metropolis m

When we were asked by Metropolis M to discuss sustainability, art, and heritage, I immediately got stuck on that first word: sustainability. It’s a term that has been used and abused a lot, but that at the same time feels inescapable. When I started working at the lectorate Art & Sustainability at Hanze/Academy Minerva, that felt like a moment where I really had to reckon with the term. When sustainability is part and parcel of my immediate context of work, how do I work with this concept? So, I’m curious to extend that question to you: what does sustainability mean to you, and how do you position yourself in relation to it?

Sustainability is a profoundly imprecise concept. It is also a relatively new concept, as I think Colin and I rediscovered when we were preparing that course a few years ago. It emerged in the 1970s where it referred to the capacity of a given energy infrastructure to be reproduced or sustained based on a baseline demographic range. Now, of course, we talk about it in all kinds of ways, using it as a catch-all term for a set of norms most colloquially associated with environmentalism. So that is why we often begin our inquiries of classes with the kind of claim that there is no such thing as sustainability, that it has become a kind of neoliberal mandate to allow for a set of institutional and economic imperatives to feel as though they are inherently progressive. We need propositions, such as reimagining or rethinking, because sustainability in and of itself is an empty signifier.

I quite like that kind of contribution to critical thought today. I think we’re in severe shortage of it. It speaks to a utopian presence in contemporary thought, which I think we need to show up for. I’m saying this, of course, on the brink of what really feels like the horrifying prelude to the coming years of conflict. Against this current moment, sustainability feels very much like a concept that was born in the 70s and died in the late 2010s. But as sustainability doesn’t name the basic motivational infrastructure of states or of capitalist civic accord anymore (i.e. to sustain the status quo), maybe now is the moment to do something more propositional with sustainability.

One thing that we share across our different research practices is an interest in how this reimagining of sustainability takes shape across different realms, which includes the level of art and heritage, but also very much the material and the infrastructural conditions that underlie them. You are both working together on the project PITCH, which explores heritage, petroculture, and the energy transition. How do those elements come together in that project?

Throughout the project, we collaborate closely with cultural institutions that are materially, conceptually, and economically embedded in the messiness of energy transition. Colin and I collaborate with E-WERK Luckenwalde, a former coal powered energy plant in Brandenburg, just south of Berlin. E-WERK has repurposed and reactivated this energy infrastructure in a variety of ways. They run a contemporary art programme, but they also produce energy through carbon-neutral and renewable technologies and sell that energy through a cooperative infrastructure that distributes power across Germany. In doing so they supply hundreds of houses with energy, called Kunststrom or ‘art current’. E-WERK moves beyond a representational paradigm of petroculture and heritage insofar as they actively repurpose this power plant to rethink what it means to inherit such systems.

We tend to talk a lot about artists’ supposed responsibility to address ecological questions not only on the level of content but also in the process of making. What do you think it means for institutions, such as E-WERK, to move beyond that representational paradigm?

What I find very interesting about E-WERK is the way in which the art institution quite literally comes home to people through the provision of energy to their homes. We increasingly see this kind of entanglement between social, artistic, and infrastructural dimensions in ecological art and research. Both PITCH, as well as JUST ART, the project on climate justice and artistic research in which Colin and I work together, really emphasize these connections to and collaborations with citizens through art. Obviously, how such projects are conducted and take shape matters greatly (both in what they mean for participants as well as how we think about art). How do you view these developments?

One of the affordances of these public, participatory models is that, whatever kind of artistic or curatorial practices we are talking about, new kinds of knowledge or literacy are getting crafted collectively. To me, that is an interesting place to begin the work of thinking about where energy comes from and to increase the organizational capacity of the art world. I think there is currently a primacy of triangulating the home, the field, and the museum or institutional space, and thinking about them as in an ongoing relation that brings with them new set of practices, norms, and affordances that are distinct from previous examples of this kind of work. I’m thinking about residency models I’ve been supporting like FieldARTS or the NICA course I teach on ‘Field Theory’ that put artists and researchers in dialogue with port workers, marine scientists, and the more than human communities that make meaning of the logistical spaces where energy as commodity is still moving around in barges and pipelines. But there are also clear efforts by organizations like Framer Framed and Sonic Acts to bring audiences and field-researchers into collaborative relation in spaces overlaid with environmental and economic neglect. Or the group exhibition shadow circuits at MaMA in Rotterdam where the curator and artists are including a field visit to the port of Rotterdam as part of the program. Something important happens to the questions we ask about art, critical inquiry, and literacy when we ground our concerns in and with the field.

When you immerse collectively in the field, you are suddenly aware that the kinds of distinctions that you are trained to recognize are insufficient. What is a subject and what is an object in the field? How do you make historical demarcations in a field that is lively and lived and remembers its own historicity in the grammar of matter? Who gets access and on what terms is often determined by labour conditions, imperial propriety, and custom, and none of these care much about the normative criticalities that we bring from the humanities. I think it can be very overwhelming and beautiful, it can also be troubling, frustrating, if not boring. Either way, there’s an inevitable contamination of your habitus that is really important to show up for.

I think it is important to take that seriously. Because we are within a certain kind of Western pedagogical model, we expect the object to release its information very quickly. And the field will persistently resist that demand, and that resistance is part of its alterity. I think what you are describing is a very ethical experience to have; there is good reason that many of the contemporary arguments for environmental ethics begin and end with the concept of alterity.

Both PITCH and JUST ART are long-term projects. What kind of challenges and possibilities do you envision for these research projects in the coming years?

I think you are right. I do believe shifting the discourse of sustainability much more explicitly towards multispecies climate justice can be very generative, as a lot of artistic practices have done over the last years. In that way, the (neo)colonial power structures and ideologies that underlie both climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as the energy transition and climate adaptation, are placed at the centre of the conversation. But while that ideally opens the door for a sense of ecological interconnection and collectivity, it is easy to see how such ways of thinking are also being co-opted. So, I think working at that knot, if you will, feels quite urgent.