Interdisciplinary conversations on art, agriculture, gardens and burials.
A Gathering on Art and Land is a day centring art and design-led approaches to planting, farming, seeding, gardening and burying. Through conversations and presentations, the event explores our relationship to the land, using ground and soil practices to start ecological conversations and reveal their potential for transformation, regeneration, and hope.
This gathering advocates for imagination and coexistence with the non-human world, platforming alternative ways of understanding and relating to the land in the face of a destructive, globalised discourse. Highlighting the importance of creativity, Indigenous land management and communal engagement, A Gathering on Art and Land underscores the transformative power of culture and stewardship, emphasising how artists engage directly with the earth in their practices.
Programme
11:00am Introductions
11:25am Marcus Coates in conversation with Lucia Pietroiusti and the Land
In this intervention, Marcus Coates will be in direct conversation with the land, interviewing temporarily extracted soil. this conversation will cover topics such as attributing personhood to soil, soil identity, health, exploitation and community. Audience members will be able to ask questions and learn more about soil supportive networks. Head of Ecologies Lucia Pietroiusti, will join the conversation to reflect on the role of listening and speaking on behalf of more than human entities.
11:50am Sandra Knecht in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
In conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sandra Knecht explores the integral role that land plays in her artistic practice. Throughout her career, Knecht has investigated the concept of “Heimat,” which encompasses one’s spiritual and physical home, through works that she describes as ‘social sculptures’, to reveal the complexities of our relationships with the land, with each other, and with ourselves. These works, several of which this conversation will touch on, take various forms, including dinner parties, performances, farms, bee houses, and even entire villages. Knecht’s art both complicates and elucidates the intrinsic connections between ecology, land, and the concept of home.
12:30pm Annalee Davis in conversation with Daisy Gould
In this conversation, Annalee Davis will delve into her ongoing practice exploring Barbados’ extractivist plantation history, posing the critical question, ‘How can we unlearn the plantation?’ Focusing on her work in gardening and agriculture as means of resistance and historical reclamation, this conversation will explore ecological practices of resistance in the Caribbean. Davis will highlight the significance of the plot in plantation economies and ecologies, and the role of ritual and ancestral knowledge systems in challenging historically inhumane conditions and contemporary environmental destruction amidst climate breakdown.
12:50pm Contributions by Carla Subrizi and Kalpana Arias, followed by an in-conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Carla Subrizi will present on the work of Gianfranco Baruchello, the pioneering artist who integrated farming into artistic practice with his Agricola Cornelia, a farm based outside Rome. In response to the hyper-aesthetic land art of the 1960s and 1970s, Baruchello viewed the land as a medium for political discourse. Claiming space back for nature, Kalpana Arias, a technologist and guerilla gardener, fights for nature in grey spaces and campaigns for the right to grow through urban growing.
This in-conversation will explore the natural and built environments as sites for politics, rewilding, and communion with the land, emphasising the intersections of art, ecology, and social practice. Through various approaches to human-land engagement, the discussion will consider the natural world as both a collaborator and an entity to be respected and preserved.
1:55pm Eva Papamargariti presents new video work All that is Hidden
All that is hidden explores a multitude of natural and synthetic organisms around the former coal-mining area of Zollverein in Germany, looking at them from micro to macro-scale.
These organisms are integral components of a dynamic ecosystem and bear witness to the history of the site, carrying within them the traces of the historical, geological events and forces that have happened through the years.
The work attempts to show how the traces of the past have been virtually “engraved” into the landscape and soils of Zollverein. What kind of worlds and hybrid forms could emerge from this amalgamation? All that is hidden unfolds a narrative that reveals traces, remnants, hidden and invisible organisms, fossils and new hybrid life forms that co-exist inside a continuous stream of geological, economic and technological changes. In the process, computer generated animations with recordings that were made on-site with a microscope camera, are combined with atmospheric soundscapes and sound recordings, also produced in situ by the artist.
2:15pm Caroline A. Jones, in conversation with Lucia Pietroiusti, Weird Cuttings, or Invisibilities of the Anthropocene
Weird is the quality to begin with: “unearthly” media objects of the Anthropocene, in which flows of video capture ongoing spews, returning us to the wyrd etymology of our ‘destiny’ to befoul the planet. These “cuts” into global industrial operations effectively puncture the ongoing invisibilities that characterise modern epistemic relations to extraction (always an elsewhere). This in-conversation aims to review that history, while also exploring what otherwise cloaks these weird Fates and Furies: the comforting blandishments of garden and pastoral. Jones touches on the spaces of art, which make room for pedagogies of right relation, reciprocity, actual symbiosis, circular economies, and respect – modest but profound interventions such as Sakiya and Cooking Sections – unweirding but also “unsettling” practices, which chastise agrilogistics.
3:10pm Yinka Shonibare CBE RA in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA will explore key themes and topics in his Serpentine exhibition Suspended States in-conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine’s Artistic Director. In the words of the artist, Suspended States ‘addresses the suspension of boundaries, whether psychological, physical or geographical.’ As part of A Gathering on Art and Land, the conversation will also highlight Shonibare’s longstanding commitment to ecology, in particular, how his practice examines the impact of colonisation on the environment as well as his Guest Artist Space (G.A.S.) Foundation’s commitment to sustainability and food security at the Farm House in Ijebu, Nigeria.
3:50pm G.A.S. Foundation residency alumni Remi Kuforiji and Graeme Smith in conversation with Belinda Holden
Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation is a Nigerian non-profit founded by Yinka Shonibare CBE RA that delivers residencies and public programmes across two sites located in Lagos and Ijebu. With a focus on interdisciplinary knowledge exchange as well as engagement with the local community, residencies at the G.A.S. Farm House, in particular, explore trans-disciplinary craft, design, art and the environment, food sustainability and agriculture. Residency alumni Remi Kuforiji and Graeme Smith, in conversation with Yinka Shonibare Foundation CEO Belinda Holden, will discuss their ongoing practices and the site-specificity of the work they created while in-residence at G.A.S. Foundation.
Remi Kuforiji’s residency was partly preoccupied with researching Lagos Island’s Afro-Brazilian history with a particular focus on speculating collective approaches to architectural preservation. Culturally entrenched in the area since the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, Lagos Island’s Afro-Brazilian quarter became an enclave for formerly enslaved people returning to the continent from South America, Europe, and Sierra Leone. Graeme Smith’s residency focussed on expanding his research into 18th-century bead trade and glass craft with a focus on Sub-Saharan glass-making technology that emerged in Nigeria. During a stay at G.A.S. Farm House, Graeme researched local approaches to ceramic production. He developed prototypes for vessels using laterite soil, fibres, and various natural glazes and mineral sealants found on the land.
Using their urban and rural perspectives as a point of departure, Remi and Graeme will discuss their responses to creatively engaging with indigenous and historical approaches to cultural and land preservation uncovered during their respective residencies.
Graeme Smith and Remi Kuforiji’s residencies were generously supported by the Royal College of Art Association of Black Students, Alumni & Friends (RCA BLK).
5:00pm Sky Hopinka Subterranean Moon and Denizens of Hell
In a new two-channel video, Subterranean Moon, verses from the poem, Denizens of Hell, permeate scenes from a powwow outside of Seattle, organized by the artist. Subterranean Moon is deftly emceed by Ruben Little Head, guiding the viewer and the audience through a 30 minute long take of a Northern Traditional dance special. The footage in the second channel is abstracted by one of Hopinka’s signature treatments, a formalistic technique in dialogue with ethnopoetic documentation and representation he’s employed throughout his work. For Hopinka, the confluence of the poetic verse and the movement of his embodied camera is a vehicle for relating to and listening to the beings and ancestors who haven’t been repatriated by museums and institutions, all the while questioning different forms of confinement that they must contend with.
5:45pm END
The Infinite Ecologies Marathon is a long durational project that looks at the world-building potential of culture in the face of ecological destruction. Committing to working towards planetary thriving, this interdisciplinary series centres artist-led reimaginings for environmental action.
Ecologies is Serpentine’s new interdisciplinary department, focusing on developing a holistic, flexible and adaptive approach to embedding environmental purpose throughout Serpentine’s programmes, infrastructure and networks. Our mission is to place culture right into the heart of environmental efforts, and environmental commitment can steer the cultural sector. Ecologies was born from the learnings of the General Ecology project and Back to Earth.
BSL interpretation is available upon request. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you would like to request this.
Marcus Coates is one of Maison Ruinart’s 2024 Carte Blanche artists. Visit here for more information.
Contributor bios
Kalpana Arias is a technologist, guerrilla gardener, urban greening activist and food grower, writer, speaker and the founder of Nowadays On Earth, a social enterprise advocating for urban nature. Alongside Nowadays On Earth, Kalpana campaigns for the right to grow and nature rights through urban gardening projects and tech policy reforms, has been researching technological ecologies for over 7 years, delivered a global TED talk, spoken at the United Nations, featured on Evening Standard’s 30 under 30 list of Climate Activists On A Mission To Save London and Vogue, and is a trustee for GROW charity. Kalpana is currently an environmental consultant for corporations and governments and works with leading charities, institutions, brands and grassroots change-makers.
Marcus Coates is an artist and amateur naturalist living in London. His works, include performances, sculptures, photography and video installations. Coates’ vicarious experiences on behalf of others are an enquiry into the degrees to which we can understand, know and relate to the world. His work is often performative, testing actual and perceived boundaries with individuals, communities and with other species. New ways of relating are proposed and often put into practice. His approach is often functional with a social and ecological impact in mind. Marcus has collaborated with people from a wide range of disciplines including anthropologists, ornithologists, wildlife sound recordists, choreographers, politicians, psychiatrists, palliative care consultants, musicians, primatologists amongst others.
Exhibitions include: Between Stories, Kate MacGarry London, (2024); The Directors, Artangel, London, UK (2022); Joseph Beuys and the Shamans, Museum Schloss Moyland, Bedburg-Hau, Germany 2021; The Animal That Therefore I Am, OCAT Institute, Beijing, China (2020); The Land We Live In, The Land We Left Behind, Hauser & Wirth Somerset 2018 Dawn Chorus, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, Spain (2015); Ape Culture, HKW Berlin, 2015; The Trip, Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (2010); Psychopomp, Milton Keynes Gallery, Milton Keynes, UK (2010); Marcus Coates, Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland (2009).
Coates was nominated for the 4th Plinth Commission in 2014 and was the recipient of a Paul Hamyln Award in 2008. In 2014 he was the first recipient of the James Lovelock Commission and in 2009 he won the inaugural Daiwa Art Prize. Coates was Co-Founder and Co-Director of Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2005 – 2008.
Annalee Davis (Barbados, 1963) is a Barbadian visual artist and writer whose practice combines history and biography in discussions of ‘post-plantation economies’ with cultural activism in the arts sector. Davis’ works explore Barbados’ transformation from a once biodiverse landscape to sugar plantations and more recently a tourism- dependent island-both arguably sectors of enclosure and exclusion. She understands the plantation as an economic model irrevocably impacting the contemporary environment whose historical legacy has been traumatically inscribed upon the landscape and its people. Working in her studio located on an operational dairy farm–once a 17th- century plantation– Davis exposes the poly-vocal narratives buried beneath the land.
Drawing, walking, making (bush) teas, and growing living apothecaries, her practice suggests future strategies for repair and thriving while investigating the role of botanicals and living plots as ancestral sites of refusal, counter- knowledge, and healing. A Caribbean activist nurturing more equitable platforms for emerging artists, her work as the Founding Director of Fresh Milk, and co-founder of Caribbean Linked, Tilting Axis, and Sour Grass–promotes pan-Caribbean community engagement by working with artists across the multi-lingual archipelago. Collectively, they reinforce the healthy growth of contemporary visual arts in the region, by working with artists who often feel
marginalised from mainstream society.
Davis graduated with an MFA from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and a BFA from The Maryland Institute, College of Art, USA.
Upcoming solo exhibitions include “Sowing Care”, Airas Wang de Lafée Gallery (2024), Girona, Spain; “Reseeding the Post-Plantation”, Barbados Museum & Historical Society (2025), and Colorado Springs Fine Art Center at Colorado College, USA
(2025). Recent solo exhibitions include“re:wilding”, Haarlem Artspace, UK; “Heartseed”, TEOR/éTica, Costa Rica; “This Ground Beneath My Feet – A Chorus of Bush in Rab Lands” The Idea Lab, The Warfield Center, University of Texas, Austin, USA. Group exhibitions include “Seeds and Souls”, Kunsthal Charlottenborg , Copenhagen, Denmark; “Against Apartheid”, KARST, Plymouth, UK; “Linhas Tortas”, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil; “Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present”, Sharjah, UAE; “What’s on your Plate?”, Hayy Jameel, Jeddah, UAE; “And if I devoted my life to one of its feathers?” Kunsthalle Wien, Austria; “Seismic Movements”, Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh; “Caribbean: Crossroads of the World” , El Museo del Barrio, Studio Museum Harlem, Queens Museum and Perez Art Museum Miami, USA.
Belinda Holden, CEO, Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.). Belinda joined Y.S.F. in January 2020, taking the lead on the programme, fundraising, governance, and the establishment of the Guest Artists Space Foundation in Nigeria. Amidst the global pandemic in 2020, she launched Guest Projects Digital to support artists in the creation and dissemination of their work. With extensive international experience, Belinda has developed and delivered culture-driven programs and commissioned new creative works. She co-founded the arts consultancy T Projects in Melbourne and served as a strategic arts consultant for the Melbourne Metro Tunnel Creative Programme in Australia. From 2014 to 2017, Belinda worked with the cultural agency Futurecity. Initially leading teams in London, she later became the Head of the Sydney office. During her tenure, she developed numerous cultural strategies and delivered a series of significant artist commissions. Belinda has over 20 years of experience working at the intersection of art, design, and the built environment. She has devised funding strategies and delivered projects across hospitals, schools, major housing developments, and transport infrastructure, effectively integrating artists and communities into the public realm and built environment.
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and Palm Springs, California. In Portland, Oregon he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media.
His films, videos, and photographs are in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center amongst others.
He was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2018- 2019, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Fellow for 2019, an Art Matters Fellow in 2019, a recipient of a 2020 Herb Alpert Award for Film/Video, a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a 2021 Forge Project Fellow. He received the 2022 Infinity Award in Art from the International Center of Photography, is a 2022 MacArther Fellow and was a winner of the 2023 Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is an assistant professor in the department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies at Harvard University.
Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, focusing on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with science. She has also worked as a curator, notably with four exhibitions at MIT’s List Visual Art Center: Hans Haacke 1967 (2011); Video Trajectories(2007-08); Sensorium (2006-07), and Symbionts (2022-23). Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at NY MoMA, SF MoMA, the Hirshhorn DC, and the Hara Museum Tokyo, among other venues. Publications include Machine in the Studio (1996/98), Picturing Science, Producing Art (co-editor, 1998), Sensorium (editor2006), Eyesight Alone (2005/08), Experience (co-editor, 2016), The Global Work of Art (2016), and the catalogue/reader Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere (as co-editor, 2022). Caroline is currently researching patterns of occlusion and political contestation in what she calls “the anthropogenic image” of environmental disaster, in collaboration with historian of science Peter Galison.
Sandra Knecht (b. 1968 in Zurich, lives and works in Buus/Canton of Baselland) researches the concept of “Heimat” (spiritual and physical home) – a concept which calls for ongoing revision and renegotiation – through the medium of art. For each individual, “Heimat” is as generically definable as it is unique. Biographical, geographical, socio-cultural and political aspects as well as relations between human beings and the natural world, are integral to the concept of Heimat, as “steeped” as it is in memory, perception, inner poise and outlook.
In her artistic practice, Knecht takes up and explores this concept of Heimat under the aspect of the unfamiliar by way of a twofold exploration of her own family history and the concept of Heimat itself. Knecht undertakes her long-term research through such various media as installation, archive, photography, video, sound, performance and the culinary arts. Her multifaceted oeuvre is informed by ten years of trans-disciplinary research into the concept of Heimat. In her work, however, the artist creates uniquely developed social sculptures, ranging from dinner parties and performance art through to the conceptualisation and execution of artworks, exhibitions and book projects.
Remi Kuforiji (London, 1997) is an architect, spatial practitioner and researcher whose creative practice explores the intersection of performance, cartography and racial politics. Developing systems of critique that challenge territorial distinctions and neocolonial policies of resource extractivism, Remi’s work focuses on wetland ecosystems, indigenous knowledge and ethnographic methodologies as modes of spatial practice.
Eva Papamargariti is an artist, based between Athens and London. She uses a variety of mediums such as moving image, printed material and sculptural installations that explore the relationships of cognitive and affective interaction between the diverse realities that we live in, as well as the dynamic intra – connection and intra – action of events between these two systems. Her work unfolds and dwells in the suspended moment and space where grotesque, fiction and realism collide and an amalgam of various worlds emerges. Papamargariti’s research and practice delves into themes related to the notions of identification and metamorphosis, the idea of simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual, the mundane, the eerie and the extraordinary.
She is interested in the symbiotic procedures and entanglement that take place between humans, nature and technology. More specifically through video, text, sound, motion capture, AR, CG animations, 3d scans, character creation softwares, sculptures and textiles she explores notions of becoming, liminality, the dialectics of fluidity, techno-romance, transformation, and characteristics of symbiosis between human and non-human agents and the intricate traces and kinships that this entanglement produces.
Furthermore, her practice revolves around processes that are established through our online presence, such as the construction and shifting of our identities, avatars, vernacular language/imagery and worldbuilding. Also the traces that our operations inscribe to the objects and habitat where we find ourselves situated, through our continuous interaction with devices and machinic artifacts.
She has exhibited through solo shows, group shows and screenings in institutions, museums and festivals such as the New Museum (New York), Whitney Museum (New York), Tate Britain (London), MAAT Museum (Lisbon), EMST (Athens), Museum of Moving Image (New York), MoMA PS1 (New York), GAMeC Museum (Bergamo), Pioneer Works (New York), Museum of Contemporary Art Montreal, The Bass (Miami), Athens Biennale( Athens), Biennale Gherdeina, Mediterranean Biennale (San Marino), Thessaloniki Biennale (Thessaloniki), MUTEK, Transmediale Festival (Berlin), MIRA Festival (Madrid), New Now Festival (Zollverein), Ars Electronica (Linz), Liste Art Fair (Basel), Kunstraum Niederostereich (Vienna).
She has been invited as a resident artist at LUMA Foundation in Arles, France (September-December 2023) and at the New Now residency at Zollverein, Germany (February-May 2023)
Her work is featured in public and private collections such as the Dakis Joannou Collection (Deste Foundation), Onassis Foundation, PCAI Collection, MOMuS collection and more.
Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (b. 1962, London, United Kingdom) has an interdisciplinary practice which uses Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. As a celebrated British-Nigerian artist working between London and Lagos, Shonibare was awarded the honour of ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ in 2019.
In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize; in 2010, his first public art commission, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. David Oluwale Memorial Association commissioned Shonibare’s Hibiscus Rising, a major public memorial in Leeds, which opened in November 2023.
In 2019, Shonibare launched Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, a non-profit based in Nigeria dedicated to facilitating cultural exchange through residencies, public programmes, and exhibition opportunities.
In 2024, Serpentine, London UK, presented a solo exhibition of works in their Serpentine South gallery titled Suspended States. Shonibare’s work is also featured at the Venice Biennale 2024 as part of the Nigerian Pavilion, in the group show: Nigeria Imaginary.
Shonibare’s works are in notable museum collections both local and international, including the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Graeme is an artist and draftsman of Jamaican-British descent born in Treaty 1 Canadian territory. He is an RCA alumnus interested in craft as a fugitive and subjugated knowledge. He explores process, transposition, and spatial poetics working primarily with ceramics and glass. He will continue a study of Nigerian glass beads during his residency at Guest Artists Space Foundation. The small, historically ubiquitous, idiosyncratic glass crafts with complex origins and manifold journeys traded and moved between Africa, Europe and the Caribbean
Carla Subrizi, is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sapienza University of Rome, where she is also Director of the School of Specialization in Historical-Artistic Heritage. She founded with Franca Sinopoli and Mariella Combi the journal ‘Novecento Transnazionale. Literature, Arts and Cultures’. She is President of the Baruchello Foundation and the scientific director of Gianfranco Baruchello’s Catalogue Raisonné. Her interests focus on post World War II art history, the methodologies of art history within the dialogue with approaches and perspectives on gender studies and feminism, the history of ideas and culture in the global world. In recent years, she has also been involved in artistic and art-historical research particularly focused on the environment and the ecosystem (currently being published is Beatrix: How they became trees again. Unseen encounters between art history and ecology, Arbor, Roma 2024). Her most recent monographs include, in addition to numerous essays, La storia dell’arte dopo l’autocoscienza. A partire dal diario di Carla Lonzi (2020), Note a margine. L’arte come esperimento del sapere (2020), Gianfranco Baruchello. Archive of Moving Images (2017), Baruchello. Certain Ideas (2014), Azioni che cambiamo il mondo. Donne, arte e politiche dello sguardo (2012), Introduzione a Duchamp (2008). Among her most recent essays: Reduction and Anachronism in the Archive. The Small Systems of Gianfranco Baruchello, in Ernst van Alphen, Productive Archiving. Artistic Strategies, Future Memories, and Fluid Identities, Valiz, Amsterdam, 2023; Contradictions and the Re-Invention of One’s Own Role: The Publishing House Scritti di Rivolta Femminile in the Life/Work of Carla Lonzi, in Sharon Hecker, Catherine Ramsey-Portolano, Female Cultural Production in Modern Italy. Literature, Art and Intellectual History, Palgrave, London 2023; Narrazioni e memoria del totalitarismo: storia, frammentazione e montaggio nell’arte italiana del secondo dopoguerra, in Franca Sinopoli, Franco Baldasso, Eredità culturale e memoria dei totalitarismi, Pearson, Londra, 2024.
Infinite Ecologies Marathon curatorial and production team:
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director
Lucia Pietroiusti, Head of Ecologies
Kostas Stasinopoulos, Curator, Live Programmes
Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes
Isobel Peyton-Jones, Producer