SESSION: This Must Be The Place: Beyond local/global binaries in ecocritical art history

A deep connection to specific localities remains a powerful source of identification and situated knowledge in our field. At the same time, the planetary scale of a globally interconnected ecosystem transcends the limits of the local and the jurisdiction of borders. The aim of this panel is to consider the challenges posed by the planetary scale to art history’s attachment to the specificity of the local, regional or national in the study of art, objects and cultural practices.

The complex category of ‘the place’ lies at the heart of this panel. Distinctive perspectives on the natural world, land and localised practices are currently articulated across many different traditions and epistemologies, including in Indigenous methodologies (Linda Tuhiwai Smith). Simultaneously, concepts like ‘planetary commons’ (Johan Rockström), ‘planetarity’ (Dipesh Chakrabarty) and ‘eco-cosmopolitanism’ (Ursula Heise) have emerged to oppose the abstraction of globalisation in capitalist and colonial projects. What can ecocritical approaches and methodologies in art history learn from, and contribute to, these debates?

Embracing an expanded understanding of ecocriticism, we expressly welcome contributions across the broadest range of subjects, periods, media and politics. This half-day session will feature an introduction from the convenors, followed by presentations. Participants may use the following prompts: What new art historical approaches reflect best the complexities of a globally connected ecosystem? How can we consider climatic, biological and topographic distinctions alongside categories of the national and the geopolitical? What examples can we share that refuse the binary of the planetary scale and the local?

Session Convenor:

Olga Smith, Newcastle University

Andrew Patrizio, University of Edinburgh

Session Speakers:

Jessica Holland, University of Sussex

Turbid Futurity: Thinking through Water in the Visual Culture of South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and its Mediterranean Littoral

Water, in its diverted, contaminated and exploited state, is at the heart of the climate crisis. This paper examines how contemporary Artist Moving Image (AMI) works from South West Asia and North Africa (SWANA), one of the most water-stressed regions globally, and its Mediterranean littoral visualise watery histories using Speculative Fiction (Hartman 2008) to trouble boundaries between the local and the planetary.

Drawing on hydrofeminism (Neimanis, 2019), my methodology explores water’s role in cultural memory and potential for resistance. This framework informs my reading of The Dido Problem (2021), a 27-minute film by HUNITI GOLDOX, the collaborative duo of Areej Huniti and Eliza Goldox. The film reimagines the myth of Dido/Alyssa, who fled across the Mediterranean from Tyre (Lebanon) to found Carthage (Tunisia), linking it with the Afro-futurist myth of Drexciya, which tells of how the foetuses of enslaved women who were thrown overboard adapted to survive underwater.

I argue that bodies of water – at once fluid; as vessels of movement and connection, and turbid; heavy with particulate matter carrying the building blocks of life or remainders of toxic pollutants wantonly disbursed within them, are chosen to appear in artist moving image from this region for this duality.

By situating SWANA’s water imaginaries within global ecocritical discourse, this paper offers a regionally grounded yet global approach to art historical analysis that challenges the binary of local versus planetary.

Elizabeth J Petcu, University of Edinburgh

Between Central Europe and Potosí: Global and Local in Early Modern Mining

This paper exposes how the circulation of mining technologies and images between Central Europe and Potosí from c.1550-1620 troubles the dichotomy between global and local in histories of early modern resource extraction. Combining methods from the histories of art, architecture, and science, as well as postcolonial and ecocritical approaches, I examine a globally mobile body of drawings, maps, manuscripts, and printed, illustrated treatises that arose from mining cultures in Central Europe and Potosí. These range from technical diagrams of ore-grinding mills in Saxon physician Georgius Agricola’s De re metallica (1556) to the city views of Andean nobleman Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c.1615) manuscript.

I argue that this corpus fostered an asymmetrical exchange of mining technologies and ways of visualising mining between Central Europe and Potosí. In exposing how European colonisers ultimately relied on Andean metallurgical knowledge, the Andean images foreground the geological, topographical, and cultural specificity of mining—its boundedness to locality—while also acknowledging the growing implication of early modern mining in planetary networks of silver and knowledge circulation. By examining this dynamic, I show how the global reach of early modern systems of ecological colonialism coexisted with and inflected mining’s inevitably local conditions. In so doing, I offer a model for scrutinising early modern mining cultures in which the tensions and overlaps between the global and the local can become productive.

Eszter Erdosi, Independent scholar

Stench on a Branch: Multispecies Labour, Transcontinental Biopolitics and Local Wildlife Management in Gerard Ortín’s Wolf Urine (2017)

Produced in the Basque province of Álava, Gerard Ortín’s photography series titled Wolf Urine (2017) shows bottles of wolf urine hung on tree branches alongside a road. The decline of the wolf population in the area has led to the overpopulation of their historic prey, the wild boar, resulting in an increase in the number of roadkill accidents. Local authorities started using bottles of wolf urine, imported from the United States of America, to imitate the presence of the boars’ predator; the smell emanating from the bottles acts as a natural deterrent and keeps both drivers and wild boars safe by keeping the latter away from the roads. Wolf Urine does not directly represent the humans and the wild boars in Álava or the wolves at the urine’s site of production overseas. Instead, it makes the bottles containing the substance its primary subject matter.

This paper will consider how Wolf Urine rejects the binary between the global and the local by centring the bottles that encapsulate the interwoven multispecies connections between human labour on site and animal labour elsewhere. As such, I will explore how Ortín’s work simultaneously distils the multispecies politics of the global marketisation of bio-based substances and those of local wildlife management practices. In a broader sense, I will also make the case for multispecies labour as a framework that can allow ecocritical art histories to bridge the gap between the local and the global.

Katherine Fein, Amherst College, Massachusetts, USA

The Global Intimacies of Ivory Miniatures

Ivory miniatures are seemingly local objects. Small-scale portraits intended for private viewing, they have long been understood through the framework of intimacy. Scholars have discussed how ivory miniatures documented and fostered interpersonal affection, contributing to cultural shifts around romantic and familial intimacy in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American world. I argue that ivory miniatures also evince a different kind of intimacy—an ecological intimacy that bridges continents and species and envelops these seemingly local objects in global networks of exchange and exploitation. Miniatures were painted on slivers of African elephant tusks, yet the word elephant is almost entirely absent in literature about portrait miniatures to date. This widespread omission obscures the imbrication of these tiny portraits in both the killing of elephants and the enslavement of human beings that accompanied the lucrative ivory trade. By foregrounding rather than suppressing ivory’s animal origins, my paper reframes portraits on ivory as multispecies objects both complicit in global histories of violence and resistant to the ideologies that justified that violence. My analysis contests the local/global binary by centring the fraught coexistence of these geographic frames, attending in equal measure to tusk and skin, elephants and people, materiality and representation. Ultimately, I undermine anthropocentric conceptions of intimacy that emerged at this historical moment—and which continue to reverberate into our present—by uncovering how ivory miniatures attest at once to interpersonal affection and the fraught interdependence of human and nonhuman lives.