Tentative itinerary via the Vera List Center for Art + Politics:
Signature event for the 25th anniversary of the founding of the VLC, with artists, curators and scholars hailing from twelve countries in celebration of Maria Thereza Alves’ prize winning project Seeds of Change, and five prize finalists.
Friday, November 3
Conference Day One
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street
12:00-2:00pm Maria Thereza Alves Panel Discussion I: The Ground We’re Standing On
Participants: Seth Denizen, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Geography; Josette Kehaulani Kauanui, Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Wesleyan University; Tomaz Mastnak, Institute of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana
Unpacking the co-production of land, plants and peoples in the research for Seeds of Change, this conversation challenges our assumptions about how and what we think we know about a site. In Maria Thereza Alves’ words: “The earth you think you’re on is not, it is someplace else. The only way you would know the place is from the flower.” By looking at human-instigated histories of soil movements – and plants as evidence thereof – we examine radical forms of geography that help uncover obscured histories of sovereignty and oppression, and consider the potential of interspecies co-operation. In this talk we reframe our relation to place as well as what we risk when we do so when the “local” or so-called native is elsewhere. The New School faculty who guides this conversation considers who and what can call a place home and the means necessary of elaborating on that definition in order to move it beyond exchange.
2:30-4:30pm Maria Thereza Alves Panel Discussion II: Seeds as Storyteller/Witness
Participants: Jane Bennett, Professor, Department of Political Sciences, Johns Hopkins University; Marisa Prefer, art and Horticultural Advisor; Radhika Subramaniam, Assistant Professor, School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons
Moderator: Lara Khaldi, Curator, Palestine
In their narrative and expository role seeds collude with human actors and fertile ground to tell a story, sometimes a different story than expected, about the history of a place. Alves’ work takes up the narratives carried by dormant seeds that endure in ballast, i.e. the soil that was used to balance trade ships as they crossed the ocean. These dormant seeds have the potential to activate alternative ways of knowing buried and obscured histories of oppression that are “flashing up,” as Walter Benjamin wrote, in the present. As such, it is our, very necessary, job to grasp these stories in those moments. An environmentalist, a playwright/writer, and an art historian guide this investigation about the illustrative agency of seeds, and elaborate on and bolster the conceptual tools Alves has developed in regards to their own research and practices. The New School interlocutors and respondents, a botanist and a historian, elaborate on these interpretations to further consider how the sciences, humanities and design collaborate to imagine tangible alternative pasts and futures, and what is lost when we choose not to consider them in concert but select one over the other.
4:30-5:30pm Meet & Greet with conference participants
Prize Presentation & Keynote Conversation
The Auditorium at 66 West 12th Street
6:00-6:45pm Keynote Conversation with Maria Thereza Alves and Saidiya Hartman
Prize presentation
Introduced by Executive Dean Mary Watson, Maria Thereza Alves receives the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018 and the prize object, Yoko Ono’s sculpture The Third Eye, for her project Seeds of Change.
Seeds of Change explores the social, political and cultural history of ballast flora in port cities and reveals patterns, temporalities and instruments of colonialism, commerce and migration going back many centuries. In the conversation that follows, Maria Thereza Alves discusses her prize-winning project and its repercussions in the current political moment with Saidiya Hartman, Professor at Columbia University and author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
Exhibition Opening
Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center
6:45-8:00pm Exhibition Opening & Reception
For the exhibition Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change –A Botany of Colonization, the artist, in association with students at The New School, has been mapping the artifacts and entities that trace the proliferation of foreign flora that travelled to New York and the surrounding region via trade ship ballast over the past two centuries. The installation includes a verdant collection of propagated ballast flora that will fill the Aronson Galleries in the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons School for Design. A new series of watercolor drawings supplements this botanical collection and its cultivation, and shows the artist’s reflection on these historical ciphers through text and images. In addition, Alves has hand-drawn largescale maps on canvas that further highlight those areas in historical New York harbor sites that have been filled in with ballast over the past few centuries. In anticipation of the exhibition three partner organizations have sourced, potted and germinated the documented ballast flora at their outdoor locations to which they will be returned after the exhibition to create actual Ballast Flora Gardens in the spring and summer of 2018.
Saturday, November 4
Conference Day Two
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street
12:00-2:00pm Prize Finalists Panel Discussion I: The House We’re Building
Participants: Doris Bittar, Nitasha Dhillon and Greg Sholette (Gulf Labor), Hannah
Meszaros Martin, Colombia (Forensic Architecture)
Try as we might, the materiality of structures and infrastructure still determines much of how we interact with others. Finalists for the Vera List Center Prize, Forensic Architecture and Gulf Labor are artist research groups dedicated to reassessing and activating the visible and invisible aspects of infrastructures. Forensic Architecture has established a form of history writing that skips over the historical significance to architectural forms, to focus instead on architecture’s performance as material witness. Gulf Labor has focused on the Guggenheim Museum’s labor practices to propose that artistic practices entail ethical positions. Representatives of the two groups discuss the visibility of markers of absences, and how alignments between organic and non-organic matter can result in an affirmative acts of community building.
2:00-4:00pm Prize Finalists Panel Discussion II: Languages For Us(e)/Ways of Knowing
Participants: Irene Agrivina, Indonesia (House of Natural Fibers), Gabriela Gamez, Mexico,
(IsumaTV), Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho, South Africa (MADEYOULOOK)
In light of rampant skepticism towards democratic forms of political representation, media platforms have recently been positioned as the new commons. But in the struggle for social justice, visual and discoursive media languages can only be effective if they enact as much as they convey social justice values shared among their members. This panel is informed by current debates in the U.S. on self-representation and protocols of accessing images, words and other culturally specific narratives. IsumaTV is a collaborative multimedia platform for indigenous filmmakers and media organizations in Canada; House of Natural Fibers (HONF) is a new-media arts laboratory in Yogyakarta, Indonesia; and MadeYouLook uses Johannesburg’s public transportation system in order to stage performative interventions that jolt different relationships among commuters. Here, representatives of all three groups elaborate on the specificities of visual and discoursive languages and the dynamics of media production that seeks distinct and different audiences and co-producers especially when addressing trans-local environmental challenges.
4:00-5:30pm Festive Closing Reception with music, dance and song