Soil, Land, Territory, and Performance

Catalog description

This course explores the multiplicity of communal and public gardens that populate New York City's landscape while at the same time indagating the relationship that artists, communities, scholars, and activists create with soil, communal grounds, and their territory. The course proposes an approach to these concepts that understands the performative power that resides in the multiple modalities in which people and communities establish a concrete and poetic relation to their grounds, lands, and territories they inhabit. In paying close attention to how the materiality of the soil participates in contemporary art-making, the course proposes that soil are active performers in the constitution of the communal. The course takes the case of the Amazonian "terra preta de indio" (a.k.a. Dark Earths) and the scholarship produced around it in the last few decades to understand revealing qualities of soil performance that overwhelm the paradigm of the productivity as a major factor in soil valuation. Instead, we will approach soil from the perspectival vantage point of contemporary art-making, socials sciences, and community engagements.