A Gathering on Art & Land

Part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon, Serpentine, 13 July 2024.
With Kalpana Arias, Marcus Coates, Annalee Davis, Belinda Holden, Caroline A. Jones, Sandra Knecht, Remi Kuforiji, Eva Papamargariti, Yinka Shonibare, Graeme Smith and Carla Subrizi.

Interdisciplinary conversations on art, agriculture, gardens and burials.

A Gathering on Art and Land is a day centring art and design-led approaches to planting, farming, seeding, gardening and burying. Through conversations and presentations, the event explores our relationship to the land, using ground and soil practices to start ecological conversations and reveal their potential for transformation, regeneration, and hope.

This gathering advocates for imagination and coexistence with the non-human world, platforming alternative ways of understanding and relating to the land in the face of a destructive, globalised discourse. Highlighting the importance of creativity, Indigenous land management and communal engagement, A Gathering on Art and Land underscores the transformative power of culture and stewardship, emphasising how artists engage directly with the earth in their practices.

Programme

11:00am Introductions

11:25am Marcus Coates in conversation with Lucia Pietroiusti and the Land

In this intervention, Marcus Coates will be in direct conversation with the land, interviewing temporarily extracted soil. this conversation will cover topics such as attributing personhood to soil, soil identity, health, exploitation and community. Audience members will be able to ask questions and learn more about soil supportive networks. Head of Ecologies Lucia Pietroiusti, will join the conversation to reflect on the role of listening and speaking on behalf of more than human entities.

11:50am Sandra Knecht in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

In conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sandra Knecht explores the integral role that land plays in her artistic practice. Throughout her career, Knecht has investigated the concept of “Heimat,” which encompasses one’s spiritual and physical home, through works that she describes as ‘social sculptures’, to reveal the complexities of our relationships with the land, with each other, and with ourselves. These works, several of which this conversation will touch on, take various forms, including dinner parties, performances, farms, bee houses, and even entire villages. Knecht’s art both complicates and elucidates the intrinsic connections between ecology, land, and the concept of home.

12:30pm Annalee Davis in conversation with Daisy Gould

In this conversation, Annalee Davis will delve into her ongoing practice exploring Barbados’ extractivist plantation history, posing the critical question, ‘How can we unlearn the plantation?’ Focusing on her work in gardening and agriculture as means of resistance and historical reclamation, this conversation will explore ecological practices of resistance in the Caribbean. Davis will highlight the significance of the plot in plantation economies and ecologies, and the role of ritual and ancestral knowledge systems in challenging historically inhumane conditions and contemporary environmental destruction amidst climate breakdown.

12:50pm Contributions by Carla Subrizi and Kalpana Arias, followed by an in-conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Carla Subrizi will present on the work of Gianfranco Baruchello, the pioneering artist who integrated farming into artistic practice with his Agricola Cornelia, a farm based outside Rome. In response to the hyper-aesthetic land art of the 1960s and 1970s, Baruchello viewed the land as a medium for political discourse. Claiming space back for nature, Kalpana Arias, a technologist and guerilla gardener, fights for nature in grey spaces and campaigns for the right to grow through urban growing.

This in-conversation will explore the natural and built environments as sites for politics, rewilding, and communion with the land, emphasising the intersections of art, ecology, and social practice. Through various approaches to human-land engagement, the discussion will consider the natural world as both a collaborator and an entity to be respected and preserved.

1:55pm Eva Papamargariti presents the new video work, All that is Hidden

All that is hidden explores a multitude of natural and synthetic organisms around the former coal-mining area of Zollverein in Germany, looking at them from micro to macro-scale.

These organisms are integral components of a dynamic ecosystem and bear witness to the history of the site, carrying within them the traces of the historical, geological events and forces that have happened through the years.

The work attempts to show how the traces of the past have been virtually “engraved” into the landscape and soils of Zollverein. What kind of worlds and hybrid forms could emerge from this amalgamation? All that is hidden unfolds a narrative that reveals traces, remnants, hidden and invisible organisms, fossils and new hybrid life forms that co-exist inside a continuous stream of geological, economic and technological changes. In the process, computer generated animations with recordings that were made on-site with a microscope camera, are combined with atmospheric soundscapes and sound recordings, also produced in situ by the artist.

2:15pm Caroline A. Jones, Weird Cuttings, or Invisibilities of the Anthropocene

Weird is the quality to begin with: “unearthly” media objects of the Anthropocene, in which flows of video capture ongoing spews, returning us to the wyrd etymology of our ‘destiny’ to befoul the planet. These “cuts” into global industrial operations effectively puncture the ongoing invisibilities that characterise modern epistemic relations to extraction (always an elsewhere). This in-conversation aims to review that history, while also exploring what otherwise cloaks these weird Fates and Furies: the comforting blandishments of garden and pastoral. Jones touches on the spaces of art, which make room for pedagogies of right relation, reciprocity, actual symbiosis, circular economies, and respect – modest but profound interventions such as Sakiya and Cooking Sections – unweirding but also “unsettling” practices, which chastise agrilogistics.

3:10pm Yinka Shonibare CBE RA in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Yinka Shonibare CBE RA will explore key themes and topics in his Serpentine exhibition Suspended States in-conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine’s Artistic Director. In the words of the artist, Suspended States ‘addresses the suspension of boundaries, whether psychological, physical or geographical.’ As part of A Gathering on Art and Land, the conversation will also highlight Shonibare’s longstanding commitment to ecology, in particular, how his practice examines the impact of colonisation on the environment as well as his Guest Artist Space (G.A.S.) Foundation’s commitment to sustainability and food security at the Farm House in Ijebu, Nigeria.

3:50pm G.A.S. Foundation residency alumni Remi Kuforiji and Graeme Smith in conversation with Belinda Holden

Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation is a Nigerian non-profit founded by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA that delivers residencies and public programmes across two sites located in Lagos and Ijebu. With a focus on interdisciplinary knowledge exchange as well as engagement with the local community, residencies at the G.A.S. Farm House, in particular, explore trans-disciplinary craft, design, art and the environment, food sustainability and agriculture. Residency alumni Remi Kuforiji and Graeme Smith, in conversation with Yinka Shonibare Foundation CEO Belinda Holden, will discuss their ongoing practices and the site-specificity of the work they created while in-residence at G.A.S. Foundation.

Remi Kuforiji’s residency was partly preoccupied with researching Lagos Island’s Afro-Brazilian history with a particular focus on speculating collective approaches to architectural preservation. Culturally entrenched in the area since the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Lagos Island’s Afro-Brazilian quarter became an enclave for formerly enslaved people returning to the continent from South America, Europe, and Sierra Leone. Graeme Smith’s residency focussed on expanding his research into 18th-century bead trade and glass craft with a focus on Sub-Saharan glass-making technology that emerged in Nigeria. During a stay at G.A.S. Farm House, Graeme researched local approaches to ceramic production. He developed prototypes for vessels using laterite soil, fibres, and various natural glazes and mineral sealants found on the land.

Using their urban and rural perspectives as a point of departure, Remi and Graeme will discuss their responses to creatively engaging with indigenous and historical approaches to cultural and land preservation uncovered during their respective residencies.

Graeme Smith and Remi Kuforiji’s residencies were generously supported by the Royal College of Art Association of Black Students, Alumni & Friends (RCA BLK).

5:00pm Sky Hopinka, Subterranean Moon and Denizens of Hell

In a new two-channel video, Subterranean Moon, verses from the poem, Denizens of Hell, permeate scenes from a powwow outside of Seattle, organized by the artist. Subterranean Moon is deftly emceed by Ruben Little Head, guiding the viewer and the audience through a 30 minute long take of a Northern Traditional dance special. The footage in the second channel is abstracted by one of Hopinka’s signature treatments, a formalistic technique in dialogue with ethnopoetic documentation and representation he’s employed throughout his work. For Hopinka, the confluence of the poetic verse and the movement of his embodied camera is a vehicle for relating to and listening to the beings and ancestors who haven’t been repatriated by museums and institutions, all the while questioning different forms of confinement that they must contend with.

5:45pm END

The Infinite Ecologies Marathon is a long durational project that looks at the world-building potential of culture in the face of ecological destruction. Committing to working towards planetary thriving, this interdisciplinary series centres artist-led reimaginings for environmental action.

Ecologies is Serpentine’s new interdisciplinary department, focusing on developing a holistic, flexible and adaptive approach to embedding environmental purpose throughout Serpentine’s programmes, infrastructure and networks. Our mission is to place culture right into the heart of environmental efforts, and environmental commitment can steer the cultural sector. Ecologies was born from the learnings of the General Ecology project and Back to Earth.