Week 3
This week my collective were tasked with sharing our ideas for the speculative project. Caught of guard, I initially began thinking about curating an exhibition of instructional work in my own home – taking influence from Fran Cottelll’s ‘House Projects’. I would advertise an exhibition featuring the works of Yoko Ono, Sol Lewitt or Barry Le Va, taking place at my postcode.
However, Frances’ lectures on the Anthropocene has me thinking about the concept of the emotional Anthropocene and how the landscape holds memory. It brings to mind the Four Corners Monument at Navajo Tribal Park which erases the indigenous meaning and use of the land in which it’s situated. Placing a monument upon a land where some of the first beings emerged enforces a Eurocentric point of view . It commercialises the land, as it’s become a tourist hotspot for people to come and see the interaction of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. The monument replaces the original native meaning attached to the land – it was sacred to the natives who have lived there for generations and marked the boundary between two tribes.
The idea that the future is ancestral is put forward by Ailton Krenak. He suggests that in order to move forward we must look backwards towards ancestral societies. Deirdre O’Mahoney is an Irish Artist who explored the ancient farming technique called ‘lazy beds’ or ‘potato ridges’ through her sustainment experiments (2021-2024) (https://deirdre-omahony.ie/portfolio/sustainment-experiments-the-plot/) and X-SPUD (2015) (https://deirdre-omahony.ie/portfolio/x-spud/). O’Mahoney draws attention to the benefits of lazy beds as a farming technique as they are hardy, cause minimal intervention to soil fauna and soil hummus. X-SPUD saw O’Mahoney create two intersecting lazy beds, positioned at a location which marked the deportation and death of the thousands of people that left for Canada in ‘coffin-ships’ during the genocide of 1845-1852 (also known as the potato famine).
So perhaps I could curate an exhibition of Irish Artists that highlight the emotional Anthropocene of my country.
