D.5.1 Gardening as Education in Healing in San Francisco

• Jessica Santone, Cal State University East Bay

This paper compares two garden initiatives conceptualized in the 1980s and developed in the 1990s: Bonnie Ora Sherk’s A Living Library™ (A.L.L.) and Cathrine Sneed’s The Garden Project. Both share a concern for environmental justice through connecting community members to the land and caring for neglected watersheds. Both primarily focus on young people learning in gardens and have education as a central core of their work. But they differ substantially in their histories and strategies. A.L.L. developed out of Sherk’s earlier environmental performance Crossroad Community (The Farm) (1974-80), which reclaimed abandoned land below a freeway as a community space. It was conceptually related to the artist’s strategy of “Life Frames,” an approach to viewing local communities and ecosystems holistically as art in order to learn from and appreciate them more fully. A.L.L. gardens were initially planned near public libraries and later schools, where they were incorporated into existing curricula as integrative education. The Garden Project developed out of Sneed’s earlier work, the San Francisco County Jail Horticulture Project (1982-92), a program for prisoner rehabilitation started after Sneed left her position in legal services there. The Garden Project principally aims to provide job training and education, now additionally serving “at-risk” youth; it also harvests food donated to the local community. Comparing these two projects offers insights on both potentials and limitations of art-life community projects. I argue that Sherk’s and Sneed’s ecological education projects propose and, to a large extent, deliver on healing both land and people through their mutual interaction.

D.5.2 Ecological Care and Contemporary Fiber Art in the Southern Cone

Jacqueline Witkowski, Colgate University

In the bowls of Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto’s installation, The Serpent’s Energy Gave Birth to Humanity (2016), viewers lie on cushions, taking in various colours, textures, and aromas – as Neto infused gauzy bundles with saffron and cloves that hang down from inside the belly. The entrance offers one to move through, relaxing in the crocheted nets and womb-like structure worked on with members from the Indigenous Huni Kuin communities. A similar sense of safety ensconces visitors to artist Alexandra Kehayoglou’s giant tapestries that simulate vast areas of the Argentine landscape. Not only can one lay on the soft green hue of the textile grass, but in so doing, the tapestry further protects the land from irreversible damage done. In the work of Cecilia Vicuña, the long and thick strands of felted wool hanging from the ceiling invite viewers inside. With titles like Quipu Womb and Living Quipus (2018-), the artist references such energy found in the material, especially in her native Chile, where the quipu has a historical connection to Indigenous Andean communities.

What connects these projects are their reliance upon textile materials to invite and embrace audiences and open dialogues with an ecological imperative. What further connects each of these works is a concern for environments and the vast populations affected by global warming, deforestation, hydroelectricity dams, among other issues. Moreover, how are the current iterations of fibers shaped by past, present, and future ecologies, and how have historical and political events affected how they encounter such physical and metaphysical landscapes today? In the wake of the global health pandemic, these conversations have shifted to consider access to health care and governmental treatment of communities on the margins.

D.5.3 Migratory and Ritualized Pedagogical Dispersions of the 2010s: Tania Bruguera and Tania El Khoury

Laurel V. McLaughlin, Bryn Mawr College

Since the onset of the so-called “migration crisis” in the 2010s, art historians have queried the relationship between globalized migration and artistic practice. Contemporary artists such as Tania Bruguera and Tania El Khoury have long challenged this focus on “crisis” as precarious hardship, speculating upon the possibility of the līmen, or threshold, within the conception and reality of crisis. This threshold, I propose, holds potential for care across power differentials, systemic injustices, and conceptions of the “other.”

In this paper, an excerpt from my larger dissertation project, I draw upon the scholarship of cultural theorist Mieke Bal to theorize a “performative migratory aesthetics” that acknowledges such potential. My theorization departs from Bal’s alignment of the ontology of film with the experience of migration to a consideration of the ontology of performance with the experience of migration through ritualized migratory conditions, or movement, memory, heterochrony, and contact. Ultimately, this theorization questions: how do such ritualized conditions construct collective liminal identities? How and why is this dispersed with others? Through this theoretical proposition I examine two case studies: Tania Bruguera’s community and political activist project Immigrant Movement International (2011) and Tania El Khoury’s interactive installation Tell Me What I Can Do (2018) that each embody ritual forms of collective pedagogy in the 2010s. Each proposes exercises, workshops, and archives from which audience members consider their political positionalities and ultimately build relationalities of care."