Thoughts on Ecological Practice (A Letter from America)

Essay for The Work of Art in the Age of Planetary Destruction publication by Complex Urban Systems for Sustainability and Health (CUSSH), University College London (forthcoming)

Excerpt from the essay:

Under this bright, overcast sky, the Paraná river is a light shade of brown, almost pink. From a car window driving through Rosario, Argentina, I briefly mistake the water for sand – a long, large beach like the ones you might find at low tide in some parts of Ireland. 

Beginning in the mid-1800s, Rosario’s privileged position on the banks of the river made it one of Argentina’s most important commercial ports. With an influx of foreign money and influence (many of it Italian, in the late 1800s), the city grew frantically, quickly, spreading widely atop its wetland ecosystems. The cemetery filled with the names of Italian businesspeople, while Italian architects built their tombs. We wander around this city of the dead with art historian Lorena Mouguelar, an expert in Rosario’s modernism, looking for the signs of architect Luigi Fontana’s booming funerary sculpture design business, and his illegitimate son’s Lucio’s earliest-ever works, simultaneously defiant of, and faithful to, the family's legacy.  

Newspaper clippings from the early 1900s depict Rosario as a port city in the way you’d imagine it: wealth, drugs, futurism, violence, some kind of anything-goes sexual permissiveness. Today, ‘soja’ and ‘narcotraffico’ are what you hear most commonly spoken by Rosarinos when talking about the city’s problems: same transportation methods, similar levels of devastation. Container ships pass by all night long, in relative silence.

Rosario’s had it hard over the last years. An intensification in the conflicts between local drug cartels has meant that murders have skyrocketed since 2018. Families with young children who can afford to think so, contemplate moving away: “children get hit in the crossfire”, they say. “We are tired.” And then there have been the fires. By the time I arrive in Rosario, the air is clear, but I am told that just a few months ago, smoke could envelop the city for days on end, making the skies yellow and the atmosphere unbreathable, forcing people indoors, wet towels at the windows. Photographer Sebastián López Brach, who has been documenting the wetlands, explains: these are anthropogenic fires, lit just across the river, across the islands of Entre Rios, to clear out vegetation and local inhabitants, and install industrial cattle farms in their place. 

I’m in Rosario to visit Adrián Villar Rojas’s new studio. In order to fabricate the works for The End of Imagination, his exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales – a project the scale of which is nothing short of insane – Adrián has had to settle into a large workshop space. “I am not a studio artist”, he explains – and this is indeed true: many of his projects take place on site, where they might remain for a while, and sometimes they return to the earth. But this was different. 

The End of Imagination began by building worlds digitally – worlds in which the artist would place objects, imaginary creatures, monuments, materials, landscapes, beings of all kinds. He then let time run, with all its catastrophes: conflict, natural disasters, the geological pushing and melding of matter against matter, fusion. A lot of fire. Long stretches of time, thousands of years sometimes, created new materials, new patterns on objects, new skins. New sculptures, conceived in these “other” worlds and brought into this one as hypotheses. The workshop, then, was developed to work with as many material processes as possible, in order to recreate these hypotheses into tactile reality. 

In short, making those worlds that, in turn, make sculptures: the digital worlds, the ecosystems of Rosario, the ecologies of the studio. As the wetlands burned across the Paraná, Adrián and countless of collaborators – artists, makers, robotics experts, architects – stretched and melted and burned – the gargantuan, geological actions of deep time on the planet being recreated at lighting speed inside the microcosm of the studio. One of the digital worlds they made, Adrián tells me, is Rosario itself. In the beautifully-designed exhibition catalogue, screenshots from the digital worlds, and shots taken by López Brach of actual wetlands on fire, are juxtaposed in such a way that Noelia Ferretti herself, the catalogue’s editorial director, takes a beat before being able to confirm which is which.

For years, the artist has insisted that Rosario is an agent in the making of his works, and this agency is human and more-than-human at the same time. Maybe you have to actually be here to realise it. Plastics and scraps from around the city’s recycling facilities are spotted by the keen eye of the artist’s father, and reconfigured by dozens of hands, pliers, printers and drills. Photos from the most active months of preparations for the Sydney works show the entire studio creating not only art, but the processes to get to it, too. In fact, it’s a bit like making, but in reverse: you start with knowing what the final thing will be like, and it is only in the process of getting there that you find yourself having to invent the machines, the materials, the support structures, the instruments and tools, that can make it possible. A world begins with the world, and ends with making sense of it… And over time, relationships form in the studio between people, as they do between materials (I am told there are not one but two “workshop babies”: concentric worlds within worlds). Briefly, I wonder whether particles of smoke from outside the windows may somehow have ended up in Sydney, stuck to, or fused into, the sculptures. 

In Rosario’s museum of history and anthropology, director Pablo Montini looks at the collection with new, careful eyes. The programmatic displacement and genocide of pueblos originarios that has gone hand-in-hand with the terraforming of this landscape remains, for the most part, all but invisibilised in everyday culture, and in most museums. Of Rosario’s collection, very few artworks survive from the region, while the bulk of the “precolombino” collection harks from the Andes, much further North, where most of the material wealth was concentrated.   

Montini shows us examples of what he calls “arte coloniál”: Christian-themed paintings, sculpture and silverware, dating roughly between 1500 and 1800. A world ends, Italian anthropologist Ernesto de Martino reminds us, when the signs of that world are no longer readable. Forced into practising an imported new cult that is fairly nonsensical (try and sell me the holy trinity), local, Indigenous artists hide local, sacred colours and the drawings of seeds and animals into these images, generating a syncretism that spells the survivance of a few memories in the face of extinction.

As in Villar Rojas’s digital worlds, time and trauma reveals relationships – and yesteryear’s missionary colonial genocide moulds and stretches into new forms and new objects that are just as terrifying: political powerlessness, abject poverty, inequity baked into the system since forever. This has been the case in much of my recent experience of Latin America; the frontline (campesiño and Indigenous) struggles for water, seed justice, decontamination and land sovereignty, that I read about frequently from London, appear cloaked in silence in the daily lives of the middle class in the continent’s large cities, from Santiago to Buenos Aires, from Rosario to Lima. 

In Argentina, it is illegal to plant seeds for commercial use that have not been patented by the multinational corporations. Artist Adriana Bustos, whose practice traces the ancient and contemporary instantiations of power and empire, tells me this while walking around her exhibition in the neighbourhood of La Boca, in Buenos Aires. A project she runs with a number of Indigenous women conserves and plants “illegal” seeds in art gardens, which require special dispensation as artworks, to avoid the seed laws. I ask her whether hiding a garden as an artwork could be a reasonable strategy to multiply these gardens in places where they may be scarce. It makes me think about ways art organisations have plenty of chances to contribute to a larger sense of purpose, by hook or by crook. 

Further away, in Santiago de Chile, and some weeks ago, artist Patricia Dominguez walked with me around an exhibition on shamanism at the Museo de arte precolombino, in the city’s centre. Having trained in botanical illustration, Dominguez now runs workshops on decolonial botany for artists. Her interviews to medicine men and women in the Mapuche regions tell stories of ancestral connections between plants, people, and places, in the face of persistent, relentless breakdown. In private, Patricia paints visions of plant mothers and machine hybrids; deep future and deep past meet around the works, closing a loop. 

So: what is an ecological practice? I ask myself and Adrián this question, in the late afternoon, as we are about to leave the studio, headed to watch Argentina play a friendly (which they will, later that evening, win against Panama), with the extended Rosarino family, at a restaurant. Given the breadth of possible approaches to this question, I wonder this: whether ecological practices today may be, in all their multiple possible forms, ones that consciously make themselves aware of the fact that they grow, exist in and belong to this planet. That we, at all moments of the day and night, and everything we do and choose and leave and destroy and repair – are all part of this planet, all of the time. And that in asking themselves then, “what to do with this fact?”, these practices offer gestures (be they poetic or practical, honestly I’m not picky) that are gestures of repair, or of making sense, or making world. Or also: of love.

Santiago, 27 January 2023
Rosario, 23 March 2023
Buenos Aires, 26 March 2023

With thanks to Beatrice Galilee, Silvia Tabachnik, Luis Villar Rojas, Mariana Telleria, everyone at Adrián Villar Rojas’s studio, and everyone else who shared their time and knowledge.