SESSION: Islands in Relation: Art, Memory, and Environment

IIslands have long inspired the artistic imagination—figured as sites of ethnographic encounter, spiritual retreat, or creative kinship. This half-day panel will consider the potential of island-based or island-informed artistic practices for critical reflection, cultural healing, and environmental justice. Oceanic islands and archipelagos, as conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze, are among the most critically impacted by the present-day climate emergency, facing sea level rise, water insecurity, storm intensification, biodiversity loss, and climate migration. We invite papers that examine the complex historical and ecological entanglements between islands and the wider world, foregrounding the enduring power asymmetries shaped by colonialism and globalization. Rather than treating artistic practice as a passive reflection of history, this panel positions it as an active, relational force in the formation of identity, memory, and resistance. In contrast to colonial imaginaries of isolation, purity, and boundedness, we draw on archipelagic frameworks of creolization (Edward Kamau Brathwaite), relationality (Édouard Glissant), and the “sea of islands” (Epeli Hau‘ofa) to envision islands as dynamic spaces of movement, transformation, and shared cultural life. We welcome contributions that explore how artists engage with themes of livelihood, memory, gender, representation, and intangible heritage in the face of ecological crisis and neocolonial pressures. Particularly encouraged are investigations into artistic strategies that reconnect communities with silenced histories, challenge dominant narratives, and offer restorative, imaginative, and pluriversal futures.

Session Convenors:

Karen E. Brown, University of St Andrews

Ana S. González Rueda, American College of Greece

Session Speakers:

Maximilian Leopold Langefeld, University of Oxford

Archipelagic Tensions: Art, Ecology, and Memory in the Taiwan Strait

This paper examines the island ecologies of the Taiwan Strait as an archipelagic field of relations where geopolitical power, environmental fragility, and cultural memory intersect. While the Strait is often depicted as a militarised boundary between China and Taiwan, its islands – Kinmen, Matsu, and Penghu – constitute dynamic environments shaped by histories of conflict, displacement, and adaptation. Amid rising sea levels, coastal erosion,and ecological degradation, these islands reveal how militarisation and environmental precarity intertwine. Through the works of Lee Tzu-Tung (b. 1990), Yao Jui-chung (b. 1969),and Tsong Pu (b. 1947), the paper explores how contemporary Taiwanese artists reimagine these geographies not merely as strategic outposts but as sites of relational vulnerability and creative resilience. Lee’s installations reframe fortified landscapes as psychic and ecological wounds; Yao’s photographs of abandoned outposts expose the entanglement of memory, emptiness, and territorial anxiety; Tsong’s performance and video works translate spatial constraint into gestures of repair and coexistence. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation and Epeli Hau‘ofa’s conception of the sea of islands, this paper situates the Taiwan Strait within a broader archipelagic and decolonial imaginary. It argues that artistic practice here functions as a relational, restorative force, challenging state spectacle, reclaiming silenced ecologies, and envisioning pluriversal futures of care and connection beyond the logics of sovereignty and militarisation.

Anne Renahan, University of St Andrews

Pia Arke: Disrupting colonial narratives through irony in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

Danish-Kalaallit artist Pia Arke (1958- 2007) is known for work that confronts colonial narratives to recalibrate (mis)perceptions of people and place in Kalaallit Nunaat, and to connect Kalaallit communities to their silent – or silenced – memories. In this paper, Ifocus on Arke’s use of irony and incongruity as an archipelagic, relational and destabilising tool to disrupt historical and contemporary perceptions of Kalaallit Nunaat. While the humour of Arke’s practice has been noted, it has not been explored in detail within her multi-disciplinary photography or through the lens of an archipelagic methodology. This paper therefore, offers new insights into an unexplored area of Arke’s practice and the role of irony as a rich thread of potential archipelagic investigation. Using archival material, interviews and literature, I carry out a visual analysis of Camel in a Snowscape, 1987 and Untitled (Put your kamik on your head, so everyone can see where you come from), 1994 (amongst other works) to explore the central query of my paper. Referencing the ideas of Édouard Glissant, Godfrey Baldacchino, Jonathan Pugh, David Chandler and Marina Karides (on island feminisms), I highlight the potential of ironic archipelagic practices to disrupt and expand the boundaries of Nordic art histories, and those of the broader European canon. In doing so, I show how Arke creates a space within the mainstream discourse for perceived peripheral geographies and alternative pluriversal futures. This is particularly timely given calls for the self-determination of Kalaallit Nunaat, and renewed US interest in purchasing it.

Taylor Moss, University of Colorado Boulder

Colonial Currents and Fragile Ecosystems: Dhari Rivera’s Río y Respiro

The contamination of industrialization flows through the Río Grande de Loíza in Puerto Rico. The island’s largest river has long sustained livelihoods for the surrounding Afro-Caribbean population, while simultaneously bearing the weight of carbon colonialism. Decades of hurricanes, extractive development, and pollution have eroded the region’s ecological stability. United States interventions, namely Operation Bootstrap, have infiltrated and legally bound Puerto Rico to the United States, preventing the island from claiming environmental sovereignty. The river is thus paradoxically both witness and participant: a living record of exploitation and collaborator in ecological memory. Puerto Rican multidisciplinary artist Dhari Rivera’s Río y Respiro (2012) holds its breath while wading through these currents.Expanding on Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s counter allegory of island-as-world (versus island-in the-world), I argue the materiality of Río y Respiro illustrates the fragile ecosystem of Puerto Rico. As a boat pulls hand-blown glass orbs through the water, narratives by residents ofnearby towns are read aloud to an audience, accompanied by the beat of drums. The glass vessels housing fragments of communal histories transcribed onto cotton cloth ribbons are attached to a tenuous bamboo structure that parallels the lack of stable infrastructureavailable. From an aerial point of view, the combination of orbs and bamboo resemble a backbone: the river and its community are at the core of political and environmental resistance. As Río y Respiro navigates the river, voices once submerged emerge to the surface, binding human and ecological survival in a shared breath of defiance.

Jeffrey Belnap, Texas Tech University, Costa Rica

Covarrubias and the Sala de los Mares del Sur: Mexico as an Eastern Edge of the Pacific Archipelago

This paper examines the exhibition La Sala de los Mares del Sur (1954, The South Pacific Room) at Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology. This experiment in Pacific-island thinking envisioned the permanent placement of Mexico’s eclectic national story within a Pacific island frame. The gallery was curated by Mexican artist- ethnographer-art historian Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957), a self-educated polymath fresh from making major contributions to exhibitions on Pacific Island cultures at the NY MoMA (Arts of the South Seas, 1946), and the American Museum of Natural History (Across the Pacific, 1949). He had also, following The Island of Bali (Knopf, 1937), just published Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Knopf, 1946). The popular ethnography underscores the impact of trans-Pacific cultural diffusion on one of Mexico’s most resultant ethnic groups, making the Isthmus Zapotecs, in a certain way, peripheral Pacific Islanders. Envisioned as integral to Mexico’s iconic pre-Columbian archaeological collection, Mares del Sur imagined Mexico as the eastern edge of the transpacific archipelago of connected cultures. Shuttling as he did between Mexico and NYC from the 1920s until he lost his visa in McCarthy era America, Covarrubias’ diffusionist thinking was shaped by the controversies that circulated in another island: Manhattan. He spent a quarter century of circulating within the Boas circle as well as the leaders in cutting-edge museography. The presentation articulates Covarrubias’s intellectual project, as well as the conditions that led to its failure. Running countercurrent toMexico’s Cold-War era nationalism, the “permanent” exhibition was eventually dismantled.