Isabelle Hayeur ‘Écume Etang,’ 2015 |
Sedimenta came to me as a part of another word broken between two lines, in a paragraph outlining a hypothesis, between definitions, between human and geologic histories.
Sedimenta issue 0 is proof of concept for a unique, digital, bi-annual journal. Essays, book and exhibition reviews, translations, interviews and soon artist talks and online exhibitions ask for new readings and new eyes. In issue 0, critical essays, separately, engage with individual artistic practices that observe and critically intervene within the shifting conditions of the Anthropocene. The book reviews, separately, discover new and exploratory voices in this discourse and their paratexts. The interviews, separately, highlight the voices of these agents. Together the essays, reviews, and interviews are not segregated into categories, but each of these are case studies in different forms and flow through the circumstances under which colonialism, capitalist economics, and imperialism occupy twenty-first century artistic practices. In addressing these broad, contemporary conditions, we convene case studies that seek the borders of artistic practice at the moment where the geologic meets the human.
Issue 0 explores artistic practices and what it means to belong to both geologic and human times scales. We explore planetarity and ontology of site in an essay tracing Lucy Lippard’s chosen hometown Galesto, New Mexico through Gayatri Charkavorty Spivak with Amy Elias and Christian Moraru. How does a material history of gravel and its tendrils of applications evidence our untenable, human-forged ecologies? Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin convene timely, ecological case studies together in their Intercalations series published by K Verlag.
We look at how Ericka Flórez and Juan Francisco Maldondo bring John Cage and Mathias Goeritz together into dance in Hegelian Dancers, where at Museo Experimental El Eco, objects become territories–and territories are rethought and reworked at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Art + Environment Conference and exhibition Unsettled. What responsibility do institutions have in defining an defying extant ecologies of practice? The exhibition We Are Nature at the Carnegie Museum of Art poses this question, with Rich Pell, Aisling Quigley, and Colleen O’Reilly answering.
We feature the work of Québequois artist Isabelle Hayeur and talk with her about her underworldly photographic practice, where ruin porn and urban sprawl are stranged out of perspective. What aberrant ecologies confront, elude, and puncture the edges of our Anthropocenic condition? Monsters and ghosts entangle and haunt our arts of living on this damaged planet, and Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt convene dispatches from the edges of our scientific practices. The essays in their collection set the ground for a cross-disciplinary experiment that uncovers the strange in our condition of endangered climate. Curated by Caroline Picard, Imperceptibly and Slowly Opening brings together the inaccessible subjectivities of plants and asks us to pay deliberate attention to watching grass grow while walls of water swell around us.
Thank you for reading Sedimenta‘s 0th issue.