Louise Boscacci
Senior Lecturer, National Art School, Gadigal Sydney. PhD (UoW), BFA (National Art School), BSc Hons. 1 (JCU).
A cross link for recent publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Louise-Boscacci
Address: Louise.Boscacci@nas.edu.au
A cross link for recent publications: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Louise-Boscacci
Address: Louise.Boscacci@nas.edu.au
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3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling. This sonorous guide in refrain, before and after the Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies conference in Tāmaki Makaurau, some eight months later. Two days ago, the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown lifted in New South Wales. Only now can you light a match without visceral trepidation. Without a gut return to the climate crisis inferno of the 2019–2020 summer. Anthropocene-in-the-making? Yes. No. These are Viral Bushranger Times. Anything can happen now.
The shadows trace of the Zincland project is one mode of more-than-human wit(h)nessing that I have introduced elsewhere from an ecology and ethos of open field practice where contemporary art and writing converges with the feminist, decolonising environmental humanities and sciences. Following the conference, I had a plan to travel south, to Pōneke/Wellington and Ōtepoti/Dunedin, to continue a linked project of engaging with naturecultures of extinction, to wit(h)ness two sites of multispecies recovery and ecological restoration. If Zincland took me to Aotearoa, I had no inkling of what I might encounter in this onward momentum of and from the shadows trace. So, let me take you there. Let me pick up this passage of wit(h)nessing and translation one day after leaving Tāmaki Makaurau.
More: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/article/view/16711
Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa. For this special cross-Tasman event, and from opposite coasts of Australia, we convened panels for participants under two invitational titles: “Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn” and “Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics.” Our project averred that the work of art in the Anthropocene was under interrogation by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. Connected with this shifting ground, we argued that new energies and collaborations were emerging across the postconventional arts and ecological humanities, creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: that the human is more-than-human and the social is an eco-social domain in a preternatural age of extinction and climate destruction. We set out to feel the pulse of what contemporary artists and researchers from Aotearoa and Australia were doing, making, speculating on, or writing about in the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Our project’s defining call was to explore encounters in a new frame of particular planetary aesthetics: moving from the particular, bodily or affective encounter to trace, reveal or refigure planetary connections, relations and concerns.
In this guest editorial note, we write in the wake of the ravages of climate crisis fires in Australia, as well as the borderless COVID-19 pandemic. We flesh out the project in its beginnings above, and introduce eleven papers and three visual portfolios of art research in practice that respond to our provocations before and after the Auckland conference. Collectively these scholarly and aesthetic works consider, trace, and respond to affective encounters of the particular and the planetary in the capricious spaces of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. | https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.8.16686
⎔ Co-author: Pip Newling
⎔ Editors: Camille Roulière and Claudia Egerer
⎔ Published: 20 May, 2022
⎔ Book Description:
"Located within the field of environmental humanities, this volume engages with one of the most pressing contemporary environmental challenges of our time: how can we shift our understanding and realign what water means to us? Water is increasingly at the centre of scientific and public debates about climate change. In these debates, rising sea levels compete against desertification; hurricanes and floods follow periods of prolonged drought. As we continue to pollute, canalise and desalinate waters, the ambiguous nature of our relationship with these entities becomes visible. From the paradisiac and pristine scenery of holiday postcards through to the devastated landscapes of post-tsunami news reports, images of waters surround us. And while we continue to damage what most sustains us, collective precarity grows.
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.
This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history."
⎔ ISBN 9781032110660
This was followed up with a second panel series: "Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics." Convenors: Boscacci, Phillips and McIntyre.
This event was a full day of three separate sessions with nine papers by the following ten speakers:
Associate Prof. Janine Randerson, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland.
Prof. Heather Galbraith and Raewyn Martyn, Massey University, Wellington.
Christopher Houghton, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Heather Hesterman, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Rob Kettels, Curtin University, Perth.
Maria O'Toole, Massey University, Wellington.
Kelly Lee Hickey, Victoria University, Melbourne.
Nicola Dickson, Independent Researcher, Canberra.
Leighton Upson, Independent Researcher/ Massey University, Wellington.
SEE THE FULL PROGRAM PDF FOR ALL ABSTRACTS.
Here are our two Introductions to our panels of artist-researchers, natureculture writers, curators, art historians and environmental humanities scholars:
"Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn.
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre.
Listen. There. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene is under interrogation by contemporary artists, theorists and historians. New collaborations across the emerging open-field of the postconventional arts and humanities are creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain in this age of extinction and climate change.
How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the impingements and implications—the effects and affects—of the Anthropocene-in-the- making? This panel highlights and explores the affective encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. Here we name, make, listen, think and intervene with three instances of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerge from the feminist ecosocial pivot towards local, embodied and affect-engaged practices that also trace and make planetary connections. Each begins with a bodily encounter, or an encounter-exchange. Through multispecies conversations and resonances we listen to the faint signals of extinct New Zealand birds in the noise of history, lost traces re-collected from encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections re-figured as ‘minor’ memorials and re-sited within their original landscapes (McIntyre); trace, wit(h)ness and sound shadow ecologies of zinc entangled with extractive colonisation of Country in northern Australia, in the here and now (Boscacci); and follow the water down mountains to the sea, as the rocks, water, weeds and humans of Albany deal with seeping, maintaining, flooding, and repairing (Phillips)."
and
"Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics. (Call For Papers)
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre
Listen. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She is heard but not seen. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene continues to be interrogated by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. In this age of extinction and climate-change, many are working to expand alternative critical frameworks and modes in which the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain.
How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making? This follow-on panel explores the bodily encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. We situate this in a developing ‘field’ of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerges from feminist ecosocial thinking and pivots towards local and affect-engaged practices. We delve into diverse contemporary practices that trace and make planetary connections and ecologies of relations in multispecies naturecultures: connections and intersections that can be unknown, unpredictable or provocative; speculations, narratives or poetic reveals. Papers by the convenors will detail encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections, shadow ecologies of zinc mined in northern Australia Country, and seepages and flows of water through granite and swamp lands.
We invite twenty-minute papers or presentations on art practices, collaborations, alliances, or speculations that take the pulse of what is happening now in the capricious spaces of attunement to the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Proposals for alternative presentations in media and methods other than a scholarly paper are welcome."
CITATION (please cite if you use this work).
Boscacci, Louise, Phillips, Perdita and McIntyre, Sally Ann 2019. ‘Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn,’ in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Conference 3-6 December 2019, University of Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand.
AT: "Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies." AAANZ [Art Association of Australia and New Zealand] Conference 2019, Auckland/ Tāmaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, 3-6 December. |
ABSTRACT |
"Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist, activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc refinery on the east coast of Queensland connected to the catastrophic McArthur River Mine in her Country (Yanyuwa, Garwwa) near Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia. She pauses, steadies her hand, looks more closely, then speaks. This paper presents the project ‘Greetings from Zincland: Unfolding a Shadow Country’ associated with Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, an international exhibition held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2017, and forthcoming as a book in 2020. Greetings from Zincland, a postcard I sent across the equator as a digital image, a recorded voice reading, and a critical text, is a dispatch from belonged-by country and its shadow places. It recalibrates vintage 1950’s imagery of local tourist views in the North Queensland port city of Townsville/ Currumbilbarra with one contemporary sighting of a twenty-first century becoming. It introduces and maps a scattered particular-planetary shadow country found in the glare of bleaching tropical light. With it, I unfold a wit(h)nessing story from one shadow place of unexpected connection and confrontation in the antipodean Anthropocene-in-the-making (Yusoff). If a picture postcard is a material form of encounter-exchange, an affect charged one is also an im/material dispatch. And, Auckland, you are one of my shadow places."