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Autonomy Is Not Freedom

Digitally enhanced image of a path through a forest

Autonomy Is Not Freedom

Three interdisciplinary groups—Awi’nakola, Gulf South Open School, and Untidy Objects—come together to share land-based research and speculative art developed in response to their distinct North American contexts. How can such approaches offer new models for rights discourse in environmental politics based on flourishing interconnection rather than autonomy?

Three interdisciplinary groups—Awi’nakola, Gulf South Open School, and Untidy Objects—come together to share land-based research and speculative art developed in response to their distinct North American contexts. How can such approaches offer new models for rights discourse in environmental politics based on interconnection rather than autonomy? Powerful recent efforts to protect lands and waters have involved the extension of legal rights, obligations, and protections under law to those other than human beings, using liberal and neoliberal legal frameworks where the political subject is specifically autonomous. Yet such conceptual separation—whether of people from land, or species from one another—runs counter to the three groups’ perspectives, methodologies, and political propositions. The researchers collectively argue that drawing boundaries between things through the language of rights, and offering similar autonomy to non-human beings, can only be a short-term measure and not a sustaining political practice. The three groups will learn from each other’s distinct practices and contexts, and consider how interdisciplinary art- and land-based research might help reshape rights discourse in environmental politics. This temporary, geographically dispersed “collective of collectives” will test methods to co-learn across distance; share strategies to protect lands, waters, and beings based on interconnection rather than autonomy; explore art’s potential and limitations within this larger work; and write a synthesis of their methodologies and beliefs to support the socio-political transformations needed to address climate catastrophe. This collaboration builds on the Neubauer Collegium’s collaboration with Awi’nakola on a 2023 program; on a 2023–2025 Collegium seed grant supporting Untidy Objects’ creation of a living sculpture and its ongoing co-constitution and annotation with other human and non-human entities; and welcomes Gulf South Open School as a new partner.

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The Chicago Cli-Fi Library

The Chicago Cli-Fi Library

This exhibition was a modest attempt to make sense of the paralysis that sets in when artists try to fashion a response to the complexity and enormity of climate change. It featured recent works by Chicago-based artists Beate Geissler & Oliver Sann, Jenny Kendler, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Dan Peterman.

Climate change is a great existential crisis for humanity, yet the apocalyptic prospect of global warming and other consequences of this great disruption hardly make themselves felt in the mainstream of cultural production. Whether we consider art, film, literature, or music, the specter of climate change has yet to produce the Anthropocene’s defining masterpieces. One could make the case that it is the very enormity of the challenge of imagining the unimaginable that causes this creative paralysis. The Chicago Cli-Fi Library was a modest attempt to make sense of this paralysis, suggesting that art’s response to the complexity and enormity of the issue at hand could only ever be piecemeal, ad hoc, and hyperlocalized – all of which must be understood as virtuous. Named after the emerging literary genre of “climate fiction,” or “cli-fi,” and accordingly bookish in both conception and outlook, this exhibition featured the work of Chicago-based artists Geissler & Sann, Jenny Kendler in collaboration with Andrew Bearnot, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Dan Peterman.

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

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The Diversity of Color: Safeguarding Natural Dye Sources and Practices in Michoacán and Oaxaca

The Diversity of Color: Safeguarding Natural Dye Sources and Practices in Michoacán and Oaxaca

Recent international interest in dyes extracted from plants and insects in Mexico is putting pressure on the local communities that manage these culturally significant natural resources. This project will facilitate local efforts to study the organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation, and ongoing use.

The use of dyes extracted from plants and insects has a complex history in multiple communities in Mexico. Organisms such as indigo plants, cochineal insects, and cempazuchitl are ingredients in artisanal practices, local cuisine, and traditional medicine that in many cases predate Spanish contact. Recent international interest in these natural resources is putting pressure on their management, but scientific and educational opportunities would allow local communities to study these culturally significant organisms and improve their cultivation, conservation, and ongoing use. We propose an interdisciplinary project to collect histories and taxonomies of the organisms used in natural dye production, addressing their identities, their ecologies, their cultural uses, and their manifold significance to colorant makers. Although the colorant uses have been previously documented, many of these studies rely on partial taxonomic classifications, where only the genus of the plant but not the species has been identified. We hypothesize that scientific documentation of the species used will provide new insights into the uses of these organisms and their dyes. A more precise description of the plants and organisms used for dye extraction will also facilitate the communities’ efforts to manage their own resources; their request for a collaboration is what gave rise to this proposal. In addition to a series of workshops, we will publish our findings in a bilingual general audience book and project website, as well as peer-reviewed journals. We will also organize six conferences in Mexico and twin exhibits in Chicago and Oaxaca.

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Long-Term Environmental and Social Change in Mesopotamia

Long-Term Environmental and Social Change in Mesopotamia

Marshaling texts, archaeological evidence, natural science findings, information on environmental processes, and satellite imagery, researchers shed light on the impact of the environment on cultural development in Mesopotamia.

The archaeological landscape of Mesopotamia (much of modern Iraq and parts of Iran and Syria) is unique because it is a record of thousands of years of human-environment interactions involving large, complex societies. But trying to reconstruct environmental conditions and geographic distribution of features from only ancient texts and archaeological evidence leads to broad generalizations. We can now combine texts with archaeological evidence, natural science findings, information on environmental processes, and satellite imagery to delve deeper into the physical changes that occurred in Mesopotamian history.

The project used this information to assess the role of environment on the development of culture in Mesopotamia from prehistory to early modern times. It supplied and integrated data on the environmental and human interactions that were factors in the development of early urbanism, state formation, the first empires, and the subsequent fragmentation and coalescence of polities that has characterized ancient Mesopotamia and modern Iraq. The project brought together an interdisciplinary team of international scholars, including epigraphers, archaeologists, and natural scientists, to collaborate closely, through field work, data analysis and a conference, on new and better organized information on the development of the Mesopotamian landscape and the interaction of humans and nature there. This contributed to development of an overview of changing environmental conditions through time and their relationship to the cultural history of Mesopotamia. The resulting data and analyses will be made available through a variety of sources and serve as the basis for further specialized studies.

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Untidy Objects

Untidy Objects

A “living sculpture” on the University’s campus that includes water and vegetation is also a social intervention, prompting viewers to consider the fact that humans are the only living organism with legal and political rights. This project will introduce “augmented reality” technology to the sculpture and study the way it alters viewers’ responses to the sculpture’s propositions.

Untidy Objects, which introduces emergent growth and multispecies co-mingling, is both a sculptural and political proposition. Since the advent of this multi-year installation, a living sculpture adjacent to the Logan Center developed in conjunction with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, the population of constituents has radically increased. What is left out is the capacity for humans to perceive the very real connections across species and the stakes of acknowledging a politics beyond a human body as a measure for rights. When one expands their senses to include what surrounds and co-constitutes them, questions of who has legal and political rights grows complicated. This at a time when mixed reality technologies are highlighting porosity between our material realities and virtual realities. This site — which constantly changes — not only provides significant technological challenges, but our requirement for technological open space positions our work in the middle of a property battle over the Internet. If the Internet has been a story of centralization and disempowerment, the incipient power struggles around emerging AR tools and platforms both raises the stakes and offers an opportunity to do the opposite: distributed, collaborative, and fundamentally unbound interaction in messy, real spaces. This project allows us to see if we can push a new technology in ways that would allow humans to perceive property, rights, and obligations, in proximity to joy, survival, play, dirt and code.

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