Latitudes’ essay “Un suelo para las historias del arte del futuro” [Soil for Future Art Histories] in TBA21’s catalogue “Futuros Abundantes”
Sun, Jan 22 2023
"Futuros abundantes" / "Abundant Futures" is co-published by TBA21 and Turner, 2023. Photos by Enrico Fiorese.
The exhibition catalogue “Futuros Abundantes / Abundant Futures” is now available. The book will be launched in ARCOmadrid’s section of ArtsLibris, on February 23rd, 2023, at 5pm.
With contributions from Rosemary-Claire Collard, Jessica Dempsey and Juanita Sundberg; Beatrice Forchini; Macarena Gómez-Barris; Berta Gutiérrez Casaos; Soledad Gutiérrez Rodríguez; Latitudes; Regina de Miguel; Plata; Matthew Ritchie; Jess Saxby; and Daniela Zyman. Poems by Ibn Zaydun and an artistic intervention by Abraham Cruzvillegas.
Hardcover, 16,5 x 24 cm
Spanish / English, 336 pages
Edited by Daniela Zyman and Eva Ebersberger
Book design by Matteo Guarnaccia
Publisher Editorial Turner
ISBN 978-84-18895-65-4
EUR 25
Miguel Covarrubias, “The Tree of Modern Art planted 60 Years Ago” [El árbol del arte moderno plantado hace 60 años], plantado hace 60 años], in Vanity Fair, vol. XL, n.º 3, New York, May 1933, pp. 36-37.
Edited by Daniela Zyman and Eva Ebersberger, and co-published with Editorial Turner in the context of the exhibition “Abundant Futures. Works from the TBA21 Collection” curated by Zyman, the show was co-organised by TBA21 and C3A Centro de Creación Contemporánea de Andalucía in Córdoba.
The 336-page book includes Latitudes’ newly commissioned essay titled “Un suelo para las historias del arte del futuro” [Soil for Future Art Histories], which delves into how we might turn the page on the pseudo-organic root-and-branch diagrams that have underpinned the cultural narratives of the archetypical institutions of twentieth-century art, and instead consider an entity that has been largely neglected in its capacity to connect human and natural relations: soil.
The essay is published in Spanish. Below is an excerpt in English:
“Thinking and building a new logic outside of the dualism of humanity on the one hand and nature on the other necessitates new narratives, new grammar, new relational strategies, and such new explanatory figurations. History in this alternative perspective is a history where human activity has always been meshed and mulched in the web of life. Following a sense of both humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity, we could imagine an art history and way of making exhibitions that is both outside in and inside out.
We could better imagine a shared vocabulary—terms that easily move back and forth between aesthetic and non-aesthetic uses. And we could give more attention to categories that, like soil, already seem to refuse a distinction between cultural forms and other forms of lived experience. The present and the future likewise require reconstructing and refreshing the theoretical model of the whole genre of the exhibition, its possibilities, and conditions. Allowing a wider and deeper sense of image- and object-making lineages could create new conditions for abundance, tackling the damaging split still left between the humanities and the natural world, and the imprint that this rift has left on the institutions of knowledge which allowed art history and artistic practices to be considered an alternative order to the forces and objects of the web of life. What we then might find is not a universal and singular structure, not a unitary tree of modernity, but countless very specific perspectives, practices, systems, temporalities, and imaginations in varying states of composition as well as decomposition, active as well as lying fallow.”
Essay keywords: Ecology, Daniel D. Richter, environmental art histories, Art History, abundance, temporalities of soil, “human forcing”, Environmental collapse, exhibition-making, Dipesh Chakrabarty, diagrams, Earth system, Miguel Covarrubias, Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA, tree genealogy, Porphyrian trees, environmental history, rewilding art history, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Jason W. Moore, Web of Life, soil, landscape, farming, agricultural intensification, Aldo Leopold, “to think like a mountain”, Julie Cruikshank, soil-attentive ethos, humanity-in-nature, nature-in-humanity, Caroline Levine, overlapping rhythms of art institutions.
→ RELATED CONTENT:
- Latitudes’ writing – exhibition reviews, artist profiles, interviews, catalogue essays, features and opinions.
- Laia Estruch performs “Ocells Perduts V67” (2022) on the river banks of the Guadalquivir river in the city of Córdoba, as part of “Pasaje del agua | The Journeying Stream”, a programme jointly convened by TBA21 and TBA21–Academy.
- Group exhibition “4.543 billion. The matter of matter”, CAPC musée d’art contemporain Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, 29 June 2017–7 January 2018;
- Lecture “Curating in the web of life” in Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 28 October 2019;
- Video of Latitudes' lecture “Curating in the Web of Life” at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 4 December 2019;
- Lead Faculty, Geologic Time, Banff International Curatorial Institute, Visual + Digital Arts Department, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada, 11 September–6 October 2017
- Editors, “Lara Almarcegui. Projects 1995–2010”, Archive Books, 2011
- Film programme, “A Stake in the Mud, A Hole in the Reel. Land Art’s Expanded Field 1968–2008”, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and tour, April–October 2008
