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Today in the news more black and brown bodies traumatized the soil is toxic the air is poison<\/em>, Mississauga, 2018.
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Today in the news more black and brown bodies traumatized the soil is toxic the air is poison<\/em>, Mississauga, 2018.
Photo : Toni Hafkenscheid, courtesy of the Blackwood Gallery, Mississauga<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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But the title of the series complicates this narrative by linking the experiences of the non-human animals that are depicted in her images with that of Black and brown human subjects. There are some among us who can no longer breathe<\/em>, for instance, features a white swan hovering above a computer-generated liquid sinkhole, but the text conjures up experiences of asphyxiation, and particularly the last words spoken by Eric Garner, a Black Staten Island resident accused of circumventing state tax law who was confronted, and then murdered, by New York City police. The capacity to breathe has also been central to the logics of plantation slavery in North America, manifested through another system that \u2014 like the Beaufort wind scale \u2014 was a colonial tool for measuring air: the spirometer, a device designed to measure the capacity of the lungs of white and Black people to adapt to different climates, which was used as a justification for slavery2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being<\/em> (Durham, Duke University Press, 2016): 111-112.<\/span> As Black Studies scholar Christina Sharpe observes in her discussion of the spirometer, \u201cThere is\u2026 a connection between the lungs and the weather\u201d in the wake of slavery, as \u201cweather monitoring was a major part of plantation management\u201d used to cultivate crops, but also to predict \u201cthe life expectancy (or lack of) of the captive laboring population.”3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Ibid., 112.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Even as race scientists argued that the lungs of Black people were capable of greater exertion, some non-human subjects \u2014 including the mute swan pictured on Battle\u2019s billboard \u2014 were protected as property of the royal family in the British Empire from 1482 onward.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Emily Cleaver, \u201cThe Fascinating, Regal History Behind Britain\u2019s Swans,\u201d Smithsonian Magazine<\/em>, July 31, 2017, < bit.ly\/3dwO43dwpcode><\/span> Battle\u2019s juxtaposition of imagery and text points to the deeply violent ironies of the history of ecological transformation and of current climate change rhetoric, which advocates for the protection of animals and plants while ignoring the racial logic that makes some human lives cheap and disposable. In other words, Battle\u2019s billboard project racializes the climate crisis, by insisting that viewers see climate change as the product of environmental racism that has been unfolding across the (former) British Empire for the past four hundred years. Battle\u2019s title, which invokes the fatalistic tone of reporting on climate change and the frenzied tempo of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, is also tinged with a sense of irony. After all, for whom are the world-ending effects of colonialism and slavery \u201cnews\u201d? As M\u00e9tis scholar Zo\u00eb Todd points out, for both Indigenous and Black subjects in North America, the world has already ended several times over.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Zo\u00eb Todd, \u201cRelationships,\u201d Theorizing the Contemporary Editors\u2019 Forum, Fieldsights<\/em>, January 21, 2016, <bit.ly\/36V3gES>.<\/span> What does it mean to discuss \u201ccatastrophic end times and apocalyptic environmental change\u201d in the context of the climate crisis in North America, Todd writes, \u201cin a place where, over the last five hundred years, Indigenous peoples faced (and face) the end of worlds with the violent incursion of colonial ideologies and actions.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Ibid.<\/span> Battle\u2019s installation therefore urges us to stretch our thinking about the timescale of colonialism\u2019s impact on the planet, to think beyond the saturation of images of the present symptoms of climate change \u2014 in news media and contemporary art galleries alike \u2014 so that we might conjure its more difficult-to-picture historical causes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While we are now accustomed to thinking of the current epoch as the Anthropocene \u2014 a geological era marked by the overwhelming influence of human activity on the planet\u2014 the term is problematic in how it focuses on an abstract, universal, and implicitly white human subject.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Feminist , Afro-pessimist, and Indigenous scholars have therefore urged us to examine the longer and more profound role played by colonialism in shaping Earth\u2019s climate. Recent scientific studies of the geological record have likewise suggested that 1610 is the \u201cgolden spike,\u201d or start, of the climate crisis: a date marked by a significant lowering of global carbon dioxide levels, following the colonial invasion of the Americas in the fifteenth century and the massive genocide of Indigenous peoples that allowed forests to temporarily regenerate.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene”, Nature<\/em> 519 (march 2015): 171-180.<\/span> While it seems contradictory to argue that a lowering<\/em> of CO2 levels marks the beginning of the climate crisis, geologists have shown a steady and relentless increase in CO2 after this moment, beginning with the installation of plantation slavery across North America in 1619, which brought with it the \u201cthe largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years.”8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - bid., 174.<\/span> It is for this reason that feminist philosopher Donna Haraway has suggested renaming the Anthropocene the Plantationocene.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environnemental Humanities<\/em> 6 (2015): 159-165.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Confronting the Plantationocene requires an encounter with difficult knowledge about the complicity of white settlers with systems of violent ecological transformation that they have inherited\u2014systems that disproportionately impact populations that are the least responsible for the climate crisis, As the feminist philosopher Fran\u00e7oise Verg\u00e8s argues, \u201cWe must, in our narrative of [le changement climatique], integrate this long memory of colonialism\u2019s impact and the fact that destruction in the colonial era becomes visible<\/em> [only] in the postcolonial era.”10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Fran\u00e7oise Verg\u00e8s, “Racial Capitalocene”, in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017): 77 (emphasis added).<\/span> But this slow violence, and its delayed appearance in the form of rising sea levels, soaring global temperatures, and eventually the geologic record, has also produced a narrative of futility and fatalism in the face of the climate crisis: a sense that it is already too late to do anything. Examining Battle\u2019s billboards through the lens of futurity allows us to see the ways that, in her collages, she thinks past \u201cthe end of the world\u201d and constructs an archive of images that blurs past, present, and future. Such an approach searches out the representational logics of what cultural studies scholar Danielle Taschereau Mamers has described as \u201csettler colonial ways of seeing\u201d that made it possible to transform the landscape, and Black and Indigenous human bodies, into commodities across the borders of what is now North America.11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - Danielle Taschereau Mamers, \u201c’Last of the Buffalo’: Bison Extermination, Early Conservation, and Visual Records of Settler Colonization in the North American West”, Settler Colonial Studies<\/em> 10, no. 1 (2020): 128.<\/span> As a white settler scholar, my hope is that in seeing<\/em> settler colonialism\u2019s attitudes toward the climate in the past, we can make reparations in the present and disrupt settler futures, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang describe them.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor”, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society<\/em> 1, no. 1 (2012): 1-40.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Whereas Battle\u2019s billboards depict a future that has already arrived, David Hartt\u2019s in the forest<\/em>(2017\u20132018) presents a more optimistic vision of what might be yet to come. Combining film, photography, and sculpture, Hartt\u2019s installation examines Habitat Puerto Rico, architect Moshe Safdie\u2019s unfinished urban housing project, begun in San Juan in 1968. Extending the principles of modernist universal design that informed Safdie\u2019s Habitat \u201967 in Montr\u00e9al, Habitat Puerto Rico was meant to create affordable housing for low- and middle-income families, but the project was abandoned and the area has since been transformed into a nature reserve. Hartt\u2019s non-narrative twenty-minute video offers snapshots of the abandoned structure that, fifty years later, has been overgrown by the surrounding jungle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n Christina Battle, David Hartt, Gabrielle Moser<\/p>\n\n\n Ants, snails, birds, spiders, vines, and plants are now the primary inhabitants, having taken over the crumbling slabs of concrete and empty housing units. The video\u2019s soundtrack, composed by Karl Fousek, amplifies the sense of the site returning to nature by incorporating field recordings in which the calls of birds and insects overwhelm the noise of a nearby highway. But Hartt\u2019s camera also catalogues the human-created techno-fossils that will be left behind in the geological record for millennia. As a uniquely human material, concrete \u2014 the primary medium for Safdie\u2019s design \u2014 now covers the globe, literally: enough has been made to encase every square metre of the world in one kilogram of the material. in the forest<\/em> therefore provides a glimpse of some of the archaeological remnants that might be excavated from the site another four hundred years from now. Safdie\u2019s utopian vision, in which everyone would have access to green space as a right, made gardens central to his designs. It is perhaps for this reason that Hartt includes vessels containing tropical plants as part of the installation, housed in ceramic pots whose design echoes Safdie\u2019s obsession with the hexagon. Steel screens weave through the greenery, providing a framing device that mimics the sightlines of Habitat Puerto Rico. Although the plants echo the jungle from the film, they are also a product of colonial transatlantic trade, as art historian Krista L. Thompson has demonstrated, imported around the world but particularly into the Caribbean for the purposes of botanical study, colonial landscaping, tourist souvenirs, and interior decoration.13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Krista L. Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque<\/em> (Durham, Duke University Press, 2007).<\/span> Hartt\u2019s work therefore draws attention to the ways in which landscaping has produced massive transformations of the ecologies under colonial rule. Environments modified by humans, such as greenhouses, national parks, and even non-native houseplants, are nevertheless responsible for most of the photosynthesis occurring around the world. Ninety percent of photosynthesis on Earth now occurs in these anthropogenic biomes.14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, <\/em>trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017): 39.<\/span> It is possible, then, to imagine a version of Hartt\u2019s film in a future archive of life after \u201cthe end of the world\u201d in which the same jungle foliage from Puerto Rico, transported to North America, escapes its status as houseplant and takes over the human environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How are we to think our way out of such totalizing conditions in which colonialism and plantation slavery have transformed the climate \u2014 and the very air we breathe?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Todd, with her co-author Heather Davis, suggests that it is only by \u201ctending once again to relations, to kin, to life, longing, and care\u201d that a future can be imagined past the Plantationocene.15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Heather Davis and Zo\u00eb Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene”, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies<\/em> 16, no. 4 (2017): 775.<\/span> To return to Battle\u2019s invocation of breath and place it in dialogue with Hartt\u2019s depiction of the resilient persistence of plant life, perhaps one way to imagine the future otherwise is through the gestures of care and reciprocity that are expressed in the everyday acts of tending to plant life. If deforestation is one of the driving causes of global warming, then reforestation, many ecologists suggest, might be one of the most effective countermeasures against climate change. As poet Ross Gay writes, Black subjects are already undertaking this kind of care work, whose impact tends to evade visualization. Gay\u2019s 2015 poem \u201cA Small Needful Fact\u201d reminds the reader that Eric Garner worked for a time as a horticulturalist for the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and, very likely, worked to put plants into the ground: Some of them, in all likelihood, continue to grow, continue to do what such plants do, like house and feed small and necessary creatures, like being pleasant to touch and smell, like converting sunlight into food, like making it easier for us to breathe.16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - Corinne Segal, “A Detail You May Not Have Known About Eric Garner Blossoms in Poem”, PBS News Hour<\/em>, July 20, 2015: <www. pbs.org\/newshour\/arts\/poetry\/small-needful- fact-eric-garner>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n In facilitating breath, plants are forms of life that exceed the human-centric view created by the Anthropocene, alerting us to other subjects that are disproportionately targeted by colonial violence through their status as non-humans, and that continue to provide sustenance even in the face of the world-ending effects of racialized violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This text was first written in the fall of 2019, when, as always, the violence of environmental racism and of anti-Blackness saturated everything, much like the weather, as Christina Sharpe writes. The sudden increase of media coverage of the murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, and the suspicious death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto in May 2020 \u2014 and the demonstrations and uprisings against this state-endorsed violence \u2014 have brought the effects of this weather to the attention of the white settler public. While it feels important to acknowledge how this moment will impact how this text is received, as a white settler, it is also imperative that those of us complicit in producing this weather acknowledge that the issues anti-racist activists are fighting on both sides of the border have always been urgent and timely because they have been shaping life, and ending worlds, for more than four hundred years on this continent.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO5-Img4-IM_Moser_Hartt_091317_GF_008_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
in the forest<\/em>, installation view, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, 2017-2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, David Nolan Gallery, New York & Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/100-DO5-Img3-IM_Moser_Hartt_N0A0822_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
Carolina I<\/em>, 2017.
Photo : courtesy of Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, David Nolan Gallery, New York & Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n
Addendum<\/h2>\n\n\n\n