Curatorial Statement
“I propose the modern, colonial, gender system as a lens through which to theorize further the oppressive logic of colonial modernity, its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorical logic. I want to emphasize categorial, dichotomous, hierarchical logic as central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality.” —María Lugones, Toward a Decolonial Feminism, 2010.
Historically, colonial enterprises have violently linked land- and water-scapes with the bodies of women and femmes, queer people, and people of color in order to dehumanize them. By becoming dirt and water, such bodies have been equated with “natural” resources, made vulnerable to exploitation, extraction, and land theft justified along lines of race, gender, and sexuality. Yet such linkages, particularly in recent years, have been meaningfully appropriated by artists as acts of resistance that articulate new futures and magnify marginalized histories. Presenting the work of Farah Al Qasimi, Beatriz Cortez, micha cárdenas, Tessa Grundon, Joiri Minaya, Ada M. Patterson, Himali Singh Soin, and Alexis Rider, Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies: Decolonizing Ecological Encounters engages with complex questions around impermanence, belonging, transformation, and erasure as they relate to human (and non-human) lives and the earth itself. The works of these artists are ecologically conscious, while their self-reflective, collaborative artistic practices emphasize notions of kinship as central to their counter-historical work.
For decades, artists have explored their relationships to the earth. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Women of Color like Ana Mendieta, Beverly Buchanan, and Laura Aguilar confronted the erasures of their bodies, histories, and memories by imprinting traces of their presence in their surrounding landscapes. Drawing on these interventions, the international group of artists of Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies relate to their environment(s) by reclaiming the earth as a medium while sharing stories that reflect the ecological experiences of broader sectors of the population; they confront the lingering effects of land, labor, and resource extraction while reckoning with the ghosts of colonial impulses that desire to instill binary modes of existence; they engage across media and artistic practices to magnify the glaring stakes of climate and colonialism while responding to the mass waves of migration across political state borders. While the earlier generation of artists was largely responding to the Land Art Movement of the 1970s, in which men claimed “natural spaces” as their cultural studios, the contributors to this exhibition are particularly concerned with the contemporary challenges of climate change denial, land loss, and the specters of colonial violence that continue to haunt our ecological and political systems transnationally.
Rooted in feminist, queer, and trans ecocriticisms, this exhibition seeks to reckon with colonial logics, especially the binaries between nature and culture and within constructions of gender and sexuality. At the same time, the exhibition takes an intersectional approach to highlight the ways that communities are affected by climate crises—which are inextricably linked to colonialism—differently. As such, artists collectively respond to the subjugation and erasure of certain bodies in history, narratives, and visual culture—and the concomitant degradation of, and assault on, bodies of land and water, resulting in all-around loss. Refusing the colonial gaze, the artists of Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies work from peripheral spaces in order to generate productive conversations and hopeful visions around the possibilities for sovereignty, sustainability, gender identity, and labor rights, all within an epoch of ecological crisis. Relationships with soil and water are explored in particular, as these elemental bodies are not only instrumental to biological life on earth, but also have been culturally linked with the most vulnerable bodies.
Some artists attempt to efface their own bodies by blending into the environment, at the same time emphasizing their distinction from it and unwillingness to disappear. Some mergings of bodies and terrain are intentionally dystopic. Others re-imagine the art-historical canon, historical archives, or futures and cosmologies in an attempt to present counter-histories to exclusionary mytho-narratives. Many pieces present visually or contextually jarring, even dystopic contrasts, with bodies (i.e., human bodies, materials, terrain, etc.) that are out of time or out of place. Such highly staged artifice is meant to unsettle the harmfully comfortable idealistic narratives we have grown accustomed to, emphasizing that many human and land bodies are actually disembodied, alienated, or trapped in non-sustainable lifeways. The artists of Fluid Matters, Grounded Bodies pave speculative, reparative pathways toward equitable futures and safe living environments. By staging these works together, the exhibition ultimately seeks to imagine possibilities for a decolonial future, shaped by networks of care, kin, and reciprocity.
Beyond the Coloniality of Place
As a mechanism of control, colonial logics transform places into grids and maps, while reducing the people, flora, and fauna residing therein into specimens for extraction and study. Despite the projection of such rigid systems, human and non-human agents alike, including land itself, regularly resist facile classifications; they exhibit hybridity and transgress arbitrary, man-made boundaries—flowing, jostling, merging, blending, and colliding. Through such (inter)actions these bodies subvert colonial legacies and confront ideological narratives.
Bodily Presence and Absence
Imperial forces flatten and marginalize colonized bodies, identifying and blurring them with the ecological landscapes that they destroy, obscuring or even erasing the presence of these bodies entirely. Through performance and new media that actively engage viewers, artists appropriate such flattenings. Artists make visible absences and erasures—particularly of the bodies of non-white, queer, trans, femme, immigrant, disabled people—creating new kinds of presences and ways of relating to (transformed) environments.
Counter-Histories and Mythologies of Place
Colonial tactics disembody landscapes, forcing biased historical narratives of supremacy and a monolithic culture that conceal abuse and destruction. Artists mobilize participatory multimedia and transdisciplinary methodologies to reckon with oppressive colonial histories. They unearth counter-histories and create new modes of knowing places through the fabrication of speculative, materially-engaged archives, re-telling of mythologies and folktales. As a result, these works play with time and blur the boundaries between history and memory, offering transcendence while remaining firmly grounded in place.
Kinship as Remediation
The creation of kin through an ethics of care promises an antidote, and a path toward remediating eco-biological and social systems alike, as well as the very process of knowledge production. Such decolonial recuperative practice urgently unfolds at the speed of trust—an engagement with communities of human and non-human beings, archives, and places that is markedly, intentionally slow, refusing the fast-paced rhythms of global capitalism and economic speculation.
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