Land Relations: Editorial

Within this publishing strand readers will find material relating to the question of cultural and social relations to Earth and its soils, waters, and atmospheres. Land relations encompasses a diverse field of artistic and curatorial practices that seek to build decolonial and demodern senses of how humans could align better with the needs of the planet and the interests of all life here.

The L’Internationale confederation includes a number of organisations that are (re)thinking land relations in terms of the history, politics and ecology of their different locations. This situated and intimate address to place is important in order to start to understand how the toxic forms of identity and cultural exceptionalism have become dominant in the political field today. All of us are therefore engaged in building relations between places and understanding the dynamic, layered nature of cultural identity, situated knowledge and narratives about the past. The conflictual dynamic between deepening land relations and the poisonous politics that is tolerating climate collapse and social division was prefigured by the book Climate: Our Right to Breathe published by L’Internationale in 2022 and available here as a PDF download. The trajectory goes back as far as the Ecologising Museums epub published in 2016 and also available for download.

Within Museum of the Commons activities, the Art for Radical Ecologies Manifesto initiated by the Institute for Radical Imagination is both a statement of intent and lays out the role of art in times of climate breakdown. A deeper dive would take in the reading lists from the Climate Forums held in HDK Valand and the catalogue of Soils, a major research and exhibition project undertaken by Van Abbemuseum and including tranzit.org, alongside artists, designers and activists from Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan and the Netherlands. Food production, cooking and conviviality are important ways of gathering around land relations and a number of texts describe different ways of working in this vein including Åsa Sonjasdotter, Mary Fawzy and Ana Barbu. The text To Build an Ecological Art Institution: The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life by Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu and Raluca Voinea offers an introduction to the work of tranzit.org in Romania that is crucial for L’Internationale’s practice of better land relations and the importance of Non-Western Technologies, whilst material related to the summer school Landscape (post) Conflict, hosted by IMMA and NCAD brings together concerns within this publishing strand through reading lists and dispatches.