Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to a virtual program of the Commonwealth Club program
My name is Shu rotary and I'm an associate professor salt in 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
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?
Rana 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. Okay, 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 gonna just show one project of mine
To get the conversation started
Before those slides. Um, I wanted to show this piece of fabric because I can in this this format
Which I can't 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
Isn't 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
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
and the project
Was installed in Woolsey Court, which is a public space at the centre of the museum
So the invitation to do this project came through Claudius schmuck Lee 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 bringing the outside
Into 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 the 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 in yet 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 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 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 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 could see the project from lots of different points of views
You could see from the ground, but also from these second level windows
Drawing was a drawing of a protester holding up an image of a journalist named Gary Lang cash 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 the
Pieces 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 does 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
with images of the women's marches on this wall and some of these patterns and
marched for our lives and also the
Approach to the dakota pipeline water protection protests that were happening at a time
So again the 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 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
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 and unn 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 and this idea that the dead can
continue to speak but also
Michael DeYoung who started the museum had a collection of stuffed birds
So I was 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 on
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 having 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 damages 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
So then zooming 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 like the public and public space and public voices
Yeah, so that's what I have to say about that project
And then when I was invited to do this talk with Sujatha
I was really excited because his book climate 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 and people's relationship to the landscape so mr. Gotta please take it away. I'd like to hear more about your book
Well, thank you and very kind of you. I
I hopefully return 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 last year
focuses on climate change in this particular
pilgrim insider not India called Braj a
Site that was supposed to be where 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 no
But I mean, I'm a big Beatles fan but 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 Burrage in which
it's not just
image of the icon in the temple
but but the natural environment the rocks the forest even the dust of Braj 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
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 carmen 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 were being built in grudge
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
the 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 not 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
Rana could me 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 cultured based in Kissinger
the kingdom of kitchens are in the West the previous slide please from
This one man's
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?
Tree 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 called the Hajj 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 extra piscine era that 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 rise of the 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 had talked about in literature over and again?
How did these sweeping alterations in the region's Agra landscape?
Transform the notion of the bower where Krishna and Radha would spend their time. I
found a few I found one and the next slide shows that
Irani could be in the next slide, please
You know, I think there's a lag because it's up on my screen. Oh, is it there now? No
Soup I'll give you move back
Thank you, so this is the sacred garden that's established in 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 is deforestation
But at this precise moment
You have the creation of this garden where accurately krishnan rata still spend the evening
So at night the garden 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. They're 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 what one once we had entered the secret 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 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 little 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. Let'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 me smelled adjustments. We have to bend we have to 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 credit oude where humans live close to nature
We always think about the past is this this Arcadian in 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 500 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 of
Sacred sites and plants one that does not fetishes 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 he could go to the next slide one
Telecom yes, okay
So think about the think about not dakota around was talking about how she worked with this idea of of
the water warriors what I found fascinating about about the
The protests in north dakota was the mobilization of a lakota experi
Expression 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 on 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 light
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 jordan were in 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 is 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 oni 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. That 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
Ramadhir 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
now and I think I'm sometimes work sort of really were seminal and I what he
Was trying to Arctic. What do you articulated?
So beautiful in the book and called the great arrangement 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 but 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 in 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 two
a photograph from Bombay and a
Image of the Canton water France
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 magic teaming the natural environment and
What happens when these trees resist us? Can we write a history of Crees resisting human?
human management
Can we think of trees running wires? My favorite image the next one?
is
Run, can 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 can in emerge if we start taking the plants?
Seriously, I mean in art history. We 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 Colonia 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 slide
We all know this the Lord of the Rings the ends of the middle-earth who are fighting
catastrophic forces of large-scale
Deforestation or we can move to Bollywood
Since this is a talk on India. How can you know about Bollywood?
Aishwarya Rai
Was really caught on core apparently 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 said that they are not a superstitious family. They have not a backward family
I should not I should not marry a tree unless you think Abhishek is a tree 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 are animated plant surrounding it and returning to mini reconning the Lakota term
Then we can these terms these ideas these notions of 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
Ron I wonder if that sort of idea of the resonance of oh we've had enough of
Stop 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
Representation 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 the and so you know?
There are moments and 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
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
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 it's been 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
or something like you know now I also think that
art practice
given the 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 eveness
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 materia the the agented nests of pigment
I mean, I wouldn't say that the pigment has agent C 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 as a 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 state it becomes like a space. That's not neutral
In some way, you know
so part of the reason that I needed to paint those walls that stay young was to make the space make the place and
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 a 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 to it
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
what I think that I mean
Only recently has aa history
Taken the soft 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 roots, it's really about our the human species and I say our our it's our way of
Controlling whether you're a sculptor and in 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 a certain non Eurocentric ways of thinking of art making and and
Thinking about making in which is 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 to it
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 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 central that's become in terms of our thinking at the moment
And I remember you talking about doing some work around st. Hellena 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 porous it begins with in San Vincente in the Caribbean when I was talking about
early neo droughts
early that early near monsoon failures and that was devastating the
Natural environment and it was this woman 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
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 Santa Ana 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 in right
Pro-environment this was a very selfish policy because there was massive agrarian. Crisis isn't 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 forints is the political theorist Edmund Burke - I 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 18th century with these
with these
attempts to create
forests, so it's a very interesting history and that that
for better or for worse
The creation of the wilderness movement is part and parcel of colonialism and part and parcel of that
History of deforestation and half forestation 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 the the John were created the wilderness movement who got affected
The the Native American population were living there for many years and and this guy was a racist
He said he he essentially said that the Native American people who live who have been historically
living here and with such minimal
Carra
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 image in his communities who live around there and I mean only two few days back
I was reading this as in the 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 gnash 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 will live on subsistence. Who?
Look at Oh gather honey and etc from the forest reserves
Immediately the government says that they should be removed
So 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 not 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 on 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 in 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 and we saw it. We see playing out in Palestine
we see in 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 only 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
But I
I
mean I also would let going back to your project and I was very intrigued by this idea of the
dannion Cree has both protective but also the space where where
Where you would have let's say the the so-called mutineers are waiting to be seven or all but not being hung there
I think there is the same interesting clay between violence and protection of benevolence and
Dystopia that's associated with the creature one if you would
It's 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 kikuya 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
Oh, man
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 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
Mean what you're saying about this sort of the never - 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
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'm going 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 history the species histories or the imaginary species imaginations, but it's almost
455 so I wanted to
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 exam. But when I was looking up the history of the museum Michael D 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 19th 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 naturally? Yeah, that is
specimens from across the world but also
Also, I'm sorry this is very difficult so
You're getting pinged I'm gonna pinged and I am wondering how we thought so yeah
So apperently we have questions, okay?
Well, I'm gonna just say quick 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 be 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 goes 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, I don't also with other people
So
Run, so can you run? No, 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
All that all can be related to Gore's art and poetry to climate change
I'm having a second question, but
Question is can you say more about how you engage artists or dancers without with?
uncertainty without
Reproach authorising. That's something I'm asking myself a lot of questions about right now the project
that I was sort of thinking about and 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 kind 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 finger 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 for a nonlinear time, and it's
Specifically trying to think very much about this
To work with people who are either resettled refugees or were 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 the 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 it's 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
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 if things are certain and so I think that we're sort of allergic to
uncertainty, we're developing and 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 our other than art making
But so
Rodge
Rodge s how do you relate to those art and poetry to private jet? That's a very interesting question. I just recently
heard a talk by a very eminent historian dearest Chakravarthy who was talking about to go Roman Nurik was writing on on
trees and how robonaut the were wrote about
Becoming a tree in my own work
I've written on art history and how I'm Shantiniketan column have owned art school
And John's Nick attend this particular art historian called Stella cram rich
reimagined Buddhist culture 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 always map it to the human body and stearic ramish in the
1930s 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 mean for the good her to become a plant and the human and their registered 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 that not much has been written on it
I think it's a very interesting project to think about climate change, especially at just as it was developed by the torus 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
The critique of top-down
Development. I think it's very important, especially with when we think about climate change and 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. I mean just not being a trickle-down effect
From from let's say Center in let's say the point in the case of South Asia
Now you're almost out of time - do 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 so, you know,
You need to talk to the experts or listen to the experts and with non-human experts - absolutely, yes
Yeah. All right. Well, let me
Big thanks to you Ron you 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 got array and this virtual program of the Commonwealth Club the place where you are in the know is a church. Thank you
