For Green Libraries Week 2024 (7-13 October 2024), we’re highlighting some of the books and zines that were featured in On Our Table: Connecting with the Land, a lunchtime sharing session held on 12 September 2024.
Let’s Become Fungal!
by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez
[ESS OST]
Looking at a range of Indigenous practices from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia, the book presents 12 teachings in how fungi can inspire new ways of thinking, new systems, and behaviours. The 12 teachings focus on how we organise and collaborate, relationships of solidarity, how to escape categorization, communication, and insecurity.
Unearthed: On Race and Roots, and How the Soil Taught Me I Belong
By Claire Ratinon
[ESS RAT]
A memoir by Claire Ratinon who found belonging through falling in love with growing plants and reconnecting with nature. The book recounts her first year living in the English countryside and her farming practice, and how she strengthens her connection to Mauritius through growing food from the island, exploring its histories and recording her parents’ stories.
John Akomfrah
By James Harvey
[AS AKO]
The book by James Harvey is the first comprehensive analytic investigation of John Akomfrah’s films, offering sustained close engagement with the artist’s core thematic preoccupations and aesthetic tendencies.
Chapter 6, in particular, investigates his works which engage with themes of climate change and ecology.
On the topic of John Akomfrah, iniva has also recently launched Unseen Guests: A Post-National Digital Pavilion, which features eight artistic commissions and investigations alongside Pan-African cultural archives across the UK and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), focusing on documentations of anticolonial events and testimonies of climate change.
Third Text The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions
Number 151-152, March-May 2018
[Journals]
This issue of Third Text compiles research on contemporary art practices that explore and intervene culture, politics, and representation through the use of soil. This issue also features an article on Palestinian artist Jumana Mana’s film, “Wild Relatives” which follows the transaction of land resources between Norway and Lebanon (pages 200-229). The article also goes in-depth into her geopolitical practice of planting and saving seeds.
Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology
By T.J. Demos
[ESS DEM]
While ecology has received little systematic attention within art history, its visibility and significance has grown worldwide in relation to the pressing threats of climate change, global warming, and environmental destruction. By engaging artists’ widespread aesthetic and political engagement with environmental conditions and processes around the globe-looking at cutting-edge theoretical, political, and cultural developments in the Global South and North-Decolonizing Nature offers a significant and original contribution to the intersecting fields of art history, ecology, visual culture, geography, and environmental politics.
Art Beyond Art: Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century
By Rasheed Araeen
[ESS ARA]
The book weaves Rasheed Araeen’s personal narrative as a diasporic artist with his concepts, sketches, and imaginations for various land and ecological art projects and proposals. Rasheed Araeen is a Karachi-born, London-based artist who is widely considered to be a pioneer of minimalist sculpture, and is also the founding editor of the journal Third Text (featured earlier in this list as well). Araeen is also a close collaborator of iniva.
Pait ii em phi, pait ii em ki: Look at what they have, look at what you have
By Synchar Pde
[ZIN PDE]
The zine is a culmination of Synchar Pde’s research about the history of the tea workers in Assam and West Bengal for the Tea’s Times Conference at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, in 2024. After realising that the history of tea workers were through colonial resources, Pde created the zine to echo the ways in which tea workers expressed themselves and fought for their rights through songs, proverbs, riddles, and humour. The zine features the poems; Don’t Spill the Tea by Anshu Chhetri, translated into Nepali by Menuka Bhujel and into Lepcha by Selina Lepcha; and All for One, One for One by Synchar Pde.
Synchar is also a recent volunteer for Stuart Hall Library, iniva.
ATE: Journal of Maori Art
[Journals]
ATE Journal of Māori Art is an annual, peer-reviewed journal with an explicit focus on Māori art, artists and art movements. Volume Three (2024) of the journal features heavily on Maori textist artists and weaver groups, and also features artist-led galleries and spaces in Aotearoa.
These are only some of the highlights featured at the lunchtime talk on 12 September 2024. You can find the full reading list here.