by Laura Knott, with commentary from artists Nolan Oswald Dennis and Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate)
(This text is from an article that appeared in the Boston Art Review, Issue 2, 2018)
Existing conditions
i. I’ve spent much of my work life at MIT. In the past few years, I’ve begun to wonder why those 168 acres of Cambridge, Massachusetts aren’t covered in vegetables and fruit trees. But if you begin to think about a vegetable garden, you begin to think about soil and the microbes that create its life. And, if you think about living soil, you’ll begin to think about land, and if you start thinking about land, you’re going to start thinking about who “owns” the land and how it came to be “theirs.”
ii. What we could call the Massachusett[1] Institute of Technology is a “land grant” university[2] built on landfill that covers marshes that will, perhaps rather soon, become watery once again. But, for now, the “solid ground” of MIT (which is never solid, but moves with the root systems of the trees planted on the campus every time the wind blows) sustains buildings and research labs and decorative plantings and work spaces for some of most brilliant young people whom you could ever hope to meet.
iii. I am surrounded by friends and acquaintances who want to establish intentional communities tied to land/soil/food and to more-than-human worlds that include microbes, other mammals, fungi, minerals, rocks, and the sensory landscape. Motivated at least in part by despair and fear stemming from climate change and politics, they (we) try simultaneously to turn their (our) backs to nostalgia (this isn’t just 70s-era back-to-the-land utopianism) and to the “shiny innovations” through which technoscience promises ever-greater increases in agricultural productivity.
iv. The facts and fiction of land ownership are intricately wound into my own life as the descendant of settler colonists. In fact, I am a settler colonist still, though I don’t like to think it.[3]
A reading
In her book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa looks at recent changes in how soil scientists and environmental theorists think about relationships between soils and humans. She speculates on the ethical possibilities of creating “care time” for soil, a combination of introspection and attention that results in actions (“doings,” “the concrete work of maintenance”) that make demands on humans in more than human worlds. Especially on humans who focus ahead, to a future of environmental and political catastrophe.
“[R]estless futurity,” she writes, “renders precarious the experienced present.”
Care time is the present, the daily, the ordinary. Care time, for soil/land/food encompasses worms, dirty fingernails, clean water, social justice, land rights, and numerous relationships among humans and the more than human, within which, while everything may not be connected to everything, everything is connected to something[4]. Something that matters.
And two artists
Nolan Oswald Dennis, a recent graduate of the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) at MIT, who has returned to South Africa, and Erin Genia, currently a graduate student in the ACT program, and I spoke about land and soil.
Laura: Does place (land) underlie what you expect of your work in the future, or of those things that your work might bring into existence?
Erin: Part of my methodology in living is that I think about the different layers of the land, the temporal aspects, the ecological aspects, the human impacts and where I fall into all of that. I want to be conscious of that, because I feel this overwhelming pressure to be removed from the land, by living in this American society. And so it’s important to me to try to reject that pressure by having a consciousness around the land, not only in my day-to-day existence, but especially in my work.
Nolan: I’ve become more and more interested in making a place for myself, to think about place in this very material way of how to insert myself into a kind of land or eco-system, and how to become a member of a productive eco-system. In some ways place is produced and confronts that place that’s already there. I have to break out of where I’m placed. That requires building or at least participating in building different kinds of places: multi-species, multi-lingual, complicated communities that are not necessarily conscious of themselves all the time.
Laura: I’ve become interested in MIT having been sustained in its early years by the gift of “federal lands.” Has that history been part of your work?
Erin: There’s a heavy reality embedded into the land that MIT is on. I was conflicted about coming to Boston because of the role that this place has played in the colonization of America. I learned right away that this land was mostly a swamp, that hills were leveled in order to fill in the swamp so that the town could be built. I think about this incredible violence of doing something like that to the land, which immediately relates back to the incredible violence of colonization to the original people of this land, and how MIT has benefited from that.
Nolan: I’ve been thinking about space not being mapped geographically but through an intensity of feeling, about MIT and Massachusetts not as a geographical space, but as an intensity of feeling about the history of this place through the land…. a certain density of history and spirit that’s been pumped into this place.
(The conversation turned to the current effort to revise the South Africa constitution to explicitly allow the expropriation of land without compensation, in order to repair colonial and apartheid dispossessions. We then talked about effects of the ownership of land.)
Nolan: In South Africa, there’s this tension about what people mean when they say they want the land [for housing, for farming, for back-to-the-land purposes]. But maybe there’s a way in which the land itself has different agendas. Maybe in some places the land doesn’t want to be fertile. Maybe in some places the land wants to be (though it sounds ridiculous) suburban housing. In some cases the land wants to be extremely fertile. I try to imagine that all of these big imaginaries are part of a negotiation around place, which includes the material of the earth itself.
Erin: There is a paradigmatic dissonance regarding ownership. What does it mean to own a piece of land? Does the land have its own agency? I think about how harmful the individual ownership of land has been in the U.S., starting with the allotment system imported from the British colonization of Ireland. It’s been harmful to break up the land into pieces that are owned by people who don’t have a connection to the land and who see it only as a resource. With ownership comes an easy framework for exploitation.
Laura: If we CAN think about desirable futures, where does rural life fit into those futures? Does it at all? Is rural life always eco-utopian?
Erin: I think that the rural/urban dichotomy is false. I think about a subversion of that dichotomy in which people lived in areas all over the world in a subsistence way. We’ve declared that to be a lesser way of living, but it worked for a very long time and it made it so that people in ”rural” places could survive. And now we’ve created systems where rural people cannot survive without access to those systems [of industrial agriculture, monetary exchange, and other infrastructures].
Nolan: It’s not so much about desirable futures for me, but how to get a sense of what the state of the present actually is.
***
Back when I used to make dances, my father told me once that the whole enterprise of dancing, if you looked at it from a certain angle, was kind of ridiculous. I was insulted, but I knew he was right. Now, years later, as I look at it from a certain angle (though belatedly and somewhat gingerly), the whole enterprise of land ownership, too, seems absurd. Likewise, the enterprise of educating anyone in any university (which is every university in the United States) that was built on stolen land.
So, from this certain angle, uncertainly, I end with more questions than when I began. Can the relations of humans to land and soil and its more than human worlds be made right? Can I live rightly in human and more than human worlds that I do not “own” and do not deserve to use for my own benefit?
With Nolan Oswald Dennis and Erin Genia, and with others if they’ll have me, I would like to think with land and soil. I would like, following their lead, to think about what land wants. I would like to turn away from nostalgia and from the seductions of techno-futurist dreaming. I would like to imagine being muddy as a form of resistance.
About the Artists
Nolan Oswald Dennis is an interdisciplinary artist from Johannesburg, South Africa. His practice explores what he calls ‘a black consciousness of space’: the material and metaphysical conditions of decolonization. He is in interested in decolonial solidarity as an ecosystematic network. He is currently thinking about geo-politics as an aspect of geological rather than geographic relations, and what it means to live in a dream.Nolan holds a degree in Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, as well as a Master of Science in Art, Culture and Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Erin Genia (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is a graduate student in the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT. Her work has focused on creating a powerful presence of Indigenous epistemologies in the arts and sciences with a goal of fostering an evolution of thought and practice in societal instruments that are aligned with the cycles of the natural world and the potential of humanity. Erin has a Master of Public Administration in Tribal Governance and a background in Indigenous peoples’ cultural resources and education. She is fluent in 2 and 3D forms and is currently exploring digital fabrication, sound, performance, immersive theater and public art interfaces.
About the author
Curator Laura Knott has had an active art career as well, with presentations of her work at the documenta exhibition, on public television, and in venues ranging from the California desert to a revolving door on the MIT campus. A graduate of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Laura studied environmental art and performance, and film/video. She was trained as a choreographer. Laura was the first dance graduate of Duke University, where she also studied political science and international relations. Twenty years ago, she created Worldwide Simultaneous Dance, in which dancers danced at the same time in 11 countries around the world, live streamed.
Notes:
[1] A Europeanized name for Indigenous lands in the eastern regions of what is now called Massachusetts, including the area around the Charles River, where MIT sits.
[2] Sponsored by Vermont Senator Justin Morrill, the first act establishing the land grant universities was signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, as were the Pacific Railway Act and the Homestead Act, all of which gave European settler colonists access to and rights over land on which Indigenous people had farmed, hunted, and husbanded wildlife for centuries. The lofty purposes of the land grant universities, which developed a skilled artisanal class in the United States, can still obscure the ways in which those purposes are tainted by their origins. There were three waves of educational land grants, the first of which allotted “federal lands” to the states to create and support universities teaching agriculture and mechanics. The 1862 land grants benefitted 17 institutions of higher education, including MIT. In 1890, cash grants were provided to start what we now refer to as the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Over a hundred years later, an act of 1994 provided very limited funds to found Native American tribal colleges, whose focus on settler agricultural methods further dissociated Indigenous people from their own technologies of food production.
[3] I, with my immediate family, “own” acreage in Vermont (formerly within the lands of the Abenaki people) that we bought using proceeds from land that the previous generation of my family “owned” in West Texas. That land was surely taken for the benefit of white people from its native inhabitants. (And Texas was taken from Mexico, an act that makes current arguments over the sanctity of the US/Mexico border seem completely absurd.) My mother’s family “owned” acreage in Mississippi, on land that was “opened to settlement” in the 19th century by murdering, stealing from, and exiling its native inhabitants. Although my father always claimed that we didn’t “own slaves” (according to Indigenous scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, the slave-owning population in the American South was about 26% of the white people), and although perhaps my ancestors didn’t personally steal anyone’s land (or maybe they did), my current comforts, my ability to look at the way the weakest breeze moves the leaves (and thus the roots) of “my” aspen tree in Vermont, and the privilege of having the time that I have taken to write this, among many other privileges, would not exist had those crimes not been committed.
[4] See Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.