“Reinterpreting the Generalife Gardens in Granada as a Domestic Space”

Blair Winter

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

For the last two centuries, the Alhambra Palace and the adjacent royal estate and gardens of the Generalife in Granada, Spain, have attracted a steady flow of visitors to a site that is both exotic and familiar. The proliferation and diffusion of reproductions of the Palace’s sumptuous interiors, the curated views a contemporary tourist encounters, and the extensive scholarship linking artistic forms and design to the power of the rulers, work together into making and maintaining the image of the Alhambra complex as a rarefied aesthetic object. What happens if we move away from the ruler and the court and think about the families that inhabited the complex? The exact use of its spaces is unknown, other than baths and a mosque, yet some functions can be inferred from placement. Scholars have interpreted the Generalife and its gardens as a pleasure palace or summer palace for the sultan. I propose an alternative reading of the Generalife that shifts the focus away from the ruler and considers the estate as a domestic space, where walkways facilitate circulation away from the public eye (possibly for women), spouting fountains are meant for the enjoyment of all ages, and the name “Generalife” celebrates the ingenious engineer behind its water infrastructure and design.

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“Cultivating a Garden: Landscape-Making as Maintenance”

Zheming (Taro) Cai

University of Toronto

This paper explores the dynamic upkeep of living landscapes. Begin with an examination of a classical-styled Chinese garden reproduction at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met), it explores the practice of landscape-making as a form of maintenance. Centered on the distinct gardening practices in China and the Met, the study situates these practices within their unique

epistemological contexts. Moreover, this trans-cultural and trans-ecological exchange offers non-Western perspectives to authenticity and conservation.

 

In 1980, a delegation from Suzhou, China, comprising twenty-one artisans, five engineers, and one chef, arrived in New York City to construct the Astor Chinese Garden Court at the Met. This garden courtyard was the first authentic reconstruction of a Ming dynasty (1388-1644) garden built overseas with traditional craftsmanship and materials. Prior to the construction of Astor Court in

New York, the Met commissioned the Suzhou Garden Administration to build a full-size mockup in Suzhou for design approval. Despite the commonality in construction materials and building techniques, these two gardens have evolved independently due to diverse maintenance practices rooted in distinct cultural understandings of the landscape and maintenance.

 

This study shifts from preserving the authenticity of individual objects to the process of co-producing landscapes involving both humans and nonhumans. In doing so, the research seeks to transcend the culture-nature binary. Additionally, it not only challenges but seeks to alter objectified perspectives of the more-than-human worlds through the lens of landscape-making.

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“Seagulls in the City”

Marvin Veloso

School of the Art Institute of Chicago 

This paper meditates upon video art and moving image to respond to the ways in which  nonhuman actors maintain, disrupt, and transform the city. Calling attention to the discursive  practices that reshape history and territoriality, I look closely to the role seagulls play in  contemporary visual culture. Seagulls have somewhat stood as embedded within the backdrop of  US empire building, exemplified within the 1856 Guano Island Act which commodified seabird poop for the manufacturing of gunpowder and fertilizer for a growing agricultural industry, while  simultaneously enabling US citizens to occupy “unclaimed” islands and atolls – across the  Pacific and Atlantic Ocean – containing guano deposits. Encoded within the images of seabirds, might the representations following the aftermath foreshadow the consequences of globalization? 

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More recently, the discourse on seagulls serve to embody a liminality between urban pest and indicator of climate change; or in other cases, as intellectually deficient actors as seen in Pixar’s  top-selling film Finding Nemo (2003). In parsing out these complexities and troubling dominant  representations, my turn to video art probes the aesthetic tactics deployed by contemporary  artists who, while raising critical themes surrounding urban and ecological emergence, feature  this peculiar seabird. Toronto-based artists SoJin Chun and Alexandra Gelis, for instance, explore the ongoing and inseparable struggles across social and ecological actors through a  place-based video performance that highlights the precarious tension between humans and  seagulls.[1] The Japanese American artist Eiko Otake directly engages seagulls to consider the aggression, agitation, and speciated choreographies of survival.[2] In taking seriously the  nonhuman animal embedded within human-made structures, my analysis of moving image  attends to the relationships between cultural production and political ecology to make visible the  global city as a site of perpetual upkeep.

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Citations:

1 Cooling Reactors (2016) https://vtape.org/video?vi=8044 

2 Seagulls (2022) https://www.vdb.org/titles/seagulls

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“Transpersonal Ecology: Reimagine a Common in Marwa Arsanios and Naomi Rincón-Gallardo’s Experimental Videos”

Jessica Zi Chen

School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Women’s struggle has never been singular, and they have been and still are subject to an oppression that is intersectional and multi-layered, or an "entangled knot," to use Hillary Lazar's metaphor. The same applies to land; political, economic, and social dispossession reinforce each other and collectively consolidate the inferiority of women and land. If the oppression is interlaced, why can’t the rebellion be multi-figural? 

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The paper examines the force of transpersonal ecology, invoked by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios (b.1978, Washington D.C., US) and Mexican artist Naomi Rincón Gallardo (b.1979, North Carolina, US) through their experimental film and video installations, as a form of resilience that maneuvers against continuous hegemonic rule over women and land in the age of postcolonialism and anthropocentrism. Through their cinematic and performative language, Arsanios and Rincón-Gallardo bring the spatial and temporal synchronically to mobilize non-human actants in fighting a war of dispossession. 

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Arsanios investigates the under-addressed violence exerted by international and domestic extractive powers on indigenous communities and nature globally, unveiling structural, ideological, and personal mechanisms that pervade land, space, and people. Her film series, Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2018-2022), seeks to reinterpret land through an autonomous, materialistic, and feminist lens, fostering an unmediated reconnection with nature. Working around land recuperation and Mesoamerican indigenous mythology in contemporary contexts, Rincón-Gallardo composes a unique language of (under)world makings that bring to light the compromised horizons of gendered politics and indigenous knowledge under Western hegemonic modernity. This proposed language is a language of defense powered by a network of entities. In Resiliencia Tlacuach [Opossum Resilience] (2019), female, male, and animal figures, together with characters from the terrestrial, aquatic, and celestial spheres, resurrect with love, joy, and care to form a transpersonal network that reimagines a liberated future for women and land. 

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“Specters and Bones of William Jones”

Ashley Dequilla

University of Illinois Chicago

The ghost, and literal bones, of William Jones (1871-1909) are traced within a historiographical nexus of complexity and reckoning. William Jones was the first Native American to ever obtain a doctorate in cultural anthropology as a protege of Franz Boas. His career assignment to the Philippines to study and collect from the Ilongot people of Northern Luzon was commissioned by the Field Museum of Natural History in 1906. In 1909, on the day before his return to Chicago, William Jones was killed. His death was deemed as a murder by US colonial interior, prompting the swift and retaliative burning of 20 Ilongot villages. My research as a Co-Curator Partner of the Field Museum’s Philippine Heritage Collection expands into an experimental documentary as creative resistance against the ruinous narratives that have been framed around William Jones’s death and undeserved obscurity. An inquiry into Philippine visual culture examines the formative role of cultural anthropology at the turn of the 20th century. Collaborative scholarship towards William Jones is a call for institutional justice, canonical reckoning, and intersectional solidarity for Native American and Filipino people. A critical look at “the bones of colonialism” describes a major discovery in search of William Jones’s gravesite at Manila North Cemetery this past December. To much dismay, there was a failure of Perpetual Upkeep for his body, which was exhumed in 1948. The fate of his remains are now left to speculation. Later findings in the Philippines gleaned evidence of the American constabulary’s framing of Jones’s death and alleged murderers through photographic reenactment, as well as questionable provenance around institutional knowledge and material accumulations related to the Ilongot people. These findings animate repressed histories and archival erasures to shift the paradigm around the historical records and after-life of William Jones, a “forgotten luminary” and pioneer of indigenous studies. 

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Specters of William Jones (short video art version) - 5 min, 4 seconds

Official Selection for Art/to/graph/ia Nuestra Video Narracion at University of Granada March 2024

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“The Passy Cravat, 1864: Maintaining (Anti)Queerness and Imperial Forms on the By Estate”

Mal Meisels

University of California Los Angeles 

In 1864, Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899), Nathalie Micas (1824–1889), Isidore Bonheur (1827– 1901), and Paul Chardin (1833–1918) collaborated on The Passy Cravat, a multi-media work of gouache, ink, and black pencil on canvas. They assembled human and nonhuman figures who inhabited Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas’ domestic space in By-Thomery, a small town in north central France. This paper traces within the form of The Passy Cravat the multitudinous space of the By built environment, simultaneously as a familial domain for By’s human inhabitants, cages for its nonhuman population, and a map of the estate. Through these layers, the work at once instantiates homophilia—a commitment to same-sex bonding—and anti-queerness—an investment in heteronormative and imperial forms. Representing the routines of Rosa Bonheur, Nathalie Micas, and their friends and family at By, the homophilic Passy Cravat portrays a collectivity organized around Rosa Bonheur and Nathalie Micas’ subversive kinship. However, as this paper demonstrates, The Passy Cravat’s intentional fragmentation and transmogrification of the bodies of nonhuman animals also mirrors the violent domestication practiced at the By menagerie. The four artists recreated the plot of the By estate to emphasize the hierarchical human-nonhuman order they maintained in the Fontainebleau forest. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in art history, queer theory, architectural history, and animal studies, this paper outlines how The Passy Cravat’s overlapping and messy subjectivities propagate the practices of Haussmannization (1853–1870) and Napoléon III’s (1808–1873) colonization of Northern Algeria at By. By moving beyond Rosa Bonheur’s biography and emphasizing the hybrid homophilic and anti-queer forms in her œuvre, scholars can illustrate how The Passy Cravat and other works produced at the By estate work to further instantiate exploitative French projects in the métropole and the 

Maghreb.

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“New Art in Post-Soviet Ukraine”

Sam Veremchuk

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, substantial aid from Western governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and wealthy benefactors flooded the Post-Communist region—including newly independent Ukraine. Yet, little scholarly research exists about the

influence of Western benefactors on Ukrainian culture since 1991. The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCA) were key institutions in funding Ukrainian arts and culture from 1993 until 2008. To this day, many practicing artists reference the SCCA as a major influence on their careers. Through my research I will document the actions and effects of the SCCA in Kyiv. I will also research the “NGO-ization” of Ukrainian culture and its effects after the SCCA closed its doors. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the economies and governments of the successor states struggled to fulfill their civic duties to their citizens. The weakened states, such as Ukraine, scrambled for aid wherever they could get it. This aid mostly came from the West. The aid often went to the governments, but significant amounts were earmarked for non-governmental organizations. These NGOs were involved in most sectors of life, such as corruption prevention, human rights, medical assistance, education, and—key to this research—art. In Ukraine, the state passed off many government responsibilities to these NGOs. This practice is often called “NGO-ization.” Understanding the impact of NGO-ization on the arts is a focus of my research and this paper will begin to address these issues and questions through the 1994 SCCA exhibit Alchemic Surrender.

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“Caught in the Crossfire: Attacks on Religious Heritage and Power Dynamics During War”

Ilinca Stingaciu

Queen’s University

Religious buildings and sites are powerful, physical spaces that draw communities together  through a shared sense of identity and belonging. The importance of these sites to national and  community cohesion has often made religious sites a target during wars. Moreover, deliberate  attacks against religion are executed to maintain or disrupt power dynamics. Recently,  intentional targeting of heritage has occurred in Ukraine, with hundreds of religious buildings  suffering damage since the Russia-Ukraine War started in 2022. Thus far, Ukrainian Orthodox  churches appear to be the most frequently targeted properties.  

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The following presentation examines two religious properties attacked during the war: Transfiguration Cathedral, in Odesa, and the Holy Dormition Lavra in Sviatohirsk. Both sites are  property of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and are important landmarks. The churches’ damage,  apparently deliberate, threatens religious and national identity, possibly in an attempt to redefine  the power structures between the Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox churches. 

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I will consult scholarship by Marko Pavlyshyn and Timothy Snyder, whose works examine how cultural erasure is enacted through the destruction of religious monuments in Ukraine. I will  explore the correlation between the damage inflicted on the two churches and the history of  Russia and Ukraine, examining how religion has been influenced by the power dynamics  between the two states.  

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To further contextualize this concept of religion and power during war, I will examine a case from the Balkans War; a conflict which was rooted in a complex history of religion and politics. During the war, many religious sites were intentionally bombed as a means of cultural erasure. I  will briefly consider the destruction of the Ferhadija mosque in Banja Luka, Bosnia and  Herzegovina and the disputes over its reconstruction. This will demonstrate how the targeting of  religious sites is a marker of power struggles between nations and religious communities.

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References: 

Apaydin, Veysel. “The Interlinkage of Cultural Memory, Heritage and Discourses of  Construction, Transformation and Destruction.” In Critical Perspectives on Cultural  Memory and Heritage: Construction, Transformation and Destruction, edited by Veysel  Apaydin, 13–30. London: University of Central London Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xpsfp.7. 

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“Khvay Samnang’s Preah Kunlong: Way of the Spirit (2016-17) and Preah Kunlong (2016): Embodied Neak Ta, Intervention in Ecocide, and Prescription of Deep Ecology” 

Anneliese Hardman

University of Illinois Chicago 

This paper explores troubled knowledge located within the local Chong population situated in the Areng Valley in Cambodia. It examines past persecution that this demographic and other Indigenous groups faced under the Khmer Rouge regime because of their divergent belief in neak ta, (Ancient One), lok ta, and the Original Master of Water and Land. While their belief and way of life survived the genocide period, it remains under threat in the present day by state efforts to undermine traditional Cambodian ways of life in the name of agricultural development projects. This paper will track the significance and persistence of broadly deemed ‘animist’ beliefs in neak ta and lok ta in Cambodia, as well as explore how contemporary Cambodian artist, Khvay Samnang, imagines spirit presences mediating within current economic and political situations in modern day Cambodia. Samnang’s specific sculptural-mask installations, Preah Kunlong: The Way of the Spirit (2016-2017) and Preah Kunlong (2019), will be analyzed as modes of understanding the relational approach Cambodians take to engaging with spirits and the current ecocide occurring within Cambodia. These projects will also be examined as approaches to deep ecology that can be implemented to heal rifts made between Indigenous and State powers over land treatment.

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Some of the specific questions this paper asks include: What is the history of belief in the Original Master of Water and Land in Cambodia and how has such belief evolved and been maintained since persecution during the Khmer Rouge? How does Khvay Samnang’s The Way of the Spirit (2016-2017) and Preah Kunlong (2019) productively treat themes of animal and mask cosmology, ecocide, and deep ecology? How are beliefs in the Original Master of Water and Land still present in negotiation and treatment of land in Cambodia today? 

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“The Perpetuity of Plastic: Maintenance and Colonialism in Everlasting Plastics”

Portia Silver

Case Western Reserve University

The Everlasting Plastics exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale centered the ubiquitous material of plastic. In my paper, I discuss how the displayed works in the exhibition interrogated systems of waste, discard, and reuse, drawing upon Max Liboiron’s writings regarding the inherent aspects of colonialism in the creation, production, and disposal of plastic. I discuss the works in the exhibition which display plastic as a facet of queer maintenance and act as a queering agent. 

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I argue that the Venice Biennale is an inherently colonial structure; created in the vein of nationalist world fairs and exhibitions, the Biennale continues to enforce physical manifestations of imaginary and arbitrary borders. The Palladian architecture of the Pavilion itself communicates specific messages about American colonialism, imperialism, and exceptionalism. As Everlasting Plastics seeks to interrogate the systems of capitalism and colonization that drive behind plastic consumption and production, I nuance the extent to which this criticism can be effective while the exhibition participated in the structure of the Biennale. To counter this, I also discuss strategies of the curators, exhibition designers, and contributors to interrupt inaccessible structures and prioritize community and sustainability. 

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As an intern for Everlasting Plastics in summer 2023, I completed daily tasks of cleaning, guarding, and maintaining the works in exhibition. In the context of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ artistic practice and philosophy, I consider my work in the Pavilion as a form of maintenance art. I interrogate the paradoxical nature of working to care for and preserve plastic objects, as they are made from a material which is designed to be both durable and disposable. Everlasting Plastics represents how both everyday disposal systems and art exhibitions are built upon the “bones of colonialism” and how associated acts of maintenance can both uphold and interrupt these structures.

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“Is All That Glitters Really Gold? A Case Study of Bogotá’s Museo del Oro, Entropy, and Research as Counter-Maintenance” 

Eric Mazariegos, Jr.

Columbia University

On a recent collections visit to Bogotá’s Museo del Oro (Gold Museum), I handled a  Tairona serpentiform labret that had, centuries since its creation, developed a moss-like patina  over its surface. The museum’s director, chaperoning my visit, made a remark that its oxidation  was “active,” problematically growing over the museum’s catalog number. This  conservation dilemma was illuminating because, here, Pre-Columbian Tairona (11th-16th  centuries CE) processes of utilizing tumbaga, a high copper alloy that was oxidation-prone,  seemed to clash against the Museo del Oro’s namesake: higher-carat, “stable” gold never oxidizes.  

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Of the 30,000 “gold” objects in the Museo del Oro, nearly a third are Tairona tumbaga; evidently, a substantial portion of the museum’s oro is, in fact, not gold. As an example of further perpetual change, Tairona metallurgists even continuously washed their tumbaga works in herb  purées to modify surfaces hues from pinkish-red to golden-yellow. Tairona metal works were thus entropic and necessitated consistent, perpetual upkeep. In this paper, a condensed  chapter of my dissertation, I theorize how an emic approach to Tairona tumbaga actually prompts perpetual upkeep (like washing practices and entropic surface change), thus clashing against the  museological infrastructures which aim to consider the ontology of these works as stable, as  “gold.”  

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Researching these works brings to light their differential material ontologies; what  implications might this have? Might a “Museo de Tumbaga” be more inclusive, more open, and  more accessible? In my time as a doctoral student, I have witnessed the Museo del Oro upkeep  colonial legacies of stringent, restrictive, and exclusionary access to its collections by refusing  visits to doctoral researchers, and denying digital image rights to hopeful article publishers. My  case study on the Museo del Oro offers a captivating example of how research can act as a  destabilizing force that counter-maintains exclusionary museological colonial infrastructures by  offering new findings to its glittering holdings.  

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“Mother Art’s Laundry Works: Making Maintenance Visible”

Ashley McNelis

University of California Riverside

In Laundry Works (1977), Mother Art—a collective formed at the Los Angeles Woman’s  Building in 1973—held five performances at laundromats across the city to address “women’s  work” in one of the most public extensions of the home. For the duration of one wash-and-dry  cycle, collective members—Velene Campbell Kessler, Gloria Hajduk, Helen Million-Ruby,  Suzanne Siegel, and Laura Silagi—transformed laundromats in their own low-income  neighborhoods into a participatory exhibition and performance space. Mother Art engaged those  doing their laundry and those present for the event in an active conversation about care. 

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Socially reproductive labor initially positioned labor in the home and/or related to the family as  essential to capitalism; these efforts are today defined as types of “care work,” or activities that  “maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it” (Fisher and Tronto,  “Toward a Feminist Theory of Care,” 1990). My presentation will consider how, in terms of their  subject matter and how they produced the series of events, Mother Art conscientiously  highlighted the importance of care work by prioritizing connection around a commonplace yet  politically-charged experience. Mother Art’s effort to develop solidarity across various publics  alongside a critique of art world barriers resulted in a care-focused collaborative practice that  merged the personal and the political, private and public, and art and the everyday. In their  emphasis on collectivity, Mother Art’s powerful sociopolitical artwork foregrounded the  importance of care and targeted the systems critiqued and circumnavigated by feminism and  feminist art history. In their performances, Mother Art clarified how making visible the work  involved in maintaining their world could, in turn, upend it.