I had the pleasure of speaking with Louise about visual art, extractivism, and Indigenous perspectives in relation to the Anthropocene. You can listen to the recording of our conversation here and read the accompanying essay here.
Alma Feigis: Well, first of all, thank you for taking the time to chat.
Louise Purbrick: It’s a pleasure to talk about research because it often stays in the classroom and, actually, it should really be out there, especially research around the questions that you’re interested in, Alma. I think it’s a good thing, I’m pleased to do it.
AF: Thank you so much. I think, in this kind of conversation, it’s really important to state positionality, especially when talking about Anthropocentrism and Indigenous knowledges, so I wanted to just start by saying that I'm coming to this conversation in acknowledgment of my positionality, and that we're both privileged that to us, this is just merely a conversation. We’re sitting in our homes discussing theories and speaking about extractivism in relation to art, while the realities of the destruction and violence that extractivism imposes on people are so devastating to so many people's lives. So, just acknowledging that while theory, creativity, and art around these problems can help people come to terms with them and fight against them, it won't really ever take place the place of understanding anyone's lived experience.
LP: It’s a very important question about positionality, particularly in relation to extractivism which, you know, I’m very happy to talk more about what that means, but the plunder of the earth's resources would be one way of thinking about it, or the plunder of land, or the plunder of energy.
I think that if you're speaking like I am to you, and I'm in my home, looking out at my garden which I tend, on the corner of a road – I live in a terraced house and I'm a gardener. I have space that I can control that's both inside and outside. And I think even not being a lecturer or not having access to books and theories, and so on, to be able to speak, I think it's really important to say the position from which you speak.
But for me as well, there's something about acknowledgement that responsibility that a part of your positionality is, that if you take as part of your position the acknowledgement of extraordinary harm caused by the systems of capitalism which we are beneficiaries of. And also then responsibilities to try and present that in everything that you do. you know whether it's academic work or whether it's activism or whether it's gardening. I think those two things have helped me deal with the kind of incredible inequality and privilege from which I speak. There's a phrase which I've found quite useful from a photographer, she's been around for a long time, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and she uses a phrase called speaking nearby, you don't assume the place of the person but you kind of try to speak from a place that's nearby. So that's one of the things that have helped me with that really difficult question of positionality.
AF: That kind of leads me to Simryn Gill’s photographs, Eyes and Storms, of Australian land in the Pilbara region, which is mainly Indigenous Australian land. So, when I'm thinking about how to approach her photographs and how we can interpret them, I incorporate Indigenous knowledges in relation to that land, because I think that's important when you're speaking about that place in particular.
When we visualise this kind of post-extractivist, post-Anthropocentric way of thinking and living, when we use these Indigenous knowledges which were developed through these people's practice and lived experience for tens of thousands of years, how do we incorporate and learn from Indigenous wisdom in order to exist and position ourselves differently in relation to the earth, but without being culturally extractive and unethical? I think that kind of links to the phrase you said before.
LP: Yeah, it's a really difficult question I think. A really, really difficult question, because in debates about the representation of Indigenous world views, which we need to be honest, we absolutely really need, because the worldview from the West has created a dying world, and we could go into in what ways it's dying, but it is dying, and we will die with it.
So, we do need the framework of people who always held a different view as their land was attacked by the forces of capitalism – the diggers, the engineers who measured and decided that things were resources rather than living beings with rights. We do need to consider the voices that have been silenced, but nobody should kind of take over that position. So, it is a really complicated thing between thinking about the world that we've suppressed, the people's ideas that have been suppressed – and I say “we” from a Western perspective. The ideas that have been suppressed, the lands that have been taken are one and the same in a way.
But some of it – people use the word amplification now, which I've listened to quite a lot – is that that our role is to amplify those voices, to provide platforms for those voices. So, I think that's one. And if you work in university sector like I do, I'm at the Royal College of Art, I work in a really privileged institution, and then to amplify the voices of others is really key. Sometimes that can be done through collaborations, if we're really careful how we do those to ensure that we don't swamp them, and take them over, and use them for our purpose. For example, collaboration is now a funding requirement. We have to be careful we don't appropriate the labour and the suffering of others for our own ends and keep that to the fore.
So, I think we've got to be careful about all those things. But I would say as well that our practice should platform, rather than author, the work of Indigenous peoples and their thoughts. That might mean not reading a paper and then citing that paper and authoring your own paper. It might be facilitating that person to write in the journal that you were going to write in, or whatever. So that's one thing. The other thing I think is really important is that Indigenous philosophies and Indigenous worldviews have a much wider constituency than Indigenous people. For example, in Chile, which is where some of my work is, there was a very important kind of social uprising, sometimes it's called revolution, in 2019. There was a site called Plaza de la Dignidad which was taken over, where there were huge protests that started off about increasing metropolitan fares, but then became actually about the previous military dictatorship from the 1970s, and about a different kind of Chile, which included this remaking of an Indigenous flag, a kind of updating. Particularly people who did not have links to a particular Indigenous group called Mapuche were adopting their kinds of ways of thinking. I think it’s quite interesting that there have been revolutionary movements, often with really young people whose identities are quite hybrid, but who have begun to adopt an Indigenous perspective, rather than just a kind of Indigenous identity. So that's quite interesting, and it should be recognised as a force in and of itself. I'm not quite sure how to theorise it exactly, but I think it's the putting into the public domain, through struggle, an Indigenous perspective that has since become broader than just those Indigenous communities.
And I think it's quite an interesting thing, if I think about it in relation to the experience of being Black in Britain. Lots of Black communities will identify as African, but they will not be able to trace their roots exactly, they will just be able to trace their roots roughly. So, I think that a lot a lot of identities, because of the interventions of slavery, because of the interventions of extractivism, because of interventions of colonialism, have been mashed up, mixed up, and turned over, so you can see how people might want to return to a perspective that doesn't necessarily belong to them, but belongs to the time when they were free. There’s something around recognising the hybrid forces that have adopted an Indigenous perspectives through struggle, as well as that we must not take over those voices. We must be really careful to amplify them.
AF: I've been grappling with the words “appropriation” and “re-appropriation” because they do have that connotation of abuse and misuse, but at the same time I think it is sort of necessary to re- I don't know… the technical compared to the cultural uses of that word are difficult to navigate.
LP: Yeah, “appropriation” itself is a difficult word, I think, because it's also the mechanism through which we learn. You know, a child will copy in terms of using language, and some forms of appropriation are considered to be inheritances, and other forms of appropriation not. So, I think we have to think carefully about the word, it is a difficult one, definitely. Its stem is “property” as well, so that's kind of difficult, isn't it.
AF: Yeah! Yeah, I think looking at us, now, in our reality, and going back to extractivism as well, those intensive practices obviously cause so much harm to ecosystems and present issues for local populations. But in the global north, we’re all embedded in, and benefit from, and can't imagine life without these economies and extracted substances. In that sense, we sort of engage with this objectification of and domination over nature every day. Like, this laptop has copper in it, and when we when we’re thinking of art and photography, film photography and digital cameras require sodium nitrate and lithium, respectively. With this in mind, how do you think we can begin to foster critical discussions about these complexities without being too condemning or cynical or moralistic, but still moving forward positively.
LP: I think about this a lot because I use the technologies which I study in my research, so copper and lithium in particular, because the work is related to Chile and Chile has a huge history of copper mining. When you're talking about the copper in your laptop some of it may well be recycled from the nineteenth century because copper has very high recyclable values.
But lithium is what I'm focusing on the moment because it's seen – as part of the green transition – as the solution to climate change, and the solution to the dependence on carbon and so on, so it's kind of interesting. So, the first thing I'd say is that in the discourses of extractivism, extractivism can be defined quite broadly, like any form of extraction of material, or energy from one part of the world and usually moved to another. I mean not always, but usually those systems of pulling away materials, such as copper, coal, or rubber, which was really important in the history of the Amazon and the history of the Belgian colonisation. It would be really hard to find a material that you couldn't call extractivist and wasn't bound up in the capitalist system. But what it tends to do is, we tend to think of some fuels as “dirty” and others as “clean”. We have imposed sort of binaries upon the act of extractivism where some are good, and some are bad. Lithium's clean. Batteries are green and they're good, and it's clean energy, and it's kind of nice. Meanwhile coal is a dirty, it's damaging, it’s destructive. I think we need to think about how some forms of extractivism used to hold the place of being “good” and now are “bad”. We just need to be sensitive to the way we've relativized our own destruction, and allowed ourselves to think, Oh, it's fine to take some materials but not others. So, one would be a kind of critique of the discourses of extractivism.
The other one I think is to do with thinking more generally about capitalism itself as the accumulation of material, because that in a sense is what it is. I mean, capitalism accumulates in share prices and in huge amounts of invisible wealth at the very, very global elite, but it is based on just making more stuff. Just keep on making more stuff, and there are cycles of making more stuff that have been analysed as kind of overproduction where the markets will slump because there's too many of those materials, or you could tail them, which is often happens in extractivist industries. You control prices by plundering materials, then releasing them more slowly onto the market. But we could think that it is that materialism itself, and this would be ways in which some Indigenous philosophies would be really important: that those materials themselves are not ours. They're not ours for the taking, they're not ours for the pushing through systems of profit. They belong to their context in the Earth and in the communities that have been their guardians. So, some of it requires us to think outside of materialism itself, and also systems of possession and ownership itself. And I think we could begin to see that differently.
And I would be careful, when I'm talking about materialism, I don't mean the reality of living in our world, because I often study material culture and I would argue that, against Anthropocentrism, we are our things, you know, many of our things entirely carry our inheritance between mother and daughter in terms of textiles, between a father and a daughter in terms of the skills that they might pass on, between the memories that we might have of the past that are in the way in which we garden, or whatever. So, I do feel that material forms are human forms, and human forms are also material, that there isn't that binary between a kind of thinking human being and a dead material world. But it's the accumulation of stuff as property I think is what we need to address in terms of extractivism, which requires rethinking. It requires an anti-capitalist position, essentially really.
AF: Yeah, which people are not willing to give up at all.
LP: Yeah, it's an interesting question if we could think about how we undo it. I've been thinking about that a lot around art practice where there's this incredible critique, and Simryn Gill’s work would be part of that, an amazing critique of extractivism and an assertion of the life that is being lost of our earthly world. Then the world goes on and does it again, so!
AF: I think that with creating art around this kind of destruction and misery, there's also an ethical issue that's imposed. You mention in your paper, Trafficking the Earth, that an aesthetic of decay destruction and displacement has no place in the material realities of people who live in the remains of a colonial past. So, what advice would you give to those people who are trying to create visual art in response to this condition and this misery?
LP: Yeah, it's really interesting because it's a long, long trope of Western art to talk about beautiful decay. I mean, it goes back to the eighteenth century, and even Walter Benjamin, whose writing I've lived with and love, I would say also has a kind of interest in the ruin as a marker of time. But the way I think you can think about ruins is, the people who've helped me have actually been kind of writers within the kind of decolonial position in Latin America, particularly I'd say Macarena Gomez-Barris, is that she talks about a submerged position. And I think, in a way, if you're in the rubble or if you're in the decay, there's something else that's going on, that not you're not looking at it from above. And maybe you're thinking, how do I rebuild? Or maybe you're thinking, what part of this is part of my history, what part of it has been torn asunder and I want to build again? So, in some ways I think that I'm just learning to try and think about the images of destruction and what we do with them. And actually, as we speak, there are incredible images of destruction on the Gaza strip, and you look at them and you just think what on Earth. What on Earth can be done with that?
Actually, there's a really interesting quote from an Italian anarchist, I'm going to forget his name for the moment, but he says, ‘We are not afraid of ruins. We are the builders; we are the workers’. In some ways I think there's something around not being afraid of them, to get a bit closer, to actually see what's inside of them and what it's like to live with them. Maybe that's one of the responsibilities that you could do with photography. I've been trying, and last time I was in Chile I tried to take more closeups, and tried to think through the detail of what I'm seeing and looking at. I don't know if that helps, but I am working on that, what it might be to have a submerged position that doesn't allow for that distance to beautify, really, I suppose, but I'm working on it. If I find a solution I will let you know.
AF: No, I did notice that, both in the photos of lithium pools that I remember seeing, and also in your other photos that are in your papers, that you do take photos from the ground of the sites of extractivism, rather than sort from an aerial perspective, like Simryn’s photos, and also how those corporations I guess would sort of track their processes from above.
LP: They do, yeah, and in fact, one of the things that is in the rubble of lithium, which is unbelievably difficult to see is fag butts, water bottles, coffee cups, sometimes the debris of alcohol. You have these signs of human debris that are also part of destroying the pristine environment as well. There's this sense that the debris itself is not of the Earth, it’s actually quite constituted by human disregard, in a way, so it's less beautiful actually close. Much less beautiful.
AF: Yeah, I also wanted to ask, in that same paper, Trafficking the Earth, you use those photographs alongside others, these kind of diptychs that work very well visually, but juxtapose each other in meaning. One that caught my eye was this aerial view of a sort of swirling copper mine alongside a detail of a painting which was acquired by a copper merchant. I found it a really effective way of bringing closer and making tangible what can easily seem so distant and so detached from our reality. I was just wondering what your intention was behind this choice of, almost, curating.
LP: Yes, so in the large photographic installation Trafficking the Earth, there are three artists at work. There's myself, Ignacio Acosta, and Xavier Ribas, and Ignacio tends to work with distant view, very precise photographs, and also now working with drone images like lots of artists are. Xavier Ribas often works with archival images as well as landscapes, so his work moves between the two. What I think we were all trying to do in that piece was think about the compressions of time. One of the things that extractivism does is it forces out of the Earth some ancient entanglements of materials, so copper entangled with the earth around it. The metals come out as ores which are kind of complicated mineral substances. When you pull those out of the Earth, time is just rendered weirdly compressed, ancient time and the speeding time of capitalism.
Also, in every act that we do is, often, we carry the past with us, and that's also something I think is important that we could say comes from – I would use that theory from Walter Benjamin whose notions of searing, how the past can sear into the future. But also, Indigenous ideas of nonlinear time are at play. I think we must all experience, just sometimes in our everyday life, the way time collides from the past into the present. So even if you're walking a landscape that you know, you might remember that you walked there years ago, or you might remember that the path is indented here and it means somebody else has walked there yesterday, or two years ago, or one hundred years ago. I think we all can feel how the landscape can carry time differently than the news media, or differently than a human voice. I think that in that piece, we were trying to look at how the past unfolds in very strange ways, or very nonlinear ways in the present, and also that the present pulls at the past in particular ways. Often there's a memory, particularly in Chile of Pinochet's coup in 1973, that still is enacted out in current policies around extractivism. Landscape holds memories, which we know, but also the rupture of time through extractivism can then spin out different kinds of time into the present. So, we were trying to look at time compressions and how historical moments then collide. I think the critique of extractivism is an important way of thinking about our relationship to the deep time of the planet, and being more respectful really of those things I would say.
I live on the chalk downs, and I was thinking this is kind of a nice thought actually about the Earth, rather than these very terrible ones, is that you know there are white cliffs that meet the sea in Brighton, which is where I live, and there is cliff erosion which is a fairly natural phenomenon as far as I understand it. When that happens, after a fall, the cliffs are really white, and so they've got this white chalk, which is a sedimentary rock, and flint, which I love, these beautiful hard layers pretty evenly between it. After a cliff fall, I was thinking that those materials have not seen the sun for, I don't know, millions of years and all of a sudden they are enlivened by the sun. They are actually seeing the sun for the first time. And it's quite interesting because we recognize that with our eyes, the gleaming cliffs, that actually the process is these hidden materials brought up to the surface to greet the world.
AF: Yeah, I think there is that kind of poetry and magic that can be found in nature and can be brought up through art. I was looking at – I mean I'm sure you know Paula Serafini?
LP: I know her writing, not her. I'd like to know her!
AF: So, in her book, Creating Worlds Otherwise, she highlights five main functions of art in addressing extraction and climate change, which are deconstruction, design, documentation, denunciation, and democratization. Apparently it was accidental that they were all beginning with ‘D’! I think they're all quite practical functions of art, so, I was wondering, as both a scholar and an artist, do you think that this poetic and affective charge that art possesses is an additional attribute to the way in which we engage with the with these kinds of discussions? I don't know if that makes much sense.
LP: No, it does. Art, in whatever form, whether it's a piece of sculpture, or a photograph, or a performance, calls attention to itself. Art will say, “Look at me”, and some of that I think is that work of acknowledgement that I think is important in terms of a positionality. It's to say, “I want us to stop for a moment, maybe longer, and look and think about this thing that is going on. Maybe here, but maybe elsewhere”. So, I think there's a function of art as acknowledgement, often of harm, but acknowledgement per se anyway. Then I think that, even though the word ‘witness’ is quite a difficult word, there is a sense in which it calls up different kinds of witnesses to its act of representation of something that happened somewhere else, so that for work on extractivism, or for Trafficking the Earth, I think that we're calling people up to be witnesses to forms of destruction that are unequal, that may not be undone but maybe could be recognized and some reparations considered. So, it's kind of to acknowledge, to demand witnesses.
Also, I think the other thing it does is that, in a world where increasingly there is few public spaces for political change, and even those public spaces for political change have often been quite restricted to certain kinds of groups of people, art still has a notion of public. And a public that can't necessarily be defined and advanced. The definition of the public of art are those people that do bother to stop and look, so that public is not something that is necessarily restricted. I think that's also important because then it creates a political arena for a possibility of change. For me, and we talked about this earlier, how you make that political arena powerful enough to produce actual change in the domains that ignore us is that is a really big question, but I think it's a really important act.
But there's also something wanted to say about photography itself, which is that photography is probably the most powerful visual form, because it is the most ubiquitous. There are photographs everywhere. I remember a colleague of mine saying that there were more photographs in the world now than bricks, and that was years ago. We love an illusionistic likeness as a culture, and so the domain of photography remains a particularly important one for political change. But the problem is the one that we've talked about, that that is often based on distance between the photographer and what the photographer is looking at. I would say that the calling attention, that art calls attention to itself and therefore what it's trying to represent is still a very important political tool.