Maja and Reuben Fowkes present at the 49th Annual Association for Art History Conference

About the Presentation:

In his Second Treatise of 1690, John Locke spelled out the rationale for the appropriation of common land, stating that “as much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property.” For the Enlightenment political theorist, it was exploitation of the soil that justified the individual right to own land, expropriating the commons and subjugating colonial wastelands. Such codifications of the extractivist approach to the soil laid the ground for the agrarian transformations of carbon modernity, which treated it as a passive recipient of chemical inputs for monocultural crops. As climate breakdown tests the ecological limits of heavy agriculture, how have artists exposed the entwined colonial and environmental histories of land and proposed ecocentric practices based on more-than-human comradeship and care? These questions are addressed through Anetta Mona Chişa’s One Are (2021), which translated the Roman unit of territory into a 100m2 inverted cast of a ploughed field to reveal the materiality of the soil in its earthy imprint of tilling, cracking and erosion. Also considered is Cooking Sections’ For the Rights of the Soil not to be Exhausted (2019), which engaged with the histories of chernozem from the Ukrainian steppe, from the terror of Soviet grain requisitioning to the impact of shifting climatic zones. The artist duo also collaborated with lawyers to legally enshrine the defence of the soil against capitalist extractivism, encapsulating the planetary tipping point in attitudes towards what anthropologist Kristina Lyons calls the “complex self-organising system” underground.

More information about the conference can be found here. 

About Maja and Reuben Fowkes:

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015) and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe project on the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. For more, see: www.translocal.org

We thank all in attendance and those who helped organise this event.

Image: Anetta Mona Chişa, One Are (2021).