Coolabah

Wounded landscapes: Human intervention into natural ecosystems.

2024-03-04T16:38:58+00:00

This article is a general introduction to this Coolabah edition.

Wounded landscapes, tense equilibriums, and broken connections:

2024-03-05T09:52:35+00:00

This text delves into the complex interplay between humans and the natural environment, exploring its philosophical, historical, and ecological dimensions. From ancient contemplations on living in harmony with nature to the present-day ecological crisis, the narrative examines the impact of human activity on the Earth's ecosystems, emphasizing issues such as deforestation, pollution, and mining. The author highlights the growing awareness of this ecological crisis and its reflection in contemporary art. Various artistic projects and exhibitions are discussed as powerful means to address environmental challenges and provoke critical reflection. The text concludes by emphasizing the urgent need for a paradigm shift in humanity's relationship with nature, urging a collective effort towards coexistence and sustainable practices to heal the wounded landscapes and repair the damaged balance between human activities and the Earth's ecosystems.

Biome | Home:

2024-03-05T10:06:34+00:00

Biome | Home was an exhibition by Jacqueline Spedding held at the Blue Mountains City Art Gallery, in Katoomba, Australia in the immediate wake of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, from September to November 2020. Looking at these dates, one wonders whether anyone was able to visit the exhibition at all. Imagining this exhibition abandoned, devoid of people due to a biological disaster, is a pertinent association to the images presented across the installation.

Ice memorial

2024-03-05T10:15:33+00:00

This text serves as ‘vehicular medium’ or thought projection towards the existence of an ephemeral Ice memorial on a stretch of intermittently frozen sea ice in the Bering Strait at 168° 58’ 37” W. This ‘work’ is offered as a memorialisation to the consequences of collectively imagined fear—in this case the (first) Cold War. Through this text, I seek to demonstrate that this location’s historical, political and aesthetic significance can be augmented through the imagination. In short, this text is an invitation to project our thoughts towards a small but significant stretch of water in the North Pacific Ocean.

Blood Real Estate

2024-03-05T10:39:37+00:00

This project titled Blood Real Estate aims to emphasise notions of wounded landscapes. The images in this series are created by applying digital manipulation techniques to images sourced from photographs I have taken of various places in so-called Australia over the last five years. Through the juxtaposition of a stark monochrome aesthetic and red filters, the Australian landscape is observed as if it were a bodily skin being metaphorically scratched at, as if it were a wound about to bleed. In stressing certain interpretations of construction and the ‘dream home’, I attempt to open a space for critical reflection on the availability of land for sale, as published daily on Australian Real Estate websites. By employing dark and dystopian futuristic lenses, I intend to examine the connotation of blood and the commodification of Indigenous lands within a postcolonial era.

All that is solid melts into air (Salton Sea), 2017

2024-03-05T10:51:33+00:00

This paper is an analysis of the artist Sadia Sadia’s 5’54” filmed loop three channel digital video and surround sound installation ‘all that is solid melts into air (Salton Sea)’ filmed at the Salton Sea, Coachella Valley, California in 2017. Integrating a practice that has included music production, sound design and fine art filmed installation, the artist examines the Salton Sea as a site of ecological devastation undergoing drought amplified by the climate crisis. The drying lake exposes ‘Salton Sea dust’ which contains a mix of arsenic, selenium, chromium, zinc, lead and DDT as a consequence of industrialised agricultural activity. The filmed installation employs aesthetic ‘methodologies of transcendence’ to initiate sublime, transcendent and epiphanic states, grounded in practice-based artistic research as well as existing sociological, psychological and neuroscientific research. Through an examination of the filmed installation work, the artist interrogates whether there is an element of the sacred that can be found in ecological devastation and whether the redemptive power of awe can lead from individual epiphany through to meaningful collective change. The submission is of a creative work of practice-based research with an accompanying expository text by a practicing artist and filmmaker.

Symphony of Fluid Punctum

2024-03-05T11:04:56+00:00

In the summer of 2005, I moved from a working-class suburb to an urban area to attend high school. Perhaps driven by a sense of estrangement from my new living environment, the elite class, and my new neighbours, wandering the streets became my favourite after-school activity. Walking, wandering and photographing, the ambulatory state akin to that experienced by Baude-laire's flaneur, served as a shelter to store my nostalgia. From unfinished buildings and damaged spots to scaffolding, I was attracted to construction sites, finding my gaze exploring the roles they play in the urban environment.

The Artist as healer

2024-03-05T11:13:03+00:00

Amidst escalating ecological crises, artists grapple with representing landscapes in the Anthropocene era, where human activity dominates. Departing from traditional portrayals, the artist advocate for acknowledging interconnectedness within ecosystems. Through personal experiences and projects like "Happy Owners," the author challenges conventional perceptions and inspire critical engagement with nature. Recent explorations into ancestral rituals and the Breton coast underscore a personal journey towards understanding human-environment relationships. Ultimately, art serves as a medium for interpretation and exploration, rather than didactic activism.

The Rurapolis Platforms:

2024-03-05T11:23:43+00:00

A possible reimagining of the phenomenon of urban sprawl is presented here, with a view to exploring and projecting a model of territorial development adapted to present and future societal and climatic contingencies: this involves rethinking the urban landscape on the basis of fragmented and neglected rural typologies. The Rurapolis platforms are anchored in the cross-border territory of the Pyrenees – between Navarre in Spain and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in France. A collective process of rammed earth construction combined with contemporary dance, brought to the abandoned village of Egulbati for a few days, will be used to address the issue of rural depopulation in a region where there are more than a hundred abandoned villages. These ruins, which run like fissures through the landscape, are seen here as potential clusters to activate a Rurapolis adapted to the ecological transition. The aim here is to show how a small-scale cultural initiative such as the Rurapolis platforms would allow us to take action in the context of the climate and health crisis, assess the viability of a larger-scale, long-term territorial project, and ultimately give visibility to a possible renaissance of the rural environment and its ruins on the back of a collective experience that revives a forgotten place.

Ynode – Caminu a su Connottu – Exhibition Tierra

2024-03-05T11:33:18+00:00

In various parts of the world we are witnessing massive ecological impact due to human activity and exploitation of the land perpetuated by economic agents, whose interests are far from the local communities of the territories under attack. The phenomenon of land grabbing is responsible, in certain areas, not only for the compromise of the landscape and the exploitation of the land, but also for the destruction of local economic activities, which increases the impoverishment of communities and the phenomenon of depopulation. The rural communities are often too small to be able to thwart the projects of large corporations or the government decisions that are made many miles away. Furthermore, within the same communities we can witness divisions between those who perhaps accept the new impositions, with the hope of being able to benefit from new income, and those who do not want to give up. The false and illusionary promises of development, promoted by the greed of the economic agents without any knowledge of the story of the place, could be fought with the construction of a new communitarian vision and an alternative dream of development. This may be the only possible way to be independent of external decisions imposed by others. This article aims to propose another vision through the description of a project whose aim was to spread small seeds, by imagining another possible future path, cultivating hope.

Work in Progress

2024-03-05T11:49:55+00:00

Questions addressed in this project are concerned with issues of photographic representation and the ways in which, through extended walks with a camera, the medium might reflect upon the problematic coexistence of nature and a cultural progressive drive towards limitless manufacturing within the context of the broader geo-political issues that affect the planet. Specifically, the images respond to problems such as the human exploitation of natural resources, urban expansion and our reliance on fossil fuels in an era in which climate change is threatening our existence.

Coda: Persistence at the End of Civilisation

2024-03-05T12:13:15+00:00

Honi Ryan reflects on the theme of the journal, Wounded Landscapes, in a visual essay that traces her series of ecologically centred performative installations Persistence at the End of Civilisation, a body of work about climate migration, produced between 2020–21. It comprises sculpture, painting, photography, video, food, participation, embodiment and movement, research and text; as well as sound, text, and performance pieces made in collaboration with artist Abi Tariq. This body of work grew in response to the megafires that burned in Australia in 2019–20 and brings an urban audience into proximity with the tactile reality of the aftermath of wildfires.