Which uses have historic archives of environments, particularly when coloniality and imperialism are embodied in collections of the natural world?
To address this question the multi-disciplinary workshop explicates the connections between artistic practices, photography, archives, and environmental imagination in the presence of the narratives of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene suggests the endangerment of the world through humans and, at the same time, the dissolution between the categories of nature and culture. Its narratives offer deep time perspectives into past and future. Through the critiques of the concept, such as Black Anthropocenes, environmental histories can however be considered afresh. Black Anthropocenes challenge white, European-centric perspectives on modernity and re-articulate junctures of historical events.
At the workshop we will discuss photographic practices (notably ecological, socio-documentary, contemporary re-performance and re-uses of archival photographs) within these scientific, social, and political contexts. Archives provide compelling insights not only into environmental changes, but into ideologies and cultures of nature, human-nature relations, and the effects of change. The archive is considered within an expanded field: the documentary and object archive as historical repository; the environment as archive of the Earth; and the memory of the human body as archive. The widened conception of the archive and photographic practices reframe and activate histories towards multiple and de-centred environmental imagination.
The workshop is convened by Dr Bergit Arends (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, The Courtauld) with contributions by Martha Fleming, Matthew Gandy, Sheila Ghelani & Sylvia Kokunda (Land Body Ecologies), Joy Gregory, Diego Molina and Harun Morrison.
Speakers and Contributors:
Bergit Arends is an academic in the arts and humanities, curator of contemporary art and museum professional. Bergit creates and studies interdisciplinary curatorial and artistic processes with a focus on environment, natural history collections, and visual art. Her research interests are the Anthropocene and its alternative propositions as interpretative methodologies for works of art. She publishes widely, including ‘Unequal Earth’ (NaturKultur 2021), The Botanical City (2020), Botanical Drift (2018), Interdisciplinary Science Reviews (2018), and on decolonising natural history museums (Art in Science Museums 2019). She has curated contemporary art projects for the natural history museums in London and Berlin (Art/Nature 2019).
Martha Fleming is a museologist, an historian of collections, and an historian of science with a particular focus on natural historical and correlative scientific collections and archives. Her current research investigates the creation and management of natural history collections as significant forms of knowledge producing practices embedded in globalised colonial contexts. She is currently the Principal Investigator of ‘Field/Work in the Archive: Herbaria as Sites of Cultural Exchange’ at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
Matthew Gandy is Professor of Geography at the University of Cambridge and an award-winning documentary film maker. His books include Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City (MIT Press, 2002), The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (MIT Press, 2014), Moth (Reaktion, 2016), and Natura urbana: ecological constellations in urban space (MIT Press, 2022).
Sheila Ghelani & Sylvia Kokunda from Land Body Ecologies
Sheila Ghelani is an artist whose solo and collaborative performances, social art works, installations, texts and videos seek to illuminate and make visible the connections between identity, ecology, science, history and the present day.
Sylvia Kokunda is the leader of Action for Batwa Empowerment Group (ABEG), an NGO supporting the indigenous Batwa community to which she belongs, in Uganda.
Both Sheila and Sylvia and are members of Land Body Ecologies, a network of hubs connected across the globe in a two-year collaborative project exploring solastalgia. In London, the project is anchored by Invisible Flock and Minority Rights Group International, and is currently a resident of the Wellcome Hub, within Wellcome Collection.
Joy Gregory is a visual artist of British Jamaican heritage, who has been working with photography for over 35 years. She is part of the Black Arts Movement in 1980s and 90s Britain. Her work has been exhibited in the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and in seminal survey shows The Place is Here (2017) and Life Between Islands. Caribbean British Art 1950s–Now, and is held in the collections of Tate, V&A, Arts Council Collection, and the Government Art Collection.
Diego Molina is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. After working as a botanist in Colombia for several years, he turned to environmental humanities. In his research, he proposes a dialogue between images, texts and botanical collections to reconstruct historical relationships between people and plants in tropical cities.
Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based on the inland waterways. Harun is currently an associate artist with Greenpeace UK. This year Harun continues to develop and repair a garden for Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Arts Catalyst research programme Emergent Ecologies, and is producing a card game, Environmental Justice Questions, which will be circulated across 2023.
Schedule:
13.30–14:00
Tea/coffee
14:00–14.15
Welcome and introduction. Bergit Arends (curator/art and humanities, The Courtauld Institute of Art).
Provocation paper.
Martha Fleming (museologist/historian of science, Natural History Museum of Denmark).
14.15–15.30
Joy Gregory (artist, London)
Harun Morrison (artist, London)
15.30–16:00
Tea/Coffee break
16:00–17.15
Sheila Ghelani (artist, London) & Sylvia Kokunda (activist, Uganda) from Land Body Ecologies
Diego Molina (botanist/environmental humanities, Royal Holloway, University of London)
Matthew Gandy (film maker/geographer, University of Cambridge)
17.15–17.30
Discussion
17.30 onwards
Drinks
