25.2 26.1 26.2 27.1 27.2 28.1 28.2 28.3 29.1 29.2 29.3 29.4 29.5 29.6 29.7 29.8 29.9 29.10 29.11

Nowe Ż ycie (New Life) (2014), Elż bieta Jabłoń ska. Królikarnia, Warsaw, Poland Gardens of the Anthropocene (2016), Tamiko Thiel. Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA, USA The Suffolk Coast Between Aldeburgh and Shingle Street and the Shoreline Management Plan of 2010 (2010), Simon Read Welcome banner in 22 languages made by participants in the ‘Branching Out’ group at Speedwell Children’s Centre (2019). Bristol, UK ‘Long-Abandoned Water Standards, 擱置已久的水指標’ (1995), Dai Guang Yu. Chengdu, China Leader of the Green Team at a mapping workshop (2014). Larmier, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Breach of Protocol (2000), Nancy Bleck Gene – Ceremony I (1998), Nancy Bleck A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (1984), Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Gouda, the Netherlands Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2008), Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Exeter, UK Dave Pritchard (left) and Chris Fremantle (right) working on the timeline (2019). Edinburgh, Scotland Anne Douglas (foreground) and Chris Fremantle (background) working on the timeline (2019). Aberdeen, Scotland Timeline of global environmental policy and politics juxtaposed with the works of the Harrisons from the 1960s to 2019 Looking for Love Again (2011), Candy Chang. Fairbanks, AK, USA If They Should Ask (2017), Sharon Hayes. Monument Lab Philadelphia Citywide Exhibition, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA, USA A Man was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015), Dread Scott. New York, USA Open Cinema (2013), Marysia Lewandowska and Colin Fournier. Guimarães, Portugal Sing for Her (2015), Zheng Bo. Salisbury Garden, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong Forgotten Songs (2009), Michael Thomas Hill. Angel Place, Sydney, Australia Conflict Kitchen (2010–2017), Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski. Pittsburgh, PA, USA Repellent Fence (2015), Postcommodity. Mexico/USA border between Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico and Douglas, AZ, USA CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones (2017–ongoing), Cooking Sections. Isle of Skye, Scotland Hucha de deseos (2009–2010), Susanne Bosch. Madrid, La Latina, Spain Migrant Choir (2015), Public Studio and Adrian Blackwell. Arsenale, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy xi

261 265 272 275 282 285 296 297 307 308 316 316 320 338 340 341 342 344 345 348 349 351 352 353

Figures

29.12 29.13 29.14 29.15 29.16

Fire hydrant drinking fountain, family (2012), Sans façon. Calgary, AB, Canada Murmur Wall (2017), Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab. Palo Alto, CA, USA Superkilen, the Black Market (2011), SUPERFLEX, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and Topotek1. Superkilen, Copenhagen, Denmark Makoko Floating School (2011), Kunlé Adeyemi. Lagos, Nigeria Chicoco Radio kids (2011), Human City Project. Port Harcourt, Nigeria

xii

358 359 361 362 363

CONTRIBUTORS

Iain Biggs is the former director of the PLaCE Research Centre, University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol. He is currently a visiting research fellow at the Environmental Humanities Research Centre, Bath Spa University, and an honorary research fellow at Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art and Design, University of Dundee. His work includes research, making visual art work, collaboration, various forms of writing, and mentoring, all as related elements in an ensemble practice. Beth Carruthers is an interdisciplinary scholar and researcher known for her investigations and analyses of the role and transformative capacity of the arts and cultural practices in human–world and interspecies relations. Over several years she developed a framework for understanding and interpreting such works and undertakings as ‘praxis’: ethical, creative, collaborative engagement among places and species for mutual flourishing (sustainable futures). Her ongoing research investigates the impact of multi-stakeholder collaborative and transdisciplinary artist-initiated and arts-led ecological art projects on environmental and public policy. Carruthers is a founding member of the International Environmental Communications Association, editor of The Trumpeter (one of the first journals on environmental philosophy), and, since 2001, an active member of the International Ecoart Network. Cameron Cartiere is a creative practitioner, writer, and researcher focused on public art, urban renewal, and environmental issues. She specialises in community-based collaborative public projects. In addition to an active art and research practice, she is also the author of RE/Placing Public Art (VDM Verlag, 2010), co-editor of The Practice of Public Art (with Shelly Willis, Routledge, 2010) and The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion (with Martin Zebracki, Routledge, 2015), and co-author of The Manifesto of Possibilities: Commissioning Public Art in the Urban Environment (with Sophie Hope, Springer, 2010). Dr Cartiere is a professor of public art and social practice in the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada. She is also the co-editor-and-chief (with Jennifer Wingate) of Public Art Dialogue. Beatrice Catanzaro is an artist, researcher, and teacher. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Oxford Brookes University with the Social Sculpture Research Unit. Her practice xiii

Contributors

questions social hegemonic structures through collective imaginary processes, grounded in long-term engagements and interdisciplinary collaborations. She has worked throughout Europe, the Middle East, and India. Between 2010 and 2015 she lived in Palestine, where she taught at the International Art Academy of Palestine (Ramallah) and co-founded the Women Centre and social enterprise Bait al Karama in the old city of Nablus. Her work has been exhibited in museums and international venues such as MART Museum of Rovereto, Fundacao Gulbenkian in Lisbon, and the Espai d’Art Contemporani de Castelló (EACC) in Spain, Quadriennale of Roma. She currently lives in Milan (Italy) with her daughter and teaches at the NABA Art Academy. Giusy Checola is a PhD candidate at University Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis, France, in the Doctoral School of Eesthetics, Sciences and Technologies of Arts (EDESTA), in cotutelle with the PhD programme in humanist intercultural studies at the University of Bergamo, Italy. She studies place-making as a socio-historical creation, humanistic-scientific research field, and integrated design methodology, through the interrelation between art, geoaesthetics, social, and cognitive sciences. She is a researcher at the Institute for Public Art – Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts of the Shanghai University, and contributor to the Public Art magazine, Shanghai. She has been responsible for the educational and researchoriented programme of Fondazione SoutHeritage (2015–2019), and author and co-director of Invisible Pavilions: The Excavated Architecture, a project by Matera-Basilicata 2019 European Capital of Culture. She has been mentor, author, and coordinator of the Italian session of the project Understanding Territoriality: Identity, Place and Possession, supported by the European Union, for Fondazione Pistoletto, Fabrica, Netwerk, and Otvorena Soba (2015–2016). Susanne Cockrell is an associate professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her public art projects and commissions begin with land and place, engaging geographical, cultural, and social histories to set up conditions for encounters between people, ideas, and the ground beneath us. For 15 years she collaborated with Ted Purves under the rubric of fieldfaring projects, investigating the overlay of urban and rural systems in specific communities, asking questions about the nature of people and place, seen through social economy, history, and local ecology. Her projects have received support from Art Dialogue (Czech Republic), di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art (Napa, CA), the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne (AUS), Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Creative Work Fund (SF), Creative Capital Foundation (NYC), and the Center for Cultural Innovation (SF). Laura Lee Coles is an arts-based researcher, published writer, and practising interdisciplinary artist. Laura Lee’s interest in the interconnected relationships between human, technology, and nature drives the inspiration of her interactive, contemplative, and site-specific video installation practice. She holds a Master of Arts from the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at Simon Fraser University and is the founder of LocoMotoArt, artistsin-resident with Vancouver Park Board Arts, Culture and Environment in British Columbia, Canada. She is a member of the Canadian Academy of Independent Researchers and Community Scholars. Gretchen Coombs is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Design & Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Her recent writing navigates a spectrum where at one end she works closely with socially engaged artists as xiv

Contributors

part of her ethnographic research, and at the other, she tries to find a critical distance to write about their art projects. The results of this journey will be a creative ethnography, The Lure of the Social: Encounters with Contemporary Artists (Intellect, 2021). Steven Cottingham is an artist working on unceded territories (Vancouver, Canada). His practice concerns the dialectic of profit (the production of more than is consumed) and friction (the consumption of more than is produced). He has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan), Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin), and Fogo Island Arts (Fogo Island). Cottingham exhibits in both professional and guerrilla spaces, with exhibitions at Noda Estudio (Havana), the Wellcome Collection (London), the Herbert Read Gallery (Cambridge), the Museum of Capitalism (Oakland), Centro Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales (Havana), the Luminary (St Louis), and the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton). Previously he founded and directed the Calgary Biennial for Contemporary Art (Calgary, 2012–2015). Currently he runs QOQQOON, a webzine dedicated to art theory and materialist philosophy. Betsy Damon is an internationally acclaimed artist who has been called a practical visionary and a humanist. Her work has been widely reviewed, exhibited, and taught. She is known for her performance works The 7,000-Year-Old Woman (1976) and The Living Water Garden (1998) in Chengdu, Sichuan, China. She has directed many collaborative public performance events, mostly notably in Chengdu and Lhasa, China. Damon’s awards include the Bush Foundation, Heinz foundation, NEA, UN Habitat, Waterfront Center Top Honor, five awards from the ASLA, and others. For the past four decades Damon’s work has focused on the subject of water, which she reveals as the connective, creative, and collaborative medium behind all life. Damon promotes public consciousness of living water and invites us to place water itself as the foundation of all planning and design. In its search for truth, her work traverses the complexities of water – from a molecular scale to the levels of ecosystems and societies. Betsy’s work has been archived by Asia Art Archive. Anne Douglas is an artist and researcher. She has focused over the past 25 years on developing research into the changing nature of art in public life, increasingly in relation to environmental change. She has published extensively on artistic leadership, improvisation, and participation exploring the function and poetics of exemplary artistic practices, including that of the Harrisons, the latter in collaboration with Chris Fremantle. She is a professor emeritus from Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen and continues to develop and support practice-led research through the arts at doctoral and postdoctoral levels. Chris Fremantle is a research fellow and lecturer as well as a producer for art projects across health and environment. He has worked as a producer on the Harrisons’ work Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2006–2009) and more recently as an associate on the project On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland. Together with Anne Douglas, he has written on the practice of the Harrisons. Chris established ecoartscotland in 2010 and has been chair of the Art Focus Group for the Ramsar Culture Network since 2016. He has served on the executive board of the Scottish Artists Union. Oscar Ho Hing-Kay is the programme director of the MA in cultural management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Formerly he was the exhibition director of the Hong Kong Arts Centre and founding director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai. Professor xv

Contributors

Ho was the guest curator for the Second and Third Asian Pacific Triennial in Queensland Australia, member of the International Committee for the selection of the artistic director of documenta 13, founder of the Hong Kong Branch of the International Art Critic Association, and a founding member of the board of directors of the Asia Art Archive. Justin Jesty researches the relationship between art and social movements in postwar Japan. He recently published the book Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), which was awarded the 2019 ASAP Book Prize by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present. He is currently researching contemporary socially engaged art. In 2017 he edited a two-part special issue on the topic in FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. He has also published articles on postwar social documentary, the realism debate of the late 1940s, and Hamaya Hiroshi’s photographs of the 1960 Anpo protests. Melissa Laing is a researcher, artist, and curator working across the fields of temporary public art, social practice, performance, and ethics. She has a PhD from the University of Sydney and her writing has been published in magazines, exhibition and artist catalogues, and academic journals. Recent initiatives include leading Negotiating Conversational Frequency, a collaborative investigation into the role and practice of conversation in art with the Performance Ethics Working Group and Te Tuhi; facilitating an artist-led response to the Review of the Copyright Act in New Zealand with St Paul St Gallery; and co-curating Walking About, a 12-month series of performative and participatory walks that travel across Auckland with Te Uru Waitā kere Contemporary Gallery. Since 2014 she has contracted with Auckland Council and Panuku, Auckland Development in the temporary arts space. This includes being the Whau community arts broker, an initiative of the Whau Local Board to support community-led temporary arts activations across a local area. Lana Lopesi (Satapuala, Siumu, Pā kehā ) is an art critic and author of False Divides (Bridget Williams Books, 2018). Previously Lana was the editor-in-chief (2017–2019) for the Pantograph Punch. Before that, she was founding editor of #500words (2012–2017). Lopesi’s writing has featured in a number of magazines, journals, and publications in print and online, as well as in numerous artist and exhibition catalogues. Lopesi is currently a PhD candidate at Auckland University of Technology. She is also a researcher for the Vā Moana/Pacific spaces research cluster – an international research platform engaging Pacific and Western thought to investigate Vā Moana or Pacific spaces. Maggie McCormick is a practising artist, curator, writer, and researcher who has exhibited, curated, and undertaken research projects, presentations, and publications in Australia, Europe, Asia, and South America. McCormick is an adjunct professor and head of the Master of Arts (Art in Public Space) at the School of Art, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia and a professor at Reutlingen University, Germany. She is a key researcher in the RMIT School of Art research group CAST (Contemporary Art and Social Transformation) and is on the strategic advisory board of the Journal of Public Space (City Space Architecture, Italy and UN-Habitat), where she is co-editor of the Art and Activism in Public Space issues. McCormick’s research focus is on the impact of urbanisation and digitalisation on urban consciousness and contemporary cultural concepts. Her most recent research, SkypeLab, is a German/Australia initiative, networking universities in Australia, Germany, China, Brazil, Colombia, and Spain investigating how contemporary art practice, mediated by xvi

Contributors

screens, maps the emergence of a new urban consciousness that informs cultural readings of the urban phenomenon. Elisha Masemann is a researcher and writer in art history with a particular interest in the intersections of art, architecture, urbanism, and socio-urban theory. Her PhD (University of Auckland, 2018) analysed the relationship between art and the ‘concept city’ through artist responses to urban spaces and conditions since the mid twentieth century. Masemann was a New Zealand Kate Edger Charitable Trust postdoctoral research fellow in 2019, and is currently an international postdoctoral research fellow at the KWI Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Germany. Carmen Papalia is a social practice artist who uses organising strategies and improvisation to address his access to public space, the art institution, and visual culture. His work, which takes forms ranging from collaborative performance to public intervention, is an effort to unlearn visual primacy and resist support options that promote ableist concepts of normalcy. Papalia’s work has been featured at: the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, New York; the Tate Liverpool, Liverpool; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; the Grand Central Art Center, Santa Ana; and Gallery Gachet, Vancouver, among others. Papalia is a 2019 Sobey Art Award Long List recipient. He has received the 2014 Adam Reynolds Memorial Bursary and the 2013 Wynn Newhouse Award. Jay Pather is a choreographer, curator, and academic. Based in Cape Town, he is a professor who directs the Institute for Creative Arts at UCT and curates Infecting the City Public Art Festival and the ICA Live Art Festival. He also curates for Afrovibes in the Netherlands, for the Biennale of Body, Image, and Movement in Madrid, and is curatorial adviser for Live Art for Season Africa 2020 in various cities in France. He recently conceptualised and edited the first book about live art in South Africa, Acts of Transgression (Witwatersrand University Press, 2019) and is currently working on a book titled Restless Infections: Public Art in South Africa. Recent conference addresses include for Cities in a Climate of Change (Auckland), Independent Curators International (New York), and at the Haus der Kunst (Munich). He was recently made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (Knight of Arts and Letters) by the French government. Lu Pei-Yi is a curator, researcher, and art critic, based in Taipei. Her research interests mainly divide into two parts: one relates to off-site art (artistic practice outside museums, including institutional critique, public art, art and city, community art, participatory art, socially engaged art, and activist art) and another is about exhibition histories with a specific focus on Taiwan exhibition histories after the 1990s, curatorial research, and exhibitionmaking. Her edited research-based book, Contemporary Art Curating in Taiwan (1992–2012) (Artouch, 2015), was nominated for the Tenth Annual Award of Art China for Publication of the Year. Curatorial practices include associate curator of the Eighth Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale: We Have Not Participated (2014), curator of Micro Micro Revolution (2015) at the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), and co-curator of the Fifth Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition: Negative Horizon (2016) at Hong-Gah Museum. Dr Lu is the founding director of the MA programme on critical and curatorial studies of contemporary art at National Taipei University of Education and now serves as an assistant professor. Dave Pritchard has worked for over 35 years in a variety of research, policy, legal, management, and governance roles in the worlds of environmental policy, cultural heritage, and xvii

Contributors

the creative arts. He is now an independent adviser to bodies ranging from the United Nations Environment Programme to the Arts Council in England. With a special interest in the intersection between cultural values and environmental management, he is also a research collaborator with academic bodies in the UK and Australia, and serves on a range of national and international boards and advisory committees. At a global level he coordinates the Culture Network of the intergovernmental Convention on Wetlands, and in the UK, he chairs the Arts and Environment Network. Lesia Prokopenko is a researcher, writer, and curator. Since 2013 she has been taking part in the work of the Institute for Public Art, an independent network initiated by the Centre for Public Art, Shanghai University. She was a participant in the Curators Workshop at the Tenth Berlin Biennale (2018), completed the curatorial residency at the Fire Station Artists’ Studios in Dublin, and attended the Fifth Moscow Curatorial Summer School by V-A-C Foundation (both in 2016). In 2018, she translated into Russian Les trois écologies by Félix Guattari. She worked as the head of projects at the School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial 2015, curated and co-organised a number of exhibitions in Kyiv, Warsaw, Vienna, and Klagenfurt, and presented talks at Konstnärsnämnden (IASPIS) in Stockholm, Winzavod in Moscow, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. José Quaresma is a painter and researcher in philosophy of art and aesthetics. Dr Quaresma is assistant professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisboa’s University, Portugal. Since 1997 he has curated, organised, and co-curated several projects of contemporary printmaking, public art, and painting. Since 2008, Quaresma has edited and co-edited several books about art and public space, painting, the digital sphere, sciences of art, and contemporary printmaking. He organises the international lecture series (and publications), Research in Arts, Public Art and the Public Sphere. Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The word ‘raqs’ in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs Media Collective practices across several forms and media; it makes art, produces performances, writes, curates exhibitions, and occupies a unique position at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation, and historical enquiry. The members of Raqs Media Collective live and work in Delhi, India. Anthony Schrag is an artist and researcher currently based in Scotland. Working within the ‘participatory arts realm’, he practices internationally, as well as across the UK. His practice-based PhD explored the relationship between artists, institutions, and the public, looking specifically at a productive nature of conflict within institutionally supported participatory/public art projects. Dr Schrag is lecturer in cultural management at Queen Margaret University and an associate member of the Centre for Communication, Cultural and Media Studies as well as the Centre for Person-Centred Care. Leon Tan is an arts, culture, design, and mental health consultant and educator, whose research focuses on cultural expression and the public realm. He has published essays such as ‘Art as Schizoanalysis: Creative Placemaking in South Asia’ (in Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis xviii

Contributors

of Visual Art, Bloomsbury, 2014) and ‘Intellectual Property Law and the Globalization of Indigenous Cultural Expressions’ (in Theory Culture and Society, 30, no. 3 (2013), 61–81), and realised participatory projects such as Receding Triangular Square (Taipei Biennial, 2012) and Public Dream Clinic (Momentum the Nordic Biennial, 2017). Dr Tan is an associate professor of design and contemporary arts and director of research in the School of Creative Industries at Unitec Institute of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand. Meenakshi Thirukode is a writer, researcher, and 2016–2017 FICA Inlaks Goldsmiths scholar at the MRes programme in curatorial/knowledge at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her areas of research include feminist praxis and the role of culture and collectivity in the subcontinent within the realm of a trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals and institutions. Her recent projects include organising the ‘Here, There and Everywhere’ conference at MAC Birmingham, UK as part of the India–UK 70 years celebration (March 2018), and ‘Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise’, exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India (15–22 December 2018). Her research, writings, and curatorial work is invested in the role of reimagining cultural and political spaces in the region through alternate methods of pedagogy, lost, erased, and invisible art histories as well as intersectionality. Fabio Vanin is co-director of the LATITUDE Platform for Urban Research and Design and assistant professor of landscape urbanism for the MSc STeR* in urban design and spatial planning at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels. His main research interest lies in the relation between design and social practices, currently ranging from the impact of the security paradigm in shaping the urban realm, to the compatibility and social value of urban productive spaces (Brussels), to the effects of environmental issues on the urban landscape with a focus on water. Dr Vanin has also conducted research on post-independence urban contexts, with a focus on the transformation processes of lusophone cities. Jennifer Wingate is an associate professor of fine arts at St Francis College in Brooklyn, NY, where she teaches art history and American studies classes including commemorative practices in the United States, civil war past and present, and art of social change. She is the author of Sculpting Doughboys: Memory, Gender, and Taste in America’s World War I Memorials (Ashgate, 2013) and co-editor with Sierra Rooney and Harriet Senie of Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue & Confront Controversies (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Dr Wingate is also the co-editor-and-chief (with Cameron Cartiere) of Public Art Dialogue. Martin Zebracki is an associate professor of critical human geography at the University of Leeds, UK. His research straddles the areas of public art, sexuality, digital culture, and social inclusivity, and has been published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, Urban Studies, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Social & Cultural Geography. Zebracki is joint editor of the Routledge anthologies Public Art Encounters (with Joni M. Palmer, 2017) and The Everyday Practice of Public Art (with Cameron Cartiere, 2016), and editorial board member of Public Art Dialogue. He is chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group (SSQRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). Dr Zebracki is the principal investigator of the multi-site research project Queer Memorials: International Comparative Perspectives on Sexual Diversity and Social Inclusivity, supported by a grant awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A collection of any sort is a group effort and this one was no exception. The collaborative labour to produce this companion bridged numerous academic and professional disciplines, most of the continents, multiple borders, and all of the global time zones. We would like to thank all of the authors who contributed their unique perspectives, depth and breadth of knowledge, and genuine passion for the field of art in the public realm. Your dedication to our diverse discipline along with your unwavering enthusiasm and heartfelt support made this project possible. We would particularly like to thank our copy reviewer, Nicolas Kojey-Strauss and our editorial assistant Asia Jong for their tremendous support. Thank you to our editor Isabella Vitti and editorial assistant Katie Armstrong for your guidance and championship of this collection. The design of the global art maps emerged from the creative talents of Geoff Campbell and we would like to extend our appreciation to all the artists, organisations, and individuals who lent their material to make this visual snapshot of public art and social practice history possible. We would like to give special thanks to our respective institutions, the Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver, BC, Canada and the Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland, New Zealand for the ongoing support and encouragement of our collective research in the creative industries.

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PART I

Introduction

1 EXPANDING OUR COLLECTIVE IMAGINATION THROUGH PUBLIC ART AND SOCIAL PRACTICE Cameron Cartiere and Leon Tan

Introduction With climate change, political upheaval, and mass migration the challenges of the day, what is the role of art in the public realm in the twenty-first century? What is the function of the artist, designer, art historian, or creative activist today, as we grapple for solutions to our environmental, social, and economic ills? Is it to find new solutions? To offer different paths and/or ways of seeing? To bring together groups of people who might not normally find themselves in the same place? To give hope? And to what end? Is this the moment to forego waiting for political will to address these challenges and instead rely on our societal will to make positive change happen? The proliferation and globalisation of artistic practices that operate beyond the context of the museum or gallery in the last two decades suggest that the societal will to make positive change happen exists in every corner of the world. Without inviting people to cross the threshold of the white cube and to become complicit with the museum experience, art in the public realm is encountered just by moving through one’s daily commute and happening upon a temporary intervention, a newly sited sculpture, artist-designed seating or street lighting, a bus shelter with a virtual reality component, a fountain that highlights the images of the community it is situated in, a performance in a park calling attention to colonial-era statues. What do artistic practices in the public realm today offer to the people and communities they serve? Do we see ourselves in works like these? Do these works make us feel safer walking about our city streets? Do they create a sense that somebody cares about this area? What is the value of the encounter to the larger community, to the visitor as well as the resident? Much of what scholarship exists around public art and social practice is situated within the context of the Global North. Yet work is happening around the world and it is that global perspective that we have attempted to capture in the pages of the Routledge Companion to Art in the Public Realm. Our aim has been to offer a variety of voices, not just from different countries, but also from different perspectives, approaches, and disciplinary practices within the field. From every continent, from big cities and rural communities, the contributions to this anthology from researchers, activists, artists, and historians bring into 3

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view the multitude of ways in which art in the public realm informs, alters, and opens up our daily lives and social worlds. This introductory chapter sets the scene by constructing a brief global history of contemporary public art and arts-led urbanism. This historical overview is premised on a single question: Why has public art, and particularly so-called ‘new genre’ social practices, become mainstream not only in places like Europe and North America, but also increasingly throughout the rest of the world? The answer relates the increasing currency of public art to political-economic changes that have largely spread from the West to the rest of the world in the last century or so. These changes include the intensification of consumerism, privatisation, and ‘propertisation’, and result in the diminishment of the public realm and erosion of the commons. Following this introduction, this companion is divided into four field topics – activation, social justice, memory and identity, and ecology. These four topical frames provide an organising logic for a range of contributions from various perspectives including artists, curators, historians, and theorists, with the assembled chapters providing a range of voices examining the questions raised above. Chapters in Part II Activation address how public art practices enliven or revitalise public space and strengthen struggling communities. Authors in Part III Social Justice discuss projects that seek to make positive changes in situations of political or institutional oppression. Contributions to Part IV Memory and Identity deal with practices that tell the stories of a community or place and its history, as well as with issues that surround the memorialising of local events and actors. Lastly, Part V Ecology considers the relationship between public art and the environment through the lens of projects that imagine alternative and more sustainable modes of social life. The final chapter of this anthology consists of a set of three thematic global maps, each featuring 25 projects. These maps provide a global snapshot of art in the public realm between the years 2008–2018, a tumultuous decade both politically and economically for the entire world economy. What do the works of Shepard Fairey – Hope (2008) and We the People (2017) – as bookends to this decade, say about the times we live in? Are we left feeling hopeful and empowered in our differences or are we isolated in our distance from each other? Has the world we live in become more or less tolerant and accommodating of the ‘Other’? These maps offer a shift of view away from not only a predominant Global North lens, but also from an Atlantic-centric view of our world.

A Very Brief Global History Art in the public realm can be interpreted in so many ways, considering the perspective from which one approaches the field – visual artist, urban planner, performance artist, architect, cultural activist, designer, humanist geographer, landscape architect – as the disciplines that overlap with public art, arts-led urbanism, and social practice art vary greatly. Each discipline has its own entry point into this broad and evolving field, so rather than try and illustrate specific timelines,1 we want to highlight some historical trends and moments that have contributed to the complex global history of what is now defined as contemporary art in the public realm.

Capitalist Globalisation In the long-duration history pioneered by Fernand Braudel and the Annales School, it is claimed that capitalism emerged in pre-industrial form in Europe as long ago as the fifteenth century, going on to acquire maturity and explosive force in the twentieth century.2 In Braudel’s wake, scholars such as Giovanni Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein extended and 4

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developed this analysis with regard to the emergence of the globalised world economy: ‘The West, Capitalism, and the modern world-system are inextricably linked together – historically, systematically, intellectually.’3 Between the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, the Genoese, Dutch, British, and Americans ascended in turn as capitalist ‘innovators’, with finance capital playing a key role in all cases, especially in connection with long distance travel and trade.4 In the twenty-first century, as the long duration of capitalism expands spatially from the West to the rest of the world, the power of states as regulators of the economy appears in decline, transnational organisations (including corporations and banks, the United Nations, and the International Monetary Fund) and the ultra-wealthy increasingly set the agenda not only for markets but also for law-making and policy decisions, and production and supply chains have become vastly complex and untethered from specific geographical territories. The long run of capitalist globalisation, in our view, goes some way towards explaining the mainstreaming of public practices not only in Europe and North America, but also in South America, Africa, and the Asia-Pacific today. The consequences of such globalisation in our century – increasing labour precarity, intensified consumption, and environmental degradation – are evident across the entire world economy. Is it any wonder then that artists in the public realm around the world appear more and more aligned with histories and conceptions of art foregrounding social agency typical of, for example, societies in the AsiaPacific, and less and less concerned with the legacy of representation in Western art history and the institutional machinations of the art market? For these practitioners, is art perhaps better conceived as ‘a system of action intended to change the world’?5

Policy Public art policy, legislation, and the per cent for art principle (the notion that a percentage of the budget for public building or development should fund public art) emerged in Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. Since then, policies and programmes for public art have sprung up in places as diverse as Korea, Australia, Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, and India. From 1982 in Korea, ‘with the passing of the Law for Art and Culture Promotion, public artworks sprang up in the interior and exterior of public buildings’.6 In Western Australia, the state government established its per cent for art scheme in 1989. In 1992, the Taiwanese government enacted ‘Regulations for the Sponsorship of Art and Culture’ incorporating in its articles a per cent for art stipulation.7 In Shanghai, the Urban Sculpture Master Plan was adopted in 2004, with the objective of commissioning 5,000 works of public art by 2020.8 In Singapore, the government established the Public Art Trust in 2014 to commission new public art and facilitate private philanthropy. In Auckland, the city council adopted its first public art policy in 2014.9 In New Delhi, the Unified Building Bye-Laws for Delhi (2016) retained a per cent for art stipulation from older by-laws.10 In the above examples, the enabling of public art through policy has not always involved a per cent for art programme. Some governments established different funding models as with Singapore’s Public Art Trust and Auckland Council’s Public Art Policy. The kinds of public art practices that are funded also vary. Even though the prevailing tendency is still for commissioning bodies to favour permanent works, there is now greater interest in temporary public art and place ‘activation’. Auckland Council’s policy, for instance, explicitly encourages the creation of temporary works alongside the annual programme for permanent works. Whether permanent or temporary, publicly funded and commissioned works 5

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are increasingly seen by governments as an important vehicle for shaping urban identity, for communities as much as for entire cities and regions. In China, this interest has seen the government invest in public art research through the Shanghai University College of Fine Arts. In a partnership with Public Art Review (USA), a programme of research including a biennial event, the International Award for Public Art, was launched in 2012–2013 to recognise excellence in arts-led place-making and urbanism, and continues to this day.

Social Practice and Community Engagement While examples from policy demonstrate the globalisation of a top-down approach to public art, as many if not more examples abound of art in the public realm driven from the ground up. In 2010, Russian art collective Voina drew a gigantic penis on the Leteiny Drawbridge in St Petersburg, directly in front of the so-called ‘Big House’ or Federal Security Service (FSB) Building. In 2011, Shepard Fairey designed an iconic ‘invitation’ for the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2014, artistic organising played an important role in Taiwan’s sunflower movement as well as in the People’s Climate March and Flood Wall Street in New York. In 2019, Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests were facilitated and amplified through the circulation of illustrations, paintings, and graphic designs online and via mobile phones in public transport and at protest sites. In all these cases, art in the public realm has given voice to the politics of the disenfranchised, marginalised, and oppressed. Social practice and community engagement around the world also manifests in less politicised forms. In some cases, artists focus on healing or recovery from crisis, as in Lily Yeh’s Rwanda Healing Project (2005), which engaged families and children in making sense of a genocidal past, or Gap Filler’s Pallet Pavilion (2012) following Christchurch’s devastating earthquake. In others, the emphasis lies on community development, as in the case of Misako Ichimura’s Tea Party for Women (2003), in which regular gatherings for homeless women in Yoyogi Park, Tokyo, provided companionship and solidarity, or Philip Aguirre y Otegui’s Théâtre Source (2010), where a muddy water source was transformed into a public open-air theatre and meeting place in Douala, Cameroon. Art out of protest, art to empower, art to heal, art as happening, art for social change, these practices constitute an important groundswell of community-based creativity characterising the landscape of public art in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Contested Memorials When Chumani Maxwele covered the statue of British imperialist Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town with a bucket of excrement from Khayelitsha, one of the poorest areas in the city, in 2015, he ignited a student campaign that eventually resulted in the removal of the statue. In the same year, the Black Youth Project 100 organised the ‘Black Out Tour’ in New York, a guided walk through the Museum of Natural History culminating at the Roosevelt monument on the museum’s front steps, where activists unfurled two banners proclaiming, ‘White Supremacy Kills’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’. For protestors in both cases, the continued existence of memorials to men who believed in the natural superiority of the white race was an affront given how systemic racial discrimination and inequality have persisted to this day as legacies of colonisation in both South Africa and North America. The ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign did not end with the removal of the statue from the University of Cape Town. It inspired similar campaigns to change the name of Rhodes University in South Africa, and to remove another monument to Rhodes at 6

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Oxford University in the United Kingdom. The Black Out Tour gave way to ‘Decolonise This Place’, which in 2016, agitated for the removal of the Roosevelt monument at the institution’s front steps. In Taipei’s Yangmingshan National Park, a statue of Chiang Kai-Shek was found decapitated in February 2017. Such attacks on public art have become common in recent years, taking place yearly around the anniversary of the ‘February 28 Incident’ in 1947, when thousands of protestors were massacred in a crackdown by Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) government. In the United States, attacks on Confederate statues have also occurred with some regularity since 2017, when anti-racist and white supremacist groups clashed in Charlottesville over the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee. In South Auckland, New Zealand, a statue commemorating Marmaduke George Nixon, who commanded the Colonial Defence Force against the indigenous Māori in the Waikato Wars, became the subject of a petition in 2017. Launched by Shane Te Pou, the campaign urged the Mayor of Auckland to relocate the statue to the Auckland Museum, opening up a national conversation on what to do with this and others like it around the country. The many pockets of activity around the world contesting public memorials point to changing relationships between groups of people and their intersecting histories. If the long duration of capitalist globalisation initially transferred goods and profits from the Global South to Western centres of capitalism and empire in the lead up to the twentieth century, it also brought about the mass movement of people – slaves, economic migrants, refugees – across land and sea. Tania Bruguera’s Monument to New Immigrants (2017) addresses precisely this dimension of globalisation, the migration of people and the resulting demographic transformation of host cities and countries. Developed in collaboration with art educators and students, the project consisted of a clay statue depicting an immigrant child of uncertain origins, the face and torso left untouched by markers of gender, race, or ethnicity, mounted on an outdoor plinth in Lenfest Plaza, Philadelphia. Weathered down by the elements, the unfired statue was replaced periodically with a new one for the duration of the exhibition. Sited in the United States, the Monument to New Immigrants nevertheless captures the complexity of the experiences and consequences of immigration as a global phenomenon, giving expression to the slow struggle between groups and societies that have benefitted from preceding waves of capitalist globalisation and those seeking a world that is more egalitarian and democratic.11

Some Concluding Aspirations If our role as artists, designers, art historians, and creative activists is to shift how we see the world, is that enough to inspire the kind of change necessary to make a difference? Where do we go from here? Perhaps this is the question that artists have been asking from the beginning – what is the next boundary, the next challenge, the next discovery? By moving the practice out of the studio and into the public realm we are, in essence, practising in public. This leaves not only our process, but also our sketches, drafts, models, experiments, and failures exposed to public scrutiny as well. But these are essential parts of the process. The need to try and fail and try again (challenging when you are spending public monies) in order to achieve more then we initially imagined. Within the sciences there are no real failures – simply findings. We found out if this experiment or that theory worked or not. If it did, that points us in a direction for the next experiment or theory. If it didn’t work, that too points us in a direction for the next experiment or theory. Every effort has value. Every effort is a step along the way to discovery and potentially new knowledge.

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The field of public art continues to expand and the boundaries of social practice are pressing back up against the wall of the museum. We are at a moment when across the board, we are calling our private and public institutions to task. Is it that we have lost faith in those institutions or that the institutions themselves have lost their way? The answer may not lie within these pages, but the questions being asked certainly open the reader up to new challenges and new approaches within the ever-expanding possibilities of the field.

Notes 1 A visual timeline comparing the history of public art in the United Kingdom and the United States can be found in Cameron Cartiere, Rosemary Shirley, and Shelly Willis, ‘A Timeline for the History of Public Art: The United Kingdom and the United States of America, 1900–2005’, in The Practice of Public Art, ed. Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis (New York: Routledge, 2008), 245–260. Additionally, a visual timeline exploring the history of social practice from a range of disciplinary perspectives can be found in Cameron Cartiere, Sophie Hope, Anthony Schrag, Elisa Yon, and Martin Zebracki, ‘A Collective Timeline of Socially Engaged Public Art Practice 1950–2015’, in The Everyday Practice of Public Art, ed. Cameron Cartiere and Martin Zebracki (New York: Routledge, 2015), 225–227. 2 Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 3 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The West, Capitalism, and the Modern World-System’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 15, no. 4 (Fall, 1992): 561. 4 See Arrighi’s discussion on the Genoese, Dutch, and British systemic cycles of accumulation in Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 2010). 5 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 6. 6 Youngna Kim, ‘Urban Space and Visual Culture: The Transformation of Seoul in the Twentieth Century’, in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, ed. Rebecca M. Brown and Deborah S. Hutton (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 171. 7 Ya-ching Chou, ‘An Introduction to Public Art Policy in Taiwan’, Taiwan Public Art, Ministry of Culture, 2009, https://publicart.moc.gov.tw/overview.html?view=detail&layout=overview&id=11. 8 Jane Zheng, ‘Contextualizing Public Art Production in China: The Urban Sculpture Planning System in Shanghai’, Geoforum 82 (2017): 89. 9 Public Art Policy, Auckland Council, 2014, www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/plans-projects-policiesreports-bylaws/our-policies/Documents/public-art-policy.pdf. 10 See Delhi Development Authority, chap. 13, ‘Notification – Unified Building Byelaws for Delhi 2016’, Gazette of India, 22 March 2016, https://dda.org.in/tendernotices_docs/july2018/UBBL% 202016%20Notified19022020.pdf. 11 ‘How the next cycle works out will be the result of political struggle between those who have benefitted from globalization and those who seek to create a new historical phase that is democratic and egalitarian.’ Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Globalization or the Age of Transition? A Long-Term View of the Trajectory of the World-System’, Asian Perspective 24, no. 2 (2000): 5.

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PART II

Activation

2 TOWARDS A PUBLIC OF ‘THE OTHERWISE’ Meenakshi Thirukode

We find ourselves at a critical moment within the political climate in India when a repositioning of how we perceive, lend, and take power has to be navigated through our cultural landscape via a new set of strategies. At the time of writing this, India has voted in a nationalist, fascist government, whose ideology is rooted in what journalist Dexter Filkins describes as recasting the story of India, from that of a secular democracy accommodating a uniquely diverse population to that of a Hindu nation that dominates its minorities, especially the country’s two hundred million Muslims. Modi and his allies have squeezed, bullied, and smothered the press into endorsing what they call the ‘New India’.1 This particular cultural context of macro-politics suggests itself as one dominant architecture of a collective majoritarian imagination within which we try to understand modalities of the minority – particularly gender and race – through community, collectivity, and our feminisms, which must include a ‘capitalist consciousness’.2 Within these modalities we try to understand the idea of a ‘public’ and the subjecthood of a ‘person’, not only vis-à-vis a physical space and its spatial relationship to the human body, but also how we are increasingly occupying shifting transient subjectivities of the ‘digital native’ within a rhizomatic digital space.3 We do this through the analysis of two specific projects: Blank Noise by Jasmeen Patheja and Khirkee Voice by Malini Kochupillai and Mahavir Singh Bhist. Aesthetics and forms of cultural expression have been mediums to propagate simultaneously the extremities of ideology, in which we are never quite sure where the lines between what might be considered the result of our own political agency and what might be an outright cooption are constantly collapsing into one another. For instance, while we see a theoretical formulation of the idea of ‘blackness’ in the work of Arthur Jafa through his complex narrative arrangements of ‘movement, form, and sound’ in what he refers to as ‘black visual intonation’,4 in Modi’s India, a recent wave of what is popularly known as Hindutva Pop, ‘a cocktail of thundering techno music, combined with nationalism and religious references’, has essentially co-opted what emerged from 1980s Detroit’s black subculture, and is quintessential to someone like Jafa’s theorisations. This pushes instead, as its proponents proudly claim, an old populist ideology, through new ways that appeal to the (largely male and unemployed) youth.5 The 11

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simultaneity of opposing ideologies existing on the same plane of consciousness, entirely complicates binary agendas be they fascist or liberal. Which is to say that film, music, and other forms of visual cultures have not only been a space for the oppressed and marginalised to speak their truths and formulate their agency and autonomy, and their own ‘language’ even, but within neoliberal capitalist economies, are also constantly in tension due to continuous cooptions via extractive economies of production and consumption, tilting towards predominantly populist ideologies. This does not necessarily bode well for the way we consider the question of ‘what can art do, that politics cannot?’6 With patience and strategy, the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, whose ideology is tied into the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), have taken decades to enter the imaginary of the masses. The RSS is an organisation, founded in 1925 by the physician K. B. Hegdewar, whose central tenets rest on the idea that India belongs to Hindus, and that those who follow Hinduism have every right to rule over other minorities.7 Be it in physical or virtual publics, Modi’s rule has been marked by extreme violence against religious and caste minorities as well as women. The country’s identity under Modi, according to Pankaj Mishra in a recent op-ed, coming right after election results were declared, is one that is ‘drastically refashioning, with the help of technology, how many Indians see themselves and their world, and by infusing India’s public sphere with a riotously popular loathing of the country’s old urban elites’.8 India has always been an unequal society, Mishra goes on to write. Both private and public spaces, from micro levels of the interpersonal to macro politics and socio-economics as well as the cultural sphere, have been spheres of violence enacted intellectually, emotionally, as well as physically, a lot of the time with dire consequences. This resentment towards political dynasties and Bollywood, in the figure of the ‘pseudo-socialist elite that claimed to supervise post-colonial India’s attempt to catch up with the modern West but that in reality single-mindedly pursued its own interests’,9 has finally erupted, and the ambiguity of a concept like ‘nation state’ has inevitably led to the co-option of leftist aesthetics and forms into the libidinal desire for a country that is truly Indian; the subjecthood of the marginalised – that is the lower caste, economically impoverished ‘chaiwalla’ and the ‘chowkidar’ – assimilated by the right wing.10 So, we now consider how this bears on the future of the cultural sphere, particularly if we think of art as a space for imagining that another kind of world is possible and a means of activating the same. We have to recognise the hybridity of being digital natives and being on the ground in order to articulate this reimagining of the politics of a public today. That organising and participating in larger movements that exist online, provides layers and counter-layers to ideas around ‘truth’ that exists both in rhizomatic networks while spilling on to the occupation of physical publics. In all this, our politics is often hit by a wave of exhaustion – a neoliberal post-capitalist kind of exhaustion. And so, in order to keep that balance between visibility, opacity, and pause as we engage in political work, we might consider the following questions: what might the infrastructures we build, particularly that of the complex ways in which private and public spaces converge, look like? Who would we call our community? What would the language of another kind of public look and sound like? If we are in a moment where the regimes of our aesthetics dictate homogeneity, how do we speak to diversity, complexity, and inclusiveness? How do we work towards an imaginary of a public of ‘the otherwise’, and how do we activate it?

The Emergence of the Indian Art Market At this point I’d like to zoom in on the specificities of the art world, and those of the Indian art world in particular. Indian art, or more specifically the Indian art ‘market’, 12

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became a player within the globalised art world economy around the early 2000s. Primarily through the machinations of the auction houses and their concerted efforts to sell artworks as investments, the Indian art market reached a peak, until the eventual market crash in 2008. This market allowed the idea of ‘contemporary art’ to emerge into the popular imagination of the public in India – although mostly confined to an urban, cosmopolitan public. Contemporary art was seen as an asset that would always appreciate, a safe bet within a speculative economy, within an informal and unregulated sector. Contemporary art, to the urban aspirational class as well as to the elite, has oscillated between being a signifier of the status quo, to holding out an opportunity to exude financial and cultural soft-power status. New Delhi, in this context, as well as Mumbai and Kolkata, are the primary ‘Tier A’ cities where industrialists’ wives as well as businessmen and women have been running some of the country’s most visible commercial galleries. In India, gallery directors function on multiple levels, taking on sales as well as curatorial roles. The quality of Indian artworks is often marred as a result of a lack of rigour and imagination within art education systems. Added to this, an understanding of ‘success’ or the lure of an upward career trajectory rests solely on the dictates of the market. In the 1990s, India experienced economic liberalisation with a more market- and service-oriented economy, allowing for foreign and private investment. This directly impacted the Indian art market as well, where art as an investment was seen to be lucrative, the numbers peaking between the years 2005 and 2008.11 There was a sudden demand for and the rise of the singular genius (often male) Indian artist, whose artwork was valued as an exoticised commodity that held immense cultural capital for a new breed of collectors internationally. Secondary market success spilled on to the primary market, and soon this idea of an all-powerful, immortalised, genius artist was seen as aspirational for most artists coming out of India at the time; we still see this as a dominant aspiration today. Especially within the context of class, gender, and caste divides, this kind of art market success is seen as a ticket out of oppressive and marginalised subjectivities. While acceptance into such spaces is still largely seen as holding the key to the proverbial castle for many young practitioners, another ecosystem has been functioning in parallel to the more visible neocolonial publics that are being built in South Asia, which threatens the establishment as it morphs and co-opts many along the margins.12

Blank Noise and Khirkee Voice By looking at the practice of Blank Noise, initiated by artist Jasmeen Patheja, and Khirkee Voice, initiated by artist Malini Kochupillai in collaboration with Mahavir Singh Bisht, I will try to elaborate on the themes of activation and imagination, locating these nuances around the idea of a public art situated within the cultural, historical, economic, and political conditions discussed above. Both projects emerge as a possibility of the ‘new’ – in a form, aesthetic, and language of an ‘otherwise’ that counters both the co-options of the state and that of a hyper-capitalist art market. Jasmeen Patheja’s Blank Noise started out as a project while she was studying at Shrishti School of Design, Bangalore in 2004. An Ashoka Fellow, Patheja uses interventions in public spaces to address street sexual harassment. As a collective, Blank Noise comprises of, and is run entirely by, volunteers.13 One of the most significant actions that have come out of the collective is the public call for action that goes by a strongly worded slogan – ‘I Never Ask For It’ (see Figure 2.1). This phrase simply brings attention to the fact that women don’t ‘ask’ to be touched, flirted, with or approached in inappropriate ways, without an understanding of the nuances of consent, just because of what they choose to 13

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wear. In one iteration of the project, women walked around in public, displaying the clothes they wore when they were harassed, which immediately shifted the burden placed on their bodies as a site of ‘victimhood’ to that of empowerment, because now, the spectator’s gaze fell on the perpetrators of unwarranted violence. One of the very first projects Patheja did as part of her final graduation work at Srishti School of Art and Design, was to ask around 60 female students to write down word associations to the term ‘public space’. The students who participated were between the ages of 18 and 23, and an overwhelming majority of them associated negative experiences to the idea of public space. Since that time Blank Noise has mobilised a largely leaderless network of individuals from different walks of life via word of mouth as well as an active online strategy via social media, to embrace themselves and their individual and collective agency as Action Heroes/Sheroes/Theyroes, to change the relationship and perception of women’s bodies to public spaces – particularly in the streets of Indian cities and towns. ‘I Never Ask For It’ has taken on the form of performative interventions in crowded streets of metropolitan cities that are often the site of physical and verbal instances of violence, where young women carry the piece of clothing they wore when they were subject to harassment, on hangers, in full display like it is a religious procession and one is looking at God. They often walk at a slow pace through the crowds, accompanied by allies, sometimes carrying statistics that showed the numbers in terms of how often, and what kind of harassment and unwanted attention women are subject to. At other times, the women just stand their ground, with an air of casualness even, holding a sign, or wearing a T-shirt with a large, hard-to-miss arrow vertically stitched across their chests – directing the male gaze to look them in their eyes instead if he dares – to humanise rather than to objectify them.

Figure 2.1 ‘I Never Ask For It’ (2017), Blank Noise. Bangalore Source: Photo credit Jasmeen Patheja.

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Currently we are witness to a wave of anti-rape performative protests that originated in Chile in the context of civil unrest sparked by an increase in Santiago’s subway fares. The anthem ‘A Rapist Is in Your Path’ was written by a feminist theatre group called Lastesis, and has now gone viral across many countries; these protests continue a long history of spectacle as provocation. Patheja’s Blank Noise does something else. It occupies those same publics through a subtlety of very particular gestures – the shift of gaze, the slow, tempered walk, the ‘standing ground’ – that belies the power of taking back ownership of one’s autonomy and agency individually and collectively.14 Together with social media testimonials, stories, and call to action, the project has extended the spatiality of a ‘public’ into a rhizomatic, networked arena of many bodies, abled and otherwise, enabling many subjectivities to sometimes coexist and at other times collide simultaneously. ‘I Never Ask For It’, along with other interventions in physical publics like ‘Meet to Sleep’ and ‘Akeli, Awara, Azaad’, makes Blank Noise, a slow and patient collective work over the last 15 years, where perceptions are being shifted from ‘victimhood’ to ‘empowerment’, where individuals pledge to make cities safer and reclaim the public as equally accessible, and where violence of patriarchy and normative ideas around gender are delegitimised. Khirkee Voice, on the other hand, is more of a localised publishing project in the form of a local newspaper that focuses on Khirkee Village, a neighbourhood that sits beside one of South Delhi’s upmarket residential and commercial colonies, Saket. In 2016, the not-for-profit, contemporary art organisation KHOJ put out its second call for an international residency, Coriolis Effect: Migration and Memory, part of Coriolis Effect: Currents Across Africa and India, a project that sought to ‘activate the social, economic and cultural relationship and historical exchange that exists between India and the continent of Africa’.15 Artist and photographer, Malini Kochupillai, who hails from Kerala and calls New Delhi her home, proposed producing a bilingual newspaper publication, having been inspired by its democratic means of production and distribution, and roped in Mahavir Singh Bisht to collaborate with her. Kochupillai explains, I was inspired by a project I saw at Delhi’s Photo Festival in 2015, where Rob Hornstra and Arnold van Bruggen presented Sochi Project, a documentary study of Russian cities’ preparations for the 2014 Olympics. It had a newspaper component to it, and to me that made for an accessible format.16 Kochupillai is aware of the power of the image and the narratives it conjures, which are often racist, classist, and casteist in the context of India and New Delhi, not only within media and popular culture but also in how those perceptions spill into the ways in which different communities occupy and claim their publics. Working through her project Khirkee Voice, Kochupillai and Bisht have slowly changed the way New Delhi treats its African diaspora, at least within one neighbourhood. In a recent interview with Kochupillai, she spoke about the ways in which ‘art’ might be an effective tool in bringing about the kind of change that perhaps politics might not be able to do. She says, I think that there are ways in which art can enter a conversation around politics and the way we think of our relationship to each other and society at large, that no other discipline allows us to. Art to me is just about making us think differently. And so with Khirkee Voice, for instance, it’s just storytelling, sharing our dreams and aspirations, or even making a space to voice concerns that suddenly changes so much of our understanding of people. Sometimes, the space of the commercial can 15

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also be subverted. So an art fair or a gallery can also be sites of engaging in larger conversations around equality or the environment.17 The city, which has large flows of migrant populations of different classes and castes, is oftentimes not very welcoming of ‘outsiders’. As a single woman myself, apart from the challenges of occupying public space freely, I find that the most basic of tasks (such as finding an apartment) becomes a hassle, because one doesn’t fit popular societal views around race, class, caste, and what constitutes a heteronormative ideal ‘family’. Subversion as a tactic in Kochupillai’s projects has included interventions that reclaim public and private spaces by bringing together both the African diaspora and the Indian community to be in conversation in Khirkee Village. This is done by making visible and engaging with all of the biases and forms of violence that are inherent in negotiating ‘power’ and ‘empowerment’ by both communities. In its eight issues so far, Khirkee Voice has been an effective way of using the newspaper format to spread positive, reaffirming stories and images of the African diaspora that lives in this part of South Delhi. Apart from the paper, Kochupillai has also done interventions in public spaces. For example, the ‘Khirkee Talk Show’ (see Figure 2.2) was a way to bring about a face-to-face conversation between the diverse communities that called Khirkee home. Set up in a shopfront as a pop-up space, a member of the African community sat across the table from his/her Indian ‘friend’ and just talked. Again, a simple gesture, much like Patheja’s strategies, empowering conversations, shifting power dynamics, and dispelling misconceptions, which make for a better understanding of each other, one small neighbourhood at a time.

Figure 2.2 ‘Khirkee Talk Show’ (2017), Malini Kochupillai. Khirkee Extension Source: Photo credit Mahavir Singh Bisht.

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Scales of the ‘Otherwise’ I will try to elaborate on the shift in narrative around art as a way to perform the politicised, and whether or not it might be empowering vast majorities of a new kind of public, a public of the ‘otherwise’. Here, using the term the ‘otherwise’ is an attempt to move away from the fraught lexicon of the left and the liberal. Let’s not reiterate the hierarchies inherent in the binary of the ‘Other’, or the tensions that are inherent in projects as a result of being co-opted by the workings of the neoliberal beast. Instead, we need to shift perspective ever so slightly, towards a space of agency and of laying claim as we narrate the role of the artist and the kinds of local and transdisciplinary publics they create within the specific dynamics of the sociopolitical landscape and cultural infrastructures in India. I’m interested not just in making these practices visible in and of themselves, but also to locate disruptions, failures, and collisions within the many public spheres such practices intend to improve, as a way to articulate instances of ‘being together, otherwise’. The year 2018 brought about a major change in how we look at power hierarchies within the arts in India. The #MeToo movement enabled a wide range of art workers to speak about their experiences working within the informal sector, and caused a stir in the art world, creating awareness around the scope of power abuse within that sector. In the midst of conversations around due process, what would be important to recognise is that these processes and systems are reiterations of the very hegemonies that oppress. One of the more astute and scathingly on-point voices of critique in the art world is artist and writer Brad Troemel, whose Instagram posts creatively question the spectrum of violence induced by capitalist co-options of our politics. In one post, Troemel takes us through the inherent contradictions of this now familiar trope – ‘art as politics, politics as art’. Taking us through a brief history of political art through Western art histories of the twenty-first century, he asks, ‘What if things were getting worse precisely because of how aware everyone was of how helpless they felt in the face of declining conditions?’18 In an art world where, as Troemel points out, political work can be seen as a ‘moral alibi’ for its ‘free market brokers’, the question is not so much about ‘what art can do to help politics but instead, what can art do that politics cannot?’19 What is therefore demanded of us is a constant practice of shifting optics, of changing our point of view ever so slightly to actually see. In the case of sexual violence and the ensuing callout culture that foregrounds the work Patheja has been doing, what we must understand is that abusers created their own systems to oppress (the casting couch in the film industry, for instance, which produced a Weinstein), and that our many feminisms within a techno-capitalist economy are attempting to at least create a countermovement (first through whisper networks, the Open Secret, and then more visibly through the anarchic #MeToo movement20). From a macro-political perspective, we live in times of slow violence21 – a violence that cannot be comprehended in its entirety, leading to a constant state of anxiety and helplessness. We’re seeing this in the socio-religious and political contexts of India that have been described in the introduction of this chapter and that continue to escalate everyday as of this writing, in what are outright fascist agendas, be it the abolition of Article 370 or the recent passing of the Citizens Amendment Bill as law.22 In the matrix of a techno-capitalist infrastructure, we can express our fears, despair, and even mobilise a mob, but the question is whether this actually leads to a change within society, or if we are only participating in an attention economy that numbs, rather than stirs, the libidinal, to become an agent of post-capitalist desire. How does desire find itself in these spaces, not so much as the desire defined by capitalism but the desire that is a loophole, or a slippage, or a slit within the system? 17

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In the micro-political perspective, we are at a critical moment, where big art world infrastructures seek to create a new public through a rather nostalgic idea of community and friendship, while the margins themselves are fraught by the collapse of a unified idea of a progressive liberal community.23 Be it queerness, caste politics, or the role of technology in our mediated positions, what is being produced and consumed within neoliberal co-option results in a trying and contradictory trajectory. Here, Elfreda Chatman’s ‘small world theory’,24 in which she explains the core idea of how we access and exchange social and political information in society, can be a useful framework to understand small-scale publics of the otherwise, including whisper networks, for instance, which occupy a new kind of underground or alternative to a hegemony that’s largely unfettered. It is an infrastructure built around care – something horizontal and invisible by choice. So the question is, what are the ways in which Patheja and Kochupillai’s practice ‘politicise’ culture within the society in which they activate an imaginary? Whisper networks have functioned both within physical and digital worlds to mobilise a public space for a coming together, especially in the build-up to the calling out of power abuses that are sexual in nature via the #MeToo movement, not least in the Indian art world. In October 2018, an Instagram account called Scene and Herd (S & H) started to publish anonymous accounts of sexual harassment and abuse suffered by art workers in the Indian art world, as well as students in art schools. The account led to individuals stepping down from positions within a number of institutions, and also mobilised a large group of supporters of the survivors. As of this writing, one of the men called out on the account for multiple instances of sexual harassment, artist Subodh Gupta, has filed a civil defamation case in September 2019 against the anonymous account. Although it isn’t clear what the consequences would be going forward for the individual(s) running the account or all of the perpetrators and survivors alike, what is imperative to note here is that the narratives speak to an implicit trust within a growing community of anonymous individuals, held together by the larger framework of the #MeToo movement. Here, a public sphere exists that adds complexity to how we think of technology and social media, not as something alienating but instead as a politicised tool of narration. And the parameters and rights of autonomy and agency as digital natives now rests on the Indian legal system, where multiple cases of defamation suits that are predicated on the fact that an individual has lost his/her reputation because of a ‘public’ disclosure, are ongoing post-#MeToo. Every legal precedent set over the course of the next two to three years in each of these cases will govern how we think about the digital within the scope of a ‘public’. Would everything that we consider as ‘critique’ then become ‘defamatory’ and how would that contend with the simultaneity of the digital as a ‘public’ space for organising, for mobilisations, for movements to rise, to spread as tools of dissent and autonomy? S & H in many ways belongs to an artist–activist historical trajectory, which could be traced back to Patheja’s early use of an online interface for mobilising a public within the context of the Indian art world. Patheja’s earliest work, in 2006, involved a ‘blogathon’ where women could share testimonials of street harassment. This was the first use of the Internet by Blank Noise to collect testimonials, which were then transcribed as a letter. Other volunteers handed these letters to strangers in busy metros and on city streets in order to invite face-to-face participation. ‘The blogosphere was suddenly seen as a new safe space to share fearlessly’, says Patheja.25 The women would hand over the testimonials in the form of letters addressed to XYZ, not in the form of a pamphlet but an intimate exchange, through an eye-to-eye contact. It was to say if you know what I’m talking about then come and talk to me.26 18

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Here, anonymity within the digital public functioned in relation to a visible encounter in the real world’s public. Reactions to these letters ranged from disgust at being asked to have a conversation, to entire families sitting with the messenger and having a healthy discussion, an acknowledgement, if not a solution. Multiple small worlds collide and collapse simultaneously, inevitably. Chatman’s small worlds function here on one level at a scale of spatial manifestation, and on another in terms of how the information is accessed and exchanged.27 Coming from a background in architecture, Kochupillai’s first impressions on moving back to India from the east coast of America, was to deal with the ways in which public and private spaces intersected differently. Whereas public spaces were meant for everybody in New York City, in Gurgaon, they belonged to ‘anonymous individuals’ who privately owned houses in these large gated communities. This was an alien space, because for Kochupillai, public spaces connect the fabric of the many private spaces. There is a sense of ownership that everyone feels the moment you set foot in NYC. There’s an involved public realm, which is completely and starkly missing in Gurgaon. The roads, the footpaths – the way we navigate it – it’s how we engage with the city and how our complex private spaces are enacted. It’s the first impression an outsider gets of the city. And if you’re a privileged person, your first and last experience of the city is in your car. And that’s not an experience of the city. That’s suburban living – not city living. So how do you start reconciling this idea of city and the idea of publicness? And so, how do we start talking about that via education?28 Kochupillai eventually moved to Khirkee and started to photograph the community as a way to build a relationship with the diverse multitudes of individuals that make up this neighbourhood. For her, photographing was not a means to document and consume this diversity in an exploitative manner, and least of all to exhibit the work within a private commercial space. One of the first events around which she started to photograph not just those who lived in Khirkee, but also the artist community that engaged with them, was at the Street Art Festival organised by then head of community programmes at KHOJ, Aastha Chauhan. It was a first-time opportunity for a lot of India’s street artists, including Anpu Varkey and Amitabh Kumar. In 2012, Kochupillai started to notice the increasing numbers of the African diaspora in Khirkee, and wanted to find a way to photograph them. It should be said here that racism towards African communities is rampant in New Delhi, as it is in most parts of the country. Together with a classist, neocolonial elite, and casteist aspirational middle-class imaginaries, in a country that stigmatises dark skin while also battling with photography that reeks of consumerist poverty porn,29 racism towards Africans in the city is a deeply disturbing temporal political condition particular to India. Kochupillai is sensitive to these conditions. Her way of navigating this was to engage on the level of human decency,30 attending a dinner gathering with African and Indian food being served at Michelle’s Kitchen. Here in an unobtrusive way, Kochupillai’s photographing was a gesture of non-hierarchical recognition – of one human to another, embroiled in all their complex gender, class, race, and caste subjectivities. Kochupillai went on to do different kinds of interventions in public spaces after that, and in one particular instance also engaging with ways to confront sexual harassment in the public sphere. In response to a friend being harassed on the Delhi metro, and whose harrowing account was posted to social media, she organised a flash mob including her students (she was teaching architecture at the time) and her flatmate, writer Rosalyn 19

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D’Mello, all wearing yellow T-shirts with words like ‘respect’ and ‘equality’ printed on them. While Kochupillai’s intervention seeks a more anarchic disruption of a hegemonic and oppressive public, Patheja’s has tended to create subversions through subtle ways of enacting a presence between different sides of this same public. Talk To Me (2012) for instance, brought men and women to an hour-long conversation over tea and samosas, at unsafe sites, in an effort to confront stories of fear and its politics. Patheja’s practice is built and informed by the community of volunteer Action Heroes, as well as project participants and sometimes collaborators. Both practices reiterate that this gesture of the intervention isn’t about being aggressive or passive, but instead the intention is to question how we think about the idea of citizenship and the related idea of agency. A public of the ‘otherwise’ is ever changing, improvisational via a constant juxtaposition of privileged bodies, alongside and along with those who are marginalised, without reiterating a language that is binary.

A Public of the ‘Otherwise’ We began an analysis of two projects, Jasmeen Patheja’s Blank Noise and Malini Kochupillai’s Khirkee Voice as examples of a micro-political lens via cultural imaginaries around how we think of defining a ‘public’ by foregrounding it against an extremely volatile populism that is taking over macro-political imaginaries. Both Kochupillai’s and Patheja’s practices necessitate the idea of ‘an accountability to the people and scenes we study’, questioning how our publics and our private spaces collapse and collide, on and off the grid, thereby providing ways for new forms, aesthetics, and languages to emerge. In Kochupillai’s case her publics involve the very fabric of what a city means. Khirkee Voice and its related programming activates the question of the black man/woman and what subjectivity they occupy in a society that functions within the frameworks of internalised colonialism, class, and caste oppression. For Patheja, it is in converting public bodies that are agents of patriarchy, misogyny, and violence into public bodies of agency, accountability, and introspection through her long-term projects like Blank Noise and Action Heroes, through which we imagine what a present and future ‘public’ can look like. While both projects allow for a ‘new’ to emerge, one must keep in mind that a public of the otherwise would also need to consider antagonisms. How do we think of solidarities not in homogenous terms of agreement but instead as an ‘equitable’ space in which there must be disagreement? We must have the ability to present opposing viewpoints in an attempt at both activating and imagining a public of the otherwise. In both cases, Patheja and Kochupillai design interventions, at times planned and at times anarchic even, that necessitate such an interaction between bodies, identities, and multiple subjectivities that allow both the viewer and participant to produce this new language of the otherwise as an activation of a physical space as well as a social imaginary. And this emerges from first acknowledging the cramped spaces from within which we function.31 Through a praxis that allows for imagining a public of the otherwise as presented in projects like Blank Noise and Khirkee Voice, we have to think of the ways we come together, not just in hope but also through alienating antagonisms.

Notes 1 Dexter Filkins, ‘Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India’, New Yorker, 9 December 2019, www. newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-narendra-modis-india. 2 Angela Davis, ‘Feminism and Abolition: Theories and Practices for the 21st Century’, 8 August 2013, https://beyondcapitalismnow.wordpress.com/2013/08/08/angela-y-davis-feminism-and-abolition-the ories-and-practices-for-the-21st-century.

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Towards a Public of ‘the Otherwise’ 3 Nishant Shah, ‘Digital Native: Hashtag Fatigue’, Indian Express, 28 October 2018, https://indianex press.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-hashtag-fatigue-5419341. 4 Afrovisualism, ‘Arthur Jafa: Visualizing a Continuum of Black Visual-Cultural Image Production’, Medium Blog, 3 June 2019, https://medium.com/@afrovisualism/arthur-jafa-visualizing-a-con tinuum-of-black-visual-cultural-image-production-e9d38ef44de0. 5 Aniruddha Ghosal, ‘Ma, Mati, Modi’, News 18, www.news18.com/news/immersive/bjp-hindutvawestbengal-2019loksabhaelections.html. 6 Brad Troemel, ‘Art as Politics, Politics as Art’, 6 November 2019, www.instagram.com/p/ B4iLDZinhkt. 7 Filkins, ‘Blood and Soil in Narendra Modi’s India’. 8 Pankaj Mishra, ‘How Narendra Modi Seduced India with Envy and Hate’, New York Times, 23 May 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/opinion/modi-india-election.html. 9 Ibid. 10 Modi in his campaigns has referred to himself as a ‘chaiwalla’ (tea seller) and a ‘chowkidar’ (security guard), appealing to the idea that he comes from and belongs to the working labour class of a country. See Jumuna Shah, ‘Sold Tea, Not Country, Says PM Modi Taking a Swipe at Congress’ Chaiwala Comment’, India Today, 27 November 2017, www.indiatoday.in/india/story/narendramodi-swipe-at-congress-chaiwala-remark-gujarat-assembly-election-1095397-2017-11-27. 11 Art Bug, ‘Then and Now: An Indian Perspective on the Art Market 1990–2010’, Art Etc, News and Views Blog, January 2011, www.artnewsnviews.com/view-article.php?article=then-and-nowan-indian-perspective-to-the-art-market-1990-2010&iid=16&articleid=361. 12 At this point it would be helpful to elaborate a little on the continued perpetuation of neocolonial publics in the context of India. When I first moved to New Delhi, artists would tell me stories of how they were denied entry to commercial gallery openings because of the way they dressed. Which is to say that they didn’t look to be of a certain ‘class’. A few institutions would have a sign at their entrance that said ‘Entry into premise is at the discretion of the institution’, while others would have security personnel exercising such discretion as and when necessary, essentially enacting a form of violence on certain marginalised communities under the pretext of creating a ‘safe space’. The question then becomes ‘safe for whom, and from whom’? As one considers institutions that engage with the community, that is in the realm of the ‘public sphere’, from which various kinds of knowledge are produced and consumed – one wonders if these words might not seem antagonistic, a way to again inadvertently reiterate class and caste hierarchies. Given the complex set of interpersonal relationships that have been built between cultural practitioners who come from across the world and the diverse communities they engage with via these institutions, both commercial and non-profit, it is imperative to think through how the policies created by top management are nothing other than the functioning of internalised colonialism building publics of the neocolonial. 13 Ashoka Fellows are the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. They champion innovative new ideas that transform society’s systems, providing benefits for everyone and improving the lives of millions of people. See www.ashoka.org/en-in/program/ashoka-fellowship. 14 Charis McGowan, ‘Chilean Anti-Rape Anthem Becomes International Feminist Phenomenon’, The Guardian, 6 December 2019, www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/06/chilean-anti-rapeanthem-becomes-international-feminist-phenomenon. 15 Coriolis Effect Project: Migration and Memory, Currents Across India and Africa, KHOJ, published summer 2016, http://khojworkshop.org/opportunity/coriolis-effect-project-migration-and-memory. 16 Interview with Malini Kochupillai by the author, 28 April 2019. 17 A direct quote from my interview notes with Kochupillai, which was conducted for the July 2018 issue of Verve magazine. An edited version of her response can be found in Meenakshi Thirukode, ‘Malini Kochupillai’s Khirkee Voice Is Trying to Change the Way New Delhi Treats Its African Diaspora’, Verve, July 2018, www.vervemagazine.in/people/malini-kochupillais-khirkee-voice-istrying-to-change-the-way-new-delhi-treats-its-african-diaspora. 18 Troemel, ‘Art as Politics, Politics as Art’. 19 Ibid. 20 Supriya Nair, ‘#MeToo Is Anarchic, and That’s a Good Thing’, Live Mint, 12 October 2018, www.livemint.com/Leisure/LhMn4nQG1Rmic88lB1ZDaJ/MeToo-is-anarchic-and-thats-a-goodthing.html. 21 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

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22 The abolition of Article 370 and the Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019 are recent developments that have been passed by the right-wing BJP government in India. See Press Trust India, ‘Government Abolishes Article 370, Massive Opposition Uproar in House’, Economic Times, 5 August 2019, https:// economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/government-abolishes-article-370-massiveopposition-uproar-in-house/articleshow/70533966.cms?from=mdr; and Rahul Tripathi, ‘Citizenship Amendment Bill 2019: Decoding What It Holds for India’, Economic Times, 13 December 2019, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/citizenship-amendment-billdecoded-what-it-holds-for-india/articleshow/72466056.cms. 23 In Anita Dube’s recent curation for the Kochi Biennale, the premise spoke to technology as alienating and the overall curatorial impetus as building a community that was part of the ‘reality’ of the world. I argue that this is a rather purist and limiting way to think about the role of technology and in fact is quite the opposite if one were to look at the trajectory of work being done by Patheja and the anarchic Instagram account S & H. 24 Gary Burnett and Paul T. Jaeger, ‘Small Worlds, Lifeworlds, and Information: The Ramifications of the Information Behavior of Social Groups in Public Policy and the Public Sphere’, Information Research 13, no. 2 (June 2008), http://informationr.net/ir/13-2/paper346.html. 25 Jasmeen Patheja, ‘Conversations with Namu Kini’, Namu Kini, Conversations with Namu Kini, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVPRIubnobk&feature=emb_title. 26 Ibid. 27 Burnett and Jaeger, ‘Small Worlds’. 28 Malini Kochupillai, interview by author, New Delhi, 25 April 2019. 29 While it is beyond the scope of this chapter, a large share of fashion and lifestyle photography in India involves the use of ‘othered’ bodies in public spaces, especially those from poorer economic backgrounds, as background props, while simultaneously speaking of that same space as one of emancipation for women. 30 I use the term here in the way Pankaj Mishra refers to it in his article, ‘How Modi Seduced India with Envy and Hate’, where he appeals to this idea of what we have lost at the most basic level, which is to do with how we treat each other on an individual basis, in recognising someone’s humanity, first and foremost. 31 Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Cramped spaces here is a reference to the way in which theorist Elizabeth Povinelli refers to the political condition within settler-colonial, post-capitalist societies like in Australia.

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3 JAPAN’S RURAL ART FESTIVALS The Echigo-Tsumari Paradigm Justin Jesty

This chapter discusses Japan’s large-scale rural art festivals, focusing on the paradigmatic example of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT) that began in the year 2000. These rural art festivals are among the largest art events in the world: ETAT attracts half a million visitors with each iteration, while the largest, the Setouchi Triennale, sees just over a million. Since the mid 2000s these festivals have been the most prominent and influential site of transformations in the social existence of contemporary art in Japan. Beginning in the 1990s, art has been increasingly sited outside museums and integrated into projects aiming to strengthen struggling communities, reactivate vernacular culture, and seed more inclusive and sustainable ways of life. Artistic practice has changed in tandem: site- and context-specific work, collaborative and participatory projects, archives and documentaries have become mainstream. The most common term in Japan for art’s new forms and contexts is ā to purojekuto, a transliteration of the English words ‘art project’.1 The rise of the art project has brought a massive increase in the prominence of public art, a proliferation of sites and modalities of public art-making, and a diversification and intensification of hopes for art’s potential in the public realm. It has also embedded the idea that public art can drive regional transformation within the mainstream of policy-making. Although these shifts are roughly contemporaneous with the rise of social practice and socially engaged art, art historian Kajiya Kenji has shown that Japan’s art projects are even more strongly connected to lineages of public art than their North American and European counterparts. He traces three lineages in particular – experimental outdoor exhibition in Japan post-1945, public art discourse introduced from the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, and Jan Hoet’s curation in the 1990s – arguing that they show that Japan’s art projects do not derive directly from the influence of relational art nor from socially engaged art. The concepts of relational aesthetics and socially engaged art came to be known in Japan respectively in the early 2000s and in the mid-2010s, when art projects were already thriving. Therefore, it is little wonder that Japan’s art projects have a different structure from relational art and socially engaged art in Europe and the United States.2 This chapter will explore three major aspects of Japan’s regional art festivals that differ from expectations rooted in Euro-American practice, approaching them as generative opportunities 23

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that can illuminate achievements, shortcomings, blind spots, insights, and unique potentials in both traditions. First, curation at ETAT and other rural festivals deliberately appeals to mainstream audiences and strives for an affirmative tone. This generates large numbers of visitors and enables more durable forms of intergenerational and interregional social capital, but many commentators raise the concern that it glosses over the actual needs of the local people and the politics of rural decay. I argue that we should balance that critique with awareness of the social dynamics of the site: attraction may be the most appropriate form of intervention where the forces of global capitalism manifest as depopulation and degrowth. A second difference is ETAT’s rejection of socially engaged art’s call to make art useful and its (re)affirmation of a more idealistic vision of art’s power to effect change. This unfortunately limits ETAT’s utility as an interface for practical experiment, but it illuminates a confusion in discourses such as arte útil: the idea that the ‘everyday’ and the ‘real’ are guaranteed by practicality.3 ETAT insists that celebration and wonder are as much part of everyday reality as usefulness, and implicitly argues they are more transformative. The final difference is the lack of emphasis on collaboration in the production of most artworks at ETAT. Although the festival’s staging relies on a massive ongoing collaboration among area residents, artists, officials, and festival staff, the work remains mostly ‘backstage’. Few of the artworks are participant-driven and the festival’s curation does not consistently foreground participant testimony or creative contribution. This raises an intriguing question: can ideas about artistic collaboration countenance collaborators who are not fully committed to the aesthetic claims of the project but are willing to support it for instrumental reasons?

Rural Sustainability and the ETAT Paradigm Regional revitalisation is one of the most common missions of art projects in Japan, and ETAT has become a paradigm for that kind of project. In 2018 there were 379 works on display at ETAT, spread over a mountainous area the size of New York’s five boroughs but with a population only slightly over 62,000. The 2018 festival was ETAT’s seventh iteration, but it has now pushed beyond a strictly triennial format: there are year-round activities, ongoing art and theatre residencies, and approximately 200 permanently installed artworks. The festival has gradually taken root as a major public undertaking in the area, with a unit in the city office assigned to it and a managing non-profit organisation with about 30 staff on-site. ETAT’s size and success make it exceptional rather than typical. But ETAT’s very success has popularised the model of using a contemporary art festival to spur rural revitalisation. Many have tried to imitate it. At its most basic, the format consists of siting a number of artworks in different communities or neighbourhoods in a given area, with the goal of increasing visitors and activating the area and its people so that they can be more socially and economically self-sustaining. Kitagawa Fram, who founded and directs ETAT, still leads the field as both an organiser and public figure. Out of approximately 13 large rural art festivals, Kitagawa directs five, and he founded a sixth that he no longer directs.4 It is therefore worth focusing on Kitagawa and ETAT. Japan’s rural areas have been losing population for a long time. The baby boom of the 1950s and manufacturing boom of the 1960s and 1970s were accompanied by massive urbanisation and suburbanisation of the population. But the problem has gotten worse in recent years, as the country’s population as a whole has started to shrink. Japan is forecast to lose 40 per cent of its population by 2100.5 The places that bear the brunt of this loss are rural villages that literally disappear, returning to nature after the last of their aged residents 24

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die or move into a care facility. Tō kamachi and Tsunan, the two municipalities where ETAT is held, lose 1,000 people per year, a trend that would cause them to disappear by 2082 if it continues.6 Amplifying the effects of this trend, Japan’s economy has entered a condition of post-growth or degrowth. When low growth and price deflation began in the 1990s people treated it as an aberration, referring to it as a ‘lost decade’. But nearly 30 years later Japan’s economy remains ‘lost’, and most developed countries have followed it. The conditions undermine a foundational assumption of modern economic and monetary policy: the assumption of growth. Broadly speaking, Japan’s rural art projects attempt to address the unevenness of degrowth and to imagine post-growth forms of life and value.7 Although revitalisation is the accepted key term for this mission in both Japanese and English, it may be a misnomer.8 The editors of an important study of Japan’s regional degrowth write: One question raised by our research is whether revitalisation – to the extent that it means a return to growth – is ultimately possible within the context of the protracted depopulation that Japan has only just begun to experience. We therefore invite readers to consider other concepts, such as stability and sustainability as replacements.9 Sustainability in this context is not a question of ensuring continuing capacity for biological life: Japan has national health insurance, high-quality public education, and excellent transport and communications infrastructure even in remote areas. It is also not a question of species survival: although many art projects do explore sustainability as an ecological question, the main focus of revitalisation discourse is a discrete collective. Villages are dying. Regions are dying. Ways of life are dying. Rural communities like the ones where ETAT is located are inefficient and unproductive. The urge to save them contradicts economic logic, both liberal logic that says things the market doesn’t support should die, and the logic of central planning that could distribute national resources more efficiently. The challenge facing them is how to survive collectively in a world where the larger economic forces welcome their extinction. Kitagawa is an articulate advocate on these issues. His critiques of urban modernity are among the most radical in the field of contemporary art in Japan. Although he decries aesthetic degradation wrought by ‘mass consumerism, endless competition, stimulation, and excitation’ of life in cities,10 his core argument is that cities are the most direct expression of capitalist development. Cities have been the goal of the 20th century. The values that cities aim for are the same values that now rule the world with the U.S. at its center . . . The U.S. government espouses democracy while continually destroying the civic foundations necessary to create democracy. The Japanese government follows them blindly in that.11 Non-urban areas’ current state of abandonment is the ultimate playing out of post-war development as determined by the Japanese state in its subservience to a US-led consumercapitalist agenda.12 Kitagawa frames ETAT as an effort to spur regional autonomy, whose forms of life will emerge precisely from their points of unassimilable difference. The unique features of local life are the resources of autonomy, and the need to attend to them becomes even more pronounced in a historical moment when capitalism has dead-ended. 25

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The Politics of Attraction But Kitagawa’s strong critical positions take a softer edge on-site at ETAT. It is rare to find a critical voice among the artworks – even criticism of urban life is mostly absent. What Kitagawa emphasises instead is how the artworks, and the travel between them, should inspire wonder, joy, learning, and appreciation. Kitagawa envisions the visitor on a journey (tabi) – a transformational process without a definite destination. He is famously proud of the inefficiency of ETAT. Artworks are miles apart and Kitagawa makes a point of finding new remote sites with every iteration. The artworks and their location selectively open out and reframe an unfamiliar territory, providing a chance to appreciate the self-sufficiency of the people in the area who built the capacity for habitation into jungle-like hillsides across multiple generations. All such evidence of humankind’s ingenuity should be considered art, according to Kitagawa, and the particular form of that art responds sensitively to the climate, topography, and ecology.13 Visitors are therefore expected to encounter difference at ETAT. But what that difference occasions is not critique or self-scepticism, but a celebration of the diversity of everyday life, history, and culture, which operates through all the senses and by all the means available to contemporary artists. Let us look at two examples. The first is Fukasawa Takafumi’s Echigo-Tsumari Homestay Museum (2015). Fukasawa recruited 26 non-local (mostly young) people to be ‘homestay researchers’, who were dispatched in teams for a one-night homestay with one of the nine households that had volunteered to be hosts and research subjects. The researchers were tasked with documenting stories and negotiating to borrow materials to be put on exhibit at the museum. The museum displayed the results of their research during the festival, housed in a building in the downtown area of Tō kamachi. Fukasawa’s underlying concept was ‘a museum of the average person’, where neither the subjects on display nor the researchers have any particular distinguishing characteristics.14 As a slightly over-formalised medium of visibility and set of performance protocols, the museum functioned to defamiliarise the ‘average person’, to reveal the material and experiential richness unique to each life. Rather than pathos or awe, the general tone of the museum was playful and curious. It featured a variety of natural oddities (such as the unanticipated trickiness of the bottle gourd, or a patch of ‘gutsy roses’ near Mr Fukuzaki’s entryway that only flourished after being paved over), creatively repurposed equipment (an unemployed tofu press used to make award-winning pressed-flower artworks, or a plastic sled put to use harvesting asparagus), professional skills and hidden talents (all manner of construction and food-prep techniques, including how to make a rice cooker from two beer cans and a milk carton), and changing roles and relationships (an elderly couple who host homestay children as a way to pass on their knowledge, and a researcher who recently relocated to a village she’d been visiting for 40 years to document its vernacular Buddhist statuary). All of the displays highlighted the unstable, provisional, ongoing nature of the lives being represented, reimagining the ‘museum’ as a space and manner of inquiry that can be used to frame and admire overlooked meaning and value. The presentation of material gave play to the push and pull between the exoticisation of the visitor’s perspective and the narrative setting provided by the hosts’ accompanying stories and explanation. In the final analysis the project succeeded in forcing together two attitudes that mutually resisted each other: the contemporary life of the nine households appeared simultaneously to be both irreducible and remarkable, and entirely normal. The second work, titled Tracing Water (2018), marked six points along the course of a mostly hidden waterway that diverts the flow of a small river to irrigate the lower fields of 26

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the village of Aramachi Shinden. It was a collaboration between Australian artist Sue Pedley and Iwaki Kazuya and students at Tokyo Denki University. At each of the six points, the group installed several large snub dodecahedron frames (i.e. polyhedrons with 92 faces) that were made of spindly blue plastic rods, inset with small mirrored triangles.15 The objects represented water molecules. Although they were large (2.5 metres across) they weighed less than 4 kg: they swayed and turned with the breeze and were surprisingly difficult to see even in daylight. The concept and installation involved little collaboration with the local villagers. But Iwaki and his students had worked in the same village for the three prior triennials and made regular visits in off-years. In conjunction with the triennial, members of the community held weekend lunch events, with a menu featuring local produce and a small informational display. I visited Tracing Water because another visitor had suggested it to me as I was relaxing at Senju Shrine (discussed later in the chapter). The person related her whole itinerary for the day with such a compelling personal narrative that I decided to follow the same route the next day. Tracing Water was the last work on the route. It was late afternoon when I arrived, sunny and gusty. The first installation site was a high plateau with a majestic view of the river valley. The second site was at the irrigation dam, from which the diverted water flows underground, down past a shrine, through the village, and into the rice fields. The final installation site was in a grove of trees beyond the village at the far end of the rice fields that marked the place where the water returned to its natural course. The grove had once been the village’s crematory. The wind was blowing and making eddies in the rice fields as I walked out to the final site. Inside, the grove was quieter but there was enough breeze to make the suspended spheres rotate slowly, independently of one another, occasionally glinting when a mirror caught the light. I was the only one there. I’d met no one on the road out. In the dim patch of forest with the wind moving over the treetops, I had a sudden, dizzying insight into my own mortality, my insignificance within the movements of nature. How many others had returned to nature in this very spot? The slowly turning polyhedron frames were part of that experience but not the only part. It is, I think, an example of what Kitagawa means when he discusses ETAT as an experience that includes artworks, individual journeys, and encounters with others. Nevertheless, many artists, critics, and art historians in Japan have raised concern about the lack of clear politics in rural art festivals.16 The artworks at ETAT and similar festivals rarely feel urgent, and the diversity in experience they foreground is not challenging enough to be compared to social justice testimony. Part of the reason for that lack relates to the terms of the festivals’ existence: they depend on the goodwill of the local people, who are middle- and working-class citizens who own land – not subaltern by any means. ETAT is also a tourism booster and its success as such has been its most powerful pitch to local businesses and administrators. But we need to recognise as well, that the socio-economic dynamics of these sites are entropic rather than intensive. That makes them fundamentally different from the urban settings assumed in most Euro-American art critical discourse. In cities, global capitalism pushes people out of their homes and neighbourhoods through gentrification and urban development. The very same market forces are driving Japan’s rural decline but they manifest as negative pressure in rural locales.17 Although enticement and attraction tend to provoke suspicion in the critical discourse of urban intervention, they should be recognised as crucial tools of intervention at entropic sites. Further, although counting tourist dollars provides a rough measure of success, a more ambitious goal of ETAT and other rural festivals is to create deeper forms of mutual involvement. There is much anecdotal evidence to suggest that ETAT has succeeded in 27

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seeding cross-generational and inter-regional connections. The most generative context has been the relatively long-term working relationships between the hundreds of young volunteers who prepare and staff the festival and the mostly older residents. The Chū etsu Earthquake, which devastated the area in 2004 is often cited as a turning point in the attitude of older residents: when the young volunteers they had met responded with concern and aid, it demonstrated that they could rely on these new connections in times of need. Quantitative sociological research has demonstrated ETAT’s success in increasing levels of social capital as well.18

The Idealism of ETAT’s Art The only way to create true social sustainability, however, is to attract people to take up life there. Interestingly, that prospect is not as far-fetched as it might sound. Many people in their twenties, thirties, and forties in Japan, who entered professional life during the ‘employment ice age’ post-1990 are looking for ways to escape the city. Cities are expensive, crowded, and alienating: the sacrifice of living in them does not make sense when growth no longer promises future reward. In a survey of Tokyo residents in 2005, 20.6 per cent of the respondents said they wanted to move to a farming or fishing village. In 2014 the figure was 31.6 per cent.19 Back-to-the-land movements can be found across the twentieth century but they have always been subcultural or alternative. In contemporary Japan, urban exodus has become a mainstream aspiration, with a cottage industry of advice books and support networks to facilitate it. Urban exodus entails some sacrifices. Professionalised city life is ‘convenient’ because it outsources the labour of cultural and social reproduction to anonymous vendors. But it is precisely in the non-professional pursuit of activities such as house repair, farming, and maintaining neighbourly ties, that the value of daily work becomes newly palpable. Ethnographer Susanne Klien’s interviews with urban out-migrants have shown that they ‘have opted for a voluntary move [to the countryside] to set up their own enterprises, implement their ideas, contribute to local revitalisation and achieve self-realisation’.20 Artistry and creativity fit well with these new life courses: they are chosen and built, they require refashioning existing resources, and they find value in non-fungible experiences of responsiveness and quality. These ways of thinking about capitalism, sustainability, and life values resonate with Kitagawa’s critique of cities and admiration for the autonomous creativity of ETAT’s rural communities. But surprisingly, ETAT has made relatively few efforts to connect the artworks at the festival to these social and cultural trends. The managing non-profit organisation does run a rice field bank that allows people living outside the area to lease small patches of rice field.21 A group of activist farmers from Hong Kong tried to set up a permaculture farm that would offer apprentice residencies to aspiring farmers.22 In the end they found it too logistically challenging. This is the only example of such an experiment occurring as an art project in the festival: it is telling that the initiative and most of its funding came from a Hong Kong foundation rather than ETAT. Given the level of cooperation ETAT has built at the village level there would be opportunities to support agricultural experiments that would introduce people to the ways of life Kitagawa is otherwise eager to admire. The fact that that is not a major part of the curation is revealing of Kitagawa’s understanding of public art and its purpose. Several prominent socially engaged artists in North America advocate making art practical.23 Kitagawa’s beliefs are fundamentally different on this point. His basic prototype for ETAT is the matsuri (folk festival): a celebration that is socialised and 28

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site-specific but that gives expression to emotional and creative excesses that cannot emerge in more practical modalities. His evaluations of artworks often evince nearreverence for their power to elevate: artworks offer prayer and connect people to each other spiritually, they express the ephemerality of joy and the meaning of existence, they illuminate the environment, give voice to the region, tap into the land’s life force, and connect humans with things faraway.24 Art is intertwined with daily life for Kitagawa but not by dint of its efficacy. As he writes, ‘matsuri and love letters are essential to the daily life struggle’.25 Which is to say that even in everyday milieu, art is an index of human inspiration. It is rare to find such open affirmation of art’s sublime origins and effects in the discourse of socially engaged art. Kitagawa also seeks artworks that have ‘the power to create experiences and phenomenological effects’ with an ‘immediacy’ unique to the work in its site.26 This translates into large-scale artworks: an affirmation of monumentality that social practice generally rejects. Kitagawa’s curatorial vision generates a mismatch between the revitalisation claims of ETAT and the artworks’ often fanciful mode of existence. It makes it difficult for the practical needs of the local people – or the practical potentials of the festival – to enter the artworks in any sustained way. Susanne Klien, who conducted extensive on-site research in 2007–2008, makes an incisive critique of the festival along these lines. She shows how artists and festival management demonstrate little interest in the needs of the hamlets, beyond securing basic permission from the community and concludes that in spite of . . . the engaging and heart-warming furusato [hometown; country home] parlance of the triennial, it is time to face the fact that the nostalgic romanticisation of regional values and lifestyle by urbanites has achieved little to improve the harsh demographic reality of rural hamlets.27 Klien’s conclusions largely hold true today. But I would argue that the root cause lies with Kitagawa’s idealistic investment in art, not romanticisation of the site. The festival as a whole is a poor example of nostalgia, first and foremost because of the artworks. Their visual and conceptual vocabulary defamiliarises the landscape and local culture considerably. The hybridity and incongruity of site and artwork are fundamental to the festival’s basic mechanism of attraction. The artworks also typically foreground (rather than try to erase) modern and contemporary transformations to the area’s landscape and lifeways when they engage them. Finally, the discourse of satoyama (literally village mountains) – which has been a key term of the festival from the start and that many have critiqued as purely pastoral – has genuine ecological significance. Satoyama refers to common land on the outskirts of human settlements that is situated between farmland and wilderness and is harvested but not cultivated. Satoyama were once essential sources of food, building materials, and fuel, but modernisation gradually destroyed them. Many environmental initiatives in Japan appeal to satoyama restoration as a step towards (re)building sustainable food and energy systems. But the festival does not connect in a practical way to such initiatives. Fukasawa’s Homestay Museum, for instance, was not nostalgic. But the format of a museum restricts the visitor to a position of spectatorship, and this is typical of ETAT’s structuration of the encounter between art and visitor. The festival could foster practical-experimental contexts for visitors to learn new lifeways, but in the vast majority of cases the practical ripple effects of the festival occur outside the purview of its curation. The works themselves address the visitor as spectator rather than potential participant. 29

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The Inner Public of ETAT Klien’s critique of collaboration at ETAT alerts us to the fact that the organisation and operation of the festival is not egalitarian or democratic. Groups of citizens who want to host an art project apply to do so, but from that point forward they have little control over what happens. Art Front Gallery controls artist selection and placement. An artist may decide to work collaboratively with the people from the hosting group, but even then the artist sets the outlines of the project. However, while true that the curation of the festival and the majority of artworks within it are not collaborative, the staging of ETAT requires deep, ongoing collaboration. If we include the people living in all the hamlets that host an art project, together with the local officials, businesses, and volunteers, the number of collaborators for each of the recent iterations of the festival would easily top 10,000. The issue, therefore, is not simply the presence or absence of collaboration. It is rather the festival’s tendency to keep collaboration backstage, to assign it an invisible supportive role, away from the event’s planning and the artworks proper. Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’s description of the ‘inner public’ can help illuminate this issue. The inner public is the supportive, involved public that emerges within a project as it develops. Most audiences – the ‘outer public’ – only see the final form of a project (which in Wodiczko’s work usually takes the form of disenfranchised individuals speaking truth in public about systemic violence or suffering they’ve experienced). But for Wodiczko, the inner public is the more important site and subject of change. In most theoretical and critical discussions of public art, there is rarely any emphasis placed on the value and meaning of projects for those who invest lived experience in them. However, a grasp of the psychologically developmental, therapeutic, educational and performative procedures of these works is crucial for understanding the social objective of such projects.28 I would venture that greater emphasis on the ‘value and meaning of projects for those who invest lived experience in them’ is a defining feature of new public art and its analysis. But ETAT is quite different. Whereas in Wodiczko’s work, the testimony of the participants forms an arc that coheres across the threshold between the inner and outer public, at ETAT there is little direct connection between the inner public and the artworks on display; there is little logical or substantive continuity between what the outer public encounters in the artworks and what the inner public puts in. It is this rupture between what the inner public provides and what the outer public experiences that distinguishes ETAT from projects that structure participation as an act of (self-)empowering expression undertaken by the participants themselves. It took years of work to build ETAT’s inner public. Kitagawa held over 2,000 meetings with local groups over a three-year period leading up to the first festival. Yet only two out of over 200 villages agreed to host an artist. There are now approximately 100 hosting villages, and the demand to host artists outstrips what the festival can provide. A hosting group can technically be anything, but it usually corresponds to a village or neighbourhood (shū raku) consisting of a handful to a few dozen households. The most basic responsibility of a hosting group is to help the artist realise their work. Oftentimes the artist simply wants to be tolerated on-site while they work. In other cases they might want people from the hosting community to participate, by sitting for photographs, lending materials or stories, or by appearing in a performance. The hosting group might also be expected to maintain the site during the festival or to check people’s tickets at a reception table. 30

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Such activities may sound menial but they achieve some of the goals of the festival (and it is worth noting that Wodiczko also includes technical and professional support roles in the inner public). A basic goal is to activate the residents of the area, who are mostly elderly and can easily slip into obscurity, especially in depopulating areas. But whether that activation is experienced as fun or a chore depends on the person, and it is unclear how much the festival activates new actors and networks. Agricultural villages already have welldeveloped systems for sharing communal tasks. All the ones I have studied have an informal hierarchy wherein a handful of men rotate the duty of being village head (kuchō ), who is responsible for communicating with municipal offices, coordinating annual holiday festivities, and serving as a point person during ETAT. It would be nearly impossible to avoid activating such existing systems and might not be desirable to do so. But there is a risk that the festival becomes ‘just another’ undertaking on the village’s calendar of communal responsibilities. While keeping that issue in mind, the festival is unavoidably different from other activities. Contemporary art is unfamiliar to most elderly people in Japan. Meeting artists and helping them in their work is a new situation that the members of the inner public negotiate collectively. The art of the festival creates a context of mutual unfamiliarity: it pulls people together but with no road map forward – a situation that can lead to new experiences and perspectives. It is common to hear that local people learned to see the attractions of their surroundings through the eyes of outsiders. It is also common to hear insightful analyses of artworks and thoughtful personal itineraries.29 Getting involved in the art festival thus creates new sensitivities to value. As discussed earlier in the chapter, it also creates durable connections with people outside the region that would not have been possible otherwise. Several villages recently restarted annual festivities like bon dancing because the festival brings enough people from outside to make them worthwhile. The festival therefore demands a hybridisation of the hosting group as a collective subject: it activates existing networks and resources but in a context that is unfamiliar and unpredictable, and in the name of a community that is much more diverse, abstract, and fluid than the usual bounds of the hosting community. But ETAT does not provide a reliable platform for the local participants to express themselves, either in terms of their needs, or in a playful spirit of creativity. Their role is to facilitate artists’ work and festival operation but whatever transformation that might entail has an essentially arbitrary relationship with the artist and artwork (except in relatively rare cases where the artist makes it central to their project).30 The conversations and sustained relationships with outsiders, for instance, happen alongside the artworks, not through them. It almost doesn’t matter what the artwork is specifically, as long as it creates a context for encounter. In this way the rupture between the inner and outer audience insulates both the artwork (from operating within the specifics of the hosting community) and the substantive participation of the inner audience from one another. To give an example, a group of citizens requested to host an artwork for the 2015 festival. The group’s core was the volunteer service association (hō sankai) for Senju Shrine, which is nestled on the outskirts of a quiet residential neighbourhood. All shrines have a nominal service association but they are often inactive. Senju Shrine’s hō sankai was eager to activate the shrine and its grounds: to bring more people to it for a greater variety of activities and to make it a more integral part of the community. The head of the group, Shirai Toshio, actively lobbied to host an artist as a way to open and enliven the space even more. Liu Jianhua was selected for the site and he installed the artwork Discard in a grassy clearing adjacent to the shrine, formerly a ground for sumo matches. The work featured 31

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about 7,000 household objects made of white porcelain, arranged in a circle around the square central dais where sumo bouts had taken place. Liu visited for about a week during the installation. The only role the supporters had in realising the work was helping unload the pieces of porcelain from the delivery truck. And, although the gleaming white porcelain stood out beautifully against the green bowl of the grounds, it was not a site-specific work. It debuted at the Keng Gallery in Taipei in 2014. It would be easy to criticise this as an example of ‘old’ public art: fabricated off-site, deposited on-site, and left for locals to accommodate themselves to. But the hosting group found ways to turn the installation to their needs. Led by Shirai Toshio and his wife Masa, members of the hosting group stationed themselves at the shrine, where they could greet visitors passing by on their way down to the installation. When visitors came back past the shrine, they would invite them in to relax on the tatami, where they had set up some small tables with tea and snacks. On my first visit I stayed for about 45 minutes chatting with Toshio and other local people who came and went on various errands. It was a normal conversation: we talked about ourselves, the shrine, the local area, the festival, and the artwork, which was beautifully framed through the shrine’s open shutters. The conversation would never have happened without the artwork. But it was not part of the artwork and its content was mostly unrelated to it. This is the dominant form of inner-audience participation that one encounters at ETAT. It takes place independently of the artwork, at the initiative of the hosting group, and usually takes the form of a host/guest relationship.31 Hospitality (omotenashi) has been adopted by many local supporters to structure their presence at the festival. A number of villages refer to the group that works on triennial-related activities as the omotenashi no kai, or ‘welcome committee’. Hospitality’s availability as a performative format is overdetermined: it is a form of labour in the tourist industry, an opportunity to display and/or garner symbolic capital, it plays on tropes of country hospitality, and recalls parents and grandparents humouring prodigal offspring. But Senju Shrine’s approach demonstrates that it can provide a way for members of the inner public to build their own connections with the outer public. The handicrafts on display in the shrine were made by Masa and friends. The dictionaries and atlas at the table – which at first seemed purely practical – turned out to be part of Toshio’s hobby of collecting dictionaries. In the 2018 Triennale, they displayed even more crafts, and the local photography club contributed photos of winter scenery. The theme was chosen partly to educate visitors about the heavy snowfall that the region is infamous for, and partly to make the shrine feel a bit cooler in the summer heat, Toshio was fond of joking. Masa played the role of the impresario: always laughing and stirring the pot. She wore the same puckish blue and yellow hat every day of the festival and was the first to greet new arrivals. Senju Shrine’s assistance association is a good example of local citizens investing in ETAT in a way that appears mutually beneficial, enriching the experience of the festival for visitors and furthering the hosting group’s goals. But we should recognise that they achieved this of their own initiative, on the sidelines of ETAT’s main programming. We should also recognise that the format of hospitality is laborious, and risks reinstating (rather than playfully foregrounding) the inequality between depopulating rural areas and urban power centres. Toshio and Masa nearly exhausted themselves in 2018 by being on-site at the shrine every day of the festival – a level of commitment that approaches a professional performance. Finally, the accessible and fun tone of their performance – although an excellent fit for the affirmative tone of ETAT – does not surface the anxieties and internal struggles of the people of the area as they face the prospect of increasing isolation. 32

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Conclusion The ETAT paradigm constitutes an unruly object of study. Well over 1,000 artworks have been displayed since 2000 and its many biennial and triennial imitators follow a similar path of gradual expansion. It is a body of work that defies generalisation. As this chapter’s meandering from admiration to critique and back again indicates, conclusions are at best provisional. The ETAT paradigm has changed contemporary art’s position in Japan. It has created a mass domestic audience for contemporary art that did not exist before, especially for Japanese artists.32 But that mass appeal may have come at the price of artistic refinement – such is the consensus among art critics in Japan, even today. Public art and socially engaged art have tackled the elitist cultural politics of modernist criticism, to be sure. Nonetheless, the uneven, sometimes gauche mixture of contemporary art, children’s games, traditional craft, hobbies, post-dramatic theatre, music festivals, talent shows, and more that one finds at ETAT might test the limits of taste for even the most permissive of art world populists. Which is to say that the rise of the ETAT paradigm has – at the same time that it has shifted art’s institutions – opened up an ontologically significant discussion of taste in the world of art and cultural criticism: a discussion of what should be framed as valuable and what better left to decay. The stakes of that discussion of taste are driven deeper by the problems of rural depopulation and the critique of urban modernity that Kitagawa attaches to ETAT. There is no easy way to disentangle the post-growth, locally focused, autonomous, ecological ethics that Kitagawa invokes, from strands of privileged conservative nostalgia that have haunted modernity since its beginnings, especially when Kitagawa and most of the artists participating at ETAT continue to live in cities. But ETAT’s goals and Kitagawa’s rhetoric are more than simply hot air. ETAT has changed the lives of people who live in Tō kamachi and Tsunan. It has increased and diversified their connections both inside and outside the region. Serendipitous encounters lead to friendships and recurring visits. The influx of visitors every summer – and especially in festival years – has revived traditional celebrations where they had been suspended for lack of participants. The vast majority of the people who visit would never have done so otherwise: the festival raises consciousness about problems that are otherwise all too easy to forget. But at the same time, and by dint of the very same mechanism, the festival may be suppressing the complexity of the local people’s anxieties and struggles. Celebration attracts people from far and wide but celebration demands work from the hosts – the very people the festival intends to celebrate. How should we feel about the proposition that their actual struggles are not directly taken up in most of the artworks? Testimony is a structure that is at the core of much social practice: it powerfully connects personal expression with political speech. Is its absence from ETAT a missed opportunity? For whom? In my research, the communities who have been involved in more richly collaborative projects have been even more taxed by the demands on their time and energy. Although cutting the weeds might seem like a disappointing form of collaboration by some abstract measure, for the majority of local residents it is probably preferable to, say, being part of a community theatre production. From the perspective of the collaborator, everything is a form of performative labour, welcoming smiles and devastating testimony alike. Which is more real? Which is more needed or more effective? Which is more valuable as symbolic currency? For whom? How, in the end, do we evaluate qualities of collaboration? It is common to appeal to the amount of time spent together and the care of the collaborative process. But those standards of evaluation only come into effect once the participants have submitted to the framework of a project. That might be necessary in cases like Wodiczko’s, where the 33

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participants need a supportive inner public to build their capacity to speak. But it is questionable in other contexts: insisting that collaboration be defined by a model of authentically expressive speech is problematic for the homogeneity it enforces in permissible forms of subjectivity and judgement. ETAT involves all sorts of instrumental, partial, ‘inauthentic’ participation. Hosting groups use participation to pursue their own goals. Individuals participate out of friendship, loyalty, curiosity, and sometimes duty. A majority of local people have a favourable view of the festival and want it to continue. But only a minority are interested in the artworks or believe the festival can change the region.33 The farther one moves away from the controlled, focused ‘inner public’ of collaboration, the greater the diversity of collaborative modalities becomes. Whatever practical possibilities might be born from ETAT, they are things that the festival leaves visitors and local people to work out for themselves. But by investing so little in the possibility of daily conversation and collaboration as frames for aesthetic experience, and by foregoing the energies of the local people as creators, ETAT risks reinforcing a latent division in the festival between art and non-art, which plays out along entirely orthodox lines, between artist and non-artist, art and the everyday, ideal and reality. In the end, the fact that these questions remain in a turbulent state of undecidability indicates to me that there is an actual experiment still underway on-site.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on research conducted in Tō kamachi and Tsunan in the summers of 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. The author would like to thank the following for their generous support of the research: the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, University of Washington Japan Studies, University of Washington Innovation Fund, University of Washington East Asia Center, and Ishibashi Foundation/Japan Foundation Fellowship for Research on Japanese Art. For an introduction to art projects, see Kajiya Kenji, ‘Japanese Art Projects in History’, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 7 (Spring 2017): n.p., http://field-journal.com/issue-7/japan ese-art-projects-in-history; and Sumiko Kumakura and Yū ichirō Nagatsu, eds, An Overview of Art Projects in Japan: A Society That Co-Creates with Art (Tokyo: Tokyo Arts Council, 2015), which is a highly compressed English translation of Ā to purojekuto: Geijutsu to kyō sō suru shakai [Art projects: a society that co-creates with art], ed. Kikuchi Takuji, Nagatsu Yū ichirō , and Kumakura Sumiko (Tokyo: Suiyō sha, 2014). 2 Kajiya Kenji, ‘Japanese Art Projects in History’, n.p. 3 In Stephen Wright’s Toward a Lexicon of Usership (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2013), for example, usability becomes inextricably entangled with questions of ontology. 4 It is difficult to pin down the current number of regional art festivals because they appear and disappear quickly. As of September 2019, the following festivals are running or scheduled to run in the near future. The first five are directed by Kitagawa, the sixth was founded by him: Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, Ichihara Art X Mix, Setouchi Triennale, Oku Noto International Art Festival, Kita Alps International Art Festival, Water and Land Niigata Art Festival, Yamagata Biennale, Fukushima Biennale, Nakanojo Triennale, Rokko Meets Art, Sanriku International Arts Festival, Biwako Biennale, Reborn Art Festival. There are several major festivals in urban areas as well, but they do not address rural revitalisation. These include Sapporo International Art Festival, Saitama Triennale, Yokohama Triennale, Aichi Triennale, Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale. A relatively up-to-date index can be found at http://eiennare.site/index.html. 5 United Nations World Population Prospectus 2019, https://population.un.org/wpp. 6 It is unlikely that the area will completely depopulate: the trunk of relatively concentrated settlement that runs north–south along the Shinano River and includes the downtowns of both Tō kamachi and Tsunan is unlikely to disappear. But the smaller villages in more remote areas are already disappearing and will continue to do so. Tō kamachi City Office, Tō kamachi-shi jinkō bijon [Tō kamachi city’s population vision] (2015), www.city.tokamachi.lg.jp/ikkrwebBrowse/material/files/group/6/ 000043279.pdf.

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Japan’s Rural Art Festivals 7 Adrian Favell, ‘Socially Engaged Art in Japan: Mapping the Pioneers’, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 7 (Spring 2017): n.p., http://field-journal.com/issue-7/socially-engaged-artin-japan-mapping-the-pioneers. Favell also explores the social background to these festivals in Adrian Favell, ‘Echigo-Tsumari and the Art of the Possible: The Fram Kitagawa Philosophy in Theory and Practice’, in Art Place Japan: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Vision to Reconnect Art and Nature, ed. Fram Kitagawa (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 143–173; and Adrian Favell, ‘Islands for Life: Artistic Responses to Remote Social Polarisation and Population Decline in Japan’, in Sustainability in Contemporary Rural Japan: Challenges and Opportunities, ed. Stephanie Assman (New York: Routledge, 2016), 81–96. 8 There are actually many terms for revitalisation in Japanese, as there are in English: okoshi (revitalisation); kasseika (revitalisation, activation); zukuri (development); saisei (rebirth); shinkō (development, promotion); sō sei (creation, generation). 9 Peter Matanle and Anthony Rausch with the Shrinking Regions Research Group, Japan’s Shrinking Regions in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Responses to Depopulation and Socio-Economic Decline (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2011), 5. 10 Fram Kitagawa, Hiraku bijutsu: Chiiki to ningen no tsunagari o torimodosu [Opening art: restoring the connection between people and region] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho, 2015), 8 11 Ibid., 9. Kitagawa’s account of the post-war relationship between city and country is not entirely balanced: it omits the strong relationship between rural areas and the centre-right Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), whose long-time rule was built partly around funnelling money to regional infrastructure projects. 12 Ibid., 146–148. 13 Fram Kitagawa, Art Place Japan: The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Vision to Reconnect Art and Nature (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), 240. 14 Fukasawa Takafumi, Echigo-Tsumari Minzoku Hakubutsukan [Echigo-Tsumari Homestay Museum] (Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu, 2016). 15 Documentation and photographs are available on Sue Pedley’s website, www.suepedley.com.au/tra cing-water-echigo-tsumari-art-triennial-2018.html. 16 Fujita Naoya, ‘Zen’ei no zonbitachi: chiiki ā to no shomondai’ [Zombies of the avant-garde: the problems with regional art], in Chiiki ā to: bigaku/seido/Nihon [Regional art: aesthetics/institutions/ Japan] (Tokyo: Horinouchi, 2015), 11–44. 17 I have discussed this at greater length in Justin Jesty, ‘Japan’s Social Turn: Introduction to Part II’, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 8 (Fall 2018): n.p., http://field-journal.com/editor ial/japans-social-turn-introduction-to-part-ii. 18 Akira Sawamura, ed., Ā to wa chiiki o kaeta ka: Echigo-Tsumari daichi geijutsusai no jū san nen, 2000–2012 [Has art changed the region? A decade of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale] (Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014). 19 Cited by Noda Kunihiro, ‘The Agglomeration of Creative People and Regional Revitalization in a Small Town: A Focus on Fujino, Japan’, presented at the 10th International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, Estonia (2018). 20 Susanne Klien, ‘Young Urban Migrants in the Japanese Countryside Between Self-Realisation and Slow Life? The Quest for Subjective Well-Being and Post-Materialism’, in Sustainability in Contemporary Rural Japan, ed. Stephanie Assman (London and New York: Routledge), 95–108. 21 As of 2017 it managed 8.3 hectares. Matsudai tanada banku kawaraban [Newsletter of Matsudai terraced rice field bank] (Spring 2017): 1, www.echigo-tsumari.jp/common/img/about/kawara ban_2017_total.pdf. 22 G. Yeung and Evelyn Char, Horizon: Urban X Rural, Japan X Hong Kong Connect (Hong Kong: C. C. Wu Cultural Education Foundation Fund, 2018). 23 Examples include Pablo Helguera’s emphasis on actual as opposed to symbolic practice and Tania Bruguera’s concept of arte útil. 24 This is an amalgamation of Kitagawa’s evaluation of various artworks in Art Place Japan, 59, 65, 89, 193, 194. 25 Ibid., 240. 26 Ibid., 14. 27 Susanne Klien, ‘Contemporary Art and Regional Revitalisation: Selected Artworks in the EchigoTsumari Art Triennial’, Japan Forum 22, no. 3–4 (2010): 513–543. See also Susanne Klien, ‘Collaboration of Confrontation? Local and Non-Local Actors in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial’, Contemporary Japan 22 (2010): 153–178.

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Justin Jesty 28 Krzysztof Wodiczko, ‘The Inner Public’, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 1 (Spring 2015): n.p., http://field-journal.com/issue-1/wodiczko. 29 Artist Satō Yū collected eight such itineraries together with the stories behind them and published them in an online collection titled Art Map Word. www.artmapword.com. 30 Major collaborative works include Christian Bastiaan’s Real Lear (2003), Mierle Lederman Ukeles’ Snow Workers Ballet (2003, 2012), and Navan Rawanchaikul and Navin Production, The School of Akakura (2015). 31 Another common type of spontaneous participation is the independent gallery. 32 Shirakawa Yoshio, Bijutsu, shijō , chiiki tsū ka o megutte [On art, market, and regional currencies] (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2001). 33 Economist and sociologist Sumi Eiji conducted two major surveys of residents’ attitudes towards ETAT, in 2006 and 2012. Sumi Eiji, ‘Daichi no geijutsusai to sō sharu kyapitaru’, in Ā to wa chiiki o kaeta ka: Echigo-Tsumari daichi geijutsusai no jū san nen, 2000–2012 [Has art changed the region? A decade of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale], ed. Akira Sawamura (Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2014), 63–100.

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4 SHAKING THE SNOW GLOBE AND CHANGING THE CITY Melissa Laing1

There is a common sentiment among urbanists and urban activists that goes something like this: ‘We’ve fucked up our city. We prioritised the wrong things, moved in the wrong directions, and now we need to fix it.’ This sentiment can be found in the mid-century writings of Henri Lefebvre, Jane Jacob, and the Situationists. It was both the point of and the cause for the objection to Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc. It appeared with polemical strength in Mike Davis’s 1990 book City of Quartz, and underlaid the smooth surface of Marc Auge’s 1992 anthropological examination of non-places. This failure to build our cities for all people is at the core of Rosalyn Deutsche’s landmark book Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, threads through Richard Sennett’s laments for the loss of urban sociality, and gives urgency to the 40 years of practical work by Project for Public Space. In the arts, the social impact of ‘fucking it up’ was a driving force behind the rise of ‘new genre public art’ and community arts practices, and continues to fuel the more recent surge in socially engaged and dialogical work. Auckland (Tā maki) a city of 1.6 million people sprawling over 1,103 km2 through the isthmus of New Zealand has its own specific history as to how it achieved such a state. One with common intersecting factors with other cities across the world, from designing for car dominance and big box retail to systemic underinvestment in utilities and public transport. Like other cities, you can see the ravages of capitalism written into its built and social environment, and how the legacies of racism and colonialism have defined whose values and world views determined its progress. Auckland is a city shaped by a growing population and a concomitant housing shortage. It’s a young city, only 180 years old with a history of sprawl slowly turning back toward urban regentrification, as well as a visible demographic shift driven by migration from both Pacific Islands and North and South Asia. Governmentally, it’s an even younger city, amalgamated from four smaller cities in 2010. The new Auckland Council wants its city to change, to gain density, to change transport modes, be more culturally and economically vital, to embed Mā ori identity into its urban fabric, and grow its social inclusion.2 Much of this change impacts on – or takes place in – the extended public realm of streets, parks, town centres, community facilities, train stations, libraries, and other public buildings. However, as the Auckland Design Office writes, ‘For our use of public spaces to change, our culture and perception of these spaces must also adapt’.3 In Auckland, we trained people to move in their cars and shop where there is 37

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parking, to commute to the city for work, move briskly from building to building, and travel home to socialise in their backyards and houses. In the words of the Auckland Design Office, ‘Aucklanders are not historically people who linger in public spaces. We use [those spaces] as thoroughfares – they are not places where we go to relax or socialise.’4 A range of strategies are being used to affect the public perception and use of space, from modifying the built fabric of the urban environment to programming activities in it. Among the techniques falls the idea of ‘activation’, a term that has gained currency in the council’s strategy documents and the everyday conversations of council staff in the last ten years, and that is slowly filtering into the language of the arts. Activation is used as a broad umbrella term for the strategy of consciously seeking to create intangible and intricate connections – emotional, physical, and intellectual – between people and to place through shared activity in space. Embedded within this strategy is the understanding that supporting and growing these intangible connections will positively impact on the creative, social, and economic culture and well-being of the sites, the wider city, and the people who inhabit them. In short, these intangible connections are understood as a public good to be invested in. In the realm of arts and culture and urban development, the council has invested in a number of strategic organisations and initiatives to drive this strategy. These include signature arts-led activation projects such as Pop Projects and Satellites, creating participation platforms that seduce people into interacting; community embedded initiatives like local board arts brokers, which fund hyper-local arts projects that interact with specific communities in the public realm of streets, community centres, shopfronts, rivers, and parks; as well as site-focused programming partnerships with arts-led social enterprises and business investment districts. The term ‘activation’ also describes a collection of tactics that are used to achieve these connections. The tactics act to interrupt, modify, and expand the use of spaces, mitigate disruptive change, and engage residents in participatory planning through experiences, games, exchanges, and actions that create aesthetic and emotional connections. They are mobilised within the framework of temporary use and ‘pop-up’ activity, and draw strongly on methods coming out of the fields of urban activism, temporary urbanism, and place-making; street-based practices including graffiti, postering, dance, and music; ‘new genre public art’ and dialogical practice; temporary visual arts and performance; psycho-geography and urban exploration; participatory democracy and citizen-led research; and finally hospitality, tourism, sport, and events. In the field of local government-funded art in the public realm, activation isn’t a new aesthetic or social form. Rather, it is a commissioning rationale that selects, funds, and promotes art and design activity because it is seen to deliver on a specific set of outcomes for residents. Working on psychological, relational, and pedagogical levels, it uses interaction, participation, social exchange, and play to trigger affective responses to place, teaching people how to dwell and be active in public space and increase social connection. As such, activation can be seen as an applied art, an aesthetically and intellectually informed approach to addressing a given problem for a site or community. One that has its roots in the arts, and draws its means from arts discourses, however one whose ends are not arts qua arts. That it is applied does not mean that it is somehow lesser. At its simplest, activation makes a site temporarily active, like shaking a snow globe, creating a joyful blizzard of activity that settles again, with its components relocated in different formations. At its most transformative, activation is akin to a chemical reaction in which the constituent molecules split and bind, creating a new element. It is multilayered, providing both transitory and durational opportunities for people to create relationships in time and space, to build the life and connectivity of a place and a community, and to critically consider how their space or community is constituted. 38

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Within the arts, activation’s closest sibling and oft-time twin is the field of temporary public art, with a similar sprawling embrace of sculpture and murals, music, dance, theatre, and performance, as well as social and dialogical art practices. However, much like the line between public programme and social practice in a museum, oftentimes the sole differential is the intention behind the work, made visible in the language used to describe it, the audience at which it is aimed, and the ends on which it is assessed. Nowhere is this differential clearer than in the shift from the temporary public arts framework of Living Room, the ten-day central city arts festival of performance and temporary site-responsive activities taking place in the streets of the Central Business District, into the activation framework of Pop Projects. Initiated by Pitsch Leiser in 2005, Living Room ran until 2012. Programmed by curators inside and outside the council over its duration, Living Room presented a wide range of works, from the modest to the spectacular. At the subtle end, poetry was painted in chalk on to pavements and Emil Goh’s Umbrella Taxi Service ushered pedestrians across the road in the rain, using yellow umbrellas. Among the many films projected on the sides of buildings was the Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’ concrete beat poem set in the fixed-width font Monaco. In 2010 Carol Brown collaborated with Phil Dadson to dance performers wearing hi-vis through Britomart in the work Urban Divas. Large-scale evolving installations were sited in city squares. The artwork one-to-many and many-to-one created by the group of artists known as ‘et al.’, in collaboration with Sean Curham (2009), appeared in Khatoum Place and almost every year Aotea Square hosted a large-scale spectacle. Ujino’s Dragon Head, made from cars, appeared in 2011, and a giant pallet maze conceived by Fleur Palmer was built in 2006. Each annual Living Room festival also featured artist talks, and later iterations were brought together as a cohesive whole through a curatorial theme. It was programmed, created, and discussed by people working from a contemporary arts framework first, focused on temporarily bringing the contemporary arts into contact with non-traditional audiences. This kind of programme operates from the understanding that barriers to accessing art are created by the environments in which art is shown, rather than the nature and framework of the artwork itself. However, individual festivals were criticised for their inaccessibility. In a review of the 2010 festival, Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers questioned this premise, writing: ‘Buoyed by the noble premise of engaging the masses, [public art] can succumb to the pitfalls of pernicious advertising, forcing an unsuspecting public to see stuff that they might not want to.’5 Later in the review, she writes that the ‘artists and their participants had none of the street-savvy of fringe-festival performers or buskers – they basically didn’t know how to work a crowd’.6 What Brettkelly-Chalmers’s review brings out is the very question of what approach temporary work in the public realm should take to connect to a broader audience. Where temporary arts projects reach out to audiences by acting in public space, and indeed reach wider audiences because of this, projects commissioned as activations specifically place the hard-to-reach audiences at the centre of their creation process. A 2017 Audience Atlas report describes such audience segments with lower arts engagement as ones seeking entertainment, stimulation, or release, without preference for whether they get them from the arts or from other contexts. These are audiences that are more likely to be interested in popular culture or novel experiences than traditional or contemporary Western art forms. What many activation initiatives do is ignore boundaries between sectors within the arts, placing popularly accessible art forms and games on the same platform as contemporary art practices.

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We can see the shift towards these audiences in the evolution of Pop Projects. In its first year, 2014, it was widely discussed within the same art context of Living Room, but ended up being a transition year towards what would become the Pop model: strongly branded, interactive creative works of guided play in public spaces. In the first year Alt Group worked with Auckland Council to create the overarching look and feel for the programme. Artist-led projects strongly linked to site and to the question of urban ecology were commissioned. Richard Orjis scaffolded a pathway through a sprawling tree (Walking in Trees), and created a rongoā (traditional medicine) garden with A. D. Schierning (Hauora Garden). Taarati Tairoa and Sara Smuts Kennedy established The Park, a social sculpture between bees and humans, with six wooden beehives situated at the centre of an abundant hexagon of clover and mustard in Victoria Park, and a series of further pasture paintings and pollinator routes radiating out from the beehives. These pasture paintings were then extended into schools through a collaboration with the Roots Creative Entrepreneurs. Alongside these works ran a series of lunchtime concerts, hīkoi (walks) by Mā ori knowledge holder Prince Davis, and pop-up performances by professional mime troupe the White Face Crew. In following years there was a strong shift to comingling design and art. Indeed activation, orientated as it is towards problem solving and the pedagogy of teaching people to sociably be in space, lends itself to design methodologies. Alt Group was contracted to programme and deliver Pop Projects and the Pop visual identity was overlaid on the actual artworks and performances presented. The performers for Pop-Percussion, Rīders, Skip, Hula, Jazz, and Foolery wore polka-dot-themed costumes, the poetry posters were created with the Pop font, and the first of the high-production value, reusable Popbranded, game-orientated works were introduced – Pop Plinths and Pop Ping Pong. In 2015 Pop Ping Pong won a gold pin at the Best Design Awards and the plinths took home a bronze, strongly signalling the coexistence of the project in a design framework. Each year up to 2018, a new large-scale relocatable work designed by a team of creatives has been introduced. The year 2016 saw the introduction of the award-winning Pop Marble Run,7 2017 introduced Pop Drop, taut water-filled bouncy ovals, and 2018 launched the Pop Big Bang, drums that light up when struck. These works sit in the space between play, design, and art, drawing on ideas from contemporary art and experimental music, urban design, and architecture. What the design influence brought was a consideration of how audiences would access the work. The signature objects were created with clear and aesthetic affordances for users to complete the work, modelled on existing experience and knowledge learned through childhood games like king of the castle, ping pong, and marble runs. They provided audio and visual feedback signals, with objects lighting up and responsive soundtracks affirming interactions and, staff in Pop T-shirts were on-site to facilitate access to the objects. In 2018, they asserted that they achieved an audience of 45,505 people over three weeks. In a newspaper interview shortly after Pop Marble Run took home the top Best Design Award, the Purple Pin, artist and designer Dean Murray spoke about how the work engaged with workers off the fishing boats that dock on the wharf every day. These fishermen who couldn’t care less saw something kind of interesting, they walked across the plaza which they never do, and engaged with this thing which they had no idea what it was, and had a good time. So they don’t know that they’ve had an interaction with an artwork, or whatever you want to term it.8

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Pop Projects is not the only high-production value activation project demonstrating such thinking. A similar orientation towards a non-specialist audience has also been clearly articulated by Auckland Satellites director Rosabel Tan. In an interview Tan described her programme development process as curating for her brother. ‘He’s a real suburban boy,’ she says. My brother’s never been to a theatre or a gallery so we never programme into institutions but places where people congregate as part of their daily lives. I like to go to suburbs that are, perhaps, under-catered for in terms of the arts and I like to ask myself, what would appeal to my brother?9 Satellites, a council-funded initiative to present work by Auckland-based Asian artists across the city employs three main tactics in its programming: art in places people already go, the intersection of the arts with popular culture, and food as art form. Large-scale works have included The Claw (see Figure 4.1), a room-sized claw machine in Northcote town centre where participants could play to capture a soft, large-eyed, blobular sculpture by Hanna Shim; the Fortune Cookie Cart, a social exchange predicated on writing advice fortunes on paper cookies and receiving an advice-filled cookie in return; The Mood Machine, an iridescent, mood-diagnosing vending machine dispensing postcards with poems and images by young New Zealand artists and writers placed in a South Auckland mall; as well as participatory spectacles in town squares such as K-Pop dance competitions and Kollywood Extra (2019), a durational theatre show as film shoot, led by director Ahi Karunaharan, which invited people into the work through inhabiting the role of an extra.

Figure 4.1 Opening night crowds for The Claw by Hanna Shim, Micheal McCabe, and Adam Ben Dror (2018). Northcote Town Centre, Auckland, New Zealand Source: Photo credit David St George. Courtesy of Satellites.

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This focus on audience access reflects a clear understanding from council staff that local government is not the body for the development of the ‘arts qua arts’. That is the role of the national arts-funding bodies Creative New Zealand, NZ on Air, and the NZ Film Commission. The council’s role sits in the space where the arts meet publics, and is informed by the question: what can art do for the city and its people? In the words of council staff member and former Pop Projects curator Tracey Williams, While the [arts and culture] unit inhabits the public arts landscape, it is distinctive in that it is not an arts organisation; rather, it is nested in the city government and subject to local government legislation and long-term city priorities in the Auckland Plan.10 At the time she wrote this, in a paper for the Auckland Art Gallery publication Engaging Publics/Public Engagement, the Auckland Plan included strategic direction three – ‘integrate arts and culture into everyday life’.11 For the Auckland Council, access to arts experiences is seen as both an intrinsic social good and a tool to realise other civic aims such as building stronger communities, contributing to education, driving economic growth through tourism and employment, and positively impacting on health and well-being. Most explicitly, this relationship between the arts and the broader social and economic goals of the council was outlined in the 2015 Toi Whı̄ tiki Arts and Culture Strategic Action Plan. References to ‘activation’ and its sister terms ‘pop-up’ and ‘temporary arts’ are found under the headings ‘participation’ and ‘place-making’. Under ‘participation’ the emphasis is on broadening the communities who access and participate in the arts, through a focus on demographic representation, community facilitation, and taking temporary arts experiences to places where people are. Indeed, for Tan, Satellites is not just about audience accessibility through creating joyful encounters with art in public spaces, ‘it’s about weaving our faces and voices into the fabric of our city’.12 The place-making framework layers in the need for site responsiveness, integrating arts into urban design and everyday life, and points to the need to simplify process in order to enable temporary arts activity. A couple of years before initiatives like Pop Projects and Satellites traced the movement of arts and culture into activation, staff in the urban development arms of Auckland Council began consciously using arts and food-led activation strategies to generate and strengthen site attachment. Specifically, Waterfront Auckland was exploring how activation might support its brownfield development of the Wynyard Quarter, and within it the Silo Park project. As a council-controlled organisation, Waterfront Auckland and its successor organisation Panuku, Development Auckland, sit in that uneasy space of development for civic benefit, balancing the commercial interests of development against the social goods and harms that development creates. Something that is less complex and contentious in a brownfield development than in town centres. Panuku’s manager of place-making, Frith Walker, cut her teeth in theatre rather than in the visual arts, and brought that sensibility to her programming with an early emphasis on the performing arts. Her simple brief for the waterfront was ‘to make sure people like it’ and her programme complemented a larger undertaking of infrastructure building and place creation, including the development of a retail and dining environment, and the scheduling of the site with a carefully selected variety of both corporate and entertainment events. For Walker, what the arts offered was exploratory and generative play and the questioning of what might be possible on a site coupled with a collaborative work ethic. Making people like it meant creating a sense that interesting and authentic activity was going on there, both pulling Aucklanders into the new space as a destination and providing 42

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for the people trickling in to live and work in the area. This broad mandate over a whole site enabled iterative testing as to what kinds of actions people responded to. These ranged from a summer food truck and craft market, a music and outdoor film series coordinated by Fresh Concept, to temporary beaches, container libraries, the installation of a piano in the park in homage to Luke Jerram’s Play Me, I’m Yours project, as well as weekend dance classes and large-scale creative games developed by the Open Fort. Among the community workshop projects leading to large-scale temporary installations was the Roots Creative Entrepreneurs’ Wave of Hope, involving 12 Schools and 4,000 plastic bottles with messages of hope. Silo 6, a collection of adjoining concrete silos, acts as the anchor space for the park, having been repurposed into a temporary arts space hosting off-site exhibitions by regional galleries, theatre shows, and contemporary dance performances. In a place-making context, activation also draws on its sibling and oftentimes twin, tactical urbanism – a practice that started as an un-permissioned, often creative, modification of an urban site by its users. Tactical urbanism has been adopted by local government departments around the world as a low-budget approach to testing urban intervention. Its approach helps council staff creatively work around their organisations’ processes using temporary time frames to circumvent lengthy permitting processes and outsourcing to enable risk-taking. This armslength procurement model means producers take on the responsibility for both expanding the creative possibilities and explorations, and managing the compliance, safety, and production risks of acting in public space. As a result, a collection of contract workers and companies have emerged in this space. They are valued for their capacity to work on a project basis, act fast, and take creative risks in a way a large publicly accountable institution couldn’t. However, their work depends on being able to access networks of expertise, filled with project-based workers in precarious or intermittent employment, who can be mobilised at a short notice.13 They negotiate the space between the arts qua arts and the applied art of activation on behalf of the council, both holding the space for art and shaping it to fit the activation framework. A case in point being Satellites, which works with artists protecting their vision while amplifying what they are able to achieve and ensuring ease of public access by partnering them with product and lighting designers and production crew. In the last three years, Panuku has taken the activation approach to seven town centres where they are leading urban regeneration and development. However, while Wynyard Quarter’s development involved building from scratch, the seven town centres have existing and active communities, networks, and relationships in place. The communities are conscious that development may mean a revitalised town centre, a reduction in shop vacancies, and stronger community connectivity, but it also means the possible displacement of residents and gentrification of the neighbourhood. In addition to promoting the pedagogy of play and the affective site attachment, activation in such contexts is used to signal change, hold the space while buildings are consented, mitigate the impact of said change, and engage local residents in the process of shaping that change. It is in these town centres that activation as a framework comes into contact with on-the-ground contemporary community arts initiatives and arts-based social enterprises. In Onehunga, a youth-led arts collective has been supported to occupy an empty shopfront – the 312 Hub – and run street activations in the area. In Manukau the programming of the central square is done in partnership with local arts-based social change enterprise the Roots Creative Entrepreneurs. Similarly, in Avondale, Panuku has begun working with local youth-focused social enterprise the Creative Souls Project and community-based arts organisation Whau the People. In the shift from the central city to suburban town centre it is useful to introduce another framing of activation proposed by artists and community activists. Rosanna Raymond uses the 43

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word activation in relation to her practice, placing the emphasis on the syllable va, reading it as Vā . For Raymond, a performance artist of Samoan ancestry, Vā is a Samoan term for space. This space is not a linear space, or indeed an empty one. The Vā is an active space. It is activated by people. It binds people and things together. It forms relationships and necessitates reciprocal obligations.14 It’s a concept that arises out of the relational and social space of the village, but one that is, in her words ‘changing as it spreads through our transnational communities’. The 312 Hub explicitly references Vā in its self-description, bringing in a Tā –Vā relationship that layers time and action (Tā ) into space and content (Vā ).15 Local arts organisations working in Onehunga, Manukau, and Avondale are acting the realm of Vā – the relational and social space – reflective of the fact that many of these organisations are led by Pacific people. A related focus on whanaungatanga, an indigenous Mā ori framework of relationships, reflects how Te Ao Mā ori (the Mā ori world) increasingly informs community-based projects. To translate whanaungatanga simply into relationships would be to do a disservice to the concept. Historically it is strongly kinship based, referring to the ties of whā nau (extended family) and tied into a larger genealogy of links, networks, and bonds between the human and non-human. In recent times it has been approached more broadly where ‘these relationships can be formed based on common goals, interests or activities as a community or group’, providing people with a sense of belonging (see Figure 4.2).16

Figure 4.2 Kids on bikes with a copy of Localise, watching the night performances at the 2015 Whau Arts Festival. Localise was a temporary newspaper publication produced for the Whau Arts Festival 2015, run by Ioana Gordon-Smith and Lana Lopesi. Each issue focused on the subject of community art, exploring how art, and even the newspaper itself, can meaningfully engage with local residents Source: Photo credit Jody Yawa McMilan. Courtesy of Whau the People.

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Whanaungatanga can be seen at an individual level in the discovery of familial relationships during activations, and the formation of new relationships through participation. It can be seen on a structural level in the prioritisation of coworking and collaboration between local organisations. In Avondale there is a dense network of associations. You can track how Avondale Community Action created the groundwork for Avondale Creative Spaces, itself the incubation ground for Whau the People. The Creative Souls Project and Whau the People provide platforms for other artists to act and partner with each other, through the Whau Arts Festival and Whau Pacific Festival. They share knowledge and skills, working on each other’s projects, drawing in their creative whā nau of poets, artists, urban designers, dancers, weavers, musicians, and community cultural groups from the area. Their activities are also supported by council funding. This is distributed through community empowerment contracts, event funding, Panuku’s activation budget, and the pool of money the Whau community arts broker administers to support temporary arts activity and activations. In addition, support comes in the form of physical infrastructure provided by community facilitates, libraries, and schools. However, for under-resourced community-based organisations, the activation model can require immense energy and detract from achieving longer-term support structures and resilience. Whau the People wrote an essay on this subject in 2016 titled ‘Why We’re Not Popping Up’. In it they did not refuse the pop-up activation model, writing that, In a world where we’ve seen it all before, there’s inherent novelty in seeing something where there’s usually nothing is immensely attractive. They can also help us see both art and the environment in a different way; this is no longer a takeaway bar, but a gallery; no longer a sterile installation but something to clamber on and play with.17 However, they did discuss the difficulties involved in producing such work without secure baseline funding, support, and infrastructure – the labour required to clean and resource an empty site, the energy going into securing funding and managing production rather than art, as well as the ideological and economic implications of funding only the temporary. ‘Encouraging the use of temporary spaces over more permanent ones distracts from the fact that the former are only needed when the latter aren’t there.’18 In her discussion on ‘the seductions of temporary urbanism’, Mara Ferreri identifies a similar thread, writing ‘the promised magic of pop-up, interim and meanwhile uses has rapidly become a panacea for many urban ailments’.19 She goes on to argue that the enthusiasm for the temporary pits its disruptiveness against ‘what is portrayed as [a] mono-rhythmic city’, ignoring the city that is a dynamic assemblage of times, spatial uses, and communities.20 The city as dynamic assemblage ‘requires an ability to think about longer-term and wider alliances and forms of organising beyond the connectionist ideal of flexible and precarious urban actors’.21 This is the same argument that Whau the People make when asserting durational security and support matter. In their words, Having a more permanent home allows people to think differently about what’s possible; after only having the keys for it for a few weeks, we’ve already had more people talk about projects they’d like to do there than in the previous two years of us doing projects in temporary spaces.22

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Among the people working in the activation space there is a caution about it as a commissioning rationale. There is an identified risk that the framework of activation could come to dominate over the practices of community arts and temporary public art, thus preventing longer-term investment in the arts. On the one hand, activations’ quick timeframes can act to de-emphasise the importance of the slower building of vā and whanaungatanga in favour of the hyper-visible spectacle. On the other hand, its orientation towards the applied ends of active places can focus creative approaches towards entertaining site interventions at the expense of the broader interrogative capacities of the arts. As the activation framework spreads out from the realms of arts and culture and urban development into other departments – parks, libraries, community empowerment – and is adopted by commercial businesses, the nuance of the practice is being lost. The pursuit of intangible and intricate connections through affective objects and social actions and the interrogation of how one might learn to relate differently in space through play and participation is being remade into a practice of making space busy through visible and consumable activity. In the face of this it is important to remember that activation is more than a collection of tactics to make active, it is a strategy to change our culture, perception, and use of the public realm for the public good. It is a way to respond to a world that is, and will continue to be, going through continuous change. The challenge for Auckland Council, and the producers, artists, designers, and performers it contracts, is to hold to the nuance and intention of the practice, so that it is in truth a tool toward remediating our urban environments and relationships and not a palliative gesture without substance.

Notes 1 The author contracts with Whau Local Board and Panuku, Auckland Development in the temporary arts space. 2 Auckland Plan, Strategy and Research Department, The Auckland Plan 2050 (Auckland: Auckland Council, 2018), www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/plans-projects-policies-reports-bylaws/our-plansstrategies/auckland-plan/about-the-auckland-plan/docsprintdocuments/auckland-plan-2050-printdocument.pdf. 3 Auckland Design Manual, ‘The Art of Creating Public Spaces’, 17 March 2017, http://admblog.co. nz/the-art-of-creating-public-spaces. 4 Ibid. 5 Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers, ‘Assessing a Week of Goodness’, Eyecontact, 30 April 2010, http://eye contactsite.com/2010/04/assessing-a-week-of-goodness. 6 Ibid. 7 Pop Marble Run won a Purple Pin in the 2016 Designers Institute of New Zealand Best Design Awards and was the Pinnacle Winner in the Spatial Design category at the 2016 Australian Graphic Design Association Awards. 8 Dean Murray interviewed by Britt Mann, ‘Best Design Awards: Pop Marbles, Lightpath, and Game of Awesome Among Winners’, Sunday Magazine, 16 October 2016, www.stuff.co.nz/tech nology/84894083/best-design-awards-pop-marbles-lightpath-and-game-of-awesome-among-win ners. Interestingly, according to place makers who worked on the Wynyard Quarter development, the fishermen were highly engaged in many activations. Their participation became a signifier for achieving accessibility. 9 Dionne Christian, ‘Satellites Heads into Auckland Orbit for Third Year’, New Zealand Herald, 28 April 2018, www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=120 40826. 10 Tracey Williams, ‘Why, Not What’, in Engaging Publics/Public Engagement, ed. Zara Stanhope and Claire McIntosh (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery and AUT University, 2015), 72.

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11 Ibid. 12 Rosabel Tan, email to Melissa Laing, 3 June 2019. 13 Mara Ferreri, ‘The Seductions of Temporary Urbanism’, Ephemera Theory and Politics in Organisation 15, no. 1 (2015): 181–191 14 Rosanna Raymond, ‘Sisters and SaVAges: Putting the VA in the Acti.VA.tion’, Te Kaharoa 13 no. 3 (2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.24135/tekaharoa.v13i3.250. 15 ‘About Us: Behind Every Strong Community, There Are Strong Rangatahi’, 312 Hub, www. the312hub.nz/about. 16 Michael Reilly et al., Te Kō parapara: An Introduction to the Mā ori World (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2018), 35; and Auckland Design Manual, www.aucklanddesignmanual.co.nz/design-sub jects/maori-design/te_aranga_principles#/design-subjects/maori-design/te_aranga_principles/guid ance/about/core_m%C4%81ori_values. 17 Whau the People, ‘Why We’re Not Popping Up’, Pantograph Punch, 8 March 2016, www.panto graph-punch.com/post/why-were-not-popping-up. 18 Ibid. 19 Ferreri, ‘The Seductions of Temporary Urbanism’, 183. 20 Ibid., 188. 21 Ibid. 22 Whau the People, ‘Why We’re Not Popping Up’.

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5 POLITICAL ART AND METAPHORIC EXCHANGE Steven Cottingham

Why does art in the public realm possess ‘utopic’ connotations? Commonly understood in geographic or contextual terms, as that which exists beyond the non-site of the gallery space, public art offers the possibility of producing artistic encounters without the foreclosure of expectation that the gallery instantiates. To some degree, its utopic tinge appears to derive from this capacity to be linked to a specific site, thereby operating against the free-flowing objects and signs that accrue discursive capital through provenance and exhibition history. If commodities exchange through the universal numeraire of money, bearing no immediate trace of its production as it traverses the economy, then artworks likewise circulate through the non-site of a white cube. This non-site guarantees equivalence between unlike signs, ensuring they are unaffected by shifts in context. The context of public art therefore becomes crucial to understanding its supposed capacity for political action – and I will come to argue that this political capacity, when actualised, exists simultaneously within artistic, economic, and semiotic spheres. This argument, however, depends upon distinguishing ‘publicness’ from a purely geographical site. We might contrast sites and non-sites by describing public artworks as being determined according to a metonymic process whereas gallery (or non-public) exhibitions operate with a metaphoric logic. In the former, art as a signifying device is made contiguous with its context. It is impossible to extricate the work from its site, meaning that the work and its context come to refer to one another through the endurance of their shared space. Metaphoric exchange, on the other hand, describes how a sign circulates in and out of a given context without being altered by it. In this way, artwork comes to refer to other artwork that shares the same context (or, semiotically speaking, the same role along a common syntagmatic axis) at different times. As products of metaphoric exchange, artworks participate in a common discourse, emboldening their commonalities as each sign refers to each other sign under the umbrella sign of art. The work as sign is exchanged for other work, and the neutrality of the white cube acts as a regulating grammar that permits these changes in content without loss of coherence at the level of form. In the same way, a sentence with a given structure (such as the syntagm of subject–verb–object) permits variations in signs as long as the form remains intact and therefore capable of granting its contents the ability to be understood, even when an individual sign is exchanged for another. Meaning can be altered at a local level (the work) while retaining its context (artistic discourse: the legibility of a work as art). 48

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I use context to refer as broadly as possible to the assemblage of cultural, political, spatial, and temporal markers that could be invoked when apprehending the work in question. Significant for this argument, however, is the way in which the context of public art is determined in no small part by an unintentional audience. Whereas the audiences of nonpublic exhibitions to some extent seek out the art in question, even assenting to pay for the experience, the audience of public art is largely unintentional and encounters the work in a contingent manner. This arrangement, as I see it, begets the notion that public art possesses a utopian potential that supersedes that of its gallery-bound ilk. Because public art does not require its audience to have purposefully sought it out, it can be said to offer a few political advantages over non-public art. The first and most commonly invoked argument for its political capacity is that public art is not enclosed by class markers, which (even if they tend to be more relevant as cultural aspects of class rather than as strictly economic determinants) necessitate money to be admitted into the exhibiting institution, free daytime hours to go gallery-hopping, and a certain amount of education to engage with the discursive aspect of art. The second, directly related to the unintentional nature of its audience, is that art in public escapes gallery conventions and therefore provides even more of a rupture against the normative expectations and logics that structure our day-to-day. By this I mean that art in public possesses no consistent markers to prepare audiences for an art encounter. The potential rupture therefore possesses the capacity to disrupt encounters not only at the level of content, but also at the level of form (challenging the coherence of artistic discourse itself). It is difficult to make overarching prescriptions with regard to the content of these markers, as they are always dependent on their specific circumstances, but in general we may say that art in public tends to lack the didactic essays, knowledgeable docents, neutral architecture, and other such discursive structures that would prepare one to apprehend an artwork. Theorist Marina Vishmidt argues: Since the era of Conceptualism and the various ‘de-materialisations’ of the art object . . . the artist is a ‘generic’ or ‘incidental’ subject who need produce no works that would be intuitively interpreted as art – it is simply her selection or production of ‘anything’, her performance of any kind of activity, that is designated art, since she is ratified as an artist by the art institution, the institution which she reproduces with every work.1 Post-conceptual art is dependent upon these discursive structures, otherwise how would we distinguish something like a ready-made from a non-art object? This distinction cannot be made through empirical means alone – nothing is self-evident, no sign contains its own signified. Only the recursive play of artistic selection and institutional ratification results in the artistic signifier. Such recursivity is comprised by the dialectical capacity to perceive and to produce. Public art therefore retains the possibility of being confused for non-art – an additional layer of confusion upon the generic confusion that describes any encounter with the non-purposive or ‘unintentional’ nature of contemporary artistic production. That is, in addition to asking ‘what does it mean?’ we are also wondering ‘is it art?’ – if we notice it or find it relevant at all. Situated beyond the regulating grammar of the gallery space, art in public appears as a nonsequitur in the vernacular of public spaces. In this way we understand that the unintentionality of a public artwork is not limited to the mode of its encounter, but also serves to describe its telos in general. Contrast this to the general compulsions of the capitalist social relation, wherein all activity must be orientated in service of profit, according to principles of feasibility, and therefore proceeds ‘intentionally’. We are accustomed to seeing street signs or advertisements in 49

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public spaces, and we understand their purpose as natural to the public sphere: streets exist to optimise and regulate our transit to places of production and consumption, ads exist to sell us commodities, and so on. If art (in the most general sense) is precisely that which is produced beyond the coercions of the wage, as Kantian purposelessness or Bataillean luxurious expenditure, then its telos is antagonistic to that of commodity production. But how do we comprehend an artwork when we are not expecting to see it? Note: Artist Brittney Bear Hat produced this photograph of her Blackfoot ancestors overlaid on an image of Blackfoot Trail in Calgary, Canada. The image was then installed on a digital billboard on Blackfoot Trail. In so doing, the artist produces a specific context for her work, upsetting the interchangeability of advertising surfaces while forcing spectators to reevaluate their presence within the site as they traverse it. Because of its class-accessible context, and because of its increased capacity to produce ruptures, art in public does appear to possess a political advantage with respect to art in galleries. Having established this appearance, we can now ask, what is a political capacity? Artist Dave Beech, whose work with the collective Freee often occurs in public spaces, writes that ‘the procedures of administration, control and organisation of society – those institutions and systems that are passed off conventionally as the sphere of politics – are best described not as politics but as policing’.2 That is, we can understand political art not only as that which is concerned with policy (the concerns of disciplines like activism or journalism), but as that which refutes policing to some degree. If we take the term ‘public’ at face value, as a common space transversed by a universal subject, then we can indeed conceive of art in public as that which escapes policing because it makes no recourse to private or proprietorial terrain.

Figure 5.1 Blackfoot (2015), Brittney Bear Hat. Atlas Sighed: The 2015 Calgary Biennial, intersection of Blackfoot Trail and Glenmore Trail SE. Calgary, AB, Canada Source: Photo credit Steven Cottingham.

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But we are aware that this invocation of public is idealised past the point of being relevant, even for a theoretical argument. In fact, because major public works of art are policed not just by curators and funders but also by municipalities, developers, fabricators, and taxpayers, and because they enter into public without the discursive infrastructure provided by galleries, they remain vulnerable to the very real threat of inertial overcoding, ultimately nullifying a political capacity. This kind of work exists first as designs and proposals, forms that corroborate policing institutions because the work’s production begins by seeking permission. The final product ultimately manifests as a commission that meets the approval of all imbricated parties. For these reasons, Freee proclaims that ‘public art does not have a public, just passers-by’.3 Contrast this to the policing specific to commercial (non-public) galleries, wherein a gallerist must convince an individual patron, and not an assemblage of risk-averse bureaucrats channelling explicit institutional mandates, to purchase or otherwise financially engage with a work (not even necessarily as investment) after the fact of its production. The artwork is policed reactively through commerce but proactively through proposals and commissions. Furthermore, inasmuch as the forms we have identified are reducible to forms of unintentionality, relying on contingency and confusion, I hesitate to argue that they are a priori political. I stand by their necessity, and indeed these operations do possess the capacity to propose forms that resist the coded intentionality of capitalist production. But political art must possess an intentionality of its own – especially given the ubiquitous albeit multivalent presence of policing – and confusion must be deployed in affirmation of a political principle, otherwise it is instantly subsumed by the status quo norms that structure our perception and attention on a daily basis. That is, the confusion produced by a work of art is compelled to be resolved immediately (often via dismissal) unless the work can persistently sustain the confusion by resisting the closure of sense. According to semiotician V. N. Vološinov, the act of perception is always a dialectic of our expectations and our apprehensions: in a given situation we are habituated to expect to encounter certain signs, and this projected expectation is contrasted with sensual experience so that we can focus on deviations from expectations. The expected experience remains abstract, unconscious, allowing us to lend our attention to whatever is pressing in context as long as it is deemed pertinent to our expectations. As he writes: Every stage in the development of a society has its own special and restricted circle of items which alone have access to that society’s attention and which are endowed with evaluative accentuation by that attention . . . In order for any item, from whatever domain of reality it may come, to enter the social purview of the group and elicit ideological semiotic reaction, it must be associated with the vital socioeconomic prerequisites of the particular group’s existence; it must somehow, even if only obliquely, make contact with the bases of the group’s marital life.4 A non-sequitur is almost guaranteed to be dismissed, overcoded by social norms, if it does not imply some reason for its presence. This is where galleries provide a useful political purpose: they sustain a rupturous interpretation and the confusion it entails by asserting that the gallery is a space for art and therefore an appropriate context for some degree of confusion or notknowing. In this way confusion becomes a tenable reaction. The form remains so that the content can be variable. So, where an artwork in public seeks political ends through nonsequiturial means, the unsustained rupture will inevitably be sutured by normative semiotic relations. In many instances, the work, like any other sign in the so-called public, will elicit a line of pragmatic rather than artistic inquiry. ‘Who paid for that? What are they paying for?’ 51

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So, in order to articulate an artwork’s political capacity, we will have to distinguish the intentionality of all capitalistic endeavours (capitalism being the predominant force that polices public spheres) from the intentionality of an anti-capitalist politics. And, because art in public often elides markers of artistic discourse, thereby producing unsustained ruptures, we will also have to consider the implications of fomenting political interventions in domains where they may not read as legibly political. Freee elaborates their claim that ‘there is no public for public art to address’ by noting that public art has become an adjunct to the economic and cultural system, through tourism, town planning, regeneration and the heritage industries. Public art, like the public sphere in general, has been privatized: it is produced for private interests, paid for by or on behalf of business and is attended to by individuals who fail to add up to a public. The public of public art is a nostalgic fantasy.5 This is a typical description of neoliberal capitalism. Economic principles become normative social relations even and especially beyond the economy itself. Ideology proceeds according to its own inertial ubiquity. The valorisation of the bottom line is found everywhere, and is hardly limited to the accounting of surplus value. All metrics are oriented toward growth, reproducing their legibility in a recursive manner, meaning that they ‘are endowed with evaluative accentuation by that attention’.6 In this way, Freee can correctly point out the ‘nostalgic fantasy’ of public-less public art while W. J. T. Mitchell writes that ‘“publicity” has, in a very real sense made all art into public art’.7 Here, Mitchell is referring to publicity as a neoliberal metric of value, which is not so much a supply-side response to public demand as much as it is precisely a manipulation of recursive relationships so that demand is produced in order to justify supply. We may recall artist Mladen Stilinović ’s famous comments on such speculative production: Artists in the West are not lazy and therefore not artists but rather producers of something. Their involvement with matters of no importance, such as production, promotion, gallery system, museum system, competition system (who is first), their preoccupation with objects, all that drives them away from laziness, from art. Just as money is paper, so a gallery is a room.8 Art is produced in order to be curated, to justify the growth of the curriculum vitae, to contribute to the speculative economy where legibility is currency. There is no paradox between these statements because the sign of ‘public’ has been metaphorically exchanged. That is, the sign’s content remains while its form has changed. This transformation occurs as an exchange with another sign, in this instance we could posit that of ‘private’, which undergoes a compossible transformation of its own: the content changes while the form remains. ‘Public’ in the neoliberal era therefore metaphorically refers to what might elsewhere be considered as ‘private’ – beneficial to corporate discourses, adherent to the logic of the bottom line. The key to its value, or to its ability to function as a kind of cultural capital, is that the symbolic amendment made by the metaphoric exchange of signs is only a partial amendment, it does not compromise the symbolic discourse in which it is situated but in fact emboldens it. As Beech puts it, ‘the acquisition of cultural capital occurs on the condition that the knowledge is preserved while its acquisition is systemically forgotten’.9 Through exchange, one commodity is equated with another (such as labour power with the means of subsistence)

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in the same way that metaphor allows two distinct signs to become conflated. Value arises because the discursive etymology or mode of production is obfuscated. In contrast with the metaphoric conflations of capital, a metonymic procedure would appear to escape the economic logic that equates like with like because a metonymic relation links contiguous signs rather than letting them circulate freely as discursive commodities. Contiguity provides something of a material basis rather than a strictly discursive relation between signs. This is the principle that undergirds symbolic exchange and gift economies, wherein the giver and receiver of an object are mutually transformed by the exchange. I stand by the above suggestion that art in public can operate metonymically, but we need to do some work to maintain this as an affirmative response to the opaque metaphoricity of capitalist semiotics. The biggest obstacle we must face at this juncture is the contestation of the sign of ‘public’. It is true that at the level of content the capacity for site-specific, non-metaphoric interventions is retained. The few generic examples I have used so far would seem to indicate all public art is beholden to nested assemblages of funders, philanthropists, gentrifiers, and other urban policing bodies, but this is of course not exclusively the case. We can also invoke various kinds of antipoliced gestures, like grassroots activity or site-specific interventions that are not reliant on funding and do not seek to be sustainable, permanent aspects of the ‘public’ sphere. Graffiti can be read metonymically, especially in the form of a tag that says, ‘X was here’. The form is political because it is outlawed, policed, and occurs anyway. But graffiti is not a priori part of the artistic discourse, and our focus here is on the politics of art in public rather than on the politics of the public as such. It is subsumed under the sign of crime rather than art because it is policed on a legislative rather than aesthetic basis. Can they be the same? For art in public to have a political capacity on the level of form, we must somehow ascertain the compossibility of both the artistic discourse and a kind of public presence. The artistic discourse has its own set of police procedures, as I alluded to above. Many of these can be attributed to the curatorial gaze, the set of discriminatory gestures that determine what is included and what is excluded from discourse. The criteria for this policing are not necessarily comprised of the same economic principles we find in capitalist semiotics writ large, but, as Vishmidt writes, ‘the distinctly non-subsumed character of art in the sphere of production does not thereby exempt art from commodification in the sphere of circulation’.10 The gallery space or non-site may not obey economic principles of production – for example by compulsively optimising relative surplus value through efficient production and supply-side logistics – but nonetheless operates as a guarantor of metaphoricity, allowing artworks to exchange in and out of the white cube that secures their syntagmatic role even as the paradigmatic content changes wildly from artwork to artwork. Before this exchange occurs, the signs in question must be admitted into discourse – they must be understood as legibly significant. Art, as that which possesses an ‘unintentional’ or ‘lazy’ telos, is especially vulnerable to metaphoricity, that is, reduction to a sign of cultural capital. Without a legible purpose in a symbolic order where legibility is determined by purpose, art’s ideological purposelessness can ultimately become its economic purpose. So, if we are using unintentionality to characterise a logic exterior to the capitalist telos of profit and productivity, then we will have to reckon with the ways in which unintentionality is itself recuperated by the same logic it appears to resist. Vishmidt muses that it is this very uselessness that endows art with its characteristic power within real abstraction, be it the emblematic power of enhancing an autonomized capital with the glamorous brand of artistic autonomy or inculcating a knowing alienation from capital’s purposes and ideals.11 53

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An artwork is created, it enters or is otherwise admitted into the artistic discourse, but if it does not take effort to maintain its political critique, then its critique will be ‘systematically forgotten’ and will circulate through artistic infrastructure as a sign of critique, a name-drop or buzzword, a metaphor that goes unelaborated. The power to critique is a recursive result of the artist’s intentions and the public’s interpretation. In instances where the public has become metaphorical, standing in for private interests in the same way liberal democracy stands in for oligarchic governance or naturalised inequity, then the artwork must derive its political capacity from the ability to antagonise policing structures while simultaneously reading as legible to the discourse of art. Prior to the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism in the international economy and the curatorial turn in artistic discourse, this capacity was actualised by the bottom-up organisation of artist societies who penned collective manifestos and publications (e.g. the Constructivists in Russia, MAVO in Japan, Supports/Surfaces in France). In this way, avantgarde artists could point to a discursive context of their own, existing beyond discrete individuals or ‘generic subjects’, making an argument on behalf of that which would be otherwise policed out of dominant discourses. In the wake of the curatorial turn (concurrent with the rise of middle management under neoliberalism), artists’ discursive production tends to manifest in supplicative rather than argumentative modes, meaning that artists write in order to ask permission, to submit proposals, or to apply for funding. Each supplicative exchange further entrenches the power of institutional gatekeepers to police and justify the demand for their institutions. While I cannot in this text give an historical account of this shift, we can still comprehend how, if artists seized the means of discursive production – arguing for their own practices or collective political ambitions instead of performing legibility for the sake of a jury of metaphoric peers – they would be policed out of the very institutions they sought to change. Any formal change in status quo is political, and any political event is policed. The cost, of course, is that the metaphoricity of an artwork is ruined by defining it, by holding it accountable to explicit rather than opaque semiotic relations, ultimately losing the opportunity to be considered for free-floating exchange within an artistic infrastructure. This prevents the curator, institution, or collector from asserting their own discursive agenda because it compromises the non-site of the gallery space. That is, when collective discursive production is attached to an artwork, the syntagm of the white cube ceases to operate as a place that identifies all of its contents as equally artistic. The space loses its neutrality because the neutral, the systematically forgotten, is precisely that which is called into question. By attacking the implicit or inertial discourse, this kind of argumentative production articulates a new grammatical terrain, and systematically forgotten metaphorical signs are recalled once more. Artist Mark Hutchinson writes that art that ‘seeks any kind of radical change must seek to change the determining conditions of the public sphere, not simply move into it or act within it’.12 At this point we begin to grasp how artistic discourse and public space may be compossible. He elaborates: What this might involve is an open question; but what it does not involve is the smoothing out of what already exists. Thus, perhaps, we can draw a distinction between, on the one hand, conservative social practice, which accepts the existing terms and conditions of the public sphere and seeks to modify, extend or otherwise reform them, and on the other, radical social practice which seeks to change the public sphere itself. The difference might not be easy to spot, however, because it 54

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is not a difference between materials and methods but depends on the specificity of any given situation. This said, however, the former is more likely to justify itself in utilitarian terms – such as participation, access, pragmatic outcomes and the like – than the latter, which is far more likely to be divisive, antagonistic and concerned with its own actions.13 Note: The artist collective Supports/Surfaces not only exhibited in specific geographic sites outside of Parisian galleries, they also produced specific discursive contexts for their work through the collectively published journal Peinture, cahiers théoriques. The specificity of a given situation is a metonymic relationship of artwork to context. Inasmuch as the term ‘public art’ can refer to that which operates without or beyond the bounds of a delineated artistic discourse, then public art that defines ‘public’ through geography rather than discourse ends up reflecting the politics of the society that commissioned it. Because it is free from any interpretative apparatus aside from that which is inertial, it exemplifies a valorisation of negative liberties, a ‘freedom from’ prescription or intentionality that ultimately corroborates the extant status quo. This negative liberty is manifest not only in monumental public sculpture and municipal spectacle, but also in art fairs where exhibitions are organised without mandates, biennials that merely survey contemporary practices, social media echo chambers, and any number of other formats that appeal to extant aesthetics, trends, or funding criteria. (This is not to foreclose the possibility of the work appearing through documentation in another site that does possess a specific discursive framework, such as a critical review or artist statement.) The work is free from

Figure 5.2 Jardin d’explosion (1972), Supports/Surfaces. Saint-Paul-de-Vene, France Source: Photo credit Ceysson & Bénétière.

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formal antagonism to facilitate its presence within the unspoken status quo. As Vishmidt argues, the art institution presupposes autonomy as a site, as a condition of its own ability to function freely in a market society, but also as a fiction which must be carefully guarded from the heteronomy represented by that society materialising in the art in any dimension besides that of content.14 A metonymic relationship of artwork to context – which can be exemplified by (but not limited to) collectively written manifestos that articulate a semiotic specificity for an artistic movement – instantiates a positive liberty that enables and empowers the public to perceive the work in question. This is not to erase their inherent interpretative capacities, which are as multifaceted and disparate as the individuals who comprise a given audience, but to enhance them. Chantal Mouffe writes that critical art is art that foments dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant consensus tends to obscure and obliterate. It is constituted by manifold artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony.15 Political art produces a public by attacking metaphoricity. In so doing, political art reveals an extant web of semiotic relations, bringing them to the fore so that they might be made broadly legible rather than obscure or assumed. This shared legibility is crucial to fomenting a public, and stands in stark relief to those two-faced instances in which terms and conditions are used to connote whatever public good while actually denoting privately beneficial processes. It is impossible to produce this public when asking permission from the same (self-reproducing) forces that gatekeep hegemony in the first place. ‘The ethics of art is not about making demands on what already exists but rather being true to something which is, of necessity, new.’ Hutchinson writes, as do I, in favour of a ‘radical social practice’ that escapes supplicative modes of discourse. ‘This “being true to the new” is, in the end, the realisation of a new subjectivity.’16 He distinguishes the ethics of art from those of activism or journalism – disciplines that certainly concern the political but ultimately defer to a policed conception of action within extant forms and systems. The ethical artist must be true to a new conception of the world – they must move without the codes of the status quo. Furthermore, Mouffe writes, Once we accept that identities are never pre-given but that they are always the result of processes of identification, that they are discursively constructed, the question that arises is the type of identity that critical artistic practices should aim at fostering.17 Ultimately, art produces its own public. It would be a mistake to think of the public realm as an a priori concept; instead we must conceive of the public in terms of what is held in common. In the instance of liberal democracy, where subjectivity is construed along unequal proprietorial lines, this commons exists largely in the virtual realm: as that which has yet to be actualised. I argue that site-specificity and the aforementioned metonymic principles must not be understood purely through geographic context, but with respect to discursive contiguities. In the globalised neoliberal economy, no site is specific. Therefore, the first step for an artwork to exist metonymically within its conditions is to identify 56

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precisely that which comprises its conditions. Such a process of identification actualises previously virtual discourses in order to shift that which may be apprehended as legible, and therefore that which may be apprehended as valuable. Counterintuitively, public art does not exist in advance of privatisation – in order to adequately critique our state of affairs we must recognise the pervasiveness of proprietorial logic. Art’s public is produced by rupturing the private. Only in this way can it become specific to its site, attaining a non-metaphoric capacity for political intervention.

Notes 1 Marina Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019), 225. 2 Dave Beech, ‘Encountering Art: Dave Beech Critiques Jacques Ranciere’s Concept of the “Emancipated Spectator”’, Art Monthly 336 (May 2010): 9. 3 Freee Art Collective (Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt, and Mel Jordan), ‘Functions, Functionalism and Functionlessness: On the Social Function of Public Art after Modernism’, in Art and Theory After Socialism, ed. Melanie Jordan and Malcolm Miles (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2008), 116. 4 V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 21–22. 5 Freee, ‘Functions, Functionalism and Functionlessness’, 117. 6 Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, 21. 7 W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Art and the Public Sphere (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), 30. 8 Stilinović , ‘The Praise of Laziness’, 263. 9 Beech, ‘Encountering Art’, 11. 10 Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, 85. 11 Ibid., 228. 12 Mark Hutchinson, ‘Everybody Lies: The Ethics of Social Practice’, Art & the Public Sphere 4, no. 1–2 (2015): 60. 13 Ibid., 60 (emphasis added). 14 Vishmidt, Speculation as a Mode of Production, 133. 15 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’, Art & Research 1, no. 2 (2007): n.p. 16 Hutchinson, ‘Everybody Lies’, 58. 17 Mouffe, ‘Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces’, n.p.

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6 GARDENS AND GRAINS Design Activations in the Public Realm Gretchen Coombs

In 2007, unfamiliar gardens appeared in front of San Francisco City Hall. Instead of neat rows of ornamental flowers or a verdant lawn to offset the white-washed building, circular planters full of edible greens dotted the landscape nestled between rows of trees to form an impressive approach to the seat of city government. For three years, this hybrid art and design project continued, and gardeners, artists, urban farmers, activists, and other civilians all chipped in to grow food and make the most of ‘unused’ public space. During the summer of 2008, over 100 pounds of organic food were harvested and distributed to local food banks. Futurefarmers planted Civic Center Victory Gardens (2007–2009) to bring attention to the need for a sustainable food supply for the residents of San Francisco. In 2018, Futurefarmers had their first retrospective ‘Futurefarmers: Out of Place, in Place’ at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. In between this time, Futurefarmers created and developed a diverse set of public art and design practices that has had the collective move across the globe, notably to Oslo, Norway for the Flatbread Society (2012–2018), the longest and most complex iteration of the Flatbread ‘series’ (see Figure 6.1). In the context of art and design, the methods, materials, and forms of art and design projects are increasingly exchanged, which has inflected the ecological strand of social art practices.1 Design methods and approaches are useful here: objects are made, experiences are created, and structures and gardens designed. Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates (transforming suburban front lawns into viable vegetable gardens), Natalie Jaremijenko’s Environmental Health Clinic (a series of consultations and prescriptions to remedy a local environmental problems), and Fallen Fruit’s Fruit Maps (hand-drawn maps to find fruit growing in public places to be accessed) incorporate design elements to activate public spaces and citizenry to grow our ecological awareness and promote sustainability. These projects actively engage participants in reimagining the intersections of human and ecological systems from a perspective of social and environmental justice and activism, and importantly, respond to urban-planning failures and dominant forms of food production and public land use. Futurefarmers’ Civic Center Victory Gardens and Flatbread Society demonstrate the strength of design activations in the public realm. This chapter begins by framing the collective’s work as design activism through public engagement and education, using culture-led initiatives to challenge the regulatory structures of urban environments and reverse poor urban-planning decisions through ecological initiatives that emphasise the commons, strengthen community, 58

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Figure 6.1 Flatbread Society Bakehouse (2017), Futurefarmers. Oslo, Norway Source: Photo credit Monika Lovdahl.

and otherwise offer new orientations for the communities in which they are designed. Both projects take inspiration from past approaches to farming and land use but reconfigure them to suit contemporary society and the challenges facing urban planning in the context of competing agendas such as redevelopment and a civic desire to maintain a commons.

Background Politics invent[s] rules. Artists break rules. Cities are planned and regulated and full of rules. For us, rules are the basis for non-creativity. Art has no use within a political system of rules. A work of art is something else – an expression of our historical being and our development in time.2 Futurefarmers started in 1995 with an art practice and design studio that includes installation, sculpture, performance, design, new media, public art, and public education. The collective forges interdisciplinary projects to address urban environmental justice issues. For founder Amy Franceschini, art is an active process, alive with possibilities – as a child she was enchanted by the performance of a harvest, which influenced her desire to get ‘audiences involved, to be a part of the theatre of making things and figuring out how to do things’.3 Futurefarmers’ work rests more in the conceptual realm with gallery installations and the design practices fuse with their activist practices; the group exemplifies the activist end of the social practice spectrum. Futurefarmers’ work in public spaces realises many of their goals in contrast to the works in galleries or museums, which remove the audience

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from seeing the process by which the work is made. Their work enters two discourses simultaneously, centred around different questions driven by context. When asked how she feels her work fits into the current state of global art practice, Franceschini replied: Maybe we can rephrase the question to ask why we choose to work under the umbrella of art rather than activism. We have found that much activism is bound by prescribed thoughts, dogma, and manifestos. Art does not have to have one aim and that helps us avoid cliched activist positions. This openness possibly allows for more mobility without constraints of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. We share a common, growing concern about a world that is on the verge of an environmental, military, and economic crisis. We are compelled to engage with this reality.4 Activist discourse has gained traction in contemporary arts discourse with socially engaged artworks gaining visibility in public and institutionalised spaces. Futurefarmers use their artistic identities strategically and weave activist ideas in the form of design activations into public policies. Such approaches have become more urgent in light of the climate change debate and actions. Design historian Victor Margolin asks, How does a designer formulate a role as a change agent and determine a course of action? To do so means to consider both the past and the present, which have been embodied or are embodied in concrete activities and artifacts.5 Margolin situates the possibilities of contemporary art practices when the ‘practical and discursive’ come together. He asks, How does one begin to think about art’s relation to sustainability such that a new understanding of artistic practice might result? . . . How do we think about art that moves from discourse to action, art whose intent is to produce a useful result?6 Arguably, Futurefarmers’ projects do just that; they form an urban design activism that retreats from conventional activist concepts in favour of a designerly ‘disruptive aesthetic’, which is complemented by an activism that takes ‘actions to catalyze, encourage or bring about change, in order to elicit social, cultural and/or political transformations’.7

Design Activism Design – broadly construed – has relationships with other fields of inquiry and practice, and in this context, public art practices cultivate social exchange and highlight how art and design can ‘increase societal awareness, and motivating and enabling political action’.8 Design activism can be determined in the following ways: ‘promoting social change; raising awareness about values and beliefs; questioning the constraints of mass production and consumerism on people’s everyday life’.9 Design theorist Alistar Fuad-Luke describes design activism to include: ‘design thinking, imagination and practice applied knowingly or unknowingly to create a counter-narrative aimed at generating and balancing positive social, institutional, environmental and/or economic change’.10 The promise of ‘design thinking’ and ‘design-led innovation’ often trumps the messiness and urgency of design for social issues (sustainability, social inclusion, to name a few), and certainly surpasses the ethics 60

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demanded of collaborative and participatory design processes. Yet, sociologist Ann Thorpe describes the affinities of design activism and social practices by considering their role and relationship to public or social practices, designed artefacts relating to the ecological issue addressed can revitalise the public’s relationship to their environment.11 Instead of a focus on design thinking, they use a design trace (discussed later in the chapter) through social practice art methods. This critical art space opens a space in which design activations can be understood. Cultural theorists and designers (Fuad-Luke) have used sociology (Thorpe) or political theory (Carl DiSalvo) to articulate how design activism has and continues to function within the larger discourse of political and cultural activism. Others (de Certeau, Latour, Lefebvre, the Situationist International, to name a few) consider the backdrop of cities to inform activist discourse. This has led artists to make work that existed beyond traditional artistic contexts so as to facilitate the infiltration of other aspects of life. These frameworks help elucidate how public space, democracy, and participation interface with design activities to advance an understanding of design’s potential interventions. But what is it about the design process, or designed objects, that make it unique from other activist processes? For Thomas Markussen, ‘the design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening in people’s lives’.12 Carl DiSalvo outlines how such political interventions might function: people’s experience of the everyday world gets reoriented, and the normalised forms of being and acting in the world are challenged and disrupted, producing a ‘disruptive aesthetic’. Similarly, Fuad-Luke sees design activism’s efficacy in its ability to promote ‘social change through their aesthetic effect on people’s senses, perceptions, emotion, and interpretation’.13 He states that ‘forms of activism are also an attempt to disrupt existing paradigms of shared meaning, values and purpose to replace them with new ones’,14 and this is done through ‘an aesthetic effect on people’s senses, perception, emotions, and interpretation’.15 It is this aesthetic dimension and intended effect of the designed artefacts or spaces and their insertion into cultural processes (in this context urban life) that they can contribute to social change. It is here that the discourse of design activism and philosophy broadly, but its manifestation in art criticism specifically, intersect. To augment this approach to design activism, designer DiSalvo uses the design ‘trace’, which he describes as ‘to follow and record the presence and movement of an artifact, event, or idea over time’.16 The design tactics DiSalvo describe are directed towards the construction of publics through a material trace. As a tactic, ‘tracing’ goes back to what John Dewey calls ‘the origins of an issue’. Futurefarmers’ projects present a ‘trace’ of a critical and pressing issue for its target public, and as Franceschini and Vranken state in the opening quote of this chapter, ‘A work of art is something else – an expression of our historical being and our development in time’,17 which in this context, is framed as a trace. Within the context of the construction of publics the tactic of tracing can be defined as the use of designerly forms to detail and communicate, and to make known, the network(s) of materials, actions, concepts, and values that shape and frame an issue over time.18 Both Victory Gardens and Flatbread Society begin with the trace of farming: edible landscapes in the midst of war time austerity, and ancient grain and accumulation. The notion of ‘farming’ becomes the trace in these projects, which Futurefarmers follows. By presenting and discussing the experience around these land-use issues, the trace of social justice forms through events, grain collection, a temporary bakery, but also through the lucid language and pedagogical impulse of the entire project. Cultural approaches to social change and the integral relationship between design and culture – both in terms of material culture and methodological considerations – can facilitate 61

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these shifts. In this context then, urban design activism operates by introducing heterogeneous material objects and social relations into the urban field of perception in order to draw attention to specific local issues. Futurefarmers’ projects on the waterfront in Oslo and San Francisco City Hall promote the values and beliefs of urban design activism that can be described ‘as a distributing of urban space and time and constructing alternative ways for individuals to participate and take part in a “common” public environment’.19 The combination of recalibrating the built environment and working with communities and their local issues to bring this about, leads to what might be termed ‘design activations’ in the public realm.

Civic Center Victory Gardens (2007–2009) In 2007, the front lawn of San Francisco City Hall was transformed into a ‘victory garden’ (see Figure 6.2). The idea of a ‘victory garden’ was born out of necessity for food and making land use productive during times of scarcity, like war, as civilians took to the task from Canada to Australia. In the United States, through a campaign of posters and advertisements during the Second World War, Eleanor Roosevelt encouraged citizens on the ‘home front’ to use their property (front and back lawns, rooftops, abandoned lots, public gardens) to grow food – vegetables, fruit, and herbs – to supplement food rations and to offset the use of canned food. San Francisco hosted its own victory garden in 1943 in front of City Hall.

Figure 6.2 Civic Center Victory Gardens (2007), Futurefarmers. San Francisco Victory Gardens, San Francisco, CA, USA Source: Photo credit Amy Franceschini.

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Galvanising citizens in this way helped compensate for a diminished agricultural labour force. Such participation engendered patriotism by giving citizens a ‘role’ in the war effort. This effort paid off: some 40 per cent of all produce consumed during the war was from victory gardens.20 In an attempt to remedy urban environmental degradation and to challenge corporate agriculture practices, Futurefarmers and John Bella (from the Rebar design collective) chose to reclaim a public space for use, which led to a critical examination of issues of labour and productive land use. Civic Center Victory Gardens forged an ornamental landscape transforming the halls of city government into an urban farm, this seat of city government had hosted victory gardens during the First and Second World Wars. Civic Center Victory Gardens won the support of then Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, who temporarily lent the project land in a very visible location right outside of his office. Franceschini also organised meetings around the project, and was commissioned to make a poster that would represent a new era of victory gardens. She chose an image that would make ‘people think about gardening as a political or playful act’. Since the time of the victory gardens, she has been asked to be on an advisory board for a new city initiative that hopes to install permanent victory gardens in sites throughout the city. The City of San Francisco came up with $60,000 for a pilot for 15 gardens citywide (Franceschini and her colleagues wanted 500, but the Department for the Environment wanted only 15 as a pilot). The Civic Center Victory Gardens garnered tremendous attention and gained valuable support over the course of its run, not only from other community gardeners and from the general public. Originally scheduled to run through late September, it closed in November 2009 with a Thanksgiving harvest. As a design trace, making landscapes edible instead of ornamental draws on traditional farming methods, land use, and food scarcity, all of which have complex geopolitical implications and intersect with farming policies, farming lobbies, as well as chemical companies such as Monsanto.21 In subsequent years, this urban design intervention perhaps influenced Michelle Obama’s White House garden. The First Lady’s attempt to demonstrate the ease with which healthy food can be grown and harvested aligned with her attempts to address the obesity epidemic. Tracing this complex design issue brings to light the interface between public land use and urban farming, and agribusinesses and political lobbies find themselves sharing the same table.

Flatbread Society (2012–2018) An urban farm, a temporary bakehouse, activities to collect grains, storytelling, an appointment of a ‘resident’ farmer all constitute different aspects of the Flatbread Society.22 Over the course of its run, the project gradually gained influence on-site through participatory events and Futurefarmers’ durational engagement. As part of their methodology, Futurefarmers worked closely with locals to identify what and how a public would look in the rapidly changing waterfront of Bjørvika in Oslo, a former port. Franceschini wanted to get a better sense of the history, what mattered to people, what had been lost, and what could be brought back, perhaps differently but responsive to the needs of locals. She spoke with communities ranging from bakers to urban planners to astronomers, to build on social movements where citizens are taking control of how their cities are being transformed in light of large redevelopment initiatives. Over time, Futurefarmers pulled together seemingly disparate strands of concern, and through the long-term nature of Flatbread Society, began a constellation of activities that pivoted around grain, how it’s grown, how it has been used, what has been lost and how 63

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the diverse communities could benefit from a reconfigured relationship with it. The group used ‘grain as a prismatic impetus to consider the interrelationship of food production to realms of knowledge sharing, cultural production, socio-political formations and everyday life’.23 The bakehouse became a site where the public – through events – would converge on an experimental architectural structure based in a public space called Losæter to create a gathering space and functional bakehouse as two enclosed areas. The structure formed a trace from three historical bakehouses and with its maritime aesthetic from the port’s history, emerges as an image of a vessel being built or repaired: scaffolding, clamps and the precarious angles of support beams evoke images of the past when this area was a port and stimulates the imagination in terms of what is to come.24 The ovens helped warm the gathering space and specific angles of the structure helped gather rainwater to water plants. This structure and the community activities it housed were built on Norwegian customs where bakehouses were used as communal sites to store flatbread. Instead of storing grain from surrounding farms, the grains were transformed into flatbread to extend the grains’ longevity and to protect it from rodents. In addition to the bakehouse, Futurefarmers and their collaborators cultivated a grain field that grew into a grain commons. The aesthetic of the bakehouse vessel resembled a rescue craft, and similarly, the group ‘rescued’ grains from the northern hemisphere and planted them in the grain field. The seeds ‘display thousands of years of a complex hand-to hand network of knowledge and genetic resources’.25 The grain commons and the bakehouse access knowledges lost or subsumed by larger social processes, yet resurface (rescued) as a design trace through community consultation and collaboration. With Flatbread Society, Futurefarmers participated in the artist-led development of an urban waterfront area, highlighting how design and public art can influence urban development. One of the enduring outcomes from Flatbread was ‘the formation of an urban gardening community called Herligheten and a full-time farmer hired in collaboration with the Norwegian Farmers Union’.26 Franceschini states, The establishment of Losæter at Loallmenningen marks a commitment to support farming as a key component within the cultural landscape of Bjørvika. By situating Losæter within this new waterfront development and alongside major cultural institutions, we embrace the understanding of farming as an art form.27 And in the context of the city’s waterfront redevelopment, Flatbread Society demonstrated the value of design activations but also how a different type of public art project engenders something more sustainable than commissioned – often by developers – public art for public spaces for the commons and sustainability.28 The art creates the open, more fluid methodological aspects of the project; the design offers the form (the trace) and function in situ. Both undermine the rational approaches to urban planning and the development-driven outcomes of Oslo’s waterfront.

Analysis Futurefarmers address the contested spaces of contemporary cities and towns and extends this concern to rural areas. Such projects chip away at perceptions that ‘the environment’ is something ‘out there’ and reminds us that cities are as deeply connected to other 64

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ecosystems as they are to global trade networks.29 Their work demonstrates the possibilities of art/design-led interventions to shape urban planning and cultivate an active civic engagement. By tracing a design issue over time, they reveal how entangled the design trace becomes with other agendas – political lobbies, urban development, land use, etc. Futurefarmers work in tandem with each other, city officials, and the volunteer labour force eager to translate short-term projects into long-term realities. In her essay, ‘Greening the Revolution’, Berin Golonu investigated greening practices in contemporary art. She found that by convincing institutions, policymakers, and government officials to get behind their utopian visions of an urban agrarian future, introduced prototypes for urban sustainability into the public sphere and gained material and moral support for their ideas, thanks in part to their highly effective collaborative practices.30 While they may share affinities with their contemporaries and are at the crest of ‘green’ social practices, Futurefarmers offers more than raising public awareness about environmental issues in favour of direct action aimed at public participation, by forming their own versions of how public space and the ‘fruits’ of the neighbourhood or communities are used. Their work contributes to the legacy of urban social movements: ‘the concept of urban social movements referred to a politics of protest and activism concerned with the character, freedom and control of urban space’.31 Communities benefit through the reuse of public space based on a design trace and this is consistent with Hardt and Negri’s use of the ‘commons’ as a site, specifically in urban contexts that can be reclaimed and reconfigured for (a different) use by the multitude.32 It also supports their belief that this type of common use engenders social relations and points to the possibilities inherent in exercising the power of producing your own food, understanding the political and economic impetus affecting food growth and distribution. This ‘marked’ space for communal activity allowed diverse urban populations to come together. It may have created public awareness about environmental concerns, engendered participation, and importantly, offered an alternative to dominant agriculture practices and distribution through ecological awareness based on Futurefarmers’ public pedagogy. Futurefarmers’ projects use conceptual frameworks, public pedagogy, and performative displays that support and help expand the cultures of local communities in urban life. These temporary occupations of space, conscious of objects and people and the relations they engender, point to a ‘condition [that] situates us in an enunciative and performative relationship to the world (and to art), where meanings take place’, in what theorist and curator Irit Rugoff calls ‘“the where of now”, by making a form of location through inhabiting temporal duration’.33 Their innovative modes of social interaction based on design traces help form a ‘dual consciousness of both local and global implications and inter-connections of a given site and situation’.34 We can question and identify the problems when such engagements become superficial and do not necessarily ameliorate the deeper alienation and disengagement from the political aspects of the urban and public sphere (Habermas) that seems to plague contemporary life, but eliciting Fuad-Luke’s design activism might provide a productive reordering of how we engage in these types of artworks and their reception. Indeed, their potential may rest in a symbolic realm, but they can still have an effective response. The political power of urban activist projects such as these remains in their capacity to 65

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engage the general public and to generate broader political and social transformations linked to activist agendas. Here, Futurefarmers’ design activations foster a ‘disruptive aesthetics’ providing creative interactions and opportunities that elude the regimentation of life and work promulgated by corporate capital and its instrumentalisation of human creativity. They may not achieve political or social change immediately; it’s the iterative processes that underscore how forms of activism are also an attempt to disrupt existing paradigms of shared meaning, values and purpose to replace them with new ones, and so activism perhaps embodies a sense of developing the spiritual capacity of individual human capital, that is collectivized in social capital.35 Margolin believes that once art gets recognised as a cognitive medium integrating aesthetic and sustainability discourses, they should then influence each other: ‘Art as a mode means that sustainability is seen, felt, thoughts, and conceived differently – and communicated differently.’36 With the practices I have described, this seems to be precisely what happens. Yet I wonder whether, in all of their efforts to work against established systems by providing alternatives to them, Futurefarmers are now somewhat incorporated into those very systems through their work and labour being instrumentalised by city officials and state or civic governing bodies to gain political capital.

Conclusion Civic Center Victory Gardens and the Flatbread Society, with diverse events and durational engagement, form part of an urgent trend in urban cultures where cities and their surrounds are turned into laboratories for creative experimentation and civic action. Artists reorder the use of urban public space, inviting the public to experience their urban habitat differently, and for Michel de Certeau, contribute to the stories, myths, dreams, experiences, and histories that connect people to a particular place.37 These encounters and activations create relationships and provide a connection to a city that is embodied through urban experiences; a revitalised collective imaginary of urban life, inspiring a sense of awkwardness, unfamiliarity, conviviality, and even perhaps a sense of agency, undermining the alienation of often-felt paralysis of looming climate catastrophe, and importantly the development-led planning impetus facing cities striving for economic growth. The Civic Center Victory Gardens and the Flatbread Society generated civic awareness via projects that facilitate organised and improvised public participation and provide a means by which people might interact within the public realm in compelling ways. They also engender a localised spectacle and enlist an actively participating local public that ‘make’ the art rather than serving as passive consumers of product or more familiar public art projects commissioned by cities and developers. This understanding of design activism is represented by connections that are established with audiences and communities to promote a greater self-awareness about the role individuals can play in their communities or cities. In this context the opportunity to explore new perceptions and conceptions can empower people in the belief that art and design offer experiences that reach far beyond utilitarian dictates, and that there is the possibility of multiple creative modes of engagement in the public realm. Ultimately, they disrupt our sense of the contemporary world, our understanding of what can happen in the public realm.

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Indeed, Futurefarmers’ design activations inspire a host of interpretations; they are critical of systems, playful in their approach, pedagogical and collaborative in their methods, and overall as a design and art practice, visionary. Farming, grain collection, baking all reveal and expose the underlying structures, arguments, and assumptions of an issue through a design trace. Anyone encountering them could engage, they did not need any specialised knowledge of art or design to understand the experience or engage in the activities. Not only does their work follow the material and cultural traces of issues, but it also helps us see how vulnerable we all are to succumb to changes based on policy and planning, or as demonstrated through a trace, an existing system that was buried under policy, planning, and large business interests. Arguably, despite the historical traces, their tactics resemble what Fuad-Luke outlines as the relationship between co/participatory design and ‘co-futuring’ for a sustainable future: Designers as facilitators and catalysts can use participatory design processes to achieve ‘participatory’ and ‘deep’ forms of democracy. These contemporary assemblies would focus on changing ‘now’, with a view to directing sustainable futures. In doing so they would ‘co-future’, give new directionality to the future.38 Futurefarmers’ designerly art practices – participatory, activist, and urban – forge the way towards these new cultural forms in a world that needs innovative ways to encourage institutions, people, and communities to act with urgency.

Notes 1 Art and design often have distinct methods, ontologies, and outcomes. In the context of this chapter, I feel that art is opening up a critical space that allows Futurefarmers to intervene with designed objects. Arguably, these designed objects are also artefacts. 2 Amy Franceschini and Lode Vranken, Situations interview, www.situations.org.uk/read-interviewamy-franceschini-futurefarmers. 3 Interview with author. 4 Amy Franceschini, ‘Free Soil’, in Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, ed. Stephanie Smith and Victor Margolin (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005), 47. 5 Victor Margolin, ‘Design, the Future and the Human Spirit’, Design Issues 23 (2007): 5. 6 Victor Margolin, ‘Reflections on Art and Sustainability’, in Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, ed. Stephanie Smith and Victor Margolin (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005), 25. 7 Thomas Markussen, ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism: Enacting Design between Art and Politics’, Nordic Design Research Conference 2011, Helsinki, www.nordes.org/opj/index. php/n13/article/viewFile/102/86; Fuad-Luke Alastair, Design Activism: Beautiful Strangeness for a Sustainable World (Hoboken, NJ: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 6. 8 Carl DiSalvo, ‘Design and the Construction of Publics’, Design Issues 25, no. 1 (2009): 48. 9 Thorpe cited in Markussen, ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism’, 1. 10 Fuad-Luke, Design Activism, 27. 11 Thorpe cited in Markussen, ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism’, 1. 12 Ibid., 2 (original emphasis). 13 Fuad-Luke cited in Markussen, ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism’, 3. 14 Fuad-Luke, Design Activism, 10. 15 Markussen, ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism’, 3. 16 DiSalvo, ‘Design and the Construction of Publics’, 50. 17 Franceschini and Vranken, Situations interview. 18 DiSalvo, ‘Design and the Construction of Publics’, 50. 19 Markussen, ‘The Disruptive Aesthetics of Design Activism’, 4. 20 Victory Seeds, ‘The Victory Garden’, 2010, www.victoryseeds.org/TheVictoryGarden/page2.html.

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21 See www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/04/03/how-the-white-housegarden-became-a-political-football. 22 As mentioned in the introduction, Flatbread Society has had many iterations and has been quite contextually specific in each location. The first version was in Latvia, then Stockholm, and finally in Oslo. Each had different events, commissions, and pedagogical approaches, with each design trace based on local specificity. In Oslo, Flatbread was a part of the Situations’ Slow Space public art programme. While Situations’ curatorial framework no doubt influenced how Futurefarmers approached their work in Oslo, here I focus more on the activities and outcomes of the work. For more on Situations’ Slow Space see www.situations.org.uk/writing/slow-space-curatorial-vision-oslo-harbour. 23 See http://flatbreadsociety.net/about. 24 See http://flatbreadsociety.net/actions/35/bakehouse. 25 Ibid. 26 See http://flatbreadsociety.net/about. 27 Amy Franceschini, et al., A Declaration of Use of Land in Bjørvika (London: Sage, 2015), www.flat breadsociety.net/downloads/declaration.english.pdf. 28 Charlotte Blanche Myrvolda and Even Smith Wergelandb, ‘Participatory Action in the Age of Green Urbanism: How Futurefarmers Leapfrogged the Culture Consumer’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 24, no. 3 (2018): 350–367. 29 Stephanie Smith and Victor Margolin, eds, Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art (Chicago: Smart Museum of Art, 2005), 15. 30 Berin Golonu, ‘Greening the Revolution’, Art Papers 32 (2008): 38. 31 Fran Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 61. 32 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 33 Irit Rugoff cited in Mick Douglas, ‘Situating Social Contingency: Mobility and Socially Engaged Pubic Art’, in Urban Interior: Informational Explorations, Interventions and Occupations, ed. Rochus Urban Hinkel (Baunach, Germany: Spurbuchverlag, 2011) 57 (original emphasis). 34 Grant Kester, The One and the Many; Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 25. 35 Fuad-Luke, Design Activism, 10. 36 Ibid. 37 Michael de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Included in the Flatbread Society constellation are stories collected throughout the project. These include observations about the sites, the people (collaborators), and the challenges and rewards of undertaking such a layered project. See http://flatbreadsociety.net/stories 38 Fuad-Luke, Design Activism, 196.

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7 ACT Activating City Transience Maggie McCormick

In an era of rapid global urbanisation, the ‘city’ is constantly reshaping itself through demolition and rebuilding, juxtaposition of new architecture against old, and the unexpected against the everyday. In addition, digitalisation has expanded understanding of urban space beyond its purely built expression, reinforcing a sense of urban transience. This chapter explores activation, within an expanded notion of public as a space of transition, through art practices that challenge embedded spatial perceptions and patterns, and in the process builds a new sense of urban identity. It does this through making conceptual links between urban art disruptions within city transience separated by time, as seen in an approach to practice as well as perceptions of the nature of public space in the central city of Melbourne, Australia. Grounded in the urban thinking of Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier that recognises the value of practice, related activations are discussed: Platform to Urban Laboratory; Sculpture Walk to Urban Animators; No Vacancy to SkypeLab. Each draws out how the urban disruption of the former laid the groundwork for the latter, revealing shifts in city transience and the relationship between public practice, public space, and the public.

City, Transience, and Art The question ‘what is a city?’ is far more complex in the context of a transient, urbanised, and digitalised world, than when it was posed by Lewis Mumford in the 1930s. The idea of the city being in a state of transition has always been applied to varying degrees in relation to individual cities, let alone today in terms of the emerging broader concept of ‘city’. Mumford’s question was asked at a time when the concept of ‘city’ was starting to be expanded. Mumford looked beyond the constructed city to ‘the city as theatre’,2 while others such as Jean Gottmann in the 1960s redefined the city as an urban cluster or corridor (the ‘megalopolis’3), and Saskia Sassen went further to coin the term ‘global city’ in the 1990s.4 Gottmann recognised connections between cities like Boston and Washington (the BosWash concept), while Sassen observed a new ‘city’ space created through the flight connections between megacities – New York, London, and Tokyo – as other ways of deciphering the urban situation. The capacity for rapid movement of people from place to place and for urban digital mind space movement creates an in-between space that Manual 1

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Figure 7.1 ‘Cyber Static’ video, SkypeLab: 1000 Pixel (curated by Henning Eichinger, Maggie McCormick, Annie Kurz, and Javiera Advis, November 2019), Fiona Hillary, Zan Griffith, and Susan Maco Forrester. Berlin Source: Photo credit Matthias Kaufhold for Baden-Württemberg Stiftung.

Castells5 outlined as an emerging networked society that changed spatial understanding towards the notion of ‘flows’. Such ideas fostered later explorations of both bodily movement and ‘mind mobility’,6 and the idea that one is ‘born urban, born transient’7 as a contemporary everyday experience. In earlier writing, I discussed the ‘transient city’ and the contemporary state of ‘being urban’ more broadly as transient urban consciousness, which I call ‘urbaness’.8 My interest is in mapping this transient state of mind. Much of my focus has been on ‘how mediation by screens is creating new urban concepts across emerging new spatial geographies and its emerging sociologies and cartographies’ and ‘the role of screens in creating a mobile state of being and a conceptualization of urban public space as transient and paradoxical mind space’.9 Such a space becomes an integral part of the new understanding of the public realm, and as urbanisation and digitalisation throw us closer

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together the public realm increasingly becomes a space of inquiry with the capacity to reveal a deeper understanding of both. Two aspects of disruption within urban transience are discussed in this chapter – that of the public realm of the city and of art practice – as well as the interaction between them. As mentioned, within this broader urban thinking, my focus in this chapter is also on one particular city – Melbourne, Australia. As in the global urban context, physical and mental urban configurations continuously rearrange spatial relationships within this city. The now everyday engagement with transience reshapes the pattern of public space, the rhythms created by this pattern, and the perceptions that emerge from these rhythms within the ‘plural rhythmicity of the city’.10 The understanding of ‘city’ now emerges out of disruption to physical and mental patterns through activation. Contemporary art practice within the transient public realm, with its move from permanent towards temporary, and from artist focused to socially engaged, is a mode of inquiry that contributes valuable knowledge towards the understanding of a new concept of ‘city’.

Rhythmanalysis and Practice This chapter is grounded in Henri Lefebvre’s and Catherine Régulier’s approach to rhythmanalysis,11 an approach that draws multiple strands of inquiry together, recognising the value of artistic thinking in interpreting the public urban realm. In two co-written pieces,12 their analysis of everyday city life embraced the interaction of the rhythms of the body, the mind, society, and politics within the interconnection between the production of time and space. This earlier thinking signposted Lefebvre’s later writing on rhythmanalysis. What is explored in this chapter is the reappraisal of an idea emerging out of the specific urban patterns and spatial experiences of the twentieth-century public realm, to contemporary public space patterns punctured by urbanisation and digitalisation. Lefebvre’s life and urban thinking (1901–1991) spanned the twentieth century and extended understanding of the social production of space and time and the relationship between these in the production of city rhythm. His work on rhythmanalysis with Régulier, introduced a ‘new field of knowledge’,13 another way of viewing the city through the lens of its multiplicity of rhythms that embraced the roles of both art and science in analysing the urban. Lefebvre observed that rhythmanalysis had much in common with poetry, noting that ‘like the poet, the rhythmanalyst performs a verbal action, which has an aesthetic import’.14 Lefebvre’s life intertwined with that of artists, writers, and poets of his time. Manual Castells, one of several younger thinkers inspired by Lefebvre and who worked with him in the 1960s, said he sensed what went on around him ‘like an artist’15 as he moved into this ‘uncharted theoretical territory’.16 The work of Lefebvre and Régulier serves as a signpost towards a methodology of practice or activation for more inventive and complete investigations into how cities have been experienced. In the case of this chapter, utilising intertwined investigations into how city space and art practice are experienced today. Over time, charting of public territory through rhythmanalysis has gained greater significance. It can be seen as a concept ‘born posthumously’17 as it lines up with twentyfirst-century urban and digital experience as well as the increasing complexity of the definition of ‘city’. While many others do not necessarily use the term ‘rhythmanalysis’, words like ‘liquid’18 and ‘flow’19 have become part of the contemporary language about urban space, while our digital googling and browsing with both its rhythms and arrhythms in its random encounters, in many ways reflect the ‘spirit of rhythmanalysis’.20 This ‘spirit’ 71

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embraces an understanding of discordant rhythms as well as the role of ‘rupture’ in urban pattern at the point of what Lefebvre and Régulier called ‘arrhythmia’, which in this chapter is termed ‘disruption’. Here it is the artistic disruptive process that is investigated.

Pattern, Public, and Disruption All cities have cartographic patterns. The pattern of central Melbourne is the Hoddle Grid. The intrinsic rhythms and later arrhythms of this grid pattern have shaped Melbourne’s spatial experiences and urban perceptions since it was devised by Robert Hoddle in 1837. While the land on which Melbourne sits has a long indigenous history, its conceptualisation as a city grew out of nineteenth-century British thinking. The original grid paid no attention to indigenous understandings of space, natural geography, or to previous informal settlement spatial cartographies. While public space was not integral to the thinking that produced the Hoddle Grid, this central ‘grid city’ expanded over time to encompass surrounding ‘public space’ edges as gardens and squares that began to reveal ‘a city in transition’.21 As part of the city’s formal pattern these continued to define public space as controlled space. Alison Young observes that ‘in cities, the lines of the law tend to coincide with those of cartography and timetabling, resulting in an image of the city as smooth, compartmentalized, organised around boundaries, and functional’ in order to control ‘the city’s perceived unruliness’.22 Other ‘public space was essentially leftover space not occupied by buildings’.23 Smaller streets and ‘a random arrangement of laneways’24 were added, but viewed for many years as ‘hidden’ service access only dissimulated from the central grid order. This can be seen as the starting point for the reshaping of the grid mentality. The public realm, its changing pattern, and the impact of urbanisation and digitalisation has grown substantially over time, leading to the new importance of public space in policy and practice. For example, the City of Melbourne’s 1985 Strategy Plan moved from referring to the central city as a central business district (CBD) to a central activities district (CAD), implying a growing understanding of the public’s role within a city. While there was no talk of ‘unruliness’ in the 1985 Strategy Plan, the conceptual framework of the public domain was changing through what one could argue was ‘disruption’ to the grid. This said, while recognising diversity, division, and disruption, many urban planners and designers tend to use words like ‘harmony’ as their focus of attention, as can be seen in a recent book that documents the transformation of central Melbourne from the 1980s. The word ‘choreography’ is used to describe the ‘process of shaping a city’ through ‘capturing the idea of many combined movements that could create chaos but can be guided to work in synergy and harmony’.25 In contrast, my interest is in exploring what Young describes as the ‘unruliness’ of the urban and digital that increasingly punctures and disrupts the grid’s ordered cartographic rhythms, as well as its mind space. This is the domain of artistic practice enquiry. Melbourne’s ‘arrhythmia’ now constitutes a major part of its urban patterns and identity. This can be seen emerging in a number of disruptions to Melbourne’s grid over the years. While in no way claiming to be a comprehensive overview of all the public art disruptions that have taken place, selected examples link art activation with re-evaluating ‘off-grid’ underpasses and lanes, repositioning streets and architectures, and reviewing horizontal and linear perspectives.

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ACT: Activating City Transience

Art, Activation, and Transience Lefebvre observed that ‘thought strengthens itself only if it enters into practice: into use’.26 Similarly, this chapter focuses on ‘methodology as practice’, the practice of activation as disruption. Artistic activation within the current twenty-first-century transient pattern of Melbourne can be seen in projects like Urban Laboratory, Urban Animators, and SkypeLab to have its roots in earlier disruptions of Melbourne’s city pattern around the 1990s, including Platform, Swanston Street Sculpture Walk, and No Vacancy. While each of the projects discussed have their own broader agendas, the focus here is on how the process of art practice – within an expanded notion of the urban public realm as a space of transience – shifts the relationship between public practice, public space, and the public.

Platform to Urban Laboratory: Re-Evaluating Off-Grid Underpasses and Lanes Both Platform and Urban Laboratory re-evaluate hidden and ‘off-grid’ spaces through disruption to the pattern of railway underpasses and lanes. While these were not part of the original Hoddle Grid, by the mid 1850s there were numerous lanes, while the first trains and underpasses started to appear. Both held to the geometric form while at the same time adding additional layers and extensions to the grid pattern. Platform was set up in 1990 by Andrew Seward and Richard Holt in what was then the Spencer Street Station underpass, and later in 1995 in the Campbell Arcade, a subway at Flinders Street Station. Platform was supported by the City of Melbourne’s Public Art Programme in its early days of recognising the value of ‘off-grid’ underused public spaces as an integral part of the city and the role artists might play in their re-evaluation. A regular art programme was held in a series of unused advertising boxes. Its twentieth anniversary publication, What Art, Which Public: Platform Artists Group 1990–2010, reflects its focus on challenging the established art world and its audiences through this move into the public realm. Urban Laboratory27 was initiated in 2013 through RMIT University and curator, Fiona Hillary, in association with the City of Melbourne. Its key focus over 12 months was to research issues of perceptions of public safety in two major city lanes, Hosier Lane and Routledge Lane, through public art interventions aimed at creating ongoing positive social impacts. While these laneways house establishments ranging from a high-end restaurant to a public health service for the homeless, they are best known for their street art culture. The recognition of these lanes as significant street art sites began with City Lights 1998.28 Like Platform, City Lights reframed spaces hidden amid the formal grid as a different sort of art gallery through installing a series of exhibition light boxes on the graffiti walls of the lanes. Over time, laneway culture has gradually matured and become embraced as an asset in the City of Melbourne’s cultural policies. Such policies evolved from an emphasis on permanent to temporary interventions, such as the later laneway commissions that offered artists the opportunity to temporarily transform a number of city lanes into art destinations. Both Platform and Urban Laboratory used practice as methodology to activate spaces in transition through disruptive art interventions in the public realm, and in the process reevaluate these spaces in order to shift the rhythm of social interaction. While Platform’s interventions were through the regular changing of exhibitions within a built public space, Urban Laboratory shifted to active interaction with the space itself as well as its public in order to incorporate social change. It used ‘live test sites’ as its practice in order to directly engage the diverse public within these laneway spaces ‘as a case study of public art as 73

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a methodology that can investigate the relationship between people and their built environments’.29 Such a shift towards more overt social engagement as practice in the public realm disrupted city patterns and rhythms more intensively, and challenged attitudes and perceptions of the city and its public ownership. Platform worked with the restrained grid rhythm, recognising its audience as one in a state of movement and a process of circulation. Its unexpected art interventions (in what would usually be advertising spaces) broke the pattern by generating repetitive sideways glances as the same people passed by morning and evening. Occasionally more unexpected events occurred that reversed and challenged spatial expectations, such as when actual people appeared inside the cramped display boxes instead of artworks. Urban Laboratory, on the other hand was designed to unfold over time as a more relational and durational disruption. Over the 12 months of its run, there was an incubation phase of artists exploring and revealing the patterns and rhythms of this space, followed by an iteration phase responding to the works that were created and the issues that had emerged as a result. In the process, it set out to ‘explore the role public art can play in interrogating public space’30 and purposefully aimed to reveal its tensions in order to foster dialogue. Urban Laboratory did not shy away from the ‘wilfulness’ of the contradictions evident in the city’s arrhythm. Its interventions addressed the conflicts and tensions, often tapping into the unlistened to, public voices of young graffiti artists, homeless people, and women. The laboratory purposefully aimed to disrupt the routine use of space and to shift the patterns of everyday urban life as well as its rhythms. The thinking underpinning the establishment of Platform in 1990 can be seen to lay the groundwork for Urban Laboratory’s thinking in 2013. The increasing transient nature of urban space extended the practice of Urban Laboratory well beyond the Platform process to encompass an added ambition of social engagement and change, through disruption to the daily pattern. Even the naming of Platform evokes a static physical presence while the title Urban Laboratory is more exploratory and fluid.

Sculpture Walk to Urban Animators: Re-Positioning Streets and Architectures In 1992, a section of a major Melbourne city artery, Swanston Street, was closed to traffic and opened as a pedestrianised public realm. While not disrupting the city grid, it began to change its pattern through changing rhythms, from traffic to pedestrian modes of movement. While only a temporary grid overlay, the roots of this pattern change can be seen in the Greening of Swanston Street (1985). Over one weekend when trams were excluded, grass covered the street, and people wandered randomly, there was ‘a great psychological change point’.31 This ‘change point’ was reinforced as more people moved into the city, encouraged by the Postcard 3000 (1992) initiative that aimed to increase central city living. The decision of the City of Melbourne to transform the public section of Swanston Street into the Swanston Street Sculpture Walk began a new relationship between the city and the role of its art. Contemporary works were juxtaposed in sharp contrast to historical statues, indicating that ‘something was happening in the public psyche’.32 While formal sculptures such as Bourke and Wills stoically towered over the city street, pigs flew and building fragments rose out of the ground.33 The idea of the ‘walk’ became embedded into the rhythm of the daily life of Melbournians so that when it was proposed in 2008 to reopen the street to traffic, instead its status as a pedestrian walk was extended by popular demand. But while the spatial disruption created by the Sculpture Walk did impact on the urban ‘psyche’ or mind space of Melbournians, its design consisted entirely of permanent 74

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works whose locations implicitly reinforced the sense of the grid as a fixed construct, with its intersections along a linear walk. Conversely, Urban Animators: Living Laboratory (2016–2018)34 embedded itself within the ‘unruliness’ of the larger capital works project, New Academic Street,35 which was being undertaken at the RMIT University city campus. Curated by Grace Leone, the framework of Urban Animators actively engaged with over 400,000 square metres of building space as its ‘canvas’, including hoardings, projections, and material interventions. New Academic Street was designed to reposition the university buildings within the city itself. The process of Urban Animators blurred the space between the university campus and the city through activation of the construction space itself, at the point of transformation – or as Lefebvre would say the point of ‘rupture’. Working in this ‘in-between’ space of scaffolding and gantries, this temporary interventionist practice set out to change the experience of – and relationship to – the impact of the transient, changing shape of the city. Unlike the Sculpture Walk, art interventions were not designed to fit in to the grid, but rather ‘integrated into fluid, changing, building sites’36 with the emphasis on direct engagement with spatial transience. Urban Animators used the word ‘animate’ in place of ‘activate’ through a crossdisciplinary approach between art, architecture, design, and urban public realm planning, while referring to their practice as ‘fieldwork’. Like the relationship between Platform and Urban Laboratory, the beginnings of disruption of the grid by the Sculpture Walk links to the later disruption by Urban Animators, but the latter now fits within a transience where ‘a city finds itself “under construction”. . . a permanent state of affairs’.37 The city’s transience has increasingly blurred boundaries between private construction sites and the public realm through the spilling out of gantries, hoardings, and building debris, as well as the coming and going of the builders themselves. The orderly grid is now truly challenged. Art practice today within the public realm activates transience in order to understand what ‘urban’ means. In the process of Urban Animators, the role of – and interaction between – the artist, the perceived art space, and the audience goes well beyond its conventional relationship to an ‘act’. The activation of this project includes a form of resistance as a kind of ‘double agent’38 where the artist assumes a multiplicity of roles, which creates a certain transience of its own. This is in sharp contrast to the framework of commissioning permanent works that underpinned the creation of the Sculpture Walk as a ‘gallery in the street’.

No Vacancy to SkypeLab: Reviewing Horizontal and Linear Perspectives The beginnings of ‘this permanent state of construction’ can be perceived as the central city grid increasingly starts to tip vertically. The first skyscraper in Melbourne in the 1950s, the ICI Building, prefigured a cityscape in transience from a horizontal to a vertical spatial experience. While Melbourne’s verticality may fall short in relation to the tallest buildings globally, the move towards verticality strongly impacts on the everyday spatial perception of this city’s inhabitants. Equally, the increasing digital world of screens that opens on to global space reframes the concept of everyday rhythm, as we traverse the ‘city’ and its disruptions, mobile phone in hand. Unlike the early concepts embedded in the grid plan, digital space is not conceived as linear. Perception of space has not just evolved from horizontal to vertical, it has now ushered a cacophony of disruptive intersecting and colliding digital diagonals. These changes in Melbourne reflect connections to wider global patterns and disruptions. The economic downturn in Melbourne during the early 1990s resulted in numerous vacant prime shopfront locations within the city centre, in particular opposite the Melbourne 75

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Town Hall. This coincided with artists’ disillusionment with the local commercial gallery system. Meanwhile, a growing awareness of a new role for art in public space was reflected in the City of Melbourne’s fostering of art practice in the public domain, accompanying a general emerging understanding of the impact of urbanisation and digitalisation on art and activation. This scenario opened up my interest in reframing vacant commercial spaces as public spaces, potentially activated through a different kind of art practice than was currently taking place in Melbourne. Supported by the City of Melbourne and the National Association for the Visual Arts, together with a group of artists, I initiated No Vacancy in empty shopfronts in prime city locations along Collins Street and the then City Square. Over time the No Vacancy (1990–1994) concept grew to become urbanart,39 which ran to 2006 and extended reactivation to city tramstop advertising panels, first-floor windows, public stairwells, and even included a 12-storey empty building, as well as taking a more global focus on connected urban space and the relationship of art practice to public space culture and urban identity.40 The aim of No Vacancy and later urbanart was not to place conventional art in public space, as a new kind of gallery, but rather the practice ‘throws ideas onto the street’41 to activate the space itself. This can be seen in No Vacancy’s practice where the reflective surface of glass windows created a relationship between art, space, and the public, intertwined in this ‘in-between’ space. While not addressing digital public space and its screens at that time, the No Vacancy focus on the active role of the glass window as a screen interface laid the groundwork for later thinking, which eventually led to my approach to SkypeLab: Transcontinental Faces and Spaces.42 SkypeLab (2012–2019) focused on the impact of the mediation of digital screens on concepts of public space, public practice, and urban identity, and its social relationships across global public space. Earlier I spoke of a changing public psyche created through a number of disruptions to the city grid and consequently to its rhythms. Digital disruption has had the most dramatic effect on answering the question ‘what is a city?’ and what is the city of Melbourne? The No Vacancy concept, while beginning to grapple with an expanded spatial concept, was restrained by its static, embedded grid location, while SkypeLab operated within an accepted, expanded understanding of space and time as the city. The increase in the number of screens across city space opens digital gateways to other cities, other time zones, and spaces that were only just beginning to emerge in the 1990s. There is now ubiquitous screen access via multiple public screens, as well as ubiquitous usage of mobile screens in public space, so that we occupy a place called Melbourne while at the same time engaging with the digital city/public sphere. The process of SkypeLab fully embraces this shift in relationship between public practice, public space, and the public, and shaped by disruption within transience. While the roots of that concept lay partially in Melbourne, it explores through artistic practice how identity and knowledge are increasingly shaped by ‘seeing’ through digital interfaces that review perceptions of urban space to ‘understand more deeply the spatial context’43 of the city. This was done through a process of online pairing of artists from Australia, Germany, China, Brazil, and Colombia (2012–2019) in order to create a public urban space shaped by contradictions through here/there, day/night, summer/winter, north/south, east/ west. With its strong emphasis on the impact of transience generated by screen reflections and fragmentations, the project’s process has interconnected a multiplicity of ‘public spaces’ through projections, performances, exhibitions, presentations, and publications.

Conclusion Every city is in a state of transience, now exacerbated by rapid urbanisation and digitalisation, and Melbourne is no exception. The Hoddle Grid of the 1800s reflected a somewhat misplaced belief in maintaining static order through the pattern and structure of 76

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the city itself. But this pattern has been disrupted by a number of arrhythms or ruptures to the grid, inherent in the increasing transience and artistic practices that emerged from 1990 to the present. The concept of ‘laboratory’ or process of inquiry through transience can be observed in the three contemporary projects discussed in this chapter – Urban Laboratory, Urban Animators, and SkypeLab. While earlier activations – Platform, Sculpture Walk, and No Vacancy – can be seen as setting the groundwork for the later disruptions, each is more grounded in practices still restricted by the physical spatial grid. Only No Vacancy gives some clues as to future thinking around the expanded public realm and into digital space, through its focus on the glass window and its reflections – not as a barrier but rather as an expander. Central to the discussion in this chapter have been the concepts of transience and disruption in framing the contemporary concept of ‘city’ and the role activation through artistic practice plays as a mode of inquiry. Contemporary public practice adds valuable knowledge to a growing, broader understanding of the extended public realm as a fluid space of transient co-production between activation and space, and contributes to new conceptual territories within a profoundly changing urbanscape and new definition of ‘city’.

Notes 1 Lewis Mumford, ‘What Is a City?’ in The City Reader, ed. Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 183–188. 2 Ibid., 185. 3 Jean Gottmann, Megalopolis: The Urbanized Northeastern Seaboard of the United States (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1961). 4 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 5 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996). 6 Maggie McCormick, ‘The Transient City: The City as Urbaness’, in Re-Imagining the City: Art, Globalization and Urban Spaces, ed. Elizabeth Grierson and Kristen Sharp (Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect, 2013), 117. 7 Maggie McCormick, ‘The Transient City: Mapping Urban Consciousness Through Contemporary Art Practice’ (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2009), 17. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Maggie McCormick, ‘Skypeography: Investigating and Mapping the Public Mind Space of Skype’, Journal of Public Space 3, no. 1 (2018): 4. 10 Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9. 11 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 12 Henri Lefebvre and Catherine Régulier, ‘The Rhythmanalytical Project’ (1985) and ‘Attempt at Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Cities’ (1986), in Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 81–92 and 93–106. 13 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 13. 14 Henri Lefebvre quoted in Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 145. 15 Manuel Castells quoted in Andy Merrifield, Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), xxii. 16 Ibid., 74. 17 Stuart Elden, ‘Some Are Born Posthumously: The French Afterlife of Henri Lefebvre’, Historical Materialism 14, no. 4 (2006): 185–202. 18 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2007). 19 Manual Castells, The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: B. Blackwell, 1989). 20 Ben Highmore, Cityscapes: Cultural Readings in the Material and Symbolic City (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 158.

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Maggie McCormick 21 William Cartwright, ‘Reading the Mapped City’, in Transformations: Art and the City, ed. Elizabeth Grierson (Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect, 2017), 29. 22 Alison Young, ‘Cities in the City: Street Art, Enchantment, and the Urban Commons’, Law & Literature 26, no. 2 (2014): 146. 23 Peter Elliott, ‘Designing and Framing Public Space’, in Urban Choreography: Central Melbourne 1985–, ed. Kim Dovey, Rob Adams, and Ronald Jones (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), 181. 24 Ibid. 25 Kim Dovey and Ronald Jones, ‘Introduction’, in Urban Choreography: Central Melbourne 1985-, ed. Kim Dovey, Rob Adams, and Ronald Jones (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), 10. 26 Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 79. 27 Urban Laboratory was curated by Fiona Hillary with contributing artists Ben Cittadini, Adrian Doyle, Clare McCracken, Ceri Hann, and Yandell Walton. 28 City Lights was initiated in Hosier and Routledge Lanes by Andrew Mac. 29 Fiona Hillary and Shanti Sumartojo, ‘Empty-Nursery Blue: On Atmosphere, Meaning and Methodology in Melbourne Street Art’, Public Art Dialogue 4, no. 2 (2014): 202. 30 Fiona Hillary and Geoff Hogg, ‘Interrogating Space: The Urban Laboratory’, in Transformations: Art and the City, ed. Elizabeth Grierson (Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect, 2017), 120. 31 Rob Adams, ‘The Marios Talks’, in Urban Choreography, Urban Choreography: Central Melbourne 1985–, ed. Kim Dovey, Rob Adams, and Ronald Jones (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), 220. 32 Kate Brennan, ‘A City with Soul’, in Urban Choreography: Central Melbourne 1985–, ed. Kim Dovey, Rob Adams, and Ronald Jones (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018), 169. 33 Charles Summer, Bourke and Wills (1865); Daniel Jenkins, Weathervanes (1993); Petrus Spronk, Architectural Fragment (1992). 34 Urban Animators was initiated and curated by Grace Leone. Many of the participating artists were from RMIT MAPS Master of Arts (Art in Public Space) programme. 35 RMIT New Academic Street was designed through a collaboration between architectural firms, Lyons with NMBW Architecture Studio, Harrison and White, MvS Architects and Maddison Architects. 36 Grace Leone, ‘Urban Animators: Living Laboratory UA:LL’ (MA in public space diss., RMIT University, Melbourne, 2017), 5. 37 Rem Koolhaas and Hal Foster, Junk Space with Running Room (London: Nottinghill Editions, 2013), 48, cited in Grace Leone, ‘Urban Animators: Living Laboratory UA:LL’, (MA in public space diss., RMIT University, 2017), 9. 38 Leone, ‘Urban Animators’, 36. 39 Urbanart was initiated and curated by Maggie McCormick. See Pandora Australia’s Web Archive: urbanart https://pandora.nla.gov.au/tep/21443. 40 Ibid. Note Kultural Kommuting (1998) linking public transport and public stairwell spaces in Berlin and Melbourne, and Global Fusion (2002) and Global Fusion Close Up (2006) linking public spaces in Vienna and Melbourne, initiated and curated by Maggie McCormick and Claudia Maria Luenig; and melbourneconnectionasia (2004) linking Melbourne public transport shelter spaces with spaces across eight Asian cities, initiated and curated by Maggie McCormick. 41 Maggie McCormick, ‘Negotiating Public Space in the 1990s: Claiming Art Space’, Dialogue no. 4 (December 1996): 17. 42 SkypeLab (2012–2019) was initiated and curated by Henning Eichinger (Germany) and Maggie McCormick (Australia). Over 100 artists participated through the digital ‘city’ and in the cities of Melbourne, Reutlingen, Shanghai, Boston, Rio de Janeiro, Barranquilla, Hobart, and Barcelona. The final iteration took place at the State Representation of Baden Württemberg, Berlin, November 2019 as SkypeLab: 1000 Pixel curated by Henning Eichinger, Maggie McCormick, Annie Kurz, and Javiera Advis in cooperation with Reutlingen University, Reutlingen, Germany and RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. See www.skypelab.org. 43 Henning Eichinger and Maggie McCormick, SkypeLab: Transcontinental Faces and Spaces (Bielefeld, Germany and New York: Kerber, 2016), 9.

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PART III

Social Justice

8 ART AS PROTEST The Forced Eviction of the Shijhou and Sa’owac Urban Indigenous Tribes in Taiwan Lu Pei-Yi

This chapter will examine two case studies from Taiwan to rethink the relationship between ‘art and protest’ and frame the concept of ‘art as protest’. Located on the North Taiwan riverbank,1 the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes are urban indigenous communities who faced forced eviction around 2008 due to new urban development plans. The Taipei county government justified eviction by claiming that the Shijhou settlement was at risk of severe flooding2 so it was necessary to move them. Additionally, the Sa’owac tribe’s settlement was billed to be demolished because of the development of a new bicycle route along the Dahan River proposed by the Taoyuan county government. These tribes employed various approaches in their protests against eviction, and art intervention was one of them. In the case of the Shijhou tribe, Burak Delier, a Turkish artist from the 2008 Taipei Biennial, worked on a project called WE WILL WIN that both welcomed publicity and drew attention to the issue. For the Sa’owac tribe, two Taiwanese artists, Hsu Su-Chen and Lu Chien-Ming, initiated a long-term collaborative project – Plant-Matter NeoEden (2006–2010) – which was not only a way of speaking out against the situation but also to exchange materials for the reconstruction of the tribe via a series of exhibitions. Since many essays or reports on these protests focus on them as part of a social movement, and are less concerned with their artistic dimensions, this chapter will take these two art projects from the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes as examples to rethink art and its relationship to/with power. In a protest, art is mostly employed to paint banners, design posters, or give performances, rather than representing effective and powerful action. However, in these two cases, the role of art goes far beyond one’s expectations within a conventional social movement. In addition, art systems – which include the gallery, museum, biennials, and art awards – play a specific role in protests that shape the lives and experience of the tribes. This chapter attempts to answer the following questions: what is the value of an art action? Is it merely a symbol of art or a new form of social practice that may engender political changes? What is the role of art institutions in a protest? I argue that art as a vehicle of protest can empower communities and raise the issue of forced eviction in highly visible

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and affective ways to a wider public. Eventually protest art issues a call for action and change in order to highlight the right to live as one desires and deserves, as well as foregrounding questions of social justice.

The Social, Political, and Cultural Context in Taiwan In the case of the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes, there are three main issues within local contexts that are interwoven with each other: (1) illegal housing, (2) urban migration of indigenous tribes, and (3) urban planning under neoliberalism. First, illegal housing is a very complicated issue in Taiwan and one that remains unresolved. It is not just a matter of regulation, but also relates to social, political, and economic circumstances based on a long history. After Japan surrendered at the end of the Second World War, the government of the Republic of China began exercising jurisdiction over Taiwan in 1945. Due to its defeat in the civil war with the Communist Party in 1949, the Kuomintang (KMT) government retreated to Taiwan along with a huge number of people. In the early stages, the KMT government regarded Taiwan as a temporary place and aimed to resume rule over Mainland China, so it paid little attention to the issue of insufficient housing. People could only build basic shelters by themselves with very limited resources, skills, and knowledge. In the period of rapid economic development of the 1960s and 1970s, Taiwan became the world’s factory. Many internal migrants moved from Taiwan’s countryside to the city in order to work. The Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes are examples of this internal migration. Temporary shelters thus gradually expanded into largescale communities. It was not until the 1980s, when the concept of urban planning became popular, that these temporary shelters become identified as ‘illegal housing’. Since illegal housing in Taiwan is a product of a long collective history, the scholar Ku Ping-ta suggests regarding it as a political fable.3 The philosopher Giorgio Agamben offered the notion of a stato di eccezione (state of exception),4 which can be deployed as a way of understanding illegal housing as a product of this state of exception. The urban planning scholar Huang Li-ling believes that ‘illegal building in Taipei actually could be seen as the first generation of social housing. When the government couldn’t provide sufficient social housing, these illegal buildings supported the basic right of minorities in the city.’5 From this perspective, illegal building is actually a self-help strategy in order to respond to living difficulties. Additionally, the scholar Chiu Chih-Sin states that illegal housing could be seen as an action from the residents, occupying spaces in order to resist mainstream ideology.6 The self-built housing of the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes can be read as effectively running counter to the standard of modern architecture within a capitalist society. It also embodies the idea of ‘people architecture’ coined by Taiwanese architect Hsieh Ying-Chun. From this aspect, illegal housing could be an alternative form of architecture. Second, the predicament of the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes also reflects the indigenous people’s marginal status within society.7 Indigenous people in Taiwan have been treated in an oppressive and exclusionary fashion for a long time. Regardless of whether it was the Japanese colonial government or the KMT – single-party dictatorship or a democratic period after the lifting of martial law – they faced long-term discrimination that includes, in its most serious form, being forced to assimilate into mainstream culture and adapt to an imposed education system. This has resulted in a great loss of tribal language and traditional wisdom. Moreover, it also culminated in various adaptive problems as these people attempted to integrate with the mainstream. As a consequence, many indigenous movements emerged in the 1980s to fight for equal rights in society, such as the 82

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recertification movement of indigenes (1984), the anti-nuclear power waste movement in Lanyu (1988), the return our land movement (since 1988 until now), and so on. These social movements initiated by indigenous people later triggered further actions that changed Taiwanese society and pushed democracy forward. The Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes belonging to the Amis, are both urban indigenous communities. Located on the North Taiwan riverbank, with Taiwan’s internal migrants moving from the east coast to the north in the 1970s, the Shijhou and Sa’owac laid down their settlements at the edge of Taipei City. Most urban indigenous residents face three critical issues: social discrimination, economic vulnerability, and a crisis of identity. They have been low-paid labourers, working in construction sites or relying on an informal economy for their livelihoods, such as being street vendors. As they attempted to adapt to a new urban context, they started to lose the connection with their original tribal environment, as well as their ancestral culture. The second and third generation experience the crisis of identity acutely. Generally speaking, the circumstances of urban indigenous people represents a multi-marginalised status. In addition to existing problems, these urban indigenous people also face a global phenomenon – namely, urban development planning based on a neoliberal ideology. The urban geographer David Harvey, who has done considerable research on this specific topic, points out that since the mid-1980s, neoliberal urban policy concluded that redistributing wealth to less advantaged neighborhoods, cities and regions was futile and that resources should instead be channeled to dynamic ‘entrepreneurial’ growth poles. A spatial version of the ‘trickle-down’ effect would then in the proverbial long run take care of all those pesky regional, spatial and urban inequalities.8 The Kenyan scholar Mary Njeri Kinyanjui argues that ‘urban planning, ingrained in neoliberalism is rooted in colonialism. It has a historical and contemporary legacy in the economies of the global south.’9 This idea connects with the localised histories and enriches the understanding of the situation in the Global South such as the complicated predicament of indigenous people in Taiwan. Following the demographic explosion of the Taipei City, a great number of luxurious skyscrapers were built along the river. The function of the riverbank thus shifted from merely being a geographical border or a flood control area with empty land to being transformed into a green place for urban leisure. Thus, plans for a cycling route, playground, and park were introduced. The urban plan ‘Big Green Lake Recreation Landscape’, initiated in 2006, was the main reason for the Shijhou tribe’s forced eviction. Because of this plan, the Taipei county government redrew the boundary of the flood control area. However, a nearby private golf course that was situated at a lower ground level than the Shijhou settlement was not included in this plan. This new urban plan was criticised because it prioritised middle-class leisure activities at the expense of existing lowerclass urban indigenous people. Since the forced eviction could not meet the requirement of social justice, this urban plan was called into question. For the Sa’owac tribe, the situation was similar: the reason for demolishing the Sa’owac tribe’s dwellings was the construction of a riverside cycling path. The local, Taoyuan county government admitted that when they created this urban plan, they didn’t notice the existing Sa’owac tribe there. Some citizens have, moreover, acquired a negative perception of illegal housing, arguing that these settlements are dirty, messy, and uncivilised, thereby supporting the forced eviction. These 83

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riverbank indigenous tribes’ forced eviction was not only based on governmental policies within a global city competition but also aligned with the preferences of the middle class. It is clear that the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribe are both the victims of a form of urban development based on neoliberalism, which is aligned with the interests of the nation state and capital. The global financial crisis happened in 2008, in the same year as the forced eviction of these two tribes. This should not be seen as a mere coincidence but rather as a phenomenon shared globally in societies today. Moreover, in these two cases, the idea of a ‘safe’, ‘green’, ‘healthy’, and ‘better life’ in the urban plan paradoxically are used as an excuse to demolish existing settlements. Most ironically, within the tribes’ traditional cultures, the indigenous community is the one who tends to co-exist with nature in perfect harmony.

To Protest: The WE WILL WIN Project in the Shijhou Settlement Located opposite Taipei City, along the Xindian River, the Shijhou tribe settlement had 45 households and around 200 residents living in its settlement. In February of 2008, another nearby riverbank indigenous settlement – the Sanying tribe – was unexpectedly demolished. Informed of their neighbouring tribe’s loss, the Shijhou residents urgently searched for help and initiated a series of events to protest their imminent eviction. These events included street demonstrations, a music festival, a screening, and an open debate in order to raise public awareness. In late March, one week before the 2008 presidential election, the Taipei county mayor, Chou Hsi-wei (KMT Party), made a surprise announcement that the Shijhou tribe settlement would not be demolished and another public site would be provided for the residents to build new houses. This policy shift was clearly informed by the tribe’s insistent serial protests and the upcoming presidential election.10 With this outcome, the Shijhou tribe were temporarily free from forced evictions and had a space for further negotiation of new settlement.

WE WILL WIN in the 2008 Taipei Biennial In the summer of 2008, Turkish artist Burak Delier was invited to participate in the Taipei Biennial. Curated by Hsu Manray and Vasif Kortun, the 2008 Taipei Biennial dealt with key social issues, such as globalisation and its resistance, the neoliberal habitat, mobility, borders, divided states and micronations, urban transformations, informal economies, politics, and conditions of war. Delier chose to present a project relating to urban equality. Informed of the Shijhou tribe’s situation and after visiting their settlement, he proposed WE WILL WIN: a project designed to draw attention to the conflict between forced evictions and the private real estate development opposite the river. At that time, although the county mayor had suspended the forced evictions, the future of the Shijhou settlement still remained uncertain. Delier cooperated with the biennial local production team, as well as the Shijhou residents, students, and volunteers to install a large banner on which was written ‘WE WILL WIN’ in the main square of the Shijhou tribe settlement. During this period of preparation, this project encountered considerable obstacles, such as flooding and opposition by policemen and Taipei county officers, for whom the issue of forced evictions was very sensitive at that time. As a consequence, the banner only survived two days before being torn down after having been documented. The whole process of making WE WILL WIN was extensively recorded and the photos, videos, and documents were presented in the Taipei Fine Art Museum as part of the biennial during the period between 13 September 2008 and 4 January 2009 (see Figure 8.1). 84

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Figure 8.1 ‘WE WILL WIN’ (2008), Burak Delier. Taipei Biennial, Taipei Fine Art Museum, Taipei, Taiwan Source: Photo credit Manray Hsu.

Delier’s works sometime rely on a guerrilla art strategy along with a great sense of humour. As a way to document the violence caused by neoliberalism and nationalism, his work is keen to fight against fake democracy. For example, in Turkey he started a fake company in 2007, called Revise Direction, asserting that ‘this company was set up for saying “NO” to populism, conservative politics and government repression’. Following on this initiative, WE WILL WIN played an outsourcing role, providing the indigenous residents with jobs from Delier’s company. As a result, the indigenous labourers he hired from a pool of residents to work on this project with the artist were implicitly enrolled in a process of resisting against their precarious living conditions. As Delier said, ‘rather than a beautiful thing, [art] should be a labour to achieve final success’.11 The artist himself never believed that this project could change anything, but he did highlight the value of this project as a way to raise collective consciousness in order to challenge the power and interests of the city authorities. In this sense, this project could be viewed as a critical, socially engaged and context-specific art intervention. At the same time, the WE WILL WIN project faces a common biennial problem: as an outsider, a foreign artist working locally within a limited time must rely on a local production team. However, this type of art intervention requires a close relationship and deep trust with local residents. When an artist doesn’t have enough time to be involved for an extended period, the local production team stands in for them. They play a major role in delivering the project and are much more familiar with the community and surrounding issues. But, as with the WE WILL WIN project, the artist becomes a de facto spokesperson for the tribe while presenting this project in the context of the biennale. As the biennial or the museum chose to emphasise the artist as author, the local production team remains unknown and unacknowledged.

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Another crucial point is that Delier was primarily concerned with the issue of real estate development and this intervention was an attempt to highlight uneven global development. He believed that the banner ‘spoke’ from the ground up to the heights where the power elites conduct planning and surveillance of their contemporary cities. The intervention sat at the centre of contested plans to dismantle housing for the purpose of ‘improving the quality of life’ in a larger operation of ‘urban renewal’.12 This concern was generally addressed within a global situation under neoliberalism, critically he neglected the fact that the Shijhou tribe was also an urban indigenous community (as well as internal migrants and from a low social class), thus facing more complicated issues. Relating to this, Taiwanese artist Wu Mali, who also participated in the 2008 Taipei Biennial, criticised this project as it made the event too ‘flat’ in ways that obscured local concerns, and the complex and intertwined realities behind the scenes.13

WE WILL WIN Survey in the 2010 Taipei Biennial Delier was invited again to participate in a two-year revisit project as part of the 2010 Taipei Biennial, which took institutional critique as a theme to rethink the system of biennials, museums, and galleries. As part of his response, he proposed a WE WILL WIN survey to reflect on the original 2008 intervention. This survey aimed to explore the impact of the original WE WILL WIN intervention and to search for the subsequent implications of this critical practice. The artist employed market research methodologies to conduct this survey and addressed four key groups that have direct interaction with the art world: (1) decision makers/managers, (2) curators/artists, (3) audience, and (4) staff/interns. Alongside, more general art-world questions were asked, including: do you agree that art should be a critical power? Do you think art should try to effect the public opinion? Do you think art should be autonomous from the dominant political and economic power? More specific questions, directly relating to the WE WILL WIN project were also asked, such as: is it political action or is it art? Do you think the Taipei Biennial is an appropriate place to discuss the Shijhou tribe’s housing problem? Do you agree that the critical potential of the project is neutralised by the glamorous spectacle of the biennial?14 The subsequent analysis showed the following results: (1) a biennial is seen as a platform where differing attitudes, and political and social issues can meet with acceptance and be discussed, even if they are considered ‘more political-like action’; and (2) WE WILL WIN was successful in redefining the boundaries of the general concept of art, and problematising it.15 This project was successful in terms of the 2010 Taipei Biennial’s core theme of institutional critique and it could be seen as an attempt to speak to the art world at large. However, the Shijhou tribe should be the central concern but instead it served as a sideline attraction. In reality, the art intervention of 2008 and the survey at the following 2010 Taipei Biennial didn’t make any direct impact on the tribe, but through an exhibition, biennial, and museum, this project still provided a platform for voicing these issues. The WE WILL WIN survey was not only published as a guidebook but also included in issue 16 of the journal Manifesta, allowing the story of the Shijhou tribe to be widely disseminated in the global art network. In this case, an art institution became a site of critique, pedagogic discussion, and public awareness. The Shijhou settlement began by adopting the approach of conventional social movements – from street demonstrations calling for political change to meeting table negotiations. After a tortuous process,16 finally a new settlement was built in 2018, ten years after their first protest. In light of such an extended process, the art intervention initiated by Delier played a minor role in the protest and served more as a biennial project, one that had even less impact on the daily life of the Shijhou tribe. 86

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As Protest: The Plant-Matter NeoEden Project in Cooperation with the Sa’owac Tribe In contrast to the one-off intervention approach of WE WILL WIN, the Sa’owac settlement engaged in a long-term collective art project called Plant-Matter NeoEden (2006–2010). Located along the Dahan riverbank in the Taoyuan county, the Sa’owac tribe is smaller in scale – comprising only 13 households and 18 elderly people with an average age of 60. The Sa’owac tribe still had first-generation indigenous residents who had life experience in their village on Taiwan’s east coast. From 2006, Taiwanese artists Hsu SuChen and Lu Chien-Ming started water environment research near the area of the Sa’owac settlement. They often visited or stayed with the tribe and as a result of field encounters such as these they learned about various aspects of tribe culture from the tribal elderly residents as well as how to speak the Amis language. Thus Hsu and Lu were key to combining art, ecology, and tribe culture to create a unique approach for the protest. At the end of 2008, the Taoyuan county government17 made the announcement that they were going to demolish the Sa’owac settlement. In an act of legal violence from the bureaucracy, the county government destroyed the whole settlement in February 2009. During their protest march, the tribe leader passed the petition to the government and made a short speech in front of Legislative Yuan on 8 April 2009. This statement became the main guideline for their later protests.

We have been wandering in this city for thirty or forty years We have no place to live When the social system of the whole country can’t accommodate lower-class indigenous people such as us We are self-reliant We choose to help each other We choose to build a house independently Build our tribe Build our home.18 After several street demonstrations, the Sa’owac tribe decided to alter their approach, since elderly members of the tribe could not sustain such active protesting. After returning to their destroyed settlement to camp along the riverbank, they decided to speak out about their predicament using four integrated approaches: mass media, writing, social movement, and art exhibition/performance. Art exhibition/performance played an important role in this case, integrating with the other three approaches. In the following sections, I discuss three projects that played a specific role in different stages of the protest.

Naming as Recovery In 2008, artists Hsu and Lu were invited to Melbourne, Australia to participate in an artist residency at the National Herbarium of Victoria, Royal Botanic Gardens. As part of the residency they presented the result of their long-term research about plants that thrive in the adverse environments of Taiwan. Prints of plant specimens from the Sa’owac farmland were produced to tell the complex stories behind the edible plants of the Amis. In early 2009, after the settlement was demolished, Hsu and Lu suggested using the plant images from their research to print on T-shirts with the Romanised name of the Amis. This act of 87

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‘naming’ defined the tribesmen’s social and cultural role. Especially for a younger generation, this was the first time they learned their Amis name. It was a good way to identify themselves and reconnect with their tribal culture, as well as to better understand the tribe’s ecological environment. This protest thus not only focused on reconstruction of their settlement it also gestured to the need for recovery of their tribal culture and heritage.

Exhibition as Method Creating an exhibition as a form of protest, executed in 2009, is the second example of these art projects, especially Born into the Tribe: The Sa’owac Tribe Born in a Vegetable Patch (SLY art space, 18 April–3 May 2009) and Cultural Reconstruction: The Material Culture of the Riverside Amis (SinPin Pier Art Space, 12 December–3 January 2009). For both exhibitions, the Amis collective house-building tradition known as ‘Sakafiyaw’ is the core spirit of this action, as well as the main approach to create the exhibition. Numerous Amis residents built shelters together by using the recycled wood pallets inside the gallery space. They used these shelters as a common space to present the photos, drawings, documents, objects, and videos taken during the protest. Audiences were invited to visit these shelters and experience the tribe life, as well their protest. When the exhibition finished, they tore down the material and moved back to the community to reconstruct their houses. In this way, the gallery became a platform for a manifesto, and a way to achieve an exchange in terms of physical materials and abstract cultural value.

Figure 8.2 Plant-Matter NeoEden: Born in a Vegetable Patch and Material World in the Amis Tribe of Riverbank (2009), Lu Chien-Ming. Taipei, Taiwan Source: Photo credit Lu Chien-Ming. Note: This exhibition of Taishin Arts Award combined the previous presentation and built more shelters in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2010.

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These exhibitions were awarded the Eighth Taishin Arts Award, which is the biggest ongoing prize in Taiwan that honours the year’s best visual art exhibition and performance. This provided the Sa’owac tribe an opportunity to have a large-scale exhibition at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts the following year (24 April–6 June 2010). As a result, not only the art prize itself (NTD 1,000,000) but also the production fee could contribute to the community’s reconstruction. Entitled Plant-Matter NeoEden: Born in a Vegetable Patch & Material World in the Amis Tribe of Riverbank, this exhibition of Taishin Arts Award combined the previous presentation and built more shelters inside the museum venue (see Figure 8.2). The exhibition opening provided an opportunity for the tribe to have a formal ceremony based on Amis tribal traditions. In the ceremony, the tribal leader prayed for the houses by spraying rice wine around the shelters, which would spiritually anoint the shelters. Following this formal spirit-giving ceremony, the tribe residents invited audiences to join the singing and dancing together. This opening performance could be seen as a demonstration of Amis tribe traditions, which had value to transform the space of the ‘white cube’ (understood as a ‘non-place’ in Marc Auge’s sense19) into a place with living atmosphere and vivid memory. After the close of the exhibition, these shelters were deconstructed and the building materials in the museum were again transported back to the tribe for real home building. These shows commented on the marginal positions that these urban indigenous people find themselves in and revealed how the tribe’s contemporary survival culture employs a critical revision of their time-honoured gathering strategies and ecologically sound material culture. As the statement from the Taishin Arts Award jury reflected, ‘the exhibition itself brings together the tribe’s attitude towards life, cultural memories and modes of production, using poverty as a means of resistance to all-powerful capitalism and transcending urban showiness and duplicity’.20 Additionally, it raised a few questions: how does art depend on its social environment? How do artists define themselves within social movements? Should art actions be merely symbolic, or should they be fully fledged protests?21 The jury statements validated indigenous culture and acknowledged the form of exhibition as a protest movement that contributes to Taiwanese society.

Building Homes Together as a Practice of Social Contract The third project is the performance Building Homes: A Practice of the Social Contract, which took place as part of the Fifth Tsai Jui-Yueh Dance Festival in October 2010 at Tsai Jui-Yueh Dance Institute. In the same vein as the previous exhibitions, this performance was also based on the Amis notion of Sakafiyaw. Since the project Plant-Matter NeoEden earned the Eighth Taishin Arts Award, supported by the Taishin Bank, this time the tribal residents collaborated with the employees of this commercial bank to build the shelters collectively. There were three parts to this performance: building shelters collectively, conducting social research via interviews and photographic documentation, and participating in on-site cooking. This three-part performance emphasised how daily life is equally as important to the Amis specific festival ceremonies. To a certain degree, the employees from the bank were participants, performers, cultural appreciators, as well as menial labourers. Through this performance, the idea of Sakafiyaw could be understood and practised by the people outside the tribe. Building on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of ‘the social contract’,22 this performance tried to point out the fact that today’s housing offering is based on privatisation, being reduced to a paper contract with a real estate enterprise. By collectively building shelters, this performance 89

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highlighted the ongoing issue of exorbitant housing prices in Taiwan and questions whether the basic human right to shelter is currently met. Therefore, through this performance, the visitors and participants experienced a ‘rehearsal’ building of a house, and were presented with questions about Taiwan citizens’ right to have shelter. Artist Lu addressed the notion that this reconstruction of the tribe’s home with the assistance of the bank’s employees was actually a revolt against bureaucratic control and societal rules. After being forcibly demolished in 2009, the Sa’owac tribal settlement was rebuilt on the original site four months later. In 2012, permanent infrastructure was set up, including electric power, tap water, and formal addresses. That is to say, the Sa’owac tribe is now a formal settlement within the administration of county government. Later, a tribal school was opened (Bachelor of Design in Indigenous Culture at the Chung Yuan Christian University) and a tribe member was even elected as a councillor in local elections in late 2014. Plant-Matter NeoEden was also included in the exhibition Micro Micro Revolution, curated by the author in 2015 at the Centre of Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA), Manchester, UK. Thus, through exhibition, discussion, and presentation the story of the Sa’owac tribe was also being shared with audiences in the UK. In contrast to the Shijhou tribe’s ten-year reconstruction process, the Sa’owac tribe successfully reclaimed their own settlement in a short period of time, and through examining illegal communities in the urban plan, it was possible to reach towards a potential model for the ecological and sustainable city. Moreover, the wisdom of tribal tradition would enrich the aspects of cultural diversity. To sum up, the value of the Plant-Matter NeoEden project lies in how it turns a disadvantaged social condition into a positive and long-lasting change. The art actions in this process have provided an alternative form of social resistance.

Art as Protest This chapter has discussed two case studies of the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribe to explore the various ways in which art as a vehicle or platform of protest plays a role in addressing the issue of the forced eviction of indigenous communities in Taiwan. After the protest and subsequent negotiations with the county government, the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes have successfully turned their status from illegal communities into formally recognised and infrastructurally connected neighbourhoods. In this process of revision and rebuilding, they struggled to challenge the dominant centres of power, particularly those underwritten by the developmental logic of global neoliberalism. These tribes, moreover, employed diverse approaches in their protests against eviction, and art intervention proved to be a vital platform for their protests. These two cases demonstrate how different values of art generate from the protest. The one-off intervention WE WILL WIN (2008) that fits the model of art within the global biennial circuit had a minor role during the protest and less impact on the realities on the ground. However, the value of this project lay in the fact that the large banner of ‘WE WILL WIN’ is a real object in the protest, as well as a demonstration of cooperation with the residents. This project thus becomes a proclamation of living rights as well as an encouragement to keep protesting. In contrast, Plant-Matter NeoEden was a long-term research project and worked collectively with the Sa’owac tribe. This proved to be a detailed specific strategy from conventional social movements. The three exhibitions and performances could be identified as the most effective form of protest as they visualised the reality of forced eviction via the 90

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tribe’s involvement. Visitors to theses exhibitions offered a chance to experience the life of the Sa’owac tribe and they could form a close relationship with the residents. The format of an exhibition/performance served as demonstration of the value of tribal culture. PlantMatter NeoEden therefore is not only a protest in the form of an art project, it also served as a forum to extend the issue of forced eviction to a wider range of fields, such as living rights, ecological value, cultural diversity, and tribal heritage. Through analysing these two cases, I argue that a concept of ‘art as protest’ could be generated, as a form that includes art for the protest, art to protest, and art of protest. There are three key elements that serve as a necessary condition to ensure the value of ‘art as protest’: visibility, a space for dissensus, and art institutions as a frame. First, I suggested in an earlier chapter that a serial movement of unfolding could be seen as a war of visibility. This is an issue of visual politics.23 From this aspect, both WE WILL WIN and Plant-Matter NeoEden rendered visible the acute situations of marginalised urban indigenous communities. The widespread visibility of these projects allowed a broad discussion on the issue of forced eviction. This visibility is one of the key elements that should be emphasised. Second, French philosopher Jacques Rancière believed that the main purpose of the politics of aesthetics is to create ‘dissensus’ in order to shed light on underlying issues and makes them visible and perceptible.24 Also, the discussion and integrations of ‘art/movement as a public platform’ serves as a kind of ‘expansion/extension of art, a new form of public art’.25 In the cases of Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes, art as protest further exemplifies how art creates space for dissensus, allowing diverse voices to exist together. I consider the space of dissensus as the second element within art as protest. The third element of art as protest addresses the role of art institutions – museums, galleries, the biennial, and art publications. Art institutions can serve as public platforms for the exploration of issues such as forced eviction and urban indigenous communities. It functions as a protected space for dissensus; and its public nature allows dissensus to be seen and heard. Ultimately, the cases of the Shijhou and Sa’owac tribes embody various forms of political dissent articulated in the public domain via art institutions and shared with those who face similar situations elsewhere around the world. In summary, WE WILL WIN is a one-off intervention that fits the model of art within the global biennial circulating system, while Plant-Matter NeoEden, based on long-term research, takes various approaches to extend the issue of forced eviction to a wider range of fields. Throughout these two cases, I argue that ‘art as protest’ can be realised based on three necessary conditions – visibility, a space for dissensus, and art institutions as a frame. Therefore, art as protest is not merely a form of symbolic dissent within the art world. Instead, it acts as a platform or vehicle for certain values, and is a new form of social practice that potentially engenders social and political change. It also highlights an individual’s right to live and their concerns surrounding social justice. Art as protest not only creates a space for public discussion but also performs democracy within society.

Notes 1 The Shijhou tribe is located on the Xindian riverbank, opposite Taipei City and belonging to Taipei county (renamed New Taipei City); while Sa’owac tribe is along the Dahan riverbank, belonging to Taoyuan county. The Xindian River and Dahan River converge as Tamsui River, the most important river in North Taiwan. 2 Until 2008, there were actually only three instances of flooding within 30 years. The county government took this as a case to conduct forced eviction. However, in the summer of 2015, the

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3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

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typhoon destroyed 90 per cent of the settlements. This disaster resulted in the move of this settlement and a new settlement was completed in 2018. Ku Ping-ta, ‘Bad Architecture’, in Keywords of Taiwan Theory, ed. Shu-mei Shih (Taipei: Linking Publishing, 2019), 359. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Huang Li-ling, ‘Rethink of Illegal Architecture Community’, National Lawyer (2015): 18–27. Social housing is not popular in Taiwan. According to a survey in 2015, private property in Taiwan dominated around 79.2 per cent, while social housing was only 0.08 per cent. Compared with the proportion of social housing in other countries in the same year – Hong Kong 29.35 per cent, the UK 18.2 per cent, Japan 6.1 per cent, Korea 5.1 per cent, and the United States 5 per cent – the rate of social housing in Taiwan is extremely low. See the Council of Indigenous Peoples website, www.apc.gov.tw/portal/index.html. Chiu Chih-Sin, ‘“Illegal Architecture” and “Building an Orchid House”: The Public Space Perspective and interpretation of the Contemporary Taiwan Illegal Architecture Discourse’, Journal of Architecture and Planning 16, no. 1 (2015): 21–39. A recent survey shows that there was only 3 per cent of urban indigenous people in the 1960s in Taiwan. By 2019 this had increased to over 50 per cent, including the first, second, and third generation of urban indigenous people. See the Social housing Advocacy Consortium website, http:// socialhousingtw.blogspot.com/2014/08/blog-post_54.html. David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), 29. Mary N. Kinyanjui, Women and the Informal Economy: From the Margins to the Centre (London: Zed Books, 2014), http://nai.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:764521/FULLTEXT01.pdf. At the end of 2007, KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-Jeou visited the Shijhou settlement and his statement highlighted discrimination against indigenous people, suggesting that the decision of suspending evictions might suit KMT’s political purposes in order to reduce the negative impact for the coming presidential election. Chen Ning, ‘The Labor Spirit in Art and the Local Victory of the Shijhou Tribe’, Pots Weekly, no. 522, http://shijou.blogspot.com/2008/08/blog-post_07.html. The statement from the artist Burak Delier’s website, https://burakdelier.wordpress.com/works-2/ we-will-win-survey-2010. Sharleen Yu, ed., Declaration/Documentation: Taipei Biennial 1996–2014 (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2017), 170. Burak Delier, WE WILL WIN Taipei Biennial 2010 (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2010), 68–73. Burak Delier, ‘Is It Possible to Provide Critique at an Art Biennial?’ in WE WILL WIN Taipei Biennial 2010 (Taipei: Taipei Fine Art Museum, 2010), 68–73. The long story of the Shijhou tribe after 2008 is as follows: based on the need of the residents, the ‘Shijhou Amis Life and Culture Park’ emerged in late 2008. Through the method of participative design, a plan was implemented by the professors and students of the NTU Graduate Institute of Building and Planning. This plan was uniquely designed to maintain the living right of residents via a cooperative social housing system while simultaneously maintaining tribal culture within the urban environment. The Taipei county government accepted this proposal in 2009. Since then, the protest turned from street demonstration to negotiation at the meeting table. However, in 2012, a new county mayor, Chu Li-luan (KMT Party), was in power. He agreed to keep the plan of the Shijhou tribe. But, he wanted to change the model from social housing to private housing and from renting to buying. Because the nearby Sanying tribe rebuilt their settlement based on a ‘3/3/3 model’ (meaning the expense of building was divided into three parts – one-third paid by government, one-third by residents, and one-third from a bank loan), the county mayor Chu insisted on following this strategy. Scholars strongly criticised this policy and stated that the residents were exposed to the risks of state and capital markets. In the summer of 2015, typhoon Soudelor destroyed over 90 per cent of the Shijhou settlement. This natural disaster pushed the process of rebuilding forward. Finally, a new settlement was rebuilt in a higher location of the riverbank in 2018 – just ten years after their first protest. The Taoyuan county government mayor was Chu Li-luan in 2009. He left the position in September of that year. Because of this shift, the reconstruction of the Sa’owac tribe could be more

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18

19 20

21 22 23

24 25

successful. From December, 2010, Chu became Taipei county mayor and he was the key person to change the policy of the Shijhou tribe construction from social housing to private mode. This was the statement announced in front of Legislative Yuan on 8 April, 2009. See the video ‘The Spring of the Sa’owac’, IN-NEWS, Public Television Service (PTS), April 8, 2009, http://video.peopo.org/news/40548. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). Winner list of the Eighth Taishin Arts Award, reasons for selection named by semi-selection jury member Chen Guan-jun, see the website of Taishin Bank Foundation for Arts and Culture, www. taishinart.org.tw/chinese/2_taishinarts_award/2_2_top_detail.php?MID=3&ID=& AID=11&AKID=&PeID=120. Ibid. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Lu Pei-Yi and Phoebe Wong, ‘Art/Movement as a Public Platform-Artistic Creations in Sunflower Movement and the Umbrella Movement’, in Art and the City: Worlding the Discussion Through a Critical Artspace (London: Routledge, 2017), 44–58. Jacques Rancière, and Steven Corcoran, trans, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Bloomsbury, 2015). Pei-Yi and Phoebe Wong, ‘Art/Movement as a Public Platform’.

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9 PARTICIPATION PROBLEMATISES Together in Violence Anthony Schrag

Over the past few decades, there has been a growing interest in participatory processes to the extent that there is now a ‘necessity of ‘civil society’ participation in decision-making processes’.1 This movement towards the participatory has been part of a wider shift in a variety of spheres, from governance,2 citizen budgeting and economics, environmental action, even religion.3 The realm of culture has not escaped this ‘participatory turn’4 and there is a strong narrative of socially engaged practices, despite extensive criticisms as to the efficacy of its impacts.5 While this text will not argue against participatory art, it does call upon parties involved in questions of participation to take stock of what participation means and how it occurs, in regards to cultural support and policies that frame this sort of work. In this chapter, I apply my own (artistic) research practice to explore issues relating to the intentions of participatory policy – specifically its ameliorative assumptions. This is addressed as part of a wider concern about the semantics of participatory practices, and what is meant by the concept of ‘participation’ in general. The discussion here aims to problematise its assumed effects. To begin with, however, it is useful to explain the methodology of my artistic research and why this approach has been useful to explore this subject.

Artist Research: Invite the Artist to the Table, They Might Have Some Interesting Things to Say While artistic practice does not generally provide the traditional quantitative or qualitative data sets that are normally applied within cultural policy research, practice-based artistic research into this subject can provide important insights into cultural ‘production’, rather than cultural presentation or reception. Of course, the notion of culture itself is problematic – I will address this ‘problem’ later in the chapter – but it is important to first briefly frame the insights that can emerge from artistic research. While the critique against artistic research that it lacks rigour and systematic inquiry6 can be said to hold true within a positivist, rationalist ontology, it should be clear that artistic research and its insights do not stem from such ontologies. Indeed, the insights

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of artistic work lie in the ability to think difference, to be irrationally surprising. As Graeme Sullivan concludes, Art practice as research continues to present a compelling argument that the creative and cultural inquiry undertaken by artists is a form of research . . . Artists emphasise the role of the imaginative intellect in creating, criticising, and constructing knowledge that is not only new but also has the capacity to transform human understanding.7 As such, there is much potential to be explored in applying artistic research methods to cultural research. Indeed, if culture seeks to explore the creative side of human understanding, there would seem to be scope to welcome artists and artistic researchers to provide ‘imaginative intellect’ to this realm. Instead, cultural policy seems heavily wedded to the managerial ontologies of social science and begs the question: where is the ‘art’ within cultural policy/management? I raise the question both as a provocation, but also to frame my creative work in what follows as emerging from a lineage of artists and researchers applying their unique skillset to creating, criticising, and constructing knowledge within the field of cultural management, not just producing works for public consumption.

Policies and Histories: Denuding the Potential for Transgression In 2010, at an informal gathering of artists who work within participatory contexts, the artist Anne-Marie Copstake was asked whom she worked with. She responded quickly and succinctly: ‘I work with people who are not me.’8 While it has a ring of humour to it, her statement provides a clue to the radical potentialities of participatory practices in that this work is fundamentally about ‘engaging with difference’. I will return to Copstake’s quote later, but in the UK and Europe – indeed globally – this engagement with difference seems to have taken on an urgent imperative, with the rise of insular politics that threaten the post-Second World War European project including the return and rise of nationalisms, Brexit, and the ongoing spectacle of Donald Trump. Indeed, on the surface participatory practices seem like the ideal strategy to address this growing trauma: participation, after all, is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘people sharing together’ and it therefore makes sense to encourage art processes that can combat these new, divisive problems. The methodologies of artists ‘working with’ people, however, are not new. While this practice is currently referred to as ‘socially engaged art’, its lineage over the past 120 years is vast and takes on a plethora of forms. It can be said to include large-scale community recreations of revolutionary successes in Russia in the 1900s; the Futurists’ bombastic performances of the 1920s; the Happenings of Kaprow and the experimental research of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visual (Group for Research in Visual Art; GRAV) in the 1950s; the public events held by Situationists and the socially embedded work of the community arts movement within the UK of the 1960s; the groundbreaking work of the Artist Placement Group (APG) in the 1970s; the resistance theatre of Paulo Friere in the 1980s; Suzanne Lacy’s work with black youth in Oakland in the 1990s; Jeremy Deller’s restaging of political riots in the 2000s; as well as current projects, such as Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses. It is therefore not a new art form. What is new, however, is how cultural policies now incorporate this practice. 95

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Ironically, the history of participatory art can be seen to be a reaction ‘against’ cultural policies. Consider the rise of community arts movements and the APG operating in the 1960s and 1970s, which both emerged in direct response to the centralised, elitist Keynesian cultural policies of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA). In this light, these works can be seen as radical strategies ‘in reaction to’ the cultural policies of the time, and so there is perhaps an irony in applying policies to creative strategies that are in fact antithetical to top-down processes. A government’s or organisation’s instrumental application of participatory practices has been criticised elsewhere, with Clare Bishop and Ruth Levitas particularly pointing out the ethical problematics of such approaches, which position participation as a tool of social engineering.9 In the example of APG, there is a specific irony in that Barbara Steveni, co-founder of the APG, points out that the arts councils accused their participatory works for being ‘social engineering’10 and yet such participatory approaches seem to be at the very heart of government today.11 It seems Chantal Mouffe was correct in that there is ‘there is no transgression that cannot be recuperated by the dominant hegemony’.12 As Owen Kelly pointed out as early as 1984: once framed by governments, the radical potentials of participatory works become denuded of any revolutionary potential and indeed become tools of the state.13 The critique of cultural policy as social engineering can be also seen in the work of Raymond Williams, who was writing at the time of CEMA’s approaches to ‘high art’. He suggests that ‘culture is ordinary’.14 His thesis is that culture is the amassed activities of all that we humans do; rather than framing culture as occurring within specific contexts – museums, galleries, opera houses – it occurs in the way that all people live and act in the world. To develop a cultural policy is therefore a form of curating a culture: it is advocating for the cultural dominance of a specific public, rather than speaking to the whole of a nation. In Williams’s framework, arguing for the concept of a ‘participatory policy’ is ontologically flawed: we are already all participating in culture, so there is therefore no need for a ‘participatory’ cultural policy. Seen in this light, the assumption behind ‘participation’ is that there are some people who are not participating in the correct way. This is addressed in Sophie Hope’s PhD thesis, ‘Participating in the Wrong Way’, which in part highlights the irony that participation is, in fact, exclusionary.15 This concept is further entrenched by Michael Warner’s influential paper ‘Publics and Counter Publics’, which explains that ‘a public organises itself independently . . . It is self-creating and self-organised, and herein lies its power, as well as its elusive strangeness . . . It must be organised by something other than the state [i.e. an authority]’.16 The state cannot therefore present ‘culture’ to the entirety of a population, because such publics do not – and cannot – exist. Who, then, are the ‘publics’ of participatory cultural policies? This uninterrogated notion hints at the broader power and political tangles of cultural policy: As Jeremy Ahearne suggests: The links between culture and political power are clear to see. Any political order needs the means to maintain its symbolic legitimacy . . . [and] the perpetuation of this order is only possible through the successful transmission across time of that culture.17 In this light, participatory cultural policies can be seen to be a form of symbolic legitimacy of a state. Andy Hewitt agrees and has argued that within the participatory approaches of the UK government in the 1990s and 2000s, artists were being conceptualised 96

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as tools of the state, ‘contracted to work within institutional parameters by policy directives’ and as ‘service providers’18 to a welfare state. Must artists, therefore, become such ‘service providers’ or is there scope for not only creative acts but also radical potentiality within this type of practice? I would argue that this is indeed possible, but only by returning to the very nature of ‘participation’.

Participation Problematises: Working with People Who Are Not Me In Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture, Lewis Hyde makes an ethno-anthropological examination into the character of the trickster in various cultures throughout history, from which he suggests that culture is the result of a trickster. He argues that the artist is a boundary crosser. Every group has its edge, its sense of in and out, and the trickster is always there, at the gates of the city . . . He also attends the internal boundaries by which groups articulate their social life. We constantly distinguish – right from wrong, sacred from profane, clean from dirty, male from female, young and old, living and dead – and in every case Trickster [the artist] will cross the line and confuse the distance.19 The trickster is therefore an essential part of the human psyche, whose purpose is not to operate for any specific authority, but to provide a ‘disruptive imagination’20 that challenges the smooth functioning of hegemonies. It is this disruptive imagination that offers insight to the radical, political potential of participatory practice, and in what follows I describe how this has occurred in my practice. Before this, however, it is important to stress that ‘political’ potentials should not be confused with ‘politics’. Chantal Mouffe explains the distinction: The ‘political’ refers to this dimension of antagonism which can take many forms in diverse social relations. It is a dimension that can never be eradicated. ‘Politics’, on the other hand, refers to the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and organise human coexistence.21 In other words, political artworks explore the way the world is ordered and the power dimension inherent within all human entanglements; politics artworks are those that argue for a specific formulation of the world, i.e. conservatism, socialism, neoliberalism, or nationalism, etc. Politics is therefore fundamentally a call for consensus under specific tenets – a socialist society, a neoliberal one, a specific environmental policy, etc. – whereas political artworks call for a productive understanding of dissensus. Consensus, as Bishop reminds us, ‘is understood to foreclose the field of debate and reduce politics to the authoritarian actions of the “police”’.22 Dissensus, on the other hand, offers a true representation of the public and democratic realm, as the following thinkers have concluded: ‘Public spaces [are] the battleground in which different hegemonic articulations are confronted. They are plural, always striated and not smooth. Where there is no undetermined sense of unity: there always exists a multiplicity of struggle.’23 ‘Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.’24 The ‘public sphere’ is therefore defined and sustained by conflicts and difference. If participatory culture is to occur in an ethical manner that respects a plural, democratic realm then it is required to create space for dissensus, for conflict. 97

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It is at this point that I return to Anne-Marie Copstake and her comment: ‘I work with people who are not me.’ This phrase illustrates the true potentialities of participation: engaging with those that hold ulterior politics; who have different perspectives on utopia; who believe in alternative ways to make the world, including – and especially – those that are different from our own understanding. It is in this way that participation can ‘think difference’. By providing a space for dissensus, ‘participation problematises’ politics. Such a practice does not solve problems, but rather reveals them. ‘True’ participation can therefore only occur under such criteria, otherwise it is not participation, it is an instrumentalised tool of authority. I now present two artworks that have attempted to operate within this understanding of participatory practice. It is important for those developing participatory cultural policy processes to consider these works, as they can provide insights about how successful participatory practices can operate, as opposed to those artworks that recapitulate dominant hegemonies and enact social engineering approaches.

Legacy of City Arts Projects: The Violence of Social Inclusion In 2007, the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow held their third Social Justice programme. This was a biannual programme exploring human rights and contemporary arts with specific interest in those subjects that were relevant to Glasgow. The theme of the third biennial (Blind Faith, 2007) was to explore sectarianism, perceived to be a major social blight in the city, exacerbated by religious, geographical, and class divisions. Each of the Social Justice programmes comprised a large exhibition and many smaller outreach and education projects that were more participatory in nature, intended to engage with various ‘non-art’ audiences for whom the topic was perceived as relevant. I was selected to work with identified young people in the east of Glasgow to develop art projects that might have an ameliorative effect on the participants via a creative inquiry into sectarianism. Once the project began it quickly became apparent that the issues faced by the young people were only superficially related to sectarianism and actually due to systemic poverty, and that a single participatory art project could not change this. I realised that I was being positioned as an ersatz social worker, and that the goals of the project were located in a specific social inclusion ideology. I was being employed as a ‘service provider’25 to neoliberal politics. This ‘orthopaedic approach’26 was apparent in the funding application, which read: The emphasis throughout the residency will be one of social inclusion, with [the artist] working particularly with groups from Glasgow’s communities that have high levels of deprivation . . . By using the power of contemporary art to challenge public attitudes, we believe we can contribute to the development of a more tolerant society.27 In this funding application, the participants were perceived as somehow flawed and the community in need of fixing, and the institution (the city council-funded GoMA) employed its dominant position to address these flaws via the transformative potential of art. I felt there was a disjunction between the intentions of the institution and the lived reality of the identified community, and participatory art was being used as a tool of social renewal without analysis of what this renewal meant, to whom, why it was necessary, and who might benefit. I realised that the rhetoric of the project was that the community required transformation, but the institution did not; that the communities were the focus of the ‘participation’, but the institution itself was not ‘participating’. I was interested in crossing the boundary between these positions and thus focused my energies on the institution. 98

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I invited the curators, advisory board, civil servants, and representatives from the advisory board to come to the neoclassical, marble GoMA building to discuss the project and my concerns with it. However, when these people arrived at the art gallery, I bundled them into waiting taxis and drove them out to the east of Glasgow, effectively ‘kidnapping’ them. Waiting in the gloomy grounds of the housing estate that was the focus of the project was a small tent protecting the round meeting table and red-velvet chairs from the light rain. When we arrived, I encouraged them all to sit and discuss their intentions towards the community in the very real, ‘disruptable’ community contexts, and examine how this artwork could feasibly achieve the goals of the project. The aim of my intervention was to ensure an equal participation between all involved parties – the artist, the community, and institution – as well as to draw attention to the impossibility of the ‘transformative’ intentions of the project unless the institution also explored the possibilities of its own transformation. In other words, unless the institution also participated in the project, it would be an exercise in social engineering. It was not my intention to make the institution’s approach to art ‘better’, but rather to challenge the expectations of the institution’s understanding of what art could reasonably achieve. In thus conflating the realities of the institution and the community and ensuring an egalitarian participatory experience of all involved, a discussion about the practical realities of art’s function within the public social realm could be had openly. Participation in this way therefore problematised the power dynamics and created a space for a more accurate representation of a democratic public realm.

Make Destruction: Together in Violence I had assumed that after effectively kidnapping curators that I would never work in Glasgow again, but it was in fact not long before I began to work with GoMA on another project. As Katie Bruce, curator/producer at GoMA, alludes to in the following quote, often institutions are caught within their own limiting frameworks and inviting an external artist into those frameworks can ask the difficult questions that they can’t ask of themselves: From an institutional perspective, we are careful about the artists that we ask in . . . there might be conflicts that might not be able to be aired within a team, or within an institution or local councils structure, because of the way that the system works. But if you have an artist in there who is able to [ask those difficult questions] then there are greater possibilities.28 The ‘kidnapping’ event of the above project allowed the institution to question their approaches of ‘participation’ and as such offered a productive space for reflection. I was therefore able to develop a strong working relationship with GoMA and was invited to be part of the 2014 project Atelier Public #2.29 In 2011, Bruce and artist Rachel Mimiec had developed a project called Atelier Public as a way to explore public participation ‘within’ the context of a gallery. The gallery show began as an empty room, populated only with art materials and an invitation to anyone entering to make and display their own creations in an expanding exhibition. The exhibition was described as one ‘that takes the form of a working artist studio – one that everyone is invited to come into, to make artworks that will become part of the installation’.30 As part of the 2014 Glasgow International (GI) Biennial of Contemporary Art in April 2014, Bruce represented the project as Atelier Public #2 and took as its starting point some of the critical insights of its previous inception. These included concerns about 99

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how the selected materials guided the form and content of the created artworks (which Bruce referred to as the ‘tyranny of the materials’31), how truly ‘public’ a gallery exhibit could be, and Bruce’s role as ‘curator’ for an exhibit that began with no artworks. As a way to explore some of these concerns, Bruce asked ‘particular artists, thinkers, and makers who have a special interest in play, creativity, and the imagination to engage with the space throughout the duration of the exhibition’.32 I was included in this group. For my contribution to this work, I was curious to explore how a city council/local authority holds a monopoly on the ‘production’ of participatory artworks,33 and suggested a work that challenged the ‘state aesthetic’ of participatory art works. This ‘state aesthetic’ takes the form of convivial or ‘nice’ projects that are visible in the aesthetics of the community art movement with its emphasis on ‘participation’ over aesthetics: where ‘the “social” [was] understood as conviviality’.34 This is a major concern for Bishop, who rails against the notion that ‘open-ended conviviality [is] sufficient evidence of social engagement’.35 Indeed, I felt that the aesthetic framing of an institutionally based participatory experience as nice and convivial was problematic, as it obscured the hegemonic functioning of the institution’s goal to ‘construct civic identities’36 amenable to a state. The framing of participatory art projects as necessarily ‘nice’ can also be seen to emerge from state-funded, social inclusion policies, in which ‘inclusion’ is the primary goal. This elides with the notion that publicly funded, policy-enacting agencies – i.e. local authority museums/galleries such as GoMA – cannot be seen to support projects that are overtly exclusionary, selfish, or contentious, as they are ‘public’ bodies and must represent the entirety of the public, and cannot be seen to exclude anyone. Rancière refers to this as the tyranny of the social and expands upon this in his paper ‘The Ethical Turn’.37 This ‘state aesthetic’ was apparent in the selection of materials with bright, genial, and cheerful colours, but it also emerged from the wording of the explanatory text, which invited people to a space for ‘looking, thinking, exploring and making’.38 Additionally, the language of the press release and invitation suggested a particular creative expressive methodology was sanctioned within the gallery: Members of the public [are] invited to create artworks using materials available in the gallery . . . In the spirit of Atelier Public, I would like to invite you to use the materials to make new work, which will be installed in this gallery for other visitors to see.39 The emphasis on ‘creation’ and ‘making’ was framed in a productive sense and limited participants’ expressive options to only those sanctioned by the gallery. This was most apparent in the way that the staff of GoMA would edit out offensive artworks, including removing those that were considered sectarian or offensive to other social groups. Most tellingly, Bruce and staff had to cover up graffiti tags written on the gallery wall that contained swearing or abusive/insulting language (see Figure 9.1). Bruce explained that much of this editing occurred because the gallery is a public space that welcomed a plethora of people and opinions including children and school groups and so had to consider the ‘appropriateness’40 of the works displayed. The materials, language, and editing of the exhibition therefore could not offend. In other words, a participatory project funded by the state (or at least this local authority) requires conceptual and aesthetic boundaries due to its position as a public body, and this delineates the edges of ‘acceptable’ cultural expression. Those that fell outside of this acceptable framework could be seen to be participating in the wrong way. I therefore aimed to challenge this ‘state aesthetic’ and so designed a contribution to Atelier Public #2 that was based around the notion of destruction. Titled Make Destruction (see Figure 9.2), 100

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Figure 9.1 Anonymous artwork as part of Atelier Public #2 (2014), unknown author. Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Source: Photo credit Anthony Schrag.

Figure 9.2 Make Destruction, Anthony Schrag. Atelier Public #2, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow Source: Photo credit Stuart Armitt and Anthony Schrag.

this event consisted of a text invitation to ‘the public’ (marketed via official GoMA channels and social media as well as a press release) to come to the gallery on 11 April 2014 and destroy any or all of the artworks in the exhibition. In the invitation, I drew attention to the ontological similarity between the concepts of creation and destruction by explaining that one cannot create anything without destroying something else, and thus to destroy something creates another thing – i.e. to draw depletes ink, to break a window creates new shapes of glass, to build a sandcastle is to destroy the smoothness of the beach. Both creation and destruction are therefore productive acts, and the only difference is a value system that gives meaning to the outcome of the different actions. The destruction event would therefore draw attention to the value systems of the Atelier Public #2 project and highlight those actions that praised one way of expression but disavowed others. Katie Bruce agreed to this proposal and on 11 April, approximately 90 people entered the gallery over the space of 1.5 hours, variously engaging in destructive acts or observing the actions of others as they ripped cardboard, tore down string contraptions, or peeled off tape and vinyl constructions. The destructive acts stood in contrast to the traditional acts of making and allowed a framework for multiple perspectives to emerge, challenging the dominant hegemony and drawing attention to the intention of the exhibition itself, providing a context where those invited could contribute to collective, public expression on their own terms, rather than being mediated by a dominant (curated) force.

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It should be noted that throughout the three-month exhibition, there was no mechanism to stop a visitor entering the space and destroying or altering a work that someone else had made, and so to a large extent, the Make Destruction event merely gave ‘permission’ to explore a different creative process. The destructive permission allowed for the development of a more democratic sphere where alternative perspectives could emerge. This was highlighted in two unexpected ways. First, the destructive process revealed the previously obscured ‘offensive’ graffiti as well as the edited/hidden works, thus revealing the curatorial approaches of GoMA. In other words, the participatory event revealed a more representative, plural constituency than the curated, safe perspective of GoMA, and relates to Mouffe’s concept that ‘public spaces [are] the battleground in which different hegemonic articulations are confronted’.41 The Make Destruction act ensured that this state-sponsored participation was ‘actually’ participatory, rather than a token gesture. The second and more unexpected way was highlighted by a raucous and lively group of defenders, who acted in opposition to my proposed intention. The date, information, and concept of this destruction event had been listed in the gallery since the exhibition had opened, including the invitation for people to come to defend artworks. After reading about the event from the press release, these four members of the public appeared an hour before the doors opened with a roll of bubble wrap, intent on ‘protecting everything they could’.42 They had also taken it upon themselves to begin a social media campaign calling for friends to attend the event in order to protect all artworks, reasoning that ‘all art was worth protecting’.43 Upon the doors opening, they established a base at the rear of the gallery and sent out protective sorties past their barricades to collect and bring back artworks they could protect behind their defences: they peeled intricate vinyl off walls and placed it in plastic folders for safe keeping, wrapped up delicate paper sculptures, or gently handled cardboard structures. Acting like a well-organised, military operation, I noticed them yelling to each other to ‘get the ninja turtles . . . I’ll get the moose head, you stay and guard the base’.44 In and among the violent destroyers (who were in a bacchanalian state of almost carnal destruction), these defenders – along with a few members of the public who had specifically returned to defend their own artworks – operated to collect and carefully protect all they could. The two forces existed in a delicate, dissensual balance. This unexpected contribution challenged my own approach of what I felt ‘should’ occur during the event and, in this sense, allowed the rise of a counter-force and even the furthering of a democratic sphere, where even I as the artist could not dictate the experience. As Bishop paraphrases Laclau and Mouffe, ‘a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased’.45 In other words, participation problematised everyone’s engagement in the event, challenging the ways democracy was being limited and framed by GoMA, but also the frameworks that I as the artist also attempted to apply as an alternative hegemony.

Conclusion: How Does Participation Mean? In 1996 Dvora Yannow wrote How Does A Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organisational Actions, explaining: In 1959, John Ciardi, English professor, poet, critic, essayist, translator and poetry editor of the Saturday Review, published his book How Does A Poem Mean? In it, he sought to explain how it is that poems convey their many and varied meanings 102

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to us, their readers. He looked at word choice, sounds, symbols, rhythms with multiple examples of each . . . Like Ciardi, I am asking: what are the various ways in which we make sense of public policies? How do policies convey their meanings? Who are the ‘readers’ of policy meanings? To what does audiences to ‘policies’ speak? I am intentionally using the oddity of the locution in the hope of provoking thought on these questions.46 This seminal work presented policy in a more complicated light; it demanded that we explore both the effects and functions of policy in order that the problems of policy development and implementation be examined fully. As an artist that works primarily with notions of participation, I want to see participation explored in a similar light, and ask: ‘how does participation mean?’ When we want to develop participatory artworks or speak of participatory governance or even participatory cultural policy, how does the participation ‘mean’ within these contexts? How is it forming the frameworks of understanding, and how is its potential for radical thinking limited? I have tried to explore some of these questions within artistic research works provided here, in the hope that they reveal how ‘participation’ is often framed to be a limited, instrumentalised, and safe zone of curated culture: one that has specific intentions of politics that seek consensus. Participation, however, requires that public sphere is striated, complicated, and full of dissensus. It requires conflict. The findings have emerged through artistic research that explores the problematics of ‘producing’ participatory art, rather than its dissemination and reception, but those insights can be of immense value to those policy makers whose governance will affect the formulation, function, and effects of what is meant by participation. The insight of this research is that institutions need to be on the same footing as their community, and the same is true of the artist: while we might all have very different intentions when we participate, it is only through the complicated violence of ‘working with people who are not me’ that we can ensure ethical participatory engagement. ‘True’ participation problematises the way the world is ordered, and that is why it is important. In order for it to sustain its radical potential, practitioners, policy makers, and institutions must allow participation to provide space for such productive conflict.

Notes 1 Sabine Saurugger, ‘The Social Construction of the Participatory Turn: The Emergence of a Norm in the European Union’, European Journal of Political Research, 49, no. 4 (2010): 471–495, at 472. 2 Ibid. 3 Jorge Ferrer, ed., The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies (New York: Suny Press, 2008), vi. 4 Clare Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 10. 5 See, for example, Eleanora Belfiore, ‘Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion: Does It Really Work? A Critique of Instrumental Cultural Policies and Social Impact Studies in the UK’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 8, no. 1 (2002): 91–106; and Andy Hewitt, ‘Privatising the Public: Three Rhetorics of Art’s Public Good in “Third Way” Cultural Policy’, Art & the Public Sphere 1, no. 1 (2011): 19–36. 6 Robin Nelson, Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 49. 7 Graeme Sullivan, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts (London: Sage, 2005). xx.

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8 Marie Copstake, personal correspondence, November 2007. 9 Bishop, Artificial Hells; Ruth Levitas, New Labour and Social Inclusion: Citizenship and Social Exclusion Panel (Bristol: University of Bristol, 2002). 10 Quoted in Bishop, Artifical Hells, 175. 11 Belfiore, ‘Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion’, 99. 12 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Agonistic Politics and Artistic Practices’ (Lecture) Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 2 March 2007. 13 Owen Kelly, Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels (Stroud, UK: Comedia, 1984), 107. 14 Raymond Williams, The Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, [1958] 1989), 1. 15 Sophie Hope, ‘Participating in the ‘Wrong’ Way? Practice-Based Research into Cultural Democracy and the Commissioning of Art to Effect Social Change’ (PhD Thesis, University of London, 2012). 16 Michael Warner, ‘Publics and Counter Publics’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 413–425, at 414. 17 Jeremy Ahearne, ‘Cultural Policy Explicit and Implicit: A Distinction and Some Uses’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 15, no. 2 (2009): 141–153, at 144. 18 Hewitt, ‘Privatising the Public’, 28. 19 Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture (Edinbrugh: Canongate Books, 2017), 7. 20 Ibid. 21 Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 2–3. 22 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 292. 23 Mouffe, ‘Agonistic Politics’. 24 Rosalind Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 289. 25 Hewitt, ‘Privatising the Public’, 28. 26 Grant Kester, ‘Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Community Art’, Afterimage 22, no. 6 (1995): 5–11, at 8. 27 Taken from the ‘Application Form for Organisations, 2006/07’ submitted to the Scottish Arts Council seeking funding for ‘an artist and writer joint residency focusing on identity, neighbourhood and nation, addressing the issue of Sectarianism with community groups across Glasgow’ (emphasis original). Submitted to author by main applicant, social inclusion officer Katie Bruce, October 2012. Issued by Scottish Arts Council, 2006. 28 Katie Bruce, personal correspondence, February 2013. 29 It is generally accepted that projects that happen within the context of the museum or gallery spaces fall outside of the definition of public art. However, as a publicly funded, free-admission institution that also provides library services, children’s clubs, etc., GoMA occupies a more complicated locus than traditional museums and galleries, and as such it is included here as a public space, albeit a limited one. Cameron Cartiere and Shelly Willis, eds, The Practice of Public Art (London: Routledge, 2008),15. 30 Atelier Public #2, press release. 31 Bruce, personal correspondence. 32 Ibid. 33 Belfiore, ‘Art as a Means of Alleviating Social Exclusion’, 99. 34 Bishop, Artificial Hells, 211. 35 Ibid., 245. 36 Jonathan Vickery, The Emergence of Culture-Led Regeneration: A Policy Concept and Its Discontents (Coventry: Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, 2007). 73. 37 Jacques Rancière, ‘The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics’, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 7, no. 1 (2006): 1–20. 38 Atelier Public #2, press release. 39 Ibid. 40 Bruce, personal correspondence. 41 Mouffe, ‘Agonistic Politics’. 42 Participants, Make Destruction event as part of Atelier Public #2. 43 Ibid.

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44 Ibid. 45 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), cited in Bishop, Artificial Hells, 66. 46 Dvora Yanow How Does a Policy Mean? Interpreting Policy and Organisational Actions (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1996), 1.

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10 AS IF An Embodied Account Beatrice Catanzaro

In 2010, I co-founded Bait al Karama, a women’s centre and social enterprise in the Old City of Nablus (Palestine). Bait al Karama, still up and running today, is managed by local women under the charismatic direction of Fatima Kaddumy, co-founder and community activist. Bait al Karama is a slow, immersive, and communal socially engaged artwork that mimics in its format a non-governmental organisation (NGO) initiative. As a result of this porosity between artistic intervention and social initiative, Bait al Karama has often been labelled as an initiative empowering the local women’s community. When I first heard the association between Bait al Karama and the word ‘empowerment’, I felt disoriented. ‘Empowerment’ echoed so much of that paternalistic, Western-centric desire to mould the voices of ‘Others’ into a binary scheme of ‘needy versus giver’, contradicting my embodied understanding, matured through a daily situated practice over five years, and rooted in a growing sense of interdependence and reciprocity. I began reflecting upon the vocabularies that comprise the glossary of socially engaged art, where words like ‘participation’, ‘empowerment’, ‘relation’, ‘regeneration’, among others, are often describing intentions and results of the artistic initiative as well as validating its engagement in the social realm. As the glossary that encompasses the practice of socially engaged art often finds its original bearings in other disciplines, such as ‘empowerment’ in community psychology, its appropriation should carefully be situated and negotiated in and through the artistic process, so as to unfold new horizons of meaning and action. Also, when terms like ‘participation’,’ empowerment’, ‘relation’, and ‘regeneration’ are reiterated by policymakers and urban developers under neoliberal, populist, as well as progressive left-wing rhetorics alike, we may want to question how these terms sit in relation to embodied experiences of socially engaged art. Further on, in the reiteration of those vocabularies, a process of reification takes place, which ‘refers to the moment that a process or relation is generalised into an abstraction’1; when reified, ‘words become an abstraction that, if on the one hand supports our practice of negotiating reality, under non-negotiable circumstances may leave a sense of common understanding that is neither situated nor participated’.2 It is precisely this ‘common understanding’ that surfaces when the writing of project proposals takes place. Here the funding bodies’ requirements for ‘participation, empowerment, relation, 106

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regeneration,’ etc., project intentions, attitudes, and results on to the artistic process yet to take place, reinforcing the oversimplification of otherwise profoundly complex processes. The danger then, is that the socially engaged art practice becomes illustrative of those intentions, attitudes, and results, and possibly gets co-opted by a cultural apparatus longing for consensus and reconciliation. This chapter is an open-ended reflection around some of the vocabularies used globally in socially engaged art, explored through close conversations with practitioners, ‘speaking from’ their embodied experience, whose voices will intertwine in the text. Initiatives such as Bait al Karama, Wurmkos, and Casa delle Agriculture, among many others, from different terrains of concern, equally question the vocabulary of socially engaged art, unfolding its complexity and vitality. Each confronts questions of social justice, moving away from illustrative (literal) representation, into substantial (acted-upon) work where the practitioners themselves set out for an enduring intimate relation with those same conditions producing oppression, discrimination, and ecological violence.

Candles for Lanterns Public art has become progressively associated with urban regeneration since the early 1980s, and predominantly in the Anglo-American world, alongside a growing interest among institutions and policymakers in advocating for the function of public art in tackling a wide range of social dysfunctionality3 and fostering ‘creative problem solving’. In today’s landscape, and several decades later, public art advocacy and funding support have reached planetary coverage, and so has its glossary, which promotes the function of socially engaged public art in increasing social outreach and inclusion. Has the reinforcement of the ‘creative problem-solving’ function of socially engaged art engendered a loss of phenomenological complexity in its glossary? I explore this question in close conversation with art historian and critic Alessandra Pioselli, who has widely researched the landscape of Italian public art. Pioselli states that while social engagement has become an integral feature of institutional cultural policies at multiple levels and on a global scale, the reiteration of socially engaged art terminologies by those same policies, has progressively emptied them of meaning, leaving generalised umbrellas under which any kind of experience that intercepts a public or a territory can take place. With the result to mistake the medium with the score, as it occurs with the word ‘participation’, turned into a product rather than in a vehicle of meaning and imagination.4 Have terms like ‘participation’ turned into a product that is simultaneously required to validate the social outreach of cultural institutions and the socially engaged art initiative? In the mechanism of project proposal writing, ‘participation’ is often a requirement to bring about benevolent results among groups of interest, results that are described prior to any actual contact with a situated reality. ‘Participation’, then, often remains a promise of a participation yet to come, that cannot be foreseen nor retraced, if not through visual documentation that frequently functions as promotional material to corroborate the project’s success to produce ‘participation’ in itself. However, if ‘participation’ is turned into a socially engaged art product, we may risk overlooking how participation will actually unfold in situated experiences: whether it will set out new forms of power relations or if it will generate reciprocity and intersubjectivity, 107

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and everything between those extremes. We may fail to notice the radical challenge that participatory processes offer, that of ‘reconstructing the modalities of group-being’5 generated by singularities as diversities, rather than a homogenised and simplified group of participants. In the artistic workshop Green Light, by the artist Olafur Eliasson at the Venice Biennale in 2017, for instance, 40 asylum seekers gathered by Venice-based NGOs were displayed during the exhibition as ‘participants’ in a design workshop aiming at assembling lights designed by the artist’s studio, as possible economic income for the refugees. Disguised as a participatory initiative, what Green Light reinforced by displaying the ‘refugee-Other’ in the exhibition venue, was the binary hegemonic relation ‘giver versus needy’. The ‘Other’, reduced to the minimum common denominator, that of being an asylum seeker, is labelled under a fixed social category from which emancipation is neither possible nor envisioned. The commodification of the ‘participants’ validates the social engagement of the project, while the singularities and diversities of the ‘Other’ remain unheard. When terms like ‘participation’ are reified and turned into a product, rather than negotiated within a situated reality, the complexities and diversities of social identities may be ironed out. Identifying a cluster of persons, with a specific social condition, such as refugees, as in the case of Green Light, ‘fixes group membership around a particular way of being’,6 where the ‘Other’ is constructed as homogeneous out-group defined by its difference from the ‘We’, of the in-group. I explored the process of reification, in close conversation with the visual anthropologist and professor Ivan Bargna, whose practice intersects the fields of public art as well as socially engaged art. Bargna shares an insightful example drawn from his research practice on the process of reification in constructing cultural identities: I was studying a monumental hut in Cameroon, a symbolic building, where people recognised themselves as sons of the village. After its restoration, on an engraved column inside the hut, together with the pre-existent images of ancestors, an image of the UNESCO General Commissioner and of the hut itself were hung: the hut was born again under the ‘sign of culture’ and as self-representation, producing a sort of detachment between the lived experience of the hut and its interpretation. Bargna continues, What is the paradox that is taking place? In the very moment I try to keep my past alive, I do it through procedures of cultural capitalisation of international agencies like UNESCO. The same administrative procedures that distribute financial support and classify reality within a sort of ‘collection of the cultural heritage of reality’. Those procedures occur in a language that classifies singularities and cultural diversities to distribute them on a level of homogeneity, where they all become comparable between each other, and, finally, the same thing: objects or images that stay inside the universe of economic tourism. Furthermore, Bargna states that ‘socially engaged art fits inside a similar contradiction of cultural capitalisation, as the value given to the artistic intervention occurs through forms that make this homogenization process to prevail’.7 108

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Turning ‘participation’ into a product of a socially engaged art initiative, for instance, regardless of the situated process, allows for the comparison of radically different experiences of participation on a level of abstraction. Bargna explains that this relates again to the distance between ‘words and things’, in particular, between the project and its translation on the ground. We can recognise similar ambiguities when bringing ‘projects’ to other parts of the world, where the mindset of [the] project-based approach is absent; as to speak about ‘project’ is to speak about a precise way to approach the world, to understand temporality and life. When we talk about socially engaged art, somehow we bring together the contradiction between the modernist dimension of the ‘project’ and that of ‘staying in’ society.8 Socially engaged art is fully encapsulated in the ‘culture of projects’, where, in order to fulfil the project, a distance from reality is required, as Boris Groys puts it, the project allows one to emigrate from the present into a virtual future, thereby causing a temporal rupture between oneself and everyone else, for they have not yet arrived in this future and are still waiting for the future to happen.9 In this detachment required by the ‘project culture’, vocabularies that address phenomenological complexity, like ‘participation’, are reified and risk becoming interchangeable commodities. I experienced this dyscrasia when I co-initiated Bait al Karama, where the quality of relatedness that tied together the community required a fully immersive involvement, where the detachment of a project-based approach could not be reproduced.

An Embodied Account: Bait al Karama Reaching the Old City of Nablus in 2009 felt like returning to a familiar place, as did first encountering Fatima Kaddumy. I was in Palestine for a residency programme and went to Nablus on several occasions until, during the month of Ramadan, I got invited to join an Iftar10 organised by the Labour union. Sitting next to me was Fatima. That encounter set us up for an unforeseen life-changing experience. Fatima still laughs at me, saying that was the longest coffee she ever had. I spent a few weeks hosted by Fatima and her family, we shared stories, and imagined what we could jointly do. Conversations happened on an old sofa in Fatima’s courtyard that we named ‘space shuttle’, as we would spend long nights surfing between our pasts, presents, and possible shared futures, exchanging our biographies and slowly moulding a togetherness. Bait al Karama came into being from those long nights sipping coffee, and days spent cooking and being introduced to the flow of life of other women in the Old City of Nablus. A collective intention slowly emerged: to reclaim the dignity of individuals otherwise living in the shadows of occupation, patriarchy, and poverty, and that is what Bait al Karama – ‘House of Dignity’ – encapsulated from its very first spark. In 2010 I permanently returned to Nablus (where I lived until 2015), and Bait al Karama was independently11 initiated and established in an ancient Ottoman building at the heart of the Old City.

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With the income generated through informal fundraising,12 we renovated the building and our kitchen, beauty salon, and a multifunctional room were set up. Women started to gather around the kitchen, taking part in training sessions, receiving counselling, bringing their kids for after-school activities, getting a haircut, or, simply just being together in a place away from their domestic environment (see Figure 10.1). In early 2012, the cooking school was launched and we began hosting foreigners for classes and lunches. The cooking classes disclosed a new space for encounter, where women could meet foreigners otherwise outside of their paths. At the time of writing, and after almost ten years, the centre still hosts classes on a weekly basis. Gradually, by teaching their skills, a new awareness of being a vehicle of knowledge arose among the women of Bait al Karama. In the words of Fatima Kaddumy, ‘By teaching foreigners in cooking classes, we became aware of our agency as beholders and vehicles of our culinary culture. We were awakening to ourselves through the encounter with the other.’13 The form in which Bait al Karama crystallised recalls that of an NGO, blurring the boundaries of an NGO’s initiative. In this mimesis, what marks the difference is the position of the makers in carefully moulding intentions into reality, by acting in adherence to the situated complexities of the Nabulsi society: Bait al Karama evolved in close proximity with situated longings and capacities rather than from distant project writing. Aware of the troublesome landscape of NGOs in evolving post-colonial relations, between preserving colonial interests under the disguise of a charitable aid organisation14 on the one hand, and effectively engendering civil rights capacities among discriminating

Figure 10.1 Bait al Karama (2010–ongoing), Beatrice Catanzaro, Old City Nablus, Palestine Source: Photo credit Tanya Habjouqa.

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societies on the other, the unequivocal fact remains that, under the long-lasting occupation of Palestine, the aid economy, brought about by international aid organisations, has generated a neurotic relation to the real economy. Hence, preserving autonomy and independence from large international funds with strings attached, set by agendas of policymakers elsewhere, was essential, as well as protecting our political neutrality on the ground. Is Bait al Karama a ‘project that empowers the local women’s community’? Empowerment takes its original bearings from the fields of social work and community psychology, where, ‘empowering a community’ means to increase the degree of autonomy and self-determination through tools commonly delivered by social organisations, where a clear definition of roles among giver and recipient is set. Migrating ‘empowerment’ into the field of socially engaged art, without negotiating the term through the lenses of a situated process, suggests that Bait al Karama is reinforcing the binary scheme ‘needy versus giver’, while acting benevolently upon a homogenised women’s community, whose identity is based merely on being women, Palestinian, and in need. Conversely, Bait al Karama emerged from a shared situated intention by a group of women and men that were, at the same time, acting upon and being the subject of the work. This group is not a homogeneous ‘community’, rather a heterogeneous body of singularities and diversities, to which I was not an external observer, but a participant in the making.

An Emancipatory Proposal Is Required In this section, I will explore the socially engaged art practices of Pasquale Campanella with the visual art laboratory Wurmkos (1987–ongoing, Milan, Italy) and Luigi Coppola with the Casa delle Agriculture (2011–ongoing Castiglione, Italy). However different in their approaches, both Campanella and Coppola shared, in close conversations, an insightful reflection on how socially engaged art vocabularies can be continuously negotiated in the flux of an embodied practice. Both practices are based on relatedness of biographies, situated knowledge,15 and the transformative potentiality of time, as they both share the coefficient of ‘duration’ as the sine qua non for their coming into being. In 1987, Pasquale Campanella – along with a group of psychiatric patients of the Cooperativa Lotta Contro l’Emarginazione of Sesto San Giovanni (Milan) – founded the visual art laboratory Wurmkos. Since its very beginning, Wurmkos created a fluid and open space, able to involve different publics including psychiatric patients, artists, family members, etc., setting in motion a situation that converges art practice and mental disorder without objectives of salvation. Wurmkos emerged from a precise moment in time where a radical shift occurred in the Italian psychiatric institution, when in 1978 Basaglia’s Law (named after its principal proponent, psychiatrist Franco Basaglia) or Law 180, reformed the psychiatric system in Italy. Between 1978 and 1998, Basaglia’s Law led to the closing down of psychiatric hospitals, replacing them with a wide range of smaller community-based centres, in contrast with the mass institutionalisation of mental illnesses. Franco Basaglia’s radical critique of the institutionalisation of mental illness and the urge to restore the ‘human status’ of psychiatric patients, was at the heart of the call to free psychiatry from institutional confinement, and question the relation between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ by returning psychiatric patients to a social environment.16 111

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Wurmkos walked in Basaglia’s footsteps while distancing itself from an art-therapy approach, as Pasquale Campanella states, We are not working for the crazy to feel better, therefore we have never done art therapy. We always worked in such a way that the psychiatric illness could have its dynamic within a shared situation, not ruled out by institutional confinements.17 Diversity, for Wurmkos, is not to be removed by categorisations, but rather to be participated in. For over 30 years, the group of Wurmkos, the constellation of which has changed over the years, meets at least once a week, sometimes twice or three times depending on the need.18 The coming together occurs in in a setting that is not a psychiatric environment with given institutional rules, as coming together for Wurmkos is essentially to affirm the individual in his/her diversities. As Campanella states, I cannot say, for instance, that Angela [psychiatric patient and member of Wurmkos] could give a lecture at the university, but I can say that Angela can generate a performative situation where she affirms her individuality and becomes a confrontational factor for others, things that would not happen within an institutional setting, and that can only occur in a non-institutionalised environment. It took me years to become aware that there are many different ways to live life, and that ‘normality’ is only one of the many possibilities. In the first ten years of Wurmkos, I was almost inoperative as artist, while I took over the role of ‘helping others’ to do what they wanted. One day, however, I decided to create my own corner in the shared studio, and to work on my own. The experiment did not last long until the other members of Wurmkos entered my work entirely. At that point, I understood that embodying diversity, in a relational setting, was not a theoretical ideology but a life condition, and that by ‘helping others’ I was in fact withdrawing from affirming my own diversity.19 A pivotal work in the evolving methodology of Wurmkos, was Tana (2000–2006), a reflection on the meaning of ‘home’ and how we inhabit ‘home’ (see Figure 10.2). Wurmkos worked in the exhibition space only with black and white drawings, as Campanella describes it: Each of us would start with one drawing, then move on to another one done by someone else, and so on. We would take the papers down only when no one was drawing on them anymore. With those drawings, we build an exhibition that you could play with, touch, live in. Meanwhile, during the three-month exhibition, the museum’s educational workshop produced – with the public – an enormous amount of material in the exhibition space, which entirely covered up our work, that is how we began experiencing the capacity of the audience to transform the spaces we had created, and that led us to further reflections and works around spaces of vitality within institutions. The modality explored with Tana further informed the weekly meetings of Wurmkos where gatherings started to occur around a large table with hundreds of materials for people to pick from. Members would work with something and put it back on the table for 112

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Figure 10.2 Tana (2002), Wurmkos. Museo di Villa Croce, Genova, Italy Source: Photo credit Annalisa Guidetti.

someone else to pick up, reformulate, and put back again. ‘We have spent years now working this way,’ said Campanella, ‘the dimension of the table has been propaedeutic to understand how we could all produce something that simultaneously belongs to everyone and no one.’20 Wurmkos approaches its public narrative (press releases, statements, etc.) in a similar modality, as Campanella shares, Vocabularies always lead to something else and never to their embodied account, that is why our written communication is based exclusively on what we have done, as our awareness comes from ‘being inside’ the process, and could not be otherwise. The texts go through many hands, they are shared, read together, corrected together, until we get to the right form.21 Wurmkos has evolved, across three decades, a methodology of checking-in ‘participation’ within all stages of the generative process. For Wurmkos, ‘participation’ is an endeavour to reclaim its very meaning, to take part in others’ parts, preserving singularities in coexistence. In a different area of concern, but with a similar ethos, sits the practice of Luigi Coppola with Casa delle Agriculture. Here, the negotiation with vocabularies, otherwise reified, is to reclaim the capacity of words to suggest new landing fields for actions for collective mobilisation. For over five years, Luigi Coppola is co-activator of the movement initiated by the Casa delle Agriculture in 2011 in Castiglione d’Otranto (in the southern region of Puglia, Italy), whose aim is to revive discarded and abandoned land that has been brutally affected by 113

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industrialised agriculture. Coppola co-directs the yearly festival Notte Verde (Green Night), and has developed the long-term projects of the Parco Comune dei Frutti Minori (2013– ongoing) and the School of Agriculture (2018–ongoing) into a pedagogical platform for ‘agroecological’ knowledge. During my first visit to Castiglione for Notte Verde in 2017, Luigi Coppola mentioned something that stayed with me: ‘The persons I work with in Castiglione are like a research unit. I feel we are sharing, with different capacities, a research practice.’22 Coppola was born in a nearby village from where he migrated, as many others did, for study and a job. His biographical ties to the region makes him profoundly aware of the situated cultural environment he speaks from; of the social complexities of southern Italy, entrapped in patriarchy, traditions, economic depression, and the mafia. Coppola has put, at the centre of this collaborative practice, an ongoing critical reflection on the history of the cultural relation between mankind and nature and the glossary that encompasses it. In the following close conversation, Coppola guides us through the way that vocabularies have been negotiated within the collective work in Castiglione: Among the first vocabularies we engaged with, was the title of Green Night, ‘Notte Verde: Agricultura e Sviluppo Sostenibile’ [Green Night: Agriculture and Sustainable Development]. We researched the meaning of ‘sustainable development’ and began to question it. The ‘sustainability’ that we were searching for did not have a term of reference: sustainable in relation to what? ‘Sustainable development’ suggests we keep walking on the same path, just readjusting to become more sustainable. At the same time, we encountered the word ‘regeneration’, which, although often misused, convinced us much more. ‘Regeneration’ is a word that acquires sense through practice, as it addresses revitalisation and reinvention. In dialogue with the other members of the Casa delle Agriculture, persons that live in and around Castiglione and from all paths of life, farmers, journalists, activists, etc., Coppola began a shared reflection on the vocabularies describing the surrounding landscape of the village: The green areas in Castiglione were abandoned, both by the private and the public sectors. We were driven by a real need, the physical impossibility of inhabiting rural lands: the private land was polluted by chemicals while public territory, streets, paths, emplacements, etc., that we had to cross to get to the plots we wanted to regenerate, were filled with, sometimes toxic, garbage. Under those circumstances, the category of the ‘common’ became very important and with the municipality, we named this territory Parco Comune [Common Park], which implied a declared appropriation and putting in common of land. [Together,] we understood that there are words that, along the way, lose their meaning as the complexity of our understanding increases. As well, there are words that suggest a horizon of action. It is not enough, however, to criticise a vocabulary: an emancipatory proposal is required.23

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A pivotal encounter in this long-lasting reflection and work around the glossary encompassing our culturally constructed relation with nature was with the ‘evolutionary plant-breeding’ approach by the agronomist Salvatore Ceccarelli.24 Coppola continues: Even though the term ‘evolutive’ was problematic as it associates with ‘progress’, we learned that ‘evolution’ refers – in this case – to an inevitable transformation; it can mean adaptation, resilience, but also, in the context of how biodiversity transformed in the past 200 years, it can also address loss, power, and exploitation. Understanding this term in the context of environmental crisis is an emergency call, as there is not even time for the adaptation of the evolutive species any longer; therefore, not only is conservative practice fundamental but also direct planting.25 Coppola’s embodied account offers an insight about how shared practices of continuous negotiating of otherwise reified vocabularies can unfold a new collective horizon of intentions and actions. As he states, ‘It is not enough to criticise a vocabulary, an emancipatory proposal is required’,26 as to emancipate vocabularies from the stillness of abstraction, and default meaning, is to explore their significance and potentiality within situated phenomenological complexity and terrain of concerns. In the complex field of socially engaged art practice, where vocabularies often converge with, and are informed by, other human-related disciplines, a further challenge is that of being responsive to result-driven institutional funding bodies. Wurmkos, the Casa delle Agriculture, and Bait al Karama, are only a few examples of a vast horizon of enquiry where socially engaged art vocabularies become ground for negotiation and nourishment. The choir of voices and practices included in this text are an invitation to ground vocabularies otherwise circulating on a level of abstraction in and through practices, where words can be emancipated from their common or default meanings and turned into situated intentions. If ‘language is the ocean in which we live, for any operation in language is an operation in us too,’27 the work then is not relating merely in forging new abstractions, but rather to evolve capacities to maintain the operation of language alive within an intersubjective setting as well as within ourselves. The intimate connections set in motion by those works with situated conditions of oppression, discrimination, and ecological violence, which echo similar settings elsewhere, are attempts to not fix struggles into given categories of abstraction but to ground the vision in embodied realities where the practitioner is equally called into moulding his or her perspective also through a careful reflection around the current language of socially engaged art.

Notes 1 Timothy Bewes, Reification: Or Anxiety of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002), 3. 2 Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 59. 3 Tim Hall and Iain Robertson, ‘Public Art and Urban Regeneration: Advocacy, Claims and Critical Debates’, Landscape Research 26, no. 1 (2001): 5–26. 4 Personal correspondence with author, 3 March 2019. 5 Félix Guattari, Les Trois ecologies (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989), 34. 6 Glenn Adams and Hazel Rose Markus, ‘Culture as Patterns: An Alternative Approach to the Problem of Reification’, Culture & Psychology 7, no. 3 (September 2001): 283–296, 286. 7 Personal correspondence with author, 12 March 2019.

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Beatrice Catanzaro 8 Ibid. As Boris Groys describes it, ‘the formulation of diverse projects has now become the major preoccupation of contemporary man. These days, whatever endeavour one sets out to pursue in the economic, political or cultural field, one first has to formulate a fitting project in order to apply for official approval or funding of the project from one or several public authorities.’ Boris Groys, The Loneliness of the Project (Antwerp: MuHKA/New York Magazine of Contemporary Art and Theory, 2000), 1. To engage in any endeavour the project mindset requires a prior, and often remote, planning of actions and accomplishments, spread out on a linear timeline, that, in its formulation, includes the ‘unforeseen’ as possible intrusions of unpredictable life events. The project mindset producing the ‘culture of project’, evolves from a specific modern approach to human work and cognition of time as a linear trajectory. 9 Groys, The Loneliness of the Project, 3. 10 The evening meal with which Muslims end their daily Ramadan fast at sunset. 11 Bait al Karama was not initiated on the basis of an institutional invitation nor was it backed up by government support. 12 The initial funding to initiate Bait al Karama was raised through the organisation of dinners in Italy and the UK, and from a few private donations. Only when it was established did Bait al Karama receive some small-scale grants, such as from Fondazione Pistoletto and Doen Fund, support that, however, would not impose predetermined agendas on our actions. 13 Personal correspondence with author, 21 July 2016. 14 ‘The critique of neo-colonialism which focuses on aid programmes argues that the economic object of neo-colonialism has been to keep the living standards of the less developed countries depressed in the interests of the colonial masters. In this way, “aid” to a former colony is merely a form of revolving credit, paid by the neo-colonial master, passing through the neo-colonial state and returning to the neo-colonial master in the form of increased profits.’ Indi Ruwangi Akurugoda, NGO Politics in Sri Lanka Local Government and Development (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 11. 15 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–599. 16 ‘The patient – from the moment in which he is placed in a new dimension of emotional vacuum – finds in the “looney-bin” a place constructed for the complete annihilation of his individuality, a place where he can assume a concrete state in his own objectiveness. If mental illness is a loss of individuality and liberty, in the “looney-bin” the mental patient can find nothing more than a place where he will be definitely lost, where he will be made into an object by his illness and by those who treat him’. Franco Basaglia, The Destruction of Mental Hospital as a Place of Institutionalisation, report presented at the First International Congress of Social Psychiatry, London, 1964, from the document archive of the Fondazione Franca and Franco Basaglia, Trieste, Italy, n.p. 17 Personal correspondence with author, 19 March 2019. 18 Today Wurmkos is located in an ex-pharmacy in Sesto San Giovanni on the periphery of Milan. 19 Personal correspondence with author, 19 March 2019. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Personal correspondence with author, 22 March 2019. 23 Ibid. 24 Salvatore Ceccarelli is an agronomist and phytogenetist, who during over 30 years of work in Syria has designed and implemented a method called evolutive plant breeding that puts control over seeds back into the farmers’ hands and responds to the decrease in biodiversity caused by industrial agriculture and the progressive concentration of seed control in the hands of a few large companies. Cultivating evolutionary populations is a strategy to increase cultivated biodiversity (agrobiodiversity), as in evolutionary plant breeding where crop populations with a high level of genetic diversity are planted, and to show that those plants favoured under prevailing growing conditions contribute more seeds to the next generation than plants with lower adaptation. Thus, evolving crop populations have the capability of adapting to the conditions under which they are grown. 25 Personal correspondence with author, 22 March 2019. 26 Ibid. 27 Bradford Morrow, ‘An Interview with Robert Kelly’, Conjunctions 12 (1989), www.conjunctions. com/print/article/robert-kelly-c13.

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11 QUIET GESTURES, GIFT EXCHANGE, AND PUBLIC FORMATIONS The Work of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share Lana Lopesi It is often said that our ways of being in this part of the world, Aotearoa New Zealand, are somewhat understated in comparison to larger centres such as the United States or Europe. The New Zealand way of doing things in many senses is to deflect attention and to fly under the radar. We work hard but do not strive for the acknowledgement that comes with it, we just get on and do it, with a ‘she’ll be right’ attitude. It is interesting to think about quests for justice and social change here in Aotearoa, which require a need to be loud and to be heard. While social justice movements here, in the form of marches, perhaps supports that category, social justice can also take place in quieter and equally powerful ways. Aotearoa New Zealand has a long history of passive resistance, the significant example of the Parihaka invasion (1881) comes to mind: When armed troops approached the pacifist community at Parihaka they were met by playing children and offerings of food.1 What ensued, however, was the government invasion and sacking of that Mā ori community and the imprisonment without trial of its leaders. Passive approaches to justice have also been evident in the occupations of Bastion Point (1977–1978) and today Ihumatā o – both instances of tribal lands coming under threat. This was also the approach of the Polynesian Panthers, whose resistance took many forms including community building through homework and breakfast clubs for Pacific youth. Passive approaches to social justice can also be heard in songs by the Herbs, Unity Pacific, Che Fu, and the art of the Wellington Media Collective, Lily Laita, and Shane Cotton, among others, whose social justice work on causes ranging from nuclear testing in the Pacific and the occupation of Palestine takes form through their music and art-making. It is within this context of passive resistance that we come to examine two artist collectives based in Tā maki Makaurau (Auckland), New Zealand: D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share form and mobilise communities through sharing and exchange. While both of these collectives have very different public-facing art practices, where the real potential for change lies is in their invisible work, the quietness and subtleties that not only come from

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frustrations with their social environments but also seek to make changes. Their work doesn’t take the glory of looking political, it just is. One of the key components of both D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share is that they are collectives. With each member of each collective holding their own art practices, their collective identities make them what Charles Green coins the ‘third artist’, or perhaps more accurately in the case of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club the fifth artist, and the seventh artist in the case of Public Share.2 Regardless, the point is that at the intersection of collective and overlapping relationships, a new and different creative praxis emerges. In addition to their individual practices, the collective practices of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share are multilayered, interdisciplinary, and strategically conscious ways to question the status quo and exist somewhat ‘independent from the mainstream art world’.3 This political nature of artistic collaborations was identified by curator Okwui Enwezor, who argues that when the individual personality of the artist is most in question, it tends to coincide with periods of general and social crisis. These kinds of crises, ‘force reappraisals of conditions of production, re-evaluation of the nature of artistic work, and reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to economic, social and political institutions’.4 For D.A.N.C.E. Art Club, the ‘crises’ perhaps manifested because of the existence of individual arts workers in both the university system and the neoliberal economy that fuels it – both of which encourage environments of heightened competition. An acronym for Distinguished All Night Community Entertainers, D.A.N.C.E. Art Club was founded in 2008 and is made up of four artists: Tuafale Tanoa’i (aka Linda T), Vaimaila Urale, Chris Fitzgerald, and Ahilapalapa Rands. The collective formed in the kitchen of their art school at the Auckland University of Technology, which they were all attending at the time. Although they were on different degree programmes and at different stages of said programmes, the kitchen – one of the only collective spaces for students in the institution – became a moment of reprieve from their individual studio practices. The kitchen became a place of congregation, to discuss how their art school experiences were different to what they imagined them to be, sparking their desire to form a community. The collective started by creating experimental gatherings while studying together, which tested the boundaries of collective art-making within their university. Their constant pushing of the confines through parties and social gatherings on campus saw the 24-hour access to the studios revoked (something that remains today), but in so doing paved the way for future collective practice and collaboration at the Auckland University of Technology, as seen in the collective H.E.P.T., or even Public Share. What started casually, quickly became a formal collective questioning what art can be, and who it should be made for. Their fresh approach to art-making saw them invited to numerous exhibitions, talks, and symposiums across the country in their first three years of practising. However, the collective did not want to get the reputation of being a party for hire, or the local brown group included for diversity purposes, so at that point they took a break to become more active in shaping their future artworks. Since then, their works have taken many forms including dance marathons, a community radio station, even pool hall competitions both inside and outside of gallery spaces. More recently a part of their collective work has been focused within gallery spaces through the weaving and gifting of Hawaiian ribbon lei to artists and other members of the wider arts communities in acknowledgement of work, exhibitions, and celebrations. Hawaiian ribbon lei, a technique learnt and shared by Kanaka Maoli collective member Ahilapalapa Rands, are typically gifted in celebratory occasions such as graduations, weddings, and commemorations of various kinds. 118

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The making and gifting of lei by D.A.N.C.E. Art Club (2016–ongoing) was responding to a particularly fractured time in the art communities in Tā maki Makraurau, where personal riffs and institutional critiques were changing the social landscape of the Pacific arts community. A community that was once so small that everybody relied on each other was reaching a point in terms of its scale, and the difference of opinions that existed within it, which revealed that specific nature of competition and conflict so specific to art. While that was happening on the surface and in both public and private domains, D.A.N.C.E. Art Club sought actions that aimed to remind people that they were loved and that their work was valued. Chris Fitzgerald describes their work as ‘showing up, being there and being amongst it’. In that sense, this ongoing work reminds people that the artists are there for them.5 The gifting of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club’s lei follows cultural, rather than artistic protocols. This means that rather than identifying or announcing this work as art made by the collective, the collective would simply gift the lei to their intended recipients by placing them over their head, with no announcement about the lei being an artwork – or anything other than a celebration of that person’s achievement. This meant that receiving a lei at an exhibition opening, a poetry reading, a graduation ceremony, or an artist talk often came as a surprise to the many artists and art workers who received them. The gifting is a quiet gesture publicly, while pointing to an unseen deeper, longer, and more generous thought process. While in the first instance it’s easy to understand the gifting of lei as public, in a sense it is best understood to be made up of two components: the most obvious is the gifting of the lei itself – something that takes place in public – and is followed by the receiver wearing that lei. Perhaps the most pertinent aspect of lei-making is the private making and forward planning. It is these unseen moments that Vaimaila Urale is most proud of, the ‘cleaning stairs, making cakes’.6 When I asked D.A.N.C.E. Art Club what it is that they do, two responses resonated. One was ‘maintaining relationships’ and the other was ‘alofa’.7 Alofa, a Sā moan word, is translated simply as love and affection.8 In the Sā moan context, alofa is inextricably tied to relationships, and for the collective, alofa offers both the underlying principle that determines how they work with each other, as well as what drives their work. For the collective the making and gifting of lei, Vaimaila Urale explained, is an ‘act of alofa’, an act of love. Coming from this place of love explains the significance of these unseen moments: it’s not about credit or clout for the collective but about doing actions that show and express love for others. This places the importance on our relationships. The Hawaiian ribbon lei, a small and quiet gesture, functions as a radical disruption of the competitive and individualistic nature of the contemporary art world. In The New Zealand Project, political theorist Max Harris writes how potent the quality of love is, because of its more active and visceral nature.9 For Harris, love connects to two other components: that of community and creativity. It’s the relational nature of love, which Harris suggests is connected to the notion of community, that is interested in our relations to each other. For Harris, a politics of love is creative in the sense that it aims to be imaginative in finding fresh ways of thinking about politics, and in the sense that it aims to create and build new approaches to policy, rhetoric and the interactions between people and politicians.10

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While the concept of a ‘politics of love’, may seem like a theoretical fantasy, Harris demonstrates how easily and practically love could apply to policy reform in New Zealand, offering a transformative potential. It’s this transformative potential, as written about by Harris, which is also catalysed in D.A.N.C.E. Art Club’s love or alofa. Easily mistaken as a romantic and gentle kind of love, the kind of alofa found within D.A.N.C.E. Art Club is much more like a family’s in the sense that it embodies the generous, the critical, the beautiful, and the ugly; simultaneously encapsulating emotions like anger, as anger too can come from a position of love. Their relationship between the world and between each other is prioritised, finding a rhythm to their own ‘social bonds’, where ‘caring for the collaboration then becomes conscious in a slower, more syncopated fashion’.11 What Timothy Murray, Tobey Albright, and Egle Obcarskaite argue, is that when care is shown, shared matters become potential materials for the collective, which allows for ‘life-based relevance and urgency’.12 For Tuafale Tanoa’i, working collectively gives her access to an amazing team of creative minds, which is ‘an absolute luxury’. It’s this unconditional support that drives her work; she continues, ‘my practice isn’t a oneperson thing, I’m just fronting it’.13 For the collective’s youngest member, Ahilapalapa Rands, being in D.A.N.C.E. Art Club has fully informed who she is as an individual artist. She says how these three always tease me that they have watched me grow up because I was the youngest member and I was a teenager . . . it has completely shaped how I look at the world, my preferred way of working is collectively, it’s fun.14 While on the surface the work of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club is fun and happy, their dedication to fostering communities and relationships is grounded in a pointed critique of the individualism of the arts sector. For Rands, the common reading of their work as happy-go-lucky is incorrect, as their works always offer some form of rupture to the status quo. A pertinent example of this misreading was the D.A.N.C.E. Art Club project encapsulating Linda T’s DJ marathon (2014), which attempted to break the Guinness Book of World Records world record for the longest DJ set. A large amount of volunteers were needed at any given time including witnesses, record keepers, and dancers. The excitement around this project and desire to support Linda T galvanised the community, bringing directors, curators, senior artists, and art students together on the dance floor. While for most of those outside of the collective the project seemed fun, inside the collective the attention was turned to caring for Linda T. In a major physical feat, Linda T reached 84 hours before the collective call was made to put the record attempt to bed. Perhaps an extreme example, the DJ marathon shows the difference in the public-facing perception of the project and collective memory, in comparison to the unseen and invisible tasks undertaken by the collective that enabled the fostering of that community on the dance floor. While for many artists these invisible tasks would not be seen to be of value, for a collective like D.A.N.C.E. Art Club it is in these moments where the transformation is happening, precisely because of love. In so doing a community of unlikely people formed on a dance floor in one of the city’s most inaccessible galleries. When asked if their work is some kind of activism, they respond that ‘[activism has] always been there from the start’ but that the language they have used has been different. It is clear, however, that the collective do not define themselves as political artists, but rather make art politically. Collective member Fitzgerald, tells me that ‘the word activism makes me think of the complete opposite [of] pacifism, which is . . . like doing nothing, so if activism is just doing something, then we’re activists’.15 120

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While much scholarship on artistic collaboration suggests that the collaborators are brought together by political and social reasons as per D.A.N.C.E. Art Club, working collaboratively is additionally a deliberate ‘artistic choice’ and ‘an artistic end in itself’.16 This is seen in the work of Public Share. Public Share, another collective based in Tā maki Makaurau, is currently made up of Monique Redmond, Harriet Stockman, Kelsey Stankovich, Deborah Rundle, Mark Schroder, and Joe Prisk. Founded in 2014, Public Share facilitate events and projects that ‘engage with contemporary social and political issues whilst providing an opportunity for pause, reflection and connection’.17 The collective formed as part of the Engaging Publics/Public Engagement symposium that was co-organised by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tā maki and Auckland University of Technology’s School of Art and Design. Collective member Monique Redmond, who was involved in organising the symposium, remembers that they were looking for a group who could offer some kind of intervention during the day that was about both creating ‘a social connection’ while also being ‘related to catering’.18 After further thought, Redmond decided that would be something that she would be interested in herself. So she connected with artist and colleague Harriet Stockman to invite other people who they wanted to make art with, people who were interested in similar ideas of making and sharing, people ‘who were generous’. At that time Stockman had already been making her own works with clay from the construction company Fulton Hogan’s worksite at the Te Atatu Interchange – an infrastructure upgrade on one of the city’s main motorways near the artist’s house. From there it was decided that the collective would make something that symposium goers or audience members could use and take away with them. The resulting work was A Break in Proceedings (2014). Using the company’s excess clay, which would usually be discarded into landfill,19 the collective made plates that they served with a cup of the tea at the symposium (see Figure 11.1). Unbeknown to the collective at the time, this would become a recurring collective model for their interactions with the public. A Break in Proceedings offered exactly what the title promised, a break in the symposium programme as a ‘means to reinstate formalised breaks and encouraging the discussion and networking that occurs in these spaces’.20 But it also acted as a moment of gifting, a slowing down of the rush of taking in information within a symposium setting, and, within a day of intellectual conversation on the social, an appreciation for the handmade gift (and its material qualities) that you were able to take home with you. A Break in Proceedings was part one of the collective’s Allotted Break(s) (2014–2015), with part two – named Irregular Allotments (2015) – occurring in private at Fulton Hogan’s work site, with 60 or so of their staff. In discussion with Fulton Hogan about what would be the most useful object for them during their break times, the collective made mugs for the staff crafted from their own clay. The exchange was an act of reciprocity that focused on site, materiality, and acknowledging those who had given the collective their clay in the first place. Perhaps the strongest of their political gestures, it was an invisible one. It’s so easy and common for socially concerned artists to speak on behalf of people such as the staff at Fulton Hogan, without being accountable to them. However Irregular Allotments reminds us of the shared care both the collective and the staff have for their environment, positioning the staff as extended collaborators in a sense. As collective member Deborah Rundle remembers, the ‘workers were immediately engaged with [the cups]’, after having worked on the site for so long they now had a sense of ‘taking the site with them when they went elsewhere’.21 Forming rather quickly and spontaneously, it was ideas about making and sharing that brought Public Share together, or a situatedness ‘between materiality and sociality’, as Redmond describes it.22 The collective’s concern was not so much about the political 121

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Figure 11.1 ‘Smoko Pt. 2’, morning tea event at Well-Connected Alliance, Wiri site tearooms (2016), Public Share. Tā maki Makaurau (Auckland), New Zealand Source: Photo credit Public Share.

context of their work, but rather how their collective making process could interact with their interest in bringing people together. However, their work was contextualised almost instantly by the legislation around the ten-minute tea break, which was being revised in Aotearoa New Zealand at the time. That legislation meant that government-enforced, regulated break times shifted to the responsibility of the employer. Placing the employee in a vulnerable position, this shift changed local rituals around the ten-minute break, or the ‘smoko’ as it is lovingly called. The ten-minute tea break then became a galvanising force for the collective, and perhaps more accurately their audiences and the critics, myself included, who perhaps imposed this political context on to the work. As Joe Prisk remembers, ‘It wasn’t until we had to identify ourselves internationally that we embraced the ten-minute tea break idea, the references to site became void so we used the political context to frame ourselves.’23 While the ten-minute break has become useful for the collective, their original interest was in the need for breaks themselves and the potential of that time. Predating the fashionable rhetoric about taking breaks as found in self-care dialogues, Public Share’s interest in ‘taking pause’, comes from an acknowledgement that – within the neoliberal worker system – interacting with Public Share’s work might be the only break people take during their work day. Understanding the work this way makes the gesture much more quiet and poignant, offering a ‘quiet political space’. For Public Share, there is a need to understand what happens in the workplace or public space when people come together. As Rundle asserts, ‘a lot of grassroots politics starts in the break, through conversation’, she acknowledges that it’s within the ‘breakaway groups’ that 122

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political conversations can thrive. While audiences are more than welcome to just have a cup of tea or do some baking (or any other gesture that is on offer), participation in a collective event is not a passive thing. The collective explains that their work requires ‘a different kind of active engagement’ and that their work ‘has a really low threshold of entry – in a good way. Nobody is trapped.’24 Rundle admits that none of the artists thought that random members of the public would sit down and talk to each other, but they do. For the collective, there is something seemingly relational in their tea breaks – what has taken them months to make goes in ten minutes. In a way the collective offers these gestures and gifts, but the conversation becomes something beyond their control. The object in a sense has the ability to continue that conversation on its own, because of its connection to the sites and the people. There is a sense of sneak attack in Public Share’s work, albeit a very gentle and passive sneak attack, but as they told me, at times people just sit down to have a cup of tea, ‘and what happens during that process is a realisation and appreciation of the materials. It’s like they realise that they are enjoying themselves.’25 While the social component is clearly a driving force for Public Share, equally important is their material production. Their objects – which have previously included plates, cups, mugs, and stirrers – often facilitate conversation. As Redmond acknowledges, ‘the material object has a lot of power, because it comes from somewhere’. Prisk explains that the objects make ‘people think a little bit differently about the material’, which changes the way in which they value it.26 The significance of site is apparent in their recent project, OVER TIME (2018). The two-part project, made in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of women’s suffrage in Aotearoa (New Zealand), used clay from the backyards of 16 members of parliament whose work contributes to improving the lives of women – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern included – to make tumblers. In addition, clay from sites connected to Meri Te Tai Mangakā hia and Kate Sheppard, two significant figures in the country’s suffrage movement, was used to create stirrers. Using materials that can be traced to all of these women within the context of suffrage, offers a non-intimidating way to connect with the politics, allowing you to literally take a piece of them with you. The different clay materials create different colours and grains in the objects themselves, encouraging a simultaneous engagement in site, material, and politics. Similarly to D.A.N.C.E. Art Club, Public Share experienced external confusion as to the nature of their practice. As collective member Mark Schroder tells me, ‘We’re not caterers’. After being asked to cater events and even wear aprons, the collective was forced to ask of themselves if they were facilitators or collaborators, and how they – as artists – function within their exchanges.27 When I asked Public Share why they do work collectively, it became clear that it was their love of materials and production that brought and keeps them together. This is evidenced in the importance of the studio in the collective’s working out of their overall methodology. In a collective large enough to form subgroups, it is no surprise that the group itself holds a number of specialisations: as Stockman puts it, ‘We learn heaps’.28 The results of such a large collective is selffinanced yet multilayered projects. What Public Share has found is that, during their projects, there is an intergenerational enjoyment of slowing down and sharing of value. This happens not only in the outcomes of their projects but also in the making among the collective members themselves. The collective members in Public Share span a 30-year age range, from 27 to 57, which offers an intergenerational approach to making art, placing even more importance on the group nature of the relationships within the collective. This intergenerational spread is also found

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in D.A.N.C.E. Art Club, which at one time found that it included collective members in their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties. For D.A.N.C.E. Art Club, and the case of their ribbon lei, perhaps it doesn’t look or feel like art because it’s not recognised ‘public art’. There is no one taking photos or recording that gifting; you have to have been privy to the exchange to know that it even happened. It comes from a deeper desire to celebrate their colleagues in an honest and non-self-gratifying way. The work is not reliant on the documentation. And in the case of Public Share, they are in all instances offering a cup of tea – a deceptively simple gesture. The nature of this exchange means that people are not signing up to a doctrine, they’re signing up to a break, a moment of pause, the length of which is completely determined by them. In this way, both of the collectives’ gestures of making space and giving alofa have the potential for people to come together in ways that are seemingly meaningful, long lasting, and quiet. Their artworks are not interested in art’s concern for the monumental, but rather elapse ‘within a factual time, for an audience summoned by the artist’.29 While the practices of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share both stem from incredibly different conceptual frameworks, what we do have is two social practices of sharing, exchange, and the social, which are also inextricably linked to material production, form, and materiality. What these two practices demonstrate is how quiet works can also contribute to social justice goals, not just by what they seek to discuss but also by how they build communities of resistance and consciousness. This brings to mind Theodor Adorno, who writes, ‘Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden “it should be otherwise”.’30 The otherwise then becomes an alternative to the hyper-competitive, individualistic, production-driven era of the neoliberal economy. The aforementioned examples discussed by Public Share and D.A.N.C.E. Art Club, operate in two veins. One is that the projects are artworks that come from the intellectual vein, in which this very publication is positioned. But the other is that they are something quite genuine, earnest, and honest. They are gifts. As David Hall writes, ‘art can function as an active political intervention, as a magnet for surges of political sovereignty . . . But it will more than occasionally be disadvantaged by precisely those qualities that make it art’.31 In the case of D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share, however, it is perhaps the qualities that make the collectives and their projects feel and look unlike art that strengthens their political resolve, and similarly it’s the intentions that are not political that offer their work some ability to mobilise groups of people.

Notes 1 Led by Te Whiti-o-Rongomai and Tohu Kā kahi, Parihaka has come to symbolise peaceful resistance to the confiscation of Mā ori land. Founded in the mid 1860s, Parihaka attracted dispossessed and disillusioned Mā ori from around the country. As the settlement began to face threats against their land, they developed tactics of non-violent resistance. Things came to a head when, on 19 October 1881, Sir John Hall’s government offered a proclamation that gave the people of Parihaka 14 days to leave to the reserves. On 5 November 1600, volunteer and armed constabulary troops marched on Parihaka. Several thousand Mā ori sat quietly on the marae as singing children greeted the force. The result was the arrest of Parihaka’s leaders, the destruction of Parihaka, and the dispossession of its people. 2 Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 3 Sondra Bacharach, Jeremy Neil Booth, and Siv B. Fjaerestad, Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 18.

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D.A.N.C.E. Art Club and Public Share 4 Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Artist as Producer in Times of Crisis’, Empires, Ruins + Networks: The Transcultural Agenda in Art (2004): 11. 5 Correspondence with the collective, 4 January 2019. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 G. B. Milner, Samoan Dictionary (Auckland: Pasifika Press, 1993). 9 Max Harris, The New Zealand Project (Wellington, NZ: Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 171. 10 Ibid. 11 Timothy Murray, Tobey Albright, and Egle Obcarskaite, ‘Empathy, Surviving, Collective Reflexivity’, in Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sondra Bacharach, Siv B. Fjærestad, and Jeremy Neil Booth (New York and London: Routledge, 2016), 94. 12 Ibid. 13 Correspondence with the collective, 4 January 2019. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Bacharach et al., Collaborative Art in the Twenty-First Century, 13. 17 Public Share artist statement, 2018. 18 Correspondence with the collective, 10 December 2018. 19 Lana Lopesi, ‘Reinstating the Smoko’, un Magazine, 2016, http://unprojects.org.au/magazine/ issues/issue-10-1/reinstating-the-smoko. 20 Ibid. 21 Correspondence with the collective, 10 December 2018. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Presses du reel, 2002), 29. 30 Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment: The Politics of Autonomous Art’, New Left Review, 1962, cited in Debating the Canon: A Reader from Addison to Nafasi, ed. Lee Morrissey (Palgrave McMillan: London, 2005), 71–72. 31 David Hall, ‘Sensing Sovereignty: On What’s Real about Emergency’, in Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture, ed. Jon Bywater et al. (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tā maki, 2015), 8–29.

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12 SURVIVING INSTITUTIONALISED CARE Accessibility as Social Practice Carmen Papalia

In 2015, I responded to the failures that I have experienced as someone who requires support by proposing Open Access: a conceptual framework for accessibility that moves beyond a policy-based model, with guidelines for mutual care. Consisting of five tenets that describe support in the midst of an oppressive system, Open Access mobilises an interrogation of the conditions that restrain agency over strengthening accessibility measures that are the result of legal and regulatory compliance. When put into practice, it problematises the typical roles of institutionalised care by encouraging participants to collectively envision a space that suits their needs, then share accountability towards that vision as they organise for accessibility from the grassroots. At first, Open Access was my personal position statement on the topic of accessibility; I shared it in an effort to advocate for myself, and gave handouts featuring the tenets to participants that I met through my work. Then I started using the guiding principles as the basis for performances, interventions, and curatorial proposals, and applied them as a methodology for assessing the conditions of institutional access and publicness. This inevitably led to an unsolicited accessibility audit of the Vancouver Art Gallery, with artists from a collectively run gallery in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside called Gallery Gachet, and a subsequent movement-building campaign at cultural institutions across Canada, the United States, United Kingdom and European Union (EU), where I introduced Open Access to staff and community members in an effort to establish a new context for commitments around accessibility. A comprehensive exploration of these projects can be found in my chapter in the anthology, Contemporary Art and Disability Studies.1 In this growing body of participatory, engagement-based work, which I call the Open Access series,2 I encourage participants to use Open Access to assess their own support-based relationships as either a care provider or recipient, and consider each tenet as a guiding principle when the need for a new support network emerges. This has resulted in project outcomes and critical frameworks that model new standards and practices in the area of accessibility. In the following pages I will expand on some of these outcomes and share experiences that have informed the Open Access framework and the ways that I have activated it over the last five years. Each section includes one of the five principles of 126

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Open Access and a story or framing that illustrates the statement that precedes it. From my critique of the scope of Bill C-81, the Accessible Canada Act, to my reflections on my time spent at a youth-run space in East Vancouver called the Purple Thistle Centre, each section is an effort to define what it means to practice accessibility as a living agreement for mutual care. While Open Access helped me articulate my hopes for accessibility as a working artist, it was my countless times in hospital since childhood, when I had no choice but to rely on emergency medical services when I couldn’t advocate for myself, that modelled how I approach institutions. Living with a severe chronic pain condition that debilitates me for weeks at a time – and that has put me in a life-threatening situation twice since the age of 16 – requires me to spend a lot of time thinking about the dynamics of a caring relationship that works. Unfortunately, having the time and space to reflect on the quality of my care comes with the cost of institutional trauma; a build-up of fear from the numerous times when trust failed me, when I had to rely on health professionals who were more bound to protocol than care. Sometimes these interactions involved convincing emergency room doctors that I needed narcotics but wasn’t addicted to them; other times I felt compromised by invasive procedures that weren’t explained to me. While I have learned to live with this trauma, I know that the experiences that inform my distrust of institutions come from the same underlying system; a system of control that I have resisted since I started identifying with one of the core concepts of the disability political movement. Before I outline the context that surrounds the Open Access framework, I want to explain how I use the term ‘disabled’ and describe my take on the topic of accessibility, as I believe it will provide insight into an alignment that is a common thread between the disability community and grassroots communities that organise around survival-based needs. What follows are the working definitions that serve as the foundation of my critique of what I call institutionalised care, which I define as ‘any prescriptive support option that is the result of legislative or public mandate and that provides a basic standard of service but does not address the systemic barriers that those with complex needs typically face under a medical model.’ Open Access is radically different than a policy that temporarily bridges a barrier to participation for a group with definitive needs. It acknowledges that everyone carries a body of local knowledge and is an expert in their own right. When I consider my life and experiences, I feel the need to distinguish myself as someone who is ‘disabled’, a term that speaks to my politics and my approach to critique. I adopted the term ‘disabled’ in 2007, when I learned about the social model of disability, a concept that emerged from disability activism in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, which proposes that a person is disabled, not by their impairment, but by a complex set of social conditions like discrimination and the effects of systemic ableism. I identify with this usage of ‘disabled’ because it describes my relationship to agency and power when I need support; it operates under the premise that oppression is ongoing and systematic, and enforced by those in positions of power. Under this framing, audio description for those who learn with their non-visual senses, and modifications to existing infrastructure such as curb cuts and ramps for those who use mobility scooters, are understood as accommodations that do not resolve ableism; the underlying system that constructs a reality where those with atypical bodies, minds, and behaviour are measured against concepts of normalcy and standards rooted in Western medical tradition. 127

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From my perspective, the current accessibility models employed in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom: • • • • • •

are employed through enforcement; fail to meaningfully address subjective, complex, and changing needs; require those who are seeking support to entrust a system with private interests with their overall care and well-being; do not nurture mutual exchange across communities or between those in need of support and those with access to support-based resources; do not account for the ongoing or systematic effects of ableism and its intersections with other forms of oppression; and do not address that barriers to access vary from context to context, change over time, and are different from each person’s point of view.

For me, accessibility is a measure of agency, the quality of one’s freedom of movement or decision-making power within a system based on the social, cultural, and political conditions that restrain agency for anyone who needs support. If considered in the context of a platform like a museum, accessibility is determined by the interrelationships between those who are present, their values and politics, the culture and social environment these conditions inform, and whether those entering from an outsider or marginal position feel welcome as participants who can meaningfully contribute to the progression of the platform. This is why I often say accessibility is temporary. When asked, I define it as an ongoing effort to hold space for a diversity of emerging and complex needs, in the midst of systemic barriers and traditions of cultural violence. In the best cases, accessibility is approached as a mutual exchange that nurtures interdependence across communities, and between those in need of support and those with access to resources; in the worst cases it is an impairmentspecific accommodation that temporarily bridges a barrier to participation in an inherently oppressive system. Open Access is the root system of embodied learning. It cultivates trust among those involved and enables each member to self-identify and occupy a point of orientation that centres complex embodiment. Whenever someone asks ‘when did you lose your sight’, I never know what to say. I don’t think of my experience in terms of loss. Beyond that, using my non-visual senses as a primary way of navigating my surroundings wasn’t something that just happened to me; it was a choice that I made when I started questioning the privileged status of visual experience. I was taking English at a local college at the time, reflecting on the two years that I spent studying character animation before my visual field became obstructed. It was through drawing that I understood the world around me and that world had become more and more obscure; even in my visual memory, where images took on a two-dimensional quality in vibrant primary colours. It was as if my memory – in its process of holding on to visual references – was echoing the worlds that I drew for my characters. Soon I understood the quality of these images as a function of nostalgia; not nostalgia for what I saw but for a time that meant something to me when I used vision. It took a while for me to step away from these visual references and find non-visual details that I could make sense of. I remember waiting for my friend’s band to take the stage at the Railway Club on one of my first outings with a detection cane. I remember 128

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how the torrent of voices and bar clatter swirled around me and how I felt a sense of dread when I tried to ground myself in the space. My cane usually revealed the general dimensions of a room when I tapped it on the ground but the crowd was so dense that I couldn’t orient myself. I knew the general layout but I couldn’t sense where obstacles were, and I couldn’t swipe for them without hitting someone. I just stood there, trying to follow the canned music. I wasn’t accustomed to making sense of the acoustic environment, so it loomed overhead like a ceiling about to collapse. It wasn’t until I took a class about the World Soundscape Project3 that I started intentionally seeking out opportunities to exercise my non-visual senses. I learned that, in the 1960s – after he spent years conducting experiential research and theorising about sound – an acoustician and avant-garde composer named R. Murray Schafer asked six researchers to go outside and learn to listen. They ‘cleaned’ their ears by plugging them when they wanted to clear their acoustic palates. They ventured into the woods, or laid their gear next to a busy thoroughfare and made recordings that documented various aspects of the acoustic environment. They listened for hours and tried to make sense of what they heard. Sometimes they noticed something that they hadn’t encountered before and took note of it in their research. Sometimes that thing would reoccur and set a precedent for the development of new terminology or systems of measure. Their dedication to this practice sets the foundation for an entire field of study. I was introduced to the history of the field of soundscape studies when I was an English major at Simon Fraser University, where Schafer convened his crew of researchers for the World Soundscape Project. As an English major, I found a way to document my process of establishing a sense of place from my new, non-visual position; first by writing sound journals in my acoustic communications class, then by writing poems that documented my changing relationship to my walking routes. I was lucky to have the support of a poet that I admired – Jeff Derksen – who guided me in establishing a poetics and introduced me to local poets who addressed language and place from their own marginalised positions; authors like Wayde Compton and Phinder Dulai, who explored narratives of displacement and migration in British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh people. Compton focused on the reclaiming and preservation of a historically black neighbourhood in Vancouver called Hogan’s Alley, which was destroyed in 1970 during the construction of the Georgia Viaduct. Dulai’s practice centred on his journey to British Columbia (BC) and his ancestral links to India, as well as the 1914 landing of the Komagata Maru; a ship that carried 376 Sikh, Muslim, and Hindu passengers who were refused entry to BC despite being British subjects. It was in Jeff’s classes that these poets became my mentors. Like them, I was drawn to the long poem as a form; a radically open space where I could represent the depth of my experience without compromise. In a poem, I could include lists of the things people mistook my cane for, or record what I heard on my way home from class. I could document troubling local histories that spoke to the systemic marginalisation of the disability community and bring in the voices of survivors of institutional incarceration. I could give space to all the things that I encountered that I hadn’t yet come to terms with. It took another major transition for me to start thinking of myself as a non-visual learner. I moved to Portland (Oregon), where I didn’t know anyone, to study the MFA in art and social practice at Portland State University. While I was faced with the familiar challenge of learning to navigate a new place in Portland, I felt a newfound sense of confidence with the way I moved through the world. In the time since I picked up a detection cane, I managed to find a set of non-visual landmarks that I used as reference points; touchstones that not only became increasingly familiar to me, but also deepened my connection to the city where I grew 129

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up. On walks in Vancouver I looked for things like the audible crossing signal by Notre Dame Secondary, the sound of traffic at the intersection of Renfrew and Hastings, the sandwich board for Señor Rooster, the beds of leaves in front of the retirement home on Venables, and the pole that I always bumped into by the party house on Parker. These were the kinds of landmarks that I tried to find in Portland. The first thing I did was write a walking poem that documented the obstacles on the route from my apartment to the train station. The poem began with the low-hanging tree branch outside my building. While establishing a sense of place was at the top of my list when I moved, a new sense of self was also emerging; something that seemed to coalesce as I found better ways to advocate for myself. At the time, I was in the process of distancing myself from the medical names for my conditions and from terms like ‘blind’ and ‘visually impaired’, which I felt enforced visual primacy. My stance on the topic grew out of a long poem that I wrote in Jeff’s class, where I unpacked the language and perceptions that were projected on to me when I used a detection cane. The conclusion of the poem was a list of synonyms for the word ‘blind’ that I found online.

I am: careless heedless (ran into a pole) ignorant imperceptive inattentive (don’t look directly) inconsiderate (don’t look directly) indifferent indiscriminate (can’t judge by appearance) injudicious insensitive myopic nearsighted (used to be) neglectful oblivious (addressed an inanimate object) thoughtless unaware (impeded on a bike lane) unconscious undiscerning unmindful unobservant (especially of visual cues) unperceiving unreasoning unseeing (sometimes) I am: hasty (I often cross too early) heedless impetuous inconsiderate irrational mindless rash 130

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reckless (I have walked without a cane) senseless (I have driven a motor vehicle) shortsighted thoughtless unseeing unthinking violent wild (I have driven a motor vehicle) I am: blocked closed closed at one end concealed dark a dead-end dim disguised impassable leading nowhere obscured obstructed secluded unmarked without exit. It wasn’t until 2010 that I met people who were interested in joining me and learning how to walk with their eyes closed. I remember asking my classmates in the art and social practice MFA programme to humour me and meet me in front of the arts building on a sunny afternoon. Then I told them to line up behind me and link arms with the person in front of them, and shut their eyes. I didn’t say for how long they would have to keep them shut, but I said that I would let them know when to open them. If anyone peeked, they had to tell me about it later. It was an exchange of trust. I trusted that everyone would participate, given the terms that I outlined. Everyone trusted me with their safety; maybe not at first, but when they opened their eyes and had confirmation that we didn’t lose anyone, I felt better about having them walk across campus for an hour. I figured that by dedicating themselves to a walk of that length they would immerse themselves in the experience and exercise their non-visual senses, something they rarely did in their daily routines. This experience with my classmates was the genesis of ‘Blind Field Shuttle’; a non-visual walking tour where groups of people line up behind me, link arms, and agree to shut their eyes for the duration of a roughly hour-long walk through cities and rural landscapes (see Figure 12.1). The largest group that I have taken on a walk included 90 participants, for my show How to Close Your Eyes at University of Tennessee Chattanooga in 2017. With a group that large, the human daisy chain becomes a disruption, stopping traffic and making a spectacle as it winds its way around obstacles. I find this work enjoyable for so many reasons, but the main enjoyment I get from it is the ability to meet groups of people who are interested in spending time with their eyes shut; not so they can get a sense of what it must be like for me, but in order to exercise their senses.

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Figure 12.1 ‘Blind Field Shuttle’ (2012), Carmen Papalia. Site-specific performance, San Francisco, CA, USA Source: Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit Jordan Reznick.

As someone who doesn’t use vision, witnessing the supportive communities that these walks have nurtured over the last eight years has convinced me that the projections of others are the most disabling. I know many of the challenges that I experience on a daily basis are a consequence of living in a visual culture but still, contending with these biases is exhausting. Sometimes I feel completely debilitated. Beyond the additional labour of translation and advocacy, I have had to unlearn my own visual biases; a process that began when I built a practice around the idea of resisting ocularcentrism. I am still engaged in this process of unlearning; looking is still so deeply rooted in my habits and the way I think. I constantly have to remind myself that looking is a choice. I have to remember, as a nonvisual learner, that I have the ability to acknowledge, map, and name entire unseen bodies of knowledge. Sometimes I wonder just how much I would thrive if I lived in a non-visual culture; or, at least, a culture that supported the different ways people learn. Open Access is a temporary, collectively held space where participants can find comfort in disclosing their needs and preferences with one another. It is a responsive support network that adapts as needs and available resources change. When I think about the tenet that I included as an introduction to this section, I think of my time with the Purple Thistle Centre; a free, open space for arts and activism in East Vancouver that was operated by a youth collective for nearly 15 years before its eventual closure in 2015. I was introduced to the Purple Thistle in 2011, when my friend Cecily Nicholson was editing a manuscript for the collection, Stay Solid: A Radical handbook for 132

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Youth.4 She approached me for a piece for the chapter on disability; it was my first opportunity to contribute to a book that was being published by a real publisher. For a first publishing gig it was a good one. I was told that my work would not only appear next to the work of a disabled artist who I admired – Sunaura Taylor – but that other contributors would include Noam Chomsky and Dan Savage. When I sent a message and accepted the invitation, Cecily sent me a prompt to respond to. It read, ‘what do you wish you knew when you were 16?’ I was hooked. I hurried to the Thistle’s website to learn more and eventually landed on the ‘History’ page. I discovered that the idea for the space was established in 2001, by a group of seven teenagers who occasionally met at their friend Matt Hern’s kitchen table to discuss what they were doing when they were the happiest and thriving. They talked about painting, writing, making films, building websites, sculpting, publishing zines, performing poetry, and making comics, and envisioned what a place where they could do all these things might look and feel like. These were the seeds that gave rise to what they lovingly called the Thistle; a space for youth liberation where young people decided what they wanted to do and adult allies helped make it happen; that is, if they were lucky enough to be invited. In the following months I learned that my inclusion in Stay Solid wasn’t the typical invitation to share my work with a community that had expressed interest; it was a chance to learn what the Thistle was all about. The frequently asked questions (FAQ) section on the Thistle site gave me a good sense of what I was in for. It wasn’t like any FAQ I had ever read, it was conversational, friendly, and bold; it let the reader – whatever their age – know where they fit in within the experiment that the participants wanted to keep alive. As an adult, I knew that I had to be invited in; and, once there, that I would be taking up space that was meant for someone else. It wasn’t a new concept for me but the idea of a space where everyone was dedicated to the project of youth liberation was. As I read on, I was curious to know how they approached being in community with one another; living well together in a creative community seemed to be the reason they established the space. Besides learning about their ‘no assholes’ policy – which acknowledged how ‘racism, sexism, classism, homo-/transphobia, ableism, and all other forms of aggression’5 would be challenged – I was drawn to their answer to the question ‘is it like a school? Are there teachers and students?’6 Their response read: We are often mistaken for an alternative school. We are not a school, not even a nice democratic one. Think of the Thistle as more of a resource centre, or better, an alternative to school! . . . People learn all the time at the thistle and there is a lot of sharing of knowledge and skills going on. We celebrate and strive for horizontal and friendly relationships between mentors and participants.7 As I spent time at the Thistle, I realised that these statements weren’t just aspirational, they described the day-to-day operations of the centre on a typical week. Learning at the Thistle was learning through experimentation, by failing, and maintaining relationships with people who experienced the world differently. The physical space was an example of this; the walls were an ever-changing array of drawings, scribbles, statements, notes, and temporary exhibitions by participants and people who had passed through. Sometimes the collective was into sewing so there were sewing machines everywhere; on my first visit the sewing machines were in storage and there was gardening equipment in the room where they used to be. The Thistle’s Guerrilla Gardeners, who maintained a community food 133

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forest, needed the space. There were animation tables, a computer lab, a loom, lockers, screen printing equipment, and a paid part-time mentor who introduced screen printing to anyone who wanted to learn. Its mission, along with its adaptability and responsiveness to the needs and preferences of its community, was the clearest example of accessibility in practice that I had witnessed. Open Access relies on those present, what their needs are and how they can find support with each other and in their communities. It is a perpetual negotiation of trust between those who practice support as a mutual exchange. In the spring of 2018, I started a six-month project titled Bodies of Knowledge, where I conducted interviews about the politics of support with six artists and organisers from diverse backgrounds whose practices were primarily based in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and Chinatown. I wanted to explore the conditions of access in each participant’s respective community after following the failures of the Accessible Canada campaign; a national consultation process through Employment and Social Development Canada that set out to inform a new federal accessibility plan – now Bill C-81, the Accessible Canada Act – and ‘spur a social change in regards to attitudes and beliefs about disability and accessibility’.8 After conducting live events across the country and promoting an online survey that posed the question ‘what does an accessible Canada mean to you?’ the Accessible Canada initiative heard from less than 1 per cent of the population that qualifies for disability support services under the terms outlined by the government of Canada. Data from the 6,000 participant surveys informed a list of so-called ‘priority areas’ for the resulting policy that would focus on ‘the built environment, service delivery, transportation, procurement, information/communications technology, and employment’.9 Not only did the report that presented these focus areas fail to mention ableism, social accessibility, and the ongoing and intergenerational effects of colonisation, organisers failed to conduct strategic outreach in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; where there are more support services per capita than anywhere else in the country. The following are the questions that I asked interview participants during Bodies of Knowledge. They were posed in an effort to frame a discussion about accessibility that moved beyond the scope of the Accessible Canada campaign.10 • • • • • •

When you think about accessibility or mutual care in the communities that you belong to/serve, what comes to mind? What does accessibility mean in your community and how is it practised? What are the current social, cultural, or political barriers to access in Vancouver/the neighbourhood/your community? What are the conditions that restrain agency? What areas are often overlooked when accessibility initiatives are discussed and put into action in Vancouver/the neighbourhood/your community? What support-based resources are the most vital in the neighbourhood/your community? What support-based resources are urgently needed? How would you characterise the informal support networks in the neighbourhood/ your community? How do people support each other in the midst of multiple systemic barriers? What examples of mutual care or interdependence have you witnessed in the neighbourhood/your community? 134

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• • • •

Is there a place in the neighbourhood/your community or an experience that you have had that you would characterise as being accessible? Alternatively, is there a place or experience that is disabling? How has ableism and its intersections with other forms of oppression impacted the people that you know in Vancouver/the neighbourhood/your community and the landscape of support-based resources that they have access to? When thinking about support, resilience, and survival in Vancouver/the neighbourhood/your community, what role does creativity or the radical imagination play? Who are the experts in the area of accessibility in Vancouver/the neighbourhood/your community and what forms of expertise do they hold?

My main takeaway from the Bodies of Knowledge interviews was that practising accessibility in the context of the Downtown Eastside – a resilient community that has endured five waves of displacement since colonisation – requires a deliberate, ongoing exchange with community that evolves with the changing social, cultural, and political conditions specific to the area, as well as an outlook that acknowledges the multiple systemic barriers that residents experience, which include – but are not limited to – social and cultural marginalisation, limited access to safe and affordable housing, trauma as the result of violence, abuse, racism, policing, institutionalisation, and the intergenerational effects of colonisation. Interview participants expressed, in addition to being responsive to these barriers, that those serving the community should centre residents as experts on their own needs, as they hold embodied forms of knowledge after being at the receiving end of initiatives that have failed them. My approach with the Bodies of Knowledge project was, in some way, an effort to address my fears in the wake of the Accessible Canada campaign; it was a way for me to start a dialogue about accessibility models that perpetuate reductive ideas regarding how bodies should function. For me, the groundswell of activity on the topic of accessibility felt like a chance to initiate a social and cultural shift around ableism. I imagined, along with the recommendations concerning employment and accessibility in public spaces, that the plan would include a cultural component that would inspire the unlearning of ableist premises and practices towards a cultural awareness around the systemic barriers that disabled people still face. At first, the Accessible Canada moment seemed like the perfect opportunity to address the troubling perceptions and power dynamics that have resulted from the ways that institutions have delivered care throughout history; conditions that have not only modelled relations between disabled and non-disabled people, but determined the measure of agency that care recipients have at any given time. I thought, maybe naively, that Bill C-81 would encourage the government of Canada to address restrictive accessibility programmes and prescriptive regimes and create a moment of reconciliation around the violence that governing bodies have perpetrated with programmes such as institutionalisation and family separation and assimilation programmes like residential schools and the Sixties Scoop. At the very least, I thought it could help rebuild trust with these communities and speak to those who still face incarceration and violence on the basis of their diagnosis. Sadly, after engaging the process, these kinds of changes don’t seem likely. When I posed these concerns to individuals who were leading the initiative, I got the sense that they were considering social accessibility a possible outcome of the policies that Bill C-81 would support, and not a priority area or action item itself. For me, this choice illustrated an approach to improving accessibility that was based on adjustments to existing infrastructure 135

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and industry standards rather than measures that acknowledged the deep-rooted and systematic effects of ableism; an approach that does not align with the widely held belief in the disability community that accessibility is relational. Considering it now, I can’t help but think of the practices and protocols that this new precedent-setting legislation will enforce as the ground floor of institutionalised care. I can’t help but wonder what accessibility could have been if it were approached as a long-term creative process. Open Access disrupts the disabling conditions that limit one’s agency and potential to thrive. It reimagines normalcy as a continuum of embodiments, identities, realities, and learning styles, and operates under the tenet that interdependence is central to a radical restructuring of power. When people feel like they – or the institutions they work for – are failing at accessibility, they want to hear about something they can do to make things better. They usually want a new accessibility toolkit or a set of protocols that they can implement so the barriers that they are contending with go away immediately. When I’m answering questions after a presentation, there’s always someone who asks a version of the question ‘what is the low-hanging fruit when it comes to accessibility?’ I know they aren’t asking about publicly mandated accessibility measures, such as the ideal dimensions of an accessible restroom, or even the so-called best practices for galleries and museums that are outlined in the Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design.11 They aren’t asking about these things, because I let them know in advance that these resources represent the very least they can do to promote accessibility; they aren’t hard to find and they barely achieve more than ensuring people with certain access needs can enter a space that wasn’t built with them in mind. This is why, when I get this question, I use it as an opportunity to recount an exchange that I had with a director at a prominent Canadian museum in 2016, when she and I were checking in with each other after a day-long Open Access training session. We had spent the day establishing a new context for commitments to accessibility and public engagement with staff from all departments, when she pulled me aside and asked, ‘what would it take for this place to become openly accessible?’ I considered the question for a minute. I knew she was looking for action items and that the most effective actions were made in equal partnership with the communities that her institution was targeting with outreach initiatives. Then I remembered how some of the participants that day mentioned never having been in the same room with their co-workers from other departments, and how they didn’t have the opportunity to discuss their roles across the divides imposed by the institution before our workshop. For some reason, this inspired me to begin with structure. I suggested that an openly accessible museum would run on a collective model and operate in such a way so departments weren’t siloed. Then I laughed, adding that ‘it would also get rid of its board of directors and cut any donors that didn’t align with its mandate’. I knew these were radical proposals, so I paused for a moment in order for the director to chime in. I took her silence as a cue to continue. Then I started discussing the collection. First on my list was a repatriation programme, so the institution could return the belongings that it was still holding on to, which was about the least it could do to account for its role in reinforcing the museum’s origin as a colonial enterprise. I followed by mentioning ‘while you’re in the collection, you might also want to identify any works that the institution could stand to sell off in order to fund initiatives that are central to its goal of being openly accessible’; like public engagement and outreach programmes that centre participants as decision makers. Of course, this wouldn’t solve the 136

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institution’s problems completely: an openly accessible institution would likely follow these changes by hiring representatives from communities that were underrepresented and assigning them to staff, as well as connecting them to the institution’s wider public as advisors, consultants, and workers with decision-making power. I concluded my response by offering the occasion of our gathering as a potential starting point for further commitments. I told the director that time spent discussing accessibility in the ways we approached it during my visit was rare, and that our meeting could serve as an opportunity to build on the dialogue that we started if the institution was interested in moving in that direction. I suggested that they commit to having monthly accessibility meetings, so workers from all departments and levels of management could have the time to discuss their relationship to the topic from their own positions. Once they had reached an awareness around the conditions that informed access and public orientation at the institution, participants could develop a collective statement that articulated their hopes and intentions for the culture of care that they wanted to work towards. I encouraged them to start this process by making an inventory of the formal and informal resources that each worker and volunteer had access to, so they could find ways to redistribute this access to an individual or group that could make better use of it. Once I was back and settled in Vancouver, I wrote to the director to thank her for the time she set aside for our programme. In the interest of leaving her with something that I thought might help start the chain reaction that we discussed, I shared a prompt from a list of questions that I posed to prominent disabled artists when I interviewed them about managing support and advancing in their field. It read: ‘Envision a museum where you and the communities that you belong to/serve feel welcome and vital to the progression of the platform; describe the characteristics and conditions of the space.’ Now, as provinces across Canada respond to the passing of Bill C-81 with provincial standards for accessibility that align with the approach of the Accessible Canada Act, I have come to think of policy-based models for accessibility as little more than a governing body’s effort to institute care. In BC alone, the history of institutions perpetrating violence under the guise of care includes forced sterilisation programmes that ended in the 1970s and the incarceration of those requiring mental health support. In Vancouver, a decentralised network of grassroots cultural and service-based organisations has oriented themselves towards a responsiveness to these traumas and, in some cases, residents have banded together and collectively resisted their root causes. After holding conversations about accessibility in Vancouver over the last seven years, I think this mobilisation – towards accessibility as a living practice – is clearest in the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, where organisations employ specific practices and protocols that address the systemic barriers that those with complex needs typically face under service provision models that focus on accommodation and rehabilitation. For me, the interdependent network of galleries, drop-in centres, and service-based organisations that provide a combination of frontline advocacy, medical and support services and opportunities for art education, creative expression, and artistic development supports a culture of care that represents what it means to survive in Vancouver at the receiving end of a disabling power dynamic. While I consider this a hopeful example of accessibility in practice, it is worth noting that many of the organisations in the Downtown Eastside that effectively address survival-based needs consistently run at capacity, with a scarcity of resources, despite offering support options that are not available through the public health system.

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Figure 12.2 ‘Open Access Poster Typeface’ (2015), Carmen Papalia. Poster series produced in collaboration with WePress Collective for Tate Liverpool, Vancouver, BC, Canada Source: Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit Kristin Lantz.

Given the wide landscape of institutional medical and support services, and the service providers that offer prescriptive and restrictive support options within that landscape, I have started naming the few individuals and organisations that approach accessibility as a living agreement for mutual care as part of a new accessibility movement. Under this framing institutionalised care and accessibility derived from policy exists as but one part of the access ecology; the other part, which is alive within the disability arts movement and within grassroots communities that organise around survival-based needs, includes agreements for support that are guided by relationships and actions that are deliberate departures from the current paradigm. These examples, which are outliers given current accessibility ‘best practices’, deserve our consideration as they pose a vision for the future where those who require support can hold agency and honour all aspects of their identities and experiences.

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In my view, this approach is significant because it operates under the premise that accessibility requires an ongoing effort to hold space for a diversity of complex needs in ways that respond to a dominant culture that, at its root, is ableist. It connects the project of accessibility to what some would call disability justice because, in most places, those with atypical bodies, minds, and behaviour still have limited access to housing and employment; still face abuse and discrimination at work, when seeking medical services, and when participating in public life; still face not being trusted or understood when disclosing their needs; still navigate the common perception that their experiences represent lack or loss; and still have limited access to platforms where they can claim visibility, represent themselves, and share their stories with a wider culture. In my effort to advocate for accessibility beyond accommodation as an artist, I plan to continue to seek out practices and protocols that shift current standards in the area of accessibility and highlight this new accessibility movement.

Notes 1 Alice Wexler and John Derby, eds, Contemporary Art and Disability Studies (New York: Routledge, 2019). 2 Carmen Papalia, ‘A New Model for Access in the Museum’, Disability Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3 (2013), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3757/3280. 3 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). 4 Matt Hern, ed., Stay Solid: A Radical Handbook for Youth (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013). 5 Quotes derived from the FAQ section of the Purple Thistle website, www.purplethistle.ca/about/ faq. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Part of an email exchange between the author and James van Raalte, director general of Accessibility Secretariat Employment and Social Development Canada, 17 January 2018. 9 Government of Canada, Accessible Canada: Creating New Federal Accessibility Legislation – What We Learned from Canadians, www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/accessiblepeople-disabilities/reports/consultations-what-we-learned/asl.html. 10 From the interview-based artist-initiated research project, Bodies of Knowledge, conducted by the author in Vancouver, 2018. 11 Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Guidelines for Accessible Exhibition Design (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 2000).

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PART IV

Memory and Identity

13 SUSPENDED MEMORY Ebbs and Flows in Attempts at Memorialising in Post-Apartheid South Africa Jay Pather

In 2015, a student at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Chumani Maxwele, enacted a performance that launched a movement. On UCT’s Upper Campus, he threw excrement at a life-size concrete statue of one of the staunchest bastions of colonialism in Africa, Cecil John Rhodes. Soon after, the Rhodes Must Fall movement was launched, the effects of which travelled far beyond South Africa.1 Maxwele’s act got to the heart of a paradox in the advent of democracy in the country. Led by Nelson Mandela, South Africa achieved ‘peaceful’ democracy in 1994, but largely by striking a deal that guaranteed the retention of wealth and land by the white settlers of the country. This retention also meant, though not explicitly stated, that key monuments of colonial and apartheid leaders would remain. Maxwele’s act foregrounds not just the paradox of the persistent presence of colonial statues in the new democracy – symbols that epitomised the pervasive oppression of the majority of the population – but also the lack of meaningful transformation. In this chapter, I use Maxwele’s act of disruption as a prompt to consider the relationship between memory (and memorialising) and the development of identity in a society in transition – one that is barely holding on to civic structures that may generate a more confident and established sense of home, belonging, and identity. ‘What’ and ‘how’ we remember through public memorial is a fluid and dynamic negotiation between image, artefact, interpretation, and cultural context.2 The ‘ebbs and flows’ in the title of this chapter acknowledge the interplay between the fixed memorial and shifts in cultural contexts, especially in a new democracy like South Africa. South Africa has struggled to come to terms with the devastations of a brutal past, but in addition remains unresolved materially, and trapped within the very narrow land and wealth distribution models of the past. This unresolved political and economic climate is a turbulent context for the retention of edifices of the past and attempts to create new memorials. My chapter explores both the power and impotence of the static public memorial, charting this territory in South Africa through three sections: memory challenged, memory transformed, and memory recreated.

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Memory Challenged The memorial marks both time and, crucially, space. A commonly held belief is that the memorial marks a time past. In the case of a memorial that takes on the likeness of a figure whose nobility and deeds have created a present that flourishes in spite of or, indeed, because of, this past – what was ‘present’ for them – helps make sense of our present. An example in contemporary South Africa is the symbolic, impressionistic resemblance of Nelson Mandela’s face in Marco Cianfanelli’s sculpture Release (see Figure 13.1). On 5 August 1962 on a road outside a town called Howick in rural Kwa Zulu Natal, Nelson Mandela posing as a chauffeur was arrested. The arrest led to the Rivonia Trial, which resulted in the 27-year prison sentence. At this site, artist Marco Cianfanelli created a unique three-storey high sculpture of Mandela’s face. It is comprised of individual rods on which he also meticulously carved out tiny figures of people. These upstanding rods comprising the figures combine to create – at a reasonable viewing distance – an impressionistic, benign image of Mandela’s face. Because of its placement and the porous nature of the sculpture, the countryside may be viewed not only around the sculpture but through it, creating a wonderful dreamlike quality evoking a sense of memory but also a vital sense of hope and optimism. Time past and time present, as well as a certain confident nod to the future, are all there. But the retention of memorials from a fraught past casts a shadow: time is frozen and arrested. In South Africa this is not just a curious oddity.

Figure 13.1 Release (2012), Marco Cianfanelli. Nelson Mandela Capture Site, Howick, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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In South Africa, caught between the promise of change with the advent of democracy in 1994, and the reality of a largely untransformed society in which 65 per cent of the population continue to live in poverty over two decades later, processes of memorialisation mirror the discourse of arrested transformation, suspended in both time and space. Time past, present, and future bend and blend when policy and promise articulate an ungraspable reality, where lived reality mirrors that of the apartheid period, revealing continuities of gross abnegation. The act of remembering after apartheid comes with further contestations. Activist and intellectual Neville Alexander noted that we cannot afford to remember with the same passions, even though it is essential to remember. The act of remembering that a memorial triggers (recalling a human-made catastrophe, for example) is often seen as working to prevent its happening again; a reminder never to follow the same path – be it of violence, totalitarianism, or war that kills the innocent. South Africa’s Constitution Hill, which houses the Constitutional Court, serves as an unintended, yet undeniable memorial where rooms formerly used for torture and imprisonment mark the gross abuses of apartheid, while also containing new art installations that speak to a diverse future. But what if that which was meant to be memorialised still exists in some form? In South Africa, the material suffering in the wake of colonialism and apartheid was expected to come to an end in 1992 with the release of Mandela and many other activists. With the ushering of Mandela into power, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) sought to be a platform for recounting, listening, and healing through forgiveness. The atrocities recounted at the TRC hearings in the mid to late 1990s shocked international audiences, although it was all too familiar for black South Africans. The purging of emotions was no doubt a powerful journey for the victims and perpetrators of the extraordinary inventory of torture and killings that dominated the hearings. However, whereas the TRC sought confessions and forgiveness, in the main, from key figures responsible for state-sanctioned torture, repression, and killings, apartheid was about much more than the heinous acts of a few individuals. Most of the repressive population, Afrikaans and English-speaking white communities, acquired large tracts of land, opportunity for education and advancement, and job reservation. Apartheid was about what ordinary people did (and benefited from doing) to other ordinary people. And yet, there has never been any substantial material restitution to right these imbalances. The country’s gross economic inequalities persist. After Maxwele’s performance cited above, and in the aftermath of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, responses from the government went from muted to outright condemnation of the students’ actions. Radio personality Eusebius McKaiser wrote at the time that President Jacob Zuma had implied with the logical use of an analogy, that removing statues is a thoroughly bad idea, regardless of process concerns and regardless of transformation concerns. You don’t read a history textbook, he tells us, and rip out a page you come across that you don’t like or that hurts your feelings.3 Zuma’s ‘analogy’ is a very telling metaphor of the relationship between memorial and national identity. The conflation here of history, memory, and the developing identity of a nation is at the heart of the absurdity of his comment. History refers to a set of events, variously subjective but with verifiable facts. Memory plays with factually fluid continuities and discontinuities, allowing past and present and intimations of the future to fluctuate and 145

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coexist. History often implies something set in the past, epitomised in the unshakeable permanence of a stone sculpture. However, when indelible markers oversee the consequences of a complex history, they become incongruous and vexing. A more dynamic commemoration is called for. This problematises our notions of time – the misconception that apartheid’s affect exists in some distant past. So yes, an equestrian statue in front of the Houses of Parliament of Louis Botha, the first president of the Union of South Africa, and a figure who was ‘adamantly opposed to granting political rights . . . to black South Africans,’4 could be seen to remind us, like Holocaust memorials, of a terrible history that we can’t simply wipe out and indeed are urged not to. However, the incongruity arises when the experience of life during apartheid, as one might remember or learn about it, still resembles the present. This reinforces a notion that surfaces repeatedly in the fragmentation of our current society: the injunction to render current distresses invisible and to simplify historical reflection in order to continue the project of social cohesion, to deny the continuities of event and consequence and for time to be frozen. The resultant psychic violence (cut through by Maxwele’s action) is worth noting in also appreciating the power of the memorial. The erection of a memorial also changes space to varying degrees of affect, animating or anchoring an open public space such as an intersection of roads, an entry into a city, a place of worship, or a park. In the manner of freezing time described above, it is also my contention that the retention of a sculpture from a brutal past immobilises space. And where the intentions of the creators of the work do not match the work’s cultural context, the freezing of space through the retention of the memorial is not just odd; it becomes vexing and cruel. In recent years and with the unfolding of notions of decoloniality in museums and other public spaces, questions of the canon and the retention of colonial sculptures in contemporary times have emerged in various parts of the world. No less and of course with particular velocity in the context of the current Trump administration, this has also emerged with regards to the Confederate memorials in the United States. Kirk Savage’s work here is particularly relevant. He tellingly writes in the preface to his book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, that rarely do monuments confront the past or reckon with it. In a sense they do not deal seriously with history at all, because history is always messy and challenging and conflicted. Built by people with power and privilege, the memorial landscape usually channels their most deeply ingrained assumptions into selfjustifying fables.5 So, in the case of UCT’s Upper Campus, the presence of Cecil John Rhodes at the foot of a flight of stairs leading to the campus’s central gathering place on one side, and on the other overlooking Cape Town in all its majestic beauty, kept that space hermetically frozen inside of a colonial paradigm. It should be noted too that a single memorial or sculpture is not necessarily a challenge in itself to (or the arbiter of) the development of fragile identities in a country in transformation. At UCT, the Rhodes statue was the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The artworks task team, appointed by the university’s council in 2015 to investigate a range of matters pertaining to artworks on the university’s campuses, found that 68 plaques and statues celebrated achievements by white historical figures as opposed to 12 by their black counterparts, and that 79 per cent of the artworks purchased by the university were by 146

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white artists. The Rhodes statue, then, was part of a much broader interplay of factors and contexts that nurture or retard the development of identities. The positioning of these colonial monuments in key places, overlooking parliament, courts and national museums, also lends them a particular prominence, taking timeless custodianship over legal, parliamentary, and heritage spaces. It is telling that with the retention of a plethora of colonial statues in such spaces, the only large-scale, publicly prominent work of Nelson Mandela overlooks a shopping centre. The sculpture of an affable, smiling Mandela stands in the middle of the upmarket shopping mall, Sandton City, in what is known as the wealthiest square mile in Africa. The use of semiotics in tracing the intentions of the colonial-era memorial (and in South Africa its continued presence) as well as the responses of the publics that populate these spaces becomes crucial in locating the form, texture, and place of the memorial within a society in transition. In extending these notions of spatiality it is also instructive to consider how the country as a whole is so irrevocably and deeply affected by colonialism. The topography of South Africa reflects a schizophrenia, of a land promised and a land denied. Parliament and other grandiose official buildings are populated with members of the majority black government while the majority of the country’s black population live squashed into tiny townships. Vast tracts of the land continue to be owned and populated by white citizens who were given this land during colonialism and apartheid. The swelling of emotions and inertia that springs from the conflict between what was promised and what has been delivered, the continued violence that erupts in these highly strung, tightly wound spaces, combined with memories of apartheid and trauma are aided and abetted by a time and space disorientation. There have been other sculptures and memorials that have emerged in the new democracy, but these have been few and far between, and one perceives a hesitation beyond the transformation of sites of repression as monumental spaces of memory. Memorials such as the Robben Island Memorial, a tiny island off the coast of Cape Town where political prisoners were imprisoned, serve as little more than a vehicle for dark tourism. The highly defined spatial containment of trauma, indicated with high concrete walls and, in the case of the Robben Island Memorial, accessible only by tourist boats, exacerbates the notion that these experiences are historical, and that South Africa has left them behind. There is an ongoing pathos that surrounds memorial projects such as the Apartheid Museum and Constitution Hill, standing as they do in the midst of ongoing poverty and human degradation. It could be argued that the most significant and pervasive national memorial is actually the Natives Land Act of 1913, which inscribed separation.6 Although the Act was abolished by the new government, its debilitating effects persist. Spatially at least, the Act can be seen as an unending reminder of the realism and continued inscription of colonisation; a largescale memorial that freezes time and space, causing much psychic disorientation and arresting identity formation. If one understands the Land Act in this manner – as a pernicious and pervasive memorial in itself – what other memorials, and of what size and scope, can possibly offset this? What is the place of the memorial in the midst of land that has not been returned to its rightful owners or shared among all the country’s inhabitants? In this scenario where a memorial could have tied in past, present, and future as well as anchor unwieldly tracts of space, the retention of apartheid-inscribed monuments, and spaces presents not a historical reference, but a particular kind of brutal irony. It should also be noted that an increased access to technology and the Internet has created a spatially charged unreality. In present-day South Africa, in stark contrast to 147

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apartheid, the image of wealth and desire is easily accessible on digital devices. These images, locked inside a small screen, may be intangible but they are being steadily and deeply embedded in a consciousness of want and of need, a consciousness aware of the continued assault on its humanity, and a consciousness fatigued by this. Hence, Maxwele’s stark reminder that the ‘past’ is very much present.

Memory Transformed Against the retention of sculptures that present an inertia in evolving identities, there are approaches to memorialisation in South Africa that take on new, unstable, inchoate meanings, suggesting that permanence must give way to suspended, incomplete arcs in temporalities on the ground that cannot simply settle down. The disruption of the singular meanings of static sculptures provides space to consider alternatives beyond the static object that connect memory with evolving identities or, rather, identities that slowly emerge from the strictures of colonial invisibilising. South African artist Willie Bester created a sculpture of the legendary Sarah Baartman who was taken to Europe in the eighteenth century and exhibited as a kind of freak show entertainment. Born in the Eastern Cape in 1789 to the Gonaquasub clan of the Khoikhoi peoples, the First Nations of South Africa, Baartman was sold into slavery at an early age by Dutch colonists. She was then taken abroad and exhibited with little or no clothing in England, Ireland, and France, where she suffered much abuse. Even after her death in Paris in 1815, her body parts were displayed at the Musée de l’Homme. It was only in 2002, at the request of Nelson Mandela, that her remains were returned and formally buried in the Eastern Cape. There have been several depictions of Sarah Baartman through visual and performance art. Inspired by a poem by Diana Ferrus, Bester created his sculpture in 2000. Ferrus’s poem evoked a call for Baartman’s return home:

I’ve come to take you home – home, remember the veld? the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.7 Bester created a life-size sculpture of imposing beauty, employing his trademark use of industrial waste materials, metal, and copper. The sculpture was subsequently purchased by UCT and exhibited in front of the main library on the university’s Upper Campus. The work came into sharp focus in 2016 during the Rhodes Must Fall and then the Fees Must Fall movements, when students created a performance ritual and procession that ended at the library in front of Bester’s sculpture. As part of the performed ritual, students wrapped black cloth around the sculpture that had depicted a near-naked Sarah Baartman. Students maintained that they were honouring Baartman’s memory as a reflection of their own experiences of violence. The country’s statistics of violence against women, and in particular black women, are among the highest in the world, evidenced, even during the time of the sculpture’s robing, by incidents of sexual assault of women students on campus. Students described the ritual as a symbolic act of preservation of black women’s bodies, explaining that the unadorned sculpture evokes trauma and exists as a reminder of the continued assault on women’s bodies in South Africa. They wished the sculpture to remain in its place, but to be covered as they had covered it. 148

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The backlash was strong. Writing in the Daily Maverick, Ivor Powell invoked artistic freedom: ‘What right, one might ask, does the university have to devalue Bester’s cultural and artistic expression? And according to what measures of student perception and experience is Bester’s work considered too hot to handle in the first place?’8 Bester himself compared the whole series of incidents to Nazism: ‘Now that is very Nazi. That was happening during the Hitler regime . . . they stole the art and they trashed everything. Now that is a good example of Nazi politics. I cannot describe it differently.’9 Several events followed. A white male librarian, William Daniels, removed the black cloth covering the sculpture, and the Black Womxn’s Collective, a collective of black female staff and students on the campus, then re-covered the sculpture, pinning parts of a manifesto to the fabric. With this to and fro on the memorial representation of a much maligned figure, ethics around gender rights seemed to compete with those of artistic freedom. The issues became murky and difficult to navigate. Resolving these questions is not the point or place of this chapter. However, the questions of memorialising and identity formation, and their place in societies of such contested transition, resurface over and over again. In the case of the Sarah Baartman sculpture, the idea of a stable memorial with singular meanings became contested as the Fallist movements foregrounded the pervasive invisibilising of black identities in Cape Town, generally, and in the university specifically. Here, it is not that identities are in flux, but society is taking on the recognition of those identities in much the same way that queer or trans identities are only slowly being acknowledged. Some years ago, it might have been enough to view the Sarah Baartman sculpture as a work in honour of a defiled human being. The impressionistic take on her near-naked physical features, placed on public display, may well have been seen as reassembling approximations of Baartman’s struggle to remain human in the midst of such depravity; a celebration of fortitude and resilience. However, it is the injunction to consider these resemblances as historical markers – in other words, that they function as reminders of a long and torturous history – that comes up for questioning. That such suffering is only historical foregrounds the ironic tension between the power and the impotence of the static memorial. Ironically, it is the daily presence of trauma that brings Bester’s sculpture and its intended meaning sharply into focus. Resilience, fortitude, and the ability to overcome trauma – qualities that are purportedly inscribed in such memorials – however, indicate that one should move on. In the face of its overwhelming presence, the memorial denoting ‘history’ evokes the emotion but becomes a kind of instrument for invisibilising continued abnegation. At some point in our history when reconciliation through the pursuit of truth seemed to suggest that a fully democratic, equitable society would follow, these historical actions felt poignant and optimistic – the beginnings of a new nation. Mandela’s summonsing of Baartman’s remains from the French government was clearly one of these actions, initiated to engender a process of reclamation and healing. However, the existence of the physical, static representation in an unchanged society should be questioned and interrogated. At the same time, with a growing affirmation and visibilising of vulnerable subjectivities and persisting inequities, the need to engage with these memorials becomes paramount. The question is probably not whether there are memorials at all, but how they reflect identities in transition, identities that surface as a result of the acquisition of levels of power, identities 149

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caught in a nexus of affirmation and violation. How can memorials be interactive and cognisant of sometimes turbulent change as well as baffling inertia? Memorials seem to suggest a sealing up of truth, but how confident can we be that the truth about a particular event or person is finite and agreed upon within the context it appears? What happens when these contexts shift? In South Africa today, the memorial is being asked to do much more than simply mark history as though it were a finite passage of time. Memory is reflexive and shifting. The memorial as a product of a static view of history may find itself not quite dormant, but contested and capable of invoking rage. Unable to continue the dialogue between the artist and the students, and in the wake of the threat of legal action against the university for censorship, Bester’s Sarah Baartman currently languishes in storage.

Memory Recreated Outside of the officially commissioned memorial, artists have addressed, through a variety of modes, the contrivances around objects of memory that freeze space and time and arrest the formation of identity. It is significant that the most compelling works have been temporary, sometimes performative, lasting the duration of the performance and existing afterwards in memory, in a photographic or video archive, or as temporary installations. In their transience, they point to dynamic ways of thinking about memory and identity in South Africa. Several works for the Infecting the City festival, a public arts festival held in Cape Town, have combined notions of memory, pathos, and bathos in performative interventions. The idea of an ‘infection’ is significant given that the city’s well-manicured central spaces are often impinged upon for the duration of the festival by artists who emerge from far-flung townships, and especially artists wanting to create public interventions or disruptions. One of many such artists is Lesiba Mabitsela who has created several public interventions drawing on his background in performance, fashion, and installation. Mabitsela created an intervention for Infecting the City 2015 titled The Man in the Green Blanket. The green blanket was a reference to a blanket worn by Mgcineni Noki who, in 2012, was among the 34 miners who were shot and killed during a non-violent strike in a town called Marikana in the North West Province. The killings implicated current president Cyril Ramaphosa, who was one of the heads of the mine in question (Lonmin) and who had tacitly agreed to the attack in an email.10 Noki, a very visible presence in his bright green blanket, spoke openly and passionately during the time of the strike and was among the first to be shot. In his work, Mabitsela deployed five performers in garments made from green blankets to walk from different locations around the city, ‘disabling the collective ignorance of a nation that knows of (Noki) only as a symbol referencing the Marikana Massacre, and encouraging a human connection with those who suffered.’11 In his death, Noki epitomised the building of a particular identity in the post-apartheid state – one that encompassed the vulnerability and fragility of the country’s poorest population. Since the 2012 killing of 34 striking miners at the Marikana Mine (the Marikana Massacre), the figure with the green blanket has spread as an icon across the country in a variety of contexts. While established artists such as sculptor Pitika Ntuli have created sculptures of Noki, it is the temporary, fleeting work of such artists as Tokolos Stencil, a collective of underground graffiti artists, that has affirmed these fragile grasps at identity formation in the public realm. Tokolos Stencil created works on pavements, on the exposed portable toilets that shamefully 150

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populate some of Cape Town’s townships, and on official buildings and colonial memorials. In 2015, after posting on Facebook about their actions, the collective’s post was removed and their account closed. This has not stopped them or several other mercuric, short-term, and performative memorials that have appeared commemorating Noki as a symbol of a new kind of resistance in post-apartheid South Africa. Among the most evocative interventions in recreating the development of identity through forms of memorialisation that meet the challenges of a South African society in transition have been the performative sculptures of artist Sethembile Msezane. Msezane is a visual artist who has incorporated performance as part of her practice. Much of her recent work has foregrounded the reinsertion of lost histories. Drawing on an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses performance, photography, film, sculpture, and drawing, Msezane’s work calls attention, in particular, to the absence of the black female body in historical narratives and physical spaces of historical commemoration. In her performative sculptures, Msezane stands on a plinth for several hours at a time, silently overlooking a public space. Deceptively simple in its conception, the works critique a very specific context, Cape Town, where the dearth of works by and about black women is conspicuous in its absence. This loaded context has inspired the work but Msezane’s sculptures do more than make a demographic visible, as her Public Holiday Series comprising performance sculptures that mark national holidays demonstrate. For a country slow to create interactive memorials of apartheid, South Africa seems to make up for this with the number of public holidays as memorials. These include Freedom Day, Workers Day, Youth Day, Women’s Day, Heritage Day, and Day of Reconciliation. All of these have their reference to a significant moment in South Africa’s political history, such as the day Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president (Freedom Day) and the killing of students by the apartheid regime in June 1976 (Youth Day) – a watershed moment in South African resistance history. On these days, over a number of years, Msezane created a performance sculpture on top of a plinth, often placed in relation to an existing colonial sculpture or a significant site, as a response to these memorials as well as an initiator of invisible identities made newly prominent and visible. She has created a particularly significant work for Women’s Day, strategically using the Freedom Square site in Langa (a township on the outskirts of Cape Town) in the guise of her great grandmother, Gog’ MaShange. It is significant that the contested public holiday, Heritage Day, saw the beginning of Msezane’s performance sculpture series. Heritage Day, 24 September, was known as Shaka Day from the days of apartheid. Celebrated largely in KwaZulu Natal, the home of King Shaka, the day honoured ‘the man who used his spear to embroider together a diverse collection of tribes and clans into one mighty cultural quilt’.12 In the presentation of public holidays in parliament in 1994, Shaka Day was absent, much to the chagrin of Mangosuthu Buthelezi, leader of the KwaZulu Natal-based Inkatha Freedom Party. This was subsequently incorporated into the public holidays and became Heritage Day, sanctioned by Nelson Mandela, who stated: ‘When our first democraticallyelected government decided to make Heritage Day one of our national days, we did so because we knew that our rich and varied cultural heritage has a profound power to help build our new nation.’13 However, the question of what heritage is celebrated and how to go about marking the loosely termed ‘common heritage’ soon began to epitomise the deep schisms in the nation that were being papered over. The matter became even more absurd when the holiday was proposed by an Afrikaans-speaking accountant, Jan Scannell, with the nomenclature Braai4Heritage, calling on 151

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people to have a braai on Heritage Day and changing Heritage Day to Braai Day. The ‘braai’ is an Afrikaans word meaning barbeque, a means for partying and socialising. The idea was supported by no less than struggle icon Desmond Tutu who said in an interview: We’re going to have this wonderful thing on the 24th of this month . . . when we all gather round one fire . . . It’s a fantastic thing, a very simple idea. Irrespective of your politics, of your culture, of your race, of your whatever, hierdie ding doen ons saam [we do this thing together] . . . just South Africans doing one thing together, and recognising that we are a fantastic nation.14 The desperation for a united country rings through in the archbishop’s words and resonates no less in the hopes of South Africans anxious to leave apartheid behind and build a new nation. But ultimately, this holiday and its shifting and shifty reinvention, and significantly, the preponderance of men in the debate, yet again foregrounds the perpetual blind spots of our time. By contrast, Msezane’s sculpture commemorating Heritage Day draws us into a space of quiet reflection (see Figure 13.2). She stands for several hours under the hot sun, on a plinth with a dangerously small area to perch on, placed diagonally across from the statue (referenced above) of Louis Botha in front of parliament. Msezane is dressed in garments that emerge from classical Zulu tradition, as required of a woman performing a ‘coming-ofage’ ritual. It is a deft and powerful move. The ‘coming of age’ is about time, about slowly thawing identities especially that of a black South African woman in the wake of both patriarchal and racist disavowal and erasure. Beyond the Public Holiday Series, perhaps Msezane’s most startling work was her performance of Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell on a plinth in close proximity to the sculpture of Cecil John Rhodes, at the moment the sculpture was being removed in 2015. Wearing a traditional beaded veil and wings resembling the Chapungu bird, her performance was remarkable on many levels beyond its timing to coincide with the removal of the statue. The chapungu bird is a reference to one of eight soapstone birds removed from then Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and still in possession by the Rhodes estate today. Msezane explained that: The performance of Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell captures the spirit of the time as embodied through myself as a millennial. It is in this time that I, a few years older than South Africa’s democracy, use performance as a societal response to the discontent with the ideal of the ‘Rainbow Nation’. Twenty-three years after apartheid, a generation of radicals has emerged. The presence of Chapungu and Rhodes in the same location and time asks questions related to power, gender, identity, space, history-making and self-representation.15 Msezane’s works bring us back to notions of time, space, memorialisation, and the inchoate representation of identity in a South Africa still in transition. Like the sculpture about to be removed, there is the appearance of frozen time and a frozen space in Msezane’s performance as she takes on the qualities of a static memorial. However, in this evocation, she actively ‘puts right’ the city and the country’s desperate lack of representation of black women, and so unfreezes time and identity. More than anything though, we are patently aware that she is alive, and that this triumphant endurance work will end. This temporariness marks her fragility and vulnerability in a society that still renders black women invisible and economically bereft. In 152

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Figure 13.2 Untitled (Heritage Day), Public Holiday Series (2013), Sethembile Msezane. House of Parliament, Cape Town, South Africa Source: Courtesy of the artist.

a broader reading of the work, unlike the overpopulation of static, imperious, built-in-stone white men that continue to litter Cape Town beyond the vacated Rhodes statue, the artist seems to acknowledge her transience, and the fluidity of her own identity. The affirmation of the memorial as performative and mercurial comes closest to inspiring the formation of identities. As governments the world over are guarding their borders and national identities more tightly and violently, it may be useful to consider, not least in the ebb and flow of identities in a country like South Africa, how memorials, like borders, may be porous and mercurial and that this realisation may nurture generative, mutable, and evolving identities.

Notes 1 Chumani Maxwele’s action in early 2015 was the catalyst for large-scale student protests under the banner of the Rhodes Must Fall movement and subsequently the Fees Must Fall movement.

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3 4 5 6

7 8

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10 11 12 13 14 15

These protests continued into 2016 and 2017 in universities across South Africa, casting a spotlight on institutionalised racism and sexism, and demanding free, quality, decolonised education. Federico Bellentani, ‘Monuments and Memorials in Changing Societies: A Semiotic and Geographical Approach’, SemiotiX, March 2018, https://semioticon.com/semiotix/2018/03/monu ments-and-memorials-in-changing-societies-a-semiotic-and-geographical-approach. Eusebius McKaiser, ‘#RhodesMustFall Hurts the ANC’, The Star, 4 May 2015, www.iol.co.za/ the-star/rhodesmustfall-hurts-the-anc-1853027. ‘Louis Botha: Prime Minister of South Africa’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/biog raphy/Louis-Botha. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), viii. The Natives Land Act of 1913 limited black land ownership to about 7 per cent of arable land, and ‘incorporated territorial segregation into legislation for the first time since [the] Union [of South Africa] in 1910’. South African History Online, ‘The Native Land Acts Is Passed’, 14 June 2013, www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/native-land-act-passed. Diana Ferrus, ‘A Poem for Sarah Baartman’, Sara I am Tara Blog, 8 April 2017, https://saraiamtara. wordpress.com/2017/04/08/a-poem-for-sarah-baartman. Ivor Powell, ‘The Art of UCT’s Max Price: Siding with Ignorance and Misperception’, Daily Maverick, 4 August 2017, www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2017-08-04-the-art-of-ucts-max-pricesiding-with-ignorance-and-misperception. Natalie Pertsovsky, ‘Sarah Baartman Sculptor Speaks Out Against Art Censorship,’ GroundUp, 5 June 2017, www.groundup.org.za/article/sara-baartman-sculptor-speaks-out-against-artcensorship. Graeme Hosken, ‘Marikana Inquiry Shown Ramaphosa Emails’, The Times, 24 October 2012, www.sowetanlive.co.za/news/2012-10-24-marikana-inquiry-shown-ramaphosa-emails. Lesiba Mabitsela, ‘The Man in the Green Blanket’, Infecting the City 2015, http://infectingthe city.com/2015/artwork/the-man-in-the-green-blanket. Fred Khumalo, ‘From Shaka Day to Heritage Day,’ eNCA, 24 September 2013, www.enca.com/ opinion/shaka-day-braai-day. ‘First Celebration of National Heritage Day’, South African History Online, 16 March 2011, www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/first-celebration-national-heritage-day. Ibid. Orms and Iziko Museums of South Africa, ‘The People’s Art: Chapungu – The Day Rhodes Fell’, Iziko, www.iziko.org.za/news/peoples-art-chapungu-day-rhodes-fell.

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14 THE DOUBLE ACT OF FLOWER TIME1 Raqs Media Collective

Prologue A flock of starlings takes flight. Starlings mimic, they click, wheeze, chatter, whistle, wolf-whistle, rattle, and pipe. They have a flock call, a threat call, an attack call, a snarl call, and a call for copulation. Starlings fall silent when guns start to speak. But a flock of starlings is called a murmuration because even when completely silent, the flapping of hundreds and thousands of starling wings makes a whoosh, a loud murmur that can be heard at a fair distance. The First World War forced a rapid drop in starling sightings.2 War is not only about fighting. War never is. Someone has to clean the mess. Someone has to touch the dead soldiers with their hands, Someone has to cook the food, Someone has to tend to the horses, Someone has to grease the wheels of tanks, Someone has to fetch water, Someone has to carry the loads that need carrying, Someone has to dig trenches, Someone has to dig wells, Someone has to clear mines, Someone has to play the flute on a foggy morning. War makes demands. It’s been heard there was a mule mutiny on the Bombay docks in the early years of the Great War. A pacifist mule, perhaps a conscientious objector or a rebel who did not want to fight the war of five kings, stood its ground and would not walk up the ramp on to the ship going to Iraq, though no mule after him dared break ranks. Some men

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then hoisted the beast on their shoulders and bore it triumphantly up the gangway and into the hold: that mule literally smiled over the trouble he was giving. Momentarily, the hostilities of the war are delayed because of one mule in Bombay.3 The sun is almost above. Three women-shaped ghosts, three figures, extend their arms, turn away and towards. A drum beats, a dozen hands clap in rhythm and the figures turn and turn again. Who are these figures who haunt so?4

Scrawl-Lines to Thickets Figuring out what is remembered of the experience of life on a daily basis, or over a lifetime, or across lifetimes, is a perplexing endeavour. From a biological explanatory frame, forms of recollection (like other kinds of mental activity), are physical, biochemical-electrical processes occurring in the brain and the nervous system of human beings. Given the structure, composition, and finite capacity of the human brain, given that it is a jelly-like mass of entangled tissue encased in a bony case, it is almost impossible to visualise the accretion of individual bits of memory, of their infinite accumulation as physical units over time. Were this accumulation to have its way, the brain would soon run out of space. Our heads would ache and burst. No human head has room enough for all the moments of even a single day were they to be piled up as a cairn of memories. It is almost impossible to visualise memory as a ‘mere’ accretion of seconds, over a day, over a decade, over a lifetime. Humans fumble towards the future, keeping alive a thing, a process, an accumulation so transient, so incomplete, so ephemeral. Some remembrances strive to outdo time and oblivion through marks of permanence; it comes perhaps from a recognition and refusal of this fragility. And then, it is possible too, to think of acts and ways of living with both praise and anticipation, like repeated, anonymous offerings of flowers at the grave of the unknown soldier, as in our poet’s poignant epigram. Contemporary neuroscience has an account of long-term memory via the activity of the ‘memory molecule’ – calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II. It is alike in rats, raccoons, and humans. This substratum of biochemical-electrical process, a charged soup of enzymes and proteins, is the travel paths of sense data – vision, sound, smell, touch, even love or danger – from one neuron to another across synapses. A reawakened memory is the reactivation of a pathway. The more something is remembered, the more pathways become etched. When memories connect to memories, electrochemical paths meet and fork. Eventually, what forms is a thicket of recollections within a thicket of charged pathways. Memory, we could say, is the scrawling, hand-drawn map of this thicket. This is what a remembered life is. When memories from different lives intersect, we begin to grope at mingled webs of scrawls of lines. A small part of it is called history. Neurobiology further goes on to explain that an activation of electrochemical signal paths necessary for memory to form requires particular enzymes. These enzymes are already present within the brain and nervous system at a cellular level, in a molecular state. They rarely last longer than a few days, sometimes just a few hours. But, for a memory to be durable, these enzymes have to be functional in a sustained way across a larger span of time. It is here that the idea of memory chain comes in. The enzymes operate in clusters, staging 156

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synaptic relays of ‘off’, to another ‘on’, and recruiting new points, keeping the process going. Though individual molecules turn off, clusters themselves continue, ensuring that the ‘path’ stays open, despite a host of other biochemical storms in the brain.5 And so, memories endure. This ‘endurance’ is accompanied by a parallel process of ‘forgetting’ – a pruning of neuronal connections frees up memory.

Many of the men show a tendency to break into poetry, which I am inclined to regard as a rather ominous sign of mental disquietude.6

The Mnemes Dilemma Herodotus, defined what he was doing as an effort to ensure that the ‘deeds of men not be erased by time’.7 This ‘effort against erasure’ relied on the construction of structures and epitaphs that would or could act as concrete bearers of memory, an account of some humans and what had happened to them and by them, and how they would be remembered. Herodotus’s list of 14 of these mnemes – memory structures – in his account of the Persian wars, may be among the earliest objects to be recognised as ‘memorials’. These are not concrete instance of private remembrance to the deceased by surviving intimates – family and friends. Instead, the mnemes at Thermopylae that Herodotus talks about are structures dedicated to the perpetuation of public memorialisation. It is strangers made familiar, abridged and intelligible to strangers yet to come. Mnemes become relics; relics turn into ruins and disappear in the undergrowth of time. But the pathways they activate stay open, as gesture leads to gesture, and then another, in a chain of markings through time, across generations. Like an enzyme cluster. An instance of an idea may disintegrate, but it is quickly replaced by other mnemes that etch further nervous paths through history. Or not. Undergrowth can pull everything within it, rendering it unremarkable. The proliferation after the First World War of memorials to the ‘unknown soldier’ – the quintessential stranger of the twentieth century – is an instance of this at work.8 The war produced death on such an unprecedented, industrial scale, that the actual dimensions of mortality, and attempts to account for it, could be apprehended in symbolic terms not so much through the figure of the named individual but through the deployment of the figure of the statistical average of casualties – the ghostly residual trace of the anonymous and fatally injured body of an unknown everyman-at-arms. While detailed and meticulous keeping of the records of the dead and injured, with name, affiliation, and rank, did occur (and was sometimes faithfully engraved on stone, like in the inner walls of Delhi’s India Gate), it was the unnamed, unnumbered, unknown figure of the dead or ‘missing-in-action’ soldier that came to embody the consequences of the new kind of war that had been unleashed.

His thoughts begotten at clear sources, Apparently in air, fall from him Like chantering from an abundant Poet, as if he thought gladly, being Compelled thereto by an innate music.9 Typically, this spirit was kept animated by the burning of a gaslit ‘eternal flame’. 157

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A Paradox Don’t go don’t go Stay back my friend. Crazy people are packing up, Flowers are withering and friendships are breaking. Stay back my friend. O train, move slowly You have a passenger bound for Basra Hearing the news of the war Leaves of trees got burnt. War destroys towns and ports, it destroys huts Graves devour our flesh and blood Alas, I couldn’t talk to him to my heart’s content The string flew with the kite.10 Every year following the First World War has seen armed hostilities between nation states, or within a nation state as it combats with proto-state clusters.11 The figure of the unknown solider has multiplied exponentially. The invocation of this spectral body is occasioned by a new kind of war in a new century. It has left no country, no society, no culture untouched. Perhaps it is the single most pervasive figural move of the twentieth century. The unknown soldier is everywhere. The entire world is his shallow grave. The rash of commemoration from the First World War onwards, apart from cloning statues of soldiers at attention with their weapons presented in a funereal salute position, has laid down a template for a tone – heroic and sombre – of ‘public art’. It inflects murals, pavilion designs, statues of great men and some women, as well as different kinds of nonmilitary ‘memorial sculptures’ commemorating atrocities and tragedies. The tone that marks also carries within it a fatigue of the count, a loss of the count. Memory straddles a paradox. Inscribing a mark on a difficult and unstable surface of historical violence is always going to be tough. As time passes, reasons to remember historical violence of a not-so-long-ago war resurge if the rhetoric that had underwritten that episode resurrects in new incarnations, with new pressure points. At the same time, the ability to recall the particularity of attendant events grows weak. This paradox of memory is a negotiation between having to remember, the obligation to mourn, the uncertainty of moments and conditions of its activation, the inability to recall, and the slow grinding requirement to forget and move on. This, then, is the force field within which public art stands when it says it commemorates.

Hesitant Absences Here, at present, this is the state of affairs. Men feigning and pretending all kinds of sickness and being brought before all sorts of committees, get sent back . . . Since the fighting grew fierce, many men who can hear, pretend to be deaf, and those who can speak to be dumb, some complain of pains in the loins, knees, or body, others they have a giddiness in the head, or something the matter with their lungs . . . Because the doctors are a set of blind people, there are many diseases 158

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they cannot diagnose, so some men, feigning all kinds of illness, save their lives and get back to India. Otherwise it would be difficult, for there is no sign of the war stopping, or of peace being made, and the whole world is being destroyed.12

If I come alive. When I come back to India, I will rehearse to you the whole story, from beginning to end. Like a book of the Arabian Nights.13 A hundred years after 1919, the centenary of the First World War has occasioned a second wave of remembrance. The most important question here is how this repetition can avoid reproducing a set of ritual gestures fixed in habits and conventions of commemoration that were laid out in the first wave. As artists we were invited to undertake the making of a work during a remembrance in the United Kingdom. A total of 1,096,013 men from the Indian subcontinent were sent overseas to different theatres of the First World War – in Europe, Mesopotamia, Africa, and the Far East. Some 605,062 of these men were soldiers; 474,789 were non-combatants called followers (labourers, cleaners, animal keepers); 73,905 of these men (soldiers and non-combatants) were killed in action; and 69,214 came back from the war with serious injuries.14

Among Troops and Followers admitted to Kitchener Hospital with respect to various types of Insanity 145 Mania | Case Admitted 15 | Fighting Men 14 | Followers 01 146 Melancholia | Case Admitted 05 | Fighting Men 04 | Followers 01 133 Hysteria | Case Admitted 02 | Fighting Men 02 – At the time of writing this report (15/11/15) there are 10 cases remaining under treatment.15 We went into archives and repositories spread across Europe and India, building on previous material in our earlier work of an extraordinarily rich corpus of haunting words left by the men who were taken to distant battlefields in the war. We have made work in the past that was occasioned by a close reading of letters that men from the Indian subcontinent wrote from distant battlefields, hospitals, and barracks to wives, family, friends, comrades, and lovers back home (or in some cases, in other theatres of war).16 This time, we encountered the report of military censors who examined these letters and the medical reports that looked at the bodies and minds of these young men.17 Also, two images from the war front deeply struck us: one was an image of men dressed up as gods and goddesses, the other of four figures dancing, dressed as women. Doctors were trying to understand what was happening to the bodies and minds of these soldiers. We read letters written by soldiers early on in the war, in 1915, the contents of which suggested that something was going wrong with their minds. One of the military censors wrote that the letters display a tendency towards an excess of poetry, which he saw as ‘an ominous sign of mental disquietude’. While there was an awareness of psychological trauma, the authorities didn’t want to give it a name – they denied the diagnosis of shell shock that was clearly a widespread condition among soldiers, both from the subcontinent and the island of the United Kingdom. Shell shock assumes that the person who is shocked has a mental life, an inner life, and the army doctors were only willing to give that diagnosis to officers – men like themselves. 159

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The common conscripted soldier – the vast mass of fighting men from both the United Kingdom and the empire – was not seen ‘fit’ to have an inner life.18 It is in the terrain of inner life that singularities emerge and outstep generalities. In transcripts of letters and diaries, in close readings of medical records and official dispatches, in extracts from novels and poetry, in accounts of dreams and nightmares, in fragments of archival film and photography, and in spectral snatches of voices captured in 100-year-old sound recordings in a prisoner of war camp in Germany: in all these we sensed a range of experiences, testimonies, dreams, and moments of lucid sanity amid the burning fog of war. The photographs of cross-dressing soldiers dancing in the middle of a bitter siege in Iraq, and of a group of men arranged in a tableau – in the immediate wake of a folk performance in a prisoner of war camp – as beasts, divinities, dancers, and clowns – offer themselves to delineating an imaginative expansiveness, of embodiments of jijivisha, a word in Sanskrit evoking the intense desire to live in the midst of shock, injury, and death.

Ephemeral Intensities of Public Art

Figure 14.1 ‘Not Yet At Ease’, still from video. First shown at First Site, Colchester, as part of ‘14–18 Now: A Centennial Commemoration of the First World War Across the UK’ (2018), Raqs Media Collective Source: Raqs Media Collective.

WaikhaaN Chaar Chofairay, Jaani Nazzar Nah Away, Sãda Sabbar Farang’eay Nu Maar’ay. (I look all around but can’t see my darling, my patience full of suffering shall destroy the empire.)19

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In ‘Not Yet At Ease’, the voices of soldiers crackle and loop, merging and colliding with readings of reports and fragments of letters, into a labyrinth of whispers and dreams confronting statistics and animals, ghosts and field dispatches, the goddess Kali and a shipwreck, a soldier’s spinal column, the constant act of cleaning blood and flesh from a terrain amid changing seasons, the intermittent laying and sundering of railway lines, and the murmur of starlings. These thickets, these scrawls, and faint traces of a forgotten world, are unresolved and discontinuous, part in hibernation and part in flow. They cannot be brought to life in the present by an act of mere recall. That will not suffice to steer us into an awareness of the contestations, the allure, the density of an inner life battling for a hundred years. These are ephemeral intensities, traveling in time, layering, leaving, leavening, obscuring, and smudging entanglements. They seep into our time in conversations when we remember and commemorate. The density of inner life is where large battles – of territories, of production, of disobedience, of bonding, of intimacies, of other worlds – live, thrive, probe, thwart, divert, combat, mask, sediment, and detour. This surfacing stands in discomfort with the public art of the last century, and confronts metanarratives of affirmation, victory, or surrender. Public art in our time needs to do memory work that is tuned to the difficulty of recalling a force of a presence that dwells in a thick web of living. It needs to be alive to fluctuations of intricate inner worlds, and aware that contingencies will make some thickets give way, even as other thickets become expressed. Life continuously contests its own memory work, through claims on the conventions by which mnemes travel in time. Art, then, has to inspire acts akin to the offering of flowers to unmarked graves of its unknown strangers, ephemeral in their mark and enduring in their compassion.

Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous Not Yet Discovered Dead Not Yet Produced Alive Not Yet Recalled To Active Duty Not Yet At Ease.20

Notes 1 The phrase ‘flower time’ in the title of this chapter glosses an excerpt from the Urdu poem, ‘Gumnaam Sipahi ke Qabr Par’ (At the Grave of the Unknown Soldier) by Iftikhar Arif. The exact lines are as follows: ‘Sipā hı̄ aaj bhı̄ koı̄ nahı̄ ñ aayā , (na?) kisı̄ ne phuul hı̄ bheje’ (‘Soldier, once again, no one came today, but someone sent flowers. Or did no one send flowers?’). This poem is included in a collection of Arif’s poems, Iftikhar Arif, Mahr-e-Do Neem (London/ Delhi: Educational Publishing House, 1983/1984), 79. Freely translated. 2 Food began to run out, and many of the Indian troops could or would not eat what meat there was. The defenders’ draught animals, the oxen, were the first to go, followed by their horses, camels, and finally starlings, cats, dogs, and even hedgehogs. Ross Davies, ‘The Tragedy of Kut’, The Guardian, 20 November 2002, www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/20/iraq. features11. 3 The reference to the mutiny of a solitary mule in Bombay is taken from Heber Maitland Alexander, On Two Fronts: Being the Adventures of an Indian Mule Corps in France and Gallipoli (London: Heinemann, 1917). 4 Taken from the spoken-word script of ‘Not Yet At Ease’. The reference here is to a photograph that is treated and featured in one of the overall nine videos that are part of ‘Not Yet At Ease’. The specific photograph being referred to here is identifiable as ‘Indian Porter Corps Open Theatre

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6 7 8

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at Kut’, taken by Ariel Varges in Kut, Mesopotamia/Iraq, in 1918. Collection of the Imperial War Museum (Item Number: Q24576). © Imperial War Museum. Somdeb Banerjee, Chris Kim, Bomsol Lee, John Lisman, Rachael Neve, and Tom Rossetti, ‘Memory Erasure Experiments Indicate a Critical Role of CaMKII in Memory Storage’, Neuron 96, no. 1 (2017): 207–216. Report of Evelyn Berkeley Howell, chief censor of Indian military correspondence in France, January 1915. Herodotus, Histories, Book 1, Part 1, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). ‘The first “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier” was unveiled on the second anniversary of the armistice, 11 November 1920 . . . The unprecedented mobilisation of mass armies and the quasianonymous character of the war and of many of the fallen soldiers made his a universally understandable and seemingly pertinent solution.’ Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage 1870–1997 (London: Reaction Books, 1998), 78. Wallace Stevens, ‘Examination of the Hero at a Time of War’, in The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play, Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage, 2011), 198–205. This fragment (translation from Punjabi folk songs) is part of the spoken-word script of ‘Not Yet At Ease’. Such songs were composed by women addressed to men leaving to be soldiers in the War. This is quoted in a lecture titled ‘How They Suffered: World War One and Its Impact on Punjabis by Amarjit Chandan’. A transcript of this lecture can be retrieved from http://apnaorg. com/articles/amarjit/wwi. For a list of twentieth-century conflicts, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20thcentury_conflicts. Sadar Singh, Lady Hardinge Hospital, Brockenhurst, England, to Katoch, Ragbir Singh, Palompra tehsil, Kangra dist., Thural P.O., Punjab, India, May 1915. Letter written by Sahib Khan (soldier, Meerut Division Signalling Company, France) to his brother Abdullah Khan (soldier, 112th Cavalry, Shahdara, Swat, North West Frontier Province) on 15 March 1915. Both these letters are included among the letters (and their translations) that can be found in the files associated with the Reports of the Censor of Indian Mails in France, 1914–1918 held in the British Library’s collection of military materials that are part of the documents of the India Office Records. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914–1920 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922). A Report on Lunatic Asylums, Kitchener Indian Hospital, from February 1915 to November 15th, 1915 by Lieut. Col. J. M. Crawford, I.M.S. The Surface of Each Day Is a Different Planet, Raqs Media Collective, 2009. First installed in Tate Britain, 2009. See also www.e-flux.com/program/65364/raqs-media-collective. Not Yet At Ease by Raqs Media Collective, opened at First Site, Colchester, UK in September 2018, https://firstsite.uk/whats-on/1418-now-not-yet-at-ease. Several studies of the psychological impact of the experience of combat in the First World War were written both during and in the aftermath of the war by medical officers in the different armies that fought the war. Among the texts that reveal a differential attitude to the distress of officers and soldiers are: Montague David Eder, War Shock: The Psycho-Neuroses in War Psychology and Treatment (London: Heinemann, 1917), Montague David Eder was a temporary captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the medical officer in charge of the PsychoNeurological Department, Malta; Montague David Eder, ‘The Psycho-Pathology of War Neuroses’, Lancet 2 (12 August 1916): 168; Charles Bird, ‘From Home to the Charge: A Psychological Study of the Soldier’, American Journal of Psychology 28, no. 3 (July 1917): 323–324; Granville Stanley Hall, ‘Practical Applications of Psychology as Developed by the War’, Pedagogical Seminary: A Quarterly 26 (1919): 83–84. Specifically, Indian soldiers were seen as suffering from an ailment termed ‘trench back’, which was ostensibly a result of physiological stress, not psychological distress. This thesis was advanced by a John D. Sandes, a medical officer who treated Indian soldiers. He published his findings in the paper ‘“Trench Back” Treated by Sodium Salicylate Ionization by John D. Sandes, Captain I.M.S, Officer in charge of Electro-Therapeutic Institute, Kitchener Indian Hospital, Brighton’, British Medical Journal (7 August 1915): 215.

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The Double Act of Flower Time 19 This fragment (translation from Punjabi folk songs) is part of the spoken-word script of ‘Not Yet At Ease’, cited in Chandan, ‘How They Suffered’. Such songs were composed by women addressed to men leaving to be soldiers in the war. 20 The phrase ‘Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous’ (usually abbreviated as ‘NYDN’) is taken from Charles Myers, ‘Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock’, Lancet, 185, no. 4772 (1915): 316–330. The phrase ‘Not Yet At Ease’ echoes the second of the twin commands ‘Attention’ and ‘Stand At Ease’ used in military drill.

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15 (IN)FAMOUS Contemporary Lessons from History’s Heroes Jennifer Wingate

This chapter grew out of conversations with my American art students at St Francis College, over a decade of teaching about two Henry Ward Beecher sculptures in downtown Brooklyn, New York, and visiting the monuments in different seasons, political climates, and physical conditions (before, during, and after conservation). Ongoing debates about historical public sculpture in the United States present an occasion to re-evaluate the Beecher statues as ‘teachable monuments’, monuments that can promote dialogue about public history, memory, and the legacy of racial inequality. Here I highlight student responses to the Beecher monuments to emphasise the need for didactics, programming, and curricula that provide historical context and link related public monuments to one another. Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was a minister and reformer during the Civil War era who gained fame in the 1850s for his sermons at Plymouth Church, in Brooklyn Heights, where he used the pulpit to advocate for the abolition of slavery and held mock slave auctions to purchase the freedom of slaves. Tourists took ferries, dubbed ‘Beecher boats’, from Manhattan to Brooklyn to hear Beecher’s famous sermons. Today, many students at nearby St Francis College also commute to the neighbourhood from other parts of New York. However, if they notice the sculptures, few recognise Beecher, or know why Brooklyn was, and is, proud to call him their own. When asked to look more closely, and to conduct research about the first pastor of Plymouth Church, many identify the sculptures’ contradictions, ones rooted in those embodied by the man himself, and in nineteenth-century politics and social mores. Few students deny that Beecher’s support of abolitionism is worth remembering today, and few object to the maintenance costs paid by New York City to clean and preserve the monument erected in Brooklyn’s Columbus Park in 1891.1 The sculpture, which underwent conservation treatment in 2016 and 2017, is one of a select group of major older New York City monuments whose maintenance is funded by the city’s Adopta-Monument programme (Figure 15.1).2 At rededication exercises in June 2017, Brooklyn Borough president Eric Adams exclaimed, ‘We must become what this statue represents. This statue is renewed and we are renewed.’3 Beecher’s vocal support of a divisive cause and the way he stood up to the riotous crowds in Manchester, England, when he was on a speaking tour in 1863, make

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Figure 15.1 Henry Ward Beecher (1891), John Quincy Adams Ward. Columbus Park, New York, USA Source: Photo credit Jennifer Wingate.

him an apt symbol of the progressive borough of Brooklyn. Yet a significant percentage of students who visit the monument, modelled by sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward (1830–1910), with a pedestal by architect Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895), observe that it appears to contradict precisely that which is worth remembering about Beecher’s life and work. The sculpture does not communicate to contemporary audiences an image of Beecher as an unassailable force of good, but projects both the good intentions and the patronising racism of nineteenth-century moderate abolitionist sentiment. Like most historical figures, Beecher the man was more complex than history cares to remember. At the unveiling of the restored monument in 2017, his biographer, Debby Applegate, called him ‘a man of great passions and contradictions’.4 Just two months after the Beecher monument rededication exercises in Brooklyn, white supremacists protested the proposed removal of a monument to Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. The violent events that transpired intensified an ongoing period of reckoning with racist histories immortalised by public statuary around the United States.5 Re-evaluations of certain public sculptures had begun much earlier, in some instances as early as the time of their creation. However, Americans started urgently 165

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rethinking the influence of Confederate flags and monuments after the 2015 Emanuel African Episcopal Church massacre in Charleston, South Carolina. Municipalities and communities took newly pressing steps to remove public representations that serve as reminders of unjust pasts, in particular those perceived as leaving a legacy of inequality and oppression for today’s audiences. In September 2017, New York City’s mayor Bill de Blasio convened an Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. He tasked the commission with making recommendations for how New York ‘should address city-owned monuments . . . particularly those that are subject to sustained negative public reaction or may be viewed as inconsistent with the values of New York City’, a place that ‘prioritizes diversity, equity, and inclusion’. In their January 2018 report, commissioners articulated specific criteria for selecting monuments for evaluation. Eligibility should include two years or more of ‘sustained adverse public reaction, large-scale community opposition (as part of larger cultural/political concerns)’, recommendations by the local community board, and instances of ‘egregious historical oversight and/or revelation of new, significant information about the monument and what or whom it represents’.6 The short-lived commission did not choose the Beecher monument in Columbus Park for its 2017 review, nor did it choose sculptor Emma Stebbins’s Columbus statue (c.1867), located in the same plaza as Beecher, even though the commission did evaluate and offer suggestions concerning the Columbus Circle monument in Manhattan. These exclusions point to unstated criteria for selecting eligible monuments, such as political expediency and concern over the city’s image. This chapter examines the pedagogical function historical monuments serve, such as those, like the Columbus Park Beecher monument, that visualise ideologies offensive to contemporary audiences but are not deemed problematic enough (using the commission’s criteria) to evaluate for relocation, or those for which removal is not considered politically expedient. The Beecher monuments in Brooklyn are extraordinarily complex both because of the man they represent and how they represent him. I maintain that educators, art historians, public historians, community members, and city employees must work to better contextualise these artefacts. Anything but self-explanatory, the Beecher monument in Columbus Park is no longer appreciated by the public, if it ever was, on a purely aesthetic level as the last major monument by ‘the dean of American sculpture’, John Quincy Adams Ward (see Figure 15.2). The sculpture requires on-site didactics, links to online information, and curricula for use in local schools to explain the sculpture’s narrative in a nineteenthcentury context. While the Beecher monument dedicated nearby in 1914 at Plymouth Church, is less ‘public’, and better contextualised by its location and by signage at the church, both monuments would benefit from efforts to link and activate them for contemporary audiences. In my classes, I assign preparatory reading for historical context.7 In addition, classroom discussions of Thomas Ball’s Freedman’s Memorial (Washington, DC, 1876) and other examples of nineteenth-century sculpture prepare students for the hierarchical visual language of the statue. Perhaps because they know what to expect, and because they have read laudatory information about Beecher, only a minority of my students directly express a strongly negative reaction to the Columbus Park Beecher monument when they complete their on-site worksheets. They nonetheless have described unsettling experiences of the sculpture. ‘Despite the role that he played, I stood in front of the monument feeling dominated’, one student wrote.8 Another student, over four years before the events in Charlottesville, that would prompt the removal of racist monuments across the country, wrote, ‘I believe the sculpture should be put in a museum rather than a public park. 166

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Figure 15.2 Henry Ward Beecher (1914), Gutzon Borglum. Plymouth Church, New York, USA Source: Photo credit Jennifer Wingate.

Columbus [Park] should have a monument in which African Americans are seen as equals instead of being placed at the foot of a white man.’9 Other students more recently wrote, ‘It looks like it contradicts what Henry was all about’, and ‘Henry was a man who did a lot of good for African Americans and this statue portrays him as being above them. A more accurate statue would have them all on the same level.’10 However, public monuments are only accurate in so much as they represent contemporary power structures. Equality between white New Yorkers and freed slaves was not a reality when Ward designed his sculpture. ‘Fundamentally’, as Applegate writes of Beecher’s lifetime, ‘most white Americans harbored a deep core of what can only be called racism’.11 Not only was Beecher ‘one of the most hated men in the Confederacy’, but most Northerners . . . blamed him and people like him for inciting the Rebellion’.12 Art historian Kirk Savage further explains the sculpture’s hierarchy in an interview with historian and curator, Paul Farber: The reasons why African Americans started to appear in sculpture only as subordinate or subservient figures to white heroes [are] . . . complex . . . But it all returns to 167

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the same basic issue of white supremacy . . . the idea that African Americans themselves played a significant part in their own liberation at this period of time is something that really wouldn’t be grappled with seriously until the mid to late 20th century.13 The same sculptor who made Brooklyn’s Beecher had modelled a heroic figure of a freedman (under two-feet tall) in 1863. Ward’s subject has a shackle on one wrist and is seated on a tree stump, looking as if he is about to lift himself to a standing position. The sculptor wrote to a patron, ‘I intended [the statuette] to express not one set free by any proclamation so much as by his own hour of freedom.’14 If, as Savage says, historians did not consider seriously the idea that African Americans played a significant part in their own liberation until the late twentieth century, Ward was ahead of his time for depicting a freedman as an agent of his own emancipation, even in a statuette not intended as a public monument. Ward’s tribute to Beecher made almost 30 years after The Freedman statuette, is an ideological regression. The portrait statue in Columbus Park features an over life-size and stern Beecher, wearing an overcoat and clutching his signature fedora at his side. Mrs Beecher sent both items of clothing to Ward’s studio when the sculptor was preparing his clay model. Beecher’s family also had invited Ward to the preacher’s deathbed to make a death mask, and along with photographs, the sculptor used these items to guide his portrait. In response to early concerns that Ward’s model did not represent an accurate likeness, the secretary of the Beecher Statue Fund defended it by writing, ‘Mr. Ward has represented Beecher as the public man, and had in mind, I believe, somewhat of the expression which must have appeared on Mr. Beecher’s countenance when facing the mob at Manchester. This may strike some as severe.’15 In other words, Beecher is shown looking stoically ahead as he mentally prepares to speak to ‘the most hostile audience he had ever seen’ in a huge hall in Manchester during a two-week speaking tour of the United Kingdom. Historians credit his British speeches for bringing him international fame and, along with his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for preventing the United Kingdom and France from supporting the Confederacy.16 The formidable figure is not in and of itself what makes this monument so much less progressive than Ward’s earlier statuette. Three figures adorn the stepped pedestal on which Beecher’s towering form stands: a freedwoman laying a palm frond at his feet on his proper right, and two orphan children, a boy and a girl, decorating his pedestal with a garland of oak leaves on Beecher’s proper left. Ward reportedly described the woman as a ‘genuine Virginian negress’ whom he modelled from life.17 ‘The face is upturned in awe and wonder at the great man who has done so much for her race’, wrote a journalist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1890. ‘Both her face and figure’, the article continued, ‘are typical of the ignorant negro of the plantation in slave days rather than of the quick-witted wide-awake negro of the cities today . . . The success of the effort is beyond question.’18 The author of Ward’s catalogue raisonné, Lewis Sharp, justified the presence of the freedwoman and children as representing ‘gratitude for the role he played in the abolitionist movement’ and ‘an expression of Beecher’s devotion to children’, respectively.19 This is how admirers have interpreted the figures ever since the model was first displayed in Ward’s studio. There are today, however, additional factors to contemplate when considering the meanings and impact of this sculpture in a public plaza in downtown Brooklyn. First, while Henry’s sister, Harriet, is still a well-recognised name, due to the role her popular novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin played attracting support for the abolitionist movement, one cannot 168

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assume that passers-by will recognise Henry or know that he supported the abolition of slavery.20 As of this writing, there is no plaque on the iron railing that surrounds the monument in Columbus Park. The sculpture itself bears only this inscription on the back of its granite pedestal: ‘Henry Ward Beecher/1813–1887/The grateful gift/of multitudes of/all classes creeds/and conditions/at home and abroad/to honor the great/apostle of the/ brotherhood of man.’ Second, students in recent years have singled out the figure of the freedwoman to support their interpretation of the Beecher sculpture as contradicting the humanitarian actions for which he is remembered. One wrote: ‘The statue reflects a view that slaves were helplessly waiting for a white savior like Beecher to help pull them out of their misery.’21 Another explained: The monument . . . shows [Beecher] as someone who is respected and honored by African Americans and Caucasians alike . . . . . . he is looking on a new horizon. However, there is a shadow of the ‘White Messiah Complex’: white man frees black slaves . . . The children and black woman seem to be honoring him, decorating his sculpture. However, the black slave seems as though she was looking at someone who is larger than life, thus undermining her worth as an African American.22 Students in the fall of 2017, in the context of a more heated political climate and greater discourse about the controversial nature of historical monuments, made specific references in their writing to how current politics inform perceptions of the sculpture and the need for didactics: This statue was made to honor him [Beecher] but here in this time of the world it seems to put him on a pedestal. Being treated like he was a god in the statue. The sculptor decided to put the people below him . . . My advice is take the women and kids off because . . . they look like they are worshipping him . . . Also put a plaque saying what he has done.23 This student suggested removing the sculptures from the pedestal to ameliorate the sculpture’s racism.24 There is precedent for Ward’s Beecher sculpture serving a commemorative function without the pedestal figures. When alumni of Amherst College, Beecher’s alma mater, dedicated a second cast of the Beecher statue, overseen by sculptor Daniel Chester French (after Ward’s death), on the college’s rural Massachusetts campus in 1915, the alumni committee in charge of the commission, which included architect William R. Mead, eliminated the pedestal figures, presumably to save money and time. Whether or not there were additional reasons for eliminating the figures, the result was satisfactory to George A. Plimpton, Amherst alum and trustee, who wrote, ‘I was in Amherst last Sunday, and I was tremendously pleased with the setting of the Beecher statue. I tell you, it is stunning! It looks infinitely better than it does in Brooklyn.’25 Two students, writing about their visits to the monument, moreover, made specific references to the potential for misinterpretation by passers-by due to lack of accessible information about Beecher: This monument, in my opinion, projects Henry Ward Beecher as one [who] is actually for slavery, rather than a man who opposes it . . . A woman approached me and was saying that her son was asking her if this guy was a slave owner, 169

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meanwhile he [Beecher] advocated for the complete opposite. So a plaque with info would provide people with the correct info. After all of the controversial statues being pulled down recently, I looked at it, and saw a young African American girl at his feet and thought he was a slave owner . . . People, like myself, just assume it’s another statue that could possibly be controversial.26 These reflections show how the sculpture’s message can be misleading. Moreover, recent controversies over Confederate monuments have made audiences more aware that historical public sculptures should not be taken at face value. Audience reception and the neighbourhood of downtown Brooklyn have both changed in tangible and intangible ways since 1985 when Sharpe wrote the catalogue raisonnée of Ward’s sculpture, but much more has changed since 1909 when art critic Montgomery Schuyler applauded the sculpture in Putnam’s Magazine. In the early years of the twentieth century, modernist public art had not yet overshadowed figurative sculpture and Ward was upheld as a master of the still revered portrait genre. Of his Brooklyn Beecher, Schuyler wrote, Few men, indeed, have so much ‘nature’ as Beecher had, and few portrait statues so much as this one . . . the expression of the attributes is carried into the heart and defiant pose of the burly figure, so that the statue is a ‘character-image’ apprehensible as far away as it can be seen.27 It is true that students, upon noticing this imposing statue as they walk north from St Francis through Columbus Park, recognise that Beecher was a man of charisma and power. Even Schuyler, though, expressed reservations about portrait sculpture as a genre: No doubt the vocation has its drawbacks as an art. Our desire to do honor to our dead is intense . . . when they are just dead. Hence such immortalization as the duration of perennial bronze can give to persons of importance in their day . . . the next generation, will gird and question.28 Even if art historians perceive the quality of the modelling of a particular portrait sculpture as absolute, the reputation of a portrait statue’s subject is vulnerable to changing opinion. In the case of the Beecher monument, the formidable bulk of this bronze portrait statue clearly articulates the man’s important role in Brooklyn’s history. However, the pedestal figures speak of nineteenth-century moderate abolitionism, preventing us from idealising the actions of this principled man. At the same time, we must exercise caution in how we judge historical personages. Beecher’s biographer speaks to the question of changing perspectives when she writes, 20th-century critics later belittled . . . Beecher’s antislavery work as sentimental, unsystematic, and pandering to white prejudice. But such criticism misreads the mind of the average American of the 19th century. It was a radical thing indeed to persuade free whites to feel a genuine kindship with enslaved blacks (or even free blacks, as Henry later did). This imaginative emotional exercise was crucial to recognizing blacks as fellow citizens.29 170

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Applegate herself does not idealise Beecher: he ‘was no William Lloyd Garrison’, she writes. He hedged on the question of states’ rights and was given to sudden reversals of opinion – reranking his values depending on the immediate threats. In general, he should be called a moderate. He hated slavery, but he loved the Union more.30 In other words, Beecher, like many public figures today, chose the politically expedient path forward. Just as historical perspective changes the meaning of a sculpture for its audience, so the physical landscape shapes audience perception. The sculpture of Beecher at Plymouth Church modelled for the centennial of his birth by sculptor Gutzon Borglum (1867–1941) serves as a foil against which to see Ward’s sculpture in Columbus Park. Visiting both helps students appreciate how location, as well as choices made by the respective artists, convey different ideas about Beecher’s character and influence the sculpture’s reception. The Columbus Park statue is located in a busy plaza, bordered by Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, courthouses, a post office, and a major public transportation hub, and crossed daily by streams of commuters. The steps of Borough Hall are increasingly the site of rallies, ranging from demonstrations of solidarity for Brooklyn’s Muslim community to student-led ‘march for our lives’ gun protests. Though Ward’s sculpture was removed from its original location facing Borough Hall in 1940, and currently presides over Columbus Park from its quieter opposite end, people use the benches that line this tree-lined northern section of the plaza in all but the coldest weather. The Beecher statue erected at Plymouth Church in 1914, though just a short walk from Columbus Park, might as well be in a different world. It is set back from a residential street in a small yard bordered on three sides by church buildings (see Figure 15.2). A waist-high iron fence forms the fourth side, separating the yard from the sidewalk and street. Though passers-by are free to walk through the gates and approach the sculpture, which is situated flush against the street-facing building beside a bronze relief of Abraham Lincoln, students experience how Borglum’s statue of Beecher is far ‘less public’ than Ward’s. Tucked away in a quiet space in the historic district of Brooklyn Heights, audiences read Borglum’s statue within the physical context of the church where Beecher was pastor. Moreover, a plaque on the sidewalk in front of the adjacent sanctuary features a photograph of Beecher and a biographical text. The Plymouth sculpture itself is more ‘welcoming’, just as the setting is more intimate. The face of Borglum’s Beecher is less stern, and his proper right arm is outstretched as if addressing his congregation and the sculpture’s audience. As with the Columbus Park statue, there are sculpted figures on the pedestal of Borglum’s sculpture. Interpretations of these pedestal figures vary, however, showing that this monument is also victim to the vagaries of perception and historical memory. Some students notice that Beecher’s proper left arm is gesturing down toward the figures as he addresses his audience with his right. They correctly interpret them as enslaved children whom Beecher fought to liberate. Borglum, according to newspaper reports in 1912, intended the figures to represent two particular slaves, the Edmonson sisters, whose freedom Beecher purchased by holding a mock auction.31 One girl looks up at Beecher, while the other hides her head in her sister’s lap. Later, the Brooklyn Eagle reported on Mrs Rose Ward Hunt’s visit to Plymouth Church in 1927. Rose Ward Hunt (Sallie Marie Diggs), known as ‘Pinky’ for her light complexion, is the best known of all the enslaved children whom Beecher freed in his sensationalist ‘auctions’. When Hunt returned to Plymouth Church in 1927, the Eagle published a photo 171

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of her standing at the Borglum statue, beside the sculpted pedestal figures, one of which, the caption claimed, represented her.32 Thus, just 13 years after the Plymouth statue’s unveiling, the sculpted figures’ identities had changed to align with the most romanticised story of Beecher’s abolitionist sermons. Borglum’s sculpture is just as potentially controversial as Ward’s, by presenting him as a white saviour with helpless enslaved children cowering at his feet, but the physical context of Plymouth Church, including the nearby plaque, contextualise the statue for passers-by. Borglum and Ward represented Beecher at Plymouth and in Columbus Park as his contemporaries desired to remember him and as those in succeeding decades mythologised him. However, the Plymouth statue’s location protects this monument from the public scrutiny Ward’s sculpture has faced. Ward’s sculpture did not meet the criteria of Mayor de Blasio’s Monument Commission for evaluation for relocation in 2017, but there was speculation that it might. The monument had been relatively free of reported controversy for many years.33 The biggest debates in its early years were over location. Beecher Statue Fund members had hoped to dedicate the monument in Prospect Park. Several newspaper editorials explained why it should be moved, or at least reoriented. The New York Tribune reported that Beecher’s son thought the statue should face away from City Hall (today Borough Hall) because in the original location, facing City Hall with its back to the park, ‘it looked as if his father had his back to the common people, with whom he was always in the closest sympathy’.34 The statue ultimately moved twice, in 1940 and 1960, due to plaza re-landscaping, and continued to garner attention in the press, mostly concerning relocations and maintenance. For many years, the community decorated and held services at the statue on Memorial Day. Though a comprehensive analysis of twentieth- and twenty-first-century reception is beyond the scope of this chapter, newspaper records reveal later examples of engagement and critique.35 Public art garners attention during moments of upheaval, and one of those was the period of reckoning after 9/11. On the first anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in lower Manhattan, a public art controversy erupted over artist Eric Fischl’s sculpture Falling Woman, installed in a concourse beneath Rockefeller Center. Because it was criticised as insensitive a year after 9/11 when New Yorkers had witnessed (in person or on TV) people jumping from the burning towers, the city removed the sculpture. A New York Times journalist used the occasion to reflect on changing opinions about public art, and asked readers ‘to nominate a work of public art they would like to see relegated to the dust bin’.36 A Brooklyn Heights resident nominated the Columbus Park Beecher. He wrote, I have seen people cringe when they see Beecher, standing larger than life on a pedestal, with a black girl (a freed slave?) at his feet gazing up at him as if he were gold. The statue reflects a view that slaves were helplessly waiting for a white savior like Beecher to pull them out of their misery.37 After another moment of turmoil, the events in Charlottesville in 2017, when news broke in September that Mayor de Blasio was convening a Monuments Commission, the New York Daily News included the Columbus Park Beecher statue in an article highlighting 23 of the city’s monuments to controversial historical figures. ‘With Mayor de Blasio vowing to scrutinize all of them in the coming months’, the article reported, ‘review of the city’s statue list found an astounding cast of historical characters whose heroism masks bloody exploits, racist views and corrupt behavior’.38 In this case, however, the article does not highlight the sculpture’s white supremacist hierarchy. Instead, it notes Beecher’s 1875 172

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adultery trial as the reason for why his statue was not appropriate for the city’s public spaces. It focused on the potential problem of the ‘who’ of historical monuments rather than the ‘how’, emphasising Beecher’s character flaws over his accomplishments, and not registering the misleading messages that the sculpture projects in contemporary times. In the case of the Beecher statues in downtown Brooklyn, both the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ are complex. Examining these sculptures together, how their individual contexts inform public reception, and how different artistic choices impact perception, is an exercise in learning how public history is made. Students engaging with these teachable monuments learn how to think critically as well to appreciate how history is always understood and constructed through the lens of the present. Encouraging students to recognise contradictions in public monuments is one step, asking them to go further by contextualising the roots of those contradictions and accounting for and analysing how physical environment and changing social mores influence reception is a second step that historical monument site visits can begin to accomplish.

Notes 1 Brooklyn became a borough of New York City seven years later in 1898. 2 Michele Bogart, Twitter post, 21 April 2019, 9:10 p.m., https://twitter.com/urbaninsideout/ status/1120132722264084481?s=21. 3 Andy Katz, ‘Henry Ward Beecher Monument Restoration Unveiled in Columbus Park’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 29 June 2017. 4 Ibid. 5 For a discussion of the reevaluation of Confederate monuments after 2015, see Sarah Beetham, ‘From Spray Cans to Minivans: Contesting the Legacy of Confederate Soldier Monuments in the Era of “Black Lives Matter”’, Public Art Dialogue 6, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 9–33. For perspectives on Charlottesville and the monument removals that followed, also see Catherine Clinton, ed., Confederate Statues and Memorialization (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019). 6 Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments and Markers, Report to the City of New York, January 2018, www1.nyc.gov/site/monuments/report/commission-report.page. 7 ‘His Statue Is Unveiled’, New York Times, 25 June 1891, 8, www.nycgovparks.org/parks/colum bus-park/monuments/102. I also have assigned an exercise where students use an online Brooklyn Eagle database to find articles about the sculpture pertaining to public engagement, reception, relocation, maintenance, etc. At least one class visited the Brooklyn Historical Society to see a scrapbook of hate mail and other correspondence Beecher saved. Henry Ward Beecher papers, ARC.212, Box 41. 8 Student blog post, February 2013, https://wordpress.com/view/fa1420amart.wordpress.com. 9 Student blog post, February 2013, https://fa1420amart.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/the-man-andthe-monument-henry-ward-beecher-at-columbus-park. 10 Student worksheets completed on site during class trip, October 2018, author’s files. 11 Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Image Books, 2006), 224. 12 Ibid., 5–6. 13 See http://monumentlab.com/podcast-1/2018/10/7/episode-02-kirk-savage-7psyb. 14 John Quincy Adams Ward to James Reid Lambdin, 1863, Albert Rosenthal Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, cited in Thayer Tolles, catalogue entry 55, The Freedman, in Thayer Tolles, ed., American Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Vol. 1: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born Before 1865 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), 140–145 (my emphasis). 15 ‘Affairs in Brooklyn. Defending the Beecher Statue Mr. Hinrichs Says . . .’, New York Tribune, 27 December 1889, 3. 16 Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 347–349. 17 ‘Seeing the Beecher Monument’, New York Tribune, 11 December 1890, 10.

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Jennifer Wingate 18 ‘Ward at Work. A Visit to the Sculptor of the Beecher Statue’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 11 December 1890, 1. 19 Lewis Sharp, John Quincy Adams Ward Dean of American Sculpture with a Catalogue Raisonné (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 237. 20 Of the 30–70 students who visit the monument(s) for my courses every semester, usually only those who have studied him for other St Francis classes have previous knowledge of Beecher. 21 Student worksheet, fall semester, 2014, author’s files. 22 Student worksheet, undated, 2013 or earlier, author’s files. 23 Student worksheet, fall semester 2017, author’s files. 24 In 2017, some students also perceived the sculpture as especially inspirational and as a symbol of justice: the sculpture is ‘extremely relevant to Americans and people around the world today. We are currently in a place where many groups are divided and a select few are trying to strip rights away from others who have a smaller voice. This monument speaks to African Americans, women, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ community. Beecher represents those who are out fighting for underrepresented groups, even when faced with a lot of opposition.’ Student blog post, 20 February 2017. An even greater number of students recognised the hierarchy of the sculpture but did not reflect critically on the meaning and impact of that hierarchy, or were unable to interpret the sculpture’s contradictory messages, underscoring the need to encourage critical analysis of public monuments. 25 Letter to Frank L. Babbot from George A. Plimpton, 6 March 1915, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, Buildings and Grounds Collection, Box 22, Folder 5. 26 Student worksheet, fall semester 2017, author’s files. 27 Montgomery Schuyler, ‘John Quincy Adams Ward: The Work of a Veteran Sculptor’, Putnam’s Magazine VI, no. 6 (September 1909): 649. 28 Ibid., 643. 29 Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 229. 30 Ibid., 224. 31 ‘Beecher Statue by Sculptor Borglum to Be Erected at Plymouth Church’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 27 September 1912, 26. 32 ‘“Pinky” Posed by Slave Statue’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 May 1927, 5. 33 A thorough overview of changing perceptions of Ward’s Beecher sculpture, including research on audience reception in the second half of the twentieth century through the present, is beyond the scope of the current chapter. 34 ‘Political and Personal’, New York Tribune, 5 February 1893, 21. 35 One Brooklyn newspaper notes a dramatisation of one of Beecher’s auctions as part of a Negro History Week programme at Trinity Parrish House in Brooklyn Heights. A thorough look at available records from local institutions and newspapers would paint a fuller picture of engagement with and reception of the Columbus Park monument. ‘Visit Statue’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 6 February 1954, 2. 36 ‘New York Voices’, New York Times, 6 October 2002, 14 (City Section). 37 Ibid. 38 Greg B. Smith, ‘A Look at Some of NYC’s Most Controversial Monuments as City Weights Whether to Remove Iconic Statues’, New York Daily News, 2 September 2017, www.nydailynews. com/new-york/city-remove-nyc-iconic-statues-article-1.3464427; Greg B. Smith, ‘Map: New York City’s Controversial Statues and Monuments’, New York Daily News, 8 September 2017, http://interactive.nydailynews.com/map/nyc-statues.

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16 PUBLIC ART, CULTURAL IDENTITY, AND THE RIVER OF OBLIVION José Quaresma1

Part I The allusion to a ‘river’ regarding the project Chiado/Carmo: Arts in the Public Sphere, a public art practice renewed every year, either in its themes that have a common horizon concerning artistic interaction, or in the authors that shape the artistic outcomes, is comprised of several meanings, of which we highlight two. The most evident of those is the fact that Chiado and Carmo (historic neighbourhoods situated in the heart of Lisbon, places where those experiences in the public sphere that I intend to present here, take place) rise up, crop the scenery, and incorporate the natural landscape of the estuary of the Tagus River (see Figure 16.1).

The Tagus leads to the world Beyond the Tagus there is America And the fortune of those who find it. No one ever thought about what’s beyond The river of my village. The river of my village doesn’t make one think of anything. Whoever is next to it is simply next to it.2 The vastness of the water ‘element’, the widening of the Tagus as it runs into the ocean, its mirror-like natural condition continuously involving us in the city hills (a phenomenon singularly captured in the above-cited verses of Alberto Caeiro, a heteronym of Fernando Pessoa, who was actually born in Chiado), casts upon these urban spaces a diaphanous interplay between urbanity and nature that provides a backdrop for a wide variety of interventions, whether stemming from near memories or distant memories, allowing the relentless construction of this place’s identity. Underpinned by this notion of a river acting as a ‘bed’ that rises and stretches along the two historic neighbourhoods of Chiado and Carmo, there is a simultaneous transformation of natural and urban spaces into places inhabited by artistic projects, with an individual or collective perspective. In other words, it gives rise to a creative modification of pre-existing spaces into places that are suitable for the needs of the public sphere and of the identity of those who build it – a qualitative passage between ‘space’ and ‘place’ of which John Rennie Short says: ‘Place is my space, our 175

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Figure 16.1 Tagus River (2010). Lisbon, Portugal Source: Photo credit Alexandre Nobre.

space . . . The more detailed the definitions of identity, the more they are associated with particular places.’3 The second meaning extracted from the ‘element river’ is related with the river of oblivion – Lethe4 – in the underworld Hades (Ancient Greece), a mythological metaphor that highlights the need to renew the project Arts in the Public Sphere, which I am pleased to coordinate annually. This is a project that expects its authors to explore new possibilities of public art, looking back to what was referred to as ‘new genre public art’,5 while moving hopefully to a ‘socially engaged practice’, a concern expressed by Cameron Cartiere and Martin Zebracki in their book The Everyday Practice of Public Art.6 This is something that I seek to reiterate each time the project emerges in public space. Returning to both meanings of the element ‘river’ and motivated by this new perspective of artistic intervention in the public domain, the reinterpretation I seek, in a deeper and also remote sense, is to indicate another ‘river’, the one suggested by Heraclitus at fragment B12,7 as metaphorical place of revival and continuous differentiation of all kinds of public art experiences: ‘On those stepping into rivers staying the same, other and other waters flow.’8 The second meaning of river specifies the act of doing ‘aesthetic violence’ against the ‘internalised past’ of the cultural and artistic experiences of these two historic neighbourhoods (in the modernist sense of a traumatic ‘forgetting’ of the past and emergence of artistic mutations). Somehow as if echoing what Carl Einstein stated about the sense of renewing artistic practice:

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No doubt that the conception of works of art contains a certain cruelty and sense of destruction. Because any precise form is an assassination of precedent versions of the world . . . More and more reality is broken down, making it less and less mandatory.9 This modernist resonance is considered here with a clear sense that the ‘symbolic’ violence, once projected outwards and backwards, eventually relapses and positively influences the authors of that symbolic ‘violence’. In fact, Chiado and Carmo constitute a very dense set of cultural spaces, and one cannot find in Lisbon (or indeed in Portugal), any other place that concentrates so many cultural institutions within such a small area: in only 500 square metres, we can walk through the doors of the San Carlos Opera House, the Faculty of Fine Arts, the Literary Society, the National Academy of Fine Arts, the Archaeological Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Theatre of San Luis, the Theatre of Trindade, the National Center for Culture, the National Ballet Company, among many other institutions. Symbolic ‘violence’ is exerted on these spaces, that is, places are scratched out in order to generate new artistic installations. To put it simply, art pieces are installed with the intention of refreshing the public sphere. In the context of a reflection on art in the public space that is based on the relationship between collective identity and history, let me enlighten the working horizon assumed over the past 11 years (the duration of the Arts in the Public Sphere project) about the public art practices and, in a wider scope, about the approaches that the arts exert upon the public sphere. Therefore, in addition to specific references that I share with other researchers in this field of artistic expression (i.e. the critical contributions of Suzanne Lacy, Patricia Phillips, Harriet Senie, Martin Zebracki, Cameron Cartiere, among others), I want to bring to the discussion multiple connections with Kant’s ‘unsocial sociability’ (ungesellige Geselligkeit; addressed in Critique of Judgement and in the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim),10 and the notion of ‘publicity’ (Öffentlichkeit), which anticipate contemporary themes of intersubjectivity and interaction for different purposes. Continuing to outline the project’s operative horizon I would like to point out a permanent link with two works of Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and The Theory of Communicative Action.11 Some works of Paul Ricoeur12 are also pertinent to this project, specifically regarding the problem of the engenderment of temporality through the poetic experience of reality, in which I include the production of public art. I should also mention the ideas of ‘public sphere’ and ‘metatopicality’13 as Charles Taylor conceives it, by which I mean the possibility of persons and communities to be concerned with similar issues without being in direct connection. We shall see how this ‘imaginary’ can erupt and manifest itself through the identity – and in the historical narrativity – of the Chiado and Carmo neighbourhoods, through the outcomes of art projects developed in loco, interrogating the notions of public sphere, identity, collective memory, and oblivion.

Part II Concerning the idea of ‘modern social imaginaries’, during the nineteenth century there was a certain ‘place’ in Chiado named Café Marrare, a ‘mythical’ café that condensed much of the cultural and political life of Lisbon due to the enormous visibility it acquired during the era of romanticism. It attracted prominent artistic, literary, and political protagonists, to the point where it came to establish the historic Chiado district itself (and by extension Lisbon) 177

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as the core of all cultural, public, and worldly effervescence in this country. In fact, the existence of this literary café, opened around 1820, comes at a time of profound transformation in a neighbourhood that was already characterised, for the last 500 years, as having a remarkable ‘civilisational gravity’, especially in terms of architectural and religious symbols. Before being catapulted into the public sphere and into ‘metatopicality’ as it began to emerge in several European cities through the transition from neoclassicism to romanticism, the Chiado area was steeped in a deeply religious atmosphere. This was attested by the number of closely located convents, including the Trindade Convent, the Boa-Hora Convent, the Espírito Santo da Pedreira Convent, the Carmo Convent (comprising the Carmo Church, founded in 1393, which I will refer to later), and finally, the convent of São Francisco, founded in 1217, where the Academy of Fine Arts (currently named the Faculty of Fine Arts) came to be housed more than six centuries later and where many of the artists who participated in the public art projects I wish to address here studied. In addition, two other decisive events arose that were influenced by other centres of ‘urbanity’ in Europe, under the spell of the Respublica Litteraria (Republic of Letters), the long-distance intellectual community in Europe and America during the Age of Enlightenment. One was a ‘natural’ event and the other ideological and civilisational, which radically transformed the spirit of Chiado and Carmo: the earthquake of 1 November 1755 and the extinction of religious orders by liberalism in 1834. Regarding the earthquake, this event caused such destruction that it left almost all of Chiado and Carmo in ruins, thus necessitating a systematic plan to recreate the spaces and pre-existing structures, both in the neighbourhoods mentioned above, but also in the contiguous areas such as Baixa Pombalina, Lisbon’s downtown. In relation to the ‘cultural earthquake’ that resulted in the extinction of the religious orders (and therefore the transformation of convents and the disposal of their assets to the National Treasury), the buildings’ uses and features also changed. They were turned into public institutions of a military nature, as in the case of Convento do Carmo, or given to academic and pedagogical purposes, as with the Convent of St Francisco, by integrating the public library and the Academy of Fine Arts. This new institutional regeneration of the public sphere provided the perfect environment for the opening of the Literary Society, founded by the poets Almeida Garrett and Alexandre Herculano in 1848 (both regulars at Café Marrare). In fact, the Literary Society still maintains its institutional role as part of Chiado’s cultural, artistic, and literary scene today and has hosted Chiado/Carmo: Art in the Public Sphere several times, in which public art projects are regularly developed and showcased. It was also the mid-nineteenth century (more precisely 1867) that became the starting point for the definition of a public art axis, integrating three poets, via the inauguration of a monument dedicated to Camões (1524–1580), a poet associated with the ‘epic’ of Portuguese discoveries. This bronze sculpture by Victor Bastos rises to an unprecedented height for the statuary standards of that time, settled in an octagonal basis completely filled with stone figures representing the sphere of literature and Portuguese Renaissance science: Fernão Lopes, Pedro Nunes, João de Barros, and others. On the slope that connects Camões Square and Almeida Garrett Street, one can find two more sculptural works radically different from the Camões laudatory sculpture (see Figure 16.2): the first is a bronze sculpture of the Renaissance poet António Ribeiro Chiado, attributed to sculptor Costa Mota in 1925, and located at the epicentre of this historic neighbourhood. The second is a bronze sculpture of the poet Fernando Pessoa, made by Lagoa Henriques, inaugurated in 1988, and set right on the terrace of Café A Brasileira.

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Figure 16.2 Chiado Square (2010). Lisbon, Portugal Source: Photo credit Alexandre Nobre.

One of the aspects that differentiates these two artworks from the Camões sculpture is the essential characteristic of conceiving a sculpture for public space that interacts with passers-by within urban space. As far as the sculpture representing António Ribeiro Chiado is concerned, the subject seems to be sitting on an unstable stool (two legs of the stool appear to be in the air) and it overlooks whoever walks down the street, gracefully extending an arm, giving a clear sign of communication, involvement, and empathy with the ‘generalised Other’ (to quote the words of American author George Herbert Mead).14 Such a way of conceiving and installing a sculpture in public space, back in 1925, was very distinct from the tradition that governed the deployment of carved figures into the urban landscape, as in the case of the Camões monument from 1867. This new attitude regarding sculpture in public space, more interactive and closer to the passers-by (something previously proposed by Rodin, at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance in the case of Les Bourgeois de Calais), is certainly more radical in the sculpture of the poet Fernando Pessoa. This piece was designed to effectively and constantly accommodate passers-by, insofar as it provides a simulacrum of the daily routine in a café such as Brasileira: on one of the corners of this literary café’s terrace, we find the figure of 179

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the poet sitting at the table, just as a regular customer, an empty chair (also cast in bronze) by his side, allowing visitors/spectators to sit and fancy themselves in conversation with the poet, sharing his ordinary daily routine, and thus bringing him to the present day. Briefly these are some signs of the public atmosphere that we get in Chiado and Carmo, the traditional quarters where we will find some of the public art projects that we use to develop new ways to practice our immersion in the ‘river of oblivion’. For the last 11 years, following the confluence of hundreds of artists from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon and other art institutions from Europe, New Zealand, and Brazil, many projects developed within the scope of Chiado/Carmo: Arts in the Public Sphere were carried out within this urban grid, already so dense in terms of narrativity and immemorial marks. A regular and consistent programme of public art was developed, showcasing twodimensional and three-dimensional pieces, performances, video, photography, as well as other media. As a result, artworks and installations have sometimes interacted directly with the ‘pulsing’ rhythm of the streets, staircases, and broader areas of Chiado and Carmo. Public art projects climbed and settled on the façades of certain businesses and stores, entered and settled in their shop windows, were collected in the form of daring interventions in the spaces of local religious temples (authorised by their officials, such as in the Basílica dos Mártires and the Igreja do Sacramento). Performances and lectures took place in the coffee houses, namely in the Café A Brasileira, longer lectures were held in the Grémio Literário (Literary Society), in the Archaeological Museum of Carmo, and in the Foyer of the San Carlos Opera (where other artworks were also installed). Artists transformed for a short while some pieces of traditional public art (as in 2010 with the sculpture of the poet António Ribeiro Chiado) and descended into the pit of the Baixa/Chiado subway station to install public works and interact with users/spectators, among many other interventions within the public space.

Part III Let me now present a more detailed description of some of the public art experiences designed for Chiado/Carmo, singling out four projects exhibited at the Archaeological Museum of Carmo as part of Chiado/Carmo: Arts in the Public Sphere. Indeed, given the aesthetic and museological orientation of the team that coordinates this institution, it has been possible to exhibit, in a place of such great historical and archaeological density, artworks by national and international artists. This ‘open museum’ is a place that benefits from the mixed condition of being simultaneously an open and enclosed space, that is to say it includes both a covered area (which houses part of its archaeological collection), and an uncovered area within the walls of the church, where a display of tombs, columns, baptismal fonts, and many other works lie under the open sky, among ruins and gothic ogives from the fourteenth century. In fact, the Archaeological Museum of Carmo is a very peculiar place that displays the wounds and traces of the devastation provoked by the earthquake on 1 November 1755; a phenomenon not just associated with the immanence of nature, but that quickly became a philosophical and theological theme concerning the ‘enigma of evil’ and human suffering. This is reflected in a quarrel in which Voltaire became involved at the beginning of 1756 with his Poème sur le Désastre de Lisbonne, also in Kant’s writings about the causes of this and other earthquakes, as well as Rousseau who polemicised with Voltaire about it, or Goëthe who in adulthood referred to his experience

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as a 6-year-old boy, listening to narratives of the heinous phenomenon, and reflecting on it in Dictung und Wahrheit. It is within the unusual interior of this building, an interior that is at the same time ‘exterior’ because it has no covering roof (there are no vaults or ceilings for the remaining naves or for the transept), that a visitor, in 2015, was surprised by Rita Castro’s installation, Praxinoscópio. From a geometric structure (180 x 250 centimetres) with a decagon as its matrix, the artist developed a project that integrated multiple artistic forms of knowledge: a creative use of geometry, a rich notion of housing spectators for a very short while inside the geometric structure, the presentation of ten xylographic images that allude to moments of pre-cinema, the ‘praxinoscope’, and finally a performative functionality of this device installed in the centre of the main nave of the Gothic church, producing a sustained rhythm of approach, visit, and withdrawal within the improvised enclosure. Within the same space, we also find the Brazilian artist Orlando Farya (Vitória, state of Espírito Santo) with A Noiva (The Bride), 2016, an artwork consisting of a translucent white cloth measuring 10 x 3 metres, installed in the main nave of the ruined church by means of its suspension on a beam that connects two columns to a height of 9 metres. This artistic intervention is characterised by its irony towards the marriages consecrated by the Catholic Church in their temples, interposing in the middle of the main nave an enormous surface that surrounds and transforms all passers-by into potential bridegrooms, promoting very singular performative and photographic situations. Meanwhile, in another nave, one can find the piece Frozen (2015) by Paulo Lourenço, a print embedded in a thick layer of paraffin of 76 centimetres in diameter, placed in a baptismal font. It is a gaze’s ‘nod’ coming to the surface from the bottom of a baptismal font, a site in which our need for voyeurism is eager for sacred images, with or without religious affection and liturgical rituals. From the bottom of the baptismal font a female figure appears, apparently petrified in layers of ice, a simulation that is obtained with semimilky and semi-translucent paraffin. Interwoven between wells and other baptismal fonts, Paul Lourenço’s piece is also a ‘sink of oblivion’ and alienation for the spectators who are leaning down towards it, because in the place of personal memories, that is, in the place of natural and narcissistic leaning down that characterises a spectator searching for personal reflections in the water, one finds there an unpleasant replacement of that anthropological need for reflection. Watching in the background the ceaseless narcissistic need for projection in contrast with the iced beauty of a strange image. In another ‘relationship’ with ‘eternity’, the artwork Reflexo-Eterno (Eternal Reflection), 2011, by Sofia Arez is a ‘sarcophagus mirror’ glued to a solid structure of MDF, leaning against a column and reflecting the spectators that seek it for selfies, while showing at the same time the other columns and the stripped ogives from the top of the building. It is a place where you can find various tombs, Inca mummies, Egyptian mummies, and other allusions to the passage from immanence to transcendence. Sofia Arez collects the external profile of the sarcophagus that is supposed to preserve the mummy of an Egyptian woman: Regarding the mummy preserved inside the sarcophagus, it is very incomplete, missing her head and upper limbs, and having the feet separated from the body, which was gutted. The linen bandages used to wrap the body are still preserved, whose anatomy also points to be[ing] a woman.15

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Sofia Arez has transformed the external limit of the sarcophagus described above in a specular plane, prompting the narcissistic vertigo of passers-by, an unexpected contact between the symbols of a remote past, absorbing everyday gazes, and the death dimension that waves to us from the bottom of the mirror, in a puzzling and glamorous reflection. Sofia Arez dedicates her artistic competence to a ‘forgotten’ past, making us feel embarrassment at this approach to a lack of life. As if we could listen to the echo of Allan Kaprow’s voice, in 1967, denigrating the museums, consigning them to mausoleums where they can venerate the dead: Allan Kaprow characterized museums [as] the mausoleums for paying respect to the dead. Though he noted museums’ ‘increasing concessions to the idea of art and life as being related’, he maintained ‘they provide canned life’ that is ‘like making love in a cemetery’.16 However, as the main function of this museum is the preservation of the symbols of the past (and of death), it modifies our fears of plastic vitality’s loss, insofar as the artistic intention of the author lives from the irony addressed to a narcissism that nourishes itself from a symbol of ‘Egyptism’. Among other motivations, in fact, we can also infer that it is a matter of feeling and ‘forgetting’ the veneration of the weight of death in Egyptian art, transforming this veneration into a narcissistic gesture of confrontation with self-image. On the one hand, it attracts the viewer to the brightness of his projected image in the mirror, and consequently his doubling in a selfie. On the other hand, the piece frames this spectator in an evocation of an already mummified time. Such a detailed comment on Sofia Arez’s work is justified on two grounds. First, because this piece was acquired by the Archaeological Museum of Carmo, thus changing from a temporary exhibit to a permanently showcased piece of the collection. The second reason is that contemporary public art, in addition to all experiences of motivated interaction, playfulness, and other forms of empathy, also must confront spectators with artistic situations not so much related to the logic of seduction and ‘attractive amenities’. By this, the plurality of its programmes must also contain the artistic reconfiguration of unpleasant themes: The idea of public art invokes experiences that co-exist and co-create with the dynamic conditions of the world at large. I genuinely lament that while there are pervasive forms and ideas of public art, its attractive amenities serve to distract, embellish, amend, or decorate a public site. Public art is a far more ambitious and consequential endeavour.17 Through Patricia Phillips’s ‘lament’, we have the opportunity to reassert less ‘monumental’ and less ‘triumphalist’ forms of individual and collective memory, seeking to create conditions for identity-building modalities that are more critical of institutionalised memory: more criticism of the excesses of ‘historical consciousness’, more catharsis, and less linearity regarding their symbolic and artistic narratives. Closer to acts of symbolic ‘violence’ and erasure, expressing the ‘unlearning’ of fear, as Nietzsche suggested in his posthumous manuscript The Will to Power,18 and being ready to immerse oneself in the ‘river of oblivion’ of public art, in its voluntary and involuntary unfolding. For these reasons I refer to a ‘river of oblivion’; the oblivion caused by the excesses of identity and of cultural sediments accumulated so ostentatiously, which may inhibit the manifestation of the ‘new’. 182

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As mentioned earlier in the chapter, in the traditional quarters of Chiado and Carmo we benefit from having before our eyes a real ‘element’ that actually involves us, the Tagus River, mirrored by the streets and buildings in which the artworks are installed. However, more than this surrounding and inspiring beauty it is also about alluding to the river Lethe, in its immemorial and anthropological dimension of a return, either to the thickening of these artistic historical places, or to its provocation, which consequently will open paths to the emergence of the ‘new’ in the public sphere.

Notes 1 I thank Diogo Freitas da Costa for his translation of this chapter, as well as the relentless commitment to finding apt solutions in the text’s conversion to English. I would also like to thank the photographer Alexandre Nobre for letting me use some of his photographs related with the public art projects he has developed in Chiado and Carmo, Lisbon. 2 Alberto Caeiro, ‘The Tagus Is More Beautiful Than the River That Runs Through My Village’, in Fernando Pessoa & Co. Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Richard Zenith (New York: Grove Press, 1998), 55. 3 John Rennie Short, Global Dimensions: Space, Place and the Contemporary World (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 15–16. 4 In ancient Greece and Rome Lethe was known as the river of oblivion; by drinking its waters one could forget the facts of one’s life and it could open the possibility of rebirth and reincarnation, getting ready for a new experience and a different world. There are many allusions to the river Lethe in Occidental culture (mythology, literature, philosophy, art, religion), namely in Book X of Plato’s Republic; Ovid’s Metamophosis; Dante’s Divine Comedy; or the poem ‘Spleen’ in Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, [1857] 2017), 120–123: Il n’a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété Où coule au lieu de sang l’eau verte du Léthé Or, in the same book (p. 242), the poem ‘Léthé’: Pour engloutir mes sanglots apaisés Rien ne me vaut l’abîme de ta couche; L’oubli puissant habite sur ta bouche, Et le Léthé coule dans tes baisers. 5 Suzanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (Toronto, ON: Bay Press, 1995). 6 Cameron Cartiere and Martin Zebracki, The Everyday Practice of Public Art: Art, Space, and Social Inclusion (New York: Routledge, 2015). 7 Among other versions of this notion of river, the fragment B12 by Heraclitus is a very strong image for the idea of ceaseless change and fluxism. 8 Patricia Curd and Daniel Graham, The Oxford Handbook of Presocratic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 173. 9 Carl Einstein, ‘L’enfance néolithique’, Documents 8 (1930), 479 (my translation). 10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1790] 2007), 41; Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James Schmidt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, [1784] 2009). 11 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1962] 1991); Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, vol. I, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1992). 12 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et Récit, vol. I (Paris: Le Seuil, 1983).

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José Quaresma 13 ‘Metatopicality’ or ‘metatopical space’ is a notion proposed by Charles Taylor in his book Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004): ‘But the public sphere, as we have been defining it, is something different. It transcends such topical spaces. We might say that it knits together a plurality of such spaces into one larger space of nonassembly . . . I want to call this larger kind of nonlocal common space “metatopical”. The public sphere which emerges in the eighteenth century is a metatopical common space . . . What is new is not metatopicality. The church and the state were already existing metatopical spaces. But getting clear about the novelty brings us to the essential features of modernity. We can articulate the new on two levels: what the public sphere does and what it is.’ Charles Taylor, ‘Modernity and the Rise of the Public Sphere’, paper delivered at The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 25 February 1992, Stanford University, CA, 229 (original emphasis). 14 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 15 José Arnaud and Célia Pereira, Guia do Museu Arqueológico do Carmo (Lisbon: AAP, 2019), 126. 16 Cher Krause Knight, Public Art: Theory, Practice and Populism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 56. 17 Patricia Phillips, ‘Short “Dialogue” with Patricia Philips’, in O Chiado e o Cinema. Do Cinematógrafo ao Videomapping. Artes na Esfera Pública, ed. José Quaresma (Lisbon: Associação dos Arqueólogos Portugueses, 2015), 210–211. 18 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York, Dover Thrift Editions, 2019).

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17 LUANDA’S EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHY Fabio Vanin

This chapter is based on the results of fieldwork conducted in 2013 in Luanda within the frame of international research1 that was set up to document and assess the impact of cultural events and public art on urban safety. Some of the questions that have been lying behind the study period highlight the strong relationship between urban development and city form, the state and the use of public spaces, the deep meaning of publicness in relation to urban security, and the role of the arts, as for example: what is the impact of public artworks and cultural events on the city? Are they able to start positive processes of urban regeneration or spatial resignification? Can they highlight urban insecurity? What is the impact of new forms of architecture that cause social disequilibrium and establish exclusive spatial uses for the (happy) few? How to deal with spaces that have neither a clear built form nor status (public/private)? When the majority of the population’s ‘rights to the city’ (Lefebvre) are not based on formal elements or visible traces but rather on ephemeral, invisible ones, how can the artist be an interpreter and a defender of these rights? Following the above-mentioned set of questions, Luanda has emerged as a key case to investigate the role of art in the public realm to overcome societal traumas, concerning collective memory and identity, and to address social justice matters in tense contexts such as the Angolan capital city.

Luanda’s Context In the contemporary Angolan scenario of peace, after a 27-year civil war that only ended in 2002, the background of the local art scene and production is rooted in the country’s recent history, the historical context of Luanda and its current urban transformations, as well as in the production of housing and public spaces by governmental and neoliberal forces. The Angolan capital represents, in fact, one of the most rapidly growing cities in Southern Africa and the fifth-largest metropolitan area after Cairo, Lagos, Kinshasa, and Johannesburg,2 with an annual average growth rate of 7 per cent over the past years, highlighting the quick emerging concentration of wealth. However, its census data put the current population of Luanda at 6.5 million, two-thirds of which still live in conditions of poverty,3 with a strong unequal distribution of resources and a power negotiation that is

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largely informal and invisible. That condition highlights the weakness of Luanda’s civil society and the lack of political clout of the majority of its population. That ambition has resulted in the city’s post-war reconstruction boom, which has transformed existing public spaces and created new ones, despite recorded socio-spatial inequalities and large-scale evictions. In that context the lively art scene in the Angolan capital is not reflected in permanent public art: both inherited and new examples occupy a marginal position in the cityscape and the commissioning of public art in the city is particularly weak. However, other forms of art in the public realm, from the production of the Luanda Triennial to informal events, unfold a rich and complex diversity that seems to better address and reflect contemporary socio-spatial issues. In an attempt to understand if Luanda’s public art and cultural events could play a role in its public realm, to the point at which they are able to enhance urban regeneration processes and turn the city into a safer environment, it was necessary to identify those cases in which the renovation of public spaces, the demolition of buildings, and the presence or absence of public artworks or cultural events in the city might suggest a tension between civil rights, open expression, and free circulation (of people and ideas) and attempts of control, repression, eviction, or hidden violence. Looking at Luanda’s most recent developments and its urban art scene, we can reflect on similar dynamics. Rapid urban transformations are imposing a city model that raises a series of serious questions about publicness, control, safety, and security. In this respect, especially due to the changes that the urban environment is undergoing, Luanda represents a case study where the balance between social security and inequality are emerging as an urgent issue, alongside the contrast between centre and periphery. Therefore, by questioning the contemporary urban form and its ongoing socio-spatial power relations, it is possible to unfold on the one hand the strict relation between urban growth and art production as direct expressions of political visions, social structures, culture, and uses, and, on the other hand, the risks of uncontrolled, unbalanced, and unshared decisions that might threaten Angolan collective memory and identity and their material– immaterial expressions in the urban realm.

Urban Development, City Form, and Public Spaces Public spaces in Luanda could be schematically classified into three groups: (1) those belonging to the former colonial city, (2) new ones resulting from the projects driven by the government, (3) and informal ones as a consequence of self-constructed settlements or unplanned spatial occupation. To understand their differences, it is necessary to briefly dive into urban development in the Angolan capital and reflect on its form. Until the recent economic crisis in 2016, Luanda has catalysed the ‘Africa rising’ narrative and the desire to transform the city as a world-class hub, shifting from the socalled ‘Paris of Africa’ – Luanda’s colonial nickname – towards the creation of ‘Africa’s new Dubai’.4 It can be described as a prototypical African city composed of three different parts characterised by fractures and formal differences: the city centre (former colonial core), the precarious peri-urban bairros surrounding the city (districts – former musseques) where most of the population live, and the southern gated areas (Luanda Sul and Belas). Those areas are expressions of Luanda’s urban history, but they also layout patterns of socio-economic differences and ways of living that are mirrored by their architectural form and urban spaces. Luanda’s early spatial structure is deeply linked to Portuguese colonial urbanism. The city quickly developed as a commercial harbour after the independence of Brazil (1822), the end 186

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of the slave trade (1836), and the opening to international shipping companies. It grew, starting from the bay, consolidating along the coastal line and the Baixa (‘downtown’), and progressively expanding towards the inland. Drafted during the nineteenth century, the urban structure of Luanda was based on a grid layout superimposed on an accentuated topography and it did not change until the beginning of the twentieth century when the city started to expand towards the upper grounds. However, it was only after the end of the Second World War, thanks to a flourishing economy5 and the emigration policies from Portugal (povoamento) that Luanda experienced rapid growth: new neighbourhoods were built and investments in civil construction resulted in an impressive production of the so-called ‘tropical architecture’ in Luanda, hit by a wave of the modernist movement. From the mid 1950s until independence in 1974, the urbanisation process in Luanda continued with the construction of important buildings and infrastructures that have structured the layout of the city as it is today, consolidating its form. With the conflicts for independence and the resulting civil war, Luanda stopped its formal growth until the ceasefire of 2002. During that period urban expansion was represented by the peripheral occupation of the city caused by the flux of migrants escaping from the conflicts who gave birth to a large number of informal settlements (bairros). The city’s post-war reconstruction boom has transformed existing public spaces and created new ones, despite recorded socio-spatial inequalities and large-scale evictions.6 After nearly 30 years of civil war and 11 years of conflicts for independence, the city appears today as the result of unprecedented violence where security issues, social frictions, and threats emerge in different ways in the urban realm, raising the question of the preservation and unfolding of the collective memory and identity in the city as an inclusive societal challenge, in contrast with top-down imposed generic futuristic exclusive visions. Moreover, political chaos has caused perceived fragmentation that can be traced in the physical divides that have been politicised and militarised since the years after independence.7 Luanda has just recently – after the ceasefire in 2002 – started to re-establish planning rules and urban design interventions,8 including the provision of basic facilities, although with significant contradictions related to spatial and class differences. In the last decade, the city centre – which corresponds to the former colonial city including its early 1970s planning interventions – has been extensively modified through demolitions and new constructions. This process has caused rapid changes in the socioeconomic geography of the downtown area, where weaker groups have been forced to move away without planned alternatives. Gated communities, in combination with Dubailike aesthetics, are the driving paradigm behind most of the new developments in wealthy areas (centre and south9) that are often costly and not sustainable,10 with no formal relationship with the rest of the city. Official documents and promotional material (advertising and documentaries) express ‘world-class’ and ‘turn-around’ discourses on new developments and the desire for international recognition on the global competitive arena, which needs to be expressed by specific design patterns. Even the new master plan for Luanda explicitly talks about ‘a world-class capital city environment’.11 The desire to promote Luanda as a world-class city is manifest in ‘flagship projects’ in the context of post-war reconstruction. Those projects target the international community of foreign partners and investors, but also what is seen by the government as central to maintaining political stability, which is the emerging urban middle-high class. Since 2002, the government played a key role in what has been defined as a ‘home-grown’ programme of post-war reconstruction12 and has allocated nearly one-third of the funds for public investments to such projects and the rehabilitation and construction of infrastructures, with 187

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a significant degree of central control and an important role played by the state oil company Sonangol.13 Consequently, it is key to understand which dominant groups have the power to guide and influence decision-making processes in the context of public art and cultural events and public or semi-public urban transformations. Through a large number of projects that have been implemented at an unprecedented speed and scale, the goal was to explicitly transform the image of the country by transforming its capital city. The leverage to conduct this process was the rising oil revenue, the availability of attracting external funding through the government, and the state’s control over these resources. We could argue that Luanda’s urban elites, identifiable in highly political groups with ‘world-class aesthetics’, have been able to guide external neoliberal forces,14 influence urban planning decisions, decide and control public spaces, and as a consequence have an impact on public art. Moreover, over the past years, the increased centralisation of the management and implementation of urban development projects,15 as well as the diminishing of spaces to contest state planning, reveal a concentration of power around the central government16 over which well-connected investors and city dwellers have exercised considerable influence. Luanda’s urban transformations follow the city’s new master plan of 2015 and are in line with the national development plan and the provincial development plan for Luanda for the years 2013–2017, aiming at developing the city as an economic, tourist, and service pole in southern Africa where the new port and airport have to work as key hubs. The most important projects include the renewal of the politico-administrative centre of Luanda,17 its downtown, and the land developments in the southern zone.18 Specific projects that also had an impact on public spaces are the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda, the area of the former Kinaxixi market, and the construction of housing projects such as Kilamba New City. The other face of Luanda is represented by the bairros, characterised by precarious construction and living conditions, and generally perceived as dangerous places. There, inequalities are strengthened by physical separation but also by the perception of insecurity. Forced evictions, military control, the lack of information and basic infrastructure (water, electricity, and sewage), as well as the lack of social recognition (no census), keep the population of the bairros in a constant state of uncertainty. The militarisation of urban space, as a manifestation of the control of public space and expression of implicit tension and power, is one of the main issues that affect Laudan’s daily life. The city is constellated and largely occupied by militarised areas, such as barracks, departments, institutions, private housing, and facilities. Every day different military forces patrol public spaces surveying sensitive spots. Additionally, transit police stand in small groups at almost every major crossing and private security companies stand in front of bank offices, malls, and other facilities, turning the city into a highly secure yet controlled entity where the question of publicness is at stake. If, on the one hand, patrolling forces might give a sense of security, on the other hand, the distance between the population and decision-making power produces an opposite feeling of insecurity directly linked to the control of urban spaces. In that respect, the renewed Marginal de Luanda is a good example of a successful formula that mixes direct control and design as a model for public space production. The large coastal area along the bay, open to the public but controlled, represents an efficient deterrence against crime in the city centre and mirrors the ambition of urban cleansing. The perfect maintenance of the public facilities, the vegetation, and the grounds, clean and well kept, with few security guards – some of whom are unarmed – seem to work efficiently 188

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against crime and squatting. As a result, the image of the centre of Luanda approaches the ones of Western or Middle Eastern cities, while on the other hand the general perceived security is uneven and new public spaces are over-policed and lack inclusivity.

Public Artworks Luanda has a very limited presence of public permanent artworks, and giving an account of their presence is challenging, due to problems related to recognition and accessibility. Nearly no contemporary permanent artworks can be found in the city, besides (often militarised) monuments, murals, and commissioned artworks for private accessible spaces, and they seem not to play a key social role, unlike the recent ephemeral production of the Luanda Triennial or the work of some artists such as Kiluanji Kia Henda. While the first production, despite its permanent character, seemed not to impact on collective sensitive issues (memory, social justice, identity, security, trauma), the second appeared to carry messages more directly and to even impact society and space. One of the few public sculptures that fall in the first group is the renowned work titled Mitologias (Mythologies, 1986) by Antonio Ole, which is placed in the Marginal, a wide artery and public space that faces the bay of Luanda. According to its author,19 besides its prominent position the sculpture has never played a significant role in the nearby area, nor it has been directly appropriated. Along with Mitologias, a considerable number of public artworks are constituted by wellknown monuments celebrating the political party (the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola; MPLA) or important Angolan political figures. In prominent urban spots, sculptures celebrating independent Angola, such as the Monumento às Heroinas or that of Agostinho Neto in Largo Primeiro de Maio/Largo da Independencia, are emphatically placed, raising questions about the relationship between the artworks production, public space, and security. In that respect, the latter represents an interesting case. The statue of the father of independent Angola, a dubious golden figure commissioned to a North Korean firm, represents an Asian communist-revolutionary version of Agostinho Neto on top of a tall pedestal, at the centre of a large roundabout (see Figure 17.1). Since the spot is considered a sensitive military area, the monument is patrolled by the police and its surroundings are not freely accessible. Similarly to what happens in the centre of Luanda, security is guaranteed by a pervasive control of public spaces that impact on the experience of the few permanent urban artworks. Next to the above-mentioned statues, while the majority of the colonial monuments have been removed, in many public spaces pedestals are the sole elements witnessing their former presence. However, there is a certain continuity and ambiguity between colonial and post-independence monuments. If one compares the colonial statues that have been removed after 1975 to the new ones, the similarity is tangible. The way they have been designed and installed in the public realm, the mimetic representation of heroes, the emphasis given to the object in space is very similar to the ex-Portuguese monuments, questioning the effectiveness of representing the actual historical and political discontinuity carried on by the independent state. However, two exceptions should be mentioned for their relative impact on public space: Largo do Baleizão and the MPLA mural by Tereza Gama. In the first case, a commemorative concrete structure erected by the Cuban cooperation rises in a recently renewed square, replacing the statue dedicated to Infante D. Henrique and symbolising the unity of the country. Built after the independence, it represents an iconography of the 189

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Figure 17.1 Comparative axonometry representing, on the left, Kiluanji Kia Henda’s performance Homem Sò (2011–2012) and the statue of Agostinho Netoin Largo da Independencia Source: Elaboration of the author (2019).

revolutionary phase in bas-relief, around which in 2009 a series of 18 large stones symbolising the Angolan provinces have been distributed following a scattered pattern. Besides the weak relation between the existing monument and the new arrangement, the resulting setting turned the square into a rather lively and well-used space, accessible, lightened, and not constantly patrolled, where people freely stop or sit around. In a different way, the extensive MPLA mural by Tereza Gama (1979) painted on the external wall surrounding the Military Hospital of Luanda plays a remarkable symbolic and social role. Its 93 scenes are a short history of Angola displayed on ‘screens’ reflecting the revelry that characterised the anti-colonial resistance against the invasion of South African apartheid forces. They were restored in 2008 by 15 national artists to prevent their complete decay,20 and to bring collective awareness about the steps Angola had to go through to reach a complete state of peace. Besides a few examples, however, conventional artworks installed in Luanda’s public space do not seem to play or be able to enable virtuous socio-spatial dynamics, nor to have a cathartic role or provoke collective reactions.

Invisible, Symbolic, Ephemeral Since in Luanda permanent artworks in public spaces do not play a significant socio-spatial role, it became necessary to move the focus to other objects, urban elements, and happenings, such as landmarks, buildings, movable objects, ephemeral and cultural events, 190

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which can play a similar role to public art in terms of deep cultural meanings, as well as tangible societal and spatial influence. As witnessed by many – from scholars to citizens – during our fieldwork in Luanda, landmarks, for example, can play a key role both in orienting people around the city, as well as for collective identity and memory. Street names are generally substituted by a system of visual references that emerge from the sometimes chaotic and blurred canvas of the urban landscape. Among the landmarks that distinctively dot (or have dotted until recently) Luanda’s cityscape, and that work as icons and reference points, were, for example, the 120-foot-high Mausoleum of Agostinho Neto (1982–2012), the former BPC tower, Teatro Elinga. They either embed(ded) historical and artistic values, as well as cultural ones or they, play a key social role: something that recent and upcoming constructions do not seem to be able to reflect. However, the removal of the label ‘architectural heritage of the city of Luanda’ applied to protected buildings and the massive demolitions that occurred in the last decades have been threatening the actual heritage stock, generating a perceived and physical sense of insecurity and disorientation, and can be considered as an attempt to transform the city into an anonymous future dream. A notorious example is the Kinaxixi market, by architect Vasco Vieira da Costa: built in 1950 and demolished in 2009, it was at the same time an outstanding masterpiece of African modernist architecture, but also one of the most lively public spaces in the city, as well as a fundamental landmark in itself. The market’s demolition led to the loss of a central space for social cohesion, a reconfiguration of the urban equilibrium, and a significant reduction of Luanda’s publicness. The market turned into a symbol of the physical and symbolic erasure process of Luanda’s identity, including the consequent evictions and the privatisation of former public spaces that in recent years often disappear without any replacement. Furthermore, the dubious architectural quality of the upcoming buildings boast economic power, but is unable to propose a contemporary language as a direct manifestation of local sociocultural values. According to several Angolan intellectuals such as Antonio Ole and Angela Mingas, the material expressions of colonial history, and even the conflicts for independence during the 1960s and 1970s, should be preserved. The result of the recent rapid and drastic urban transformation and the reluctance to appropriate and intervene in public spaces led to a situation in which the invisible, metaphorical, symbolic city seems to weigh more than the physical one, while temporary and ephemeral art interventions are perhaps Luanda’s most relevant public art expressions as effective ways to reflect on key themes such as the collective memory and identity, sociopolitical and spatial conflicts. In recent years, on the one hand, Luanda has become a clearer spot in the global mental map thanks to the work of some emerging Angolan artists. On the other hand, a central role has been played locally by the Luanda Triennial. While artists such as Kiluanj Kia Henda (Redefining The Power – 75, 2013; Homem Sò, 2011–2012) or Edson Chagas (Luanda, Encyclopedic City – Golden Lion for the Angolan Pavilion at the Art Biennale of Venice in 2013) have contributed to disseminating Luanda and the national identity abroad, with specific works on public spaces, identity, and memory and their interplay between physical and mental spaces,21 the Luanda Triennial has been focusing on those aspects on-site, through a process of spatial reappropriation.

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The Power of the Emotional In the context of the scarce presence of permanent artworks in the city, where cultural events and ephemeral artworks have got perhaps the most relevant impact, institutions, associations, galleries, groups, and single artists define a vibrant milieu, thanks to which different spaces are temporarily occupied and opened to the public. Since Angola achieved independence that cluster constitutes a constellation that operates in the capital city, defining a lively cultural scene and promoting various events for different publics. Their production unfolds different approaches, reflections, goals, means, and the interlinks that exist between various entities such as universities (Lusiada, Agostinho Neto); foreign cultural centres (Goethe Institut, Alliance Française, Portuguese Embassy); private foundations and associations (Teatro Elinga, Celamar Art Gallery, Fundação Arte e Cultura); public ones (Associação Cultural Cha de Caxinde, Kalu Association, CeFoJor – Centro de Formação de Jornalismo); and independent initiatives (E-studio, led by artists Rita GT and Francisco Vidal, or UNAP – União Nacional Artistas Plasticos). In parallel, music events, from former concerts in theatres or clubs (e.g. Espaço Bahia) or festivals (like the March music festival on the Marginal) to the most impromptu events like the kuduro gatherings,22 form a rich scene. Informal and ephemeral music happenings are often played from cars parked in marginal spots where extemporary raves can happen and do not last long. As Marissa Moorman claims, music was fundamental in the construction of the Angolan nation and plays a key role on multiple levels.23 Next to that, the contemporary local art scene has been recently dominated by important actors, such as the Sindika Dokolo Foundation and the Luanda Triennial, which have achieved a great degree of recognition in the global art world, with a relevant impact also on urban spaces. Looking at the impact of the produced cultural events on public spaces during its past editions (2006/2007, 2010, 2013), the complexity of intentions, the number of events, and the effect produced, the Luanda Triennial can be considered in itself the most relevant and internationally renowned happening with a direct impact on the city and its society, which was able to turn Luanda into a ‘laboratory’.24 The Luanda Triennial is a complex event that was set up for the first time in 2003 by the artist-curator Fernando Alvim as a regular large-scale exhibition organised every three years (on average) in the Angolan capital. It includes exhibitions, temporary outdoor installations, multidisciplinary events, and educational programmes. Its duration and extent vary according to the edition and each one is preceded by several anteprojectos (preliminary events) that have national and international visibility. As Fernando Alvim argues, the concept of the Luanda Triennial is one of a long-term ‘cultural movement’ and not just an exhibition, with Luanda as the main ground.25 The explicit strategy of the Luanda Triennial has been to temporarily occupy and renew vacant buildings, such as the Globo Hotel or Correios de Angola during its first edition (2005–2006) (see Figure 17.2), as well as the reproduction of artworks on billboards across the city, together with weekly cinema programmes, conferences, theatre plays, and music performances as part of the ‘outdoor projects’. As Alvim states, ‘It is not a Triennial in Luanda but the Triennial of Luanda’.26 According to the curator, the idea is to unfold Luanda including its contradictions, highlighting the city’s inconsistencies, its limits, and hybrid nature. That does not mean a place without identity, but on the contrary a place that combines many different identities together.

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Figure 17.2 Map of the central area of Luanda highlighting the spaces that have been renovated by the Luanda Triennial during its first edition (2004–2006) Source: Elaboration of the author (2019).

In this view, the city is seen as a ‘laboratory’ where Angolans can experience its spaces as citizens, reflecting on the relation with its history, personal and collective memories, coping with its recent dramatic past. Reconstructing the cultural identity of the country after three decades of civil war (ended in 2002) – as addressed in the first edition of the Luanda Triennial – was the main goal: ‘What is your geography in 193

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a country during the war? It is characterised by places where you escape. You escape and your emotional state is profoundly altered.’27 Therefore everyone’s ‘emotional geography’ is far more relevant than the physical space, and the influence produced by public art on Angolans as well as on a broader audience should be the main goal. Accordingly, Simon Njami insists on the importance of the non-physical, immaterial aspects, which are the most important achievements, arguing that the spaces transformed by the Luanda Triennial have been just simple containers: ‘everything was done to build mental spaces’.28 The goal of working on the ‘emotional geography’ is to re-signify spaces through art interventions: a fundamental action to reconstruct the cultural identity of the country and to recover a wounded society. The idea that only by working on the ‘emotional geography’ through art could Angolans overcome the trauma of the long-lasting civil war and inscribe new meaning in wounded spaces is enlightening. The dense combination of hundreds of ephemeral events, from exhibitions to shows and performances, was conceived with the precise aim of appropriating numerous urban spaces to leave emotional rather than physical traces. Without questioning here the success of the Luanda Triennial, the strength of that idea lies in the shift from an interpretation of public art intervention as permanent and formal, to one that imagines a far more labile and open relationship between form, society, use, identity, and symbolism, primarily relying on a sort of emotional architecture of inscription. In that sense, the Luanda Triennial shows how the relationship between society and space is played first of all on an immaterial basis, with powerful results in terms of reshaping the city and positively influencing society. Events are a way to heal from the devastating violence of the civil war and the colonial period, and the Luanda Triennial is seen as having a kind of cathartic effect on the city and its inhabitants, shifting existing perceptions and memories, overlapping new ones, and projecting the compressed energies on the construction of the future society.

Notes 1 ‘MA2K Culture and Safety in Africa’ (2011–2014) was research funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies, supported by Lettera 27 Foundation with the involvement of various institutions, which aimed at investigating cultural events and public art installations produced in three unsafe African cities: Douala, Johannesburg, and Luanda. The author was the coordinator for Latitude Platform and main researcher for the case of Luanda. 2 UN-Habitat, The State of African Cities 2008: A Framework for Addressing Urban Challenges in Africa (Nairobi: UN-Habitat, 2008). 3 Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE), Resultados Preliminares do Recenseamento Geral da População e da Habitação de Angola 2014 (Luanda: INE, 2014). 4 For example, ‘Future City: Why Luanda Is the New Dubai’, Sonangol Universo Magazine (2008), available on request at http://universo-magazine.com. 5 As a result of, for example, agrarian plantation, coffee, new industries, and the harbour. 6 Accounts build on the works of human rights organisations, activists, and researchers who have diligently documented many cases. See, for example, Amnesty International, ‘Angola: Mass Forced Evictions in Luanda: A Call for a Human Rights-Based Housing Policy’, 12 November 2003, AI Index: AFR 12/007/2003, www.amnesty.org/en/documents/afr12/007/2003/en; Human Rights Watch, They Pushed Down the Houses: Forced Evictions and Insecure Land Tenure for Luanda’s Urban Poor (New York: Human Rights Watch, 2007), www.hrw.org/reports/2007/angola0507/ango la0507web.pdf; SOS Habitat, A justiça e o desalojamentos forçados em Luanda-Angola (unpublished document, 2012); and the work of Rafael Marques de Morais at www.makaangola.org. 7 Delinda Collier, ‘Art in a State of Emergency: Figuring Angolan Nationalism, 1953–2007’ (PhD thesis, James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies, Atlanta, GA, USA, 2010). 8 Paul Jenkins, Paul Robson, and Allan Cain, ‘Luanda City Profile’, Cities 19, no. 2 (2002): 139–150.

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9 For example, representative cases include the blueprints of Luanda Sul and Belas. Planned in the 1950s as new residential areas in the city outskirts, these neighbourhoods appear today as a series of gated communities with no open public spaces, enclosed malls, facilities, and services, organised according to a mash of roads where it is difficult to navigate and even walk. Large non-linear roads are surrounded by high walls and defensive systems are strengthened by cameras and electric fences, seen as effective devices against crime by the high and middle class of Luanda living there. 10 They have independent water and electricity supplies. 11 Governo Provincial de Luanda (GPL), Plano de Desenvolvimento Provincial 2013/2017: Luanda (Luanda: Governo da Província de Luanda, 2014), 10. 12 Nicholas Shaxson, ‘Angola’s Homegrown Answers to the “Resource Curse”’, in Governance of Oil in Africa: Unfinished Business, ed. Jacques Lesourne (Paris, IFRI, 2009), 51–102. 13 They include, for instance, the Presidential Office for Special Works (Gabinete de Obras Especiais – GOE), the Office for National Reconstruction (Gabinete de Reconstrução Nacional – GRN), and the Technical Office for the Urban Requalification of Cazenga and Sambizanga (Gabinete Técnico de Reconversão Urbana do Cazenga e Sambizanga – GTRUCS). Sonangol played an important role especially after the financial and economic crisis of 2008. 14 For example, Isabel Simões Raposo, Sílvia Jorge, Sílvia Viegas, and Vanessa Melo, ‘Luanda e Maputo: inflexões suburbanísticas da cidade socialista à cidade-metrópole neoliberal’, Urbe: Revista Brasileira de Gestão Urbana 4, no. 2 (2012): 189–205; Claudia Gastrow, ‘Negotiated Settlements: Housing and the Aesthetics of Citizenship in Luanda, Angola’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago, Chicago, USA, 2014). 15 The top-down and state-led approach of the central power in managing both urban regeneration and new projects, artists residences, and production. 16 Jethro Pettit, Power Analysis: A Practical Guide (Stockholm: SIDA, 2013). 17 This project has consisted of the rehabilitation of some of the main buildings in the politicoadministrative centre, such as the presidential palace in the Cidade Alta (High City), road works, and the construction of a new High Court and a National Assembly, all with state-of-the-art facilities, as well as the completion of the Agostinho Neto Mausoleum. A second phase is planned on the Island of Luanda and is also part of the ‘new administrative centre’. For information on the new city centre project, see www.dar.com. 18 The Luanda Sul land development project was implemented through a public–private partnership between the provincial government of Luanda and a Brazilian company between 1997 and 2012, on an area of 1,700 ha. The project was meant to include social housing, but today Luanda Sul mainly consists of up-market, residential and gated communities, hotels, conference and shopping centres, as well as office complexes. For more information, see www.pradovalladares.co.ao; Gastrow, ‘Negotiated Settlements’; Ricardo Valente Cardoso, ‘The Crude Urban Revolution: Land Markets, Planning Forms and the Making of a New Luanda’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Berkeley: University of California, USA, 2015). 19 Antonio Ole, interview with the author, Luanda, 2013. 20 The private artistic institution Dizalalu Space was the company in charge of directing the recovery of the murals, under the responsibility of the Ministry of Culture and the provincial government of Luanda. Painters such as Solo Lopes, Dani Adam, Manuel Ventura, Antoninho, and Sabby were among the guests for the restoration of the wall. 21 Simon Njami, interview with the author, Paris, 2012. 22 Kuduro was born after the independence, during the first period of peace, and it is a popular Angolan urban music that boomed in the 1980s especially in the bairros. 23 Marissa J. Moorman, Intonations: A Social History of Music and Nation in Luanda, Angola, from 1945 to Recent Times. New African Histories Series (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008). 24 Nadine Siegert, ‘Luanda Lab: Nostalgia and Utopia in Aesthetic Practice’, Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (2014): 176–200. 25 Fernando Alvim, Heike Munder, and Ulf Wuggenig, eds, Next Flag: The African Sniper Reader (Zurich: JPR-Ringier, 2005). 26 Fernando Alvim, interview with the author, Luanda, 2013 (original emphasis). 27 Ibid. 28 Simon Njami, interview with the author, Paris, 2012.

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18 THE IMAGINARY INSTITUTION OF PLACE Notes on Art-led Place-Making as Aesthetic, Social, and Temporal Engineering Giusy Checola

In 1975 Greek-French philosopher, psychanalyst, political thinker, social critic, and economist Cornelius Castoriadis formulated one of the most influential theories in European contemporary thought, the imaginary institution of society.1 Castoriadis contends that the ‘imaginary’ is the central system that shapes the social world and the relationship to the self, which determines the choices and connections of the individual and collective symbolic networks, the meaning that creates the unique way to live, to see, and to do in any historical time and society.2 According to Castoriadis, the ‘radical imaginary’ refers to the imaginary as a common root that acts both at a functional and symbolic level.3 It is ‘the elementary and irreducible capacity of evoking images’, a ‘more or less structured vision of the whole of available human experience’ that makes use of the ‘rational lines of what is given, but arranges them according to and subordinates them to significations which themselves do not belong to the rational order (nor, moreover, to a positive irrational order) but to the imaginary’;4 the central system societies refer to for defining themselves, and, therefore, for the ‘making’ and ‘remaking’ of institutions.5 Institutions are here understood as the intangible values with ‘real’ effects that arise from the articulation of the symbolic networks that societies organise structurally through communication, sanctions, and written as well as unwritten norms, for example, dualisms such as good versus evil, life versus death, or the divine versus the earthly for Western Christian societies. But the imaginary is also the source of the intellectual, material, and normative processes of territorialisation as a complex form of social control, through which humans symbolically denote place, transform place into space for its material occupation and structuration, and divide the terrestrial surface according to its different functions and resources, subjecting it to a regulatory regime determined by the authority of certain subjects.6 Consequently, the visual experience constitutes the sensory institutive element of the territorialisation processes. At the time of Castoriadis’s writing, during the 1970s, art communes were emerging all over the world, and in New York the leading global organisation devoted to place-making called Project for Public Space (PPS) was founded. The aim was to expand the work of

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urban planner and people watcher William (Holly) Whyte, inventor of the term ‘groupthink’,7 whose practice was based on the anthropological observation of daily life in the city. Whyte affirms that we have ‘a moral responsibility to create physical places that facilitate civic engagement and community interaction’.8 Since then, PPS has completed place-making and community-based projects in more than 3,500 communities, and its models have been exported and realised in over 50 countries and all 50 US states. In 1976, Polish artist Jan Ś widziń ski published the Contextual Art Manifesto, which already included some conceptual, linguistic, and methodological elements of the ‘autonomy’ of art-led place-making, from the widest meaning of ‘public art’ and – at the same time – of its ‘autonomisation’ from the paradigms and symbolic systems of dominant ‘site-specificity’, locating ‘contextual art’ ‘in the enclosure of epistemological logics’ concerned by ideology and myths generated by ‘the structure of civilization’ that governs its ‘proxisocial’ status – a virtual proximity of society – the sciences, culture, and the arts, while decomposing meanings that have lost their anchoring in reality and establishing new ones.9 In these terms, the Ś widziń ski manifesto can be considered as one of the ‘inaugural acts’10 of a process of self-determination of art-led place-making, which has undergone an unprecedented acceleration from the mid-1990s to its current realisation as ‘models’, ‘matrices’, ‘archetypes’, and ‘ideas’ for creating places across the infrastructural flux of hyperconnection.

Expanding the Sphere of Influence of Art: From Geoculture to Geopolitics In 1977, the moment in which the term ‘scale’ came to be employed beside ‘space’ and ‘place’ in philosophy and postmodernism’s linguistic turn,11 American designers and directors Charles and Ray Eames produced the popular film Powers of Ten, in which they employed the system of exponential powers to visualise the importance of scale as ‘new geography’.12 In 2004, this notion of scale was further developed by PPS as the first step of the place-making participatory process with professionals and stakeholders of the place to be ‘made’, establishing the ‘Power of 10+’ as a new paradigm of regional development, because ‘places thrive when users have a range of reasons (10+) to be there’.13 In The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis analyses heteronomy as ‘alienation in the general sense of the term’, which, on the level of the individual, is ‘the domination of an autonomized imaginary’ that defines for the subject both reality and desire, and the ways symbolic networks come to ‘empower themselves’ from society, acquiring a universal value towards alienation, ‘the almost unlimited reign of a principle of “de”-reality’.14 On the contrary, cooperation and collective self-management of activities and responsibility can be interpreted as the emergence in society of the possibility and the demand for autonomy.15 In the same way, a process of ‘self-determination’ and/or ‘alienation’ of art-led place-making could bear, on the one hand, the reinforcement of ‘cartographic reason’16 and ‘cartographic thinking of images’,17 encouraging the anchoring of new or renewed forms of the centralisation of parametric design. On the other hand, it can lead to forms of overcoming the diagrammatic, territorialising schema, and constrained imaginaries, reducing the risk of assimilation of minority meanings into dominant thinking systems. According to Augustine Berque, in the ontocosmology of Plato, topos is the word that represents ‘space’ and corresponds to the question ‘where is it?’ while chôra is the word that represents ‘place’ and corresponds to the complex ontological question ‘why that where?’18 Furthermore, in Timaeus Plato formulates the assumption that the current representation of 197

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the universe is essentially mathematical.19 In this universe, today, the human condition is defined as that of ‘inforg’,20 informational interconnected organisms that share with biological agents and engineered artefacts a global environment built by information and ‘relocated’ textual, visual, and audiovisual data.21 At the same time, the essential role that ‘locality’ currently plays within art in public space and in the art-making of place, evokes both the existential connotation of Plato’s chôra and the need for ‘local distinctiveness’ understood as the dominant quality of the ‘where’ investigated by Berque, which today is central in the construction of collective identities and a sense of belonging. In Castoriadis’s theory, ‘society is always the self-institution of the social historical’, like the alienation of heteronomy of society is a ‘self-alienation’. But self-alienation can be also an essential part of the inherited ‘extra-social origin’, such as related to supernatural beings, God, and laws of history, which is one of the manifestations of the rationalisation of the heteronomy of society.22 According to researchers Ola Söderström, Francisco Klauser, Etienne Piguet, and Laurence Crot, the ‘mobile constitution of society’ is based on ‘concomitant’ transmigration of people, objects, ideas, knowledge, practices, and capital across multiple borders and spatial scales. Like the spaces of mobility are defined by its route, velocity, rhythm, and spatial scale, ‘social construct [is] defined by its meanings, regulations, experiences and competences’, which, therefore, shape and are shaped by contemporary societies.23 As they remark, in our globalised world the administration, regulation, and control of various types of mobilities at local, national, and transnational levels is of fundamental importance, and advanced IT solutions such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), other location and identification technologies and interlinked databases create the ‘smarter cities’ as worlds of ‘perfect order’, coding urban circulations into software.24 As a strategy, display, and form of self-governance, art-led place-making can be considered as an engineering work that goes over the establishment of new sets of space to improve their publicness or inclusivity: it deals with central systems that respectively encode, acquire, and articulate the figures/forms/images created by the ‘central signification’ of place as ‘world’ and cosmos, as organisation of signifiers and signifieds into peripheral systems, which ‘permits the extension, multiplication and modification of this signification’.25 These systems are imaginary because they are neither perceived (real) nor something thought (rational). They refer to the ‘central imaginaries’ existing in every culture, on the level of elementary symbols or of global meaning, beyond the ‘peripheral imaginaries’ that correspond to a second ‘imaginary development of symbols, and to the successive layers of sedimentation’.26 Institution, in Castoriadis’s terms, is ‘a socially sanctioned, symbolic network in which a functional component and an imaginary component are combined in variable proportions and relations’.27 Since the social relations are always instituted and so the contemporary relations of production (infrastructures), the figures/forms/images created by the radical imaginary that own the needed ‘quality’ to ‘institute’ the central meanings would act as ‘institutive’ tools according to conditions created by the place ‘made’, understood as infrastructure that produces and organises them. GPS was implemented as an accurate navigation system in 1973 by the Pan Am Aerospace Division in Florida, two years after the discovery of place cells by John O’Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky – the neurons in the hippocampus that fire when the animal occupies a specific location – which are influenced by environmental cues and provide a cognitive map. GPS started to be freely available for civilian use in the United States as a developed ‘common good’ in 1980, at a time when in Italy, in his book titled Segno, Umberto Eco defined Man as a semiotic animal, of which culture, rites, institutions, social 198

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relations, and customs are but symbolic forms.28 In France, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari published Milles Plateaux,29 which deploys a philosophy of spatial logic to reproduce the modes of articulation between the processes of subjectivisation and the institutional apparatus, showing the potential productivity of the groups’ subjects;30 and the ‘global’ exhibition entitled Cartes et Figures de la Terre took place at the Centre Georges Pompidou – Centre de Création Industrielle, the iconic building of modern architecture.31 With this exhibition, the map was ‘instituted’ in the ‘world of art’ as an aesthetic, cultural, and cognitive ‘art device’, expanding the sphere of influence of art, so that today ‘art is potentially of all places’.32 Curated by Giulio Macchi, the exhibition presented prestigious ancient documents and contemporary representations of the world, to investigate the language and function of the map and its ethos, celebrating the role that maps and figures of the earth played and still play in the process of reshaping our relationship with place, space, territories, worlds, and cosmos as human creations. It exposed the map’s operational mechanisms, from a humanistic and scientific perspective, by exploring three directions of research about the map: as an ‘image of the world’, a ‘technical and scientific adventure’, and an ‘instrument of management, decision and power’.33 When, in the 1990s, Deleuze and Guattari theorised the indiscernible relationship between deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation processes, they responded to the need to rediscover the geographical roots of philosophy and tear it away from the abstractions of its history: ‘In every case the Greeks had to become philosophers in the first place, just as philosophers had to become Greek.’34 We could therefore say that the indiscernible relation between place, societies, and forms of collectivity that inhabit, cross, and experience it, is also a relation of mutual metonymic becoming. However, more recently, research by Nobel Prize winners in physiology and medicine May-Britt and Edvard Moser demonstrated that ‘the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition’,35 suggesting a more universal theory of cognition of place and space. The Mosers discovered that we memorise and position ourselves in space through a localised positioning system. This ‘internal GPS’, which works thanks to a variety of cells located in the entorhinal cortex grid (a hub for the brain network that guides us), among other things contributes to the representation of selfpositioning (‘self-location’) and demonstrates that episodic memories (the ones related to our life experience that, together with the semantic memories related to general knowledge, compose the explicit, conscious long-term memory) are separated from each other in the early stages of hippocampal memory. In other words, they demonstrated that our GPS exists independently to our experience of place, and that it is therefore possible to study it independently from the sensorial inputs and motor elaborations.36 According to Castoriadis, ‘the radical imaginary exists as the social-historical and as psyche/soma. As social-historical, it is an open stream of the anonymous collective; as psyche/soma, it is representative/affective/intentional flux’, but there is something that ‘rests unchanged when a message is translated into another by a code’, which ‘allows to define the partial identity of the same code which composes messages that are formally different’:37 it is ‘sense’ as theorised in 1948 by Claude Shannon, the ‘father’ of information theory.38 In 1968, Alexandre Kojève affirmed that his former idea of the ‘American way of life’ as ‘the kind of life proper to the post-historic period’ that foreshadowed ‘the future “eternal present” of all humanity’ was replaced by that of the ‘Japanisation’ of the West including Russians,39 because Japanese society is ‘the only one to have experienced almost three centuries of life during the “end of history”’.40 More recently, Philippe Nys and Augustin Berque questioned modernity through the analysis of the ‘logic of place’ by Nishida Kitarō , 199

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the main figure of the Kyoto School, already well known in the 1930s but universally recognised in the 1970s, whose project was to build a philosophy ‘at the confluence of Eastern and Western cultures, to face the global problems to which the peoples of contemporary humanity are confronted together, and in particular the ecological problems’.41 In the ‘logic of place’, ‘judging or predication takes place in turn in the topos of consciousness’, the ‘intelligible world’ concretised as ‘the universal or topos of reflexive selfawareness wherein acts of seeing, knowing, desiring and willing take place’,42 of which the individual self is but a focal point. Here place was instituted as the ontological and cognitive dimension of the problematic relationship between the Western model and the nationalism and expansionism in Japan of the time, but also between the dominant modernity and other civilisations and non-dominant Western countries today. The ‘logic of place’ – and therefore place as ‘logic’ – is then a historical, cultural, and (geo)political problem, and, at the same time, according to Nakamura Yûjïro, it is ‘the “paleological” of the creative inspiration of every human work’.43 Place as ‘logic’ and the notion of ‘sense’ we refer to, were formulated respectively before and after the Second World War, when Europe and the world were going through destruction and reconstruction processes, under the establishment of a new global order. Nowadays, at the time of the One Belt One Road initiative – simplistically labelled as the ‘Chinese Marshall Plan’ – and the diversification of power centres in a more multi-polar direction, the world is undergoing a radical rethinking of its ‘order’, in which art and placemaking are considered as key fields for extra-territorial interventions. In these terms, art-led ‘making’ or ‘remaking’ of place could both overcome and radicalise territorialising logic locally and globally.

The Imaginary Institution of Place and Society According to Deleuze and Guattari, capitalism is a resumption on a previously unknown scale and in different forms and means of ‘the combination for which the Greeks took the initiative – democratic imperialism, colonizing democracy’, whose man ‘is not Robinson but Ulysses, the cunning plebeian, some average man or other living in the big towns, Autochthonous Proletarians or foreign Migrants who throw themselves into infinite movement-revolution’.44 In this ‘world reactivation’ ‘pragmatism and socialism’ played out ‘the return of Ulysses, the new society of brothers or comrades that once again takes up the Greek dream and reconstitutes “democratic dignity”’, to which echoed the ‘supercommunity’ imagined in the 1960s, the dream of a new society driven by the scientific world.45 In the Western world, in the course of the 1960s artists increasingly embraced dialogue with non-institutionalised recipients, and the audience became a central element of their artistic, social, and political practice. In 1981, artists of Group Material, mainly composed of former students of Joseph Kosuth at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1979, showed The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango) and opened a storefront gallery in the Lower East Side, understanding their exhibitions as an interface between art and communities in the neighbourhood.46 At the same time, academic communitarianism emerged in response to the Theory of Justice by American philosopher John Rawls (1971),47 who stated that the liberal conception of the self as an ‘autonomous creature’ who – outside of a formative social context – ‘ignores the crucial fact that individuals are “embedded” in societies, finding themselves affected by external forces that influence their ultimate decision’.48 Later, Charles Taylor affirmed that ‘the free individual of [the] West is only what he is by virtue of the 200

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whole society and civilization which brought him to be and which nourishes him’.49 In contrast, William Davies defined the communitarians of the 1970s as principally moralists, and emerging neo-communitarians as policy technocrats that emerged in response to the distinctive failure of neoliberalism located in ‘carefully designed systems of audit and incentive management, which by the 1990s have become collectively referred to as ‘governance’.50 In Italy, Roberto Esposito stated that political philosophy and neocommunity philosophies tend to think about community in terms of broad subjectivity, of a hypertrophic figure of a unity of unities, producing a substance in which the sense of possession is mainly linked to territory, which is defined by the category of property as the original matrix of all subsequent properties. According to him, this produced the most paradoxical aspect of the ‘common’ that ‘unifies’ in a single identity the ethnic, territorial, and spiritual property of each of its members, because ‘what each “has” in common is “proper” only to those who belong to community’.51 If understood in Castoriadis’s terms, that ‘unity’ is composed by ‘the world-image and self-image’ that society gives to itself through the ‘essential moment’ of the choice of objects and acts, to make these things ‘exist in sufficient quantity and in an adequate fashion’ as if they are immaterial like ‘saintliness’, through which it creates an existence ‘worth living’.52 In this framework, the global production of art-led place-making projects could lead to processes of redefinition, diversification, and contamination of the meanings and functions of community, according to ‘the style’ with which communities are imagined,53 compared with the singularities of place and the way artists take positions in terms of the predefined local scenarios, social achievement and engagement, space design, and cultural politics. These processes could enhance the imaginary institution of forms of ‘community’, ‘neo-communitarianism’, ‘communitas’, and ‘commons’. In 2014 anthropologist Vito Teti wrote that ‘we are all the places, real or imaginary, that we have lived, accepted, discarded, combined, removed, invented’,54 and that we are the multiplicity of relationships that we establish with the places we create live in, permanently or temporarily. Following on from this, we could affirm that through its figures/forms/ images the imaginary operates as a central system that determines our perception, cognition, and behaviour as our individual and collective memory of place. Art-led place-making potentially transforms a place to be seen and lives in a place that performs its mutability and pluri-sensoriality, resulting in a hypertrophic, immersive, and intermedia installation, an ‘Empire of the Senses’55 that incorporates different languages, spatial and temporal dimensions, and ‘truths’ of place created and manipulated by today’s hyperconnected radical imaginaries. We could therefore consider the place ‘made’ as a manifestation of the ‘socialhistorical institution of time and natural temporality’, including both ‘implicit temporality’, such as society itself, which in Castoriadis’s terms ‘exists “first” as self-alteration and as a specific mode of this self-alteration’; and ‘explicit temporality’, such as the institution of capitalistic time as identity or marking time, which is ‘measurable, homogeneous, uniform and wholly arithmetizable’, whose imaginary significations are clearly ‘more “real” than reality’.56 Finally, if, according to Castoraidis, history exists only in and through all kinds of ‘language’ that society gives to itself, constitutes, and transforms, and if art-led place-making includes in ‘its whole’ diverse languages, we can assume that the creation of place could be understood as a historical ‘creation’. Indeed, whether it would be designed by a dominant vision or if it would constitute a collective ‘restart’, by responding to imaginaries from different origins it would expand the generalist and dominant definitions (and implications) of ‘place-making’ into a more complex and pluralistic understanding of the ‘creation’ of place as place’s ‘regeneration’, ‘construction’, ‘remaking’, and ‘re-creation’. 201

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The genesis of the expression ‘place-making’ is framed in New York City’s planning strategy, which was established in 1969 to deal with the economic and social problems brought to bear by the growth of the population; conversely, at a global level, the sharp acceleration of population growth was causing drastic environmental, cultural, and social changes denounced in 1968 by biologist Garret Hardin. In the much-debated article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Hardin focused on the morality and limitations on freedom needed to deal with ‘non-technical solution problems’ such as ‘the misery of overpopulation’ caused by the insane over-consumption of the commons.57 In so doing, he established the interdependence between place and consumption, overpopulation and migration, ethics and governance, studied later by American economist Elinor Ostrom, who obtained a Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her research on cooperation and regulation among members of communities as ‘governance’ of the commons, in response to Hardin.58 Nowadays ‘governance’ is a constitutive element of art-led place-making infrastructures. At the time of writing this chapter, the architectural online platform ArchDaily relaunched ‘The Eleven Principles for Creating Great Community Places’ (originally published in 1999 by PPS),59 a manifesto that defines the principles for creating vibrant community spaces. This manifesto was itself followed by ‘The New Rules of Public Art’ (published in 2013 by Situations, a leading European public art association),60 which outlined a ‘set of possibilities’ to provoke debates about public art and its future, as well as to ‘create communities’. If new genre public art places participation and social engagement within the urban realm at the centre of the process, art-led place-making focuses on the performativity of place itself, which ‘remakes’ or ‘activates’ its singularities, where humans are part of the ‘ensemble’ of the instituted imaginary; and the ‘reality’ of place, that is its predictability, coexists with its ‘real’, the ‘non-predictable’ by humans.61 In 1976, in the ‘Contextual Art Manifesto’, Jan Ś widziń ski affirmed that contextual art is concerned ‘with propositions such as: I recognize, I know, I believe, I assume, I regret, I understand, I prohibit, I admit’,62 and anticipated the questions at the base of the ‘Gestalt paradigm’ by Franco (Bifo) Berardi, ‘the algorithmic form of capitalism’, which directs knowledge and technology.63 According to Beradi, this paradigm ‘gives us the possibility of seeing a certain shape in the surrounding flow of visual impulses’ and, at the same time, ‘forbids us from seeing something else in the same flow of visual impulses’, which should bring us to ‘create technical platforms to enable a neurological reshuffling of the general intellect’.64 In this framework, the centrality of the ‘local’ both as an alternative and supportive dimension to localism and nationalism, can lead to the creation of a common sense of place and equally of a ‘place of commons’, based on a mythical ‘truth’ of place ‘which reveals itself through enlightening experience’65 and on human and cultural rights, defining or predefining figures/forms/images of local and translocal ‘distinctiveness’.66 These are globally transmitted through massive material and immaterial displacement, defending the borders of an alleged authenticity of place to which one could translocally belong and/or promoting emancipative forces and creation of imaginary meanings to which one could feel emotionally connected. Paradoxically, as for biodiversity, forms of hybridisation could guarantee a more democratic process of conservation and survival of cultural diversity. As Beradi states, we use the word ‘democracy’ as a value, while ‘democracy is a methodology of political action’ to obtain ‘the welfare of people, freedom in daily life, redistribution of wealth, the possibility of having public education, public health systems, the possibility of living well’.67 If we assume that the fundamental experiential precondition for infrastructural place-making is the establishment of more equal humanistic-scientific 202

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knowledge of place, we need to identify or co-create ‘radical’ pluri-disciplinarity methodologies to study, produce, and redistribute accurate cognitive tools, and promote the fundamental ‘institutive’ role that art-led place-making could play as an integrated research and experimental field. Finally, we can affirm that in the mid 1970s, parallel to the publication of Castoriadis’s book The Imaginary Institution of Society, the main components of art-led place-making – understood, according to my theory, both as a self-determined and an autonomous imaginary ‘institutive’ strategy – were emerging. As I wrote on the occasion of an exhibition focused on the 1970s in Italy, the general intellect’s forms of self-representation as well as the self-determination of collective intelligence (as witnessed in works by Ugo La Pietra, Franco Vaccari, and Uliano Lucas, among others) created a path towards the social and multidisciplinary ‘overspill’ of languages, time concepts, and social performances that cannot be disregarded, because they were not classifiable under the pre-existing aesthetic categories and, therefore, were only potentially responsive at a later date.68 This assertion should lead not to their symbolic remake, but to deeper ‘unclassifiable’ unexplored perspectives, namely ‘place-making’, in order to overcome pre-instituted aesthetic, social, geopolitical, and temporal dominant paradigms of territorial-based ‘site-specificity’, whereas we are dealing with place-singularities, complexity, and translocal values. Roy Ascott, artist and pioneer of Technoethics, asserted that the cultural and pedagogical character of art results from the interrelationship between art as ‘coordinator of experience’ and cybernetics as ‘coordinator of sciences’.69 If coordinated by art, ‘place-making’ could be considered as a democratic methodology to ‘nest’ knowledge diversity to rearticulate and recodify the complex symbolic and functional systems of place, while facilitating the coexistence of the need for a common-sense and emotional connection to place, as well as the natural mutability of identities of societies and places. If, according to Castoriadis, the ‘real acts’ such as work, consumption, war, love, childbearing, and ‘the innumerable material products without which no society could live even an instant’ can only happen ‘in’ and ‘across’ these symbolic network systems, which belong to ideal structures and fit into quasi-rational relationships combined in variable proportions, times, and scales,70 then place itself can be understood and researched in the art field as the result of the interconnection of diverse space-times, aesthetic and cultural meanings and functions, referring to diverse social, (geo)political and scientific purposes. Considering the act of thinking as a contamination process, the act of writing as a tailormade creative process, and the act of theorising as a recoding practice that is constantly ‘in becoming’, I aim to engage pluralistic hypotheses of ‘place’ to be researched and experimented. To be more precise: •

Place-world: a natural or artificial site of variable dimensions whose symbolic connotation recalls specific meanings in the subject’s existential sphere and activates forms of emotional impression in the ‘viewer’, as formulated in the 1980s by the ‘grammar’ of humanistic geography.71 According to Roberto Barbanti, ‘feeling and acting, in their mutual implications, appear as [an] horizon of sense, which is fundamental in order to understand the current issues at stake in the relationship between the subject and the world’, between the ‘reduction of the world to the Artworld’, which implies ‘metaphors of reflectiveness and tautology’ imposed as ‘artistic-aesthetic procedures’ and the ‘dissolution of art inside the world’, in which, according to the definition by philosopher Yves Michaud, art progressively dilutes inside reality until it 203

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•

•

•

reaches a ‘gaseous’ state. Here the production of artwork is replaced by the ‘aesthetisation’ of the social sphere.72 Place-space: a socially occupied, constructed, and operating system, which incorporates the interaction between artists, people, and groups of ‘participants’ in life’s systems, institutions, land uses, political and economic decisions, and languages of representation. Here, according to Doreen Massey, ‘the identities of place are always unfixed, contested and multiple’, because they are ‘constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counter-position to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of links and interconnections to that “beyond”’.73 At the same time, the role of imagination intensively emerges through the ‘mobile reality’ of people who migrate, cross, inhabit, and re-inhabit places, ‘giving people a chance to meet and to imagine themselves as part of the same future community’, according to Paola Gandolfi.74 Place-territory: a place understood as a complex landscape, which transcends the specificities of urban and rural, natural and artificial typologies, becoming a constitutive element of local cultures and human proprium, which emerges through the performative character of place reified by ‘visitors’. In 2000, a specific meaning of landscape came to be regulated by the European Landscape Convention,75 which considers landscape as a key factor for the consolidation of regional identities, encouraging the transregional enhancement, restoration, and creation of other landscapes (or landscapes’ ‘others’?). Place-thinking: the image of place we create, whose symbolic and functional network systems recall global and universal meanings of human common existence at a planetary level, according to translocal collective memories and cultural backgrounds. A place’s ‘otherness’ can result from actions and processes of hybridisation of languages, remediation of data, and pluri-scalar relocation of visual and sensorial experiences, activating empathy in the ‘users’.

A Temporary Conclusion The ‘imaginary institution of place’ is an expression I have formulated, which stands at the core of my research about the process of art-led place-making as an integrated research field, following the process of institutionalisation of the ‘Imaginary of the Internet’, as defined by sociologist Patrice Flichy:76 in the middle of the 1990s, this process was accomplished by the evolution of the Internet protocol into a meta-protocol, that is, into a ‘network of networks’. In the same way, art-led place-making could be understood as a symbolic and functional ‘system of systems’, which can be researched beyond the perspectives of the given narration both before and after its making. Here, data and information are collected and deepened like evidence of the remaking plan, concerning the way the project relates and reshapes aesthetics and dominant collective memories, because the more we dig in the ‘building’ process of place, the closer we get to understand the ‘radical imaginary of place’, the more we could produce thematic and methodological tools to analyse and pre-evaluate the transformative potential of the art project. As we have seen, the hippocampus is a determinant for producing memory, navigation skills, and the representation of two-dimensional spaces; as one of the two essential structures of the limbic system, it is the part of the brain involved in our behavioural and emotional responses, especially when it comes to behaviours we need for survival.77 According to more recent data, ‘some researchers suppose that the same encoding system can help to browse other types of information, such as images, sounds and abstract 204

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concepts’,78 as suggested by an experiment in 2016 on grid cells in a much more abstract context by computational neuroscientist Timothy Behrens, who discovered that ‘the brain processes trajectories through physical spaces and conceptual spaces in the same way’.79 Considering the universal character of our entorhinal map, which operates at ‘all times in all kinds of environments’ as an internal independent system of encoding and storage of associative memory including spatial and non-spatial elements, whose ensembles of grid cells ‘are activated in a stereotypic manner, regardless of the unique landmarks of the environment’ potentially representing ‘all places and potential places’80 on the one hand, and the relativity of our experiences that are submitted ‘to time in general, to space in general, and to the same categories but in their full and concrete being-thus’81 on the other hand, the main question then could be: ‘What if we research the “imaginary institution of place” as a nexus between place and different types of memory?’ Following the paths opened by Castoriadis, going through the unexplored paths that artled place-making could potentially open as a plurilinguistic and infrastructural strategy, methodology, and display, the imaginary significations of place as a whole could be reshaped by the interdependence of humanistic and scientific knowledge, in which art is understood as a shared shifting-thinking and as coordinator of a ‘matrix of ideas’;82 preserving the qualities of the parts, ‘starting from transdisciplinarity and moving across fields and integrating aspects of science’,83 whence a ‘syncretic place-thinking’ could arise. In these terms, syncretism would be a precondition for it to happen, and humanistic and scientific knowledge should be considered as ‘necessary parts of a creative symbiosis’,84 which must include ‘the social institution of a common or collective marking of time’.85 Art-led placemaking could be then researched as a complex system, simultaneously organised and organising, created by ‘system designers’,86 and that produces, establishes, and coordinates the conditions themselves for the social-historical unceasing creation of place.

Notes 1 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blarney (Cambridge: Polity Press, [1975] 1987). 2 Ibid., 3. According to Castoriadis, the term ‘imaginary’ ‘does not come from the image in the mirror or from the gaze of the other. Instead, the ‘mirror’ itself and its possibility, and the other as mirror, are the works of the imaginary, which is creation ex nihilo. The imaginary of which he speaks ‘is not an image of’, but ‘it is the unceasing and essentially undetermined (social-historical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images, on the basis of which alone there can ever be a question of “something”’, and ‘what we call “reality” and “rationality” are its works’ (3). 3 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 127. 4 Ibid., 149. 5 Ibid., 191, translation from French by the author. 6 Angelo Turco, Configurazioni della territorialità (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2010). 7 William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Space (New York: Conservation Foundation, 1980). 8 Project for Public Space, ‘Placemaking Heroes’, 3 January 2010, www.pps.org/article/wwhyte. 9 Jan Ś widziń ski, ‘L’art comme art contextuel (manifeste)’, Hygiénisme 68 (1997), translated from French by the author, https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/46357ac. 10 I refer to the generation of the built world based on the authority of the ‘founding’ texts and theoretical discourse on urbanism and architecture as defined in Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle. Sur la théorie de l’architecture et de l’urbanisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996). 11 Courtney J. Campbell, ‘Space, Place and Scale: Human Geography and Spatial History’, Past & Present 239, no. 1 (May 2018): e23–e45, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtw006.

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12 Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten [film], Eames Office (1977), duration nine minutes, www. eamesoffice.com/the-work/powers-of-ten. 13 Project for Public Space, ‘The Origin of the Ten’, 1 January 2009, www.pps.org/article/ poweroften. 14 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 103. 15 Ibid., 99–103. 16 See Franco Farinelli, La crisi della ragione cartografica (Turin: Einaudi, 2016). 17 See Teresa Castro, La pensée cartographique des images: Cinéma et culture visuelle (Lyon: Aléas, 2011). 18 Augustin Berque, ‘La chôra chez Platon’, in Espace et lieu dans la pensée occidentale, ed. Thierry Paquot and Chris Younès (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 13–16, translated from French by the author. 19 Luc Brisson, ‘Platon aujourd’hui’, Études platoniciennes 9 (2012), http://etudesplatoniciennes.revues. org/261, translated from French by the author. 20 Luciano Floridi, Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction (London, New York: Routledge, 1999). 21 See Simone Arcagni, Visioni digitali: Video, web e nuove tecnologie (Turin: Einaudi, 2016). 22 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 372. 23 Ola Söderström, Francisco Klauser, Etienne Piguet, and Laurence Crot, ‘Dynamics of Globalisation: Mobility, Space and Regulation’, Geographica Helvetica 67 (2012): 1–3, www.researchgate.net/ publication/307833700_Dynamics_of_globalization_Mobility_space_and_regulation. 24 Ibid., 7. 25 Ibid., 140. 26 Ibid., 131. 27 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 132. 28 Umberto Eco, Segno (Turin: ISEDI, 1973). 29 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Milles Plateaux (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980). 30 François Dosse, ‘Vers une géophilosophie: Les apports de Foucault et de Deleuze-Guattari pour penser avec l’espace’, Géographie et culture 100 (2016): 15–28, https://journals.openedition.org/gc/ 4641, translated from French by the author. 31 Cartes et figures de la terre, curated by Cci/Mnam/Bpi, J. Mullender, and G. Macchi, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 24 May–17 November 1980, www.centrepompidou.fr/cpv/resource/ciBqEe/ r9nkggq. 32 Paul Ardenne, Un art contextuel: Création artistique en milieu urbain, en situation, d’intervention, de participation (Paris: Flammarion, 2002), 158, 172, translated from French by the author. 33 Cci/Mnam/Bpi et al., Cartes et figures de la terre. 34 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Geophilosophy’, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 96. 35 Jordana Cepelewicz, ‘The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces’, Quanta, 14 January 2019, www.quantamagazine.org/the-brain-maps-out-ideas-and-memories-like-spaces20190114. 36 Giusy Checola, ed., Invisible Pavilions: The Regeneration of the Hypogean Space as an Aesthetic, Functional and Resilient Infrastructure (Milan: Mimesis, 2020), 66. 37 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 369. 38 Claude Elwood Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3 (1948): 379–423. 39 Cited in Augustine Berque and Philippe Nys, eds, Logique du lieu et œuvre humaine (Brussels: Éditions OUSIA, 1997), 33–34, translated from French by the author. The seminar Logique du lieu et œuvre humaine took place in Paris, 8–28 January 1996. It was organised by the Centres de recherches sur le Japon contemporain de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Centre for Research on Contemporary Japan, as part of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Science), in collaboration with the Collège international de philosophie (International College of Philosophy) and supported by the Japan Foundation. 40 Ibid., 33–34. 41 Bernard Stevens, ‘Dépasser le moderne’, in Logique du lieu et œuvre humaine, ed. Augustine Berque and Philippe Nys (Brussels: Éditions OUSIA, 1997), 29, translated from French by the author. 42 Nishida Kitarō in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, revised 18 November 2019, https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/index.html#ref-2. 43 Cited in Berque and Nys, Logique du lieu et œuvre humaine, 5–11.

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The Imaginary Institution of Place 44 Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Geophilosophy’, 97–98. 45 Ibid., 99. 46 See Kristine Stiles and Peter Seltz, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996). 47 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). 48 Rawls cited in Amitai Etzioni, ‘Communitarianism’, The Encyclopaedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbson, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2014), 1. 49 Charles Taylor, ‘The Myth of Atomism’, Review of Metaphysics 59, no. 4 (June 2006): 841–868. 50 William Davies, ‘The Emerging Neo-Communitarianism’, Political Quarterly 83 (2012): 767–776, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-923X.2012.02354.x/abstract. 51 Greg Bird and Jon Shor, eds, Community, Immunity and the Proper: Roberto Esposito (Oxford: Routledge, 2015), 49. 52 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 149. 53 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 54 Vito Teti, Il senso dei luoghi (Pomezia: Donzelli Editore, 2014), 4, translated from Italian by the author. 55 Nicolas de Oliveira et al., Installation II: L’empire des sens (Paris: Thames & Hudson/Beaux livres édition, 2004). 56 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 202–210. 57 Garret Hardin, ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, Science 162, no. 3859 (December 1968): 1243–1248, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243. 58 Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 59 Christele Harrouk, ‘11 Rules to Follow When Creating Vibrant Public Spaces’, ArchDaily, 6 November 2019, www.archdaily.com/927754/11-rules-to-follow-when-creating-vibrant-publicspaces.. 60 See www.situations.org.uk/overwhelming-response-new-rules-public-art. 61 See Augustine Berque, Milieu et identité humaine: Notes pour un dépassement de la modernité (Paris: Éditions donner lieu, 2010). 62 Jan Ś widziń ski, ‘L’art comme art contextuel (manifeste)’, Hygiénisme 68 (1997), https://id.erudit. org/iderudit/46357ac. 63 Franco ‘Bifo Berardi’, ‘The Second Coming’, e-flux journal 83 (June 2017), www.e-flux.com/jour nal/83/142355/the-second-coming. 64 Ibid. 65 Angelo Turco, ‘Mythe et géographie’, Cahiers de géographie du Québec 45, no. 126 (2001): 369–388. 66 Ibid. 67 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, in conversation with Andreas Petrossiants, e-flus podcast, e-flux, 4 July 2019, http://e-flux.libsyn.com/franco-bifo-berardi-on-the-future-possibility-of-living-well. 68 Giusy Checola, ‘The Unarchivable’, Domus, 13 April 2016, www.domusweb.it/en/reviews/2016/ 04/13/the_unarchivable.html. 69 Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace (Oakland: University of California Press, 2003). 70 Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 117. 71 See Adalberto Vallega, Le grammatiche della geografia (Quarto inferiore, Bologna: PÀTRON editore, 2004). 72 Roberto Barbanti, ‘Mondo e questione est-Etica’, in Invisible Pavilions, ed. Giusy Checola (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2020), 107–112. 73 Doreen Massey, Place, Space, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 5 (original emphasis). 74 Paola Gandolfi, ‘Looking at the Maverick Campus Pilot Project – at a Distance: Discussing Legitimate and Illegitimate Issues’, in Invisible Pavilions, ed. Giusy Checola (Milan: Mimesis Edizioni, 2020), 228. 75 See the Council of Europe Landscape Convention, www.coe.int/en/web/landscape 76 The ‘imaginary institution of place’ is a theory from the PhD thesis in process by Giusy Checola in aesthetics, sciences, and technologies of art, entitled “L’institution imaginaire des lieux: La création des systèmes géoesthétiques, sociaux et cognitifs de l’art contextuel à l’art-led place-making” [The imaginary institution of place: the creation of geoaesthetic, social and cognitive systems from contextual art to art-led place-making] (EDESTA – University Paris VIII Vincennes Saint-Denis,

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77 78

79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86

forthcoming). The theory aims to affirm art-led place-making as an autonomous genre of art of the common/s, and proposes to study it as an integrated field of research on art theory, geoaesthetics, collective memory, behaviour, and thinking. It results from the elaboration of the theory of the imaginary institution of society by Cornelius Castoriadis, and is influenced by the ‘imaginary of the Internet’ as defined by sociologist Patrice Flichy in his book L’Imaginaire de l’Internet (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2001). Description of the limbic system from the University of Queensland, see https://qbi.uq.edu.au/ brain/brain-anatomy/limbic-system. Jordana Cepelewicz/QuantaMagazine, ‘Il cervello usa mappe spaziali anche per idee e ricordi’, 29 gennaio 2019, translation by the author, www.lescienze.it/mente-e-cervello/2019/01/19/news/cer vello_mappe_spaziali_concettuali_esagoni_celle_griglia-4262054/?refresh_ce. Ibid. E. I. Moser and M. -B. Moser, ‘Hippocampus and Neural Representations’, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 2009, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780080450469007671. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 202–203. Roy Ascott, Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Roy Ascott, ‘The Planetary Collegium’s Ninth International Research Conference, Consciousness Reframed’, in New Realities: Being Syncretic, ed. Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, Margarete Jahrmann, and Ruth Schnell (New York: Springer, 2008), 8–9. Ibid. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 204. Clarissa Ribeiro and Gilbertto Prado, ‘Trans-Actions: To Be Between, Across, and Beyond’, in New Realities: Being Syncretic, ed. Roy Ascott, Gerald Bast, Margarete Jahrmann, and Ruth Schnell (New York: Springer, 2008), 240.

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19 THE BATTLE OF PUBLIC SCULPTURES On Three Sculptures in Hong Kong Oscar Ho Hing-Kay

At the city centre of Hong Kong along both sides of Victoria Harbour, there are three public sculptures that carry distinctive messages that reflect the complex political situation of post-1997 Hong Kong. They reflect the continuous battle between the central authority of Beijing, the government of the Special Administration Region (SAR) of Hong Kong, and the people of Hong Kong. This chapter goes through the analysis of three public sculptures: The Golden Bauhinia, donated by the Central Government in Beijing; The Monument in Commemoration of the Return of Hong Kong to China, commissioned by the Hong Kong government; and The Flying Frenchman, created by the French sculptor César Baldaccini, with the intention to show the mindsets of the three important sources and the ongoing political struggles and confrontations in Hong Kong since 1997. For a long time since 1842, the early British colony did not have many public sculptures. The two prominent ones were the statue of Queen Victoria, installed in 1897, and the statue of a successful businessman, Sir Catchick Paul Chater (1846–1926),1 installed in 1907. The two statues show the essence of early colonial governance: the affirmation of British imperial rule and the importance of business. With the statue of Queen Victoria being moved from ‘Central’ to Victoria Park in 1952, the statue demonstrates its prominence, while the Sir Catchick statue still stands firm in front of the HSBC headquarters in the Central District. The only political monument that still exists in ‘Central’ is the Cenotaph, which was built in 1923 to commemorate those who died during the First World War.2 Located at the city centre behind City Hall and in front of the HSBC headquarters, the Cenotaph used to be an important monument where an official ceremony was held annually on Remembrance Day, 11 November. After 1997, Remembrance Day was cancelled as a public holiday and replaced by a new holiday, Buddhist Day. However, a small-scale ceremony continues on Remembrance Day, mainly conducted by members of the Hong Kong Ex-Servicemen Association.

The Golden Bauhinia Since the 1960s, with the exception of some decorative art sculptures at City Hall and some commercial buildings, hardly any public monuments were built. It was only since 1997,

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when Hong Kong was returned to China, that more public sculptures and monuments started being installed as political statements. Politically the most outstanding and prominent one is The Golden Bauhinia (see Figure 19.1). Since 30 June 1997, the Convention Centre by Victoria Harbour in Wanchai, which is a little distance from the Central District, has taken on a special political status. Not only because it is the place where the historic ceremony of handover was held, but also because, in addition to the daily flag-raising ceremony, all important political events such as the National Day flag-raising ceremony and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day are solemnly held at Golden Bauhinia Square, which is an extension of the Centre. Golden Bauhinia Square is of great significance, as it houses an important political statue that states the new ownership of Hong Kong (replacing the former British colony), as well as the new relationship between mainland China and its people in Hong Kong. The square is named after a bronze sculpture of the city flower, Bauhinia. The sculpture was sent to

Figure 19.1 The Golden Bauhinia (1997), unknown creator. Golden Bauhinia Square, Wan Chai, Hong Kong Source: Photo credit Oscar Ho.

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Hong Kong during the handover as a gift from the Central Government to the Hong Kong people; it is also a statement expressing their views about Hong Kong and its future. The sculpture is six metres high, gilded in the shape of the flower Bauhinia blakeana, the city flower of Hong Kong. It is placed on a cylindrical pedestal made out of deep-red marble. At the bottom, there is a flat square with little blocks running alongside the edges, looking as if they were the parapets of a defensive wall. It is an obvious reference to the Great Wall of China, a national symbol that implies that whatever falls within the Great Wall belongs to the country, a subtle declaration placing Hong Kong within the territories of China. Putting a cylinder on a square is based on the traditional Chinese concept of ‘the sky is round and the earth is square’.3 It also refers specifically to the total territory of China as ‘nine states round and square’.4 On the pedestal is carved the sentence ‘Forever Blossoming Bauhinia’. Choosing a symbol to represent Hong Kong is complicated for the Chinese. Naturally, the old colonial emblems such as the arrival of the British at Stanley5 or the lion sculpture of HSBC would have no place for the reclaimed Hong Kong. The flower Bauhinia, a reddish-purple flower distinctively found in Hong Kong, has been commonly used to represent Hong Kong since the 1960s. The flower is pleasant to look at and seemingly does not carry any political association. There was an assumption that the people of Hong Kong would accept using a neutral flower symbol for the representation of their home. Interestingly, the sculpture only utilises old symbols such as the Great Wall and traditional philosophy, without using any of the visual language typical of communist propaganda. It shows a conservative approach that is not in line with the tradition of communist expression. It is a subtle expression showing the wishes of Beijing toward Hong Kong. The Bauhinia is not in a state of full bloom. Instead, it is just getting near maturity and ready to blossom, implying that Hong Kong has not yet come to its fullness under the British and is waiting for full blossoming after 1997. If one looks at the flower from the front, its shape is similar to the female genitals, denoting a symbol of birth, a mother that gives birth to a child, suggesting a mother and child relationship at the rebirth of Hong Kong. Using a sexual organ for official expression is not a common practice of the Chinese government. It is most likely a subconscious act. However, it does show the good will of Beijing at that moment, an attitude that has disappeared since the suppressive governance of the Special Administration District (SAD) under Carrie Lam,6 the chief executive of Hong Kong who seems willing to sell Hong Kong for anything that pleases the Chinese leaders. The golden colour of the sculpture is commonly used by the Chinese, who see gold as a representation of wealth. Taking away the natural reddish colour of the flower and replacing it with a surface covered with gold plates, the sculpture shows the mindset of the Central Government, which sees that the highest and most desired value of Hong Kong is to make money. While the choice of a Bauhinia seems neutral, the flower is loaded with hidden meanings and ironies that make the reading of this flower complicated, if not satirical. In 1964, the Urban Council officially endorsed the Bauhinia as the official flower of the city. For the first time, there was a local emblem that did not carry any colonial symbol. In the statement announcing the new choice, the council clearly pointed out that ‘the armorial bearings granted by the Queen in 1959 still remained the official emblem of Hong Kong and would not be affected by the proposal of a flower emblem to represent the colony’.7 The statement was a reminder to the Hong Kong people of who the real boss was. After 1997, 211

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the flower was commonly adopted as an emblem, and was found in the city flag and the coins of Hong Kong, replacing the old emblems of crown and lion. The uniquely Hong Kong flower Bauhinia blakeana, also known as the Hong Kong Orchid-Tree, was discovered by the Catholic Fathers of a French Mission in 1903. The flower is, almost like a metaphor, a sterile, hybrid tree whose existence comes from the mixing of two different kinds of Bauhinia. It was found along the seashore near a ruined house. Bauhinia blakeana is named after Sir Henry Blake, a former governor of Hong Kong and enthusiastic botanist. Ironically, Henry Blake happens to be one of the most brutal governors in the history of Hong Kong. In an effort to take over the New Territories following an agreement made in 1898 giving a 99-year lease of a piece of land north of Kowloon measuring 953.1 square kilometres, he ordered soldiers to brutally attack the native residents in 1899, killing nearly 500 people in Tai Po. It is indeed ironic to have a flower named after a vicious colonist as an emblem of Hong Kong after 1997. It is also ironic that the sculpture of a flower is cast in bronze and plated gold. While the materials might suggest strength and wealth, it does not communicate the lightness and liveliness of something from nature. It looks heavy and unnatural. The thickly cast metallic petals fail to suggest any sense of movement toward full blossoming. In fact, it looks frozen. The sculpture is like a tragic omen that foretells Hong Kong will be in a static state of inability to further develop, despite its potential to grow. The name of Bauhinia blakeana in Cantonese is ‘Yeung Chiking’. The word ‘Yeung’ means ‘foreign’, and ‘Chiking’ is a different flower called Cercis chinensis, which originated in China. Since 1997, ‘Yeung Chiking’ has been replaced by ‘Chiking’, with the word ‘foreign’ being taken away. By taking away the word ‘Yeung’, it changes into a totally different flower from China. In all official statements, Bauhinia is now called the ‘Chiking’, and the sculpture is referred to as the ‘Golden Chiking’. Golden Bauhinia Square is a popular place for Chinese tourists, where they take pictures to celebrate the regained ownership of Hong Kong. Hardly any local would visit the square except to go there for demonstrations during National Day ceremonies. As a public sculpture, it generates little attention from the local public.

The Monument in Commemoration of the Return of Hong Kong to China Golden Bauhinia Square, outside of the Convention Centre, is a big open space designed for serious political activities. At the other side of the centre, which is a much narrower space, another public sculpture commemorating the return of the city to China is timidly located. It is called The Monument in Commemoration of the Return of Hong Kong to China. Like an afterthought being put in one year after the installation of the Golden Bauhinia, it stands quietly in the corner, like a humble subordinate who does not dare to violate the powerful presence of their master. It is, nonetheless, necessary and politically appropriate for the SAD government to officially make a statement glorifying the return of Hong Kong to China. Through an open competition, Hong Kong architect Thomas Tang was given the commission to design and build the monument in 1998. The monument was officially installed in 1999. This 20-metre-high monument is a long pillar made out of dark granite, with a capital made out of copper at the top. The capital does not hold anything. It is purely for decoration. When the monument was installed, the bronze capital had already lost its original colour and turned green. It was deliberately oxidised so that the bronze would not 212

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change it again. By permanently changing its colour, according to the official explanation, it displays an act of ‘symbolizing that Hong Kong continues to prosper after its return to the motherland’.8 For the city to continue to prosper, it must go through a process of oxidisation at the beginning and permanently change its original colour. The design of the monument intends to tell the history of Hong Kong. It is built with 206 overlapping stone slabs, each of which represents a year since 1842, when the Chinese gave Hong Kong to the British, and ends with 2047 when the agreement of ‘One Nation Two Systems’ ends.9 Among the stone slabs are six circular slabs with light colour granite, denoting the years 1842, 1860, 1898, 1982, 1984, and 1990. These are important years regarding Hong Kong’s departure from, and return to China. Considering the height of the pillar, the reading of these historical moments is simply impossible. Such opaque design has no meaning to its audience. The most highlighted feature of the pillar is the writing of the Chinese name of the monument by President Jiang Zemin and his own signature, which is engraved on the facade of the pillar and then painted in gold. For the Chinese, the writing and signature of a leader always represents an endorsement of the supreme authority. While the pillar intends to be an expression of the Hong Kong people celebrating the City’s return to China, the locals rarely visit it. While the pillar attempted to be a humble response to The Golden Bauhinia, it is not within view when visiting Golden Bauhinia Square. The pillar, which is supposed to celebrate the return of Hong Kong to China, fails to generate any meaning among the Hong Kong people. At the same time, its lack of artistic characteristics also fails to attract outside visitors, including those from the mainland. However, it is a work that must be installed for the purpose of officially showing loyalty to the new masters. During official ceremonies at Golden Bauhinia Square, the activities never extend to the other side of the Convention Centre, where the monument is. With the powerful presence of the Golden Bauhinia, the monument, like the SAD government, takes on no authority as a political symbol. If The Golden Bauhinia echoes the image of a female sexual organ, the monument that erects a long pillar with a slightly enlarged capital at the top becomes a phallic symbol. It is a male sexual organ blessed with the authority of the nation’s leader. Ironically, as if it tries but does not dare to frontally face the vagina, it remains hidden on the other side of the square, remotely echoing a timid desire. The 1989 Beijing student movement, and the subsequent massacre on 4 June, have left unforgettable memories for the Hong Kong people, as they witnessed some of the most brutal military violence against civilians in modern history. Intensely disturbed by the brutality, since 1989 the Hong Kong people have consistently attended a memorial annual gathering at Victoria Park, on the evening of 4 June. In 2019, which marks the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre, organisers of the memorial event estimated that 180,000 people attended. Cenotaphs for the dead from the massacre and a small-scale reproduction of The Goddess of Democracy10 are temporarily installed at the park during the event. The display of these monuments is only temporary because there are no public places allowed for public sculptures of such a political nature. Soon after the famous Goddess of Democracy at Tiananmen was destroyed and a bloody killing started, a group of artists started to build a new version of the goddess statue as a sign of the continuation of the movement. After being used for a series of demonstrations, the revised statue was finally trashed, as there was no room for the storage of such large sculptures. As Hong Kong was moving close to 1997, the government acted conservatively, despite the fact that the city was still under British rule. Currently, all the public sculptures commemorating the 1989 student 213

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movement are installed at the universities, as the government and real estate developers control all the public spaces and allow no room for political display.

The Flying Frenchman With the increased attention to investing in art and creativity, district councils and the Cultural and Recreation Department have increased the installation of public sculptures. Normally these are works of a decorative nature, with little cultural significance to the community. In 1993, one of the most prominent public sculptures was installed at the square in front of the Cultural Centre facing the Victoria Harbour. It is called The Flying Frenchman (see Figure 19.2). In 1991, the Cartier Foundation proposed to donate to Hong Kong a public sculpture by the established French artist César Baldaccini (1921–1998). The Urban Council,11 which was responsible for arts and culture in the city at the time, was delighted to accept the offer. It is common and natural that, when an artist is commissioned to make a sculpture for a place, they will try to engage in a dialogue with that community through the work. In addition to following their creative path, the contextual significance of placing the work in a foreign place is an important consideration. The very basic question is: what will the artwork mean within that community?

Figure 19.2 The Flying Frenchman/Freedom Fighter (1993), César Baldaccini. Kowloon, Hong Kong Source: Photo credit Oscar Ho.

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The commission was made two years after the 1989 Beijing student movement, which shocked and disturbed many with a brutal ending. The courageous struggle of the Beijing demonstrators left a strong impression on people from all over the world, including the French. After the 4 June massacre, the French government was active in supporting ‘Operation Yellow Bird’12 to give asylum to political dissidents secretly brought out of China by Hong Kong activists. Being commissioned to make art for Hong Kong, a city known for its active support of the Tiananmen movement and still haunted by the vivid brutality that the Hong Kong people witnessed, it is difficult for an artist not to think about that particular moment in history. When the commissioned sculpture was officially unveiled in 1993, the main guest of the ceremony, César Baldaccini, did not show up. This is most unusual, especially in Asia for the unveiling of a major commission, unless some unexpected incident happens to the artist. Even in such a case, the organiser would merely reschedule the event. A total absence is most unusual. The unusual explanation of the artist’s absence at the unveiling ceremony started to go around within a small circle. The artist did not show up, according to hearsay, because he wanted to protest against the renaming of his sculpture. The sculpture was originally called The Freedom Fighter, a commemoration of the people participating in the 1989 Beijing democracy movement. Shocked by the political implication of the title, the Urban Council of the Hong Kong government insisted on changing the title of the work to The Flying Frenchman. But what is the meaning of installing a sculpture of a ‘flying Frenchman’ in the city centre of Hong Kong, especially when he has only one wing? What did the artist try to communicate, within the context of Hong Kong? Since the installation of a sculpture commemorating the 1989 Beijing democracy movement at the heart of Hong Kong was too controversial politically, no one dared to formally reveal the truth. Only bits and pieces were leaked around, and the rumour only remained within a small group of people. During the fifth anniversary of the 4 June massacre, I wrote three articles consecutively in the Hong Kong Economic Journal entitled ‘Wanting to Fly’.13 The first article was about the desire to fly in ancient mythology. The second was about the desire to fly with the aid of machines, and its impact on art during the end of the nineteenth Century. The third one, published on 4 June, was about The Flying Frenchman. In fact, it was about the wish to fly, as expressed by The Flying Frenchman. I wanted to tell that story to the public. Since most of the stories remained unconfirmed, proving the real title of the sculpture only relied on circumstantial evidence, such as the background circumstance in which César made his sculpture, his interest in the topic of flying and freedom, and his absence from the unveiling ceremony; in addition to hearsay, another reliable source would be the artwork itself. Formal analysis of the artwork might help to prove that the sculpture was in fact of a ‘freedom fighter’. The sculpture is a black-winged human figure cast out of bronze. The left-hand side attaching to the figure’s body is a big, long wing. His body bends backward slightly and his right leg leans back a little so that the wing moves slightly upward. The body and the central chord of the wing are structured with metallic bars, giving the body and the wing an expression of energy and power. The winged figure represents an angel, or at least someone who can – or wants – to fly. However, he has only one wing. He is an angel with a broken wing, or a person whose dream has crashed, and who cannot fly. But the figure still stands strong, with the head and the wing pointing upward to the sky. He is ready to fly again, despite a temporary defeat. 215

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Even when there is no confirmed information of the real title of the sculpture, it is clear that, based on the artwork itself, it is a work about undergoing temporary defeat while still holding strong to one’s vision, with the strength and determination to fly again. It is a perfect metaphor for the Beijing demonstrators as well as ‘Hongkongers’,14 who have been actively calling for freedom and democracy. The story about the ‘real’ title and meaning of the sculpture started to spread around within the arts community. On 4 June 1999, during the tenth anniversary of the 4 June massacre, a small group of cultural workers, including writers, critics, and artists, went to the statue and performed the first flower dedication ceremony there.15 It was a collective action to reclaim the original title in order to restore the meaning of the sculpture. It was an act of re-establishing a permanent monument to freedom and democracy in the city centre. The event was also a protest against governmental censorship. In a public statement by the group, calling for participation in the ceremony, it stated: This action symbolises Hong Kong people’s struggle for political, emotional, artistic and other forms of expression in public space. It’s up to you whether to believe this piece of public art in the middle of our city has suffered from political censorship, and managed to survive only under an alias. It is also you, and all of us, too, who can enrich our collective memory, and interrupt the all too top-down and monolithic voices from the authorities.16 Gradually the sculpture has become a platform for small-scale ceremonies, of flower dedication or meditation by small groups of cultural workers. In 2011, during the twelfth anniversary of the Beijing democracy movement, the issue of the real title of the sculpture was brought up again in a local newspaper, the Ming Po Daily.17 In the same year, the local art group ‘Woofer Ten’ organised an event called ‘Who’s Afraid of the Freedom Fighter? A Ceremony of Rebirth’. People gathered around the sculpture in commemoration of those killed on the 4 June massacre. At the same time it was a protest against the arrest of the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. The sculpture has become a symbol of political protest. Increasingly, more groups other than the cultural ones began to recognise the real meaning of the sculpture. On 4 June 2014, the radical political group ‘PassionTeens’ organised an anti-communist gathering at the square of The Freedom Fighter. In Wikipedia, the description of The Flying Frenchman includes a statement that ‘the name “Freedom Fighter” was rejected by Hong Kong’s government, causing the artist not to attend the unveiling ceremony in 1993’.18 The story has been spread quietly, but widely. To extend the awareness of the real meaning of the sculpture, during the thirtieth anniversary of the Beijing democracy movement, I wrote another article entitled ‘Give Back the Right Name to the Official June 4 Monument’ at the popular pro-democracy newspaper, the Apple Daily.19 While responses from the cultural community mainly focus on reclaiming the original meaning of the sculpture or making a critique of the act of censorship by the government, the article put in an additional provocation, highlighting the ironic fact that it is a governmental monument commemorating the heroic act of the Beijing democracy movement. On 4 June when the massacre happened, in addition to the massive gathering at Victoria Park, the main venue of the commemoration ceremony, there was a gathering of nearly 200 people at the square where The Freedom Fighter was located. Interestingly, all the reports about the gathering online or in newspapers called the sculpture The Freedom Fighter. The sculpture has been officially renamed, not by the government, but by the media and the people. 216

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The Freedom Fighter has now become a symbol of fighting against authoritarianism among the public. On 12 June 2019, at Admiralty, a large-scale confrontation broke out between police and demonstrators at a protest against the ‘Extradition Bill’.20 On that evening, a group of about 10 people were sitting around the sculpture just talking, when 23 policemen surrounded the group. The police asked the reason for their gathering and checked their identity cards. The sculpture, which now carries a subversive character, makes the police nervous. Public sculptures belong to the public. It does not matter if the story is ‘real’ or only hearsay. It is the public that makes the public sculpture publicly meaningful.21 Art involves interpretation and also the imposition of interpretation, but one should not deny the power of art to speak for itself. César Baldaccini’s sculpture has already carried some of the formal elements that make it a freedom fighter. All it needs is some explanation, and more importantly, the endorsement of the public. A real public sculpture is a sculpture endorsed by the people, and one that generates meaning among the people.22

Conclusion The three public sculptures at the centre of Hong Kong represent three different mindsets, and the structure of power behind them. While The Golden Bauhinia is a work about declaring ownership and blessing from the new owner, at a time when China still wished to respect ‘One Nation Two Systems’. The Monument in Commemoration of the Return of Hong Kong to China is a necessary response from the SAD government, making a declaration to show loyalty to its new superior. It has little meaning to the locals. The complexity of renaming The Freedom Fighter reveals the political undercurrents within Hong Kong, where people finally create their very own monument, whether the story is true or not. The sculpture has become a public recreation, a true public art presence expressing the voices of the people in a city that is becoming increasingly suppressive.

Notes 1 Sir Catchick Paul Chater also played an important role within the colonial government, serving on many official committees, including being a member of the Governor’s Executive Committee in 1896. 2 Later on, the Cenotaph extended its role to cover the soldiers died during the Second World War. 3 The concept 天圓地方 of seeing the sky as round and the earth as square exists in early Chinese philosophy and was consolidated in the I Ching (Book of Changes). The concept was also adopted later by Confucius philosophy. 4 The term of 九州方圓, means ‘round and square are the nine provinces’. It first appears in the ancient book《禹贡》of 500 BC. The term refers to the land of China. 5 The scene was called ‘Ah Kwun showing the road’, a scene printed on the old dollar bills, telling the story of the early colonial days. 6 Carrie Lam was ‘elected’ by a special committee in 2017 as chief executive of Hong Kong. 7 Chris Wood, ‘How the Bauhinia Flower Became Hong Kong’s Emblem’, South China Morning Post, 13 January 2017. 8 ‘In Commemoration of the Return of Hong Kong to China’, press release, Hong Kong Government Information Service, 1 July 1999, www.info.gov.hk/info/monument/eng.htm. 9 ‘One Nation Two Systems’ is the principle behind the Sino-British agreement regarding Hong Kong’s return to China. The Chinese government has agreed that after 1997, for the following 50 years, the city will retain its mode of operation according to a structure of one nation two systems.

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10 On 29 May 1989 during the democracy movement in Beijing, students from various colleges built a ten-metre-high statue called The Goddess of Democracy and moved it into the occupied Tiananmen Square. It immediately became a powerful icon representing the spirit of the movement. The statue was soon destroyed during the 4 June massacre. 11 The Urban Council was established in 1883 to look after municipal services. In 1973 the council gained its financial and operational autonomy. In 1999, the council was cancelled, and was replaced by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, directly under the authority of the government. 12 ‘Operation YellowBird’ was a secret operation based in Hong Kong to help dissidents running away from the persecution from Chinese government after the crush of the 1989 Beijing democratic movement. 13 何慶基, , 《信報》, ‘Wanting to Fly’, Hong Kong Economic Journal, 2, 3, and 4 June 1994. 14 The term ‘Hongkonger’ is widely used among political activists and most commonly used right now during the extradition movement. The term is formerly included in Oxford’s Lexico dictionary. 15 梁寶山，, 《獨立媒體》Leung Po Shan, ‘Self-Reflection Upon the Flower Dedication of June 4’, Hong Kong In-Media, 31 May 2011. 16 The statement was jointly made by Anthony Leung, Grace Cheng, Oscar Ho, and Keith Tsang, who are the main organisers of the event. 17 林茵「被命名的飛翔法國人」,《明報》Lam Yan, ‘The Naming of the Flying Frenchman’, Ming Po Daily, 29 May 2011. 18 Wikipedia: Flying Frenchman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Frenchman. 19 何慶基，「為官方六四紀念碑正名」《蘋果日報》Oscar Ho, ‘Give Back the Right Name to the Official June 4 Monument’, Apple Daily, 31 May 2019. 20 The Extradition Bill, proposed by the Hong Kong government, allows the extradition of any Hongkonger to Mainland China, as long as the Chinese government claims that the person has committed a crime defined by them. The proposal led to massive demonstrations involving more than two million people taking to the streets, and the bill was postponed. 21 See Man Yi Ling, ‘Exploration of the Historical Meaning of Memorial Sculptures’, Cultural Studies 47: n.p., Ling Nam University, Hong Kong, July 2015. 22 See Hans Belting, ‘Contemporary Art and the Museum in the Global Age’, Disputatio: Philosophical Research Bulletin 1, no. 2 (2012): 16–30; and Tony Bennett, ‘Out in the Open: Reflections on the History and Practice of Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (1996): 133–153, on how the interpretation of art changes with time and social and cultural context, and how the understanding of art is to be reconstructed by people of the time.

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20 PUBLIC ART, GENTRIFICATION, AND THE PRESERVATION OF BLACK AND BROWN URBAN IDENTITY The Case of Little Haiti, Miami – an Interview with Muralist Serge Toussaint Martin Zebracki1

Serge Toussaint’s mural artwork has become an acclaimed, vital symbol for Little Haiti, Miami’s historic ethnic, immigrant neighbourhood. Over the 1980s, Haiti’s dictatorial regime of Jean-Claude Duvalier led to a significant influx of Haitians into South Florida, where – especially in Little Haiti – strong neighbourhood connections were formed through family ties, family-owned enterprises and (free) schooling programmes.2 The area hosts a mix of a relatively strong, although declining, Haitian immigrant community and other African American immigrants across the Caribbean, with a rising population of Hispanic immigrants (notably from Venezuela, following its socio-economic and political crisis since 2010).3 Better known perhaps is Little Havana, Jan Nijman argued that this has something to do with the Cuban community’s much larger numbers and stronger voices compared to the Haitians . . . Little Haiti’s character, as a place, is not as well defined or iconic as Little Havana’s. Neither its centre not its boundaries are selfevident.4 Nevertheless, as a form of cultural protection, the City of Miami formally designated the area as ‘Little Haiti’ in 2016 – as will be critically revisited in this account. On 9 December 2016, I had the privilege of meeting Toussaint for a street interview in Little Haiti.5 Born in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in 1963, Toussaint moved to New York at the age of 12, before finding his home in Little Haiti in 1994. He told me that his mother owned a restaurant, to which tourists brought interesting artworks and antiques. His schoolbooks were rich in depictions of art. All of which made him realise that perhaps he could 219

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make some money with it. His mother, however, told him that ‘art cannot easily be sold and that artists [only] get famous once they are dead’. But ‘art’s me’, he replied. Toussaint is an autodidact; he learned on the job, on the street: ‘I look at the vibes – what does the neighbourhood like to see? You’ve got to feel the vibe to see what the neighbourhood wants.’ Toussaint’s passion for art married with his love for Little Haiti. There, he found a warm and welcoming culture with the subtropical climate as a bonus – as it could let him work on the street all year round. Toussaint declared his artwork as a due reminder of a unique cultural heritage straddling the French-Creole and African-American identities, as embodied by the locals. Ever since his arrival, Toussaint has been creating murals that cover a blend of storefront signs, advertising, and full-length murals. They combine more utilitarian purposes with visions inspired by Haitian cultural heritage.6 Portrayed figures feature notable Black and Brown freedom fighters, political leaders, and artists. This interview-based piece is mainly ethnographic: it presents vignettes that connect with topical debates across scholarship and news media regarding gentrification and the challenges of preserving neighbourhood identity. Particularly under-examined is the (under-)representation and (un-)remembering of Black and Brown urban life, which lies at the heart of Toussaint’s artwork. In this piece, I want to be upfront about my positionality as white researchervisitor, learning about Black and Brown knowledges that are distinctive from hegemonic Anglo-Saxon knowledge production in which I am co-situated.7

Little Haiti’s Gentrifying Context How long until the displacer is displaced? Can you count it in years? Generations? Janus is the god of beginnings but also of endings. Gentrification, the artist’s very own ouroboros.8 No matter which face, it just is.9 Toussaint’s urge to make art has, in the more recent past, adopted the form of an ‘artivist’ fight against unprecedented levels of gentrification. His case is exemplary but not isolated.10 The formal area designation ‘Little Haiti’ might be telling for fears over the disappearance of the Black and Brown identity of a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. According to a food seller at the Caribbean Marketplace, the area has become ‘a dead zone; nothing is going on. Haitians have pretty much left the neighbourhood.’11 The arts have been a primary motor for reviving urban spaces throughout the Miami area and, on the flip side, the knock-on gentrification. Artists compete for visibility and recognition in Little Haiti as well, where Toussaint found some of the newer murals entirely unrelated to the neighbourhood.12 Notable to mention in this context is the former warehouse and working-class Puerto Rican immigrant neighbourhood Wynwood, which residents have long referred to as Little San Juan or El Barrio. The dominant real estate developer Tony Goldman created the arts epicentre Wynwood Walls in 2009, giving the starting signal for a widespread sprawl of creative enterprises in the area ever since, with omnipresent murals and (commissioned) graffiti artwork that have become Wynwood’s global visiting card. But the arts have, to some extent, become a victim of their own success. As also witnessed on Miami Beach, arts gentrification has priced out the first artists and galleries of Wynwood, forcing them to seek affordable workspaces elsewhere.13 Little Haiti has become the ‘creative alternative’,14 where property ownership is ‘increasingly deemed the only way for art workers to break a vicious cycle of art-powered gentrification’.15 New development plans include the already highly controversial Magic City Innovation District®, a billion-dollar residential, commercial, and arts hub, co-directed by Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté. Reading the shirts of some of the anti-gentrification 220

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protestors, for some this project heralds a ‘Tragic City’.16 Although such arts-led developments in Little Haiti may lay claims to assumed social benefits, their intentions often receive scrutiny from locals.17 Resulting hyper-gentrification increases rents and thereby pressure on affordable housing, which has led to the forced relocation of the longer-time, low-income and overly Black and Brown residents.18 New developments have also been pushing out small ethnic enterprises, including eateries, clothes shops, kitsch bars, and thrift shops. This all has been occurring at such a fast pace that the local district commissioner speaks of a downright ‘whitewashing’ of the neighbourhood.19 Now, real estate developers are often reluctant to use Little Haiti as identity reference, due to the stigma around its socio-economically deprived profile. Perhaps more appealing to targeted residents and markets, they would rather use the area’s historically known names of Little River or Lemon City20 – or invent new ones such as Wynwood Norte.21 Visit Florida™, the official state travel promotion agent, speaks of the next ‘Capital of Cool’.22 The trajectory of gentrification is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Little Haiti not only faces the consequences of arts gentrification but also of a so-called climate gentrification.23 Rising sea levels have caused developers to look for safer capital investments in higher-elevated areas, including Little Haiti. This compound gentrification process is accelerating the obliteration of Little Haiti’s distinct identity – will the images of Toussaint’s murals become postcards of a forgotten past?

‘Welcome to Little Haiti’: Public Art as Pedagogy Toussaint is a prolific mural artist with a record of – according to his self-report at the time of the interview in 2016 – roughly 500 murals in Little Haiti alone and 500 murals in the larger Miami area. To heighten his fight against the yoke of gentrification, Toussaint has been applying the word tag ‘Welcome to Little Haiti’ to most of his recent murals (Figure 20.1), imparting, as said in an interview elsewhere, ‘a long-term effort to help affirm the neighbourhood’s existence and protect its identity’.24 I recorded the conversation with Toussaint while I was sitting on a garden chair on the sidewalk, next to his mural-in-progress entitled The Bread Sellers (Figure 20.2). Toussaint’s reputation as a local figurehead was shown by the way locals warmly greeted him when walking by. His words flowed together with his strokes of paint, as he explained to me how with his new mural, and with his art more generally, he wants to bridge history, identity, and place: This is a Haitian farmer selling some bread in the 1980s. We now see people going to buy bread at little bakeries. But in this, we see how the bread is sold on the street in the morning when people go farming. We could see the ladies that have a little basket of bread in front of them on the side of the street [. . .] There are bakeries but we don’t really go to bakeries to buy bread. You know what I mean? So, once I paint that, it brings people, Haitians, way back [. . .] This brings back the memory of street life. Because it’s Little Haiti, it’s Little Haiti. You have to put up something that our history, our people remember [. . .] I paint to make you remember what you can’t find. ’Cause if I come here and paint a skyscraper, like the World Trade Center, it wouldn’t be appropriate, even though it’s a nice building, but it wouldn’t match with what we’re trying to do in here.25 While I was talking to Toussaint, he painted the contours of a mountain. This was not a coincidence. The country ‘Haiti’ infers its name from the indigenous Taíno name Ayiti, which means the ‘land of high mountains’, obviously a stark contrast with Miami’s flat surface area. 221

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Imagery that combines street scenes with natural environments seems to play an important role in Toussaint’s murals. He rendered his art as a teaching tool for intercultural encounters – as if he creates a schoolbook of his university of life: ‘When people come to Little Haiti, I want them to take a piece of Haiti with them, because there are people that don’t even understand what I’m doing.’26 Toussaint conveyed how some people noticed little aspects of significant cultural difference. Toussaint recalled the following conversation he had with a passer-by, a visitor, indicating how his art elicited surprise that facilitated transcultural understanding: There was a lady that walked in here and asked: ‘What is she holding?’ I sat down with her and explained to her what it was. She’s holding her bread. ‘She’s holding her bread? What is that she’s holding?’ A [loaf of] bread. People hold breads like that with no gloves. We do that in Haiti. ‘They hold breads with no gloves? Why doesn’t she have gloves on her hands?’ [Toussaint laughs] ‘But why would she sell bread in the street? Dust. All that thing coming on it. People will buy that stuff? Why is the bread not covered?’ [Laughing] You know, yes this is something that you need to teach people [. . .] Haitian people know exactly what this really represents. But foreigners, also people born here, they don’t always know what this is [. . .] That’s how I paint, so that I can explain to you what this is.27

Figure 20.1 Anpil Min Chay pa Lou (2016), Serge Toussaint. Little Haiti, Miami, FL, USA Source: Martin Zebracki. Photo reproduced with Toussaint’s consent. Note: ‘Anpil Min Chay pa Lou’ is Creole wordplay for ‘many hands make the load lighter’.

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Figure 20.2 The Bread Sellers (2016), Serge Toussaint. Little Haiti, Miami, FL, USA Source: Martin Zebracki. Photo reproduced with Toussaint’s consent.

Name Play: The Power of (Visual) Language The conversation segued into a discussion about the strategic role of language in identifying the area, where different interests have translated into different namings. Toussaint signalled processes of systemic racism and social exclusion, which are interlocked with the real estate ‘game’. He argued that ‘the big problem’ only started just recently with the new investors and developers coming in. Toussaint argued how these newcomers have reclaimed ‘their’ space and even want to create, or reinvent, a whole different, new identity for the neighbourhood. As Toussaint asserted: I’ve been in Miami since 1994 [. . .] When I came here, the only thing I knew was that this is Little Haiti. But the developers tried to change the name [. . .] They want to buy a piece of land out . . . Once you mention the word Haiti, the land is not worth a lot [. . .] Before, it was called Lemon City. At the time there were a lot of lemon trees everywhere. But if you go around, I don’t even think you’d see one single lemon tree. It’s gone [. . .] So, now the developers tried to turn this into Lemon City – it’s too vague because there are no more lemons. [Laughing] 223

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It’d be worth more money if you say, I’m going to buy a piece of Miami. ‘Where?’ [referring to fictional interlocutor] In Little River.28 But not all is bleak, and the reality seems ambiguous. Toussaint acknowledged that Little Haiti is a somewhat natural choice for developers and artists to move in. Its development potential not only has to do with its elevated ‘hardware’ but also with its social ‘software’, as the community cohesion is a competitive pull factor, too: The problem is South Beach is getting so crowded [. . .] The closest space for the people to come when they want to hang out is Little Haiti. There’s Overtown but they’re scared of going to Overtown, because in Overtown there is [sic] a lot of yankies and a lot of Black people [. . .] They’re going to rob you. They’re going to kill you [. . .] Haitian people are different. We are sort of French. We respect one another. So, now they, the developers, are taking the kindness for weakness [. . .] If you go to 36th street right now, there’s no more Haitians. They [i.e. the developers] took over [. . .] When I first came here the only bar was Churchill’s, the one right there on Second Avenue [. . .] Nowadays they have art galleries everywhere. They’re coming up.29 Just as developers use specific language to protect their interests, so does Toussaint. In his art, visual semiotics – i.e. inclusive visual language – plays a major role in safeguarding local heritage. As such, Toussaint has been renegotiating (or subverting, depending on your point of view) the hegemonic Anglophonic landscape: Back in 1994, when I first came to Miami, all I saw was just signs. There was [sic] no artworks, you know, and I realised, I am in Little Haiti and everything is written in English . . . Tiny Cup, barber shop, beauty salon . . . People here don’t understand what the word beauty salon is. They don’t understand what barber shop is. They don’t understand what grocery means, because that’s not how we say that in Creole. But why not painting a soda, a hotdog, a cigarette, a beer. So, people who don’t know how to read English, automatically, by seeing behind, they know what’s going on in there. That’s how I started. So, when I started doing that, people have come to embrace that [. . .] Now all of a sudden, I was called for a botanica [i.e. Haitian Vodou shop], the botanica is right there [points at location].30 When asking about the foregrounding of language, Toussaint stressed his larger effort to reminisce about urban life: The language? I’m bringing back the culture. Back then, all you saw was just the word botanica, but they have a particular saint that they worship. I was like, okay, what if I paint your saint for you? What you worship? They like cows. What if I paint a cow for you? [. . .] Once you walk up in here, you already know what’s going on in there by not even knowing how to read. It’s like when you see Coca Cola. You don’t know how to read but once you see red and white, that’s coke [. . .] They remember the label and it’s the same thing I’ve tried to do in Little Haiti.31

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Empowerment versus Erasure: The Politics of Recognition Toussaint reflected on his muralism as tool of empowerment for the local community, including himself. This has provided force to his warning message that the local culture that his artwork embodies should not be erased. Locals were already forced from homeownership into foreclosure since the recession in the late 2000s. The argument of Toussaint became particularly defensive when I dropped the name Magic City. For him, this most recent development is the epitome of the sophisticated practices of developers to push out the impoverished community in order to replace them by newcomers who have little or no ties with the local community, culture, and life.32 When I asked Toussaint whether he is afraid of Little Haiti’s identity being taken away by large-scale commercial development of this kind, his response was testament to community resilience: I’m really afraid of that, because that’s the reason why I’m fighting so much as an artist, because there are not too many artists at my level [. . .] Wherever you go to Little Haiti, you see my work. It’s related to Haiti. It has something to do with Haiti [. . .] Maybe by me doing all that, I’m just going to put some type of power on Haitian people, knowing that whatever they own, you cannot let it go like that. People cannot go to Little Havana, take Little Havana from the Cubans [. . .] As soon as you walk in Calle Ocho you have a sense of being in a Cuban community. You understand what I’m saying? But why would they [referring to developers] want to take our little place? [. . .] But by me being around, and putting up all this Haitian artwork, when people are going back and forth, the sense of Haiti is still going to be around.33 Toussaint, in this sense, construed himself as an influencer who instigates recognition: Every time I make a little piece on the wall, I pass the message. So, in other words, I’m not a writer, but with my artwork, I can inspire you [. . .] In a sense, I’m not a politician but I’m like . . . almost like . . . I don’t even know how to explain that. But I stand for truth. You understand what I’m saying?34 Indeed, I have observed how his muralism is present, as much as on the public streets as in public tweets (i.e. social media), lending visibility and a life span beyond the original location and ephemeral materiality of his art. Also, I, as researcher-visitor, have become part of Toussaint’s outreach. In so doing, relating back to the previous point about public art as pedagogy, Toussaint aims to teach about – and put a face to – community history through mural art, which he contemplated as particularly effective in reaching and empowering a wider audience beyond school textbooks. Toussaint turned to me and said: People like you are going to be involved because I give you something to write about. I give you something to influence you. I do some work so that people would act. If you go down there on 54th street, I don’t know if you’ve seen that work before. I put up all the ancestors, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines [both Haitian revolutionary leaders, 1789–1804], Charlemagne Masséna Péralte [Haitian nationalist leader resisting the 1915 US occupation of Haiti], the ancestors that gave Haiti freedom. It’s right there. I think I’m going to show it to you before you leave [. . .] People who, in 1804, gave Haiti freedom.35 So I paint 225

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those ancestors, to let the Haitian people know that, hey man, you have a background [. . .] You are the first [Black-led] nation in the world that got your freedom [from colonial rule and slavery] [. . .] Those are the people that fought for you, for you to keep your head up [. . .] We did help Americans get their freedom, so why would you bring yourself less.36 Toussaint’s artistic route of empowering others is anchored in his personal life course. He passionately reflected on the future generation: I don’t paint just to paint, I paint just to put out a message, to remind you of who you are. So, I want to make it when my son grows up, even if I’m not alive anymore, he will be like, man, my father was one of the guys who was fighting for this [. . .] my dad was one of the pioneers that fought for Little Haiti.37 At the same time, Toussaint realised that neither his murals nor his ‘wake-up call’ through the image of his murals may last forever. His muralism has become a site-specific strategy; an aesthetic act of empowerment that calls for recognition, protection, and ready action to avoid consigning the local identity to oblivion in the minds of the community in transition: The Haitian, we, need to wake up, to realise that if you stand for Little Haiti, five years from now, eight years from now, you’re going to come right here looking for Serge’s artwork, and they’re all going to be washed off, they’re going to be off [. . .] [But] it’s still going to be Little Haiti because I put a fight for this. And my voice is being heard man, my voice is being heard everywhere. My voice is being heard.38 I queried Toussaint about whether there are any efforts in place to preserve his murals. Not much can be officially done when developers or new owners wish to take down his murals – as anything else – on their properties, as a result of which many murals by his hand are left unrecorded.39 Toussaint’s ‘wake-up call’, however, could make a moral appeal to discourage them from doing so. Toussaint argued that he has developed great, promising support among the local community and fellow artists, cloaking his murals with a certain level of informal protection: All my works are protected. I can say they’re protected because I’ve been around here since 1994. The people that could destroy your work, is [sic] your artists, the graffiti people. They call me the godfather, because, in other words, they know that I started. Wherever I put my work, I don’t get tagged [. . .] If they come here with graffiti, they go: ‘That’s Serge, I don’t like touching Serge’s stuff’. Because they have some respect for me [. . .] As you can see, I left all my stuff here. Nobody’s going to touch it. I can leave that till the morning until I come.40 Toussaint’s labours and struggles, as artist and community builder, did not go unnoticed by the authorities. His work has been endorsed and sustained by invited commissions, including from local authorities: City of Miami, they love my work. As matter of fact they give me some work sometimes [. . .] If they’re going to do something, the one they’re going to ask is 226

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me to give the first shot at it [. . .] They’re like, you know, Serge is the one that changed the face of Miami.41 Recognition from the Florida Department of State came in 2016, when he was the recipient of the Florida Folk Heritage Award: You know how many artists there is [sic] in the state of Florida? For someone to recognise you as being a winner? This thing really means a lot to me [. . .] and it was on the news. This is one of the greatest things that I have accomplished in my life. But this was followed by a sad postscript: ‘I was telling you about my mom who never wanted me to be an artist [. . .] What hurts me the most is that I became famous when my mom died.’42

Controversy: Black Memorialisation or ‘Whitewashing’? Commissioned public art may come with challenges to artistic autonomy, in this case within the context of a complex racial, post-segregation society. Toussaint highlighted one salient controversy around the time of the 2007–2008 US election: The city of Miami hired me to paint at 62nd Street. That’s before Mr Obama became president [. . .] I thought I’d paint a picture of Doctor Martin Luther King but it’s like I made a mistake. It’s not a mistake but the wall was so big. I painted Doctor Martin Luther King but there was a big empty space on the side. And I’m trying to figure out, what if I put a flag, American flag [. . .] Then again, I’m like . . . but what else should I put to fill the gap? [. . .] But that’s at the time that Mr Obama came up and I’m like, you know what? Why I don’t just paint Mr Obama and Doctor Martin Luther King together because Doctor Martin Luther King’s dream was to have a Black president before he died, which he didn’t get the chance to see [. . .] But Mr Obama was a son of a white woman and a Black man [. . .] Doctor Martin Luther King fought [for the recognition] that all people are the same. So, Mr Obama, to me, is the dream of Martin Luther King. So why don’t I just put Mr Obama next to Martin Luther King and call the wall ‘The Dream of the Century’?43 Toussaint continued: So, I painted Doctor Martin Luther King and then, all of a sudden, I put a nice picture of Mr. Obama next to him. Man, before I knew it . . . the TV started calling me [. . .] This is beautiful, ‘We want to have an interview with you. Why would you paint this?’ I’m like, ‘because he’s going to become president.’ The next day the City of Miami calls me. And I’m like, ‘Hello?’ They say, ‘Serge, we have a problem.’ I go, ‘what’s the problem?’ ‘The problem we have is this: we had heard you would paint Doctor Martin Luther King, not Mr Obama, so now we want you to paint over Mr Obama’s picture.’ [Toussaint:] ‘You know, I get so many compliments. People are loving it and now you want me to paint it over?’ But what I did is, I didn’t paint it over. They gave me 72 hours to take it down

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and then what I did, I painted the silhouette, I painted around it [. . .] You know, Mr Obama got some big floppy ears, I just left the outline of Mr Obama on the wall.44 Then, I asked Toussaint whether it became a neighbourhood icon and he agreed. It became widely discussed across the news media. The rhetoric revealed a dissonant conversation piece, targeted against whitewashing: Yes, boom now the news called me again. ‘Serge . . . we really want to do an interview [. . .] But why did you paint that with white paint? [. . .] Why didn’t you use a different colour? [. . .] Did the white man make you take it down?’ – because Mr Obama is Black [. . .] Oh my god, next thing I know is, it’s a big controversy. They called the wall ‘the white out’. The white out? . . . I’m like ‘no, man, because whenever you paint something on a background you always use your white paint to cover it’ [. . .] They [i.e. the media] are calling the wall the white out . . . oh my god, that was really hard for me.45

Epilogue Toussaint’s muralism visualises the Little Haitian fabric of the last three decades. His oeuvre can be rendered as a twofold, ongoing act of artivism: an act of bestowing a sense of ownership on the local population (in a larger attempt to take pride in Black and Brown culture, identity, and neighbourhood community), as well as an ongoing grassroots artivism that, in a more recent context, has adopted a fight against the exclusionary forces of (hyper-)gentrification. The critical narrative that has come to me through the interview with Toussaint has shed light on a fascinating yet troubling mosaic of the identity of an ethnic, Black and Brown, neighbourhood in transition. This transition occurs under joint art and climate gentrification mechanisms. They are mediated through neoliberal regimes of power and post-colonial hierarchies, which feed Miami’s urban imaginary.46 At the same time, Toussaint’s muralism manifests itself as apprehension: that is an uneasy, or fearful, anticipation of existing and future real estate developments that threaten the continued existence of Little Haiti’s distinct cultural life and migratory background identity. New arts-driven development may well appropriate the creative spirit of the area while compromising the right to place of longer-term residents who are, in fact, increasingly forced to move out of the neighbourhood. This reality of social disenfranchisement is a vicious circle, as it obviously makes resident-led counteraction harder, or even impossible. The interview has revealed some key tensions: Toussaint’s artwork is respected; the popularity of his area-designated public art may have produced a clear visual identity marker. This artscape may have, nevertheless, canonised Little Haiti, potentially contributing to the stabilisation of Miami’s imaginary as a ‘creative city’. This may not be problematic per se. But what does it mean when new developments are possibly compensating for lost neighbourhood life by capitalising on its cultural and artistic legacy? They may well become ersatz developments that detract from Black and Brown community development.47 In other words, what does the authentic ‘publicness’ of Toussaint’s image culture entail if, or when, his visual artwork gets commodified for the gaze of audiences that cannot relate to the Black and Brown identity and street culture from which his work originates? In conclusion, could there be a stereotypical reproduction of a Haitian urban imaginary if there were no locals left for interpretation? It is also nothing new that the further marginalisation – and stigma – of Black and Brown communities points to systemic discrimination and related processes of exclusion and segregation in urban redevelopment, 228

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i.e. gentrification.48 Who, or which neighbourhood, is next? And how can public artists fight back to reclaim power, place, and identity beyond what might be(come) remnant beacons of an abandoned and underserved population?

Notes 1 I owe a debt of gratitude to Serge Toussaint for this unique opportunity to conduct the interview while he was at work on a new mural. Toussaint consented to be named in this dialogical piece (as anonymising would be impracticable in this case). 2 See David Brown, The Story of Little Haiti: Featuring Its Pioneers (Pompano Beach, FL: Educa Vision, 2001), cited in Sandra Lemaire, ‘Fighting Gentrification by Making Little Haiti Great Again’, VOA, 9 April 2018, www.voanews.com/usa/fighting-gentrification-making-little-haitigreat-again. 3 For an interesting historical background reading about Little Haiti in the light of gentrification, see Andres Viglucci, ‘Little Haiti Is Up for Grabs: Will Gentrification Trample Its People and Culture?’, Miami Herald, 29 September 2019, www.miamiherald.com/news/business/real-estate-news/ article232134932.html. 4 Jan Nijman, Miami: Mistress of the Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 158. See also Edward LiPuma and Thomas Koelbe, ‘Cultures of Circulation and the Urban Imaginary: Miami as Example and Exemplar’, Public Culture 17, no. 1 (2005): 153–180, who argued that ‘there is no city of Miami’ (161, original emphasis) in an effort to deconstruct Miami ‘as a stable, bounded, space’ (161). 5 For compelling reference interviews with Toussaint, see Maria Murriel, ‘Little Haiti’s Street Art, Before the Wynwood Era’, WLRN, 30 November 2015, www.wlrn.org/post/little-haitis-streetart-wynwood-era; and Monica Uszerowicz, ‘In Miami’s Little Haiti, a Muralist Fights Gentrification One Wall at a Time’, Hyperallergic, 7 September 2016, https://hyperallergic.com/321133/inmiamis-little-haiti-a-muralist-fights-gentrification-one-wall-at-a-time. 6 See Uszerowicz, ‘In Miami’s Little Haiti’. 7 The discursive use of the capitalised ‘Black’ and lower-case ‘white’ is an attempt to ‘centre antiracism’, Alex Kapitan, ‘Ask a Radical Copyeditor: Black with a Capital “B”’, https://radicalcopye ditor.com/2016/09/21/black-with-a-capital-b. 8 An ouroboros is as an ‘emblematic serpent of ancient Egypt and Greece represented with its tail in its mouth, continually devouring itself and being reborn from itself’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, www. britannica.com/topic/Ouroboros. 9 Dana Bassett, ‘How Many Sides Are There? A Meditation on the Many Headed Janus of Gentrification’, Miami Rail, 10 October 2016, https://miamirail.org/web-exclusives/how-many-sides-arethere-a-meditation-on-the-many-headed-janus-of-gentrification. 10 Toussaint is not alone in his fight against the gentrification of Little Haiti. In 2013, the Miami artists Loriel Beltran, Domingo Castillo, and Aramis Gutierrez opened GUCCIVUITTON, an ironic play on the high-end fashion brands Gucci and Louis Vuitton. See Jarrett Earnest, ‘Toward South Florida Aesthetics: An Oral History of GUCCIVUITTON’, Miami Rail, 13 September 2014, https://miamirail.org/visual-arts/toward-south-florida-aesthetics-an-oral-history-of-guccivuitton. In 2019, local ‘artivists’ Najja Moon and Michelle Lisa Polissaint critically responded to the widely circulating Miami Design District designer umbrellas, taken by them as a ‘marketing propaganda for the gentrification machine’ and the ‘whitewashing’ of Little Haiti. For their collaborative sitespecific public art project Who’s the Fool? How to Patch a Leaky Roof, they designed their very own umbrellas, which were placed open on doorsteps across Little Haiti, see Alexandra Martinez, ‘Two Little Haiti Artists Are Resisting Gentrification With an Army of Umbrellas’, Miami New Times, 23 April 2019, www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/o-miami-poetry-festivals-whos-the-fool-how-topatch-a-leaky-roof-fights-little-haiti-gentrification-11149028. 11 Cited in Lemaire, ‘Fighting Gentrification’. 12 See Uszerowicz, ‘In Miami’s Little Haiti’. 13 See Alfredo García, ‘The Walls of Wynwood: Art and Change in the Global Neighborhood’ (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2017). 14 See Beth Dunlop, ‘Grappling with Gentrification in Miami’s Little Haiti’, Metropolis, 5 April 2016, www.metropolismag.com/design/grappling-with-gentrification-in-miamis-little-haiti.

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Martin Zebracki 15 See Brett Sokol, ‘Miami’s Art World Sets Sights on Little Haiti Neighborhood’, New York Times, 23 November 2015. 16 Allison Waller and Joey Flechas, ‘Little Haiti Residents Rally for a More “Inclusive” Development Ahead of Magic City Vote’, Miami Herald, 21 June 2019, www.miamiherald.com/news/local/com munity/miami-dade/article231762063.html. 17 See Viglucci, ‘Little Haiti Is Up for Grabs’. 18 See Sokol and Jerry Iannelli, ‘New Report Warns Magic City Development Could Displace Thousands of Low-Income Residents’, Miami New Times, 21 June 2019, www.miaminewtimes.com/ news/little-haiti-miami-activists-warn-magic-city-innovation-district-could-displace-thousands11201465. 19 See Uszerowicz, ‘In Miami’s Little Haiti’. 20 See Sokol, ‘Miami’s Art World’. 21 Andres Viglucci, ‘This Working-Class Miami Barrio Is Geared Up for Gentrification: Welcome to Wynwood Norte’, Miami Herald, 19 September 2019, www.miamiherald.com/news/local/commu nity/miami-dade/midtown/article234485632.html. 22 Jodi Mailander Farrell, ‘Now’s the Time to Visit Little Haiti, on the Brink of Change’, Visit Florida™, www.visitflorida.com/en-us/cities/miami/visit-little-haiti-in-miami.html. 23 See Jesse Keenan, Thomas Hill, and Anurag Gumber, ‘Climate Gentrification: From Theory to Empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida’, Environmental Research Letters 13, no. 5 (2018): 1–11; see also Carolyn Beer, ‘Miami Residents Fear “Climate Gentrification” as Investors Seek Higher Ground’, PRI, 19 December, 2017. 24 Cited in Uszerowicz, ‘In Miami’s Little Haiti’; see also Miami New Times, ‘Arts & Entertainment 2019: Best Street Artist Serge Toussaint’, n.d., www.miaminewtimes.com/best-of/2019/arts-andentertainment/best-street-artist-11190836. 25 Interview, Miami, 9 December 2016. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 See Viglucci, ‘Little Haiti Is Up for Grabs’. 33 Interview, Miami, 9 December 2016. 34 Ibid. 35 Haiti declared independence in 1804, after having been the French colony of Saint-Domingue from 1659 to 1804. 36 Interview, Miami, 9 December 2016. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid. 39 See also Murriel, ‘Little Haiti’s Street Art’. 40 Interview, Miami, 9 December 2016. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 LiPuma and Koelbe, ‘Cultures of Circulation and the Urban Imaginary’. 47 For an account on the exclusion of Haitian migratory culture and identity in Miami’s cultural production, see Fredo Rivera, ‘Precarity + Excess in the Latinopolis: Miami as Erzulie’, Cultural Dynamics 31, no. 1–2 (2019): 62–80. 48 See Louis Marcelin, ‘Identity, Power, and Socioracial Hierarchies Among Haitian Immigrants in Florida’, in Neither Enemies Nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos, ed. Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 209–227; and Tatiana McInnis, ‘Missing Miami: Anti-Blackness and the Making of the South Florida Myth’ (Phd diss., Vanderbilt University, 2017).

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PART V

Ecology

21 DIGGING IN THE WORLD Art and Emergent Forms for Living Susanne Cockrell1

I live in Huichin and Yelamu, also known as Oakland and San Francisco, on the unceded territories of Chochenyo and Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who have lived in this beautiful and ancient place for thousands of years, and continue to live and thrive here today.2 To acknowledge that we are guests immediately restructures our relationship to the land and people, bearing witness to long histories of racism, violence, and colonisation in California, in the United States, and across the globe. Teaching ethics and context alongside aesthetics is critical in the education and the ‘un-education’ of the artist. A commitment by our institutions to decolonising pedagogy and creative methodologies models for young artists and designers, how to take part in dismantling unjust systems of power and participate in cross-cultural ecological healing and regeneration. In dismantling we revive aspects of ourselves and each other, not always welcome or consciously engaged within higher education learning and knowledge production. We offer our respect as we acknowledge it is critical to heal the social fabric between land, people, and society as we co-create new social imaginaries of being, with – and for – each other. When my son was 3 years old, an entire shelf of our bookcase was dedicated to picture books, pop-up books, little books, and oversized books, some with pull-out timelines about the Mesozoic era, the golden age of dinosaurs, which was – as we know – cut short a few million years by a meteorite impact that instigated their extinction. He knew the names of all the dinosaurs and the eras they roamed the earth and seas. A year later, the age-appropriate books we read were about trucks and trains, bulldozers and excavators, oil rigs and container ships, cars, and things that go! My son is now 17 and the apocalyptic narratives of global climate disasters from the extraction of the earth’s resources and perturbation of the carbon cycle by human activity are delivered in daily online newsfeeds and data inventories, readings in English class, and AP-Bio case studies. We see the domination of this resource extraction industry, and the scarcity mindset it produces, reflected in continuous war, violence, and the movement of people around the world looking for safety, relief, and belonging. We are all implicated in this story that connects prehistoric reptiles with an uncertain future, bearing witness to the devastation of the environment, homelands, and thousands of living species and life forms. As an artist and educator living in the San Francisco Bay Area for 30 years, I have been deeply influenced by the social and ecological landscape of this place, renowned for its activism and

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coalition building, ocean and coastal landscape, abundant sun, vegetation and food, and the many critical voices that hail from this hub of cultural and economic innovation and struggle. Donna Haraway writes that ‘the task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in the thick present’.3 No imagined future will save us or make the world better, rather we must engage in innovative processes of making meaning here and now. To continue in her line of thinking, to ‘stay with the trouble’ is to be radically and simply present to each other, to complexity, to making unexpected connections and collaborations, ‘to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’.4 In these times of ecological crises and deep social and political fracture, generative resistance and collective actions by artists and many others are telling different stories that nourish hope and resilience, and the healing of the social body. In this chapter, I will present a collaborative project from the early 2000s that was framed against the backdrop of the Bay Area’s cultural and ecological heritage. We called the project a social sculpture, a phrase that Joseph Bueys coined to talk about the expansion of art and its potential to shape and transform society. The project was situated in a cultural moment when art and the re-emergence of urban food production came together in social movements such as Slow Food, Farm-to-Table, and Community Sustainable Agriculture (CSA). The case study will look at some of the core principles and ethical frameworks that have infused my thinking and perception of working in public contexts. Social practice and community engagement as they exist in the academy today evolved out of the history of dematerialised art practice. This includes fluxus, conceptual art, performance, new genre public art, as well as community art, social justice, and identity politics; genres that blur the boundaries of art and life, and art and activism. The many more artists working in social and public contexts today who are generating strategies, interventions, and symbolic public gestures as critical discourse are pointing toward emergent ways of living together as a social movement, which is very much part of the ethos of the San Francisco Bay Area. This is not a counter-cultural project, but a generative survivalist protocol. We can no longer separate art, ecology, cultural life, and activism. In such a turbulent and precarious time, we need the grounding of context, ethics, and ecological thinking more than ever to reframe our attention and habitual ways of seeing, in a world that often feels like it has lost its horizon line. People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values. – Grace Lee Boggs, Community leader and author 1915–2015.5

Temescal Amity Works One early afternoon in the warm Bay Area Fall of 2003, a woman walked down our long driveway in north Oakland and disappeared behind our neighbour’s garage. We lived on a quiet street in a compound, as we called it, of multiple houses on a lot – something like co-housing, but we were all renters. I was a new mom, prone to daydreaming and watching the birds at the feeder. Much of my day was oriented around home economics and caring for a small child. A few minutes later, I saw this woman reappear and walk back the way she came. Two bright yellow lemons filled the palm of each hand. She smelled and looked at them as she walked. This woman’s walk to pick lemons in a friendly neighbour’s yard I thought of as 234

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a dance through the neighbourhood, a way we move and walk through the adjacent spaces where we live. This kind of familiarity and friendliness with the land and people we live alongside on blocks and neighbourhoods, knits us together in both visible and invisible ways. Her dance became one of the inspirations for Temescal Amity Works (TAW). My partner and late husband Ted Purves and I launched and ran TAW from 2004 to 2007. The project was designed to explore the history of the neighbourhood through backyard fruit trees, the migration of Italian farmers and farming practices in the last century, and the local inheritance of this history, drawing upon historical models of mutualaid societies, barn raisings, DIY collectives, and communitarianism. We were interested in how a specific community built relationships through personal and casual economies, and how this project might overlay itself on to these relationships and bring them into new focus. Our hope was to increase dialogue around the nature of living in Temescal, and the ways people perceived this public space, by creating a system of exchange. We had been living in the neighbourhood since 1999, and wanted to localise our attention and to restructure our practice to work in a community that we were implicated in, and not external to. Ted and I were versed in the theory and practice of new genres, post studio, and DIY aesthetics, and witnessed first-hand new directions taking shape in public art coming out of the 1900s and in the work of Suzanne Lacy, Helen and Newton Harrison, Rick Lowe, Mary Jane Jacob, Mel Chin, and others. Married with a young child, we were also responding to the collective pain and sociopolitical upheaval after 9/11, the ever-turbulent economics of the San Francisco Bay Area, and our individual practices in land art, performance, and site-based work. Temescal is situated between Berkeley and downtown Oakland, two miles from the UC Berkeley campus and on the edge of a Korean food district. In the early 2000s, it was a neighbourhood with a distinct history that was beginning to gentrify, with new ‘farm-to-table’ restaurants moving in and paving the way. A century before, the natural abundant character of the land and watershed was more evident as this area of Oakland was planted with orchards and farmland. At that time the city was also growing at a prodigious rate. Immigrants from Northern Italy, Genoa in particular, settled in greater Temescal. Many of the gentlemen worked at the nearby quarry. Some of them formed the first collective of garbage haulers and scavengers. These residents were primarily from farming communities, moving to America to start a new life away from the economic and political changes sweeping through Europe. They planted lemon, orange, plum, and fig trees, towering black walnuts, grapevines, and rosemary bushes. All of these were carefully inserted into the yards, easements, and patios of the houses and apartment buildings that made up the neighbourhood. Many of the shoots and starts that these bushes and trees grew from had travelled from their homelands along with the immigrants. In one case, we were told that a venerable lemon tree had been smuggled through immigration in a brassiere because the woman was afraid that it would be taken from her. Beyond the possibilities that these carefully transported plants created for cultural preservation, it is also possible to understand them as an economic move, a bit of a hedge, against the dominant structure of working for hire in an urban economy. We were told by more than one of the neighbourhood’s long-term residents that the men who worked for the garbage collective also sold fruits and vegetables from their horse-drawn wagons. We also heard stories about how groups of neighbours would pool money to bring in wine grapes by the truckload from up North. These were pressed and fermented, and stored in great casks in the earthen floor basements beneath the houses, to be tapped on Fridays after the men got their pay cheques. Another story told how neighbours collectively divided

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labour and tasks; one household on a block would grow the pole beans, another the basil, and another would mow the lawns up and down the street. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams offers a concise way to view the complex importance of such urban strategies: Again and again, down to our day, those living in villages have tried to create just this sort of margin: a rented patch or strip, an extended garden, a few hives or fruit trees . . . for at least some they were an important protection against the exposure of total hire. Such marginal possibilities are important not only for their produce, but for their direct and immediate satisfactions and for the felt reality of an area of control over one’s immediate labour.6 Throughout the neighbourhood, it was still possible to find a few examples of residences where such an approach had been elevated from a margin to some sort of centrality. There were houses with a side lot given wholly to the production of apples and pears, backyards turned over entirely to apricots and plums. Salvatore Barbieri’s house on 49th Street was set back 150 feet from the street, at the back of the lot. This created a massive front yard, which Sal had turned over to the production of citrus, cacti, and vegetables, fava beans over the winter, pole beans and tomatoes during the summer. Sadly, his yard, which was something more than a garden, yet less than a farm, was no longer maintained in such a way after he passed away. Inspired in part by Sal’s yard and all it represented, we focused on amplifying what was already taking place in the neighbourhood, layered in the area’s history and geology. We were interested in finding ways to bring to the surface some of the alternative economics, collective activity, and rural aesthetics present in the history of the peoples that had lived there before us – and who lived alongside us still. How could the daily life of a neighbourhood defy dominant cultural narratives about capital, labour, and private property? We hoped to stimulate engagement, give the neighbourhood an ecological anchor, and provide a location where abundance was redistributed. We drew on our own rural backgrounds, though we had lived most of our adult lives in cities. For TAW, a name that invoked the spirit of goodwill and fellowship, we designed two interlocking programmes: The Big Backyard and The Reading Room. The Big Backyard was built on the history of the neighbourhood as an Italian-American, immigrant community that was planted with citrus and fruit trees. The trees still produced fruit, but the culture that planted them had dwindled. Much of the harvest would rot on the ground or be hauled away by the city. The programme was based around a hand-built steel pushcart, designed on a paper napkin and built by our friend Andrew Bigler (see Figure 21.1). With flame decals on its sides, this cart was made to collect surplus fruits and vegetables from neighbourhood yards, which we then gave away fresh or redistributed in the forms of collective marmalades and fruit butters. Our son rode along in a green plastic kid’s chair mounted on top, strapped in with a 1960s seat belt. More than one passer-by over the years asked whether this pushcart, almost six feet long and three feet high, was our stroller. The Reading Room was located in a storefront, and contextualised the ongoing experience of The Big Backyard through casual contact with us during open hours, as well as through public events, film screenings, and a small resource library. TAW was shaped in significant ways through the grant-writing process, and by the support we received from the Creative Work Fund (CWF) in San Francisco and the Creative Capital Foundation in New York early on in the project. The terms of the CWF grant were that we partner with a non-profit, so we established a partnership with the 236

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Figure 21.1 Napkin sketch of the Amity pushcart (2004), Andrew Bigler. Oakland, CA, USA Source: Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves.

Temescal Merchants Association, at that time a loose organisation of business owners in the Temescal Business District. This affiliation centred the project around being shopkeepers as well as the redistribution of local fruit and produce. It positioned us to critically explore the social and economic dynamics of running a business where all goods and services were free. We liked that TAW would operate situated in the company of merchants on Telegraph Avenue, a main business corridor. We opened a storefront in an alley just off Telegraph on 49th Street, and generated a social interface through a website and public programming. We established open hours and started moving through the neighbourhood with our pushcart. At our opening party on 24 October 2004, we served home-made apple butter and hot cider. Bowls were full of persimmons and lemons to take away. The poster for this opening event featured a photograph of my great-grandfather David Figg’s barn raising in rural Michigan, in the late 1880s (see Figure 21.2). I have little information about the events of the day captured in this picture. I am struck by the men who are half-visible, sitting in the barn’s rafters, who may be relatives, but are certainly my great-grandparents’ neighbours or other local farmers. The image offered Ted and me a way to think about how a social sculpture and neighbourhood community project might function. There are always hardcore organisers who instigate and guide a community process, but the work of building it is done by many, either through direct participation or by passing the word through gossip or local newsletter. We cannot do it alone, and neither do we want to. Participants in barn raisings were not paid; rather, one donated one’s labour to the effort with the understanding that there would be reciprocation. Barn raisings involved cooperation, mutual aid, and friendship.

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Figure 21.2 Temescal Amity Works opening poster (2004) Source: Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves.

Very quickly, we had to figure out what to do with all the fruit we were collecting. While people usually manage to use a portion of the fruit a mature tree produces, it is nearly impossible to use all of it. We were presented with the predicament of how to make the harvest not go to waste, a problem that many residents happily handed over to us. We learned to preserve, and put up in our kitchen – often into the night – hundreds of jars of marmalade, plum jam, fig conserve, and preserved lemons. New on the block, Bakesale Betty’s once offered us their commercial kitchen to make 100 jars of neighbourhood marmalade, a blend of lemons, oranges, and Mexican limes from residents’ trees. Our audience was made of a complex mixture of home gardeners, emerging foodies, fans of the Slow Food movement, urban homesteaders, community organisers, co-housing community members, artists living in the neighbourhood, and people who had just moved 238

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to the area and were looking to connect. We became a meet-up place for weekend regulars and curious folks who saw our sign and wandered down the alley. Patrick and his partner had just moved to the neighbourhood, kept chickens in the front yard of their duplex rental, and brought us jars of preserved lemons to give away. Novella Carpenter, who later wrote Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer several years later, was one of our early visitors, coming to check out our operation.7 Deb and Drew, living on Avon street, shared their quarter-acre abundant backyard farm many times over the years for TAW events and walking tours. Over the course of the project, we harvested and redistributed thousands of free oranges, lemons, apples, and other produce from local yards. We made and gave away many jars of marmalade, fig conserve, and apple butter. We published a series of postcards documenting local groups and collectives, venerable fruit trees, and the local landscape. We invited local artists and activists to create projects that overlaid those of TAW in a productive and complicated way, making our space and resources available to them, including modest redistribution of our funding. We sponsored a seed-sharing project, garden tours, a yellow car parade, a sourdough bread baking workshop, weed walks, and a walking tour tracking the history of protest in Temescal. These events were created by artists living in the neighbourhood. In our last year of operation, we produced a resource map that was given out to residents and visitors through local businesses on behalf of the Temescal/Telegraph Business Improvement District, a non-profit organisation. TAW was invited to participate in exhibitions, panels, and group shows circulating in both art and urban lifestyle contexts. For Hybrid Fields, an exhibition organised by Patricia Watts at Sonoma County Museum, we staged a preserved food contest that brought local residents into the museum, many of whom had never visited it. A team of judges included a local radio show host, an antiquarian cookbook dealer/conceptual artist, and a San Francisco art dealer and collector. The judging and tasting event was open to the public as well as contestants. The winning preserve was acquisitioned into the museum’s permanent collection. We found that social forms like a store, contest, parade, or meeting were ways to generate participation with non-art audiences. The ‘participation debates’ taking place at that time between critics such as Claire Bishop, Grant Kester, and others, tended to describe participation as both a quality and an outcome that artists employed as a construct in social and community-based artworks. Participation and collaboration was seen as both the content and the medium, and were scrutinised for their lack of aesthetic presentation and criticality in favour of building relationships and sharing authorship. From the perspective of our own practice, however, the way to think about participation was to think of it much more simply as an outgrowth of choices of form. German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel wrote about social forms as organising our relationships with people outside of ourselves. If the social takes place between people, the social form facilitates these social encounters.8 TAW seeded a series of participatory projects that, over the next several years, highlighted what could be termed rural customs, economies, and practices as they were occurring in urban contexts. Throughout our projects from 2004 to 2009, there was an ongoing interest in revealing and ‘playing’ with the social economies of a given context or community. Often deliberately introducing or amplifying what might be termed ‘rural economies’ within urban spaces. While still nominally based in capitalism, rural communities have a different balance between informal and personal economies versus impersonal and formal economies. These informal economies emerge because people know each other. This 239

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allows for traditions of seasonal celebrations, communal work, and labour exchanged to be able to maintain themselves for generations. Ruralism has been defined as the motivation for exalting country above city living. A ruralist pertains to promoting the characteristics of the country, country life, or country people. As a way to unpack this idea of ruralism, what we were witnessing in urban contexts and in the themes of our projects was a combination of three different social forces: first, people’s actual rural background, whether in their generation or generations prior; then the social imaginary of the rural; and finally the capitalisation of the rural as a lifestyle that we see reflected in fashion and entrepreneurship. We found that these three aspects were all interrelated. More than 100 years since the Genovese migrants settled in Temescal, the neighbourhood and the city itself have undergone many layers of change. The Italian residents are largely gone, replaced by a wide, multicultural array. The specific connections to lemons, figs, and rosemary have become distant. Neighbours no longer share a common country of origin. But upon moving into the old houses, something of the previous community remains. The yards overflow with fruit. The basements still have telltale shelves built into the walls that are just deep enough to store bottles and jars. Like wine in a bottle or a jar of jam, the yards, the soil, the climate, all the basic architecture for reengaging with these traditions, and this economy, were preserved. Even though many who are now reimagining a more rural life in the cities are not necessarily direct migrants from the country, there is a tangible inhabitation of the social imagination of the rural that runs through their occupation of these practices. It is possible to see this complex, socially shared conception of the ‘rural’ as a part of a larger social imaginary, one that collects a set of symbols, histories, and values together in such a way that common expressions and practices emerge in its wake. We witnessed the signs of this re-engagement throughout the neighbourhood at that time. Lawns were being taken out on every block, replaced by fruit trees, lavender bushes, and bee hives. There were chickens in backyards, and we met tenants in four- and six-unit apartment buildings who were creating collective permaculture gardens. The local bakery took backyard lemons and gave store credit in return. What is left is to wonder whether the inhabiting of a social imaginary by a disparate urban community is ‘strong’ enough to also draw forth the social economy that traditionally attended such communities. Furthermore, should it indeed be drawn forth, will it be enough to produce tangible economic results, one that generates shared labour, common harvests? Will there be new barns? In January of 2007 we decided to close the storefront and end the ‘public’ phase of TAW. We had observed that the longer the storefront remained in operation, the more the project’s identity as a service became ingrained in the neighbourhood’s ‘consciousness’. This worked against our own interest in amplifying a network wherein residents circulate their backyard surplus among themselves. Following the closing, it is worth noting that two independent efforts emerged in the neighbourhood, both (it seemed) in the wake of TAW. The first of these was created as a community network directly modelled after the TAW concept (though it operated without storefront, rather on bike). The second was a summer jobs programme focused on harvesting backyard fruit, sponsored by Adobe youth projects and run through the City of Oakland. Over a decade later, in the same alleys just off 49th street you can find an entrepreneurial and boutique marketplace. All the small buildings are occupied by small businesses and engaged young artisans interested in the art of living, health, gastronomy, and local industry. There is a store dedicated to the home economics of preserving food around the corner on Telegraph Avenue. The scene is young and vital, though not representative 240

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of the diversity you find in most of Oakland. I imagine many of these business people are homeowners in Temescal and raising families. Some of them have heard of TAW by word of mouth, or maybe met us before we closed the project. TAW has become embedded in the local history, remembered, and relayed (as we hoped) through the neighbourhood like a good story. Emergence notices the way small actions and connections create complex systems, patterns that become ecosystems and societies. Emergence is our inheritance as a part of this universe; it is how we change. Emergent strategy is how we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for.9 Stories locate us. Stories are also a way to take things with us. Social imaginaries are carried in images, stories, and legends. Charles Taylor describes the concept of a ‘social imaginary’ as the ways that people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper notions that underlie these expectations.10 One of the stories of our time, to echo Haraway’s words, is to restore our attention. The art of attention we do not have to pay for. In withdrawing our attention from all the daily tasks, technology, jobs, and entertainment that surround us we begin to restore our ecologies of being and identity.11 We use context and ethical values to locate ourselves in the present, yet remain grounded in those who came before us. Then a myriad of collaborations and connections find us. TAW brought us into close encounter with the land, our neighbours, residents, and merchants, and the layered histories of our neighbourhood. It is a public narrative, an urban ecology about community. In a project that unfolded in time and involved people and publics, we found ourselves inside stories, conversations, interviews, local issues, and ecological systems. As artists, we search for ways to establish and welcome intimacy while maintaining critical distance, ways of going in and withdrawing, as a practice. This involves listening, touching, and being touched. I call this ‘attunement’, or listening with all the senses of the body and mind and beyond. As Ted would say, ‘all real living is meeting’. In this beautiful phrase, there is a resonance of what we call a phenomenological or ecological self. We encounter something between ourselves and others, living and human, and we encounter something bigger than ourselves. As artists, we distribute parts of ourselves through artwork. We find new ways to collaborate and make connections, and thus stretch the capacity of our attention and the context itself. In stretching ourselves, we stretch and bend the world and what a story can be.

Notes 1 Portions of this chapter were previously presented in public talks and online in Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves, ‘The Parent Material’, in Images of Farming, ed. Wapke Feenstra and Antje Schiffers of myvillages.org (Heijningen, NL: Jap Sam Press, 2011), 182–193. 2 Vince Medina and Louis Trevino, 2019, www.makamham.com/blog. 3 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2016), 1. 4 Ibid., 1. 5 Grace Lee Boggs, 2013, americanswhotellthetruth.org. 6 Raymond Williams, The Country and City (London: Spokesman Books, [1973] 2011), 102. 7 Novella Carpenter, Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (London: Penguin Press, 2009). 8 Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971).

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9 Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change Shaping Worlds (Chicago and Scotland: AK Press, 2017), 3. 10 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 23. 11 Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn, NY and London: Melville House Press, 2019), 155.

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22 LANDSCAPE, ECO-ARTS PRACTICE, AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN THE PUBLIC ART REALM Laura Lee Coles

By fusing the local and the global, the temporal and the spatial, artists are pushing the boundaries of technologically mediated art practice in natural urban places from one that is contemplative to one that is a living experience. Artists, in partnership with landscape and public natural space, are becoming the arbiters, mediators, and advocates for intimate and sensitive forms of socially engaged public art. We have now become so interwoven with and changed by our digital devices and technologies that attempting to reconnect to the natural realm by way of these technologies seems to be a logical approach. Further, as the ‘climate crisis’ emerges as a stark reality, the promotion of a fresh, experiential driven art movement ‘eco-futurism’ is suggested as a schema for expanding ecological awareness. These claims are supported by evidence from the artwork events discussed herein, and from a qualitative research study conducted from 2009 to 2012, ‘utilizing the natural environment for the exhibition of new media’.1 In that study we asked whether digital technology (i.e. digital mediation), can provide a sense of reconnection to nature. In researching the interconnectivity between human, technology, and nature – or what we termed ‘the HTN triad relationship’ or ‘HTN’ – findings indicate there is a momentary awareness of the interconnected state of human, technology, and nature that reawakens the human predisposition (i.e. enhanced awareness of a sense of reconnection to the natural world). Participants confirmed the hypothesis that digital technologies also provide multiple sensory and interactive experiences and augment the human senses in ways that could be considered similar to the sense of arousal one experiences in nature settings.2 This is of particular interest because (a) it epitomises the occurrence of a potentially new vocabulary, as a neoteric way of storytelling3 and perception; (b) it is a practice of enhanced connection to the natural setting, one that is seamless and therefore goes unnoticed by the person using the equipment, thus it is holistic; and (c) as spectator or audience member, the emancipated status of moving fluidly about the environment, becoming immersed in it, or watching others do it, enables one to locate a triad or trifocal sense of interconnectedness among self, technology, and landscape, or the natural realm.4 It is my contention that digitally enhanced artworks and practices intervene and exist between experiences of electronic space/place and physical place/space and actually

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reawaken our connection to natural places. Findings from this study further indicate that connection to place is reinforced by such sociocultural experiences and opportunities for interaction. This has significant implications for current society. It is from these new possibilities within artistic practice that emerging characteristics transform knowledge, and thus the artistic aesthetic experience. We opine that within the user in flux and the atypical use of digital devices, refreshed understanding may transition the user within the realm of aesthetic engagement. Finally, these promising results indicate that the hypothesis that digital technology may also serve as a sensorial gate or pathway to interact with nature warrants further research.5 Since our study was completed in 2012, several artists, arts groups, and corporate multimedia production companies such as Montreal’s Moment Factory and design groups such as London’s Marshmallow Laser Feast, are changing not only the face of public art, but are also shifting the paradigm of experiential electronic exhibition into nature/tech spectacle. It is also worth noting that other electronic arts practitioners explored landscape as canvas, as gallery, and as outdoor museum ‘prior’ to our study. As Richard Louv states, ‘The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.’6 We are now able to easily recognise and acknowledge the fact that both technology and society exist within a tightly woven relationship. Given the sense of freedom that hand-held computation devices offer, one sees how their influence inspired artists to move electronics into and about landscape, engendering nature-based electronic art-making. As a result, we see more technologically/nature-based works appearing in the public realm. We must consider that there are many interactional experiences and relationships that exist in both natural settings and digital technology. Our ability to connect with nature is generally understood to be accomplished by way of direct experience through sensuous engagement. Because digital devices and sensor technologies provide enhanced experience by augmenting human sensorial awareness within auditory, visual and haptic experiences, we can also be sensuously and immediately engaged through such technologies. By combining these multisensory augmentations with the experience of a natural setting, the two can blend, resurrecting our culturally desensitised connection to the natural realm, as reminded by Abram and Suzuki. In this way, we may also nurture, or centre a new awareness or sense of interconnectedness, proposed here as the human–technology–nature, HTN triad relationship.7 As Amen and Thrift note, this has ‘crucial consequences’ because ‘the technical is not seen as separate from the social or the natural’.8 Works by artists encompassing the techno-natural, bioart, themed walk-based phone Apps, computer generative, gesture controlled, and interactive installations (both intimate as well as large-scale spectacles such as architectural video mapping), are now found in both urban and natural settings in urban screen public exhibition formats. Virtual reality, holograms, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality are becoming components of public art offerings as creators and curators alike recognise the importance of the interactive experiences that emerge from the relationship between human, technology, and nature. Currently not as prolific, but more of an inchoate art form in the public realm, these forms of media will soon rapidly change the face of public art. In ‘Disrupting Conventional Boundaries of Public Art in Urban Space’, I note that 244

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use of space embraces a multitude of competing trajectories, which are interrelated. Contributing to these intertwined boundaries, we find that physical space and place are deeply embedded with technology and thus, electronic space and place is as much a part of space and place as buildings, parks and plazas.9 While recognising a number of approaches, such as large-scale works in public spaces (e.g. urban screen projects) noted above, for the sake of space this chapter focuses on digital works in natural settings through the practice of digital eco-art. While a comparative discussion is warranted, it is not the aim of this chapter. What spark inspired the fusion of human, technology, and nature interaction through art expression? What influenced pioneers to conceptualise the projection of visual and sound elements on to natural settings as a means of storytelling? And, what influences the artists and groups who develop and practice this new paradigm of environmental art exhibition as public art today? To answer these questions, I discuss several artists and artist groups thematically and attempt to present them chronologically or sequentially in relation to the creative explosion of the digital era (2000–2016). This chapter seeks to provide the reader with a glimpse into the pulse, rhythms, and progression that such works have offered.

The Reinstatement of the Memory of Wilderness An opportunity has arrived, attuning the human imagination in the form of a digital time machine that allows one to travel back to visit Manhattan, New York in 1609. Landscape ecologist Dr Eric W. Sanderson’s Mannahatta (2009),10 both a book and a website, is the culmination of a decade of research and a project of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). For Mannahatta, Sanderson utilised habitat information and a digital mapping of the island of Manhattan, geographic information system (GIS) spatial data visualisation, as well as cartography to create a digital ‘landscape ecology’. The work provides examples of current topographical features, including streets, buildings, and urban infrastructure, compared to the same location in 1609. Mannahatta is one example of a lens for viewing human compatibility with nature, wildlife, and wild places. By asking the viewer to play with their memory and understanding of history, one can examine the relationship between natural wild habitat and the current urban environment. The oscillation between the past and present infers that the notion of human disconnection to nature has changed human attitudes about stewardship of the environment.11 Despite the complexity of its technical and ecological aspects, the work is also whimsical. Mannahatta provides the necessary cushion for us as we fall away from outdated notions of man conquering nature. Mannahatta’s approach is multidimensional through the use of digital technology. Revealing the past compared to the present asks us about the future. The viewer is asked directly on the website, ‘What is the vision of the future that works?’12 Mannahatta also gives viewers the option to view landscape from an imaginary perspective of its original human inhabitants. The human inhabitants of the past were incredibly connected to the rhythms of the natural world, its sounds, sights, smells, and vibrations. A contemporary example exists in the Apache language, which is unfamiliar to the phonetic alphabet and is instead attuned to the ‘storied earth’ rhythms, where ‘place names’ (the uttering) ‘in the mind’ of native names and descriptions of various locations within the Cibecue valley provide a sense of feeling or embodiment within the presence of the ‘place’.13 When reciting the names, the Apache travel in their minds, and, in effect, 245

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a ‘direct sensorial bond’ between Apache and place is established.14 This is perhaps not the original intent of Mannahatta, but it is plausible to imagine the viewer interacting in this manner.

The Rejuvenation of Voices and the Expansion of Place Dutch sculptor Ap Verheggen’s cool(E)motion Project was designed to draw attention to global warming and its effects on humans and the natural environment. Verheggen’s Dog Sled Riders was a human-centred project, inclusive of local culture for the design influence and the staging of digitally enhanced, land-based, site-specific artwork. The work draws immediate attention to the melting of ice fields and its adverse effects upon local inhabitants. Verheggen erected a large-scale iron sculpture entitled Dog Sled Riders on an iceberg off the west coast of Greenland, near the village of Uummannaq,15 in early March 2010. Incorporating a significant aspect of Inuit culture as metaphor for the iceberg’s journey, the artist information states that ‘usually it is the driver who determines when the journey begins, where it goes, and when it is over. By placing the dogsled driver on an iceberg, we show that nature ultimately determines the course of the journey.’ On 30 March 2010, the iceberg broke away and began floating in the ‘open wilderness’ of the ocean. The intention of this work was for anyone to be able to view the iceberg journey of Dog Sled Riders live via a global positioning system (GPS) satellite through a 3-D plug-in for Google Earth, until the iceberg melts and the sculpture disappears into the sea.16 Verheggen’s Dog Sled Riders existed in the actual reality of a natural landscape, yet through digital technology it also allowed the world ‘into’ the project, thus expanding upon the realm of its public space. The work has been a significant voice for a living culture under direct threat from climate change, and has an ethnographic tone. Verheggen continues, ‘Because we are very concerned about the effects of climate change moving south, we give the very first victims of climate change a voice: the Inuit, a group of people who currently have no voice.’ Conditions caused the iceberg carrying the Dog Sled Riders to end its journey abruptly after only two months. It is believed to have melted and vanished in the ‘warm’ waters of Uummannaq Bay. As the artist notes, ‘nature took control’.17

Re-Envisioning Natural Settings with Electronic Art A group that succinctly exemplifies proof that artists are creating and displaying new media in natural settings as a practical and common method of arts practice is New York-based ecoarttech. Cary Peppermint and Dr Leila Nadir founded ecoarttech in 2005, as a collaborative group of artists interested in ecological and environment concerns. Ecoarttech exemplifies an emerging generation of researcher-artist scholars. The duo’s work includes numerous curatorial efforts, exhibitions, and individual works, often in conjunction with symposia related to arts, science, technology, and nature or the environment. Many of their early exhibitions combined sound art, video, performance, and sustainable arts practice. Ecoarttech utilised digital technology and solar power in the natural environment to ‘explore environmental issues and convergent media and technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective, including art, digital studies, philosophy, literature and eco-criticism’. Ecoarttech used both rural and urban natural environments to stage their events and exhibit installation works such as 246

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Technorganic (2005), a one-night mini-festival that celebrated the autumn equinox in a forest and featured art works in digital video, animation, multimedia performance, and installation, including sound works from a variety of artists (see Figure 22.1).18 The purpose of this event was to merge new media art technologies with an emphasis on creative ‘figurations’ of the natural environment. Wilderness Information Network (2006), a solar-powered environmental sound installation, explored human/nature sonic communication through the works of 65 international sound artists. Frontier Mythology (2007), a mobile, solar-powered environmental digital video and FM radio installation made of recycled shipping pallets, showcased radio transmissions of recitations of quotations from ‘classical works of US literature that comment on the frontier myth informing American constructions of land, nature, and wilderness’.19 During an interview with the author in 2012, Dr Nadir said: The way we put together media and the environment is shocking for many people because they expect media to be used in instrumental, goal-oriented ways involving direct communication or exchange of information. We try to show how media is also an ecological space that can be enabled to make room for ‘wild’ experiences, akin to wilderness sites. And, that the media landscape is part of our ecological being just as much as the physical environment.20

Figure 22.1 Technorganic (2005), ecoarttech. Pine Lake Environmental Campus, Hartwick College, New York, USA Source: Cary Adams.

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Ecoarttech worked with explorative approaches for these projects. First, language, sound, and visuals are used to cultivate the participants’ ‘imagination of nature, wildness, and sustainability in a networked, cosmopolitan environment’. Second, the digital artefact is used as a form of trans-communication control of the subject matter, which is generally about myths, or the idea of nature, thus guiding the participant to a particular reference. Third, solar energy panels, which appeal to public awareness of sustainability, are incorporated as a sustainable energy source. Finally, fourth, the participant is required to move their body away from the human-made urban world by hiking, walking, and being in a natural environment to experience the work.21 Is it possible to truly experience a human–technology–nature relationship if as a body, mind, or spirit, one is not attuned to the natural world in the first place? Does our loss of sacred awareness create a block? Is our symbiotic relationship to our technology separating us further from our connections to nature?

LocoMotoArt LocoMotoArt (LMA) is a group of multidisciplinary artists based in Vancouver, Canada, who re-envision urban natural space through an extensive practice of digital eco-art. LMA’s first outdoor public art exhibition took place during the summer of 2012 in Tatlow Park, a small urban park in Vancouver, Canada (see Figure 22.2). Surrounded by a neighbourhood of 100year-old craftsman-style homes, it is the former site of a large stream and wild salmon run. Various interactive video and sound installations were offered.22 Through an extended arts residency with the Vancouver Parks Board (2013–2021), LMA has been able to expand its offerings and further develop the genre of digital eco-art. The works of LMA artists and guest artists placed in outdoor natural settings such as parks, gardens, arboretums, urban forests, and beachheads, offer the public new ways of experiencing the urban natural landscape through electronic visual and sound art installations. LMA has also participated in other local digital arts and music festivals and curated exhibitions. Publications and international conferencing have spread the concept of digital eco-art globally, as have citations of the work in books, journal articles, and graduate theses. Supported and funded through municipal grants and in-kind support as part of their aim to achieve inclusiveness and democratisation of the arts, LMA’s numerous large-scale outdoor events are offered at no cost to the public. These include LocoMotoArt at Queen Elizabeth Park (2013), where the public was invited into the lower grotto of the gardens during the evening to experience 14 visual, sound, and interactive installations; and Oscillations held at Charleson Park, Vancouver, BC, in partnership with Vancouver New Music, Vancouver Park Board, and the Disruption ISEA Vancouver group, as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Art 2015. For Oscillations, 24 artists made use of the park’s forested areas, lawn space, and rock wall of a waterfall to display 19 individual installations using computer generative, gesture control performance, sound and visual mapping, lighting sculpture, bio-art, electronic music, soundscapes, and a sound walk related to the theme.23 Curatorial statements from the Oscillations exhibition catalogue provide a glimpse of the influences that inform LMA’s practice of digital eco-art as a developed form of public art: ‘We seek to interrupt the everyday and transplant human activities through the ubiquitous and sensorial aspects of digital technologies.’24 As the artists move towards unconventional use and repurposing of urban natural space, a means for local place making and exhibiting public art emerges that 248

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disrupts conventional and traditional boundaries of the space. With this approach, the works assembled here this evening emphasise the electronic and physical space and place by oscillating between the two perceived realms. It is our intent that Oscillations pushes traditional boundaries of urban public art to be more socially interactive, immersive and inclusive of place while appealing to intimacy and imagination; that is; community engaged.25 In his curatorial statement, co-curator Giorgio Magnanensi indicates: With this project we wish to invite affective responses while confronting the complex considerations of our predicament in the disruption between nature and place. We also wish to ignite imagination and stir emotions, while acknowledging the limitations of what is possible as art. We believe that being able to embody contradictions is a very productive process and with Oscillations we hope to be able to engage everyone’s imagination without needing to endlessly validate either artistic values or ‘original’ ideas, but to act creatively, welcoming affective responses in a real opera aperta, an open work in which each person creates both an interpretation and a performance.26

Figure 22.2 Living (2013), Sebnem Ozpeta and Sunstorms, Rob Scharein. LocoMotoArt, Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, BC, Canada Source: Michael Moster.

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Digital Carnival – Your Kontinent Digital Carnival – Your Kontinent, first held in Minoru Park, in Richmond (British Columbia) in 2011, also advances art, technology, and nature themes within a local park setting and has featured a combination of interactive installations, immersive video projections, sound art, performances, single-channel videos, and virtual reality experiences. Digital Carnival is presented by Cinevolution Media Arts Society in partnership with Richmond World Festival, the City of Richmond, and the Richmond Art Gallery. The event draws up to 50,000 people each day over the two-day festival. Cinevolution’s curatorial interests are in artworks that are family friendly, hands-on, immersive, or performance-oriented and respond to topics such as science, spirituality, cultural storytelling, and art as activism. Emphasis is placed upon works addressing cultural identity and a sense of home, and the power of storytelling to create community and awareness, including works exploring contemporary issues between settlers and indigenous people.27 Exhibitions are offered freely accessible to the public.28 In 2016, through guest curator Wynne Palmer, Digital Carnival committed to a fouryear themed set of exhibitions based on the four elements of classical Western culture (earth, water, air, and fire), believed to be essential to life, in order to investigate the interconnection of nature, technology, and art.29 With over 80 artistic works, minimal details of four exhibitions are capsulised in the ‘Featured Artist Programme’.30 A significant aspect of Digital Carnival is that it operates as a prime example of what is possible when there is a collaboration between entities seeking to create entertaining events with, in, and for their respective communities. It is important to recognise that as art-related resources become limited, grant funders, city programmers, and planners are tasked with exploring new options that will transform, support, and expand cultural experiences for both artists and audiences. It becomes apparent that collaboration between artists, cities, and citizens is a necessary element in the democratisation of the arts.31 I suggest this arrangement emanates from the concept of ‘tactical urbanism’, as authors Lydon and Garcia claim, ‘it makes use of open and iterative development processes, the efficient use of resources and the creative potential unleashed by social interaction’.32

Landscape Installation as the Spectacle of Public Entertainment Art philosopher Jacques Rancière argued for a ‘new politics of looking’ and reminds us in his book The Emancipated Spectator that the spectator becomes an ‘active participant’ as opposed to ‘passive voyeur’ when removed from the traditional position of ‘strict observer’. This removal occurs when natural setting serves as event place because it subverts the traditional focal experience. Rancière further proposes that it is in the abdication of the very position of viewer that theatre becomes an ‘exemplary community form’. The positioning of the spectator in such a way reaffirms the spectator and ‘involves an idea of community as self-presence, in contrast to the distance of representation’ generally found in traditional settings.33 A group who emphasises an aggrandised theatrical effect of the digital experience in natural settings is the Montreal-based multimedia entertainment studio Moment Factory. The studio specialises in the conception and production of immersive environments combining video, lighting, architecture, sound, and special effects to create remarkable visitor experiences. This audio-visual industry leader, with revenues from $25–$50 million annually employs up to 500 people, inclusive of digital programmers and coders who are 250

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leaders in their field. Currently the studio creates works for parks and recreation, public spaces, arenas and stadiums, resorts and casinos, and retails spaces, with clients such as internationally acclaimed resorts, world-class music industry celebrities, and corporate retailers. In 2014, the Moment Factory presented Foresta Lumina in Coaticook, Quebec, as a ‘night walk’ filled with video projections, lighting, and sound, incorporating blockbuster movie-style special effects and top industry digital scenography expertise. Perhaps one of the few creative production entities with both the financial and human resource capacity to create lavish events on a scale of grandeur, the Moment Factory’s early claims of being the first to use digital storytelling in natural settings and positioning video and sound installations in such an environment, is unfortunately not supported by actual evidence. Perhaps these claims are more marketing hype than fact. With extensive budgets and connections outranking most government funding bodies, artists, and arts groups, the Moment Factory’s approach represents the branding and commodification of digital expression associated with large-scale spectacle. While many of these works are positioned in public spaces for large audiences, they are not necessarily accessible public art, with ticket prices often expensive enough to marginalise those who cannot afford it.34

Reconnecting to Nature Through Revivification Artists are creating works in an attempt to provide opportunities to impart a renewed sense of life, energy, and spirit – a revivification of our connection to the natural realm. From the Latin word vı̄ vificā re, meaning to vivify, we find the derivative word, ‘see’. Our senses of sight, smell, and hearing are a perceptual system. We have the capacity to detect and feel sensation, which is then interpreted through a complex neural system. Our capacity to apprehend and interpret our environment and other beings is rooted in sensory perception. Vision, for example, provides a reciprocal or ‘participatory interplay between the animal eye and the animate cosmos’.35 Internal and external perceptions are produced at the same time and ‘in our experience we never find them disjoined’.36 Marshmallow Laser Feast’s In the Eyes of the Animal draws upon aspects of science, biology, perception, and nature. As part of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival in 2015, Marshmallow Laser Feast, a London-based design collective, invited participants to walk in an area in Grizedale Forest, located in the heart of the Lake District between lakes Windermere and Coniston. Once in the forest, globe-shaped virtual reality headsets decorated in moss and plants were used as a means to explore the woods through the ‘eyes’ of one of three woodland creatures: a dragonfly, a frog, and an owl.37 The immersive experiential installation is described as creating ‘the illusion of soaring over the treetops or wandering the forest floor’. To create this work, designers incorporated data taken ‘from LiDAR (remote sensing technology), computerised tomography (CT) scans, and aerial 360-degree drone filming’, relying on a ‘real-time system that visualises an artistic interpretation of how trees and plants might appear to the forest’s animal’. Motivation of this work is attributed by studio cofounder Barney Steel as ‘a hunger for hacking people’s senses by combining art and technology’.38 E. O. Wilson reminds us that humans are genetically predisposed to have ‘living’ connections with the natural realm.39 There are also cognitive benefits to be had interacting with nature; peaceful aspects of natural environments can restore directed-attention abilities and increase cognitive control.40 In conjunction with this aspect of interaction with nature is the human desire for extensive interaction with digital technology. Peter H. Kahn Jr, who investigates human interaction with nature and technology, confirms through his 251

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collaborative research that the pervasiveness of computational technologies has ‘changed our species’ long-standing experiences with nature’ and suggests that these technologies ‘mediate, augment or simulate our natural world’.41 He further concludes that technological nature ‘provides some but not all of the enjoyments and benefits of interacting with nature’.42 Knowing that digital technologies also provide multiple sensory and interactive experiences and augment the human senses in ways that could be considered similar to the sense of arousal one experiences in nature settings, it is axiomatic that such mediated works in natural settings provide the participant a heightened sense of space, place, and self. We are reminded of Arnold Berleant’s idea of the ‘aesthetic field’ and the importance of how his concept of the ‘aesthetic engagement of nature’ may bear upon the future of electronic environmental art praxis.43

Re-Affirming Transformative Opportunities The diversity of influences that shape the work of eco-artists and like-minded design and production groups, inclusive of messages conveying eco-art themes; reveals that several factors contributed to the cultural evolution of emergent genres using digital technologies in natural setting. From ubiquity to improved computer systems, platforms, and artefacts, as well as social networking, these components are moving artists towards a demonstrative and well-defined practice within the public art realm. Leading audiences towards this milieu, digital eco-artists serve as cultural ambassadors ushering in new urban futures. Influences transfer from artist to spectator, such as a concern about climate crisis, or themes designed for experiences of magic and social interaction while in a forest or urban natural space. Serving as the catalyst of the democratisation of art and experience, several arts groups are forging new digital art and guiding the flow of these works as performative digital storytelling. Since the completion of our study in 2012, a noticeable explosion of artists using landscape and natural settings for the exhibition of the media arts is evident. Despite not really being aware of the findings of our study, the artists mentioned in this chapter have publicly conveyed their observations of their event participants, whose comments included: ‘magical’, ‘transformative’, ‘living art’, ‘living process’, ‘socially engaged’, ‘leading to awareness of a living environment’, and ‘stewardship’. These field comments evoke the possibility of common belief that digital eco-art works ‘are’ a conduit, a pathway, a catalyst for instilling a sense of place so that participants might become environmental stewards and understand the significance of our human role in the Anthropocene. Our deeply embedded relationship to digital technology is of increasing interest to researchers within social, psychological, educational, and environmental disciplines. Situated at the intersection of human societal concerns for environment and interests in the human– machine relationship, earlier research responds to both, and to the particular demands of the dialogue between them. Peter H. Kahn, Jr. opined that ‘technological nature is better than no nature but not as good as actual nature’,44 and other techno-nature discourse furthers the necessity for future arts-based and transdisciplinary research and enquiry into how humans, technology, and nature interact. What are the possibilities of digital media to reconnect us to our former ‘sacred’ connection to the land? This is especially evident with concerns of youth and technology over use, especially when combined with a total lack of nature experiences. One explorative path may be the advancement of the individual as ‘artist’, using their own digital technologies in the natural environment as a self-directed nature/technology 252

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experience. Within this explorative rethink, the social psychological dynamics of personal authenticity and the combined cognitive benefits of nature become transcendent.45 The body-tech extension Marshall McLuhan spoke of is significant in this context: ‘The ability to perceive media-induced extensions of man, once the province of the artist, is now being expanded as the new environment of electric information makes possible a new degree of perception and critical awareness by non-artists.’46 It is now time to consider a complete reversal of traditional practices and move ‘art’ from the hands of creative elites. One notion to advance this concept is in the development of a movement suggested as ‘eco-futurism’; one that encompasses the individual, the secondary student, the child in nature, the family together outdoors ‘as artist’. As each individual practices eco-futurism, they may gain a trenchant understanding of the social and ethical implications of interconnectedness with the magical, totemic, mythological, life-giving natural world that was once part of our awareness. They also are offered a harmonising sense between the relationship of human embeddedness to digital technologies, the human-built world, and the cognitive benefits of being outdoors in nature settings. In his book Sacred Balance: Rediscovering our Place in Nature, David Suzuki offers us wisdom and a forewarning: If we are to balance our remarkable technological muscle power, we need to regain some ancient virtues: the humility to acknowledge how much we have yet to learn, the respect that will allow us to protect and restore nature, and the love that can lift our eyes to distant horizons, far beyond the next election, paycheque, or stock dividend. Above all we need to reclaim our faith in ourselves as creatures of the Earth, living in harmony with all other forms of life.47

Notes 1 With digital mediation, there is also a characteristic attribute, that is, a perceived separation between technology and the sensuality of what is the natural realm. Human, technology, and nature or the HTN triad relationship acts as an intervener towards bridging the perceived gap between digital mediated experiences in nature. Therefore, the notion of the HTN triad relationship functions as an intermediary between the digital device, with its capacity for interactivity and spatial and temporal shifts (instrumentality), the momentary feeling of interconnection (transmission), which ‘fills’ (indirect causation), and the gap between the three. In doing so, the HTN triad relationship defines the moment of sensed awareness of the instance a person feels that there is no longer a separation of the three, rather one that is ‘absorbed into the landscape’ because it ‘fits’. HTN then, acts as a conduit, a potential sensorial pathway (intermediate agent). 2 From the HTN research findings, it is my view that digital devices and sensor technology provide enhanced and augmented human sensorial awareness within auditory, visual, and haptic experiences in situ. Digital technologies provide multiple sensory and interactive experiences and augment the human senses in ways that could be considered similar to the sense of arousal one experiences in nature settings. It is because of these multisensory augmentations by way of digital technology that I proposed in 2011 that the use of such technologies can be used to resurrect our culturally desensitised connection to the natural realm, especially through sound and visual installations. Ecophilosopher David Abram informs us that it is ‘only at the scale of our direct, sensory interactions with the land around us that we can appropriately notice and respond to the immediate needs of the living world’. David Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 268. 3 In summer of 2010, during one of the field studies we conducted with sound and visual projections on Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, BC of the works of artists Dinka Pignon, Dave Leith, and Bobbi Kozinuk, it was acknowledged by participants and the artists that video installations

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projected in natural setting were seen as a new means of storytelling. It is worth noting that the iPhone had only been released on the market for a short span of three years in 2007, and live streaming in real time was still in its infancy. This convergence of hardware and software capability was recognised by artists, and has evolved in the quotidian as mobile and locative arts, which now extensively includes global positioning system (GPS), social media, and networking. This coming together may be paradoxical, and is still debated, however it highlights that digital storytelling has evolved and was less commonplace at the time of the field study comments. Laura Lee Coles and Philippe Pasquier, ‘Utilizing the Natural Environment for the Exhibition of New Media’ (MA thesis, School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada, 2012), 120, https://summit.sfu.ca/item/12338. Laura Lee Coles and Philippe Pasquier, ‘LocoMotoArt: Interacting Within Natural Setting through Performance Using Pico-projection’, Proceedings of the International Symposium of Electronic Artists, ISEA – Istanbul (2011), www.isea-archives.org/symposia/isea2011/isea2011-presentations2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-3-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-22-2-3-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-139/. Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Reconnecting with Life in a Virtual Age (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2012), 4. Laura Lee Coles and Philippe Pasquier, ‘Digital Eco-Art: Transformative Possibilities’, Digital Creativity 26, no. 1 (2015): 3–15 at 5. In his book, Spell of the Sensuous Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, eco-philosopher David Abram claims that our seemingly desensitised connection with the natural realm is partially due to the intensive interaction between humans and technology. Abram also expresses concern that our passion for technology is connected to the loss of the sense of the sacred in nature. He further states that additional loss of the sacred along with the loss of a sense of deep connection with nature further supports unsustainable exploitive practices and engenders a more profound sense of loss and disconnection. Ash Amish and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 78. Laura Lee Coles, ‘Disrupting Conventional Boundaries of Public Art In Urban Space’, 1, https:// isea2015.org/proceeding/submissions/ISEA2015_submission_116.pdf, 2015. Eric W. Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. (New York: Abrams Books, 2009). See the Mannahatta website athttp://welikia.org. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Abrams, Spell of the Sensuous, ix, x, 40, 43, 65, 94, 120, 125, 156. Ibid. In Greenlandic, the word Uummannaq means ‘heart-shaped’ and is named after the 1,175- metre heart-shaped mountain that lies behind the town. Uummannaq is known for having 2,000 hours of sunshine a year. It is one of the most northerly towns in Greenland and lies around 590 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. Some sources interpret the word to mean ‘invigorating’. Verheggen stated on the project website: ‘Yes, in time the sculptures will disappear, but hopefully their memory will trail the arctic seas’. The effort, he says, will put feeling and emotion back into the debate about climate change. See https://apverheggen.nl/coolemotion. See https://apverheggen.nl/coolemotion. See http://ecoarttech.net/project/technorganic. Leila Nadir, email conversation with author, 13 May 2012. Ibid. Cary Peppermint, email conversation with author 13 May 2012. Laura Lee Coles, ‘LocoMotoArt: Digital Art Practices in Natural Settings’, International Journal of New Media, Technology and the Arts 10, no. 1 (2015): 1–10. Oscillations, https://locomotoart.weebly.com/oscillations.html. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Digital Carnival also provides opportunities for new media artists engaging in their first public art exhibition or updating their practice by integrating new media with more traditional art forms, e.g. textiles, hand-made, fragile, or ephemeral works.

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Landscape, Eco-Art, and Digital Technology 28 During an interview with the author on 13 September 2019, curator Wynne Palmer said: ‘Thematically I was looking for diversity in the interpretation of the theme, paying particular attention to familial and cultural anecdotes, stories, experiences, and how they are presented using digital technology. Early on in curating the series, storytelling became an apparent central theme that I felt strongly united each set of artists.’ The exhibitions were comprised of several projects that were presented as flat-screen/monitor videos, installations, interactive, generative, AR/VR, performance, audio/sound art, and video mapping. 29 Wynne Palmer, email interview with author 13 September 2019. 30 The ‘Featured Artist Programme’ is a selection of artists who use digital technology in a unique way to further their storytelling through theatre, dance, or performance art. Some examples include: Digital Carnival – Water 2016: Sammy Chien, Water Can Carry a Boat; It Can Bury a Boat. Chien incorporated dance and performance as a process of working with Isadora software for storytelling of his immigrant experience. Digital Carnival – Land 2017: Cindy Mochizuki, Compass. This work used multiple elements of the theatre, including live video, puppets, and projections. Mochizuki ‘acts as a performance artist’ to relate her grandmother’s experience living in Richmond, BC. Digital Carnival – Air 2018: Lisa Birke and Terrance Houle, Different Ways. This duo used video, VR, audio, and performance art to mediate the crossroads of the colonialist/indigenous relationship. Digital Carnival – Fire 2019: Nicole Dextras, Dystopian Museum. Dextras used video and portable tech (iPads) to create a ‘moving’ exhibition on wheels. Acting as performance artist, Dextras related mythology to current-day fire prevention. 31 In the opening remarks of his speech for the Big Thinking lecture series at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences Annual Congress in June 2019, Simon Brault of Canada’s Council of the Arts stated: ‘Today, I’d like to discuss the civic responsibility of a funding institution in a sector in which viability relies on the quality and relevance of its content and experiences. Quality and relevance are measured in terms of public engagement and the democratic legitimacy – or, to use a trendier term, social acceptability – of the public funds this sector relies on, in Canada, at least.’ He further stated, ‘The notion of art for art’s sake is less and less accepted and the expectation is that public funding of arts and culture will contribute to the much-desired democratic utopia that is the common good or public interest.’ See https://canadacouncil.ca/spotlight/2019/05/simons-speech. 32 Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia, Tactical Urbanism, Short-Term Action for Long-Term Change (Washington, DC: Streets Plans Collaborative, Island Press, 2015), 2–3. Within this model of integrated partnerships, I turn again to Lydon and Garcia who remind us that ‘for citizens, it allows the immediate reclamation, redesign, or reprogramming of public space’. But most importantly, it ‘reaffirms and invites a new conversation’ as cities and citizens together explore long-term transformation but also adjust as conditions inevitably change. 33 Jacques Ranciere, The Emancipated Spectator (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 2–6. 34 See https://momentfactory.com/home. 35 Laura Sewall, Sight and Sensibility: The Ecopsychology of Perception (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Putnam, 1999), xv. 36 James J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), 1. 37 See www.dezeen.com/2015/11/02/in-the-eyes-of-the-animal-virtual-reality-installation-marshmal low-laser-feast-abandon-normal-devices-festival-england. 38 Emma Tucker, 2015,www.dezeen.com/2015/11/02/in-the-eyes-of-the-animal-virtual-reality-instal lation-marshmallow-laser-feast-abandon-normal-devices-festival-england. 39 E. O. Wilson, Biophilia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 40 Marc G. Berman, John Jonides, and Stephen Kaplan, ‘Cognitive Benefits of Interacting With Nature’, Association for Psychological Science 19, no. 12 (2008): 1207–1212. 41 Peter H. Kahn Jr, Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), xiii. 42 Peter. H. Kahn Jr, Rachel L. Severson, and Jolina H. Ruckert, ‘The Human Relation with Nature and Technological Nature’, Current Directions in Psychological Science 18 (2009): 37–42. 43 Arnold Berleant, Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2010). 44 Peter H. Kahn Jr, Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), xv.

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23 CHANGING SPACE Lesia Prokopenko

Asking Questions What happens when art is placed in public space? What makes it possible to call this space public? What does, on this basis, public art stand for? The complexities of talking about public art derive not only from the comparative newness of the term, but, in the first place, from the lack of consistent critical reflection on the qualities of space and spatial relations that public art enters. It is quite easy to attach value to a work that confronts, embraces, or illustrates a visible crisis, although frequently the very structure of this crisis remains normalised, naturalised, and, at times, locally decorated. The common naive fallacy – resulting in a trap of hypocrisy – is to look at art as something that offers direct public benefit, bringing immediate social gratification through visibility and representation. It is much more interesting and efficient to view public art as a poetic practice and a process that, by itself, presents an alteration of viewpoint, providing a subtle key to a different possible setting, an insight into different modes of political imagination and production of subjectivity, often dealing with the invisible and the unrepresentable, with slow and infinitesimal movements. This chapter will not offer any definitive answers to these questions, but rather suggests that by asking even more questions, we can trace routes for new meanings to cling to and move through. This is the most that can be done if we agree to preserve particular terminology, on the one hand, and to detach ourselves from it in order to avoid applying it blindly and taking certain power relations for granted, on the other. There is one idea that is crucial for the discussion about space, and, in our case, about public space, which immediately makes one see it in a different light, namely that space is not a given, it is something that has to be produced. The philosopher who made this radical thought particularly clear was Henri Lefebvre – he developed it in his work La Production de l’espace (The Production of Space) originally published in 1974.1 Understanding how the production of space takes place, how space is brought into being, and what it means for us today, should be the foundation of all reflections on what we agree to call ‘public art’. Accordingly, a part of this chapter is going to be dedicated to Lefebvre’s proposal. One of the most important conclusions he makes is that ‘to change life . . . we must first change space’.2 This is an essential statement in a time when the promise of change is blatantly

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overused and stands for very little. Increased meticulousness in the use of words and concepts can work miracles. The simplest and most demanding gesture that keeps overcoding at bay is asking ourselves what we mean precisely by bringing change, what happens exactly, what kind of material outcome we can observe, what kind of symbolic shift is taking place. It is possible to agree that art, as a micro event, does open a possibility of a certain change for a certain space. Where does it take us next? Let us rephrase and expand the question that opens this chapter. Instead of asking what happens when art is placed in public space, let us ponder: what happens when art leaves the institutionalised areas and enters the realm of ‘unlocked’ space that is constantly in flux, mutating, transferring a variety of flows and charges? It may pass as something superfluous, but it may also, serendipitously or not, transform particular elements or attributes of this space, thus bringing an inevitable micro revolution, a possible molecular revolution, in Guattarian terms. And we need to be able to tell what this micro revolution is about, what it changes and what it sustains, which, obviously, requires analytical instruments that come from beyond the realm of contemporary art criticism. What we habitually call public space is an intense political domain. It is far from being neutral. Publicness is not neutral at all. As soon as space is labelled ‘public’, it becomes a space of control – and a controlled space. It designates who belongs to the ‘public’ and structures their relation to the power apparatuses. We need to be especially cautious about cases where the term ‘public’ stands for the state, the government, or is being obscurely replaced by those. In order to highlight this distinction, in a text on publicness of the intellect, Paolo Virno came up with the notion of ‘a non-public public sphere’: When the fundamental abilities of the human being (thought, language, selfreflection, the capacity for learning) come to the forefront, the situation can take on a disquieting and oppressive appearance; or it can even give way to a nonpublic public sphere, to a non-governmental public sphere, far from the myths and rituals of sovereignty.3 Looking at art in the public realm necessarily means reading a particular context that allows it to take place. It is crucial to comprehend that this context is defined by the complexity of global communications and trade networks, apparatuses of power, strategies and tactics within information technologies, and, most importantly, the reciprocity of spatial and digital realms, which bears a far-reaching potential for understanding the ways space is ‘coded’ and includes questions of social ecology as much as those of environmental ecology. As Tiziana Terranova has pointed out, ‘new spatial ecosystems emerging at the crossing of the “natural” and the artificial allow for the activation of a process of chaosmotic co-creation of urban life’.4 Artistic intervention is precisely what might ‘hack’ the given contextual conditions. Public art may enter the space acting, on the one hand, similar to the work with code, and on the other hand, as augmented reality that fixes itself within existing contexts – with a potential to reveal, conceal, or transform them. This act is not meaningful by default, and again, we need to be able to analyse how it works: ‘No problem of meaning, but only of usage.’5

Production Simple as it seems, the idea that space is being produced grows from centuries of philosophical evolution. In order to imagine its basic contours, we may turn to the famous debate that took place in correspondence between Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Samuel 258

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Clarke – the latter, in this case, represented the position of Isaac Newton. The Newtonian conception of space assumes that space and time are actual entities. The position of Leibniz explains space and time as determinations or relations of things. In other words, for Leibniz, space cannot exist independently of objects that constitute it: ‘space is the order of the actual and possible relations among objects’.6 Immanuel Kant went on to suggest what might seem to be a solution for the debate, but is rather a pathway through it: he talked about space and time as nothing but forms of intuition, which means ‘that we have non-empirical, singular, immediate representations of space and of time’.7 In his lectures, Gilles Deleuze elaborated on Kant’s theory as follows: Space and time are the forms of appearing, or the forms of presentation of what appears. In effect, we can understand this because space and time are indeed a form of appearing, but they contain no specific unity. What appears is always diverse, an apparition is always an apparition of diversity: the red rose, a smell, a colour, etc. So what appears is, by nature, diverse. Space and time are forms of perception, but you can see that space and time themselves have a diversity, namely the diversity of ‘heres’ in space, any point in space being a possible ‘here’, and the diversity of moments for time, any point in time being a possible moment.8 Deleuze explains Kant’s space as the form of exteriority: ‘That doesn’t mean that it comes from outside, but it means that everything which appears in space appears as exterior to whoever grasps it, and exterior from one thing to another.’9 Time, thus, is the form of interiority. According to Deleuze’s reading of Kant, it is the affection of self by self. When we talk about art entering public space, shouldn’t we also look at how it interacts with the realm of time and what time it takes place in? Lefebvre arrives at his position about the production of (social) space from the Leibnizian side, which at the time could be supported by the newest scientific research. In particular, Lefebvre turns to the mathematician and theoretical physicist Hermann Weyl and his work on symmetry: Bodies – deployments of energy – produce space and produce themselves, along with their motions, according to the laws of space. And this remains true, Weyl argues, whether we are concerned with corpuscles or planets, crystals, electromagnetic fields, cell division, shells, or architectural forms, the last of which Weyl attributes great importance. Here then, we have a route from abstract to concrete which has the great virtue of demonstrating their reciprocal inherence. This path also leads from mental to social, a fact which lends additional force to the concept of the production of space.10 The connection between mental and social highlighted here by Lefebvre is a crucial element in thinking about the issues humanity is facing today and the possibility of change. In 1989, in his manifesto-like book Les Trois Écologies (The Three Ecologies) that is becoming increasingly relevant today, Félix Guattari establishes the indissoluble interdependence between mental ecology, social ecology, and environmental ecology.11 Ultimately, we cannot talk about public space without taking into account the environment, as a part of what is being produced by a certain kind of sociopolitical relations.

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But let us return to Lefebvre’s dialogue with Leibniz to see how production itself defines space. Leibniz maintains that space ‘in itself’, space as such, is neither ‘nothing’ nor ‘something’ – and even less the totality of things or the form of their sum; for Leibniz space was, indeed, the indiscernible. In order to discern ‘something’ therein, axes and an origin must be introduced, and a right and a left, i.e. the direction or orientation of those axes.12 In order to come into being, space must be occupied, and what occupies space, writes Lefebvre, is a specific body that establishes the orientation. And this is precisely what it means to create space: it is not about ‘manufacturing’ spatiality, but about setting up what Deleuze would call ‘exteriority’. Before producing effects in the material realm (tools and objects), before producing itself by drawing nourishment from that realm, and before reproducing itself by generating other bodies, each living body is space and has its space: it produces itself in space and it also produces that space.13 But what happens between the bodies? As Luciana Parisi points out, ‘Gottfried Leibniz’s study of differential calculus admitted that the space between undivided monads was not a void but a full texture of percepts and affects’ (and, for Parisi, Gregory Lynn’s topological architecture actually ‘suggested that these points were qualitative variables that could be included in the process of computation itself’).14 This is how simple and beautiful it gets here: space is bodies and what they produce, that is, percepts and affects, relations, and, therefore, directions, orientation of axes. Alfred North Whitehead added another twist to it, which became an important part of Parisi’s exploration: ‘Between points there are always more points (or an infinite amount of points), which correspond not to infinitesimals, percepts, and affects but to finite segments internally defined by a unique arrangement of infinities.’15

New Life ‘The idea of a new life’, writes Lefebvre, is at once realistic and illusory – and hence neither true nor false. What is true is that the preconditions for a different life have already been created, and that that other life is thus on the cards. What is false is the assumption that being on the cards and being imminent are the same thing, that what is immediately possible is necessarily a world away from what is only a distant possibility, or even an impossibility. The fact is that the space which contains the realized preconditions of another life is the same one as prohibits what those preconditions make possible.16 This observation in a miraculously precise way relates to the work of the Polish artist Elż bieta Jabłoń ska, titled, no more no less, New Life. Making visible the elusive yet strong motion that art may cause and trace in public space, it also overcomes Lefebvre’s shortsighted impasse: even if it doesn’t match the cards, the possible is what’s always already here. The Leibnizian idea of ‘the best possible world’ implies that the only world passing 260

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into existence – that is, our world – is the one ‘in which figures and forms will fill the maximum of space time while leaving the least emptiness’, ‘the one that realizes in itself the maximum of continuity, that is, which contains the greatest quantity of reality or of essence . . . Continuity is, in fact, precisely the means of containing the maximum quantity of reality’.17 Elż bieta Jabłoń ska found an old neon signboard in the form of an inscription ‘Nowe Ż ycie’ (new life) in 2005, in Trzeciewiec, a village in the north-west of Poland. It was mounted above the front of a building belonging to the Agricultural Production Cooperative. The inscription was the name of the cooperative that had been created in the 1970s, when ‘new life’ in Poland was understood as a new communist world. After 1989, when the Polish People’s Republic was replaced by the Third Polish Republic, the ideas changed, and numerous agricultural cooperatives were closed, but the sign survived. Four years after discovering it, in 2009, the artist was finally able to obtain it in the form of scrap metal. During the following months, she had the electric parts replaced and the whole piece restored. Since 2010, the neon New Life, as an eponymous artistic work, has been travelling from place to place (see Figure 23.1). So far, the gigantic ten-metre light installation has been shown in about 15 different city spaces, configurations, and contexts, including an endangered park around a mid-1960s reconstruction of an eighteenth-century classicist palace, a lively area next to the theatre in the capital city, a building under construction hosting an experimental art initiative, a former coal mine in a provincial town, and a shipyard.18 The former collective farm sign entered numerous locations at different stages of transformation, at times indeed acting as a trigger of change, but perhaps much rather as its symbolic indication. The neon

Figure 23.1 Nowe Ż ycie (New Life) (2014), Elż bieta Jabłoń ska. Królikarnia, Warsaw, Poland Source: Ola Litorowicz.

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inscription operates as a Chinese character, with both a meaning of its own and meaningforming properties that arise in combination with other symbols, opening new semantic routes. In July 2016, the neon sign was taken on a river cruise. The work was transported by the International Waterway E70 from a small river port in northern Poland to Berlin, where it was going to be exhibited. The six-day trip was thoroughly documented, resulting in a 45-minute video observation of the changing landscape, seen from the perspective of the river. This particular iteration of the project gracefully lets us observe space as something that is permanently in flux; indifferent to the distinction between ‘public space’ and ‘land’; unfolding through connection between urban and rural areas, states, ports, ‘natural’ and ‘human-made’ ways, stillness, and movement. Eventually, Elż bieta Jabłoń ska assigned the money received from New Life by Nomus, the Museum for Contemporary Art in Gdań sk, for the construction of a small house on the bank of the Wisła River, to be used as a place for residencies and artistic activities, both for the rural community and for outside visitors. The potentiality nested in the white neon on an old rusty construction proved to be shape-shifting, creating numerous possibilities from its ongoing journey. For Jabłoń ska, the title ‘New Life’ does not necessarily mean a revolution, and it is not necessarily connected with an end. It can happen anywhere, anytime. It is about putting yourself into a state of readiness to change, opening to the unknown, searching for new solutions for yourself, but also for places that lose their meaning.19 It is important to realise that the artist does not dwell upon or cite explicitly any ideological components of the object’s history. Instead, playfully and assertively, she has turned failed politics into constructive poetics. After all, if we look at the original neon sign as a materialised communist algorithm, isn’t the further story of New Life an illustration of how it, in Parisi’s terms, ‘unleashed incomputable probabilities into everyday culture’?20 New Life engages – changes and produces – not only space, but also, reciprocally, time, a form of interiority. Traversing histories, it opens its own temporality of the ‘anytime’, the true infinity of the autopoietic universe – the time that can’t be lost.

Autopoietic Transformations When Lefebvre talks about bodies producing themselves in space – and thus producing space – we are entering the field of what is called ‘autopoiesis’. This primordial type of production is essential for Félix Guattari’s key idea of ‘production of subjectivity’. Coined within his (anti-)psychiatric practice, the production of subjectivity is a concept that immediately shifts and changes the order of the given: ‘We are not confronted with a subjectivity given as in itself, but with processes of the realisation of autonomy, or of autopoiesis.’21 A similar shift happens when we introduce the production of space. Further, the autopoietic production is, for Guattari, what can truly overpower the spurious infinity of the production of commodities: Production for the sake of production – the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies – leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous 262

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fashion. The productive apparatuses of subjectivity can exist at the level of megapoles as easily as at the level of an individual’s language games. And to learn the intimate workings of this production, these ruptures of meaning that are autofoundational of existence – poetry today might have more to teach us than economic science, the human sciences and psychoanalysis combined.22 Luciana Parisi – drawing, among other things, upon Guattari’s findings – looks at autopoiesis and beyond it, in order to mark the way for understanding the interrelationships between computation, aesthetics, and space. On the one hand, it is not difficult to observe how ‘a short computer program – a genetic code for instance – guarantees the autopoiesis (self-making) of the universe’.23 Moreover, ‘the autopoietic model of self-organization demonstrated that chaos could be turned into order in the form of negentropic information’,24 an idea carefully taken by Parisi from the work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, whose notion of autopoiesis (self-making) turned the entropic tendency of a system to run out of equilibrium, and thus to dissipate its unity, into a negentropic measure of information, according to which any small living entity could become productive of complex levels of organization, including cognition.25 And yet it is crucial for her to explain that algorithmic objects are spatiotemporal actualities constituting and producing space, which cannot be described only by ‘the generative power of algorithms to design self-evolving structures’ and ‘interactive systems of physical connections’. For that, Parisi turns to Guattari’s concept of metamodeling, as it ‘offers us the opportunity to describe an extraspace of nonunifying actualities, a contagious architecture that does not prioritize formalism or empiricism’.26 What Parisi demands is a possibility to embrace the reality of abstract objects and to think of a space it yields: ‘This extraspace corresponds to the random, incompressible data of algorithmic objects that are immediately experienced as irreducible parts larger than any totalizing whole.’27 Why is it so important to be able to think of such space? In the first place, because ‘random data – indeterminate quantities – are the contagious architectures of the present’.28 The digital design of urban space is, according to Parisi, defined by contingent rules triggered by the incomputable: The digital design of time and space not only controls (or preempts) the emergence of events, but is unleashing unlived urban worlds into the spatiotemporal programming of the everyday. These space events are symptoms of the concreteness of digital architecture, which, it is now clear, can never absolutely match the political sentiment for a progressive change in social behavior. I do not consider this mismatch to be a failure. Instead it points at a schizophrenic and nonreversible situation whereby the programs used to organize urban infrastructure are instead constructing or revealing an infrastructure of another kind, thereby exposing the all too real realm of data volumes, data density, and data architecture.29 Today’s space is not different from what space has always been – it only became clear that transformation is its intrinsic, defining property. Lefebvre’s principal message is that in order to change society, to change life, space must be changed and produced,30 but along with that we need to consider that space is perpetually changing precisely because life must be 263

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changing in order to be life. ‘For a self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living’, as Virginia Woolf elegantly remarked.31 Lefebvre explains space in terms that enhance its transformational qualities: ‘Space is social morphology: it is to lived experience what form itself is to the living organism, and just as intimately bound up with function and structure.’32 What does it mean for our understanding of public space? We are confronted not by one social space but by many – indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we refer to generically as ‘social space’. No space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local. This is not a consequence of the law of uneven development, but a law in its own right. The intertwinement of social spaces is also a law. Considered in isolation, such spaces are mere abstractions.33 Public space is necessarily a multitude, an interconnection of power regimes, narratives, temporalities, languages, of what is absent and what is present, aesthetic and ethical modes, bodies and signs – and bodies as signs. Nothing can be taken for granted in space, because what are involved are real or possible acts, and not mental states or more or less well-told stories. In produced space, acts reproduce ‘meanings’ even if no ‘one’ gives an account of them. Repressive space wreaks repression and terror even though it may be strewn with ostensible signs of the contrary (of contentment, amusement or delight).34 This last admonition must be particularly decisive for down-to-earth perception and analyses of art in public space. Art, however, may and should be seen as what potentially marks, anticipates, or even induces the change of space. When Lefebvre calls art a representation of the relations of production, it by no means diminishes the role that art itself has in these relations. As a poetic node and agent of spatial and subjectivity production, art may lead us towards an understanding of how space is changing and what it is that’s changing in space – what is coming into being.

Gardens of the Anthropocene To perceive space is to produce space, and when it comes to ‘extraspace’ (of algorithmic objects), its imperceptibility implies an immaterial type of aesthetic production. Virtual reality or augmented reality do not correspond to such space, but they can present the idea of concretised abstractions and show the possibility of ‘extraspace’. Tamiko Thiel’s augmented reality installation Gardens of the Anthropocene, originally commissioned by the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park in summer 2016, is a work that can be viewed this way (see Figure 23.2). Importantly, Gardens of the Anthropocene is an example of a work that fully takes place both in the virtual realm and in the actual urban public space‚ being experienced as part of the actual space of several different locations (the ‘gardens’ spread from the Olympic Sculpture Park to Stanford Campus, the Pioneer Works art space in Brooklyn, NY, and the Salem Maritime National Historic Site). The project imagines

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Figure 23.2 Gardens of the Anthropocene (2016), Tamiko Thiel. Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA, USA Source: Tamiko Thiel.

a surreal, dystopian scenario in which plants are ‘mutating’ to breach natural boundaries: from photosynthesis of visible light to feeding off mobile devices’ electromagnetic radiation, from extracting nutrients from soil to feeding off man-made structures, and to transgressing boundaries between underwater and dry land, between reactive flora and active fauna.35 Tamiko Thiel’s world resonates with the idea of evolutionary flexibility outlined by Guattari in The Three Ecologies: ‘There is a principle specific to environmental ecology: it states that anything is possible – the worst disasters or the most flexible evolutions [évolutions en souplesse].’36 Just as the digital imagery enters the interrelation with the space of the park, streets, and buildings, creating together with it another actuality, the actuality of an artwork – Thiel’s species appropriate particular technological components and/or let technology enter their DNA in a symbiotic co-mutation, creating antenna-based blossoms and kelp-based drones. In both cases, we observe the inseparability of the ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. ‘The mutant algae’, toxic red formations that, within the project, the artist ‘detected’ on both coasts of the American continent, could be seen as a nod to Guattari, who had insightfully compared certain scenarios of the late 1980s to the pernicious seaweed:

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Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally’. Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements [énoncés]. In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.37 Yet again, the only way to overcome the proliferation of what appears to be threatening certain equilibriums is to continue transforming, mutating – just like non-respiring bacteria did when cyano-bacteria ‘polluted’ the earth with their waste gas, oxygen.38 Guattari outlines three directions where transformation is to take place if we are ‘to escape from the major crises of our era’: ‘a nascent subjectivity, a constantly mutating socius, an environment in the process of being reinvented’.39 Mutation and production come together in Thamiko Thiel’s work in all the three dimensions: the transformed environment is now one with the social, present in the form of numerous seemingly contingent street signs that pop up among the plants, organising and directing incomputable flows – one can’t say whether the mutant plants have grown these signs or the mutant signs have entered the new populations of flora. This merging space is the space of and for – produced by and producing – new forms of subjectivity, a subjectivity that is always composite, becoming, autopoietic. This subjectivity is not something anticipated by Gardens of the Anthropocene – the space of the work already is the space of this shared subjectivity. Gardens of the Anthropocene is, in fact, a project less surreal than its description cunningly claims it to be. There are two aspects that make it realistic/real – in addition to its contact with the public space. One is the reality of the virtual. Another is the machinic reality of evolutionary processes. The virtual here stands not only for the virtuality of augmented reality as a medium, but also for mutations (of a body) as, according to Parisi, those designating ‘the abstract or virtual operations of matter’.40 Referring to Deleuze and Guattari, Parisi goes on to explain how ‘the virtual is not to be confused with the realm of the possible’: The possible, in fact, is often the reflected image of an already determined reality contained in a closed set of choices. Possibilities do not have a reality, as their reality is already determined. Instead of denoting a possible reality, the virtual is reality in terms of strength or potential that tends towards actualization or emergence. Thus, the virtual does not have to become real. It is already real. It has to become actual. The actual does not derive from another actual, but implies the emergence of new compositions, a becoming that responds to (acts back on) the virtual rather than being analogous to it.41 Evolution implies mutation, and the project of Gardens of the Anthropocene acts as an instrument or technology that enables one to observe it – for which one needs to enter a newly produced mutating space and to become its producer, respectively. The production of this space is an ecological act per se, as that which is based on the relations of organisms to one another and to their surroundings. 266

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If the realm of mutating flora that takes down the distinction between the organic and inorganic to state the oneness of ever-changing (virtual) matter may seem unsettling, in a different work Thamiko Thiel provides access to it in a way that makes the potential of such space more explicit. Lotus Meditation, geolocated in Kennin-ji, the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto, is an augmented reality installation that lets users of the app hold a digital lotus flower that eventually ‘enlarges to embrace you’ and lands in the hands of a Buddhist monk.42 Here, the Buddhist understanding of impermanence and unreality of perceived reality comes into play – showing the virtual and the actual in their reciprocal becoming.

Notes 1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, [1974] 1991). 2 Ibid., 190. 3 Paolo Virno, ‘Publicness of the Intellect: Non-State Public Sphere and the Multitude’, European Institute for Progressive Culture Politics, January 2001 (original emphasis), http://eipcp.net/trans versal/0605/virno/en 4 Tiziana Terranova, ‘Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital, and the Automation of the Common’, Euronomade, 8 March 2014, www.euronomade.info/?p=2268. 5 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 78. 6 ‘Kant’s Views on Space and Time’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2016 (original emphasis), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-spacetime/#LeibNewt. 7 Ibid. 8 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Sur Kant: Cours Vincennes: Synthesis and Time’, 14 March 1978, www.webde leuze.com/textes/66. 9 Ibid. 10 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 171. 11 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, [1989] 2000). 12 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 169. 13 Ibid., 170. 14 Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 98. 15 Ibid., xi. 16 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 189. 17 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Sur Leibniz: Cours Vincennes – St. Denis, April 22, 1980’, www.webdeleuze. com/textes/53. 18 More information about the ways the installation was presented can be found on the website of the Institute for Public Art, www.instituteforpublicart.org/case-studies/new-life-nowe-zycie. 19 See www.elajablonska.com/projects-more.php?id=41. 20 Parisi, Contagious Architecture, 117. 21 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 7. 22 Ibid., 21. 23 Parisi, Contagious Architecture, 38. 24 Ibid., 16. 25 Ibid., 262. 26 Ibid., 3 (original emphasis). 27 Ibid., 4. 28 Ibid., 9. 29 Ibid., 94 (emphasis added). 30 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 59.

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Lesia Prokopenko 31 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Humane Art’, in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (Adelaide: University of Adelaide Press, [1974] 2015), https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chap ter9.html. 32 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 94. 33 Ibid., 86. 34 Ibid., 144. 35 See http://tamikothiel.com/gota/index.html; https://vimeo.com/177393844. 36 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 66. 37 Ibid., 37. 38 Read more about these processes in Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Bio-Technology, and the Mutations of Desire (London: Continuum, 2004), 62. 39 Guattari, The Three Ecologies, 68. 40 Parisi, Abstract Sex, 14. 41 Ibid. 42 See http://tamikothiel.com/AR/lotus-meditation.html.

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24 ENSEMBLE PRACTICES Iain Biggs

Félix Guattari argues that we need new configurations of three ecologies – the natural, society, and the psychic – if we are to address our current, increasingly toxic, terrestrial situation.1 When artists acknowledge this insight, they tend to focus on the first two ecologies. This chapter addresses the third as an inseparable element of necessary thinking. In 2014 the performance artist Andrea Fraser claimed that artists are not part of the solution to our current crisis, as many assume, but rather contribute to it.2 Is it possible that the nature of ‘art’ has become problematic as part of the deepening epistemological crisis in which current notions of creativity are embedded? (A crisis that, as Bruno Latour suggests, requires ‘progressives’ to acknowledge the reality of those it previously viewed as ‘outsiders’ – as outmoded, reactionary, traditionalist, parochial.3) This chapter examines this possibility from the perspective of an ecology of self. Andrea Fraser’s claim restates concerns raised by the artist-turned-anthropologist A. David Napier, the liberation psychologist Mary Watkins, the writer, poet, and art critic Thomas McEvilley and, most recently and inclusively, by the writer and academic Amitav Ghosh. I share their concerns and want to raise two possibilities. First, to consider that the art of the culture of possessive individualism enacts the failure of imagination that Ghosh calls the ‘Great Derangement’.4 Second, to foreground an alternative view of creative activity in which art acts to animate ensembles of heterogeneous skills and concerns, facilitating in turn processes of ‘mutual accompaniment’5 necessary to enact a geopolitics of the terrestrial.6 Ensembles that retain the psychic benefits of an engendering creativity but at a distance from the assumptions, expectations, and protocols central to a hyperprofessionalised art world. Considering increasingly heterogeneous creative practices as compound ensembles is, I suggest, a step towards reversing the situation in which art serves to perpetuate the culture of possessive individualism, and with it the Great Derangement. In this chapter an intellectual position is modified by a sense of what, in practice, individuals can manage to do in a ‘global’ culture of possessive individualism. A framework for ensemble practices is followed by brief accounts of the work of Simon Read and Luci Gorell Barnes. The chapter as a whole builds on my previous use of the term ‘mycelial’ to describe how the work of Christine Baeumler incorporates the roles and skills of citizen, neighbour, artist, university teacher, student of ecology, researcher, curator, and mentor.7

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Here ‘ensemble practice’ is used to consolidate this understanding, to stress individuals’ mycelial entanglement in multiple, interconnected tasks, connectivities, and interdependences. It posits individuals as compound, multi-relational ensembles, supporting a view of the artist that does not presuppose an exclusive hyper-individualism.

Placing Ensemble Practices Art is a parasite that feeds upon the corpus of culture. Its insularity is just a conceit.8 The symbolic function of the artist in the culture of possessive individualism is to publicly embody individual exceptionalism; to reinforce the assumption that creativity is ‘owned’ by self-contained individuals and so reinforce that culture’s notions of personhood, nature, and society. Contrary to these assumptions, we are in actuality constituted in and through our connections, attachments, and relationships. It is in this context that Napier claims that a more environmental form of thinking requires a deliberate destabilising of the identity ‘artist’.9 My argument, following the authors just mentioned, takes up a distinction made by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead by positing a spectrum of identity positions between a ‘life-as’ and ‘being-as-becoming’.10 Life-as is the identity position shared by, for example, the English Member of Parliament, Catholic traditionalist, and multi-millionaire Jacob ReesMogg; members of fundamentalist organisations such as Islamic State or the Aryan Brotherhood; and the artist-as-financial-entrepreneur Jeff Koons. Despite their obvious considerable differences, I contend that they share an all-consuming psychosocial investment in a self-contained and monolithic identity that opposes or denies all values, connections, and relationships that do not reinforce it. They lack, that is, the basic capacity for empathetic imagination that enables us to negotiate identity and alterity, to genuinely engage in and with multiple psychic, social, and environmental ecologies. At the other end of this spectrum are those whose sense of selfhood is coexistent with a social multiverse; that is fluid, contingent on relations with others, and so mutable and open-ended. Such people understand alterity as the means by which we identify the new in ourselves. The psychosocial and political stakes here are simple. To face our eco-social crisis, we must now find ways to attend to, sustain, and cherish as many ways of belonging in the multiverse as possible through mutual accompaniment. This cannot be done by investing in a life-as, including ‘life-as an artist’. Life-as an artist now needs to be differentiated from an involvement in making art ultimately predicated on the understanding that the self cannot be reduced to a categorical identity, given the divisions this then creates. This view is implicit in Edward S. Casey’s distinction between a ‘position’ as a fixed postulate within a given culture and a sense of ‘place’ that, notwithstanding its nominally settled appearance, is experienced through living experimentally within a constantly shifting culture.11 What ‘places’ those with ensemble practices predicated on negotiating multiple psychic, social, and environmental connections, attachments, and relationships is an open engagement with the productive tensions between experience and category, reality and representation, life and language. It is in this context that we should understand Simon Read’s observation that, for an artist, to make is to become; where becoming is ‘to develop a level of understanding that is communicable’, and thus ‘where a conversation starts’.12 This is reinforced by the view that the real value of the arts ‘as research’ is embodied as expertise, confidence, understanding, and an orientation to tasks and concerns to be addressed, thus generating tools and abilities, and is best seen as a form of responsiveness. As that aspect of ‘response-ability’ that thrives 270

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in conversational spaces, generates the possibility of argument, discussion, critique, and reflection that support modes of being-as-becoming, so that ‘collaboration’ becomes a basis ‘for evaluation’.13 Art understood as open-ended research or essaying then becomes a conversation between ongoing evaluative narratives. A process related to the dynamic materialisation of continuing collaboration and evaluation, human and otherwise, in an entanglement of beings and places that emerges in confluences of mutual intra-relatedness and, it is to be hoped, mutual accompaniment. The art of conversation then becomes primary, one in which normative forms of exclusivity have no place.

Littoral Entanglements: Simon Read In 1980 Read and his partner left London to live on a barge on the Suffolk Coast, where he began modifying his successful cosmopolitan aesthetic to think about the health and management of increasing unstable coastal and estuarine systems. He started to immerse himself in debates in which he saw the cultural implications of environmental change as central and his work increasingly focused on the myriad forms and manifestations of the energy of water. Following the release of the first estuary strategy for the River Deben in 1997, Read realised that the public were largely unaware both of its terms of reference and of the nature of estuary systems. He was by then actively involved with the River Deben Association, a community organisation. Unable to find any large-scale maps that articulated the relationships between the river, its defences, and the surrounding landscape and floodplain, he decided he should make his own. The necessary information to do this existed but had to be retrieved from admiralty charts, OS maps, Environment Agency Indicative Flood Plain maps, and aerial surveys. Once synthesised and cross-referenced, it then had to be checked against what was physically ‘on the ground’. This arduous work then equipped him to make properly informed contributions to debates between multiple-agency concerns and community interests about the river and its environment. He updates the maps as necessary. In 2009 the Middlesex University Research Institute published PLOT, a series of international case studies exploring cultural perceptions of land for which Read wrote an account of planning and constructing a tidal attenuation barrier for Sutton Saltmarsh on the River Deben.14 This marked the maturation of a learning process that has enabled him to be substantively involved in the regional community’s response to environmental change, providing a grounding in estuary and coastal dynamics and, in consequence, enabled him to develop an ensemble practice that substantially contributes to environmental engagement on many levels. Read’s numerous highly detailed hand-drawn maps have continued to visualise multiple analyses of dynamic environmental factors made by coastal scientists whose processes he has had to absorb. In doing so he updates himself on their implications and so can help generate wider understandings of how scientific work on natural systems is applied. This in turn helps ground exchanges of viewpoint at the level of public consultation through accurate visualisation. Read’s practical work in creating the tidal attenuation barrier for Sutton Saltmarsh and the subsequent Falkenham Saltmarsh Tidal Management Scheme are physical manifestations of insights gained through pragmatic exercises in visualisation on one hand, and their function in public debates regarding the Deben and its environs on the other. Like many projects undertaken by artists with ensemble practices, there is no simple answer to the question: ‘what is the outcome of the Falkenham Saltmarsh Tidal Management Scheme project?’ Answers will depend on the assumptions and values of the questioner. To the farmer who owns the saltmarsh, and to the Deben Estuary Partnership, it 271

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Figure 24.1 The Suffolk Coast Between Aldeburgh and Shingle Street and the Shoreline Management Plan of 2010 (2010), Simon Read Source: Simon Read.

is an intervention that seeks to restore and manage a complex tidal saltmarsh; one aspect of creating new intertidal habitat through a process of community engagement in managed realignment. To those interested in the development of ‘land’ or ‘environmental’ art, Read’s drawings and the structures built from them can be contextualised and discussed as contributing to those genres. Those involved in environmental land management might focus on Read’s use of biodegradable timber, brushwood, straw bales, and coir to create structures that baffle and slow the outflow of water as the tide drops, while acting as sills that allow the tide in and so encouraging the retention of the sediment on which the health of the saltmarsh depends. For those interested in the intersection of public and environmental engagement, or in environmental governance, the project evidences a process

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by which aspects of environmental change can be taken up by the cultural sector of a community and so assist it in an informed re-engaging with, and reflecting on, issues of ownership, land, responsibility, and belonging. For Read, each answer is equally valid, and none excludes others. At the time of writing, Read, as a member of a research partnership CoastWEB, is in the process of completing a major project relating the estuary of the River Taf to the evolution of the community of Laugharne.15 This includes working with the Electronic Games Design Department at Middlesex University on the development of an app capable of articulating coastal processes. Once again, this project involves him balancing the demands placed on him when working in the context of social science-led research and his own need to preserve the complex and nuanced nature of his own creative insights against instrumental reduction to ‘data’. His understanding of his own practice is, in this respect, predicated on a number of specific factors. Perhaps the most significant is its relationship to environmental change, to his employment as an associate professor involved in art education, and to research, all in ways ultimately inseparable from that practice. These factors inevitably complicate my framing of ensemble practice as a distinct category and, in consequence, I will reference his sense of his own position more fully. He writes: A deep interest and curiosity in the way systems work combined with the attraction of working directly with the reconfiguration of local and regional landscape, has persuaded me to undertake an executive role in the generation and coordination [of] estuarine and coastal management plans. Through this I recognise the need to make policy work on the ground and welcome the opportunity to participate tangibly in what would otherwise be a spectator’s view of environmental change. In turn this both feeds into and is nourished by my academic and visual arts practice to the extent that I now find that they have become indistinguishable.16 Whether this position can be understood as identical to that set out here is open to question. What is not is a shared understanding that ‘it is essential to climb down from the pedestal’ created by ‘the highly ghettoized professional environment’ in which artists conventionally work.17 In order to make a tangible environmental difference, Read has accepted to do just this by developing an alternative strategy that holds multiple commitments normally viewed as distinct in a creatively intermeshed tension. His aim then, using all the various skills and insights at his disposal, remains to balance the continually shifting dynamics of that tension in an ensemble practice.

Crossing Over In writing a chapter editorially limited to two individuals, I have chosen not to reference the work of Pauline O’Connell, Erin Kavanagh, Christine Baeumler, Cathy Fitzgerald, or Marega Palser, artists whose work and conversations have helped formulate my thinking here. I chose to write about Read’s work because I have been familiar with it the longest, because he has written thoughtfully and at length about concerns we share, and because it is unusual, at least in my experience, to find a male artist who so openly acknowledges the ensemble nature of his practice. Read’s practice might be seen as a particular, if highly unusual, manifestation of the role of the artist/teacher/researcher employed by a university; someone capable of producing such a hard-to-categorise work as Cinderella River: The Evolving Narrative of the River Lee. What distinguishes him is that others with similar compound roles conventionally privilege their identity as artists over their roles as teacher and researcher. By acknowledging the full 273

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complexity of his working reality, Read helps clarify the conditions necessary to enact a genuinely transdisciplinary working culture and, by inference, Latour’s terrestrial geopolitics. This position flows from his acceptance that his contribution to any environmental debate or course of action cannot rest on presuppositions about the exclusivity of his status as artist; that his informed understanding ‘is no more important than another point of view in the mix that might ensure an equitable solution’.18 Arguably, the work of Luci Gorell Barnes extends this understanding into a guiding principle.

Luci Gorell Barnes: Local Cosmopolitans, Mutual Accompaniment, and the Terrestrial as Dwelling Place At the heart of Bruno Latour’s articulation of a new geopolitics of the terrestrial is the question of a radical realignment and complication of the binary relationship between the global, as defined by a transforming modernisation animated by corporate privatisation, and the local as that to be transformed, modernised, and privatised. I have referred elsewhere to individuals addressing this realignment via the arts as engaging the tensions inherent in a ‘local cosmopolitanism’.19 Latour’s argument confirms that this approach is vital to our moving towards the (re)construction of a shared commitment to the terrestrial as a dwelling place predicated on mutual accompaniment. A commitment that must outface and outwit the fantasists promoting the out-of-this-world, Latour’s term for the project of unreality enacted in multiple denials: of fact, truth, and connectivity; of the overriding importance of addressing climate change; of the sixth great extinction; and of the growing loss of human dignity and solidarity. This is the refusal of reality advanced by the multi-millionaire sponsors of Brexit (a Trojan horse for financial, social, and environmental deregulation in the United Kingdom); and by Donald Trump’s fantasy of ‘making America great again’ while denying climate change. I understand the ensemble practice of Luci Gorell Barnes as enacting a local cosmopolitanism in the context of contesting the unreality of such out-of-this-world positions from the perspective of the terrestrial. Gorell Barnes earns her living as an educator, researcher, and artist-in-residence of some 14 years standing at Speedwell Nursery School and Children’s Centre in Bristol, England. Simultaneously, she maintains her activities as a partner, mother, and grandmother, a published writer, an illustrator, and a studio artist. She understands all these activities as mutually interdependent, as interrelated means that allow her to focus on an underlying unifying concern; our urgent need to develop ‘flexible and responsive processes that enable us to think imaginatively with ourselves, and each other’.20 This concern is particularly vivid in the context of her work with socially vulnerable people including refugees and migrants, where it serves to help transform a legislative acceptance into a place-making grounded in mutual accompaniment.21 Disappointed by the disconnection between art school education and daily life, Gorell Barnes dropped out of art college to involve herself in community arts workshops and performances, take street theatre performances to Europe, play accordion in Nicaraguan schools and hospitals, teach performance at Britain’s first school for professional circus training, and make art ‘alongside . . . women prisoners, gypsies and travelers, children, refugees and asylum seekers’, supporting them in expressing ‘their personal perspectives as part of a shared purpose’. She has in consequence gradually developed an ensemble practice that extends across a wide range of disciplines and skills. These include, for example, writing, image- and map-making, participating in Research Council-funded academic projects, facilitating both work on an allotment, where groups meet to grow, cook, and share food and friendship, and Bad Maman, an informal group that makes preserves and 274

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Figure 24.2 Welcome banner in 22 languages made by participants in the ‘Branching Out’ group at Speedwell Children’s Centre (2019). Bristol, UK Source: Luci Gorell Barnes.

liqueurs from foraged fruit to raise money for women living in refugee camps, much of which activity is focused by her long-term artist’s residency at the Nursery School and Children’s Centre. This work includes Companion Planting, an action research project based on a council allotment plot, which uses gardening as a medium to explore parents’ engagement with their children’s learning and to bring people together to share skills, make friends, and celebrate diversity. A project that functions, on a local scale, in ways similar to peace parks.22 Underlying the many aspects of her ensemble practice is the desire to devise ‘ways of supporting people to represent their individual perspectives as part of a shared purpose’; in her case particularly ‘those who find themselves on the margins for one reason or another’. This desire is ‘placed’ through her commitment to her place, one perhaps most typically enacted through her engagement with the Nursery School and Children’s Centre. This helps ground her work in, without restricting it to, an in-depth engagement with a specific geographical area and the communities for which it provides the possibilities of a habitus enacted through mutual accompaniment. This relationship to a place and its communities is fundamental to her ensemble practice as a local cosmopolitan, as someone able to adopt a critical solicitude towards the possibilities of a ‘local’ place-based habitus that is, intellectually speaking, informed by a ‘global’ awareness. Somebody whose inclusive practice

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is animated by her being an informed and plural subject playing many roles, rather than identifying with the fixed, monolithic identity position of life-as an artist. Gorell Barnes would be the first to acknowledge that she has had to ‘grow into’ her particular ensemble practice as tensioned by her local cosmopolitanism. Something of the process involved can be indicated by juxtaposing two texts she has authored. On the one hand, her paper ‘Writing from the Margins of Myself’ (2014)23 identifies and reflects on her own creative multiverse; on the other hand, her illustrated text ‘This Long River’ (2018),24 a thoughtful homage to an elderly neighbour Jean, begun in 2013, evokes her sense of how listening to Jean’s stories enabled her to negotiate an appropriate sense of mutual accompaniment in the particular locality where she and her family have their home. In ‘Writing from the Margins of Myself’, Gorell Barnes indicates some of the conditions that constitute what I refer to here as the ‘cosmopolitan’ aspects of her working identity. Her text takes an example of her own experimental process of free writing as its starting point and, with discussions of ethical dilemmas that might arise from such writing in mind, reflects on how her writing practice calls up awareness of a necessary care for self and others. In setting out the process involved as a whole, using a wide range of theoretical positions and other viewpoints, she indicates how it allows her to transcend her dominant voice and so to restructure some of her own ideas about what it is to study. She proposes that, through the process of writing fiction, she was able to consider complex psychosocial issues in such a way as to open up multiple meanings for herself, and equally to offer a range of views into social experience. In short, it offers a practical example of how the process of being-as-becoming is enacted through a combination of creative and reflective work that opens into the space in which mutual accompaniment of different aspects of self and other can occur. The illustrated text ‘This Long River’ can be seen, in the light of her earlier paper, as marking the practical application of a cosmopolitan understanding to her own existential engagement with a place, to the living-through of mutual accompaniment in her local habitus. The text was initially intended as an inquiry into how the stories told to her by her elderly neighbour Jean had contributed to her own sense of belonging in the valley where she has lived since 2003. Because Jean died shortly after Gorell Barnes began her project, focus shifted to become one of grieving. A grieving bound up with the fear that the sense of fragmentation precipitated by Jean’s death would unravel Gorell Barnes’s own recently constructed sense of belonging in the valley, and would leave her adrift. The process of writing and visual mapping thus became a meditation on Jean’s life as the embodiment of time, place, and memory, as filtered through the medium of personal loyalties and belonging as underwritten by the mutual accompaniment inherent in neighbourliness. A neighbourliness grounded in an attentive listening that, increasingly, puts in question an implicit assumption of civic society; namely that the provision of care for the elderly is best determined by those designated professionals whose livelihoods are predicated on their being specialists in such care. As the text progresses, it becomes a weaving together of Jean’s and the author’s memories, shot through with fragments of local lore and practice, snatches of song, shared acts of remembrance, and more detached reflections on the role of storytelling in the creation of family history and a place-based neighbourliness; one grounded by Jean’s storied, familial sense of the valley that contributed to both women’s sense of being intimately placed and known. Gorell Barnes writes of the process of making her illustrated text in terms of a gathering up of the threads that linked Jean and herself, of imagining herself as 276

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one filament woven in among others. She envisages Jean’s stories as a thread pulled from her past and embroidered for her in the present, and the process of writing as one of ‘unraveling, unpicking and re-stitching myself back into the fabric of the landscape’; as ‘mending the rip that Jean’s death had left behind, using stitches that allowed me to see where the edges [of] our lives had touched’.25 The text becomes, then, an exploration at a personal level of the work of neighbourliness as mutual accompaniment necessary to her multiple engagements with the migrant and refugee women and children with whom she interacts on an almost daily basis through her work as artist-in-residence. An exploration that oscillates between the ‘voices’ of personal grief, shared remembrance, a critical reflexivity informed by the cosmopolitan self-re-education in a multi-perspectival approach that allowed her to author ‘Writing from the Margins of Myself’, and the visualisations she provides as an artist/cartographer. Itself the product of an ensemble of skills and understandings, this text can be taken as evoking those qualities that inform Gorell Barnes’s ensemble practice as a whole. In this context she writes of having come to writing and research through her creative practice within communities rather than through academia and of being most comfortable learning from experience; as Brydon-Miller et al describe, she is ‘unable to resist “embodied” intellectual practice’.26

Coda Simon Read and Luci Gorell Barnes continue to refer to themselves as ‘artists’. My concerns here do not contest this. My aim is simply to clarify the fact that their ‘art practice’ is predicated on porosity, connectivity, attachments, and relationships that reflect a process of trying to understand the self in relation to others. The more generally such relationality is acknowledged the better chance we have of creating the creative commons on which any kind of future for our species will depend. Writing in 2014, Simon Read asked himself whether his identity as an artist had become so diffused by his socio-environmental engagement that he was actually losing it altogether or, alternatively, whether he was developing a new form of modus operandi, one that allowed him to enter cross-disciplinary partnerships without fearing that he will become constrained by his ‘own ego or signature methodology’.27 This will remain an open question for all those similarly artfully engaged in ensemble practices, but my hope is that the second option is increasingly the case.

Notes 1 Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, trans. Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton (London: Athlone Press, [1989] 2000). 2 Andrea Fraser cited in Sarah Thornton, 33 Artists in 3 Acts (New York: Norton, 2014), 376. 3 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 42–43. 4 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 5 There is no simple definition of this term, which I take to involve forming horizontal relationships of solidarity and accompaniment with human and non-human others, challenging the monopolies created by hyper-professionalism, and mutual creation of ecosophically oriented purposes, desires, and visions. However, see Mary Watkins ‘From Hospitality to Mutual Accompaniment: Addressing Soul Loss in the Citizen-Neighbour’, in Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness, ed. Tomaž Grušovnik, Edurado Mendieta, and Lenart Škof (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 25–39. 6 See Latour, Down to Earth.

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Iain Biggs 7 Iain Biggs, ‘Christine Baeumler’s Mycelial Art Practice’, in Pollinators at the Plains: Christine Baeumler’s Defiant Garden for the Plains, ed. Colleen J. Sheehy (Fargo, ND: Plains Art Museum, 2018), 32–44. 8 Simon Read, www.simonread.info/portfolio-items/the-amateur-on-the-beach. 9 A. David Napier, Making Things Better (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 134. 10 Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead, The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005). 11 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 31. 12 Simon Read cited in Janette Kerr and Christiana Payne, eds, The Power of the Sea: Making Waves in British Art (Bristol: Sansom & Co., 2014), 153. 13 James Leach and Lee Watson, Enabling Innovation: Creative Investments in Arts and Humanities Research (London: Arts and Humanities Research Council, 2010). 14 Simon Read, ed., PLOT (Middlesex: Middlesex University of Fine Art, 2008). 15 Simon Read and Thomas van Veelan, www.simonread.info/within-the-living-memory-of-thedead. 16 Simon Read, www.simonread.info/portfolio-items/the-amateur-on-the-beach. 17 Ibid. 18 Simon Read, www.simonread.info/portfolio-items/american-association-of-geographers-agm. 19 Iain Biggs, ‘Educating “Local Cosmopolitans”: The Case for a Critical Regionalism in Art Education?’ Journal of Visual Art Practice 1, no. 1 (2001): 16–24. 20 Luci Gorell Barnes, www.lucigorellbarnes.co.uk. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Luci Gorell Barnes are taken from this website. 21 Edward S. Casey, ‘Moving Over the Edge: Borders, Boundaries, and Bodies’, in Borders and Debordering: Topologies, Praxes, Hospitableness, ed. Tomaž Grušovnik, Edurado Mendieta, and Lenart Škof (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), 14. 22 See www.lucigorellbarnes.co.uk/companion-planting-continuing-the-allotment-project. A useful discussion of border peace parks is found in Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins, Up Against the Wall: Re-Imagining the U.S.–Mexico Border (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 246. 23 Luci Gorell Barnes, ‘Writing from the Margins of Myself’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods 13 (February 2014): 237–254. 24 Luci Gorell Barnes, ‘This Long River’, in Water, Creativity and Meaning: Multidisciplinary Understandings of Human–Water Relationships, ed. L. Roberts and K. Phillips (London: Routledge, 2018), 36–53. 25 Ibid., 47. 26 Mary Brydon-Miller, Davydd Greenwood, and Patricia Maguire, eds, ‘Why Action Research? Action Research 1, no. 1 (2003): 21. 27 Simon Read, ‘The Power of the Ooze’, in The Power of the Sea: Making Waves in British Art 1790–2014, ed. Christiana Payne and Janette Kerr (Bristol: Sansom & Co., 2014), 51.

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25 PUBLIC ART VISIONS AND POSSIBILITIES From the View of a Practising Artist Betsy Damon

The word ‘public’ can be deceptive. It is ambiguous and often misused. However, a dictionary definition is clear: ‘concerning the people as a whole’. So, I am mulling over all the confusion around this word – ‘public’. Once upon a time, all art was public art. Most of it was utilitarian. We are in a moment in history evolving away from cultural hegemony and assumed dominance of some body over others – kings, dictators, colonial powers, other institutions – and towards a more decentralised and equitable redistribution. We are right now in this struggle. The sculpture on the Parthenon, masks and objects used in rituals around the world, murals in the subway, decorated bus stations, benches, and walls – all of these are public. In theory, current public art reflects the values and aspirations of a society. I consider public art to be art that is created ‘with, for, and by’ the public. This criteria contains a wide range of fascinating possibilities. Art is the heartbeat of a community – it is that wonderful hum of people creating things that they love and care about, with the goal of informing, elevating, and celebrating. Artists belong in the centre of their community and should receive sufficient funding in the same way that other public services like the postal service or health clinics do. Funding determines almost everything in a capitalist culture. Funders rarely accept pieces or processes that would truly engage the public, enhance local ecologies, provide interaction, or entail long-term contextual evolution. Funders and foundations tend to be obsessed with quantification; every hour and every object created must have easily defined monetary value. As a consequence, public arts organisations often do little more than ‘go shopping’ for artwork that satisfies a predefined and somewhat superficial checklist. Throughout my working life, I’ve swung between the privacy of my studio and public spaces, with occasional pauses in galleries and museums. A public space allowed me to define myself, to interact with the public. Once I stepped out, in 1976, I received sufficient funding to keep going one way or another. A gallery or alternative space would sponsor a street event. At times, I simply went out and existed in a public space for a period of time. As someone who has performed and worked in both private and public settings, I can attest to the reality that the two are very different. Listening to a man tell his story in front of a Wall Street bank is a profoundly different experience from asking people for their stories while performing in a museum. But the museum paid for that performance, and I was grateful.

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The existence of art with the public challenges dominant power structures simply because it engages the public, often connecting people, offering vision and possibility, and is not constrained by markets. Public art or ‘per cent for art’ is beholden to the funder, not the public. An application processes is mandated for public art. However, all depends on the integrity of the organisation and their selection process. Sometimes, the artist is preselected and the public application process merely amounts to a ‘performance’ of due diligence. This premature selection often reflects hidden racial and gender biases. Usually the artist is asked to contribute only after all of the surrounding context is in place: building designs, park designs, educational materials, and so on. Public art is best and most real when it is contextually robust. This means engaging an artist at the beginning of the design process. Collaborative processes are rare, especially if those collaborations involve members of the public. It is possible for public art to invite consciousness, add dimension to a public space, and reveal hidden aspects of a culture. Can public art become engaged with infrastructure? Can we expand the definition of public art away from objects with price tags, and centre public art’s value on the value of humans and nature? The divorce of the artistic from the scientific and sociological is symptomatic of a larger trend to deny the complexity and interconnectivity of superficially unrelated fields. Personally, I learned this lesson – that nothing is worth saying unless it acknowledges interconnectivity – beginning with The 7,000-Year-Old Woman (1976) and recently from my work with water. My most effective projects have been projects where funders understood and valued my decision that proposals come from gaining familiarity with the place and people for whom the project was intended. The public is a partner, the place is a partner, and for me, water is a partner. Over the course of my 55 years as an artist, I’ve taken the word ‘public’ literally: to be in and with the public. Asking for stories from the public, listening to the public, creating installations to encourage interaction, and making a space in which others can create. Recently I have a singular interest in creating works that engage with community, ecology, and infrastructure. Weaving together art, science, and citizens is an exciting creative process.

Keepers of the Waters Chengdu For me, ‘public’ began with street performances, notably The 7,000-Year-Old Woman in 1976. Six years later, A Meditation with Stones for the Survival of the Planet began as a street piece and evolved into large-scale participatory events at conferences. The jump into conferences is what made possible the founding of the non-profit organisation Keepers of the Waters in 1991 and soon a collaboration with the Environmental Protection Agency of Duluth, Minnesota. Artists and scientists came together to brainstorm ways to address the local waters. The outcome was a number of multimedia events presented in public: music, T-shirts, sculptures, and paintings. Word of the project spread around the Great Lakes, up to Grand Marais where restaurants distributed information on placemats and menus. This model of collaboration is what I took to Chengdu, China in 1995. The opportunity to create a public event in Chengdu began at a conference I attended in 1993. There, we brainstormed an activist project, Living Yangtze, and I met an enthusiastic Chengdu social scientist, Zhu Xiao Feng, who offered his help. Funding came through a phone call from a woman I did not know, Marion Rockefeller Weber. I invited artist Kristin Caskey to help out, as well as my son, Jon Otto, who speaks Chinese. With funding stashed in a money belt around my waist, we arrived in Chengdu in early June 1995. We settled into the cheapest place to stay. I began familiarising myself with the 280

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river by biking along it every morning with the butterflies who landed on my handlebars. We began meeting people and started giving lectures to small but highly attentive groups. All this took place in parks, because we had nowhere else to meet. After Tiananmen Square it was forbidden to make public art and meet with foreigners. After three weeks of organising, it was time to travel up to the headwaters of the Yangtze River, situated 16,000 feet up in the Kunlun Mountains. Seeking out headwaters is a passion of mine. When we arrived back in Chengdu from Lhasa, we discovered that artists from Beijing, Shanghai, Lhasa, and Chengdu were waiting, eager to join up with the project. Soon three artists from the United States also joined. Little did I know that quietly, word was spreading about a woman artist hoping to do performances for the waters. There is nothing quite like the mystery of word of mouth in China. The Min, Tuo, Dadu, and Funan rivers all run through Sichuan Province and are main tributaries to the Yangtze, the longest river in Asia. We began by learning the history of the Funan River (which encircles the centre of Chengdu), the 54 types of fish that had disappeared over the last 30 years, and the 3,000-year history of the four great water projects of the Sichuan Province. We did not know that we were becoming part of the fifth great project: the restoration of the Funan River. Becoming familiar with an area is essential. I remember walking down old stone steps that had been carved out by countless human footsteps over the centuries and the dark green slime of sewage on the edges of the river. We collected stories from the local elders, who told us about a time in the not-too-distant past when locals caught their dinner in the river, bathed in it, got their drinking water from it. Now, there were no fish to catch. We were witnesses to a vanishing time; today, you can no longer see the graceful lifting and tossing of beautifully designed capture nets. We began with weekly meetings with the group of interested local artists, to get to know each other and to discuss what we would do on the Funan River. However, we were not a group as everyone stuck to who they knew and would not interact with others. This dynamic was broken when I invited all to greet me with a hug. After much laughing and Jon inviting the same engagement, we starting working and playing together. We faced three major hurdles: we had no place to meet, no sponsors, and we faced considerable language and cultural barriers. Luckily, the Chengdu Environmental Protection Agency gave us space in their vacant offices. Bringing everyone together as often as possible built a group in which the artists could begin to support each other and form a collective process among themselves. Over the course of our weekly meetings, artists brainstormed and presented their ideas to the group. The artists soon took charge, each figuring out just how to implement their pieces. It was an open and honest process. It was entirely up to the group how to share the $7,000 I brought from the anonymous donor. Those few who could not carry out their own ideas because of budgetary constraints helped with others. Each person received enough money to cover room and board. We all lived on the same daily fare. As the group flourished, I began to attend to logistical details. Obtaining the necessary permissions from the government was another matter entirely. Each artist was required by the government to submit their artwork with titles. Strictly speaking, ‘public art’ was forbidden after Tiananmen Square. However, we went through the arduous bureaucratic process and unexpectedly obtained permission. Suddenly, it felt as though a dark cloud had lifted. The citizens, students, and businesses pitched in to help with the events. Over the first two weeks of August, our installations and performances animated the banks of the river. We began the events with a small parade to the river, complete with a banner saying ‘Keepers of the Waters’ in Chinese and English. 281

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We started with a performance, Washing Silk, a piece created by Kristin Caskey with a team of six Chinese artists. The river had once been called the Jin Jiang, Bright River, because it was so clean that merchants washed their silk in it. Washing Silk addressed the current state of the river, which had become a murky sewer, stinking and poisonous. In the performance, six women stood in the river with red gloves and washed white silk, which quickly turned grey in the dirty water. The government officials watching on the banks of the river began clapping and shouting. In Washing Ice, the artist Yin Xiuzhen froze polluted river water into large ice blocks and invited people to wash the blocks clean. Children wanted to suck on the ice and elderly people wanted to take it home to cool their houses. Poets recited poems beside the piece while participants scrubbed away with their brushes. The piece lasted four days as it melted into the ground. A large bulletin board was posted with images illustrating water issues (see Figure 25.1). On the ground, photographs of our faces lay decomposing in trays full of polluted river water. The public entered into the piece by signing their names on the bulletin board. At the time, displaying this piece was an act of bravery. When a Chinese official actually signed his own name, everyone cheered.

Figure 25.1 ‘Long-Abandoned Water Standards, 擱置已久的水指標’ (1995), Dai Guang Yu. Chengdu, China Source: Photo credit Betsy Damon.

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A Tibean artist created hand-painted banners that were strung along the river’s edge defining the place of the actions. A final event, Dreams for a Pure River, invited people to tell their stories. It was created by Beth Grossman, Christine Baeumler, and a host of Chinese participants. An elder storyteller opened the event, and members of the public were invited to ‘speak their dreams for a clean river’. The candles were lit and the raft sent into the river. Crowds ran along the bank after it as it slowly drifted away. The stories were transcribed and presented to the Environmental Protection Agency of Chengdu. For two weeks, every day hundreds of people gathered to watch and discuss what they’d seen and participated in. These events were broadcast on national China Central Television throughout the two weeks of the project. These works were addressing issues clearly and directly. For me, these two months were exceptional: artists working together, citizens feeling inspired and engaged, the relationship between people and their waters renewed. Above all, it inspired many to engage with the river and envision for themselves what they wanted for their city. These projects fulfilled all of my requirements for effective public art. They were a catalyst for further action. Towards the end of July, I was invited to see the city government’s plans for the river. The plans called for a ring of parks along both sides of the river and no superficial economic development like hotels or restaurants. I suggested creating a park to teach people about how nature cleans water. Without hesitation, they asked me, ‘Can you do that?’ I nodded yes. They asked me to give up the performance pieces and start the park project, but – after a sleepless night thinking about it – I insisted on finishing what we’d set in motion with the performances. They assured me that they’d watch us carefully, and that if they liked what they saw then they would be in touch about the park. It was the performances that generated excitement and hope in a discouraged public and the government. The spirit of these public events was contagious – the government wanted the ideas and the spirit of these performances to remain in the city forever. I was invited back to create the Living Water Garden, which would become the first urban park designed as a water cleaning system. As a result, today you can walk in a cool green environment along the river.

Living Waters of Larimer One of the best – yet most heartbreaking – experiences I’ve had as a public artist in the United States came with a project called Living Waters of Larimer between 2012 and 2016. I was able to be in the community for four years thanks to a grant from the Kalliopeia Foundation. The project began with an installation at the Mattress Factory, in Pittsburgh. The installation, titled Feminist and . . ., was curated by Hilary Robinson. I agreed to participate, on the condition that I could initiate a community-based project. In my search for a community to partner with, I discovered that almost all of Pittsburgh’s streams were in pipes, and its wetlands and lakes had been drained. It was challenging finding a community willing to address their water issues – even though flooding was constant and water infrastructure issues were growing. The local waste-water treatment facility had a stranglehold on the city and wanted to retain control over all storm water flowing into the plant. Finally, I met a woman from Pittsburgh at a workshop in Brooklyn who told me about the Pittsburgh neighbourhood called Larimer. She directed me to Fred Brown, a dynamic leader of the Transition movement, who introduced me to Carolyn Peeks, leader of the 283

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Larimer Green Team. Thanks to Fred’s leadership, the community had created a vision for food, energy, and water. The neighbourhood’s food and energy situations were understood – but water? To begin, Carolyn, myself, and two others had a meeting. I suggested Waters of Larimer and she responded Living Waters of Larimer. From that minute on, we started to create together, and then others joined. A short film of community members talking, along with a topographic map of Larimer were exhibited in the Mattress Factory installation, called Only One River. In our initial discussions, we asked: Where does this water go? What can be done with it? How do we use it? Where can we capture the water? Larimer, once a thriving and diverse community, was now a struggling, predominantly African American district. The community was filled with vacant lots and crumbling buildings. I found the Larimer community to be full of savvy, energetic survivors with their own ideas on how to fight gentrification and implement fair allocation of resources within the community. They were fighting an uphill battle against our prevailing top-down, own-it-or-lose-it power structures. It is not an exaggeration to say that classism and racism dominated the landscape. Larimer was built on a unique plateau, and was beloved for its large churches and historic houses. The community was made up of people passionate about its history, who were fighting hard for a community vision of revitalisation. A large part of that vision was to transition to renewable energy, sustainable food, and water. Contrary to all-too-common classist practice, values like these do not need to be externally imposed by the privileged and powerful. In fact, most of them ‘originated’ among the disenfranchised, who know all too well how exploited they are and what they need: good food and clean water. There I was, an older white woman, talking to people about water in a community where basements flooded, roofs leaked, and water bills were rising, while people’s basic needs such as holding on to their homes and lots were all consuming. After the fact, many people told me that – at first – they did not want to listen to yet another white person babbling on about something unrelated to their concerns. At Fred’s invitation I gave short pitches at community meetings about the need to collect and reuse water. These pitches were well received, as I was practical and real, not someone looking to test out her idea or make a buck. I attended barbecues and church gatherings. It took two years to develop enough relationships to build trust with community members – a step that cannot be rushed. We then applied for a Heinz Foundation grant to do a feasibility study with evolveEA, a sustainable architecture and design firm that understood what was needed. A new challenge arose: the Heinz Foundation appointed a local sculptor to direct Living Waters of Larimer. He had no idea how to developed a community project and began without consulting me. Now there was a white team that I did not select that had to interact and work with an African American community group. The white team was salaried and the foundation had refused a line item to pay people from the community. Some people had professional titles and others did not. Right then, everything shifted. Classism and racism were dominating all interactions. In truth, all skills were equally important. It was essential to recognise this, and to break through the strong barriers that kept us all in our own respective boxes. Foundations often inadvertently aggravate those differences. After months of going round in circles on how to value the community members’ time, we agreed that that everyone should get paid, no contracts were needed beyond a form for tracking hours – and we were done! To become a group, it helped to eat together and be together outside of the work: we decided to have dinner at a local Chinese restaurant regularly. This became possibly the most valuable time we all spent together. It was especially good for the community members to enjoy some relaxed 284

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time with each other. I got to understand that in their overly busy lives, they rarely had free time to spend with each other. Often the white males came to our meetings awkwardly, and the hardest part of all of this was to face our learned racism over and over again. Fred Brown was constantly puzzled by our inability to see our racism. Eventually, through many meetings, dinners, and barbecues, we succeeded in creating a viable plan to collect and repurpose rainwater. It was designed for maximum collection of rainfall water in the community. It established the best sites to place cisterns, included plans for a potential farm, and explored the viability of bioswales and sources of income from the water. Above all, it was designed by and with the community. It was the process of mapping that empowered the community and enabled everyone to understand what was possible. Mapping was a neutral place to meet and think together. We were all on the same page in our efforts to understand and create Living Waters of Larimer. Mapping empowered everyone and built relationships between citizens and professionals. It eliminated the kind of information gap that keeps people disempowered. We are not talking ‘rocket science’; we are sharing common knowledge, common sense. While Larimer community members consistently came to our events, many others from the Greater Pittsburgh area also found their way to these two-hour workshops (see Figure 25.2). People know how to read street maps, but few know how to read topographic maps or work with a geographic information system (GIS). Many people believe these are skills that they will not be able to master. At the first mapping workshop, we provided large street maps, topographic maps, tracing paper to put on top of the maps, and coloured pencils. I invited everyone to think outside the box, the street grid, and to begin to draw. Teams of three or four were formed, and those with skills (such as those who had been in art/design classes or knew landscape design) were assigned to different groups.

Figure 25.2 Leader of the Green Team at a mapping workshop (2014). Larmier, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

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It was good to have various disciplines at each table. A representative was sent from evolveEA and some landscape design students from local universities also joined. We made lists of what was important, and learned where the waters flowed. No one considered that pipe systems form a mutable infrastructure that can be changed. The first mapping meeting was slow and awkward, with many participants afraid to make a mark on the tracing paper that was put on top of the maps. Regardless, all mappings and marks were discussed at the end of the two hours. From then on, each successive meeting produced more and more ideas and enthusiasm. Basic understanding of where the water flows, and what could actually be done, became common knowledge. Participants became engaged and excited about growing possibilities. Using geographic imaging software created by LandBase Systems, everybody could see and understand where the water flowed and gathered naturally, where we could collect it, and where to locate cisterns. One idea that came out of this conversation was to mitigate localised flooding by capturing rainwater and diverting it to wetlands before it hit the main boulevard. Another idea was to create a stream beside the steep steps of a historic sidewalk that could generate electricity, using a small turbine. Possibilities sprung up: ‘We want this street to change.’ ‘How about dead ends for children to play, or a greenway passing through our neighbourhood?’ ‘Could we bring this stream back to life?’ Capturing this sort of excitement made it possible for us to fulfil all of the requirements of the public hearing. EvolveEA played many important roles from doing solid research to facilitating games that educated people about water infrastructures. We brainstormed businesses that could be formed from collecting the water, such as car washing and paper-making. At one place where the water tumbled over a cliff, one community resident recognised the potential for a waterfall that could generate electricity. We thought about park amenities and greenways, bioswales, converting streets to parks where children could play in water features, some driven by their movement, e.g. spinning or jumping waters. Ideally, Larimer could capture most of the runoff for their parks, possibly supplying rainwater for street sweepers, paper-making, and urban agriculture. But all this optimism did not influence the city planners. All voices, ages, and experience levels were welcome at the table. The ideas were generated by those who came. Each step was a triumphant moment, building confidence and accumulating solid information. Over time, all participants were thinking outside the box, envisioning dead-end streets for young people to play, a waterway through the neighbourhood, a centrally located cistern, and a park. Imagine if their ideas really got into the city planning process and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) had to work with that! A community member installed her own rain barrel and discovered from her calculations that she had lowered her water bill by 60 per cent. She went on to successfully teach others in the neighbourhood. There was a moment that I remember well, but the significance of which I did not realise at the time: I was instructing people around the maps, and I asked them to think outside the box, outside the grid of streets. The leader of the Kingsley Association (a Larimer-based organisation that provides services to working-class families in the Pittsburgh area) scolded me, and told me not to invite people to think outside the box. At the time I did not grasp the implications of this. He did not want this community – over which he considered he had control – to think for themselves. My roles in the project were numerous: to make real relationships, to hold the vision of what is possible, to close information gaps about ecosystems, and to actively back the community in any way that I could think of. Each community member needed to be able to ask for what they wanted, to be able to talk to the mayor and HUD. 286

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An overriding issue in the project was ‘who controls what’: regardless of what the community planned and wanted, they had little control over what would happen in their neighbourhood, because they did not own the land. The city owned over 60 per cent of the land. This community chose a design company to create the new housing with HUD funding. But despite the design company being compatible with their vision, ultimately the community were not allowed to hire them. HUD functions with traditional models of economic development – cookie-cutter housing – which prioritises neither community empowerment nor sustainable design, nor rainwater collection from roofs or site homes, designed in relationship to local weather and sun direction. Working with HUD money, they had to accept less-than-ideal designs. And yet, if one does the maths, housing models incorporating energy-saving materials and other innovations would at least break even in five years. Most significantly, Larimer was a community that did not turn itself over to urban renewal: they fought for each other, they prepared lots and public spaces. Their housing plan was original, with a green solution, and they were asked to talk about it at HUD. Nonetheless, this did not appear to ultimately influence HUD’s housing proposal. We began to conceptualise The Well, a place where lots of storm water collects, to be located in the centre of Larimer as a civic place/model of water capture and reuse for a playground. By mapping, we found the perfect place to create this rainwater capture system: three vacant lots through which much runoff flowed, as well as a space for a visible wetland cleaning system. EvolveEA had an excellent way to sort out how to think about a site, its assets, and challenges, that helped us determine which places the community could consider for The Well. All of the players were lined up: a key Larimer funder – the Land Trust – agreed to participate, and the landscape company was on board. We debated about who should fulfil the role of fiscal agent for the project: the Kingsley Association, or my not-for-profit Keepers of the Waters. We ended up going with Kingsley, which turned out to be a huge mistake. We talked openly about if it would make a difference to our other funders, such as ArtPlace America, if we did not use the Kingsley Association, and used my not-for-profit instead, coming from an established artist. In conversation, Carolyn Peeks (from the Larimer Green Team) asked if the cistern could be a tree. Wow! How exciting to imagine a tree that drew water from the ground and captured water from the sky! This could be the centre of a playground in which young people played, water could flow from limbs or down roots. This was all to be designed by 12 community members, aged 16 to 80. We found local artists in the community to make the artwork, tiles, and the stories of places embedded in the walls and the walkways. We won a large ArtPlace grant, and identified foundations in the area interested in adding to this funding. We succeeded in getting funding from ArtPlace America – $450,000, the largest grant they gave – and we celebrated. But then, a huge, unforeseen setback occurred. The ArtPlace interviewer asked me how I got the community to do a charrette. I replied that I did not use that approach, but they were not interested in what really happened. It seems that they simply did not believe that the community really did create the design. Looking back, I suspect that they thought I did it myself, and only got members of the community to present the work as theirs. No one asked, and no one inquired or talked to Carolyn, Donna, Ms Betty, Mr Germany, or other community members. As quickly as we received this money, the entire effort of three years was brought to a halt as the funding was pulled. The plane was loaded and the workshops planned, and all the people who would be joining selected, but it would not proceed. All the people who worked tirelessly and were so 287

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thrilled to be creating something for their community were beyond disappointed. This was familiar for them. People shook their heads . . . no one had any recourse. They all felt terrible for me. The director of the Kingsley Association hired a woman whose job it was to take a hatchet to Living Waters of Larimer. She had me out of there in 24 hours. She cancelled the workshop. The director subsequently misused the funding. Larimer was on track to become one of the only places in the United States repurposing rainwater for public use water but it would all be for nothing. I tried to contact ArtPlace America, but they refused to speak to anyone but the director of the Kingsley Association. The very structure of ‘who talks to whom’ – that the funder, a person who controls access and money, only wants to communicate with the person who has access to money and control – creates invisible walls that keep classism, sexism, and racism intact. As artists, we are among the freest agents in society: we choose that, and I would not choose differently. I love all that I do from the flat work, to installations, and most of all working in the community with many to know and protect their waters. The Larimer experience woke me up to the very depth of institutionalised exploitation and oppression that artists are subject to in the United States. Although the Heinz Foundation knew the work and the ideas were from me, they asked a local male artist to take over the programme. In the case of the ArtPlace grant, while I initiated the process and led the workshops, all the ideas came from the community and the Green Team of Larimer, but that was ignored. Public artists are often underfunded and unrecognised. Time and time again, we have created in – and with – communities, worked effectively and creatively with many, initiated change, and empowered many, yet the system often dismisses the work and roles. In the case of Living Waters of Larimer, although this vision of collecting and repurposing rainwater for Larimer’s community to use was not implemented, a lot of our ideas filtered through to other projects, other districts, and some of these ideas are now fully incorporated in other city-planning processes. The Well might be in a park nearby Larimer, a shadow of what was originally conceived. The director of the Kingsley Association acted as if he represented everyone, yet did not invite any community members to meetings. So, this project is no longer a community project: it is the project of a single artist brought in by the Kingsley Association. Many foundations prefer to deal with one person and rarely look beyond that, and the deception that one person can perpetrate. None of the people who would have designed The Well in Larimer, or owned the idea proudly, are engaged in its creation any longer. They cannot go there and tell their children, ‘I was part of that!’ On the bright side, every participant in Living Waters of Larimer finished the project more knowledgeable than when they began, and many are keeping going. Ultimately, as a project, Living Waters of Larimer was a grassroots effort that greatly impacted the city of Pittsburgh. We opened channels of communication with government officials, including the mayor, and modelled ways that other nearby districts could use to approach water issues. As a hopeful note, remnants of the project continue to this day. The citizens of Larimer have since started their own not-for-profit dedicated to green issues. Equity in our natural resources is not a goal of our materialistic society, yet it must become our goal. Equity in life-sustaining ecosystems is true democracy. These two examples – Living Waters of Larimer and Keepers of the Waters Chengdu – invite comparison. The common assumption is that American culture is more ‘democratic’ while 288

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Chinese culture is ‘authoritarian’. So how could the outwardly authoritarian culture champion the public and allow a public art project to thrive, while the democratic culture had such little respect for the public interest in the case of Living Waters of Larimer? One culture had a rice bowl for every person, forbade billboards that objectified women, and placed exercise machines for public use in public spaces. The other culture practices an ideology that cannot admit that not everyone gets to eat three meals a day, yet has a constitution that insists that all people have rights. China has a population of 1.4 billion. They have evolved a culture over 5,000 years and have embedded ethics about what it means to be in that culture. We received permission and support after we proved that we could benefit the public. Our success was due to this, and my firm insistence that no one was to hijack the project for their own means, be it to criticise the government or promote another agenda. We the artists were to inform, invite solutions, bring attention to the river . . . once that was revealed then all doors opened. I had no motivations to change anything except the awareness of water. The work of the Chinese artists was remarkably direct, honest, and demanded that all look at their river. The artists in Keepers of the Waters Chengdu were not afraid to expose the conditions of the river. Their work was effective because their art aligned with public values. For all of their challenges, at this time in Chinese history, many leaders still saw themselves as servants of the public, and their role as servants demanded integrity of action. What are the public values in the United States? We are in a time of dynamic evolution, trying to move out of racism and classism. The ground is shifting as I write. These two projects affected many – both in the work they did and the communities in which they took place. Looking at the reality of the impacts of oppression in any country is hard. Art is powerful, art can topple nations, artists empower, and individual initiative is exactly what governments try to control. In the United States, most funding is on a short string from the corporate world. Ours feels like a harsh country whose public services on most levels are lacking. It is also unfair and superficial to compare in a few paragraphs two cultures that are so different. I learned from both. In Larimer, sexism, racism, and classism were all in play. Although I knew that, the depth of these oppressions still remain inside me, unarticulated. In Western culture, artists can basically send any message they choose, no matter how right or wrong, how conservative or radical – and yet their messages often have little impact and rarely affect the power structures because the power structures responsible for promoting public art actively work to neutralise public impact. There is a great fear of truly empowering the public, and scant belief that maybe people know best what they need and how to organise. These two rather extensive public art projects reflect the possibilities and challenges. Each were ultimately dependent upon the leadership in the community – something the artist can’t control. I worked ‘in’ community, not ‘above’ or ‘beside’ community – inviting all to join. In China, many people joined, from the general public to businesses to the government. In Larimer, that was much harder to achieve. The gifts in this truly community-engaged public art process are the sharing, the relationships, and the real shifts that can take place when people come together, not relinquishing their minds but bringing their selves to work together for a common goal. Regardless of the ultimate outcomes, this process of coming together for and with each other happened in both communities.

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26 A COMPASS ROSE FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE New Maps for Old – the Art of Transforming Cultures for Sustainable Futures Beth Carruthers

Orientation At the beginning of any journey it is important to know where we are, and to have a vision of where it is we want to go, even if the route is unknown. A compass serves to orient us; it helps chart a course and make necessary course corrections, even if the journey takes us off known maps. As E. F. Schumacher notes, All through school and university I had been given maps of life and knowledge on which there was hardly a trace of many of the things that I most cared about and that seemed to me to be of the greatest possible importance to the conduct of my life. I remembered that for many years my perplexity had been complete; and no interpreter had come along to help me. It remained complete until I ceased to suspect the sanity of my perceptions and began, instead, to suspect the soundness of the maps.1 In what we now conceive of as the Anthropocene, at the tipping point of life systems, drifting deeper into unknown territory, it is widely agreed that the technological fixes developed in response to the complex ‘wicked’ problems of sustainability are not alone going to get us to a flourishing future for life without a profound and comprehensive transformation of ‘cultures of unsustainability to cultures of sustainability’.2 Sustainability is not just a matter of technological fixes, but is, as sociologist Hans Dieleman notes, ‘a societal change process’.3 This change must be both profound and far-reaching in order to be lasting, especially given the nature of the changes to culture and lifestyle that must be embraced in order to alter anthropogenic factors driving ecosystem and biodiversity collapse.4 While increasing attention is paid to the role of the arts in informing publics about issues such as climate change, and presenting scientific data in forms more readily understood,5 relatively little research has been done on more profound impacts of artist-initiated and

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artist-led projects intended to generate and nurture sociocultural transformation. This is the case also for projects intentionally generative of changes to land, water, environmental, and planning policy – changes where, as they say, ‘the rubber meets the road’.

The Art of Transformation Gentle action begins from the realization that we are all inexorably a part of the one world, actors with responsibilities, values and obligations. Since an objective ‘problem’ no longer lies outside us, in some external and objective domain, what is now required is an action that arises out of the whole of the situation and is not fragmented or separated from it. Such an action need not be violent but could, for example, arise out of a very gentle, but highly intelligent ‘steering’ of the system, in which each one of us assumes responsibility.6 Policy impacts of the arts seem difficult to measure or determine because, on the one hand, data on impact and outcomes in regard to sociocultural change and environmental policies and planning are not included in final reports to funding bodies in the arts. On the other hand, the transformation of perceptions, beliefs, and deep understandings that produce lasting cultural and behavioural change is profound, slow, and difficult to apprehend or measure except, perhaps, in hindsight. In discussing the role and impact of ecological art, sociologist Sacha Kagan, citing French philosopher François Jullien, refers to the latter as ‘silent transformations . . . long-time, wide-scale transformations in nature and society that are deep, and progressively, imperceptibly emerging’.7 These silent transformations are indeterminable in process, and can be difficult for Western culture, with its focus on identifying clearly determined forms, to comprehend. Industrialised cultures seem fond of large-scale heroic approaches with planned outcomes, yet cultures, like life, are rife with indeterminate and fluid processes producing transformations and ‘ends’, some of which seem inevitable, and that become integrated into our understanding of being in the world, our beliefs and basic understanding of existence, and embodied in our values. The way to work with such backgrounded processes, according to Kagan, is to observe changes in cultural tendencies, in response to which one can introduce subtle interventions that can over time have deep transformative effects, such as when a gardener recognises propensities, observing the ‘field’ or ecosystem of a garden and the interactions within it, then taking subtle intentional actions that transform that ecosystem.8 Rather than trying to change reality heroically with big and salient actions and with abrupt events, we should rather explore the subtle propensity of situations, and induce changes by finding moments of inflections, or propensities: in other words, possible shifts of inclinations in other directions.9 It has been my contention,10 as it is Kagan’s, that it is artists, already operating outside many social conventions, and observant of the complexities of cultures they inhabit, that may be ideally situated to determine where to introduce what physicist F. David Peat termed ‘gentle actions’; small actions to initiate sociocultural transformation.

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Some Thoughts on the Deep Aesthetics of Transformative Praxis First, it is important to clarify that the aesthetic, and aesthetic experience and engagement, are not to be conflated with art, with the ‘art world’, nor limited to the arts and design; nor is the aesthetic limited to notions of beauty. Ecologist Neil Evernden observed that ‘aesthetics is a way of being, a stance toward the world; an aesthetic experience requires a relationship between a seeking subject and a responsive world’.11 He makes at least two assertions in this statement, which reveals tensions in how we understand the aesthetic, and aesthetic experience. He states that aesthetic regard is ‘a stance taken toward the world’. This could possibly be seen as in line with the status quo of an aesthetics of disinterested contemplation (after Kant). Here whatever is regarded is disconnected from the self; the observer stands outside a world. In this view, aesthetic experience is something one chooses, rather than an experience inherent to our being in the world. Evernden’s statement that ‘aesthetics is a way of being’ contradicts such distancing, and relates to the claim that ‘aesthetic experience requires a relationship between a seeking subject and a responsive world’.12 Deep aesthetics is an ongoing project and developing transdisciplinary theory focused on the primacy and importance of aesthetic experience to humankind as a species enmeshed in a complex and dynamic world of relations with and among beings and places. ‘Deep aesthetics . . . subverts the way we commonly think of the aesthetic, which is often reductive.’13 It investigates how sensory aesthetic experiences, engagements, and practices, especially those refined by artists and cultural practitioners, might inform, form, and transform our apprehensions, beliefs, and values. True to the etymology of the term ‘aesthetic’ as sensuous perception, deep aesthetics stresses the embodied, sensuous nature of aesthetic engagement as well as the emotional, psychological, intellectual, philosophical, and cultural aspects. We are first and foremost in the world through the primacy of our sensory, immersive attending within it. As I have discussed elsewhere,14 much of our engagement with the world is backgrounded to our conscious engagements and actions; we operate with maps and within frameworks of belief largely predetermined. Freud termed this ‘the guard at the gate of the mind’, whose job it was to keep out what does not fit the map or framework. Yet by way of aesthetic engagement the guard can be tricked, or seduced into welcoming experience, perception, or knowledge subversive to established maps and frameworks.15 We might think of this seducing of the guard as artists introducing a kind of Trojan Horse; a gentle action or subtle intervention by way of aesthetic experience that exploits propensities, or emergent tendencies in a culture to seed transformation.16 Ellen Dissanayake has dedicated decades to a transdisciplinary study of the nature of aesthetic experience, the role of the aesthetic, and of the arts across human cultures. For her there is no question that the aesthetic is so essential to humankind, so intrinsic to who and how we are in the world, that she describes humankind as ‘homo aestheticus’.17 Drawing in part on scholarship she describes as out of favour in the context of contemporary aesthetics, she makes a comprehensive study of empathy in aesthetic experience. Noting that in Western culture as recently as the early twentieth century it was not uncommon to read or hear accounts of strong, even visceral, emotional, embodied, and empathetic responses to artworks, she proceeds to build a case for aesthetic experience as, in the first instance, embodied as well as emotional, psychological, and intellectual, but most especially as engendering, or even embodying in itself, profound empathy. It is important to note that empathy does not indicate an 292

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enjoyable experience, but a powerful, and profoundly connected one. Empathy is deeply affective; we might think of it as the mirroring in the entire self of the experience of another being, or even of a place.18 An aesthetics that is inherently inter-relational, unabashedly situated in the world, and intrinsically empathetic can only be bound up with questions of ethics, or ‘right action’. Ethics asks us how we should live; aesthetic engagement can inform the answer.

Praxis: Ecological Art,19 Complexity, and Public Engagement Poiesis is about acting upon, doing to: it is about working with objects. Praxis, however, is creative: it is other-seeking and dialogic . . . for Aristotle, praxis is guided by a moral disposition to act truly and rightly.20 Almost characterising the contemporary Anthropocene are ‘wicked problems’; problems so complex that they are not easy to apprehend or comprehend in entirety, and that cannot be comprehensively addressed by the usual approaches of industrialised culture. Global climate change and biodiversity loss, for example, are not readily dealt with through problemcentred approaches that follow a linear trajectory with a relatively narrowly defined problem on one end, and solution on the other. I suggest that wicked problems might be better understood as perturbations in natural systems; systems that are complex, dynamic, rife with surprisingly fragile interdependencies, and mysterious resiliencies.21 As cultural workers artists observe and attend to the complexities of the field of the sociocultural. Ecological artists are additionally tuned to the meshwork of interactions and complex interrelations that constitute an ecology of being in the world in a broader sense. They are aware, as anthropologist Tim Ingold put it, that ‘relationships among humans, which we are accustomed to call ‘social’, are but a subset of ecological relations’22 and their practice is situated within this understanding. That we and all beings are always acting within that greater context, that field of interdependencies and mutual reliance, is commonly so far backgrounded in dominant industrialised cultures as to be absent from our consideration and even from our thoughts.23 Ecological art works with an expanded view of ‘public’ as community, and of community as ecosystem,24 with all the complexity that comes with it. Studies investigating impacts of ecological artworks and initiatives tend to be limited to what is easiest to observe and assess, such as habitat recovered, or publics reached through the creative dissemination of scientific data. Here I elect to focus on more profound impacts of these works. Through a transdisciplinary approach and with a long view, ecological artists work in several ways to address the systemic perturbations of wicked problems. These are discussed in a growing body of publications dedicated to that conversation across disciplines.25 The practice of ecological art often avoids a focus on talented individuals, and instead fosters a non-possessive, shared authorship. Many of these works and practices are collaborative, inter-, multi-, or transdisciplinary in nature, focused on the engagement of and participation with communities and multiple stakeholders over time; they may also be designed to be adopted, implemented, and/or maintained by others. Much ecological art may be thought of as embracing art as process, rather than artefact. Ecological artist David Haley concurs,26 as does sociologist Sacha Kagan, who uses in reference to ecological art the term ‘art as a verb’, which can also embrace the inclusion of multiple approaches and others in that process of art.27 Haley, past collaborator with preeminent ecological artists Helen 293

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Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, notes their suggestion that ‘the effective deployment of ecological art may both require and generate post-disciplinarity’.28 It may also require and generate intercultural collaboration at the storm front of colonial worlds.

Revaluing, Re-Evaluating: Of Alternative Ontologies and Ways of Knowing in Colonised Territory Even if Canada, with its colonial narratives precarious on the unceded lands and waters of other sovereign nations was not these days increasingly attentive to the cultures and knowledges of those First Nations, indigenous cultural knowledge is increasingly attractive to industrialised culture, which seeks new maps of knowing and being in the world for assistance in navigating the stormy seas and hot winds of climate change and extinction.29 Here in Canada, cultures and ontologies collide, sometimes violently, and occasionally fruitfully, in ancient habitats still teeming with life and clear waters, and where extractive industry still rules the roost, despite opposition. Ecological artists in British Columbia are greatly concerned with saving rare habitats, globally precious pockets of remaining biodiversity, from the predations of industry, rendering their eco-art practices as distinct as the ‘cultures of habitat’30 in which they are rooted. Concerned to protect cultures, as well as the habitats and species of the sovereign lands and waters with which cultures and livelihoods are enmeshed, First Nations have the greatest claim, perhaps the greatest concern, and the most to lose when it comes to home places and industrial practices. Although not without rough waters to navigate, these days respectful intercultural collaboration focused on local species and habitats is more common than it was 20 years ago, in the days of the ‘war in the woods’.31

Uts’am Witness32 Once upon a moment in time immemorial, during a decade from 1997 to 2007, a particular piece of land witnessed a transformation. At first known simply as the Witness Project, a community formed around ‘an invitation to witness’ during camping weekends on the sandbar at Sims Creek, deep in the northern part of the Squamish nation’s traditional territory. A sandbar became a longhouse, and the sandbar, as sandbars in the wild are known to do, disappeared. What reappeared was the rich traditional history of this special place.33 Initiated by Vancouver-based artist Nancy Bleck, with mountaineer John Clark and hereditary chief Bill Williams of the Squamish nation,34 Uts’sam Witness over a decade brought together artists, activists, cultures, and knowledges, engaging the public, including tourists and visitors from around the world, in an intervention that troubled the business as usual of industrial activity on colonised lands, and over the course of the decade engendered significant transformation and change. For the government of British Columbia, these included changes to land-use policy and some recognition of indigenous title, and for the Squamish nation, a revitalisation of cultural practices in and with the land and waters of its northernmost territories. From the beginning what was called the ‘Witness Project’ (later incorporating Uts’am, the Squamish word for calling witnesses) was designed to be what the ‘war in the woods’ was not. It was created to be a space of celebration and learning, to be inclusive and generative of community, and above all, to be non-confrontational in seeking to save the 294

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ancient forests from clear-cut logging, and encourage acknowledgement of unceded Squamish title to the land. Uts’am Witness embodied a subtle activism, a gentle action with a fierce heart that would initiate silent transformations leading to significant and long-term change. As is common to oral cultures, the Squamish nation have protocol and ceremony for designating official witnesses, who come forward in future when called upon by the nation to speak truthfully of what they had experienced. In choosing to collaborate from the beginning with the people and the work he had been observing taking place in Squamish traditional territory, Chief Bill Williams was taking a risk in offering an unprecedented gift of intercultural collaboration, a sharing of traditional knowledge and culture. He was showing us, not telling us, another way of seeing, hearing and feeling the world, and given the historical injustices that First Nations people have gone through and continue to experience in Canada, for him to make this process inclusive was itself part of the uniqueness of Witness.35 The structure of Uts’am Witness was simple, comprised of weekend camping on the sandbar of Sims Creek in the wild forests and watersheds of Squamish territory, ending with participation in a traditional witness ceremony, which made everyone who attended an official witness for the Squamish nation as to what was taking place in their traditional territory. There was also a range of workshops each year that deepened the immersive experience of being in the forest, and in Squamish territory. Despite its simple structure, the impact and influence spread in ways no one could have anticipated. Uts’am Witness was rich with ceremony; ceremony and place together engendered what became more family than community. On the sandbar at Sims Creek, far from ‘mod cons’, on the land together as people were before such things, with sounds of water, wind, animals, the light of stars and fire, a deep aesthetic engagement and profound empathy was experienced. At Sims Creek the knowledge and understanding to be gained of the enmeshment of land and culture was complex, and very different from the daily life most participants were used to. Many people returned each year to community, and to witness what could break one’s heart – the normalised casual destruction of the living world (see Figure 26.1). In 1999, Nancy Bleck was asked by Chief Bill Williams to undertake the work of photographing culturally modified trees in a sacred site deep in the territory. Traditional ceremony prepared her for this work, when she would spend days and nights alone deep in the forest, fasting and documenting. Before entering the sacred site she was painted with tmlh, the red powder used in ceremony comprised of the bodies of ancient cedar elders. Underlining the understanding of ‘art as a verb’, Bleck noted that ‘the entire process is as much a part of the work as the photograph itself; in other words, it is not made by one artist, and the artwork is not the end result’.36 Theses photographs became part of the Squamish official submission for land use policy change.37 In 2001, faced with the intransigence of the multinational International Forest Products (Interfor) and the immediate threat of the logging of sacred sites, Chief Bill Williams called the witnesses to a public verification ceremony (see Figure 26.2). Over the years 5,000 people had participated. While not all responded to the call, a great many did. They spoke of the old growth forest as a community of beings steeped in culture. They spoke on behalf of the beings that dwell there, of watersheds, of the Squamish people, of culture enmeshed with place, and of the decimation of this, as was not only permitted, but encouraged by 295

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government policies. The verification ceremony was, by invitation of the Squamish nation, attended by the media, and by Interfor VP Ric Slaco who, as if scripted, publicly thanked Chief Bill Williams for the invitation. ‘The Squamish Nation had set a new precedent that had so much power, Interfor had no authority to stop it.’38 That year logging was stayed, and Interfor abandoned the tree farm licence. Changes emergent from transformations seeded four years earlier began to manifest. These required work and direction, but they were ripe, and felt inevitable. Chief Bill Williams was determined that this land no longer be known as Tree Farm Licence (TFL) 38, and that the province would acknowledge Squamish right to take the decisions for this land. In the words of hereditary chief Ian Campbell, ‘We’re not asking permission, we’re asserting that these places are sacred.’39 Anticipating the province, the Squamish nation developed and presented a comprehensive land-use plan for its territory on its own terms. In 2005, eight years after Uts’am Witness began, they initiated and signed an agreement with the province to set aside the Wild Spirit Places under the 200-year Xay Temixw/Sacred Land Use Plan.40 This had never been done, and was unthinkable within the framework of a tree farm licence on designated Crown land. In preparing the plan, including proper Squamish place names, it was found that the name of the very site of Uts’am Witness ceremony at Sims Creek had for thousands of years been Nexw-áyantsut – place of transformation.41 Reflecting on outcomes, which is after all how this chapter began, there is no space here to discuss the scope and complexities of the impacts of the work of Uts’am Witness, which continues to this day in the ongoing implementation of the Squamish nation’s Land Use Plan, in Squamish youth participation in revitalised cultural practices on the land as Squamish history moved into contemporary context, in precedent-creating policy, and in inspiring others. When artist Nancy Bleck decided, based on a passion for right action and love of place, to take action, setting the seed for Uts’am Witness as collaborative creative practice, it was with no certainty of a desired outcome; but if no one had stepped toward an envisioned future of flourishing lands, waters, and cultures, the certain outcome would have been the decimation of that sacred place of wild spirits, rich culture, and teeming life. Industrial culture does not account for, or acknowledge such losses in its data sets. Our categories can register that a rich biodiverse and carbon sequestration ‘resource’ was secured, as was salmon spawning habitat, and watersheds that ultimately supply the city of Vancouver. We could also note that land-use policy was changed through an artistinitiated creative intercultural collaboration where all were welcomed; and we might learn to properly value this work as a step toward reconciliation between cultures, and with the land itself.

Figure 26.1 Breach of Protocol (2000), Nancy Bleck Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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Figure 26.2 Gene – Ceremony I (1998), Nancy Bleck Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Notes 1 E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper Colophon, 1977), 1. 2 Sacha Kagan, Toward Global (Environ)Mental Change: Transformative Art and Cultures of Sustainability (Berlin: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2012), 12, 37, 38. See also, Worldwatch Institute, 2010 State of the World: Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2010). 3 Hans Dielemann, ‘Sustainability, Art and Reflexivity: Why Artists and Designers May Become Key Agents in Sustainability’, in Sustainability: A New Frontier for the Arts and Cultures, ed. Sacha Kagan and Volker Kirchberg (Frankfurt: VAS, 2008), 108. 4 See also Worldwatch Institute, 2010 State of the World. 5 For example, the work of ecologist David Curtis in Australia has over some years focused on using the arts for sustainability, and he urges scientists to form connections with the arts community in order to obtain better outreach for their work. For an example, see David Curtis, ‘Using the Arts to Raise Awareness and Communicate Environmental Information in the Extension Context’, Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension 17, no. 2 (April 2011): 181–194. It is the opinion of this author that such approaches to the arts and artists in sustainability as are promoted here are problematic, but that is another discussion. 6 F. David Peat, ‘Gentle Action©’, www.fdavidpeat.com/ideas/gentle.htm. See also F. David Peat, Gentle Action: Bringing Creative Change to a Turbulent World (Pari: Pari Publishing, 2008). 7 Kagan, Toward Global (Environ)Mental Change, 37. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 37–38. 10 See Beth Carruthers, Mapping the Terrain of Contemporary Ecoart Practice and Collaboration, research report for the Canada Council for the Arts, Canadian Commission for UNESCO, Vancouver Foundation, and the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) (Ottawa, ON: Canadian Commission for UNESCO, 2006). 11 Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1993), 54. 12 Ibid. 13 Beth Carruthers, ‘Call and Response: Deep Aesthetics and the Heart of the World’, in Aesth/Ethics in Environmental Change, ed. Sigurd Bergmann, Irmgard Blindow, and Konrad Ott (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2013), 131. 14 See, for example, Beth Carruthers, ‘Through the Eye of the Heart: In Search of a Deep Aesthetics’, working paper presented at the Thinking Through Nature: Philosophy for an Endangered World summit, 19–22 June 2008, University of Oregon, USA. 15 John McLaughlin Gray in Seducing the Guard (film) by Daniel Conrad (Moving Images Distribution, 1999). 16 For an expanded discussion of deep aesthetics and these ideas, see Carruthers, ‘Through the Eye of the Heart’; Carruthers, ‘Call and Response’; Beth Carruthers, ‘A Subtle Activism of the Heart’, in

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17 18 19

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Sustaining the West, ed. Lisa Piper and Liza Szabo-Jones (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2015), 65–78. See Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). Ibid. The definition of ecological art or ‘eco-art’ that I use here is the definition created by the International Ecoart Network, founded in 1998. The network is an interdisciplinary group of artists, scientists, philosophers, art historians, social scientists, curators, planners, and theorists dedicated to the transformation of cultures and ecologies for flourishing futures. Eco-art praxis often embodies transdisciplinarity, as defined Basarab Nicholescu: ‘Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth, by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. It is distinct from environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.’ Wikipedia page authored by the Ecoart Network, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_art. Mark Smith, ‘What Is Praxis?’ in The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education, http://infed.org/mobi/ what-is-praxis. See Terry Irwin, ‘Wicked Problems and the Relationship Triad’, in Grow Small, Think Beautiful: Ideas for a Sustainable World from Schumacher College, ed. Stephan Harding (Edinburgh: Floris, 2012), 2. Tim Ingold, Perception of the Environment (London: Routledge, 2000), 5. See Beth Carruthers, ‘Transforming Ontologies’, paper presented at the Staging Sustainability conference, York University, 2011; Carruthers, ‘Call and Response’; Carruthers, ‘A Subtle Activism of the Heart’. See Luisa Maffi, Biocultural Diversity Toolkit: A Primer (Saltspring Island, BC: Terralingua Foundation), http://terralingua.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/tk_1_Primer.pdf. This work transgresses all disciplinary boundaries, and perhaps this is the reason there is no dedicated database or list in existence (as yet – this is a new project of the Ecoart Network). See the work of Beth Carruthers, Hans Dielemann, David Haley, Sacha Kagan, Helen Meyer, Newton Harrison, Linda Weintraub, and others across disciplines and too numerous to mention here. David Haley, ‘Ecology and the Art of Sustainable Living’, Field Journal 2, no. 1 (2011): 17–34, http://field-journal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2-Ecology-and-the-Art-of-SustainableLiving-David-Haley.pdf. Kagan, Toward Global (Environ)Mental Change, 31. David Haley, ‘Art, Ecology and Reality: the Potential for Transdisciplinarity’, in Art, Emotion and Value: Proceedings of the Fifth Mediterranean Congress of Aesthetics, Cartagena, Spain, ed. Jose Alcaraz, Matilde Carrasco, and Salvador Rubio (Murcia, Spain: University of Murcia, 2011), 601. See contemporary intercultural collaboration focused on traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) in fisheries management and recovery, and other applications. Gary Paul Nabhan, Cultures of Habitat (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1997). In the 1990s thousands of protestors blocked logging roads to force an end to the aggressive clearcut logging of British Columbia’s increasingly rare ancient temperate rainforests. The protests at Clayoquot Sound, in Nuu-chah-nulth territory, with more than 1,000 arrests, drew international attention. These events in our forests came to be known as ‘the war in the woods’. This section draws heavily from the book on the Uts’am Witness project co-authored by the remaining two co-founders of the project and on my own knowledge based on a close affiliation with the project and its founders throughout. See Nancy Bleck, Katherine Dodds, and Chief Bill Williams, Picturing Transformation/Nexw-áyantsut (Vancouver, BC: Figure 1, 2013) Bleck et al., Picturing Transformation, 35. It is worth noting that hereditary chiefs are part of the traditional governance structure of nations. Elected band councils and chiefs, on the other hand, were created and imposed by the Crown to hold governance over reserve lands. Hence, band council chiefs do not have the cultural mandate or breadth of concern of hereditary chiefs, although they are to this day the figures of authority federal and provincial Crown governments recognise. See Emily McCarty, ‘The Complicated

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41

History of Hereditary Chiefs and Elected Councils’, First Nations Drum, 4 February 2019, www. firstnationsdrum.com/2019/02/the-complicated-history-of-hereditary-chiefs-and-elected-councils. Bleck et al., Picturing Transformation, 43. Ibid., 88. Ibid. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 145. An outline of the Squamish Nation Sacred Land Use Plan is available at www.squamish.net/aboutus/our-land/xay-temixw-sacred-land-land-use-plan. Bleck et al., Picturing Transformation, 145.

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27 IN THE TIME OF ART WITH POLICY The Practice of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison alongside Global Environmental Policy since the 1970s Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, and Dave Pritchard

From around 1970, the artists Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932), known as ‘the Harrisons’, started to focus on ecology and ecological systems, influenced by, among other things, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. ‘Earth Day’ was established in 1970. Limits to Growth was published in 1972.1 Global environmental policy took a step change with the first of the global environmental conferences – the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (1972) – as well as the adoption of the first of the modern global treaties on the environment – the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention, 1971) and the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972).2 What might a juxtaposition of the trajectory described by the work of the Harrisons with the expansion of global developments such as these since the 1970s reveal about the potential cross-currents between art in the public realm and public policy? Exploring the relationship between art and climate change specifically, the recent paper ‘Raising the Temperature’ highlights the urgency for decisive action and profound cultural transformations, looking to the role of artists.3 It frames this challenge as a need for greater levels of sociocultural integration, while also being respectful of difference. It notes that the arts are increasingly engaging with climate change issues through the co-creation of knowledge and through interdisciplinarity, but are curiously absent from global environmental policy discussions. The authors specifically highlight the absence of the arts from policy documents, noting that despite increasing interest in the ‘human dimension’ of global environmental change across a variety of disciplines, the arts are a forgotten dimension in IPCC reports:4 a word search in IPCC AR5 shows that the term ‘arts’ (in the sense of artistic practice) does not appear.5

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The Great Derangement explores the capability of the arts, and literature in particular, to address the scale and multidimensionality of the climate crisis and highlights the responsibility of artists, saying, When future generations look back upon the Great Derangement, they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists and writers to be equally culpable – for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.6 Galafassi highlights the role of the arts in social learning, suggesting that the arts are particularly well equipped to draw on multiple sources of knowledge and to drive action relevant to the kinds of transformations that climate issues have made urgent. The double challenge articulated by Galafassi and Ghosh concerns ways of being more open to the contribution of the arts and ways in which the arts might best make their contribution. Galafassi highlights the increasing engagement of the arts with climate change over the ten years from 2006, and offers a framework for thinking about what the different forms of contribution are. Ghosh’s argument in The Great Derangement is that some of the contemporary forms in the arts, and he particularly focuses on the novel, are ill-suited to addressing the crisis. One way of reframing the role of the artist is offered by The Artist as Leader research report, which highlighted the importance of ‘reading’ artists’ practices in the wider context of policy development. The authors explain that ‘by mapping policy changes in relation to the arts, we aim to demonstrate the importance of knowledge of policy developments to arts practice as the first step towards developing a critical stance in relation to artistic leadership’.7 From the perspective of the artist, the research showed that this reading enabled individuals (artists and their audiences/collaborators) to become informed of – and adapt – in important ways to social, cultural, and economic change. At the time that the research was being undertaken (2006–2009), change was predominantly defined in economic terms, in the light of post-industrial regeneration and the emergence of the ‘creative industries’. From the perspective of society, cultural policy sought to locate the arts (and design) as instrumental to the economy. This posed a problem: while the arts have a function in society, one that shifts and changes, they were increasingly in danger of falling into the trap of seeking to legitimise this function by claiming causation, through social, economic, or political impact. The authors observed that ‘this trajectory suggests that any construction of artistic leadership would need to embrace a more complex set of artistic positions in which artistic endeavour becomes more than the valuing of a certain form of production in monetary terms’.8 With this problem in mind, The Artist as Leader research conceived of and explored the approach of a number of artists as a form of leadership in civic life, thinking in terms of ‘leading through practice’. Particular practices were conceptualised in ways that avoided instrumentalism while sustaining a clear transformative function in the public realm. Such an ‘artist as leader’ manifests particular skills and competencies, particular ways of imagining how to work through the arts on societal issues, frequently in the form of direct and practical interventions. Such practices present distinctive and complex ways of ascribing value in public life, a function that policy also attempts to fulfil.

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In this chapter we focus on the practice and works of the Harrisons because they are recognised as pioneering the development of an ecologically oriented art practice.9 Helen Harrison was a poet and Chaucer scholar and Newton Harrison is a sculptor. Some 50 years ago they began working together and committed to only making work that served the health of the ‘life web’.10 This commitment, a remarkable conceptual move that has underpinned their practice from that point to the present, shifted the centre of gravity from outcomes to process, from skill in relation to materials to a practice of experimentation and learning, creating a form of inquiry that unfolded over time. This time-based process consciously reframed the way human beings imagined themselves in relation to their environments, and was increasingly set against a backdrop of multiple escalating environmental crises. The Harrisons are not alone in developing an artistic practice that addresses the pressures of environmental change, effectively bringing the arts into public policy issues. Others in this field include Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), Mel Chin (b. 1951), Agnes Denes (b. 1931), Peter Fend (b. 1950), Hans Haacke (b. 1936), John Latham (1921–2006), Alan Sonfist (b. 1946), and Mierle Laderman Ukeles (b. 1939), to name a few in the Harrisons’ generation, as well as many more that have followed. Through such approaches it becomes effectively possible to scrutinise and unlearn entrenched systems of value.11 A consistently crucial facet is the way these artists work with time, exploring the potential for different temporalities to emerge from the imagination of the artists. They work experimentally with, rather than against, the rhythms of ecosystems; or at least expose the disjuncture between human and ecological time, the time of policy, and the time of environmental change. Our aim in this chapter is to uncover qualities of the Harrisons’ particular approach as artists and what this offers as a different way to tackle the environmental crisis, and possibly to engage policy. We aim to enrich understanding of how this particular artistic practice works in a world of changing perceptions of the environment and its increased presence in global public policy. We will conclude with some observations on what artists might bring to the policy ‘table’. Barbara Matilsky, writing on the Harrisons in the context of the other artists included in the Fragile Ecologies exhibition and catalogue, says, Because their art involves the largest territory of any of the artists discussed in this book, it must by necessity be more conceptual. Most artists study and remediate a particular site, which is often fairly small. By contrast, the Harrisons have accepted the challenge of interpreting bodies of land and water that often cross national boundaries.12 The Harrisons’ work is rooted in the ‘deep ecology’ philosophy and movement, seeking to reposition the human within the ecological rather than controlling from a position ‘outside’.13 Their work addresses the complexity of human impacts on environments, most recently through the framing of sea level rise, heatwaves, and extinction in The Time of the Force Majeure.14 It is collaborative, involving the artists in working with many environmental scientists and developing a high level of expertise in several aspects of ecological science.15 However, the radical implications of a focus on putting the health of the life web first cannot be understated. Matilsky goes on to say,

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The Harrisons’ solutions to environmental problems are sometimes utopian calls to action offering alternative visions of art and life. Meditations on the Great Lakes of North America (1978) was a way of shocking people into a radical rethinking about environmental problems . . . Using maps, texts, and performances, they argued that the citizens of the United States and Canada should secede from their respective countries and reform themselves into an ecological province, not based on traditional political and economic boundaries, and led by a ‘dictatorship of the ecology’.16

The Harrisons and Policy The Harrisons’ ‘progression from an initial decision, made in ’69–70, to do no work that did not in some way look at ecosystemic well-being’17 is further articulated in their work The Serpentine Lattice, which says, Then A new reversal of ground comes into being where human activity becomes a figure within an ecological field as simultaneously the ecology ceases to be an ever shrinking figure within the field of human activity.18 All of their works over 50 years put the well-being of ecosystems as a prerequisite for human well-being. Different works explore aspects of this, proposing economic models (A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland, 1994), modes of farming (On the Deep Wealth of this Nation, Scotland, 2017), urban forms (Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom, 2008), as well as approaches to remediation and regeneration of natural systems (The Serpentine Lattice, 1993). When the Harrisons started their exploration of ecological systems in the early 1970s, it was still common for many to see nature as unchanging, and ecological systems as self-contained and self-supporting, somehow separate from human life. While human impacts affected ecological systems, these were described as ‘interventions’. In other words, a prevalent view was that ecological systems needed to be understood in themselves, as both ‘other’ and also as stable over time.19 The Harrisons, however, never subscribed to the notion that ecological systems were ‘other’. They positioned the human within the ecosystem and consistently articulated what one might call ecocultural well-being as the objective. In their work from The Survival Series (1970–1977) through to at least Peninsula Europe (2001), they did, on the other hand, appear to subscribe to the idea of ecological systems being able to exhibit an optimal stability. The experiments in The Survival Series attempt to model life cycles. The measure of success in, for example, Portable Fish Farm (1971) would have been stable self-replication. However, each time they attempted to demonstrate this, they failed. The natural systems pushed back and opened up a point of learning. With time, the Harrisons’ understanding of stability became more nuanced. They describe this in From There to Here, saying,

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Despite flux, indeterminacy and ongoing change, both cultural systems and ecosystems, individually or in transaction, maintain their stability, their continued existence, by virtue of taking in from their environments that which appears necessary for their well-being. To take in from the environment carries with it prima facie the requirement to release that which is unused, the detritus, back into the environment.20 This statement undergoes another shift in gear in 2016, with the publication of their manifesto The Force Majeure.21 Gradually the references to stability are replaced with references to the state of energy in the system, interplay between energy and entropy. Natural systems are low-entropy systems that keep themselves in balance at a local level by taking in what they need and releasing what they do not need back into the environment, to be taken up by other living forms. However, high-entropy systems reverse this dynamic by increasing inert, unusable energy to a dangerous degree. High-entropy systems are those of human culture. The Harrisons express it thus: Nature’s processes manifest themselves by self-organizing, self-complicating, selfevolving, and self-stabilizing, with resilience as the norm – whereas the productive, creative human race is far along in a contrary process, transforming local low-entropy systems (which we can call collectively the ecosystem of the earth) into rising-entropy systems that might well be called humanity’s preferred cultural landscape.22 By including the human within the ecological through the dynamics of energy across natural/cultural systems, the differences between ecologically sound and destructive systems are thrown into sharp relief. At issue is the unchecked growth of human systems in contrast to the limits and boundaries of natural systems. Turning from the conceptual underpinnings to focus on the policy context, although their work is focused on the public realm, we mainly encounter it in galleries and museums. They use cultural institutions in the places they are invited to work as spaces in which to bring environmental policy issues into the cultural discourse. They frequently actively engage politicians.23 The forms of the works, persistently using maps and plans alongside photography, share elements in common with public policy documents, but where the texts of the latter are extensive, repetitive, depersonalised, and unified in voice, the Harrisons’ texts are poetic. In fact, the Harrisons’ use of language draws on key traditions of storytelling, influenced by their involvement in the ethnopoetics movement.24 This involvement would have brought them into close proximity with different constructions of time along with the understanding that their particular form of poetry should be spoken first. As Matilsky noted, the ‘work’ is composed of time-based performances. Where public policy uses a unified voice, the Harrisons developed a plural voice, which is able to capture contradictory positions and hold inconsistency so that it can be understood in an expanded way. This is done through literary, rhetorical, and performative devices, adopting different personas. In their seminal work The Lagoon Cycle (1985) the two voices are the Lagoon Maker and the Witness, the active and the reflective aspects of the artist. The ability to articulate plural voices and complex, contradictory positions is one important contribution that the artist can make to the world of policy and its public understanding.25

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The use of plurality of voice opens up a set of possibilities in contrast to public policy’s closing down through a unified approach to the content of the message. It may also be said that public policy attempts to take a unified approach to conceptions of time.

Time in Public Policy At this point we are not aware of any academic research (e.g. a cultural history) into framings and understandings of time in public policy, so we offer a few observations of our own. Environmental policy-making at the global intergovernmental level is constructed from systems of international diplomacy that work through iterative, negotiated trade-offs in search of an eventual consensus. The iterations may take decades, and the eventual consensus, shaped to achieve potential acceptance by nearly 200 countries representing a vast range of situations and perspectives, is necessarily limited in its ambition by this need for wide agreement. There is thus often a tension between the aspiration to drive a leading agenda for action on the one hand, and on the other hand the appearance, to the general public’s eye, that often the result is instead a delayed re-action and a weak, ‘lowest common denominator’ outcome. Some assumptions seem to underpin these processes about the way they are situated in time. These may speak to more implicit kinds of consensus about dominant world views. For example, the building of a robust justification for a new instrument may often follow trajectories of evidence gathering and adversarial proposition testing that borrow from particular (usually Western) traditions of scientific method and legal jurisprudence. Linear conceptions of form following function, reaction following action, and so on, are similarly woven into the process, and are conditioned not only by chosen philosophies but also by factors such as linguistics. English, for example, despite its influence as a quasi-lingua franca in some circumstances, is just one among many currencies with which to conceptualise the relationship between past, present, and potential (conditional) futures. A global orthodoxy in institutions such as the United Nations has been built up on these foundations, which are nevertheless somewhat culturally specific in their origins, and are perhaps not necessarily representative of the worldwide human community’s multiple ways of thinking about time. There are delicate balances to be struck also between expressions of timeless permanence (as in any affirmation of fundamental rights of humanity, or fundamental principles concerning the value of ecosystems) on the one hand, and shifting perceptions over time concerning priorities, revised understandings, and contingent responses to the unforeseen, on the other. Preambles to global declarations and treaties make much use of the ‘present continuous’ tense (e.g. ‘affirming’, ‘acknowledging’, ‘recognising’) in open-ended messaging about enduring conditions. As initial pronouncements about principles lead onward to implementation and monitoring phases of these policy regimes, however, more time-bound devices begin to proliferate, in the form of action programmes, funding cycles, resolutions on shorter-term concerns, and periodic meetings of governing bodies to review progress. Within the climate change and biodiversity fields, the past half-century has also seen an evolution of more tangible expressions of results to be achieved within defined future time frames. Most of the conventions now adopt strategic plans for periods between five and ten years at a time, containing indicators of expected performance. End dates for global expectations have become more explicit, with examples including the ‘2010 target’ for significantly reducing the rate of biodiversity loss, the ‘Aichi biodiversity targets’ (end date 305

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2020), the ‘Vision for Biodiversity’ (2050), the successive ‘commitment periods’ of the Kyoto Protocol to the Climate Change Convention, the Millennium Development Goals (2015), and the Sustainable Development Goals (2030).

Time in the Works of the Harrisons While time is dealt with in literal, negotiated, and agreed ways in global environmental policy, the Harrisons use it as part of a method: they articulate their approach as based on the use of two primary questions, ‘how big is here?’ and ‘how long is now?’ as a starting point in any context. As they explain, This way of working in any place begins with . . . : How big is here? How can what is happening here be understood and engaged? What patterns are forming or reforming? . . . And the question – How big is here? must also include, How long is our Now? Now may also be understood as an instant, but the instant may be 250 years long.26 The capacity to shift scale in this way, if ‘now’ can mean an instant or 250 years, suggests that time in the Harrisons’ work is malleable, a means to evoke a vivid idea and move imaginatively between scales. Their work A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (see Figure 27.1), one of the most significant in relation to issues of public policy, opens thus: Looking at the map of Holland. Seeing it as the expression of a moment in 1200 years of contested history about who will command the land and why and how. Seeing it as a metaphor for yet another contest as to who will shape the future of this physical terrain understood to be the Randstad and the Green Heart. Where in a ten year moment less than one percent of the time of its whole history as a civilization the people on this ground must construct a response in physical terms to intense population pressure coupled to an expansion committed economic engine in such a way that these two self-reproducing forces mutually energizing and interrelated will consume much of these lands available in the Green Heart.27 306

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The ‘Green Heart’, an area of open landscape and farmland surrounded by the major cities of the Netherlands (the Randstad), was facing pressures of urban development that would threaten its identity as one of the most important open green spaces in Europe. By framing these competing interests together (economic, ecological, and cultural, across an urban/rural divide), the Harrisons envisioned forms of development that worked with the metaphor of ‘heart’, positioning the green space as central to the landscape and using biodiversity corridors (imagined as arteries and veins or rays of the sun) to separate the cities. Focusing on the specific issue of time, it is interesting to note that the Harrisons are also using a ‘continuous present’, e.g. ‘looking’, ‘seeing’, just as we have noted is used in policy. They show the urgency for a policy decision by creating intervals of time, ‘1200 years of contested history’ and ‘ a ten year moment’ – the ‘moment’ in their terms is the ‘now’, not of an hour or a day, but of the significant time in which a critical event plays out. Time is plastic, capable of being experienced as compressed, capable of being experienced as stretched. Using these two time frames, they create a tension, saying ‘the people on this ground/must construct a response’. By revealing the urgency for action as ‘less than one percent’ of a significant period, we come to feel that urgency in a visceral way.

Figure 27.1 A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (1984), Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Gouda, the Netherlands Source: Photo credit Newton Harrison.

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Figure 27.2 Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2008), Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison. Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Exeter, UK Source: Photo credit Newton Harrison.

The Harrisons comment on ‘framing’ as a particular method within artists’ practices (they are referencing painters, but it is by analogy true in other art forms), saying, For the painter, the field of play becomes a canvas, the physical boundaries are the edge of a canvas . . . We define a field of play in much the same way, except that the scale-shift is profound; measured in orders of magnitude.28 While their example is spatial, it is clear that their approach to time is characterised by the same assumptions and approach. Defining a period of time produces a field of play. The field of play allows for emphasising particular aspects, ‘bringing them forward’ in compositional terms. Another useful example of this approach to framing time comes from the Harrisons’ 2008 work Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (see Figure 27.2), where in the audio associated with the large-scale three-dimensional model showing the impact of sea level rise on the coastline of the island, the voices say, [Newton Harrison: ] Will it be enough [Helen Harrison: ] as the most extreme model suggests 308

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to halt the juggernaut of the ocean if carbon use is stopped almost all at once almost all over in the next 10 years.29 The narrative addresses the global issues of climate change that were the subject of discussion at the time, including the break-up of the Greenland ice shelf, the widespread loss of forests, the (then still likely) building of hundreds of coal-fired power plants, the melting of the Siberian permafrost and associated release of methane, and the economic implications and requirements of this (the Stern Review that highlighted the economic implications of climate change was published in 200630). The dialogue comes back to the question of time, saying, [Newton Harrison:] Will it be enough to construct a global consensus to withdraw from the carbon world entirely? [British voice:] Some models say we have a 30–50 year window to do so A different alternative is offered, [Newton Harrison:] However some models predict an ocean rise of only 1 metre or less in a hundred years which by all accounts is manageable. Within this conversation comprising three voices, several different timelines have been evoked (‘10 years’, ‘30–50 years’, ‘a hundred years’) based on the different models, the same models drawn from their discussions with various scientists that were underpinning policy development at the time. The narrative ends with, And in this state of indeterminacy in this state of knowing and not knowing from one perspective nothing is enough from another anything might be enough. The Harrisons use literary devices, including repetition and rhythm, coordinated with the visual movement of sea level rise and storm surge projected on the model, to draw attention to increasingly complex and indeterminate outcomes. The ‘frame’ provided by focusing on 309

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the island of Britain changing over time provides a field of play where they can explore the significance of different possible futures. Different time frames are used to highlight different futures. The skill is in the selection of an effective focus, the actual boundary of the island (literally the edge), selected because it is a familiar ‘figure’ rather than the political entity (environmental policy being a responsibility divided between the separate administrations for England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland). The composition is both in the selection of compelling elements (aspects of climate change) and their juxtaposition within the narrative, visualised through the changing ‘figure’. Time provides both underlying rhythm as well as tension. However, it is important to understand that the Harrisons also recognise the limitations of these devices. As they put it, Nature, the life web in its entirety, appeared interactive, interdependent, mutually evolving and, therefore, in various degrees indeterminate and frameable only in a narrow way. As a result, any central images that appeared seemed to exist for only a moment and thereafter to fade back into a pattern of moments grouped within moments.31 In the two previous examples, we have seen how the Harrisons use the question, ‘how long is now?’ to open up possibilities, connecting ecological time with human time. We want to turn to their most recent articulation in The Time of the Force Majeure where they re-express the underlying problem of human development in terms of intervals of time, in this case evolutionary time. Their argument is that, as noted above, human culture has developed ‘rising-entropy systems that might well be called humanity’s preferred cultural landscape’.32 They step back from the consequences of rising-entropy systems, offering no judgement as to whether these are related to industrialisation or to the advent of agriculture, instead focusing on the implications. It has taken 3.5 billion years for the planet to be formed; 50 million years for the planet to reform to its present state after the fifth mass extinction; and there are 200 million to 300 million years before the sun’s slowly increasing temperature makes most of the life on earth impossible. This latter interval of time constitutes four to six cycles of 50 million years each for life to begin again and ‘get it right’, i.e. for intelligent life to create an exchange-based civilisation rather than an exploitative one. In the final poetic text of the manifesto, the Harrisons appeal to the politicians, policy makers, and voters for new forms of legislation: ‘We see no alternative than to yield to nature’s agency accepting a new form of global governance that reflects surrendering the idea that humankind is a special case understanding that we are simply even humbly, a species among species.’33 This sophisticated and visionary articulation draws ecologically informed environmental policy (as it might become in the future) into the cultural realm. It does so through aesthetic means in the form of a poem. It connects practical/implementable value together with intrinsic value, creating a foundation for new global policy and legislation built on what it is ‘right to do’. The Harrisons talk about this approach as addressing the ‘ennobling problem’ saying, ‘First, ennobling issues need to be taken up directly. By “ennobling” we mean envisioned actions that most people would accept as prima facie good to do, whether or not they believed they could be done.’34 This means that they are not focusing on what we characterised earlier as the ‘lowest common denominator outcome’ on which a large group of nation states with diverse 310

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interests could possibly agree. Instead they focus on that which everyone would agree is ‘good to do’. When we think about this in relation to ideas of the avant-garde, we recognise that the Harrisons’ concern with the ‘utilitarian’ and the implementable is provocative in relation to contemporary art practice.35 This concern goes back to The Survival Pieces, on which they commented, ‘Our decision was to deal with survival and allow all the forms we used and all the activities we pursued to spring from that single decision.’36

Conclusion Galafassi and Ghosh provided a double challenge to policy makers and artists at the outset, on the one hand for global environmental policy to engage with the arts, and on the other hand for artists to address climate change. Drawing on The Artist as Leader we recognised that artists seeking to contribute to the civic realm need to engage with and be alert to public policy in the areas of their interest. While not concerning ourselves with claims for causal relations, we explored the works of the Harrisons and some aspects of global environmental policy. From this we have been able to draw out some similarities and differences, indicating what certain aspects of artists’ practice, at least as demonstrated in one particularly salient body of work, might contribute distinctively to policy formation in the public realm. In focusing on the practice of the Harrisons we have drawn attention to their underlying commitment to looking to ‘ecosystemic well-being’ and putting the life web ‘first’ in all decision-making. This guiding principle plays out through juxtaposing ecosystem ‘frames’ with human ‘frames’. By contrast, global environmental policy has tended to be driven by human frames. As we have shown, the Harrisons work with time in two ways: they foreground ecological time over human time, and they demonstrate that time is malleable – it can be a material in the artwork, conceptualised and reframed within a narrative of place. While the Harrisons’ guiding principle is shared with others associated with the deep ecology movement, it is enacted in the artworks through an understanding of framing drawn from the deep traditions of art practice. They are able to draw attention to multiple, often competing versions of reality, and to hold these in relation to each other by using multiple voices and linguistic devices including pattern and rhythm. It is worth noting that their engagement with environmental issues at the scale of policy, starting with The Meditations on the Sacramento River, the Delta and the Bays at San Francisco (1977) comes after they have negotiated these aspects of their practice at the scale of two individuals wondering where food comes from, starting with Making Earth, Then Making Strawberry Jam (1969–1970). There is a tendency to be concerned with what the arts offer other domains such as environment, health, and justice, domains that form part of the ‘public realm’. This overlooks the value of drawing these issues into the cultural sphere to enable audiences to experience their own everyday concerns in new ways. It is this enabling to see differently that forms one of the key contributions of the Harrisons’ work, drawing issues of environment and environmental policy into the cultural sphere. They demonstrate that these issues can form material for artworks that create an encounter with climate change that is well-informed, imaginative, and emotionally intelligent. Perhaps in contrast to policy (and also to activism) the Harrisons’ use of ‘urgency’ is situated within their construction of time, so they talk about the ‘urgency of the moment’ but the moment is not today or tomorrow as it can be in pragmatic political terms.37 The

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urgency may be extreme but the transformations of the cultural behaviours to focus on ecosystemic well-being are not so fast. Galafassi and his co-authors suggest that significant work is needed to understand how artists can contribute to social transformation in the face of environmental crises, indicating that some aspects might include the way artworks become experiments that prefigure change, and the way narratives engage thinking and feeling in new ways. The arts provide fresh approaches that can support societies in thinking, feeling and narrating their experiences of complex issues of socio-ecological change. Artistic engagements are becoming sites of active experimentation, enacting novel social– ecological relationships and leading to more-than-rational explorations of current systems and possible futures. They create spaces in which the normative aspects of climate change can be addressed, and thus negotiated and redefined through collaborative processes.38 The Harrisons express the same thought thus: ‘Generally we make installations which stand for the place and as a meeting ground for discourse.’39 Expanding Galafassi’s sense of artistic processes as path-making strategies, we might draw out of the Harrisons’ approach the following recommendations for future work. Art practices like that of the Harrisons demonstrate the value of imaginative engagement with the world of policy, drawing critical attention to unspoken assumptions and implicit cultural conditionings (e.g. on the issue of time). One of these conditionings is the, perhaps particularly Western, need for policy to be underpinned by evidence and therefore also to have a determined outcome. The Harrisons exemplify a willingness inhabit indeterminacy, ‘this state of knowing and not knowing’, which is a clear challenge to the ‘outcome’ focus of policy makers and politicians.40 Some forms of art practice, and in this the Harrisons are a key example, position collaboration at the core. This is related to another aspect of arts practice and ecological mindedness: the ability through compositional skills to hold conflicting ideas in tension. It suggests that further research into such practices can enrich how we are addressing the challenges. In turn it prompts the need for intensifying methods of facilitating collaboration along with sharing commentaries and analyses of similar issues elsewhere and involving other practitioners.

Notes 1 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 1962); Donella Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis Meadows, Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972). 2 ‘Global’ refers to those policies that involve a significant proportion of the countries of the world, where ‘international’ includes regional (in the sense of supra-national regions) and bilateral, trilateral, and other transboundary levels too. 3 Diego Galafassi et al., ‘Raising the Temperature’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 31 (2018): 71–79. There is much debate about whether the term ‘climate change’ should be replaced in political discourse by climate ‘breakdown’, ‘disruption’, or ‘crisis’. We are continuing to use ‘climate change’ because that is the way it is enshrined in most of the relevant policy instruments, not least the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change itself. 4 IPCC is the acronym for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and IPCC AR5 refers to the series of scientific assessment reports produced by the panel in 2014, the fifth assessment cycle. 5 Galafassi et al., ‘Raising the Temperature’, 72.

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6 Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 135. 7 Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, The Artist as Leader (Aberdeen: Robert Gordon University, 2009), 9. 8 Douglas and Fremantle, Artist as Leader, 22 9 Jeffrey Kastner, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon, 1998), 36, 142–147. The Harrisons’ works are included in most of the significant exhibitions of environmental art that have been created since the late 1970s, including Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions (Matilsky 1992), Natural Reality: Artistic Positions Between Nature and Culture (Strelow 1999), Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies (Spaid 2002), Groundworks: Environmental Collaborations in Contemporary Art (Kester 2005), Weather Report: Art and Climate Change (Lippard 2007), Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969–2009 (Barbican 2009), as well as exhibitions on art and research (Spurlock 1979). Their work is also included in key texts on systems aesthetics (Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974), 15); dialogic aesthetics (Grant Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 63–66, 172–173); and art and sustainability (Sacha Kagan, Art and Sustainability Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity, 2nd ed. (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 283–288, and Sacha Kagan, Practice of Ecological Art, Plastik: Art & Science 4 (2014), https://web.archive.org/web/20150402123100/http://art-sci ence.univ-paris1.fr/plastik/document.php?id=866). 10 The Harrisons use the term ‘life web’ (or ‘lifeweb’) drawing on Fritjof Capra’s conception of the ‘web of life’, focusing on patterns rather than things. 11 Sue Spaid, Ecovention (Cincinnati, OH: Contemporary Arts Center, 2002), 3–4. 12 Barbara Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies: Contemporary Artists’ Interpretations and Solutions (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1992), 66. 13 Arne Naess, ‘The Basics of Deep Ecology’, The Trumpeter 21, no. 1 (1986): n.p. 14 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Time of the Force Majeure (New York: Prestel, 2016). 15 More than 30 scientists are named in Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure. 16 Matilsky, Fragile Ecologies, 68–69. 17 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, From There to Here (San Diego, CA: Harrison Studio, 2001), n.p. 18 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Serpentine Lattice (Portland, OR: Reed College, 1993), 5–6. 19 Amy Ione, ‘Review of the New Ecology’, Leonardo Reviews, March 2017, n.p., www.leonardo. info/review/2017/03/review-of-the-new-ecology-rethinking-a-science-for-the-anthropocene. 20 Harrison and Harrison, From There to Here, n.p. 21 Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure, 426–431. 22 Ibid., 426–427. 23 Something like 45 town and city mayors are mentioned (though not named) in Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure. 24 Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, ‘Inconsistency and Contradiction’, in Elemental: An Arts and Ecology Reader (Manchester: Gaia Project, 2016), 153–181. 25 Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, ‘What Poetry Does Best’, in Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure, 455–460. 26 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Position Paper (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, 2003), n.p. 27 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (Gouda, the Netherlands: Harrison Studio and Harrison Green Heart Studio, 1995), n.p. 28 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, ‘Public Cultures and Sustainable Practices’, Structure and Dynamics 2, no. 3 (2007): n.p. 29 This and the following quotes from the audio element of the Harrisons’ work Greenhouse Britain: Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom (2008) are not reproduced in full in Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure. They have been sourced from working documents. 30 Nicholas Stern, Stern Review (London: H. M. Treasury, 2006). 31 Harrison and Harrison, From There to Here, n.p. 32 Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure, 426–427. 33 Ibid., 431.

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34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Harrison and Harrison, ‘Public Culture and Sustainable Practices’, n.p., emphasis in original. Harrison and Harrison, From There to Here, n.p. Craig Adcock, ‘Conversational Drift’, Art Journal 51, no. 2 (1992): 35. Harrison and Harrison, Position Paper, n.p. Galafassi, ‘Raising the Temperature’, 77. Kester, Conversation Pieces, 64. Harrison and Harrison, Greenhouse Britain, n.p.

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28 THE HARRISONS’ PRACTICE IN THE CONTEXT OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND POLITICS FROM THE 1960s to 2019 A Timeline Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, and Dave Pritchard

These notes are provided as background to this timeline. The timeline complements the previous chapter, ‘In the Time of Art with Policy’. It is offered as a working document that can be annotated by others and in this way further evolved.1 The three authors, Fremantle, Douglas and Pritchard, offer different disciplinary perspectives to this analysis of global environmental policy2 and the work of Helen Mayer Harrison (1927– 2018) and Newton Harrison (b. 1932), known as ‘the Harrisons’. Fremantle is a cultural historian, public art producer, and researcher, Douglas is an artist researcher and Pritchard a conservationist working with environmental and cultural policy (see Figures 28.1 and 28.2). Douglas and Fremantle have written on the Harrisons’ work together3 and separately.4 Fremantle worked with Douglas on The Artist as Leader (2006–2009).5 Fremantle has worked with Pritchard, chairing the Art Focus Group within the global Ramsar Culture Network coordinated by Pritchard (2016 onwards).

Approach We first created a timeline by pooling our different disciplinary resources principally drawing on information from the United Nations (UN) and other documentation associated with various Conventions, cultural histories of climate,6 histories of science,7 and histories of environmental activism,8 as well as works and essays of the artists.9 We mapped selected key milestones of development in global environmental policy from the early 1970s, alongside developments in science that have directly informed global environmental policy, and key projects in the Harrisons’ work. We then met together to work with the timeline, suspending disbelief as to what this might reveal.10 315

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Figure 28.1 Dave Pritchard (left) and Chris Fremantle (right) working on the timeline (2019). Edinburgh, Scotland Source: Photo credit Anne Douglas.

Figure 28.2 Anne Douglas (foreground) and Chris Fremantle (background) working on the timeline (2019). Aberdeen, Scotland Source: Photo credit Anne Douglas.

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Context Timelines provide a useful way of opening up patterns of complexity with multiple points of interaction. Douglas and Fremantle included a timeline in The Artist as Leader research report.11 This mapped key cultural policy milestones from the foundation of the Arts Council in the UK postwar period until the date of its publication, alongside the emergence of leading artistic practices that worked directly in public life in the United Kingdom and the United States. Cartiere included a timeline in The Everyday Practice of Public Art that mapped socially engaged artworks in the period 1950 to 2015 (i.e. up to the date of its publication), identified by five different contributors offering different interests and perspectives (Cartiere herself, Sophie Hope, Anthony Schrag, Elisa Yon, and co-editor Martin Zebracki).12 Sue Spaid included multiple timelines in Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies, in particular a timeline of ecoventions from 1955 to 2002 (i.e. up to the date of its publication), and a second one of eco-art exhibitions (1951–2002).13 Artists have produced timelines, such as George F. Macunias’s Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus and Other 4 Dimentional [sic], Aural, Optic, Olfactory, Epithelial, and Tactile Art Forms,14 and Rachel Sussman’s (Selected) History of the Space Time Continuum.15 Global environmental policy organisations also use timelines on their websites as ways of accessing their iterative processes. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) provides access to documents through a timeline of meetings starting in 1997.16 The Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the UN presented the exhibition 70 Years, 70 Documents through a timeline tracing the development of UN policy over that period.17 The American Institute of Physics has a comprehensive timeline entitled The Discovery of Global Warming starting in 1800 to the present.18 The Worldwatch Institute has a timeline of ‘environmental milestones’ specifically juxtaposing ‘pollution’ (specific instances) alongside ‘governance’ (Conventions) and aspects of biodiversity starting in 1960 through to 2004.19 Finally, the webcomic xkcd’s quirky A Timeline of Earth’s Average Temperature reveals the exponential and recent rise in global temperatures by tracing a pattern from the Ice Age to the present.20 This is not a comprehensive sample.

Some Observations We recognised the complex and contradictory nature of the material we had accumulated. Environmental policy at a global level develops in diverse and often non-obvious ways. The science of environmental monitoring is a significant shaper of policy. It has developed incrementally and in increasingly complex ways as new areas of research reveal themselves. Both policy at this scale and research dance to the tune of global and domestic politics. The current form of the timeline barely covers the complexity of juxtaposing the Harrisons’ work with key global environmental events. Nonetheless we started to develop what we felt to be some significant insights. The timeline is therefore both a tool and a method – a tool in the sense of holding in one place a complex body of information, and a method of questioning the strengths and limitations of a bird’s-eye perspective. That said, we might imagine all three strands of the timeline and their interrelationships as a means of facing the horror and absurdity of climate change by making the works of policy, science, and art visible in relation to each other. The timeline clearly reveals that the work of the Harrisons begins around the same time as a change in the pace of the work of global environmental policy and related scientific research. There are certainly influential historical moments in advance of this date, including the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962.21 The development of a comprehensive model of the general circulation of the atmosphere (1955–1965)22 formed an important step in grasping 317

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the complexity of the world’s climate systems. The moon landings of 1969 opened an unforeseen perspective on the fragility of planet Earth. The year 1970 saw the first Earth Day, as well as President Nixon’s establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency. This brought together in one body federal research, monitoring, standard setting, and enforcement of environmental policy. In the same year, the Harrisons began their artistic career together as a partnership through a series of works known as the Survival Pieces (1970–1985). It is interesting to note that the United States had a particular leadership role both in domestic and in global policy that continued until interrupted by President Bush’s withdrawal in 2001 from the Kyoto Agreement and again in 2017 by President Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement and from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2019. There is a clear rhythm of global summits taking place roughly every ten years from 1972. This is interspersed with the setting up of new ‘instruments’ including the 1971 Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar); the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention covering cultural and natural heritage, the 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and the 1979 Convention on Migratory Species (CMS). In 1992 there was a significant round of new instruments (the UNFCCC, UN Commission on Sustainable Development, Agenda 21 Action Plan, Convention on Biodiversity, Statement of Forest Principles, and Convention on Desertification) agreed at the UN Conference on Environment and Development (‘Rio Summit’). Associated with each Convention is a programme of meetings of their respective Conferences of the Parties (the now familiar COPs). Each Convention’s COP meets on a different cycle (Ramsar’s COPs have settled into a three-year cycle; the UNFCCC’s are annual). While the UNFCCC’s COPs are annual, some are of greater significance and are known by the locations in which they occurred (e.g. Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Paris). These COPs are concerned with setting globally agreed expectations, guidelines, and targets. Each Convention also publishes reports, again with differing frequencies.23 There are of course other geographical scales of environmental policy-making in the public realm, at sub-global, national, and local levels, for example; but the universal applicability (in principle) of the global regimes is the reason for that focus in this timeline. We recognised that politics and science are intertwined and made manifest in global environmental policy. Our timeline is not intended to establish causality. We can see an initial broad focus on the environment, and then later bifurcations and increasingly specific instruments and processes for particular issues. We have highlighted the development of climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development, but the bifurcations are more complex than this suggests. Turning to the Harrisons’ element of the timeline, we might ask ‘why artists?’ The CenterC for the Study of the Force Majeure, led by Newton Harrison, answers the question saying, Why not artists? Art is the court of last resort – and our best hope. The evidence is overwhelming, and many people are, indeed, overwhelmed. But in case after case that we have looked at all over the world, these issues have been looked at locally – we saw a crying need to find ways to talk about the problem at the scale in which it is occurring. That can be terrifying and discouraging, but for us it opens the door to creative possibilities.24 More specifically, we recognised that although the Harrisons’ works exist along the same conventionally conceived timeline as the policy, the way they evoke time within the works 318

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is very different from the way that time is manifest in the policy processes and documents as is described in the preceding chapter. Just as we have not sought to identify causality in the relations between politics and science, the intention is not to suggest any causal connections between the Harrisons’ work and environmental policy or strategy (in either direction), whether in terms of ideas, motivation, or content.25 However, the point that we want to make is that their way of working is radically different from, but also potentially highly relevant to, policy-making; and that considering this from the perspective of time frames, durations, rhythms, and periodicities can offer fresh insights into this. The Harrisons’ work grows and changes, becoming more complex and ambitious in the issues it addresses and clearer in the methodological approaches it adopts. The Survival Pieces (1970–1985) model the life cycle of particular species in context as a means of learning about ecosystems and complexity. Over time, self-directed work evolves into invitations, first in the United States and then internationally (starting with the 1989 work Atempause für den Save Flüss). An early retirement ‘package’ in 1993/1994 frees them from teaching responsibilities at University of California, San Diego, and they take on a new series of large-scale works in Europe. They articulate their growing realisation as they move from the Survival Pieces, through The Lagoon Cycle (1975–1985), to the systemic scale work that they needed to shift from gallerybased installations of living material at 1:1 scale to be able to address whole systems rather than fragments of systems. The consistent use of maps, complemented with photographs and video, opens the work up to multiple perspectives and scales. They engineer another step-change from the mid 2000s, which in due course is manifest as the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure and the grouping of a number of works under the heading of Counter Extinction Works (2006 to the present). That shift is driven by the recognition that human systems are almost designed to produce entropy-rich rather than energy-rich systems. It is worth noting that in the accompanying timeline we have focused, as the Harrisons do, on ‘projects’, and the resulting exhibitions. We have not highlighted where an exhibition might have been installed in multiple venues within a ‘project’. Many of the works in the timeline have also been exhibited again subsequently, sometimes many years after the initial project. We have not attempted to include the ways in which the Harrisons have worked with scientists throughout their career. This is a very important aspect of the way they work (in the Time of the Force Majeure they name more than 30 scientists with whom they have collaborated), but is a distinct (if related) subject from the ways in which their practice offers ways of thinking and working that may benefit the world of policy.26

Conclusion We have selected some elements with which to compose this timeline, but we do not claim any degree of completeness. Some of the items in the timeline extend beyond the present, both in terms of policy and in terms of projects that the Harrisons have initiated. More importantly, however, there are many other strands that could be introduced, ranging from personal journeys of realisation to other dimensions of, and actors in, the discourse. We set out with different forms of expertise. We have negotiated across our different bodies of experience the limits of what to include, as well as what to conclude. As a result of this exercise and method we have generated a mutual understanding of what is important without needing to synthesise or conflate events or create false connections. In other words, the two broad categories of policy and everything bound up in it and the artists’ trajectory have put each other in sharp relief (see Figure 28.3). 319

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Figure 28.3 Timeline of global environmental policy and politics juxtaposed with the works of the Harrisons from the 1960s to 2019 Source: © Chris Fremantle, Anne Douglas, and Dave Pritchard, with thanks to Newton Harrison for his comments and to Laura Hart for design.

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Notes 1 An alternative version of the timeline is available on the RGU repository, https://rgu-repository. worktribe.com/output/802605, as a PDF and can be printed on A3 paper or on a continuous roll if available. 2 ‘Global’ refers to those policies that involve a significant proportion of the countries of the world, where ‘international’ includes regional (in the sense of supra-national regions) and bilateral, trilateral, and other transboundary levels too. 3 Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, ‘What Poetry Does Best’, in The Time of the Force Majeure: After 45 Years Counterforce is on the Horizon? ed. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison (New York: Prestel, 2016), 455–460; Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, ‘Inconsistency and Contradiction’, in Elemental: an Arts and Ecology Reader, ed. James Brady (Manchester: Gaia Project, 2016), 153–181. 4 Chris Fremantle, ‘Making Poetry to Invent Policy’, paper presented at the Fifth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment UK, 10–13 July 2008, Edinburgh, UK; Kathleen Coessens, Anne Douglas, and Darla Crispin, The Artistic Turn (Leuven: University of Leuven Press, 2009); Anne Douglas, ‘Venturing out on the Thread of a Tune’, in Creative Practice and the Art of Association, ed. James Oliver (Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 2018), 63–82. 5 Anne Douglas and Chris Fremantle, The Artist as Leader (Aberdeen: Robert Gordon University, 2009). 6 For example, Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010); Tom Bristow and Thomas H. Ford, A Cultural History of Climate Change (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 7 For example, Hugh Gorman and Erik M. Conway, ‘Monitoring the Environment’ Environmental Monitoring and Assessment 106 (2005): 1–10. 8 For example, Keith M. Woodhouse, The Ecocentrists (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 9 Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, The Time of the Force Majeure (New York: Prestel, 2016. 10 ‘Suspending disbelief’ comes from theatre and refers to suspending one’s assumptions about reality for the purposes of engaging in an artwork’s construction of reality. 11 Douglas and Fremantle, The Artist as Leader. 12 Cameron Cartiere and Martin Zebracki, The Everyday Practice of Public Art (Abingdon: Routledge, 2015). 13 Sue Spaid, Ecovention (Cincinnati, OH: Contemporary Arts Center, 2002). An ecovention is defined in this context as an artistic tactic through which an artist seeks to create a concrete positive change in the natural environment (ii). 14 Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus, www.primaryinformation.org/product/diagram-ofhistorical-development-of-fluxus-and-other-4-dimentional-aural-optic-olfactory-epithelial-and-tact ile-art-forms. 15 (Selected) History of the Space Time Continuum, www.rachelsussman.com/timeline. 16 UNFCC, https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/conferences/past-conferences/past-conferencesoverview. 17 Dag Hammarskjöld Library at the UN, http://research.un.org/en/UN70/about. 18 American Institute of Physics Timeline of the Discovery of Global Warming,https://history.aip. org/climate/timeline.htm. 19 Worldwatch Institute, web.archive.org/web/20180723164209/www.worldwatch.org/brain/features/ timeline/timeline.htm. 20 See https://xkcd.com/1732. 21 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (London: Penguin, 2000). 22 See https://history.aip.org/climate/GCM.htm. 23 The now familiar reports on climate change are actually produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a separate body from the UNFCCC. 24 Introduction, www.centerforforcemajeure.org. 25 There are examples where links of this kind could potentially be explored, such as Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Position Paper (Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University, 2003), n.p., for example, where images created by the Harrisons reappear in land-use strategy documents, particularly in relation to A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (1995). 26 Harrison and Harrison, Force Majeure.

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Mapping Social Change

29 MAPPING ART IN THE PUBLIC REALM 2008–2018 Cameron Cartiere, Leon Tan, and Elisha Masemann (map design, Geoff Campbell)

Introduction We are all the public. From who we are as individuals within collective communities, through how we engage with public agencies and institutional structures, to our interactions with the physical world around us – particularly in an urban context as increasingly populations shift to the metropolis. Our connections to the social, political, and physical infrastructures of our contemporary world bind us together in a host of varying publics, and within these publics, our individual roles and degrees of engagement can be fluid. Some public connections may resonate within us for a lifetime, particularly those related to historical community connections. Others may change as we age, move, shift political views, have life-changing experiences, rediscover histories, or abandon long-held traditions – the potential list of influences for change is extensive. In exploring public art and social practice projects around the world from 2008 to 2018, we used this perspective to position the projects into three broad categories: memory in the making (social), changes from within (political), and the shape of the city (infrastructure).

The decade between 2008 and 2018 has been a time of tremendous change and upheaval across the globe. From a political perspective, the decade can be bookended by the US presidential elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. In between are political events that have radically changed the global political landscape, such as the protests of the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain; the Hong Kong umbrella movement and Taiwan’s sunflower movement; the emergence and expansion of China’s Belt and Road Initiative; and the enduring legacy of Occupy Wall Street. 335

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Many economists refer to this time period as the ‘lost decade’ with financial woes in the Global North having world-wide impact including the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggering a global recession and a $700 billion bailout bill passed by the US government (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) that supported banks, credit card companies, and the auto industry. For much of the working population, the effects of these changes have been stagnating or declining wages and increasing financial precarity. Between 2008 and 2018, there were significant environmental gains and losses – mostly losses. The Paris Agreement was open for signatures on Earth Day, 22 April 2016 as a collective effort by over 190 nations to curb climate change. On 3 September 2016 President Obama signed the agreement along with President Xi of China. On 1 June 2017 President Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report for 2018 stated that there was a 60 per cent decline in vertebrate populations, meaning that we had less than half as many birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, and amphibians as we did 40 years ago. Through so many of these monumental cultural, political, and environmental changes and upheavals, artists working in the public realm have responded. They have responded through creative action, community collaboration, and civic intervention. With grassroot movements and global initiatives, using institutional support and institutional opposition, from local issues to worldwide concerns, the breadth and depth of projects goes far beyond what we can capture in these few pages. What these maps attempt to represent is a snapshot of a moment in time – a starting place for a global view of creative solutions being developed by artists working in the public realm around the world and the inspiration these projects present for positive action today.

Figure 29.1 Looking for Love Again (2011), Candy Chang. Fairbanks, AK, USA Source: Photo credit Candy Chang.

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1. Looking for Love Again (2011), Candy Chang, Fairbanks, AK, USA A public art installation that drew an emotional reaction to the abandoned Polaris Building in downtown Fairbanks. Chang suspended a four-storey-high canvas sign on the building that read: ‘Looking for Love Again’, with chalkboards installed at street level inviting the public to record memories of the building and ideas for its future use (see Figure 29.1). Feedback from the boards and project website was collected by the developer and civic bodies to be implemented in the development of the building and area. 2. Digital Natives (2011), Lorna Brown and Clint Burnham, Burrard Street Bridge, Vancouver, BC, Canada An interactive and socially engaged work curated for the 125th anniversary of the city of Vancouver for which Brown and Burnham invited North American artists and writers to contribute messages to be displayed on a digital billboard. The usual transmission of advertising was interrupted as the billboard was appropriated as a space for artistic and literary exchanges between native and non-native communities on the complexities of colonisation and communication. 3. Hope (2008), Shepard Fairey, Los Angeles, CA, USA Initially created as a street poster during the 2008 US presidential elections, the screenprinted portrait of then-presidential candidate, Barack Obama, featuring the word ‘hope’, was adopted as the unofficial image for Obama’s campaign. The image was popularised by media, distributed through stickers, T-shirts, and posters, and later legally contested. The National Portrait Gallery acquired the original in 2009. 4. We the People (2017), Shepard Fairey, Los Angeles, CA, USA Created with the same three colours of the American flag and those used in his earlier ‘Hope’ poster for Obama’s election campaign, Fairey’s We the People posters featured faces of Muslim, Latin-American, and African American women representing groups undermined in Trump’s election campaign. Posters were distributed online, posted on city walls, and published in newspapers as a way to promote inclusive engagement and solidarity. 5. Monument Lab (2012–ongoing), Paul Farber and Ken Lum, Philadelphia, PA, USA Monument Lab emerged from class-based discussions held by Farber and Lum with university students on the subject of public art. Since 2015 the projects brought to life by Monument Lab have had at their core one key question: what is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia? In collaboration with tertiary and civic institutions, other artists, and the public, Monument Lab responds to this question by activating dialogue about the city and its history, reimagining the possibilities for ways to present collective memories in Philadelphia’s public spaces through temporary, site-specific works (see Figure 29.2). 6. Gramsci Monument (2013), Thomas Hirschhorn, Brooklyn, NY, USA The final iteration of Hirschhorn’s participatory monument series was dedicated to philosopher Antonio Gramsci. The monument consisted of a library, Internet space, and area where public talks and activities based on the philosopher’s work were held. Constructed from makeshift materials in collaboration with local residents, it was a ‘counter-monument’ designed to activate a community, while also disrupting traditional notions of public memorials.

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Figure 29.2 If They Should Ask (2017), Sharon Hayes. Monument Lab Philadelphia Citywide Exhibition, Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA, USA Source: Steve Weinik/Monument Lab and Mural Arts Philadelphia.

7. A Man was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015), Dread Scott, New York, USA This work recalled the anti-lynching message used by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, the NAACP would fly a flag outside the New York office that read ‘A Man was Lynched Yesterday’ the day after the execution. Scott created an updated version of the iconic NAACP flag with the addition, ‘by police’, making reference to the 2015 shooting of Walter Scott by a police officer in North Charleston (see Figure 29.3). 8. The Wrinkles of the City (2008–ongoing), JR, Cartagena (Spain), Shanghai, Los Angeles, CA, Havana, Berlin, Istanbul In the developing areas of different cities, French-born photographer and artist JR has pasted large-scale black-and-white photographs of elderly inhabitants on public walls. Blending the city’s metaphorical, temporal, and architectural ‘wrinkles’, JR connects with the living memory of a city with reference to the knowledge that can pass from ageing citizens to younger generations. The first iteration took place in Cartagena, a strategic naval port during the Spanish civil war. Portraits of the city’s oldest residents were pasted on to crumbling walls, acknowledging these witnesses to the chaos and suffering of war, and its aftermath. In Havana JR collaborated with Cuban-American artist 340

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Figure 29.3 A Man was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015), Dread Scott. New York, USA Source: Photo credit Dread Scott.

José Parlá to create 25 black-and-white portraits of the city’s oldest residents framed by Parlá’s gestural painting, a tribute to those who experienced the turbulent sociocultural history of Havana. 9. Anonymous Auras (2009), Beatriz González, Central Cemetery, Bogotá, Colombia In Bogota’s Centre for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation (CMPR) González’s silk-screen depictions of peasants charged with collecting the bodies of war victims cover 8,957 empty niches of four columbaria. At this site of collective grieving, the work symbolically traces the memory (aura) of those whose bodies were unspoken for, with eight iconic images repeated to activate memory, making the absent present. 10. Sumando Ausencias (Adding Up Absences) (2016), Doris Salcedo, Plaza de Bolívar, Bogotá, Colombia Salcedo’s site-specific work responded to the 2016 Colombian referendum that failed to reach a peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces. In a ‘collective act of mourning’ the names of victims of the nation’s long civil war were inscribed using ash on to 2,000 rectangles of white fabric. These were knitted together by volunteers to

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form a tapestry that covered the plaza. A symbol of short-lived peace, the blanket was removed from the plaza within 24 hours. 11. The Geometry of Conscience (2010), Alfredo Jaar, Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago, Chile Jaar’s public memorial to the victims of the Pinochet regime is a subterranean room measuring five cubic metres into which visitors descend. Enclosed in darkness and silence, the disorientating and persistent effects of trauma in Chile’s cultural memory are revealed through 500 illuminated silhouettes that gradually appear on the wall. The victims of the regime are humanised as they surface alongside anonymous Chileans photographed by the artist in the street. 12. Open Cinema (2012), Marysia Lewandowska and Colin Fournier, Largo Condessa do Juncal, Guimarães, Portugal Investigating sociopolitical and cultural issues, Open Cinema was a temporary cinema installed in the public square Largo Condessa do Juncal. Members of the public stood upright in a series of enclosed portals and viewed films selected by local factory workers. While temporarily recalling the city’s politically radical cinema history, the work also activated social participation in public art (see Figure 29.4). 13. Mobile Museum (2014–ongoing), Verity–Jane Keefe, Barking and Dagenham, London, UK Mobile Museum is an ongoing interdisciplinary project that expands insight into the sociocultural history of 11 housing estates in the Barking and Dagenham borough within Greater London. A converted mobile library vehicle serves as a roving archive and collection service to document and classify memorabilia or found objects in the area, while providing a mobile site for public workshops, documentary work, and publications.

Figure 29.4 Open Cinema (2013), Marysia Lewandowska and Colin Fournier. Guimarães, Portugal Source: ML/CF CC by NCSA 4.0.

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14. Carved to Flow (2017–ongoing), Otobong Nkanga, Kassel, Germany A multi-site performance and installation work produced for documenta 14 that delved into complex issues and histories of natural resource extraction, exploitation, and environmental impact through the creation of soap products. A laboratory and warehouse installed at Kassel produced soap to be sold to documenta audiences, revealing both the natural and economic processes underlying the production of everyday items, and tracing the origin of tangible and intangible elements. 15. Remembering (2009), Ai Weiwei, Haus der Kunst Museum, Munich, Germany To honour the 80,000 victims killed during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, many of whom were school children, Ai fixed 9,000 school backpacks to the façade of the Haus der Kunst, Munich. The work was prefaced by the artist’s criticism of corruption and negligence by the Chinese government, which reportedly contributed to the collapse of school buildings and the deaths of thousands of children. 16. Presencia (Presence), Karen Lissette Fuentes (2017), Regina José Galindo, Elpidos Street, Athens, Greece Presencia follows similar performances in Guatemala in which the artist addresses issues of femicide and gender discrimination. Performed for documenta 14, Galindo stood for two hours in an area of Athens known for its brothels wearing the dress of a murdered Guatemalan woman, Karen Lissette Fuentes. The Elpidos Street site was significant; a place where non-Greek women are lured into prostitution under false promises of improving their lives, while the street name means ‘hope’. 17. A Needle in the Binding (2010–2011), Beatrice Catanzaro, Nablus, West Bank, Palestinian Territories Having discovered thousands of decaying books read by Palestinian prisoners from 1967 to 1995 in the Nablus Municipality Public Library, Catanzaro documented the literary and oral histories of former detainees on living conditions in Israeli prisons. The relational, process-oriented work gained interest among the Nablus community, leading to recognition of the books as cultural artefacts. 18. Walled Off Hotel Apology Tea Party (2017), Banksy, West Bank, Palestine Street artist Banksy staged a mock British-style tea party outside the Walled Off Art Hotel, Bethlehem, on the eve of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. Responding to Britain’s role in the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948 and ongoing conflicts with Palestine and Arab states, it was attended by children from Aida and Dahishe refugee camps, with an actor playing Queen Elizabeth II. An informal apology was offered, ‘Er . . . Sorry’, that played on the monarch’s initials, E.R., etched into the separation wall. 19. Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell (2015), Sethembile Msezane, Cape Town, South Africa Msezane performed Chapungu over four hours during the removal of the John Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town, a concrete reminder of colonial oppression in post-apartheid South Africa. Embodying the soapstone bird looted from Great Zimbabwe in the late 1800s, the artist symbolically contested a collective memory that ignores wounds caused by racial segregation and subjugation. 20. A Pakhtun Memory (2011), Tentative Collective, public square near migrant colony, Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan At a roundabout near a migrant colony in Karachi, musicians performed folk songs from Pakhtun, the rural origin of many locals, as a way to activate participation and cultural memory. As the crowd joined in the performance, the power dynamic of public space

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momentarily shifted to the migrant population of economic refugees, who are politically disadvantaged and displaced from their origins and practices. 21. Sing for Her (2013), Bo Zheng, Hong Kong Sing for Her acknowledged the 100,000+ domestic workers from South East Asian countries who serve in households across Hong Kong, yet who are marginalised economically, politically, and culturally. A giant interactive megaphone was installed in public spaces, activated through shouting to encourage public engagement. The public were invited to participate in ‘karaoke sculptures’, a karaoke-style singalong in Tagalog, the national language of the Philippines and the homeland of a majority of Hong Kong’s migrant communities (see Figure 29.5). 22. Don’t Follow the Wind (2011–ongoing), ChimPom, Fukushima Daiichi, Japan In 2011, 12 artists were invited to create works to be installed within the restricted Fukushima Exclusion Zone, the area evacuated following the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Due to the inaccessibility of the area, the works cannot yet be viewed, and therefore remain invisible until they are viewed by future audiences when the restriction is lifted. 23. Embassy (2013–ongoing), Richard Bell, Melbourne, Australia Created as a ‘satellite’ to his earlier Aboriginal Tent Embassy (1972), Bell’s ongoing project turns a large military-style tent into a participatory space where indigenous

Figure 29.5 Sing for Her (2015), Zheng Bo. Salisbury Garden, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong Source: Zheng Bo.

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diplomacy and sovereignty is articulated. Embassy has been presented in multiple cities, with indigenous speakers reflecting on oppression and displacement, while publicly promoting alternative futures based on resilience, equality, and solidarity. 24. Forgotten Songs (2009), Michael Thomas Hill, Angel Place, Sydney, Australia Forgotten Songs evokes the sounds and presence of 50 native birds that once inhabited the central city area in Sydney before processes of colonisation and urbanisation threatened their habitat. A collection of 180 empty cages hang at different heights above the laneway, with the names of species engraved into the pavement below as hidden speakers play the calls of daytime birds, changing to nocturnal songs at dusk (see Figure 29.6). 25. Blood Money: Currency Exchange Terminal (2018), Ryan Presley, Brisbane, Australia A currency exchange booth where members of the public could exchange Australian dollars for so-called blood money dollars. The notes featured portraits of prominent leaders in Aboriginal culture, replacing the current heads of colonial figures. As a form of redress, the blood money currency, with participation of the public, was a way to circulate the stories of Aboriginal leaders, activating them in cultural memory.

Figure 29.6 Forgotten Songs (2009), Michael Thomas Hill. Angel Place, Sydney, Australia Source: Courtesy City of Sydney.

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1. Dorchester Projects (2009–ongoing), Theaster Gates, South Dorchester Avenue, Chicago, IL, USA In the suburb of Dorchester in Chicago’s South Side, Gates transformed abandoned houses into workable art and culture spaces using repurposed materials. Initial developments included a library, an archive, a kitchen serving soul food, and free art workshops. These doubled as spaces for opening a dialogue on affordable housing in the city, including studios for artists. The work has expanded to a larger scale as its impact has grown. 2. Conflict Kitchen (2010–2017), Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski, Pittsburgh, PA, USA Rubin and Weleski created a restaurant that for seven years on a rotating basis served cuisine from countries where the United States was engaged in political conflict. Each iteration was accompanied by public events and discussions that engaged with cultural and geopolitical issues related to various regions (see Figure 29.7). 3. Creative Time Summit (2009–ongoing), New York City, USA Since it emerged in 2009, the summit has provided a platform for artists, activists, and theorists working in largely non-object based or commercial art fields to engage with the varied methodologies and strategies behind then emerging practices of socially engaged art, social aesthetics, participatory and dialogic art. The summit convenes annually to share and discuss a range of critical perspectives offered by individual practitioners, theorists, and artist groups.

Figure 29.7 Conflict Kitchen (2010–2017), Jon Rubin and Dawn Weleski. Pittsburgh, PA, USA Source: Conflict Kitchen.

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4. Immigrant Movement International (2011–ongoing), Tania Bruguera, Queens, NY, USA An artist-initiated project initially situated in a neighbourhood of multinational communities in Queens, New York, which examines the place of ‘useful art’ as a way to address growing concerns about how immigrants are represented politically and the conditions that they face. 5. Public Trust (2016), Paul Ramirez Jonas, Boston, MA, USA Across 21 days the Public Trust project collected and displayed promises made by members of the public alongside pledges made by officials such as politicians, scientists, and economists. Each individual pledge was recorded as a contract and sealed through an oath made by participants. The project examined the value of the promise made by an individual, and questioned the accountability and ‘empty promises’ of those in higher levels of publicly instated authority and bureaucracy. 6. Repellent Fence/Valla Repelente (2015), Postcommodity, USA and Mexico border For four days in October 2015, 28 large scare-eye balloons with stylised designs floated 30 metres above the landscape for over 3 kilometres, temporarily rejoining Douglas, Arizona and Agua Preita, Sonora on the US–Mexico border. A metaphorical ‘suture’, the installation promoted public awareness and discourse on indigenous selfdetermination and inter-relationships of people, knowledge, communities, and land (see Figure 29.8).

Figure 29.8 Repellent Fence (2015), Postcommodity. Mexico/USA border between Agua Prieta, Sonora, Mexico and Douglas, AZ, USA Source: Courtesy of the artist. Photo credit: Michael Lungren.

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7. Palas por pistolas (2008–ongoing), Pedro Reyes, Botanical Garden, Culiacán, Mexico In Culiacán, a city in western Mexico with high death rates by gunshot, Reyes initiated a public campaign inviting citizens to donate weapons in exchange for coupons that could be redeemed for household appliances. In total 1,527 weapons were collected; these were crushed in a public display before being melted down to produce 1,527 metal shovels. The tools were distributed to art institutions and schools to be used for a large-scale public action to plant 1,527 trees in the city’s botanical garden. 8. Bibliobandido (2010–ongoing), Marisa Morán Jahn, Honduras Responding to high rates of illiteracy in rural Honduras, Morán Jahn worked with local librarians to create the legendary character, Bibliobandido, a book-eating bandit who rides his horse around collecting stories written by children and playfully terrorising them to feed his appetite for books. The project has been taken to 19 other communities as well as to Miami, New York, and Seattle. 9. Ghetto Biennale (2009–ongoing), Atis Rezistans, Grand Rue, Port-au-Prince, Ouest, Haiti Ghetto Biennale shines a spotlight on a lack of mobility for Haiti-based artists, drawing attention to the disparities of a global art market through social practice. Realised as a ‘third space’ for marginalised voices after organising artists were refused travel visas to participate in international exhibitions, each iteration brings international artists together to collaborate with local communities to create music concerts, exhibitions, and film screenings. 10. Auto Theme Park (2010) Basurama, Surquillo, Lima, Peru Responding to a lack of government initiatives to maintain zones for Lima’s many pedestrians who do not drive cars, Basurama artists converted an abandoned railroad track into a public playground and space. The disused railroad was both a neglected urban space and visual reminder of unrealised promises; its conversion represented grassroots creativity that responded to social needs. 11. CLIMAVORE – On Tidal Zones (2016–ongoing), Cooking Sections, Isle of Skye, Scotland A long-term project that responds to the impact of aquaculture such as salmon farming on the marine environments at intertidal zones on the Isle of Skye. Revealed by the outgoing tide, the dual-purpose installation is both an underwater oyster table, and a dining table where educative cooking sessions can envision new possibilities for food production and consumption in an era of climate alteration (see Figure 29.9). 12. Granby Four Streets (2013–ongoing), Assemble Collective, Toxteth, Liverpool, UK The multidisciplinary Assemble Collective oversaw the renovation of five Victorian terraces in the suburb of Toxteth, which had been left to deteriorate after urban regeneration schemes repeatedly failed to restore them. The Assemble Collective’s work activated the community, setting up events and the Granby Workshop, a social enterprise that sold products made in the community to raise funds for larger renovation projects. Assemble Collective was awarded the Turner Prize in 2015 for the Granby Four Streets project. 13. The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour (2009), Marjetica Potrč and Wilde Westen (Lucia Babina, Reinder Bakker, Hester van Dijk, Sylvain Hartenberg, Merijn Oudenampsen, Eva Pfannes, Henriette Waal) Nieuw West 61, Amsterdam, the Netherlands Artists Potrč and Wilde Westen worked with a predominantly migrant community in Amsterdam’s Nieuw West to convert a vacant neighbourhood site into a communal 350

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Figure 29.9 CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones (2017–ongoing), Cooking Sections. Isle of Skye, Scotland Source: Colin Hattersley/Atlas Arts.

vegetable garden and kitchen. Conceived as a means to reclaim the ‘village green’ as public space during a period of intensified urban development, the project brought people of different cultural backgrounds together to share knowledge and different traditions of farming and cooking, while activating a community to engage with public space. 14. Hucha de deseos (2009–2010), Susanne Bosch, La Latina, Madrid, Spain ‘Hucha de deseos: ¡Todos somos un barrio, movilízate!’ (‘We are the neighbourhood: act!’) involved collecting redundant Spanish peseta currency in a public ‘piggy bank’ and working with locals to realise two wishes from the collected funds. As a result, eight plum trees were planted to enhance green spaces, and a community blackboard was installed to exchange ideas and event notices (see Figure 29.10). 15. Migrant Choir (August 2015), Public Studio and Adrian Blackwell, Venice, Italy Invoking Hannah Arendt’s question, ‘who has the right to have rights?’ the Migrant Choir of recent immigrants to Italy performed the national anthems of Italy, France, and Britain in front of each country’s pavilion. The performance highlighted the exclusion of their voices in national anthems (see Figure 29.11). 16. Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! (2012), Pussy Riot, Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, Moscow, Russia Known for their provocative public performances, five members of Russian feminist punk rock collective Pussy Riot performed a song on the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in protest against support from church leaders for Vladimir Putin’s

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Figure 29.10 Hucha de deseos (2009–2010), Susanne Bosch. Madrid, La Latina, Spain Source: Photo credit Susanne Bosch.

2012 election campaign. With members Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, and Yekaterina Samutsevich arrested and charged, the event has drawn attention to artistic repression in the context of Russian cultural politics. 17. 48° Celsius Public Art Festival (2008), multiple artists, multiple locations, New Delhi, India A nine-day festival exhibiting 25 site-specific installations and public interventions that addressed issues around Delhi’s urban development and ecology. Each of the works in eight different locations highlighted an aspect of the city’s fragile urban ecology, one of the most polluted in the world, while drawing visitors to neglected public spaces, and inviting them to engage with the public performances, concerts, and tours. 18. Talk to Me (2012–ongoing), Jasmeen Patheja, Bangalore, New Delhi, Kolkata, and other cities, India Patheja’s site-specific interventions establish safe zones in India’s urban streets for women to engage in conversation with a male stranger over tea and samosas. Supported by a dedicated group of ‘action heroes’, Patheja’s work builds empathy between male and female strangers while critically addressing the sexual harassment many women in India fear when walking in public spaces after dark. 19. Disposable House (2012) Samudra Kajal Saikia, Guwahati, Assam, India Using a range of organic materials fixed on to auto-rickshaws, Saikia created five lifesize dwellings that were carried on a 22-kilometre procession through central Guwahati

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Figure 29.11 Migrant Choir (2015), Public Studio and Adrian Blackwell. Arsenale, Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy Source: Public Studio.

to the banks of the Brahmaputra River. Here the materials were distributed to local homeless residents. Central to the work were broad understandings of ‘home’ with questions raised on possession, homelessness, and the social use of art. 20. Umbrella movement (2014), Hong Kong The movement began as a sit-in street occupation during the democratic election protests in Hong Kong 2014 with the ubiquitous umbrella serving as a symbol of resistance while also functioning as a defence against police pepper spray. The non-violent occupation of public space in the city extended to 79 days with artists developing works based on the umbrella as an emblem of peaceful reform. 21. Sunflower movement (2014), Taiwan A largely student-led occupation of the Taiwanese Legislative Yuan prompted by political protest over a free trade agreement with China and the process by which it was 353

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passed. The sunflower is symbolically linked to Taiwan’s history of pro-democracy student movements and helped to differentiate it from the contemporaneous Hong Kong umbrella movement. Walking in the Unknown (2017), Koki Tanaka, Kyoto, Japan Responding to a desire to comprehend overlooked realities in the aftermath of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant meltdown in 2011, Tanaka’s peripatetic walk from his home in Kyoto to the nearest nuclear power plant sought to collapse a psychological ‘remove’ from events in ‘far away’ places. The 60-kilometre journey took four days to complete, bringing a physical experience of imminent disaster into closer proximity. Naga (2008), Leang Seckon, Siem Reap River, Cambodia Created as part of the Rubbish Project launched by Seckon and Bourgeois in 2006, Naga is a 225-metre-long serpent made from rattan, plastic, and nylon that floated 5 metres above the Siem Reap River for World Water Day. As a mythical serpent with powers to transform, Naga was designed to raise awareness and call on governments and communities to increase efforts to protect and conserve natural water sources. The Borderlands Public Arts Project (2018), Leila Anderson, Chase Rhys, and Kati Francis, Sibabale Silo, Cape Town, South Africa Driven by a desire to forge geographical, psychological, and social connections in the region south of Cape Town known as the ‘borderlands’, the project activated sites of ecological, cultural, and topological significance – mountains, wetlands, beaches, and contested public spaces. Art was used to reconnect communities and overcome historical, socio-economic and urban forces of separation and oppression. Mo’ui tukuhausia ‘Life Put Aside’ (2014), Kalisolaite ‘Uhila, Auckland, New Zealand For three months performance artist ‘Uhila lived a homeless existence in the streets around Auckland Art Gallery. Experiencing the everyday conditions of the city from the position of the homeless enabled ‘Uhila to collapse a barrier between gallery and public space contexts for discussing the social conditions experienced by those who are both vulnerable and

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invisible, and highlighting intrinsic controls operating in public space through ideological conditioning and law enforcement. 1. Watershed + (2008–ongoing), Sans façon, Calgary, AB, Canada With a vision to connect communities to their local water management systems, Sans façon embedded artists and art initiatives within water and environmental protection utilities in Calgary. The artists work collaboratively on public and educational processes to raise awareness and generate networks between people and place (see Figure 29.12). 2. Brightwater (2011), commissioned by 4culture, King County Wastewater Treatment Division, Seattle, WA, USA Brightwater is a conceptual art project for which artists are commissioned to carry out works at the King County Wastewater Treatment Division. Artworks are integrated into the architectural and engineering systems and conveyance routes as a way to educate public audiences on the importance and function of waste-water management. Artists work with planners and designers to expose the unseen infrastructure and operations of the system, and to encourage public participation in the care and sustainability of the natural environment. 3. Murmur Wall (2015–ongoing), Future Cities Lab, Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco, CA, USA A multi-sensory work that responds to the question: what will the city be thinking, seeing, and feeling in the near future? Taking the structural form of woven steel and

Figure 29.12 Fire hydrant drinking fountain, family (2012), Sans façon. Calgary, AB, Canada Source: Sans façon.

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Figure 29.13 Murmur Wall (2017), Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson, Future Cities Lab. Palo Alto, CA, USA Source: Photo credit Jeff Maeshiro.

light tubes, at night it displays ‘whispers’ left by the public on a website, as well as data collected in real-time online activity, projecting the inner anxieties and desires of the city’s inhabitants about its future (see Figure 29.13). 4. High Line (first section opened to public 2009; High Line Art founded this year), New York, USA A conversion of historic industrial railroad into a hybrid public space where visitors experience art and food, connect with friends, and view the city from uniquely elevated perspectives. Part of a place-making exercise, High Line serves as an example of how repurposed historic infrastructure can be creatively redesigned for the purposes of public activities and creativity. 5. Safehouse (2008–2010), Mel Chin, St Roch, New Orleans, LA, USA Chin created Safehouse in St Roch, New Orleans, where toxic levels of lead have contaminated the soil, resulting in a lead-poisoning crisis, alongside an ever-present threat of flooding. A residential dwelling was converted into the temporary headquarters of Operation Paydirt, an artist-initiated project that works with communities to prevent lead poisoning. Accessed through a bank-vault door, the interior was lined with socalled fundred dollar bills drawn by Louisiana school children; part of Operation PayDirt’s Fundred Dollar Bill Project to call attention to the dangers of lead poisoning for children. 6. Keepers Lab & Kitchen (2018), Cascoland, Chajul, Chiapas, Mexico Designed to generate spaces for encounter, dialogue, and exchange with locally produced food as the medium for communication, this active project explores the relationships between food production, its preparation, and conservation of the local jungle environment. Food is prepared around a communal table with stories and information shared on the origin of the food and culinary traditions in the region. 359

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7. Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park (2008), Alejandro Haiek Coll, Eleanna Cadalso, and Michelle Sánchez de León (Lab.Pro.Fab), Caracas, Venezuela Working to remedy a lack of communal recreational spaces in Caracas’s barrios, Lab. Pro.Fab engaged local communities in a social process to create a cultural centre with multipurpose spaces and youth programmes. Design was used in innovative ways to construct the park from repurposed materials on a disused lot bordering a highway that divides the formal and informal cities of Caracas. 8. Ad Trees/Urban Nature (2008–ongoing), Grupo BijaRi, São Paulo, Brazil An urban intervention that repurposed abandoned public billboards as climbing frames for vertical gardens. By converting advertising infrastructure into green zones, the artists opened discussion on urban ecology and sustainability issues. 9. Pimp My Carroça (2012), Thiago Mundano, São Paulo, Brazil Alluding to the popular MTV show Pimp My Ride, Mundano set out to refurbish the waste collection carts of the city’s catadores. Workers gathered to have their carts painted by street artists as they received medical care, food, haircuts, and massages. The work drew attention to the crucial role these marginalised workers play in recycling the city’s immense waste. 10. City for Children Under 99 (2013), Basurama, Sao Paolo, Brazil Using repurposed metal barrels and advertising banners, Basurama constructed an imaginative playful space and urban furniture that marked ‘the right to play’ for the city’s ‘children under 99 years’. The project demonstrated an extension of a Lefebvrian ‘right to the city’ in which public space can be reclaimed and co-created as heterogeneous and socially activated. 11. Torre de Babel (2011), Marta Minujín, San Martin Square, Buenos Aires, Argentina A seven-storey-high tower made with 30,000 books donated from libraries, readers, and embassies to mark Buenos Aires as the World Book Capital, 2011. The public could climb the tower while listening to music composed by Minujín and the artist’s voice reciting the word ‘book’ in different languages. In 2017, Minujín’s Parthenon of Books was installed in Kassel, Germany as a symbol of democracy and free speech using books that were banned or burned at certain historical points. 12. Rainbow Park (2012), Adam Kalinowski, Southbank Centre, Queen’s Walk, London, UK An interactive installation in which audiences walk over 150 tonnes of coloured and plain sand, mixing the colours so that new colours appear. The colourful sand was designed to stimulate play and creativity, while installed benches invited participants to rest and enjoy the environment. 13. Biodiversity Tower (2015), SEADS, Kris Mys & Compostmeesters Willebroek, Willebroek, Belgium A site-specific and participative work that brings together biology and art in a public space to promote biological as well as social and cultural diversity. Located on the site of a former Second World War concentration camp, the work consists of a living tower where plants, insects, and public coexist; a spiral staircase and seating so people can gather and interact at a neighbourhood focal point. 14. Freehouse Zuid – Wijkwaardenhuis (2013), Jeanne van Heeswijk, Pretorialaan 141, Afrikaanderwijk, Rotterdam Wijkwaardenhuis was a three-day market platform based on cultural production and activating the neighbourhood’s inhabitants to exchange products, services, and 360

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17.

18.

knowledge within a local area. Approaching the neighbourhood as a ‘one-stop-shop’ concept, it provided alternative economic, social, and cultural platforms for sourcing goods and values. Superkilen, The Black Market (2011), SUPERFLEX, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and Topotek1, Copenhagen, Denmark A project to install in a public park over 100 objects such as drain covers, trees, and signage that signify familiar public sites in over 50 different countries. Superkilen was designed to reflect the many origins of residents living in Nørrebro (a Copenhagen suburb) based on a concept of ‘extreme participation’ (see Figure 29.14). Ælia Media (2011), Pablo Helguera, Piazza Puntoni, Bologna, Italy A participatory art project consisting of an alternative arts radio station broadcasting from the centre of Bologna. Connected to the student movement of 1977 and underground broadcasting traditions in the city, the project focused on live participation, empowering cultural producers from different arts backgrounds to create content. Perception (2016), eL Seed, Manshiyat Nasr, Cairo, Egypt El Seed created a large-scale calligraffiti work across 50 buildings inhabited by the Zaraeeb communities who collect and recycle rubbish from the streets of Cairo. The anamorphic work comes together when viewed from an elevated point in the city, delivering an ancient Coptic proverb that holds an underlying message that redresses negative cultural stereotypes aimed at the Zaraeeb people. Makoko Floating School (2011), Kunlé Adeyemi, Lagos, Nigeria A prototype for a floating structure in the Lagos lagoon, Makoko Floating School

Figure 29.14 Superkilen, the Black Market (2011), SUPERFLEX, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), and Topotek1. Superkilen, Copenhagen, Denmark Credit: SUPERFLEX, Iwan Baan.

361

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Figure 29.15 Makoko Floating School (2011), Kunlé Adeyemi. Lagos, Nigeria Source: NLÉ.

responded to the needs of local communities in a climate and urban context that continues to morph at a rapid rate. The project explored possibilities for alternative building systems and sustainability, providing an innovative approach to housing urban populations dwelling on or near waterways (see Figure 29.15). 19. Human City Project (2010–ongoing), Michael Uwemedimo, Port Harcourt, Nigeria Following the demolition of informal waterfront settlements, including homes and businesses, by order of the government in 2009, the Human City Project founded a community-driven media, architecture, planning, and human rights movement that works to develop the voice and capability of marginalised communities. The projects create spaces of expression and meaningful participation in shaping the city (see Figure 29.16). 20. New Walk Ways in New Bell (2010–ongoing), Kamiel Verschuren, New Bell, Douala, Cameroon Approaching the problem associated with poor water drainage systems with uncovered sewers, Verschuren used long wooden boards to construct walkways over approximately two kilometres of open-air gutters in the New Bell neighbourhood, on which the artist wrote texts about water. 21. Kin ArtStudio – Mobile Gallery (2015), Vithois Mwilambwe, Kinshasa, DR Congo Responding to a lack of spaces for social and participatory art projects, Mwilambwe created the gallery as a way to bring contemporary projects to neighbourhoods and for artists to intervene in Kinshasa’s public spaces. 362

Mapping Social Change

Figure 29.16 Chicoco Radio kids (2011), Human City Project. Port Harcourt, Nigeria Source: Photo credit Michael Uwemedimo.

22. Infecting the City Festival (2010–ongoing), multiple artists, Cape Town and Mbombela A public art festival designed to bring socially engaged performance and visual art practices into everyday urban spaces. International and local artists work on dynamic projects that promote diversity, inclusiveness, and imagination through the temporary reinvention of public spaces. 23. Park (2008–2009), Sreejata Roy, Block J, Sector 5, Dakshinpuri Park, Delhi, India A project of collaborative action with local communities to transform a local park in a working class neighbourhood in South Delhi in a state of neglect into a safe social space for children. Roy’s work involved gaining the trust of the park’s homeless inhabitants and local communities to engage them in participative activities of campaigns against littering. 24. Neorizon (2008), Maurice Benayoun, Century Avenue, Pudong, Shanghai, China An interactive work that used ‘IDworms’ housed in physical structures to capture the profiles of public pedestrians as digital IDcodes. The IDcodes were used to create a morphing IDscape of the city from the black-and-white pixels of each IDCode added. Referred to as critical fusion, the artist made visible in public space the digital codes that increasingly profile people and their daily lives. 25. Pallet Pavilion (2012), GAP Filler, Christchurch, New Zealand Pallet Pavilion was created using 3,000 wooden pallets and repurposed materials to reactivate vacant city sites in the wake of an earthquake that destroyed the city centre. As a socially engaged project Pallet Pavilion brought communities together in ways that fostered resilience and connection.

363

INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote a figure, n an endnote 48° Celsius Public Art Festival 352 Abram, David 244, 253n2, 253n7 accessibility, social practice: Accessible Canada, addressing its failure 134–136; community led support 132–135, 137–139; ‘disabled’, artist’s experiences 127, 128–130; institutional change proposals 136–137; non-visual walking tours 131–132, 132; Open Access, formulation influences 126–128; poetry, expressional writing 129–131; soundscape studies 129 Adeyemi, Kunlé: Makoko Floating School 361–362, 362 Adorno, Theodor 124 Aguirre y Otegui, Philip 6 Ahearne, Jeremy 96 Ai, Weiwei: arrest protest 216; Remembering 343 Alexander, Neville 145 Alt Group 40 Alvim, Fernando 192 Anderson, Leila 354 Angola: urban regeneration and public art, Luanda 185–194, 190, 193 Applegate, Debby 165, 167, 170–171 ArchDaily 202 Arez, Sofia 181–182 Argentina 360 Arrighi, Giovanni 4–5 art as protest, Taiwan: collective performance 89–90, 91; concept elements 91; exhibition, protest platform 84, 85, 88–89, 88, 90–91; indigenous eviction studies 81; indigenous tribes, socio-political contexts 82–84; PlantMatter NeoEden, integrated approaches 87–91,

88; visual politics 91; WE WILL WIN, artist-led intervention 84–86, 85, 90 Artist as Leader report 301, 311, 317 Artist Placement Group (APG) 95, 96 Ascott, Roy 203 Assemble Collective: Granby Four Streets 350 Atelier Public #2 99–102, 101 Atis Rezistans: Ghetto Biennale 350 Australia: Melbourne’s public art disruptions 72–77; public realm projects 344–345, 345; state art scheme 5 autopoiesis 262–264 Baartman, Sarah 148–149 Bait al Karama 106, 109–111, 110, 116n12 Baldaccini, César 214–215, 214 Banksy: Walled Off Hotel Apology Tea Party 343 Barbanti, Robert 203 Bargna, Ivan 108–109 Basaglia, Franco 111, 116n16 Bastos, Victor 178–179 Basurama: Auto Theme Park 350; City for Children Under 99 360 Bear Hat, Brittany 50, 50 Beech, Dave 50, 52 Beecher, Henry Ward: abolitionism advocate 164; Borglum sculpture’s reception 171–172; Ward sculpture and its interpretation 165, 165, 166–171, 172–173, 174n24 Belgium 360 Bella, John 58 Bell, Richard: Embassy 344–345 Benayoun, Maurice: Neorizon 363 Berardi, Franco 202

364

Index

Berque, Augustine 197–198, 199–200 Bester, Willie 148, 149 Bishop, Claire 96, 97, 100, 102 Bjarke Ingels Group: Superkilen, The Black Market 361, 361 Blackwell, Adrian: Migrant Choir 351, 353 Black Youth Project 100 6 Blank Noise 11, 13–15, 14, 18–19, 20 Bleck, Nancy 294–297, 295–296 Boggs, Grace Lee 234 Borderlands Public Arts Project, Cape Town 354 Borglum, Gutzon 167, 171 Bosch, Susanne: Hucha de deseos 351, 352 Braudel, Fernand 4 Brazil 360 Brettkelly-Chalmers, Kate 39 Brightwater, Seattle 358 Brown, Lorna: Digital Natives 339 Bruce, Kate 99–101 Bruguera, Tania: Immigrant Movement International 7, 349 Bueys, Joseph 234 Burnham, Clint: Digital Natives 339 Cambodia 354 Cameroon 6, 362 Campanella, Pasquale 111, 112–113 Canada: accessibility, grassroot practices 132–135, 137–139; Accessible Canada critique 134–136; cultural sustainability, Uts’sam Witness project 294–297, 296–297, 298n34; eco-arts and digital technology 248–251, 249; political art 50, 50; public realm projects 339, 358, 358 Cartiere, Cameron 176, 317 Casa delle Agriculture 113–114 Cascoland: Keepers Lab & Kitchen 359 Casey, Edward 270 Caskey, Kristin 280, 282 Castells, Manual 69–70, 71 Castoriadis, Cornelius: imaginary institution of society 196, 197, 198, 201, 203, 205, 205n2; radical imaginary 199 Castro, Rita 181 Catanzaro, Beatrice: A Needle in the Binding 343 Ceccarelli, Salvatore 115, 116n24 CEMA 96 Chang, Candy: Looking for Love Again 338, 339 Chatman, Elfreda 18 Chiado/Carmo: Arts in the Public Sphere, Lisbon 175–177, 180–182 Chile 15, 342 Chim-Pom: Don’t Follow the Wind 344 China: Hong Kong politics and public sculptures 210–217, 210, 214; Keepers of the Waters Chengdu project 280–283, 282, 289; public art policy 5, 6; public realm projects 363

Chin, Mel: Safehouse 359 Chiu, Chih-Sin 82 Cianfanelli, Marco 144, 144 city transience, public space and art: concept of ‘city’ 69; digital disruptions 75–76; off-grid activations 73–74; permanence and fluidity 74–75; rhythmanalysis and appliance 71–72; urbanart 76; ‘urbaness’, digital conceptualization 69–71, 70 Civic Center Victory Gardens, San Francisco 58, 61, 62–63, 62, 66 Clarke, Samuel 258–259 Cockrell, Susanne: Temescal Amity Works 235–241, 237–238 Colombia 341–342 Cooking Sections: CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones 350, 351 Coppola, Luigi 111, 113–115 Copstake, Anne-Marie 95 Creative Time Summit, New York 348 cultural sustainability: aesthetic experience 292–293; Anthropocene issues 290–291; art of transformation 291; ecological art practices 293–294; indigenous focus, Uts’sam Witness project 294–297, 296–297, 298n34 D.A.N.C.E. Art Club: collective agenda 117–118, 124; critique through engagement 120; gifting of lei, valuing collaboration 118–120, 124 Davies, William 201 de Blasio, Bill 166 Deleuze, Gilles 199, 200, 259 Delier, Burak 81, 84–86, 85 Denmark 361, 361 Derksen, Jeff 129 design activism: civic engagement 66–67; commons and sustainability 63–64, 65; concept, practices and interventions 60–61, 66; disruptive aesthetic 60, 61, 66; Futurefarmers initiatives 58–60, 59, 62–67; social and environmental justice 58, 60, 65–66 design ‘trace’ 61, 63, 65, 67 Dieleman, Hans 290 Digital Carnival, Richmond BC 250, 255n28, 255n30 ‘digital native’ 11, 12 DiSalvo, Carl 61 disruptive aesthetic 60, 61, 66 Eames, Charles and Ray 197 Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT): diversity of experiences 26–27; Fukasawa’s Homestay Museum 26, 29; idealism over practical potential 28–29, 33–34; inner public, host group participation 30–32; public art role 23–24, 33; rural degrowth, revitalisation spur

365

Index

24–25; social capital benefits 27–28, 31–32; Tracing Water 26–27 eco-arts and digital technology: commodification threat 250–251; community programmes 250, 255n31; digital eco-art 248–249, 249; environments re-envisioned 246–248, 247; individual as ‘artist’ 252–253; landscape and stewardship 245–246; local voice, global reach 246; nature and human interconnectivity 243–245, 251–252, 253n1, 253n2; virtual realities 251 ecoarttech 246–248, 247 eco-futurism 253 ecological art: ensemble practices 271–273, 272; Gardens of the Anthropocene 264–267, 265; Keepers of the Waters Chengdu project 280–283, 282, 289; landscape and digital artworks 244–249, 247, 249, 251–253; Living Waters of Larimer project 283–289, 281; Temescal Amity Works 234–241, 237–238; transdisciplinary practices 293–294, 298n19; Uts’sam Witness project, Canada 294–297, 296–297; see also Harrison, Helen and Newton ecological heritage, art and social practice: community engagement 234, 241; ruralism in urban contexts 239–240; Temescal Amity Works, inspiration and programmes 234–241, 237–238 ecologically-led practice and environmental policy: framing time, Harrison artworks 306–310, 307–308, 311; global policy initiatives 300; Harrisons’ ecosystemic approach 303–305, 311–312; interdisciplinary contributions 300–301, 312; policy building, time factors 305–306 ecovention 317, 332n13 Egypt 361 Einstein, Carl 176–177 Eliasson, Olafur 108 eL Seed: Perception 361 ensemble practices: being-as-becoming 270–271, 276–277; belonging in the multiverse 270–271; contextual 270; local cosmopolitanism 274–277; notions of creativity 269; transdisciplinary insights and actions 271–274, 272 environmental policy and Harrisons’ practice timeline: construction method 315, 316, 319; Harrisons’ insights and relevance 318–319; policy making, science and politics 317–319; timeline 1962-2019 320–331; timelines, contextual usage 317 Enwezor, Okwui 118 Esposito, Roberto 201 Evernden, Neil 292 EvolveEA 284, 286, 287 Fairey, Shepard: Hope 339; protest art 6; We the People 339

Farber, Paul 167–168; Monument Lab 339, 340 Farya, Orlando 181 Ferreri, Mara 45 Filkins, Dexter 11 Fischl, Eric 172 Fitzgerald, Chris 118, 119, 120 Flatbread Society 58, 59, 61, 63–64, 66 Fournier, Colin: Open Cinema 342, 342 Franceschini, Amy 59–60, 63–64 Francis, Kati 354 Fraser, Andrea 269 Freee 50, 51, 52 Fuad-Luke, Alistair 60, 61, 67 Fukasawa, Takafumi 26, 29 funding and politics: colonial legacies 110–111, 116n14; culture of projects 106–107, 116n8; institutional agendas 54, 98, 255n31, 284, 287–288; localised challenges 45; state policies 5–6 Futurefarmers: active civil engagement 64–65; Civic Center Victory Gardens 58, 62–63, 62; commons and sustainability 63–64, 65; design activism 58–60, 62–67; design ‘trace’ 61, 63, 65; Flatbread Society 59, 63–64 FUTUREFORMS: Murmur Wall 358, 359 Galafassi, Diego 300–301, 311, 312, 312n3 Galindo, Regina Jose: Presencia (Presence) 343 Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow 99–102, 101 Gama, Tereza 190 Gandolfi, Paola 204 GAP Filler: Pallet Pavilion 6, 363 Garcia, Anthony 250, 255n32 Gates, Theaster: Dorchester Projects 348 gentrification challenges: community-led regeneration, Pittsburgh 284–288, 285; neighbourhood identity, Little Haiti 220–225, 222–223, 228–229, 229n10 Germany: memory in the making projects 343 Ghosh, Amitav 269, 301, 311 global positioning system (GPS) 198 Goldman, Tony 220 Golonu, Berin 65 Gonzalez, Beatriz: Anonymous Auras 341 Gorell Barnes, Luci 274–276, 275 Gottman, Jean 69 GRAV 95 Greece 343 Green, Charles 118 Group Material 200 Groys, Boris 109, 116n8 Grupo BijaRi: Ad Trees/Urban Nature 360 Guattari, Félix 199, 200, 259, 262–263, 265–266, 269 Gupta, Subodh 18

366

Index

Habermas, Jürgen 177 Haiti 350 Haley, David 293–294 Hall, David 124 Haraway, Donna 234 Hardin, Garret 202 Harris, Max 119–120 Harrison, Helen and Newton: artistic practice focus 300, 302–303, 313n10; ecosystemic well-being, issue engagement 303–305, 311–312, 319; ennobling issues 310–311; Greenhouse Britain; Losing Ground, Gaining Wisdom 308, 308–310; practice and environmental policy timeline 318–319, 320–331; A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland 306–308, 307 Harvey, David 83 Heeswijk, Jeanne van: Freehouse Zuid: Wijkwaardenhuis 360 Hegdewar, K. B. 12 Helguera, Pablo: Ælia Media 361 Henda, Kiluanj Kia 190, 191 Henriques, Lagoa 178, 179–180 Herodotus 157 Hewitt, Andy 96–97 High Line, New York 359 Hillary, Fiona 73 Hill, Michael Thomas: Forgotten Songs 345, 345 Hindutva Pop 11 Hirschhorn, Thomas: Gramsci Monument 339 historical monuments (US), legacy debate: Beecher sculptures, Brooklyn 164–165, 165, 166–173, 167; contradictory embellishments 169–170, 172, 174n24; inscription issues 168–169; locational factors 171–172; New York evaluations 166, 172–173; racist histories 165–166 Holt, Richard: Platform 73–74 Honduras 350 Hong Kong: politicised engagement 6; public realm projects 344, 344, 353; public sculptures, political significance 209–217, 210, 214, 218n10 Hope, Sophie 96, 317 Hsieh, Ying-Chun 82 Hsu, Su-Chen: Plant-Matter NeoEden 81, 87–91, 88 Huang, Li-ling 82 human, technology and nature (HTN) 243–245, 252–253, 253n1–2 Hunt, Rose Ward 171–172 Hutchinson, Mark 54–55, 56 Hyde, Lewis 97 Ichimura, Misako 6 India: art world abuse, digital exposé 18; Blank Noise, sexual harassment activism 13–15, 14,

18–19; cultural sphere, political context 11–12, 17–18, 21n12; Indian art market’s emergence 12–13; Khirkee Voice’s inclusivity 15–16, 16; New Delhi scheme 5; public realm projects 352, 363; racial subjectivities challenged 15–16, 19, 20; World War I, accounts and remembrance 155–156, 157–161 Infecting the City Festival, Cape Town 363 Ingold, Tim 293 inner public 30 Italy 351, 353, 361 Iwaki, Kazuya 26–27 Jaar, Alfredo: The Geometry of Conscience 342 Jabłonˊ ska, Elż bieta: Nowe Życie (New Life) 260, 261–262, 261 Jafa, Arthur 11 Japan: community engagement 6; Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale paradigm 24–33; public art expansion 23; public realm projects 344, 354; rural art festivals 23–24; rural sustainability and art projects 24–25 JR: The Wrinkles of the City 340–341 Kaddumy, Fatima 106, 109–110 Kagan, Sacha 291, 293 Kahn, Peter H., Jr. 251–252 Kajiya, Kenji 23 Kalinowski, Adam: Rainbow Park 360 Kant, Immanuel 177, 259 Keefe, Verity Jane: Mobile Museum 342 Keepers of the Waters Chengdu project 280–283, 282, 289 Kelly, Owen 96 Khirkee Voice 11, 15–16, 16, 20 Kinyanjui, Mary Njeri 83 Kitagawa, Fram 24, 25–26, 28–30, 33 Klien, Susanne 28, 29, 30 Kochupillai, Malini 11, 15–16, 16, 19–20 Kojève, Alexandre 199 Korea 5 Ku, Ping-ta 82 Lab.Pro.Fab: Tiuna el Fuerte Cultural Park 359–360 Lacy, Suzanne 95, 235 Laliberte, Guy 220 Lastesis 15 Latour, Bruno 269, 274 Lefebvre, Henri 37, 71, 73, 257, 259–261, 263–264 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 258–259, 260–261 Leiser, Pitsch 39 Leone, Grace 75 Levitas, Ruth 96 Lewandowska, Marysia: Open Cinema 342, 342 Liu, Jianhua 31–32 Living Room festival 39

367

Index

Living Waters of Larimer project, Pittsburgh: community vision and obstacles 283–285; institutional agendas 287–288, 289; mapping tasks and empowerment 285, 285–286; ongoing impact 288 LocoMotoArt 248–249 Lourenço, Paulo 181 Louv, Richard 244 Lu, Chien-Ming: Plant-Matter NeoEden 81, 87–91, 88 Lum, Ken: Monument Lab 339, 340 Lyndon, Mike 250, 255n32 Mabitsela, Lesiba 150 Magnanensi, Giorgio 249 Mandela, Nelson 143, 144, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151 Mannahatta 245–246 mapping art, artworks/projects 2008–2018: categories 335; changes from within 346–354, 348–349, 351–353; memory in the making 336–343, 338, 340–342, 344–345; political and economic context 335, 338; shape of the city 356–363, 358–359, 361–363 Margolin, Victor 60, 66 Markussen, Thomas 61 Marshmallow Laser Feast: In the Eyes of the Animal 251 Massey, Doreen 204 Matilsky, Barbara 302–303, 304 Maxwele, Chumani 6, 143 McLuhan, Eric 253 Melbourne, public space and art: ‘grid city’ disruptions 72–77; laneway culture 73; No Vacancy 75–76, 77; Platform 73–74; SkypeLab 70, 76; Swanston Street Sculpture Walk 74–75; Urban Animators 75; Urban Laboratory 73–74 memorialisation and identity, South Africa: colonial legacies 145–147; Heritage Day debate 151–152; Man in the Green Blanket 150; Rhodes Must Fall movement 143, 145, 148–149, 153n1; spatial contestations 146–148; static object, transitional views 148–150; temporary art interventions 153; temporary art/performative interventions 150–153; time related contestations 144–146 memory and wartime commemoration: biological processes 156–157; mnemes dilemma 157; poetry 155–156; soldiers’ inner lives 158–161, 160; unknown soldier paradox 158, 162n8 ‘metatopicality’ 177, 184n13 #MeToo movement 17, 18 Mexico 349–350, 349, 359 Michaud, Yves 203–204 Mimiec, Rachel 99 Minujin, Marta: Torre de Babel 360 Mishra, Pankaj 12, 22n30

Mitchell, W. J. T. 52 Modi, Narendra 11, 12 Moment Factory 250–251 Moorman, Marissa 192 Morán Jahn, Marisa: Bibliobandido 350 Moser, Edvard and May-Britt 199 Mota, Costa 178–179 Mouffe, Chantal 56, 96, 97 Msezane, Sethembile: Chapungu: The Day Rhodes Fell 152, 343; performative sculptures 151, 152–153, 153 Mumford, Lewis 69 Mundano, Thiago: Pimp My Carroça 360 Murray, Dean 40 Mwilambwe, Vithois: Kin ArtStudio 362 Nadir, Leila 246–248 Nakamura, Yûjïro 200 Napier, A. David 270 neighbourhood identity preservation, Little Haiti: arts gentrification challenges 220–221, 228–229, 229n10; community mix 219; language, visual reinvention 223–224; Toussaint murals, cultural education 221–222, 222–223, 225–226; Toussaint’s motivating empowerment 225–227 Netherlands 350–351, 360 new genre public art: activism and public art, Auckland 38–46, 41, 44; Chiado/Carmo: Arts in the Public Sphere 176–177; contextual art 202; Living Waters of Larimer project 283–289, 281 New Zealand: art-making and social justice 118–124; Auckland’s public policy 5; community engagement 6; contested memorials 7; D. A.N.C.E. Art Club, collective engagement 118–120; justice, passive approaches 117; public realm projects 354, 363; public space and art, Auckland 37–45, 41, 44 Nicholson, Cecily 132–133 Nigeria 361–362, 362–363 Nijman, Jim 219 Nishida, Kitarō 199–200 Njami, Simon 194 Nkanga, Otobong: Carved to Flow 343 Noki, Mgcineni 150–151 Norway 58, 59 Obama, Barack 227–228, 338, 339 Obama, Michelle 63 Ole, Antonio 189 Open Access framework: accessibility in context 128, 132, 134, 136, 138; ‘disabled’ framing 127; formulation influences 126–129 ‘otherwise’, public spheres: art and politics 17, 18; digital activism 18–19; harassment interventions 18–20; new perspectives 20; racial subjectivities challenged 19, 20

368

Index

Pakistan 343–344 Palestine 343 Palmer, Wynne 250, 255n28 Panuku 42, 43 Papalia, Carmen: ‘Blind Field Shuttle’ 131, 132; Bodies of Knowledge 134–135 Parisi, Luciana 260, 263, 266 participatory art: artist research insights 94–95, 103; cultural policy, historical links 95–97; dissensus, ‘think difference’ 97–98, 103; Make Destruction’s democratic sphere 100–102, 101; project dynamics, challenging intentions 98–99; ‘state aesthetic’ boundaries 99–100 Patheja, Jasmeen: Blank Noise project 11, 13–15, 14, 18–19, 20; Talk to Me 352 Peat, F. David 291 Pedley, Sue 26–27 Peppermint, Cary 246–248 Peru 350 Pioselli, Alessandra 107 place-making, art-led: Castoriadis’s imaginary institution 196, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203; community and society 200–201; geoculture to geopolitics 197–200; governance and infrastructure 202–203; ‘imaginary institution of place’ 204–205, 207n76; pluralistic hypotheses of ‘place’ 203–204; Project for Public Space 196–197 Plato 197–198 political art: discursive production 54–57; intentionality, societal implications 51–52; metaphoric exchange 48, 52–54; metonymic relationships 55–57; political capacity, non-site potential 49–50 Pop Projects 38, 40 Portugal: public art and cultural identity, Lisbon 175–183, 176, 179; public realm projects 342, 342 Postcommodity: Repellent Fence 349, 349 Potrč , Marjetica: The Cook, the Farmer, His Wife and Their Neighbour 350–351 Powell, Ivor 149 Presley, Ryan: Blood Money: Currency Exchange Terminal 345 Prisk, Joe 122 Project for Public Space (PPS) 196–197 public art and cultural identity, Lisbon: Chiado/Carmo: Arts in the Public Sphere 175–177, 180–182; ‘cultural earthquake’ 178; public sphere transformations 177–180, 179; ‘river’ element 175–176, 176, 182–183, 183n4; ‘symbolic’ violence 177 public art, global history 4–7 public art, social and economic value: community regeneration, Larimer’s vision 283–288, 285;

funding criteria and processes 279–280, 284; participatory engagement, Chengdu 280–283, 282 public sculptures, Hong Kong: Beijing democracy movement commemorations 213–214, 215–216, 218n10; colonial legacy 209; Flying Dutchman (Freedom Fighter) 214, 214–217; Golden Bauhinia, political symbolism 209–212, 210, 217; Monument in Commemoration of the Return of Hong Kong to China 212–213, 217 Public Share: active engagement 121–123, 122; collective agenda 117–118, 123; making and sharing 121; materials and site significance 121, 123 public space and art, Auckland: activation challenges 45–46; audience accessibility 39–41; community empowerment 43–45, 44; Living Room festival 39; participation and placemaking 42–43; Pop Projects 40; Satellites initiative 41, 41, 42, 43; temporary public art 39; urban design and activation strategy 37–38, 42–43 Public Studio: Migrant Choir 351, 353 Purple Thistle Centre 132–134 Purvis, Ted: Temescal Amity Works 235–241, 237–238 Pussy Riot: Punk Prayer: Mother of God, Chase Putin Away! 351 Ramirez Jonas, Paul: Public Trust 349 Rancière, Jacques 91, 100, 250 Rands, Ahilapalapa 118, 119, 120 Rawls, John 200 Raymond, Roseanna 43–44 Read, Simon 270, 271–274, 272, 277 Redmond, Monique 121 Régulier, Catherine 71 Reyes, Pedro: Palas por pistolas 350 Rhodes Must Fall movement 143, 148–149, 153n1 Rhys, Chase 354 rhythmanalysis 71–72 Ricoeur, Paul 177 Roy, Sreejata: Park 363 Rubin, Jon: Conflict Kitchen 348, 348 Rugoff, Irit 65 Rundle, Deborah 121, 122–123 Russia 6, 351 Saikia, Samudra Kajal: Disposable House 352 Salcedo, Doris: Sumando Ausencias (Adding Up Absences) 341–342 Sanderson, Eric W.: Mannahatta 245–246 Sans façon: Watershed + 358, 358 Sassen, Saskia 69

369

Index

Savage, Kirk 146, 167–168 Schafer, R. Murray 128 Schrag, Anthony: Make Destruction 100–102, 101, 317 Schroder, Mark 123 Schumacher, E. F. 290 Schuyler, Montgomery 170 Scott, Dread: A Man was Lynched by Police Yesterday 340, 341 Seckon, Leang: Naga 354 Seward, Andrew: Platform 73–74 Shim, Hanna 41, 41 Short, John Rennie 175–176 Silo, Sibabale 354 Singapore 5 Singh Bhist, Mahavir 11, 15–16 Situationist International 37, 95 Situations 202 socially engaged art vocabularies: appropriation issues 106–109; Bait al Karama’s evolvement 109–111, 110; Casa delle Agriculture 113–115; culture of projects 109, 116n8; emancipatory proposal 114–115; problem-solving product 107–108; Wurmkos, embodying diversity 111–113, 113 social practice art: accessibility, challenging perceptions 131–139, 132, 138; art as protest, Taiwan 84–91, 85, 88; community engagement 6; conservative and radical 53–56; design activism 60–62; design trace 61, 63, 65, 67; Futurefarmers initiatives 58–60, 59, 62–67, 62; Open Access framework 126–128, 132, 134, 136 Söderström, Ola 198 South Africa: memorialisation and identity 143–153, 153; protest art 6; public realm projects 343, 354, 363 space and public art: autopoietic transformations 262–264; complexity of meanings 257–258; digital imagery and subjectivity 264–267, 265; potentiality for change 260–262, 261; production of space 257, 258–260; publicness 258 Spaid, Sue 317, 332n13 Spain 340, 351, 352 Steel, Barney 251 Steveni, Barbara 96 Stilinović , Mladen 52 Stockman, Harriet 121, 123 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 168–169 Sullivan, Graeme 95 Sunflower movement 6, 353 SUPERFLEX: Superkilen, The Black Market 361, 361 Supports/Surfaces 55, 55 Suzuki, David 244, 253 Sˊwidzinˊ ski, Jan 197, 202

tactical urbanism 43, 250, 255n32 Taiwan: contested memorials 7; protest art, indigenous eviction studies 81–91, 85, 88; public art policy 5; Sunflower movement 6, 353 Tanaka, Koki: Walking in the Unknown 354 Tanoai, Tuafale 118, 120 Tan, Rosebel 41 Taylor, Charles 177, 184n13, 200–201, 241 Technorganic 246–247, 247 Temescal Amity Works, social sculpture: community engagement and heritage 234–236, 241; programme aims and functions 236–239, 237–238; social economies 239–241 Tentative Collective: A Pakhtun Memory 343–344 Te Pou, Shane 7 Terranova, Tiziana 258 Teti, Vito 201 Thiel, Tamiko: Gardens of the Anthropocene 264–267, 265 Thorpe, Ann 61 Tokolos Stencil 150–151 Toussaint, Serge: artist’s passion 219–220; murals, cultural education 221–222, 222–223; politics of recognition 225–227, 228; visual semiotics 223–224; whitewashing controversy 226–227 Troemel, Brad 17 Trump, Donald 95, 146, 266, 338 Tutu, Desmond 152 ‘Uhila, Kalisolaite: Mo’ui tukuhausia ‘Life Put Aside’ 354 Umbrella movement 353 United Kingdom (UK): participatory art, challenging ‘state aesthetic’ 99–102, 101; participatory cultural policies 96–97; public realm projects 342, 350, 351, 360 United States (US): Beecher monuments, legacy debate 164–173, 165, 167; community regeneration, ideals/challenges 283–288, 285, 289; contested memorials 6, 7; ecological heritage, art and social practice 234–241, 237–238; Futurefarmers, design activism 58–60; neighbourhood identity preservation, Little Haiti 219–228, 222–223; politicised engagement 6; public realm projects 338, 339–340, 341, 348–349, 358–359, 359 Urale, Vaimaila 118 urbanart 76 urban development: neoliberalist inequalities, Taiwan 83–84; public art disruptions, Melbourne 73–77 urbanism and public art: activation, term and forms 38; Auckland’s activation strategy 37–38; audience accessibility 39–41; durational challenges 45–46; non-place critiques 37; participation and place-making 42–45, 44;

370

Index

tactical urbanism 43; temporary activities 39, 46 urban regeneration and public art, Luanda: artworks limited presence 189–190, 190; ‘emotional geography’ and cultural identity 191–194; heritage, symbolic erasure 191; Luanda Triennial 191, 192–194, 193; security tensions 188–189; urban growth impacts 185–186; urban history and processes 186–189 Uts’sam Witness project, Canada 294–297, 296–297; hereditary chief’s role 295–296, 298n34 Uwemedimo, Michael: Human City Project 362, 363 Venezuela 359–360 Verheggen, Ap: Dog Sled Riders 246, 254n16 Vermeulen, Angelo: Biodiversity Tower 360 Verschuren, Kamiel: New Walk Ways in New Bell 362 Virno, Paolo 258 Vishmidt, Marina 49, 53, 56 Voina 6 Vološinov, V. N. 51 Vranken, Lode 61 Walker, Frith 42 Wallerstein, Immanuel 4–5

Ward, John Quincy Adams 165, 165, 166, 168, 170, 174n24 Warner, Michael 96 Weleski, Dawn: Conflict Kitchen 348, 348 WE WILL WIN project, Taiwan 81, 84–86, 85 Whau the People 45–46 whisper networks 18 Whitehead, Alfred North 260 Whyte, William 197 Wilde Westen 350–351 Williams, Bill, Chief 294–297, 296–297 Williams, Raymond 96, 236 Williams, Tracey 42 Wilson, E. O. 251 Wodiczko, Krzysztof 30, 33–34 Wu, Mali 86 Wurmkos 111–112 Xi, Jinping 338 Yannow, Dvora 102–103 Yeh, Lily 6 Yon, Elisa 317 Young, Alison 72 Zebracki, Martin 176, 317 Zheng, Bo: Sing for Her 344, 344 Zuma, Jacob 145

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