Lumumba in Chongqing

Workshop in Chongquin

A great deal has been written about Earth rights, environmental rights and increasingly, ecocide, from the point of view of politics, law and sociology. I will write about it as a practicing artist and as someone struggling with personal implications.

In a recent article for the feminist on-line journal, Dark Matter, ‘There Will Be No Managed Retreat’ I wrote that there can be no "managed retreat," from what we have wrought on the planet. I meant that we seem trapped in ecocidal patterns that have been internalized into every aspect of modern life, with roots that were established centuries ago, if not millennia. My position is that to 'stand my ground' might be literal. That is simultaneously a personal and a professional position.

My opera-in-progress is about the horrors of ecocide. But it is individual people who choose that path, not abstract corporations, just as it's individuals who are impacted. Any opera requires credible roles for credible performers who tell a credible, tragic story. Ecocide is both a private and a public event. I am still researching that idea.

In a handful of days, I will be in Geneva, Switzerland for a research mission. I am going to attend a school reunion and then come home three days later. My intentions for that short, expensive and exhausting trip is to stand in the room where I watched Patrice Lumumba and his wife greet and collect their two weeping very young children on the other side of the closed door to the school director’s office. The Lumumbas had come to save their two sons from the relentless verbal assaults of a cruel, teenage South Africaaner. A year later, Lumumba was murdered. Lumumba was an historical blip of hope for the much ravaged Belgian Congo. The Belgian Congo may be the ultimate poster child for the ecocidal horrors of colonialism and extraction with impunity to this day. The teenage tormentor, like Lumumba's assassins, the country of Belgium or modern-day corporations have gained power with impunity at the tremendous expense of individuals, such as Lumumba's children, or the well-being of the entire Earth. The closed door behind them was a powerful metaphor for how the world has closed its doors on justice, whether for bullied children or for whole nations under siege from ecocide.

My takeaway from what I witnessed the day of that intimate family tragedy, was cynical. I watched a public display of indifference to the private sadism of racial power exercised with impunity, extracting dignity from children. What I hope to accomplish by next weekend, is greater insight into the pathology of ecocide. These are on-going issues humanity hasn't solved but the stakes keep getting higher.

Another monumental ecocidal tragedy is being perpetrated in Ukraine now that exempifies what can't continue with impunity. Just days ago, I attended a Zoom event with the Ukrainian Environmental Group, describing another kind of cruelty with impunity at the hands of a power-hungry dictator, Vladimir Putin, President of Russia. They provided details about the monstruous scale of depredations on what was once the breadbasket of Europe.

Lumumba and Ukraine are separated in time and space but they represent a range of tsunamis of rage and violence at the service of greed for something besides the common good: greed for power or money, for example. Despite this past and present nightmare, groups that include artists are uniting to resist internationally and demand accountability for harming common good. In the Ukrainian Zoom, I was pleased to encounter colleagues from “Cooking Sections”. They will be including my work from The Blued Trees Symphony in an upcoming show at the Carnegie Museum and told me they would be presenting June 16 with the Ukrainian group. I look forward to being there to hear how interrnational coalitions might be evolving for a better world. 

Between 2010-2014, as I began my dissertation on trigger point theory and before I began the Blued Trees project, I did a series of sugar lifts and aquatints, as I carefully studied the natural world surrounding me. I was trying to understand how change happens between water and land. Over and over, I represented details of what I studied. I couldn't have started work on my opera without the rest this project gave me to simply contemplate the vanishing points between earth, sky and water. The prints are mostly quite small, small enuf to hold in my hand, from 4"x5" to 8"x24," just as we each hold cruelty and accountability in our hands. It makes everything both more intimate and more laborious. 

In the same days that I was reflecting on these two extremes, my personal memories of school and the horrors in Ukraine, I received a letter from a Lipeng Jin, my colleague in China, who posted on an international forum for ecoart, the ecoart-list. He wrote (edited)

"I co-curated an exhibition entitled “Emergence：Eco-art Actions on the Climate Crisis” in downtown Chongqing, China. We feel greatly honoured that a few members, including Betsy Damon, Beverly Naidus, Basia Irland, David Antin, Aviva Rahmani and Ruth Wallen, participated in the exhibition. 

...

The inspiring works include Betsy’s precious video documentation of Keeper of Waters, the public performances in Chengdu in 1990s; Beverly’s Dead_Ocean_Scrolls_&_Other_Possible_Futures_&_the Pandemic_Healing Deities and Tacoma Story Hive responding to the Covid and climate depression; Basia’s project of Ice Books co-created in Chongqing in 2021; David’s Dialogue with Clouds, a series of haiku poems for generating a co-learning, interpreting process and a performance reflecting on the potential disappearance of clouds due to climate change: Aviva’s Blued Trees Symphony and Requiem for Dead Trees and Dying Horses; and Ruth’s Walking with Trees communicating the ecological grief for giant sequoias and echoing the wildfires in Chongqing last summer.  

As the title suggests, the principle of emergence, the unexpected creativity of living systems, empowers us for envisioning new ways of being and acting, and for avoiding the high-entropy trajectory of endless growth. We hope for more healthy interactions, exchanges, and connections among communities could be created out of climatic chaos for wakening up and calling more people into actions."

The artist Krisanne Baker then replied to Jin. "How did you get Aviva's Blued Trees there? Are they local upcycled trees then painted? 

Jin replied:

"Dear Krisanne & Aviva 

I appreciate your support and encouragement. That’s an interesting question! Most of the trees were sourced from the Healing Garden, which was transformed from a construction waste dump on campus. The trees are actually paper mulberry, a local wild tree which grows rapidly, symbolizing the restorative force and speed of nature. 

At the beginning of the semester, I was told the site of our garden was chosen to be a place of teaching building and will be demolished in the near future. Later on, they cut the unwanted wild trees deemed worthless, including paper mulberry. I consider it as a continued urbanization process that’s still going on. So these branches in Aviva’s work carry deep meaning of resistance and the tension between the force of nature and human encroachment. Right now these trees are healing pioneers that are coming back, springing up and thriving here again, since my Institute meet some trouble with establishing new buildings. 

We are inspired by the vitality of paper mulberry. You know, its bark is a main raw material of Cai Lun (the inventor of paper) paper making and its new leaves and fruit are edible. So we organized workshops for students and kids to observe the trees and introduce them ancient Chinese books recording papermaking and famine herbal. Finally, we made papers from its barks and embedded paper mulberry seeds in the paper. The whole empowering process provided a catharsis and became a form of artistic resistance. 

The stories of the trees on campus are very complex and poignant. Most trees are purchased and transplanted from rural or mountainous areas to make man-made forest here. Half of them actually died partly because the density of trees is too high...

Jin”

I replied,  

"... The story you tell, is of course, in itself poignant. I’m happy to have contributed in some small way to a campaign of resistance to another level of ecocide on the altar of “progress”. 

Your account also begs the question of why and how we make art.

One of my goals throughout my career, has been to create performative catalysts that engender a life of their own beyond my agency, albeit, to address issues I think are important. Also, throughout my career, I’ve abhorred work that lionizes the artist vs the ideas. With the Blued Trees project, that has been especially moving for me to watch, as in most cases, teams have completed the work based on my minimalist instructions (as someone pointed out, like Sol Lewitt) but then had their own experiences, for example with forests where trees were painted. In many cases, even tho trees were eventually massacred, participants described experiencing a spiritual catharsis from the interactions with the trees. 

A profound reason for my commitment to this approach ... is to resist a trajectory of internalized authoritarianism, ie., the seated passive audience admiring the reification of some object."

The memory of students milling aimlessly in front of the Lumumba family. The directors closed door.

Artists work intuitively and reflectively. The world often works reactively. What I learn from revisiting the scene with the Lumumba family tragedy so long ago, is still to be revealed. The end of the horrors in Ukraine are still uncertain. I make art to find another way. I am still searching.