'Speculations on Ecology, Time and Action' by Essi Vesala

A lot has been said and done around ecology in contemporary art discourse, as we’re in the middle of an accelerating climate crisis and other environmental and social injustices in our planetary being. Ecology holds a magnitude of meanings: it can be understood as a discourse, a theme, a practice, an ontology, a speculation, an action, a way of thinking. In best cases, it can take the form of all of the above. Through ecology, it’s possible to encounter alternative practices and structures of thinking – I will introduce some ideas regarding those. I have found it important to research ecology related to not only artistic, but also curatorial and institutional practices – discuss ecological perspectives on the level of mediators and facilitators.

As the crisis is all-encompassing and pierces through every experience, it seems relevant to ask: what does the current state of the world mean for artistic practices, curating, institutional structures and experiencing art? Artists and curators have started to take on issues around the climate crisis with different approaches and pragmatic shifts. Art and curating can be fertile grounds for knowledge-creating and embodied knowledges, finding and creating meanings and communities for ecological resilience. According to my own previous research, ecological thinking within curatorial work and in institutional practices in general, entails ideas from feminist new materialisms, as well as decolonial and post-fossil thinking. All of the three immense theoretical frameworks connect to each other through their aim of questioning, challenging and dismantling dominating Western-hetero-patriarchal power structures and fossil-capitalist world order. Within this set of ideas, theory and practice are not fully separated, but feed into each other – in the same logic as there’s no binary between mind and body, or mind and matter. 

More-than-human ontologies

Ecological thinking has its roots in very tactile problems that our being, as such, is facing. However visible these questions are in the contemporary art discourse, understanding of ecology is oftentimes reduced to the Anthropoceneor an overall theme in exhibition practices. The Anthropocene thesis fabricates a single narrative – the story of humankind – out of complex phenomena and includes everyone in the Anthropos. In reality, the myriad of situations, effects and impacts of climate collapse and ecological crisis happen simultaneously in many planes of existence, experience and time. Ways and means of ecological thinking and practices are always situated differently in different bodies and timespaces. Thus, the present should be regarded as multiple simultaneous realities at once and ecological thinking as first and foremost a relational practice. In Four Theses On Posthuman Feminism (2017), Rosi Braidotti articulates the current post-human shift in research as post-anthropocentric turn, which calls for “becoming relational in a complex and multidirectional manner.” It’s important to see the bigger picture, turn to a different ontological perspective and ask: what happens when we move forward from humanism, individualism and technocratic solutions?

Theories of feminist new materialisms challenge the Western object-subject-based ontology, through paradigms of thinking beyond binary and anthropocentric ways. The set of theories unearth a way of delving deeper into ecological questions of sensing the Earth and its materialities. “Taking matter seriously,” Alaimo & Hekman propose in Material Feminisms (2008), “entails rethinking the fundamental categories of Western culture”. Matter is seen as more than a mere resource, more than a passive backdrop to our human activities: matter in itself carries transformative power and agency. This view of the more-than-human world challenges the way of seeing “nature” as a resource and as a site for extraction and exploitation. Feminist new materialisms propose a possibility to place ourselves in the middle of bodies and bodyminds we coexist with, in the world, to surrender our human and subject centric paradigms.

Pragmatic shifts

The ecological crisis calls for profound changes in the fabrics of our societies. The transition from our deep oil dependency asks more than solely relying on technofixes and switching to renewable energy sources – it will be a deep cultural change, a transformation and a reconstruction. In essence, we have to change the way we perceive life on Earth. Independent research unit BIOS has worked effectively in Finland to introduce, bring forth vocabulary and discourse around ecological reconstruction of the society. They have proposed tentative solutions and tools for the transformation, from infrastructure and food production to use of lands and forests. BIOS also discusses the role and potential of art in the transformation, as they write: 

Art cares for meaningfulness by holding a constant inner and interpersonal dialogue on what is important in individual and common life. In art, the dependence of one human on other humans and nature becomes recognisable, acceptable and even enjoyable. Art expresses the fragility, finiteness and mortality of all life and the necessity of change.

It is acknowledged that art, by no means, needs to influence or discuss certain topics, but artistic practices have the potential to propose new ways of being and render our understanding of the world. It holds space for dealing with certain topics and affective responses to those, be it about ecological transformation or our relationship to more-than-human world. Curators, too, have taken a turn to think and work around material bases of practices, which emerge from material realities of the world. However, on a larger scale of exhibition practices, ecology needs to shift from a conceptual starting point to be implemented in everyday practices, on the level of the artist, curator and institutions at large. Many artists already pay attention to the changing environments, energy bases of practises and materials, as well as the relationship to more-than-humans. Curators and institutions should carve space and engage in experimental, post-fossil fuel and new materialist working methods.

Institutional structures and exhibition making are often harmful in themselves: they can have negative impacts on the environment; create emissions and waste; be profit- or goal-oriented and don’t always enable equal chances to POC, women, LGTBQ+ and disabled artists. We have to ask more from our institutions, and ourselves, if we are holding positions of power: to look beyond sustainability, beyond quick fixes and green capitalist intentions. Ecological practices are not a trend, a buzzword or a single project, but a paradigm shift, which concerns everyone. The burden shouldn’t be on the shoulders of artists only, since artistic practices are intertwined with institutional structures and have to reside within their heavy energy, labour and material consumption and rigid infrastructures. Those structures can and should be contested; they exist, because they are lived real through everyday actions. Even if institutional structures and their values are produced by complex socio-political and economical interrelations, they can be reconstructed. How we, as curators and artists, discuss ecology, bodies and beings matters. Likewise, how we perceive and actively dismantle prevalent harmful norms matters.

Usually in ecological practices things like material dimensions of exhibition making come into question. Especially large-scale, international exhibitions, which function within fossil-capitalist structures, start to feel outdated, when they are looked from an ecological perspective. The flow of energy, materials, people and objects can be immense. It’s clear that material realities of exhibitions should be thought about in more depth: how exhibitions are built and installed, what materials are used and where they are sourced from. Priority should be given to reused or reusable materials and those that are locally sourced. Degrowth and post-fossil thinking can be implemented in infrastructural decisions, funding and programming, as curator Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez did with Contour Biennial 9 – Coltan as Cotton.[1] 

Petrešin-Bachelez wanted to rethink the whole biennale structure; unlike many biennials that last for a few months, Coltan a Cotton span over a year. The biennale was not active for the whole time, but it was divided in three phases, which followed the lunar cycle. Not too often, it’s questioned how biennials or exhibitions should be produced and how production cycles work. With Contour Biennial 9 artists had more time to produce their work and there was more time for curatorial research. For Petrešin-Bachelez, slowing down practices means adapting to changes inevitably caused by climate crisis and engaging and committing in practice that take also social and cultural issues into consideration. One another example of a paradigm shift, regarding funding: some Finnish funding bodies have started to award higher travel grants for arts professionals who choose to travel by land and sea rather than fly to their residencies and other international projects. These kind of initiatives underlines that changes shouldn’t happen on the level of individuals but overall systems. 

Post-fossil thinking and degrowth are not perhaps seen as overly inspiring way of perceiving art and curating, because of the ethos of scarcity, cutting down and refusing. However, it’s more than letting go of familiar and harmful ways of doing – experimenting with new possibilities that the paradigm opens up. Art is fluid – a process, a ritual, an act, a sensation, an idea – art, if anything, has a potential to separate itself from fossil structures. 

Speculative turn in ecology

Ecology-oriented practices in the arts are often future-oriented. The view of the future takes different shapes and forms, even if the consensus seems to be that the future is more or less doomed – at least if no proper actions are taken on national, intra-national and infrastructural levels. However, the view of the future is relational. Climate related catastrophes are already present especially in the Southern parts of the world. Effects and urgencies of climate crisis happen in different time scales, which should be taken into consideration when we talk about ecological issues, as the history of climate change has been evolving hand in hand with the history of colonization.

A growing number of artistic and curatorial research around ecology speculates different ways how the world could evolve. There’s a turn to speculative fiction and world-building, as we lack the words or specific means in the current state of the world. I find it important to be immersed in speculative realities, as often those imagined worlds open up a myriad of possibilities and speculative knowledges.

In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story She Unnames Them (1985), the protagonist decides to unname all the beings of the Earth that they encounter – creatures like dolphins, whales, yaks and sheep no longer are known by their given-names. The story poses a new possible reality: what if all the beings of the Earth would have the right to name themselves? By unnaming the earthlings, the protagonists feels immediately closer to them, like there is no more boundaries dividing “them” from “us”:

They seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear. And the attraction that many of us felt, the desire to feel or rub or caress one another’s scales or skin or feathers or fur, taste one another’s blood or flesh, keep one another warm […] that attraction was now all one with the fear.

In the story, naming and categorization serve towards othering; seeing those other creatures inherently different from us. Just like when we talk about nature, we automatically assume it to be outside of ourselves – somewhere out there. In Le Guin’s story, “unnaming” works as a counter-mechanisms to othering – it could be perceived as a decolonial act. What if we, in the Western parts of the world, would look to our colonial pasts, and use same kind of counter-mechanism to recognise the rights of those, who have been othered with violent acts and oppression? How would Western modernity look like after those pasts, presents and realities have been acknowledged? Possibly, new ways of being in the world come true not only through speculative futures, but also speculative presents and pasts.

Through speculative practices it’s possible to imagine a more intimate relationship with the Earth and earthlings. Feminist new materialisms, speculative fiction and working towards a post-fossil world all ask for an open mind. It comes down to changing one’s perception, be it through a shift to post-anthropocentric ontologies or accepting a fundamental transformation in the fabrics of our societies.

There are no quick fixes to solve these multiple entangled crises and circumstances at once. There are different ways in relating to our planetary being, though. The epoch of the individual often lacks perspective beyond one’s own experience, beyond what could mean to be truly relational. What I’m rooting for, is active curiosity, seeing past limits of a capital-driven, patriarchal and Western worldview, past the limits of what it means to be a human – what it means to be a rock, a centipede, a river or a lizard? Speculative ecological practices seem vital in redefining what kind of worlds we could aim for. I like to think speculative fiction and world-making as action: without speculation there is no space for becoming and without action there is no transformation. Thus, every action against oppressive forces proposes a multitude of new possibilities and new collective realities to arise. The earth we live true today is one of myriad of possible earths. In coming together and sharing our speculative pasts, presents and futures lies potential for change.

[1] Based on Petrešin-Bachelez’s interview in dissertation Practicing Coexistence: Entanglements Between Ecology and Curating Art (2019). More about Contour Biennial: www.contour9.be. 

References:

BIOS, “Ecological Reconstruction”, Published 8 November 2019. (Retrieved 10 December 2019 from https://eco.bios.fi).

Braidotti, R. (2017). “Four Theses On Posthuman Feminism”. Anthropocene Feminism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Le Guin, U. K. (1985). She Unnames Them. First published in The New Yorker, 21 January 1985.

Vesala, E. (2019). Practicing Coexistence: Entanglements Between Ecology and Curating Art. Dissertation. Stockholm University.

Alaimo S. & S. Hekman (eds.). (2008). Material Feminisms. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Essi Vesala is Helsinki-based independent curator and writer, who occasionally works with film. Their practice is informed by speculative ecology and queer feminisms. Vesala’s research around ecology and curating has focused on challenging current fossil capitalist structures and creating alternative, sometimes experimental ways of working. Through their work, they aim to make space for complexity. Vesala curated a site-specific exhibition Hyper-terrestrial in Nacka forest, Stockholm, and currently is planning upcoming projects in Helsinki.

This text accompanies episode 2 of Withstanding, a podcast by the Finnish Cultural Foundation in New York. It has been previously published in conjunction with the exhibition Silent Spring, organised at Hafnarborg, Iceland in 2020.