Ecologies of Practice
PANEL 18
Ecologies of Practice
Wednesday, 6 July 2022
2:45 am - 4:15 pm
Location: University Theater
Panel Speakers:
Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton
Karishma D’Souza & R. Benedito Ferrão
Paul Merchant
Moderated by: Kiran Sunar
Water/Log
(extracts)
Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton
Water/Log is an ongoing body of work that follows material and geopolitical flows in the enduring aftermaths of colonialism, extractivism and military-industrial expansion. From the mainland shores and islands along the southern African coast, to the South Atlantic, South Indian and Southern oceans, the sub-Antarctic islands and, finally, to the frozen ‘end/s of the earth’: Antarctica. With the histories of the ‘harvesting’ of whales, seals, seabirds and guano as entry points, Water/Log – alongside the earlier project Salt-Water-Bodies: From an Atlas of Loss – grapples with complicity and heightened precarity, the unfinished labours of postmortem mourning-as-witnessing, and a yearning towards more wake-full and just planetary futures.
Afterimages and aftersounds. Stories told in pieces, in parts.
Adrienne van Eeden-Wharton: As an artist-re/searcher, Adrienne is passionate about finding ways of re/storying fraught and entangled terraqueous, multispecies relatings. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, on the Antarctica, Africa and the Arts project which is funded by the National Research Foundation as part of the South African National Antarctic Programme; it is a nested project of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South initiative at Wits University.
Roots between Waters: Beyond Goa in the Canvas of Karishma D’Souza’s Inter-Oceanic Worlds
Karishma D’Souza & R. Benedito Ferrão
No place is only ever itself. Our proposed presentation looks at two oil paintings by Karishma D’Souza, both locating Goa in a nexus of Indian and Atlantic Oceanic world histories, as well as the Lusocentric pluricontinental heritages of Asia, Europe, and Africa. Given Goa’s history as one of the longest held European colonies, its position as the capital of the erstwhile Estado da Índia, and its significant location and involvement in trade (slavery included), our joint artistic and scholarly work attempts to query how the enclave’s inter-oceanic links may be understood as an archive that supersedes the Indian Ocean alone. In our engagement of art as a record of the transoceanic/continental, we consider placemaking as a product of historical encounters that may be obscured by, and yet undergird, the present. D’Souza’s Ocean Words and Rooting-1 were both produced in 2018 and, as their titles suggest, take inspiration from processes of mobility and stasis; transregional cultures additionally inform the making of these works. Accordingly, what these canvases allow for is an enquiry into the connections between places, not only through time and ecology, but also in the movement of people and objects. Thus, we seek to comprehend how art can register and simultaneously surface interconnected legacies across oceanic worlds. As we will explore, D’Souza’s works serve as an atlas of intertwined geographical heritages. In their rendition of personal and familial displacements, regional histories, and ecological motifs, the paintings reference their own moment but also signal the past as an ongoing presence.
Karishma D’Souza is a visual artist based in Goa and Lisbon. Her recent exhibitions include Invocation, Xippas Galerie, Paris (2020), History Routes, Lisboa Open Studios, Atelier Concorde, Lisboa (2018), and Endless State, Skowhegan Alliance (2020). She was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2012-13).
R. Benedito Ferrão is an Asian Centennial Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor of English and Asian & Pacific Islander American Studies at William & Mary and Fellow of the American Institute of Indian Studies, 2022. He is the editor of Goa/Portugal/Mozambique: The Many Lives of Vamona Navelcar (Fundação Oriente 2017) and curator of a 2017 retrospective of the same title
Speculative Ecology an Political Agency in the Chilean Pacific
Paul Merchant
Focusing on works by Claudia Müller, Sebastián Calfuqueo, and Delight Lab, this paper argues that the political agency of much contemporary Chilean installation and intermedial art lies in its articulation of an ocean-based “speculative ecology.” This playful, experimental approach to the representation of natural environments, which can be traced in the works of figures such as Cecilia Vicuña, Raúl Zurita, and Nicanor Parra, as well as in indigenous cosmologies, allows the spectator, listener, or participant to conceive of alternative modes of human-nonhuman relations. These alternative modes of relation frequently emerge in marine and aquatic environments, in line with Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality (2012) and Macarena Gómez-Barris’s articulation of decolonial “submerged perspectives” (2020), and have been previously overlooked by a Latin American ecocritical tradition that has privileged notions of identity tied to the land. I contend that the “speculative ecology” proposed by contemporary artworks can be seen as an active part of the movement toward a new constitution in Chile, which has included calls for an end to the neoliberal extractivism that characterizes the country’s current political order. Ultimately, the multisensory and intermedial nature of these works suggests a new ecological episteme (Escobar, 2020) that is better able to address the intersection of environmental, social, and racial questions than previous understandings of ecological art. I conclude by arguing that careful attention to contemporary art from Chile can therefore enrich both the global “blue humanities” and our understanding of art’s political agency in today’s Latin America.
Paul Merchant is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, UK. His current project, ‘Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present’, is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is the author of Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and the co-editor of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020).