Sarmiento completed her PhD in Visual and Performing Art from Durban University of Technology. Title of dissertation: ‘Of Art and Ecology:Anti-Colonial Methodologies in Artistic Practice’
Abstract
This dissertation seeks to make a methodological contribution to the fields of visual art. Anchoring this study in artworks that are at once visual, textual, audio-visual, embodied, the works I look at move across South African, Brazilian, Palestinian and US landscapes and histories.
The artworks that ground this dissertation are by artists Haroon Gunn-Salie, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Forensic Architecture and Jumana Manna. The works grapple with contested land and a failure of post-apartheid justice in contemporary Cape Town; a city in Mariana, Brazil covered in toxic mud and the calls for ecological clean-up that remain unresolved; petrochemical corridors in New Orleans built upon layers of plantation economies and racial slavery; enslaved ancestors buried within regimes of care where body, land, water, trees, caress, hold and speak; scientific/legal regimes that police Palestinian herb-picking cultures and criminalize foragers, using ecological veils for policies aimed at further alienating Palestinians from their lands that they were forcibly removed from. Submerged in these works, their methods and the stories they tell, this dissertation places art in conversation with memory, land, restorative justice and ecological resistance – opening up space/time in ways that unfasten linear progressive time and offer alternative visualities.
In this dissertation, I look at how the artists engage questions of the living world and human entanglements with water, soil, plants, and memory in ways that refuse land/nature as an abstracted object/thing, seeing land as more than monetary value or extractive potential. These visions of land and ecosystems move towards complex, intimate, submerged ways of seeing that relate to land as space/time that carries memory, that is sentient and inseparable from human life. I illustrate the ways these works and their methods provide rich terrains of scholarly and creative engagement.
Through the lens of these works and the contexts of their creation, exhibition, and circulation – I place seemingly distinct realms of art and ecology in the same frame. Art and ecology may appear to be separate, disconnected disciplines and practices. However, they both speak of visible and invisible, life and death, visual and embodied, material and ephemeral, history and memory, relationship and community. Art and ecology converge to offer traces, textures, plant/human intimacies, botanical and sedimentary archives that speak to ecological resistance and desire.
Grounded in the multisensorial grammar of these artworks, and the literature and scholarship this dissertation threads together, this thesis hopes to move beyond simplistic, homogenizing labels and disciplines towards transdisciplinary methodologies of care and relationality that tend to desire, disrupt linear temporalities and offer futures of care, ecological resistance and decolonisation.
Supervisors: Dr. Sara Dehkordi and Dr. Heeten Bhagat