Re: <nettime> Reportback from the Parana Delta

On Tue, Mar 5, 2019 at 2:40 PM Sebastian Stein <bushalle@gmx.de> wrote:

dear brian and all,

as I read your post and especially this part

"How to move from away the current pattern of agrochemical exploitation,
toward a new coexistence with nature? The expressions gathered in this
exhibition give a foretaste of future social conflicts, when humans and
non-humans will come together to resist the forces that are denying
everyone's right to residence on Earth.",

I was reminded of the Anthropocene Socialist Mouvement discussion on
nettime some weeks ago.
Already at that time, I wondered how all of you think about the
discussions around the anthropocene,
non-human agency, survival, the already slowly happening disaster and
the need to invent a different
(human) way of interacting with a nature after nature to sort of fight
for “everyone's right to residence on Earth”
- and nothing short of by that eventually also survive as humans. What
role would this new conception
of nature after nature and the ensuing ideas of humanness as part of and
enmeshed with non-humanness play in
the forming of an Anthropocene Socialist Movement? How much of a change
of human self-conception and with
that of human western cosmology would be necessary? And how to think of
a human way-of-life that is trying to
approach the non-human part of the planet in, say a more fair way,
without falling back into neither romantically
idealist, nor paternalistic-hidden colonialist, nor
neoliberal-sustainability traps? What would something like an
eco-communist way of dealing with non-humans look like? Not sure if
nettime is the right place to ask this,
though.

best,
sebastian

On 03/05/2019 04:11 PM, nettime-l-request@mail.kein.org wrote:
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2019 12:11:36 -0300
> From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
> To: nettime <nettime-l@kein.org>
> Subject: <nettime> Reportback from the Parana Delta
> Message-ID:
> <CANuiTgwP9SnnjmuV_YoZkbgTQbrJ_Dt0j6q6=3EsUOf0yGhzGQ@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> The Earth Will Not Abide / Collaborative Territories
>
> by Brian Holmes
>
> We are on the banks of the Parana River, in Rosario, "the Chicago of
> Argentina" - one of the biggest grain-exporting ports in the world. Behind
> us is a wealthy metropolis with towers reaching into the sky, then dead
> flat fields of GMO soybeans that stretch across the Pampa and beyond, into
> the foothills of the Andes. In front of us is the river itself, wide and
> brown like the Mississippi but entirely different, because it is not
> integrally dammed, diked, channeled and transformed into a simple highway
> for barges laden with grain, sand, stone, coal and petrochemicals. Instead,
> the Parana retains a vast delta, 200 miles long and as much as 50 miles
> wide, full of densely vegetated islands separated and joined by braided
> channels.
>
> The Delta is a tremendous bioregion whose outline is clearly visible from
> the air, while its labyrinthine inner landscape is known only to those who
> live there. Between the monocrop on land and the rolling flood of the
> river, we are camped out in three enormous and shadowy brick tunnels - an
> underground exhibition space that used to be a railroad depot on the river
> docks, filled with dusty grain on its way to the sea. Right now this place
> is bursting with art. The show is called The Earth Will Not Abide. The
> context is called Collaborative Territories.
>
> The Earth Will Not Abide is an exhibition of critical geography that aims
> to explore the symbiotic community of the soil and its destinies in the age
> of globalized industrial agriculture. Collaborative Territories is an
> initiative that responds to the threat of total environmental control by
> engaging in expressive solidarities with the island-dwellers of the Delta.
> The meeting of the two is hardly an accident, because the central goal of
> The Earth Will Not Abide was to explore the changes in land use brought on
> by GMO agriculture plus the new China market, which together have sparked
> huge expansions of the grain-growing frontier, both in North and in South
> America.
>
> The video entitled "A Great Green Desert," by Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross,
> compares scenes from monocrop fields in Illnois and Brazil, in such a way
> that you often cannot tell the difference. That's because the underlying
> processes of colonization are so inherently similar. The wall display and
> web-based map/archive, "Open Veins of the Americas," by myself and
> Alejandro Meitin, explores the "Living Rivers" of the Mississippi and
> Parana watersheds, which are both major industrial river basins exporting
> grain. The theme of the symbiotic soil community and its relation to
> industrial farming is developed in the soil chromatography by Claire
> Pentecost, and in a somewhat different way, in the delirious
> "Cornstitution" translated from the language of the Maize by Sarah Lewison
> and duskin drum. Finally, the conflict between traditional peasant life and
> financially driven modernization processes is raised, not in South America,
> but instead in the soy-importing country of China. Sarah Lewison's
> three-channel video "Naxilandia" deals with everyday peasant resistance to
> modernization in the Lashihai Valley in the Chinese province of Kunming.
>
> The Argentinean edition of the show is quite different from the three
> previous versions that were held at the University of Illinois at Chicago,
> at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and at the Pacific Northwest
> College of Art in Portland. The difference is simple to explain: we sent
> out a powerful message from the North, and we got a transformative response
> from the South, fulfilling and exceeding the potential spaces left vacant
> in our work. Graciela Carnevale and Alejandro Meitin organized, not only
> the exhibition in Rosario, but much more: five "campaigns" that sent
> artists, activist researchers and local inhabitants out into the island
> territories of the Delta, and then subsequently brought the same
> heterogeneous mix of people together again to elaborate aesthetic
> expressions of their experiments in collective perception. The
> formalization process of these experiences was particularly interesting,
> socially, geographically, ecologically - a real intensive mix that delves
> deep into each particular territory. The results of the five campaigns were
> combined with works by Eduardo Molinari and Santiago Fredes, as well as
> small retrospective sections devoted to multiple antecedents, including the
> CuencasLab program in 2015 which Sarah Lewison and I were fortunate enough
> to join along with Critical Art Ensemble (eternal thanks to CAE). Finally I
> should add that all this was correlated with support for a very concrete
> objective endorsed by everyone participating, namely the passage of a
> "Wetlands Law" that would provide a conservation framework for riverine
> environments in Argentina, including their human dwellers and not just a
> fantasy of pristine nature.
>
> The closed two-day meeting that followed the opening was an organizational
> interweave of around forty people, involving NGO representatives,
> environmentalists, local political figures, artists, island-dwellers,
> people chased off their land by gated communities and a project on the
> "Feminist River" that comes straight out of a rising national social
> movement (however all but one of them chose not to come to the event). In
> contemporary art circles there used to be a lot of value placed what Felix
> Guattari called "transversality," which referred to social and political
> initiatives mixing people of different outlooks, origins, languages, social
> classes, skin colors and genders, in such a way that the differences
> resonate far beyond the statistical sum of diverse parts. These kinds of
> things are never smooth or easy, but I am glad to be doing them again.
>
> A key part of this work is an interactive map, made with open-source and
> community-oriented mapping technology supplied by a Seattle-based group
> called Mapseed (https://mapseed.org). There's something very beautiful
> going on here, because Mapseed is considered by its inventors to be a
> "spiritual successor" to the Argentinean project "Que pasa Riachuelo?" - a
> participative "social monitoring map" for the cleanup of the Riachuelo
> river, launched in 2010 by the group M7red. As it turns out, that same
> group also carried out one of the campaigns in Collaborative Territories.
> With the return of the Seattle-based mapping project to the Argentinean
> context that inspired it, the loop is looped, so that origins are also
> futures. To see Mapseed's work in action, and to get a sense of the Delta
> territory as expressed by those who love it, check out
> https://mapa.casarioarteyambiente.org.
>
> Here's the wall text we wrote to describe the stakes of this exhibition and
> larger project into which it is now inserted:
>
> "Convoking multiple perspectives on the Parana River Delta, The Earth Will
> Not Abide asks a question at the scale of the Western hemisphere: How to
> protect vital ecosystems against the devastation of extractive agriculture?
> How to escape the standardizing process that is transforming landscapes
> throughout the Americas?
>
> "The exhibition in Rosario comes out of a collaboration with artists from
> in and around Chicago: two cities at the center of the global grain trade,
> each surrounded by a 'great green desert.' In the Mississippi basin, as in
> the La Plata watershed, endless fields of genetically modified crops are
> causing increasing levels of environmental damage while contributing
> significantly to climate change. The works presented in the final room of
> the exhibition draw striking parallels between North and South, showing how
> living soil is reduced to a simple substrate for chemical products. Even in
> China, the largest of the soy-importing countries, the transformation of
> the territory mixes modernization and threat: two sides of the same coin,
> whose economic laws regulate our planet's destiny.
>
> "Faced with this critical assessment, an emerging movement composed of
> artists, researchers and inhabitants of the Rio de la Plata Delta have
> begun 'learning from the flood,' letting themselves be guided by the
> shape-shifting territory of the wetlands. Five groups, each mixing
> different horizons, set out for experiments in collective perception along
> the river's braided channels, from Rosario and Victoria near the Delta's
> northern tip, to Isla Paulino on the south bank of the estuary. Using an
> interactive map to leave traces of their passage, and adding their new work
> to previous iterations of the Delta project, these groups translate their
> perceptions into visual and acoustic forms, creating a flourishing 'culture
> diversity' in tune with the amazing biodiversity of the riverine
> environment.
>
> "How to move from away the current pattern of agrochemical exploitation,
> toward a new coexistence with nature? The expressions gathered in this
> exhibition give a foretaste of future social conflicts, when humans and
> non-humans will come together to resist the forces that are denying
> everyone's right to residence on Earth."
>
> ***
>
> For further information about The Earth Will Not Abide, see
> http://regionalrelationships.org/tewna
>
> For a look into the projects organized by Alejandro Meitin and a wide range
> of collaborators, see https://www.casarioarteyambiente.org
>
> For visitor information see the website of Centro Cultural Parque de
> Espana: http://ccpe.org.ar
>
> Finally, if you have not checked out Rios Vivos/Living Rivers, you can see
> that at http://ecotopia.today/riosvivos/mapa.html (and don't forget to hit
> the "North" button if you want some English).
>
> Feel free to post this on all those social media that I don't use...
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