Confluences: Stories of Art and the Planetary

‘there is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.’

Lao Tzu, Dao De Jing 1

Drawing its title from an excerpt of Dao de Jing, the 14th Gwangju Biennale ‘soft and weak like water’ asked us to consider the inherent complexity, potentiality and paradox of water as an element. Water is both yielding and eroding, soft and forceful. It possesses both creative and destructive potential. Gathering 79 artists with over 40 new works and commissioned projects, the biennale invited reflection on the theme of water within and across multiple scales: individual, collective, visual, sensorial, oceanic and planetary. The accompanying symposium ‘Confluences: Stories of Art and the Planetary’ convened artists, curators and audiences to consider the restorative potential of water as a life-giving force, method and cosmology – what Artistic Director Sook-Kyung Lee called ‘a way forward in a time of perma-crisis’.

As water flows across borders, it challenges structural, conceptual and material divides. It is unruly, unpredictable, stormy. What happens when we navigate the world as water does – fluidly, in all directions? The question of how to forge a path forward is not a new one, but an urgent one that requires reframing beyond the disciplinary logics of the nation-state and toward the planetary.

In her keynote address, titled ‘Decompositions at the Sea’s Edge’, writer and scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris presented the theme of decompositions as an invitation away from the colonial Anthropocene. She understands the latter as ‘human led planetary climate change and environmental destruction as a spatial and temporal structure with accelerating consequences, one that spans more than five centuries of colonial domination.’2 Similar to the biennale’s call to move beyond frameworks of perpetual crisis, Gómez-Barris critiqued the impasse of the contemporary model of climate disaster that implies a foreclosed planetary future. Instead, she invited the audience toward a practice and poetics of making art to survive otherwise.

In a strategic decentering of the colonial Anthropocene, she began her lecture at the sea’s edge with her own journey as a young child swimming in the Pacific Ocean on the coast of California after fleeing military dictatorship in Chile. Remembering the sea’s edge as a site of encounter and counterculture, Gómez-Barris then drew our attention to artists and thinkers who are making their way beyond the dehumanisation, destruction and acceleration of environmental catastrophe. Indeed, her scholarly and curatorial practice engages with artists who proliferate queer and femme pleasure, Indigenous cosmologies and embodied knowledges. Thinking alongside Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo, Gómez-Barris considered how eco-queer artmaking practices challenge and decompose western framings of climate change, and instead centre embodied Indigenous knowledges. Moreover, delving into the photography of South African artist Luvuyo Nyawose, Gómez-Barris also reflected on how the portrayal and pleasure of Black beachgoers dissolves the extractive gaze of colonialism in the afterlife of apartheid.

These modes of artmaking forge a path around and beyond the framework of climate permacrisis. This is a radically different approach from the liberal humanist narrative of climate salvation that is inherently entrenched in the violence of colonialism and extractive capitalism. Instead, Gómez-Barris grounds us in relation to artists, thinkers and makers who draw on embodied knowledge formations and Indigenous cosmologies to chart alternative modes of planetary care, akin to what Vandana Shiva calls radical earth democracies.3 Attending to a multiplicity of queer, racialised and Indigenous ‘submerged perspectives’ that arise from these sites of encounter and extraction, Gómez-Barris asks how we can challenge the ecological violences of colonial capitalism and produce new geographies of planetary vitality.4

As bodies of water cross and disrupt landed borders, many artists and contributors considered the potentiality of art and art work – the work of making art – to address and redress the traumas and disruptions of state violence. The first panel titled ‘Source: Artistic Activation’ considered artmaking as a worldmaking process, as both an individual and communal endeavour. Guadalupe Maravilla reflected on creating his ‘sound sculptures’ using found objects, retracing his migratory path as one of the first undocumented children to arrive at the United States border during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. As a cancer survivor, Maravilla seeks to bring healing to others who have been impacted by the trauma of violence and the uneven effects of capital. Drawing on Indigenous cosmologies and healing practices, Maravilla utilises sound as a healing practice. In addition, through the fabrication of his sound sculptures, he generates micro-economies for undocumented, migrant and Indigenous communities by employing local artisans, thus redistributing wealth. The importance of working in relation with and alongside collaborators and co-creators was shared by the panel. When Maravilla plays a gong on one of his Disease Throwers, the echoes resonate and wash over the body as a kind of sonic cleansing that calls into the present the many hands that make the work.

Healing is thus a pluralistic and holistic practice: material, relational and spiritual all at once. This kind of communal work challenges and extends beyond the violent border regimes of the nation state, producing instead new modes of worldmaking, care and sociality. In the panel ‘Estuaries: Navigating Boundaries’, Meiro Koizumi reflected on the production of his five-channel projection titled Theatre of Life. Filmed over two days, the work engaged teenagers and young people from the Goryeo community. Diasporic Koreans, they originally migrated to the Soviet Union in the 19th and early 20th centuries and were deported throughout Central Asia following the Soviet Union’s conflict with Japan in the 1920 and 1930s. Koizumi gathered a group of young people who recently migrated to Gwangju and, with an acting coach, helped them contend with and understand their unique historical identities as Goryeo people through acting and roleplay. Koizumi’s work is a kind of theatrical alchemy of historical memory and trauma, allowing young people to see themselves in new ways and imagine new possibilities. As Koizumi spoke movingly about the impact of the workshop on the young collaborators, it became clear that the temporality of Koizumi’s work exceeds that of the exhibition itself and will have ongoing resonances in the lives of the participants.

Throughout the symposium, participants raised the pressing question of how to conceive of ecological care beyond the framework of crisis and rescue. Australian artist Judy Watson drew on the knowledge and cosmologies of her Aboriginal grandmother to highlight the disappearance of groundwater in her homeland. Through communal collaboration, Watson creates large-scale tapestries inspired by Waanyi conceptions of water and place, in stark contrast to the extractive geographies of capital. Watson reminded us that water is a living being. Her work called into memory important Indigenous-led protests such as Standing Rock in 2016, whose resounding chant that water is life remains a rallying call against global resource extraction and the destruction of sacred lands.

In Abbas Akhavan’s work entitled Loop 2023, the sound of water trickling echoes through the mixed media installation of rocks, plants and water from Gwangju. The installation is set against a green screen to reveal the artifice of human intervention, while water and LED lights sustain the installation as a living thing. With thoughtful attunement to the local and the locale, Akhavan will return the materials that comprise the installation to their native habitat once the Biennale concludes. On his panel, Akhavan described how his work interrogates what it means to ‘be a guest on a land’ and to return that which belongs to the land. Indeed, Akhavan’s work is both natural and artificial, material and ephemeral, revealing how ‘nature’ is so often mediated by human desires and needs.

Gathered in Gwangju, located on a divided peninsula surrounded on three sides by the sea, one could not consider the theme of ‘soft and weak like water without contending with the oceans that cover more than 70% of the planet. Addressing the specific histories of the Atlantic and the Pacific, several symposium panelists conceived of the ocean as an archive of historical memory and effectively decentered continental conceptions of land as the privileged center of artistic and cultural thought.

In her incisive work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe delves into the wake of the Middle Passage and interrogates how the spectre of the slave ship continues to contain, regulate and produce Black social and physical death. In the hold, in the wake, Sharpe draws on Black feminist thought and the cultural production and consciousness of the Black diaspora to theorise ways of witnessing and proliferating Black life– ‘a method of encountering a past that is not past’.5 South African artist Buhlebezwe Siwani’s performance Inhlambuluko (To be pure again) began too, in the wake, in the submerged space of the slave ship. Siwani sat on a chair surrounded by salt and which faced a pool of water, as visual representations of the slave ship and enslavement were projected on two screens placed behind and in front of her. Cleansing requires a confrontation with the anguish, pain and trauma of the past. Drawing on her knowledge as a Sangoma, or traditional healer, Siwani conducted a cleansing ceremony using sound and salt, her voice and her body. When the ritual ended and Siwani left the space, the installation was washed over with projections of Black women dancing in the sea. The misty projections were cast into the pool and invited our gaze into the water. The healing practices of the Sangoma are spiritual and corporeal, drawing on ancestral and embodied knowledge. Through her performance, Siwani invited the audience to bear witness to this healing and be submerged with the healer herself in the archive of memory that is the ocean.

Turning to the Pacific and to Oceania, Yuki Kihara’s work emerges from Indigenous oceanscapes. Kihara cited Tongan and Fijian writer Epeli Hau’ofa’s call to consider the Pacific Islands not as ‘islands in a far sea,’ but rather as a ‘sea of islands.’6 Of Sāmoan and Japanese descent, Kihara utilised traditional Sāmoan siapo cloth and Japanese kimono with communal artmaking practices to portray the oceanscape of Moana as a site of extractive European and Japanese colonialism, as well as of long-standing Indigenous resistance. On the fabric, Kihara’s illustrative work juxtaposed orientalist fantasies of the Pacific and depictions of islanders as noble savages with symbols of Sāmoan strength. Kihara’s work in form and in practice is a reclamation of the Pacific and a prescient reminder of the primacy of the ocean. Through Indigenous Oceanic perspectives, we move away from privileging continental and landed forms of seeing and knowing.

Considering the coastal geography and architecture of the Korean peninsula, Oh Suk Kuhn’s photographic work engages with the homes and dwellings in the city of Incheon, a site of overlapping encounter and conquest. As part of the panel ‘Undercurrents: Ambiguous Narratives’, Oh shared how his work Enemy Territory explores jeoksangook, homes built during Japanese colonialism and now inhabited by Koreans. Against the historical backdrop of Japanese colonialism and American military occupation, Oh discussed how his work is an intimate look at the everyday lives and aesthetic sensibilities of Koreans who reside within and despite the architecture of the past. This work of quiet memory is especially resonant in Gwangju, where the events of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising are very much alive and part of everyday life. In its attention to emergent modes of planetary solidarity and resistance, the Gwangju Biennale continues to remember those who stood up against military dictatorship and lost their lives as a result.7

With a deep commitment to emergent forms of relation and care, the symposium Confluences: Stories of Art and the Planetary drew out the multi-scalar resonances of water as life and artmaking as a worldmaking force. The symposium and the biennale exhibition reframed the question of how to deal with the permacrisis and responded resoundingly with plurality and proliferation: indeed, many futures are possible. Over the two days of the symposium, it became clear that seeking a different kind of planetary future is not naïve optimism, but rather a practice and a study that draws on embodied knowledge, Indigenous cosmologies and communal praxis. Like artmaking, worldmaking is a practice of care - fluid and durable at the same time. The promise of this practice lies in a pluriverse – what Macarena Gómez-Barris calls a bridge ‘from an impossible now to a possible elsewhere.’