Maya Lin, Public Art, and the Confluence Project

Partners & Spade

<p>A place comes into existence through the depth of relationships that underwrite a physical location with layers of sedimented names. In <i>Place Matters</i> scholars and artists conduct varied forms of place-based inquiry to demonstrate why place matters. Lavishly illustrated, the volume brings into conversation photographic projects and essays that revitalize the study of landscape. <p/>Contributors engage the study of place through an approach that Jonathan Bordo and Blake Fitzpatrick call critical topography: the way that we understand critical thought to range over a place, or how thought and symbolic forms invent place through text and image as if initiated by an X marking the spot. Critical topography's tasks are to mediate and to diminish the gap between representation and referent, to be both in the world and about the world; to ask what place is this, what are its names, where am I, how and with what responsibilities may I be here? Chapters map the deep cultural, environmental, and political histories of singular places, interrogating the charged relation between history, place, and power and identifying the territorial imperatives of place making in such sites as Colonus, Mont Sainte-Victoire, Chomolungma/Everest, Hiroshima, Fort Qu'Appelle, Donetsk airport, and the island of Lesbos. With contributions from the renowned artists Hamish Fulton and Edward Burtynsky, the Swedish poet Jesper Svenbro, and others, the collection examines profound shifts in place-based thinking as it relates to the history of art, the anthropocene and nuclear ruin, borders and global migration, residential schools, the pandemic, and sites of refuge. <p/>In his prologue W.J.T. Mitchell writes: "Places, like feasts, are moveable. They can be erased and forgotten, lost in space, or maintained and rebuilt. Both their appearance and disappearance, their making and unmaking, are the work of critical topography." Global in scope, Canadian in spirit, and grounded in singular sites, <i>Place Matters</i> presents critical topography as an approach to analyze, interpret, and reflect on place.</p>

<b>Artists and writers portray the disorientation of a world facing climate change.</b><p>This monumental volume, drawn from a 2020 exhibition at the ZKM Center for Art and Media, portrays the disorientation of life in world facing climate change. It traces this disorientation to the disconnection between two different definitions of the land on which modernizing humans live: the sovereign nation from which they derive their rights, and another one, hidden, from which they gain their wealth--the land they live <i>on</i>, and the land they live <i>from</i>. Charting the land they will inhabit, they find not a globe, not the iconic "blue marble," but a series of critical zones--patchy, heterogenous, discontinuous. </p><p>With short pieces, longer essays, and more than 500 illustrations, the contributors explore the new landscape on which it may be possible for humans to land--what it means to be "on Earth," whether the critical zone, the Gaia, or the terrestrial. They consider geopolitical conflicts and tools redesigned for the new "geopolitics of life forms." The "thought exhibition" described in this book can opens a fictional space to explore the new climate regime; the rest of the story is unknown.</p><p><b>Contributors include</b></p><p>Dipesh Chakrabarty, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuele Coccia, Vinciane Despret, Jerôme Gaillarde, Donna Haraway, Joseph Leo Koerner, Timothy Lenton, Richard Powers, Simon Schaffer, Isabelle Stengers, Bronislaw Szerszynski, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, Siegfried Zielinski</p><p>Copublished with ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe</p>

Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art: A Reader

Humane Ecology: Eight Positions

Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment