Good afternoon everyone and welcome to a virtual program
My name is Shiva Torre and I'm an associate professor Sultan Southeast Asian art history of our department at UC Berkeley
Today's program is the second in a series of programs
Created through a partnership between the Thompson Center for the Humanities at Berkeley and the Commonwealth Club
The focus of a series is catastrophic
That story and storytelling play in helping us face and
survive
Catastrophic goal is to share knowledge and renew. Hope at this critical time
by discussing literary and visual accounts of catastrophic change through history
Interestingly this program was in development before the coronavirus crisis began
Now I speak to you from the San Francisco Bay Area
Which is one of the first regions in the country to go into a lockdown and it's just beginning to emerge
This new series of programs seek to remind us that it is not the first time that human societies have faced
catastrophic collapse
- this program focuses on the relationship between the natural world and the
sacred realm especially as it has developed in India over the last several centuries of
civilization and the rise of the Anthropocene era
Join me today for the conversation joining me today for the conversation is Rani Mukerji?
Ronal is a visual artist who makes painting animation and large-scale
installations and
Before jumping in I want to remind people that you can ask questions
Please post your questions in the YouTube chat area and they will be forwarded to me. Ok, let's start running
Thank You segata hello
Good to see you. Hello. Everybody who's out there wherever you are. Thanks, Commonwealth Club and the Townsend Center for having us
yeah, I was excited to do this before but now it seems really prescient and I'm going to just show one prod of mine to
Get the conversation started
Before I post slides, um, I wanted to show this piece of fabric because I can in this this format
Which I can do on stage
This is a print and it is a pattern that I made that comes from
Images of the youth climate marches in the last three three years or so
Abstracted into a pattern and printed on up to a piece of sari cloth
This is a gem Donnie sari
Which is made on a jacquard loom and this is something that I do in order to make raw
material for the collage works that I do
And so there's a relationship between the loom the jacquard loom which is sort of a proto digital
technology and the digital
The digital information that I'm printing on to it
So those things are having a conversation
in that print and I wanted to show you that because it's a little bit harder to see in the slides that I'm going to
Show but I'm going to share my screen and go on to the slide presentation
There we go
Um
So here we have the first slide. This is a slide of the project
I'm going to talk about which is called a bright stage and it was on view at the DeYoung museum
In middle of 2018 through early 2019 so about six months
the project
Was installed in wills E Court, which is a public space at the center of the museum
So the invitation to do this project came through Claudia schmoly
Who is the curator in charge there?
and she really just invited me and she's done this with other artists too to just
Inhabit this space with a piece of art and the middle wall. There is about 50 by 30 feet
so the space is quite monumental and
It is a public space again, which means that it doesn't there's no entry fee
So it is technically a public space and when she invited me to do this besides thinking I need to paint the walls
a color to take take it out of white space and to bring I thought a lot about the idea of bringing the
outside in to the museum and I also thought a lot about
public voices in public action and
I thought about the banyan tree, which is what I'm really going to talk about now
And maybe I'm gonna be a storyteller for a little bit to talk about this plant
which is a plant that banyan tree is a really
incredible natural
Form that I've been thinking about for a while
But the the scale of that space really gave me the opportunity to spend some time doing some research and think about it some more
the banyan is a species of fig tree and it is sacred in many cultures, but
particularly and Indian other parts of
the Indian subcontinent
and this is an image of a
cotton procession moving underneath the tree spending time setting up a
Caravan, you know getting shelter and shade and the tree
So for a long time has been a source of shade a source of shelter and and now currently is
Sort of the site of many public parks. So there's one outside of Calcutta
That is it's like a sort of small city scale tree. So it's one tree and
One of the things that's fascinating thing about it is the way that it grows. So it grows
Outwards and down, so it starts with fig trees
So the bird a bird will take a fig from one tree and go and poop a seed out into another tree
and then the epiphyte will start in the
Crux of a tree that's already existent and the tree will start the roots will start to grow
Downward and outward and as it grows down it often strangles the host tree
so in a sense the tree is both sacred and it's also this kind of monstrous plant and it's
What I was thinking of as it has its own sort of colonial mentality
So it's a tree that is the home to many species, but it also has a colonial
a
colonial way of propagating itself
So it in my project sort of became like this metaphor for where ecology and culture come together
and also
Talking about its role in or in the role that it ended up playing in these kind of
Confrontations between Imperial or colonial power and indigeneity. So this is an image of a
Person in India being hung by the British soldiers in the 1800s
because they were rebelling against the the colony and so they used these trees and the limbs of these trees because they were a
Taker they could do a kind of double kind of injury on a population
it's a very it's a handy because it has these branches but also, you know, there's a way in which
this has happened in the United States as well that these trees become because they're sacred the symbolic power of the violence is is ever
stronger
So that was those were some of the starting points for this project of wanting to bring
a kind of natural form into the museum to think about these sorts of
These sorts of how this sort of idea might might exist today in terms of the public
voices that we are hearing and who's trying to find ground and how
I'm just gonna walk a little bit through the project with these slides. So this was the left wall
some of them and some of them so these pieces are all made on linen with cloth elements that were used as collage and
Some of them are more tree-like than others. So there's a sort of you know
Abstraction to the idea of the tree the tree was like both a protagonist and a guide as well as a formal device
This particular piece some of them had these line drawings
And so there was a way in which you can see the project from lots of different points of views
You could see from the ground, but also from these second-level windows
This drawing was a drawing of a protester holding up an image of a journalist named Gary Lang
Kesh who was killed a few years ago for her pro-democracy
Journalism speaking out against Hindu fundamentalism in India now
And so this was a protest where the people were holding up her the image of her face
You know a little bit like the I am Trayvon protests that happens in the United States
So and then some of the pieces these these elements of fabrics see and this piece this
Was actually made of the images of the vigils for the same person
and so, you know
What I was doing here was making these patterns printing them onto the fabric and then using the fabric as collage
Material to think about the ways that these histories will kind of grow also they grow out
I mean, I loved the idea of thinking about the pattern of growth the outward and down
movement of the tree and also the way that
media image is kind of appear and we think about them and then they disappear and
But but that may be the things that happen there have another life and are kind of continuing on into the future in other ways
So that's a close up of that piece
And then on the center wall, I was using so each of these pieces had a different shape
missing images of the women's marches on this wall and some of these patterns and
March for our lives and also the
Approach to the Dakota pipeline water protection protests that were happening at a time
So again this sort of cultural and the ecological go hand-in-hand and a lot of my work and I'm trying
really hard to make work where the the ecological impetus is a kind of agency and
Also that the kind of nature and culture can't be separated
so this is these line drawings were images of some of the
People who are doing those protests that are coming out of the news and the patterns
So associated with those images also
I was thinking of this in a way that because of the trees being
Home to the spirits and lots of cultures
Like could I make something that functioned that way for these images?
So, you know while we may not be seeing the images that we saw eight six months ago in the media?
maybe the patterns or the sort of interest or the
Futurity of those kind of
Movements and how maybe just like the prophets of the Banyan they're sort of looking for ground and looking for a way to root
into culture, I guess that's a hopeful way of thinking about things but
Yeah, I think that those those hopeful things are important. This one shows you some of the
the places where I chose to make the work very tree like so some of the some of the linen pieces were very angular and
abstract while others
really clearly
Related to the shape of a tree. Some of them didn't have any collage at all like this blue one and
Then there were videos which were a series of extinct birds that were forming a nun forming in a sequence
And so there was sort of some movement
happening in the room, which was actually it began as a
they were I was sort of thinking of them as spirits in these trees in this idea that the dead can
Continue to speak but also Michel DeYoung who started the museum had a collection of stuffed birds
So I'm thinking about this idea of a 19th century
Museum and sort of the colonial roots of the museum and how those sorts of histories carry
into the present
this is a detail that I I put in here because this is an image of
Some people these were migrants that were waiting at the southern border of the United
States around the time that I was doing this work. I started making these line drawings
The summer before the 2016 election and it was a time when I was really humming
It was just really overwhelming everything that was going on
and then when the elections came it was even more overwhelming and so part of my way of
handling
all of that was to trace these images of things and I was thinking a lot about
The landscape and the Futurity that these people like wherever the people and up will be
Communicate will will affect the the future of that place and that they will add something to that place
so it also it was like
Can I put them in a safe space in my work?
even if they're not in a safe space in their life, so
You know now of course, I'm thinking a lot about the people that are stuck now
either in cages or at one side of the border and how those migrations and
The sort of issues of climate change are totally interwoven
this wall is another one where the tree become the tree shapes are really clear and there's also
These patterns on that wall all came
A lot of them came from the migrations that were happening in the Mediterranean Sea at the time
So I used a lot of the images of the boats and things
And those are just sort of traces that people can't see but for me there it's really
Important to mning out, you know
Just this was a sort of a situation again where people could see the work from all different kinds of angles
And I wanted it to be a place where people again the video was creating a kind of movement
so it was about bringing a sort of animated quality into this space bringing the outside in and also
Making an image of landscape that was using this kind of very non pastoral plant
Which is kind of monstrous and has this this this really rich history - you know
Also, just think about the way that historically landscape has been
in some cultures of force that is about sort of containment and
domestication and so I was really trying to sort of do the opposite and
Yet include these sort of public the idea of like the public and public space in public voices
Yeah, so that's what I have to say about that project. Then when I was invited to do this talk with Judith
I was really excited because his book I'm a change in the art of devotion was
Introduced to me through this invitation and I read it and was you know, it was amazing to me to read about
you know the
history of another I have another climate change another period of climate change and a period in an art history where
There was this agency
Inherent in people's relationship to the landscape. So you gotta please take it away. I like to hear more about your book
Well, thank you Raul and very kind of you. I
I hopefully returned to some of these conversations
As part of a discussion later in terms of thinking about both
Indigenous activism, but also how one retains the history of colonialism and the relationship
between
Colonialism and sacred groves. So as Ronald mentioned my book, which came out last year
focuses on climate change in this particular
program inside not India called bridge a
Site that was supposed to be where the god Krishna is believed to have spent his youth
now incidentally George Harrison
Composed it. Is he after he visited bridge and that's why I wrote the book
but know
What I mean, I'm a big Beatles fan, but more more than that
I think what is so interesting about this site and you can see it in this image of
devotees
circumambulating a for a
mountain or little hillock is that
in the 16th century a new sort of devotion develops in bridge in which
it's not just
image of the icon in the temple
but but that the natural environment the rocks the forest even the dust of
Brad is considered sacred
So much as one would go to a Hindu temple and circumambulate the temple here. We see pilgrims
Circumambulated a hillock. Now. What is more interesting is that this new practice of devotion?
Emerges precisely at a point where there are massive
monsoon failures El Nino Indians monsoon failures in
Africa in South America in Asia and scholars now call it the Little Ice Age
so on the one hand you have this rise of devotion of
Worshipping a natural environment on the other hand you have massive monsoon failures
So one of the chapters in this book
Focuses on what is pertinent to our discussion the idea of sacred groves
so the next image what I have is
This very interesting
project by William, Roxburgh
Who's considered the founding father of Indian botany a Scottish surgeon who works in India?
this is a this is a book called plants of the course of coromandel South India and it includes illustrations of
plants that are indigenous to the to the
to the
to South India now
This is a moment of global botany
this is a moment when these groups having built-in garage, you have a new technique of
governance a new way of controlling the natural environment of colonies not just South Asia but in South America in Africa
Expansion of colonial plantations that support tea rubber indigo opium
But all of these colonial plantations that are being set up in the colonies also leads to massive
Deforestation and and the natural environment is suffering. The people are suffering
so part of this larger global
Botany and colonialism and it's very similar to today's
biotech and agro companies that steel indigenous knowledge
from across the world in the name of science and medicine
so the same way William, Roxburgh
collects the bio knowledge from the Coromandel course and that
Produces modern science in Europe. So in this moment of global botany colonialism
Environmental devastation, I turn to the pilgrimage site of bridge and I look at these grooves that are being built
So the next image for instance shows this particular
Ron can you move to the next image, please? I'm sorry. It's so difficult to manage via
Zoom, so it's a fabulous painting by an artist colony hull champ based in Kitchener
the kingdom of kitchens are in West the previous slide please from
This one man
So we have to colonial
Botany, we have deforestation
And at this point what is so interesting is that you have the rise of new poetry and painting
That describes Brad justice pristine forest where Krishna and Radha
Spend their time they roam this wilderness there
They're part of this verdant sacred groves
So as deforestation is increasing as colonial presence is increasing in the subcontinent a poetic imagination
Becomes more prominent and in the painting by this particular artist colony house and we see Krishna and Radha on the left
Lying in the sacred grove
Beautiful brushwork and the density of forest that that is being made
visible through pigment and this is the beginning of what we call the
Anthropocene era the the team that we were planning to talk about
this is precisely the era of our current geological period in which
Human activity has been the dominant force of the environment on the environment. So what we have is this horizon
Anthropocene
massive deforestation
Colonialism and then in the sacred site you have the rise of this new
Critics of Krishna worship which is focused on on gardens
So when I was looking at this plane things I went to grudge and I was trying to find these gardens
Where are these gardens that are depicted in painting that have talked about in literature over and again?
How did these sweeping alterations in the regions Agra landscape?
Transform the notion of the power where Krishna and Radha would spend their time. I
found a few I found one and the next slide shows that
Irani could we have the next slide please? You know, I think there's a lag because it's up on my screen. Oh sit there now
So I gave you move back
Thank you, so this is the sacred garden that's established in the 18th century and
on the left you can see
Aerial view so this is dense urban center
The sacred site was in the heart of the mercantile world of not India
So massive urban population does deforestation
But at this precise moment, you have the creation of this garden where a currently krishnan rather
I still spend the evening
So at night the gardens the doors are shut so that we mayor mortals to not disturb
Krishna and Radha in the nocturnal tryst but in the daytime you can visit the garden and you can see how the trees are being
shaped in a very interesting way the very
Small so when I was there I had to actually bend I had to go through the trees. It's almost as if it was
creating this the sacred forest of poetry and painting so
It's an effect of unspoiled nature and wilderness that is produced through gardening
architecture
Poetry one one once we had entered the sacred garden through the gateway
Immediately if we find a mass of jasmine creepers and we have to make our way through this dense vines
Imagining ourselves as rather looking for Krishna, but all of this is happening when there is massive climate change and deforestation
so what I found very interesting about this site is that at this time of Anthropocene climate change an
Imagination a mythical a metal poetic imagination of secret garden. Sorry man emerging in bridge
But one has to be careful because these are this is not the actual natural
Vegetation of the region because remember this is completely deforested. It's the urban center
it's a it's a suburb of Delhi literally so but it's a it's a it's a it's an
Imagination of sacrilege. It's an imagination of the natural world
And we as devotees as pilgrims. We are asked to clear long and there's a particular
Notion of Leela or clay which essentially means that there was an it's my corporeal body
Experience its we walk through the we smelled adjustments
We have to bend we have to be the creepers catch on our clothes
so this was one of the chapters that focused on the idea of the sacred grove and how
at a moment of industrial revolution at a moment of
economic
Transformations the rise of modernity there is a attempt to reimagine what the neat natural environment is
So this project and this book allow allows me to think about
How does one talk about environmental discourse and I want to sort of end this?
part segment to the proposition
and now in contemporary environmental discourse
the past is always seen as a
period of ecological plenitude where humans live close to nature we always think about the past is is this
Arcadian bucolic world where everything was good and people live closer to nature and then get modernity and everything was disrupted
But climate change. It's
A longer theory problem we have to think of deep time
Long durations not five years ten years, but at a scale of five hundred years
So what this allows us to do is when we start thinking of secret spaces sacred grooves in
Specific there isn't a there's a way in which we think about it as unchanging
primordial
untouched by modernity whether we think about Native American sacred sites in the US or we think about our groves in
Africa what this particular Garden reminded me is that these groves were not
Representative of the region's vegetation they were simulated garden. There are artificial Gardens. So rather than
idealizing sacred bio habitats as static and unchanging
what I propose is a post romantic approach to the sky of
Sacred sites and plants one that does not fetishize the pre-modern that is one does not make the pre-modern into this other
into this sort of a bucolic
Space of all, Terra T from the worlds that we live in but one also that takes the resilience of religious
conceptions of flora
fauna the natural environment
Very seriously and that has resonances in our world today
We seem globally if you could go to the next slide one
Did it go
Yes, okay. So think about the think about not Dakota I ran was talking about how she worked with the idea of of
the water warriors what I found fascinating about about the
The protests in North Dakota was the mobilization of a lakota xperia x pression the expression mini vakani
Water is life
Now this is a protest off the present but but the activists
engage and work with pre-modern
philosophical systems lakota philosophies of what a vital water where water is not just a resource water is not just a
Histories of water typically focus on governments but here it's a way of life
It's a philosophical system and what this particular?
Movement and not dakota made visible to me was that there are other notions of the environment that at certain points would
intersect with
modernist ideas of nature as
Resource or wilderness think about john moore and the wilderness movement here in california fast
Pristine, but at some other times it offers other ways of thinking interactions
between humans and the nonhuman
That is not bound by modern notions of what the subject of days and who the object is in that subject object binary
That is fundamental to modernity gets unraveled are challenged by
By let's say a term like a lakota term like many vakani or even thinking about this
relationship between plants and humans in india
so that what's what my book was trying to do was trying to think of other histories of environmentalism but is not
Limited to a certain presentist understanding of the past
The past is very complex very rich, and I think that was what the book was
Trying to do
Ronald you Angela I
Was that's the next slide but I was excited about maybe talking a little bit more
Just about the idea
I you know
I
Really been reading Amitabh Josh's work and I think what you're saying reminds me a lot of his the great derangement where he talks about
this sort of way in which
You know, we have to kind of try to think bigger or think in a more epic way and his his
His conversation was really about literature and modernist literature
And the way in the West a lot of the modern literature had us sort of or had had the writers
Basically making the individual experience the the
Bigger like the everyday was everything and everything was coming from this personal point of view and that the Indian epics had a more
sort of situation where there are these like more non-human agencies, so I'm curious about
you know thinking about this period that you talk about in your book where there's
There's a there's a drought but people are making images of water. You know, there's a there's a
deforestation but people are making these images that these really lush forests and
Like how you know what that's a very different move and say making a documentary
Making something about exactly how things are
Know and I think i'm tom times work sort of really were seminal and I what he
Was trying to Arctic. What do you articulate? It's so beautiful in the in the book and called the great derangement
Was that climate changes the crisis of the imagination?
Yeah
It's a crisis of how do we tell stories and and it's a and then really love it that that this particular series is called
storytelling and catastrophic
storytelling whether it's in literary form or visual form, I think storytelling and the role of
imagination in trying to understand how we
think about the climate change and how we write the histories or paint the histories or make
or annotate the histories of climate change and I sort of wonder I mean
responding to Ronald's question what we see on the screen are to
a photograph from Bombay and a
Image of the Canton Waterfront
Quanzhou, so thinking about trees that's returning to the broader theme of our conversation today
Colonial botany was all about managing. It was all about ordering. It was making sense of the landscape
Making it visible
creating vistas of governance of power
So again what we saw in Bombay Shanghai been in Hong Kong
was the planting of banyan trees as a way of of
managing the environment of the colony a specific very specific ecological regime a
vista of view of governance and imperial control but there's a lot of scholarship on on on colonial governance and the way in which
Colonial gardens, which you mentioned the Botanical Garden Calcutta and how these gardens were way of managing the natural landscape
I think
What the epochs are what other forms of storytelling offer us is a way of thinking human
Non-human interactions that is not just about domination that it's not just about ordering managing
bringing the matcha teaming the natural environment and
What happens when these trees resist us? Can we write a history of trees resist a human?
human management
Can we think of trees running wild my favorite image the next one?
is
Run and you move to the next one, please I did. Oh you did. Okay. We're moving another time
This is one of my favorite pictures. It's it's a colonial
depot in Calcutta, the
Capital of the British Empire that the heart of empire the jewel in the crown and so forth. But what we see here is
Banyan trees literally running wild. Can we go back running?
Wild these very trees that were planted by the colonial government to create a Vista of view
Now have their own agency. They are taking over they are rewriting
Colonialism and what sort of a art history or visual practice getting map emerge if we start taking the plants?
Seriously, I mean in art history. We are it's a history of
Species history. It's a history of
artists patrons
audiences
but what artists what sort of an art history can emerge if we go beyond the
species boundaries and start taking the tree seriously and
The ruins of empire and I mean I find this it's so poetic that the ruins of empire are now
now being controlled by this banyan tree that extends all
Over colonial this particular colonial structure and this idea of animism. That is the agent of Nisour
agency of
Plants of rocks of animals of nonhumans. It's everywhere the next leg
We all know this the Lord of the Rings the ends of the middle-earth were fighting catastrophic forces of large-scale
Deforestation or we can move to Bollywood
Since this is a talk on India. How can you know?
Bollywood
Aishwarya Rai was really caught on caught affranchi ritually married to a tree
Before her marriage marriage to Abhishek Bachchan in order to counter the negative
effects of being born under adverse planetary
constellation mongolic so you have whether you have Lord of the Rings or
Aishwarya Rai marrying a tree now Amitabh Bachchan. I
Sure as father in law
Completely denounced this so that they are not a superstitious family. They are not a backward family
I should not ask did not marry a tree unless you think Abhishek is a creep I
Was very intrigued by
Amitabh the big bees response to this room or that Ash was marrying
I had to marry a tree it really hit at something what it hit at was a lot longer history 19th century
history of colonial anthropology and and this idea of
Animism that the primitive that is the colonized
Who are like children? They cannot distinguish between animate and inanimate beings
So the big beam was very serious that they are not a superstitious family. They're not a big
Backward family and all these rumors are just rubbish
But what what sort of worldviews emerge if we if we take that seriously if we take that rocks
Rocks our animal plant surrounding it and returning to mini recaii the Lakota term
then we have in these terms these ideas these notions of
The agency of the nonhuman have resonances today to fight climate change
the role of the past the role of the epics and
That for me was a question, but I think I've spoken
for around 30 but Ron, I wonder if that sort of idea of the resonance of oh we've enough enough of
The slides yeah
hang on I gotta
Get my technology rolling here
Okay, there we go. Yeah, so, I wonder if that this notion of the agent of an agency an agency of plants
plays out in your
Work and how do you engage with this idea? Because artistry is very species centric. Yeah
No, I mean it's something that I'm like since doing that project
I'm trying to do more and more and it's it's lots of different kinds of
Maybe non-human agencies enter the work
It's also really a question that then then you have to really tangle with the history of rep
Presentation and where does the sort of pictorial and this and where does depiction come in?
And so if you have something that's kind of like I try to think of this tree as being a protagonist and in that particular
Instance it's young. The tree could have a form
that
Had some
Resonance with the form of the tree itself, but then when does it become abstracted into something else?
And when does that and so, you know there are moments in the work where maybe you know
The tree is actually still a protagonist, but nobody can see it visually as a sort of representation. So I think the question about
You know using like having them
having something
Other than human have an agency in some ways. I think that that's what's happening all the time when you're making work
I mean, I think that you're like when you're in tune with things
There's all of these different kinds of of entities that speak to you or speak through you or something like that
you know if you're letting your
Conscious mind go for a little bit and and get into these things. But I also think that there's something about
Just
questioning the the representation of the landscape
itself, so for I've done this in a different bunch of different ways and the banyan tree is one of the figures and like a
Protagonist, you know, I've also done work where I've tried to have people like for instance dancers
You know rolling around in the ash that happened in the fires and the recent fires in California. And so it's another way of like
connecting with the landscape
that's through a
catastrophe but that also is something that you know
How do you sort of connect with these realms of uncertainty without becoming completely traumatized to the point where you can't act?
You know, so I think that that's a really big question and I think if you have a relationship
With other kind other sorts of life forms
It seems more doable. I mean it
or something like, you know, I also think that
art practice
given the very material nature of art making and it's fundamentally an engagement with
with the agent illness of other other right arms, I mean
Pigments have their own agent stiffness you however much you force color
Color runs its color has its own agent illness
I think you know we I find out history and art practice really central to thinking about these
Debates on vibrant matter that have emerged in the recent past about the idea of materiality
and also what I wonder I mean as someone who thinks about painting very seriously, I mean
how would you could we talk about let's say
the material the the agent eveness of pigment
I mean, I wouldn't say that the pigment has agency in that notion on that
it has a subject or a political will but it certainly
Forces the artist to move in a certain direction even so so I wonder if that sort of work
Well, I mean it does, you know, there's sort of so many physical
properties of the pigment
itself, like where the thing about where it comes from and the different minerals and you know
But for me, it's the it's the it's the it's the space. It becomes like a space
That's not neutral
In some way, you know some part of the reason that I needed to paint those walls
It's DeYoung was to make the space make the place and this make a kind of environment
With which to collage and so when I start making a piece of work, I always start with what's the color the ground?
Which I really do associate with ground like what's the relation
So this question of figure ground that is sort of completely part of what a painting is
you know is
That the the ground becomes a forceful environment through color
you know through chroma and through the and I do use powdered pigment very specifically because
You know, you have to really pay attention
It's not just kind of coming out of a tube like you have to mix it up and then you have to figure out exactly
What that shade is doing and I don't know how to describe what it's doing also. Like I can't it's not symbolic
It's not like I'm using red because it's an angry color or something. Like it's you know, I don't think about it like that
It's it I do give it as a sort of force
Right. I think that's I mean only
Recently has out history
Taken the force of pigment
seriously, and I it'll really change the way ISM because
Essentially how we think about art for art history and it it's enlightenment truth
It's really about our the human species and I say our our it's our way of
controlling whether you're a sculptor any controlled stone and
Stone that the fact that the stone has its own own
Process and the stone has to be taught through its own own
Vitality and I think these sort of questions in a way also
take us back to us certain non Eurocentric ways of thinking our art making and and
Thinking about making riches
it's not just about how we can control dominate and order whether it's pigment or the garden or
Stroll and and that I think in a way opens up the question of indigenous epistemologies
Where where you you like we think about?
Lakota philosophical systems and how these
Philosophical systems can offer other ways of thinking histories of water or stone or pigment
But because how this listening culture that's attached to them
So like and there's a there's a culture of time that's different, you know like from you know
Like I mean, I have to make say I put down a ground. It'll take me until I figure out what is next
I'm gonna have to leave the ground to sit there for a little while before I can actually put something else there
I'm almost like you have to listen to and I think that those kinds of indigenous methodologies are also like a lot a lot
You know that kind of listening well speaking of which
Where are we do you think we have questions that we should go to or I would
Let's do that. Let's do that. So I have instructed that I will be getting questions
Okay good
so
The time very saggy when I for those who are joining us. He's joining the conversation
Yeah, anyone has questions call the links one thing if we don't have questions, yeah
Just about the moment that we're in because I remember when we were talking and preparing for this, you know
I was thinking about this idea of trees being the lungs of the planet and this sort of you know this sort of idea
That's around about
You know just that this we have this situation that is being
shaped by virus that attacks the lungs and
This idea of the breadth and the air and how important and central that's become in terms of our thinking at the moment
And I remember you talking about doing some work around st. Elena and this idea
I was wondering if you could yes, that's very interesting question and idea of
Gardens or or or forests being the land of the lungs of the planet
And and the irony of this is that it's actually a colonial intervention
The idea of conservation the idea that that
protecting forests it begins with in San Vincente in the Caribbean when I was I was talking about
El Nino
droughts
early that early near monsoon failures and that was devastating the
Natural environment and it was this woman that that could the colonial authorities decided to create
Protected forests in Society of a protected forest that we are so familiar with whether it's in, California
Which we assume begins in the 20th century or the late 19th century. So the the scholarship on on
Conservation forest conservation sort of point towards the wilderness movement in California as a beginning
But it's actually much this longer history
so the law was put into force in santolina India in the Caribbean and because of
the El Nino
droughts and this idea that
This idea that if we created forest the lungs of the planet
protected forests that would help
Rainfall and thus avert agrarian crisis. So these were not these were not invited
Pro-environment this was a very selfish policy because there was massive agrarian crisis is happening because of the droughts
there was an assumption that if we protect forests that we would
produce rate that there would be rainfall and that would lead to
a better
Agriculture now
Edmund Burke for its is the political theorist Edmund Burke 2 refers to the high mortality rate in India
because of the
1791 drought in his critique of his East India Company and
the botanist that I began with the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh was
Studying droughts in the subcontinent and studying climate change
So the study of climate changes begins in 18th century and conservation as we know it today
begins in the 18th century with these
with these
attempts to create
forests, so it's a very interesting history and that that
for better for worse
The creation of the wilderness movement is part and parcel of colonialism and part and parcel of that
History of deforestation and a forested region at the same time
but what for me is also interesting about this history is that and
We say see it play out today in many parts of the world that the creation of a protected forest
Is that the cost are the indigenous communities who live there? So if you think about Yosemite
When when this the the John Muir created the wilderness movement who got affected
The the Native American population were living there for many years and and this kinda racist
he said he he essentially said that the Native American people who live who have been historically living here and
such minimal
Effect on the environment was the problem, right?
So I think what is also one has to remember that?
Afforestation are protecting forests in a way
Affect the indigenous communities who live around there and I mean only a few days back
I was reading this as a New York Times. It's about Tigers and the tiger in
The Bronx mirin museum had called it but a tiger in a National Forest in India also had covered
So and I remember that what is interesting about?
The National tiger reserves in India is that it's the largest population of tigers in the wild
So immediately what the government does is to protect the Tigers
They ask the local villagers who live around the protected forests who live on subsistence who?
Look at oak gather honey and etc from the forest reserves
Immediately the government says that they should be removed
So it's it has always been that these communities who live in these forests in these areas
Who are being affected?
the most by
This sort of North American variety of wilderness movement or if you go back the sort of colonial idea
It's it's a form of colonialism. It's a form of of
Arbitrarily selecting a piece of land and saying that this should be protected and the cost of and there are scholars who
Call that call for a new way of thinking
Environmentalism which they would say, it's environmentalism of the poor rather than importing that the wilderness movement the North American variety
scholars have argued that we have to think about other practices of environmentalism the global south or in
Other in Africa Asia and South America, which is not about making
migrants or
forcing people out of their
Local context in the name of protecting animals and forests, right? And we saw it. We see playing out in Palestine
we see it played on many parts of the world to do and
It's interesting. So it's you on the one hand. It's it's a form of greenwashing right on the one hand
You're like yeah, we are protecting forests. You're building these forests
but at whose cost the cost is always the poor the poor always bear the cost of
pro or anti environmental
practices
Ok, I'm looking at my phone
But I
I
mean I also would let going back to your project and I was very intrigued by this idea of the
banyan tree as both protected but also the space where where
Where you would have let's say the so-called mutineers are waiting to be seven or all but not being hung there
I think there is the semi-interesting clay between violence and protection of benevolence and
Dystopia that's associated with the kree's and one of you would
It just seems to be a
Sight
Because I think I guess it's like when we were talking before about this idea of the sacred and what happens when
You know something becomes sacred
You know that it it had it always has this
I mean depending on who's going to kind of like wield it if it's wheel double
it always has this problem, but it's also if you if I'm just taking it as a figure, you know, the fact that it actually
strangles its host
You know for me, was it really? I mean, it's
historically been this side it also is I think in
The Kikuyu people. I think there's there's a I've read several stories from different places, right?
So there's like I know in different parts of Africa the same tree, which has a different name. They're
Considered like if one of them dies it's considered a very
Political
Omit like a bad omen or something politically and so they have to sort of do a big ritual
To make sure that the sort of leadership of the particular village where the trees died is doesn't get deposed
Or something like that
So the tree seems to have this sort of power in places, but I think also just as a figure to think about
ecology and culture that you know, I I mean
What you're saying about this sort of benevolent supposedly benevolent green
You know efforts the idea that you can kind of like protect everything by displacing some people and making it
You know giving the trees this Bay, I don't know. You know, it's it's a white thing in a museum izing
I think it helps to think about the complexity of the whole situation, which is that, you know
We're in a situation where we're consuming more. I mean, even the green energies consume a lot of
You know rare earth elements tree also wood wood chipping. There's all of these kinds of twists in
In the way that
the that
In order in order to continue as we are we just have to keep consuming
So, I mean it's just sort of points to the notion that there needs to be a kind of whole philosophical shift
Like you were speaking of at the beginning of this talk
Like it's not just a matter of finding another way to consume the way we're consuming
You know
It's and and to be able to think sort of both individually and collectively
Is important I think there's something about the way
The tree is both a home to all of these species and a colonial force itself
That just places other things around it is an important lesson
You know that maybe it has to teach us, right
That that there's not a kind of monocultural solution to our
Problem and also to it as a figure of the imagination also to go back to I mean to have gosh, you know
there's this like
Need to try to figure out him to imagine in a magnitude
that includes
a
complexity of
Thought it's not just like oh we're gonna find this one. Happy solution
or something
yeah, I think the question of scale is a very important one in terms of thinking whether we talk about
Individual histories or species histories or the imaginary species imagination, but it's almost
455 so I wanted to sort of go back to the question of the museum and I'm
fascinated by the fact of how you
Activate the space of the museum the exhibition area complex. How do you activate the space of a museum?
and I did not know that there was a taxidermy collection in the
horizon
Yeah, the taxidermy collection is not in the museum. But when I was looking up the history of the museum Michael de young actually
Wanted to open a museum
Because he had this collection of stuffed birds that he didn't know what to do it
Where to put that so his idea was to open a museum to put them in which he didn't raise the funds
Before he had to sell the collection of birds before he could raise the funds
But it's sort of how he became a museum person and how the Deion's became this museum family in the Bay Area
and so I just I kind of wanted to think about that because that museum
You know, how is still has this like nineteenth-century?
Model and it's also an ethnographic
model where there are these kind of sections of the museum that like represent different places and you know
I sort of always think about that when I'm putting things in it
But it's it has a long history to the consumers of the great the of the early modern period and the birth of Natural History
And that led to both where you collect natural? Yeah, that is
specimens from across the world but also
Also, I'm sorry, this is very difficult
You're getting pinged haven't pinged and I am wondering how we suck so yeah
So apperently we have questions
Okay. Well, I'm gonna just say one quick thing is which is black panther came out when I was also making that
Work and you couldn't no I couldn't not do thinking about the colonial history of the museum
Right, and I think it's very interesting to sort of go back to this colonial history and sort of D
reactivate that that history through new ways of thinking about human non-human
interactions thinking about indigenous epistemologies
thinking about how these other histories of plants animals rocks can take us beyond that sort of a
European early modern scientific ISM that that really is the birth of modern
Rational rational thinking that has marginalized so many philosophical systems. Yeah
Yeah, and I thought well those birds they're extinct but they're still talking right, you know
They're saying a lot of things just like some of these objects
They might have been sort of caged, but they still have you know a lot to say so
What would what would they be saying? I mean it was like asking a question of like what do those birds have to say?
I'm still asking that question
And how do we how do you even?
creatively think back to the question of a matter, of course the question of
a
question of how one talks about
imagination
Yeah, how do we how do we imagine into this and how and that's something I like to work on?
with myself and also with other people
So
Run, so can you run? Oh, this is I'm ventricle icing for
For the audience. Can you say more about how you engage with artists answers?
with uncertainty without redraw mechanism and
Also can be related to Gore's art and poetry to climate change
I'm having a question. But the first question is can you say more about?
How you engage artists or dancers without with?
Uncertainty without we triage appetizing that's something I'm asking myself a lot of questions about right now the project
that I was sort of thinking about when I when I talked about that is one that I
worked on in the wake of the 2017 fires in California, and I was thinking I had these dancers I
worked with hope more dance and we worked with some dancers to
improvise in the remains of the fires and it was a way of trying to
think about how you
if you just bury a trauma it gets bigger and
if you
let it
become
It it becomes a cut an entire weight, but there needs to be a way of kind of hanging
so I was thinking about the figure in the ground literally as a
That the idea that of the relationship between the figure and the ground is actually a critical
Relationship right now in this moment of history and then at the moment, I'm trying to devise a project where I want to work with
Different populations also with hope more and this project is called ensemble foreign and nonlinear time
And it's specifically trying to think very much about this
To work with people who are either resettled refugees or where it lost things in the fire
And I think that we're all in this situation right now
So I'm kind of working with this for myself, but I'm trying to think a lot about a way
Ruptor it can be a catalyst and if you make rupture into a cat into a character, right?
So I'm thinking a lot about speculative fiction and if we take a rupture as a character and try to imagine how it moves
changes
What it does over time?
In a way that doesn't that we don't over identify with it. It's not it doesn't become us
The trauma is not us. The trauma is something that's that happens and is moving over time like this virus is happening right now
How do we sort of
characterize it and then like
Listen to it. I mean, how do we understand how to listen to something traumatic and how to learn from it?
So that's sort of my approach. I don't have an answer really about how to do that
But I think that that's part of what the work has been for me
So one of the things that I do also is to trace news images over and over again
and
I I sort of overlay them onto paper and that's a way for me to kind of process a lot of traumatic news
but also to look at it in a in a way that some
the doesn't
that doesn't
Trick me into thinking I actually know more than I do. So I think that a lot
I'm trying to kind of break down also our our image culture in certain ways because I think the way that like
Media images and also a lot of marketing works, which is what we're sort of
Saturated in is that it works by kind of trying to convince?
culture that we know something that things are certain and so I think that we're sort of allergic to
uncertainty we're developing as sort of I think we need more to have more capacity for uncertainty than the
sort of dominant cultural
modes particularly a visual visual culture are
Giving us right. So I think it's about sort of I'm actually expanding the capacity for uncertainty through
Art making for me, but I think that there's lots of ways to expand that capacity that maybe maybe are other than our thinking
Right, so
Raj
Raj s how do you relate that was art and poetry to private dude. It was a very interesting question. I just recently
heard a talk by a very eminent historian dearest Chakraborty who was talking about to go remunerative was writing on on
trees and how robonaut the world wrote about
Becoming a tree in my own work
I've written on earth history and how I'm
huntin gettin Colorado at school and Chandni gettin this particular art historian called Stella cram rich
reimagine Buddhist sculpture in terms of plants
not just in terms because when we think about sculpture and that's what you
Let's say the history of sculpture. It's always about
Mapping the sculpture in terms of the human body the human body the logo centric body from the 16th century
Becomes the center of the universe
so even when we think about sculpture
we we always map it to the human body mysteric ramish in the
1930's proposes this very interesting model of understanding buddhist art through a
true idea of transubstantiation
where she our news that that the body of the buddha becomes vegetal becomes plant like
So I think it's a very interesting way of thinking about sculpture where we do not again privilege the human body
What does it need for the good her to become a plant and the human and the vegetal to?
merge and in imminent energy
so I think Shantiniketan and
Sort of the critical writing the music the poetry the literature the visual arts really offered us a way of thinking
About climate change and I mean not much has been written on it
I think it's a very interesting project to think about climate change, especially at I suppose developed by the tourists in Shantiniketan
Yeah
so Joan asks
Have you encountered Elinor Ostrom s work then demonstrating how local communities around the world?
Almost always manage their local resources better than a government body
I
Mean
the critique of top-down
Development. I think it's very important, especially with when we think about climate change and but there's a it's a very
Important move that has to be made that we cannot
Export not American notions of wilderness and we have to think about other ways of engaging
Biodiversity that does not take us back to that early 20th century model and I think a
lot of nonprofits from across the global south have have been
Pushing forward to think about new policies that involve local communities local resources and it just not being a trickle-down effect
From from let's say the center in let's say the quick in the point in the case of South Asia
Now you're almost out of time to drink you want to add something
I
want to just say one quick other thing about
Uncertainty, which is that I think that there I think that what we're talking about with
these questions of like letting you know having people to
manage their own resources or
You know what? I'm trying to get up by thinking with people who have been through some sort of major
cataclysmic change which now a lot of people have been through or going through is this idea of expertise and
that like, you know
local or expertise
I mean, I think that you know to ask people who have expertise in rat rather than victimize them
So I feel like there's a sort of problem where most often people who are considered victims are actually experts
sooner no, no
leave it at that like we need to talk to the experts or
Listen to the experts it'll end with with non-human experts too. Like absolutely. Yes
Yeah. All right. Well, let me
Big thanks to you Ronnie for joining us virtually
For today's Commonwealth Club program as I noted earlier
This is the second in a series of programs between the Commonwealth Club and the Townsend Center for Humanities at Berkeley
The next program will be announced shortly
please visit
Commonwealth Club dot org to learn more. Thank you again
I'm sure both array and this virtual program of the Commonwealth Club the place where you are in the know is a chip
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