Peer-Reviewed Articles by Aaron Katzeman
Third Text, 2022
Concentrating on contemporary art, visual culture and politics in Hawaiʻi, this article articulat... more Concentrating on contemporary art, visual culture and politics in Hawaiʻi, this article articulates a specific kind of abolitionist aesthetics that has ecology at its core and through which traces of a demilitarised futurity are interwoven. The work of anonymous collectives, artists and architects ‒ including Hui Menehune, Tropic Zine, Jane Chang Mi, Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick and Sean Connelly ‒ stretches abolitionism to consider the role US militarism in Hawaiʻi plays in maintaining and enforcing global capitalism, holding captive alternative ways of organising society and the possibility of an environmentally just future. Analysing experimental residencies, video work, socially engaged proposals and other public interventions produced in relation to movements for racial justice, demilitarisation and Hawaiian sovereignty, these projects offer the provocation that the US might have to burn before the world, both spatially – in terms of being visible for all to see – and temporally, a prerequisite to mitigating the worst of climate catastrophe.
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Pacific Arts, 2021
In 2013, Pacific Islander American artist and architect Sean Connelly formed a geometric sculptur... more In 2013, Pacific Islander American artist and architect Sean Connelly formed a geometric sculpture with 32,000 pounds of earthen matter at the now-closed ii Gallery in the Kakaʻako neighborhood of Honolulu. Titled "A Small Area of Land (Kakaʻako Earth Room)," the work was composed of volcanic soil and coral sand—deemed by Connelly as "two of Hawaiʻi's most politically charged materials and highly valued commodities"—sourced from various locations on the island of Oʻahu. Connelly allowed his sculpture to slowly erode in the gallery over the course of its installation, a non-gesture toward what might seem to be uncontrollable disintegration. "A Small Area of Land" adds a divergent dimension to Euro-American art movements, pushing back against the rigidity and firmness of minimalism and the grand impositions of land art that initially inspired him. In doing so, Connelly expands the notion of "land" beyond a material or merely site-specific interest for artists into something that additionally includes more explicit references to structural systems of dispossession, exploitation, theft, and lasting injustices. Connelly’s work amplifies relationships to land that do not rely on economic value in the extractive, capitalist sense so much as values that link Indigenous onto-epistemologies with ecological flourishing, providing an avenue through which we can think about histories of land, labor, and the increasing disassociation between the two, as well as how material choices are imbricated with personal and political complexity in Hawaiʻi.
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Reviews by Aaron Katzeman
caa.reviews, 2022
Exhibition and catalog review of Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022: "Pacific Century - E Ho‘omau no Moananui... more Exhibition and catalog review of Hawaiʻi Triennial 2022: "Pacific Century - E Ho‘omau no Moananuiākea," eds. Melissa Chiu, Miwako Tezuka, and Drew Kahu‘āina Broderick. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2022.
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Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography, 2021
Book review of "The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change,"... more Book review of "The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change," eds. T. J. Demos, Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee. London: Routledge, 2021.
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Conferences and Panels Organized by Aaron Katzeman
Panel at CAA 2025, the 113th annual conference of the College Art Association.
Abstract: Artis... more Panel at CAA 2025, the 113th annual conference of the College Art Association.
Abstract: Artistic representations of those who work the land have varied across time and space. During the 1800s, peasants were commonly portrayed in European paintings as toiling, albeit righteous, laborers. Similar depictions abound in social documentary photography of the 1900s. Agnes Varda's 2000 film "The Gleaners and I" revisited historical representations of peasants to draw connections between the poor then and now. More recently, collectives including Critical Art Ensemble, Futurefarmers, and SeedBroadcast, among many others, have examined the increasing privatization of seeds and modernity's growing detachment from food production. Despite their varying criticality, though, none of these have necessarily engaged the peasantry as a political class. The Bolshevik, Mexican, and Chinese communist revolutions, however, actively produced a new status of the peasant as an agent of history through agitprop, posters, and murals. Campesino and fellahin movements have since advocated for agrarian reform across Latin America, the Arab region, and the Global South broadly speaking. Black and/or Indigenous efforts continue to attempt to rekindle relations with land threatened by racial colonial capitalism, while members of the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina struggle against the corporatization of agriculture by promoting agroecology, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. To cultivate a global method of agrarian art history, this panel asks: How have historical formations of revolutionary peasant and agrarian movements influenced artistic practice? And how have these artistic engagements echoed the social, ecological, and political experiments such movements represent? Submissions addressing any periods, geographies, and media are encouraged.
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Panel at AAG 2024, the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers. Sponsored by... more Panel at AAG 2024, the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers. Sponsored by the Socialist and Critical Geography Speciality Group.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (co-chair), Zoe Weldon-Yochim (co-chair), Scott Volz, Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez
Abstract: The U.S. military is everywhere and nowhere, hidden in plain sight. Although the Pentagon confirms just over 750 military bases operating in 80 countries worldwide, the actual number of U.S. military installations—including bases but also training ranges, proving grounds, supporting infrastructure, and more—is well over a thousand and, by some estimates, puts U.S. military presence in over 150 countries. Extending across the globe, into the atmosphere, and through telecommunications networks, the U.S. military's combatant commands pierce physical, outer, and digital space, locating national interests well beyond the terrestrial boundaries of earth itself. Maintaining this vast range of domination across disparate geographies not only suggests the U.S. military to be of exceptional environmental concern—it is, after all, the single largest institutional polluter on the planet, a violence that ensures the perpetuation of petrocapitalist hegemony under U.S. empire—but also a uniquely unifying subject matter for artists and activists alike, who coalesce and organize around shared inflictions. Utilizing varying media and strategies, practitioners have long scrutinized the Department of Defense’s role in administering geographies according to perceived military and economic threats, weapons testing needs, speculative extractive zones, and other forms of commodity frontiers ripe for enclosure. By way of distinct case studies, this panel traces critical artistic responses to U.S. militarism emerging in relation to settler colonial and imperialist ventures, from the origins of U.S. foreign policy in genocidal Indian Wars and the Nevada Test Site in Newe Sogobia (Western Shoshone lands), to the islands of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi and Vieques in Puerto Rico. In doing so, papers examine how visual practices have grappled with the expansive socio-ecological costs of U.S. militarism in specific local, regional, and global geographical contexts, helping to reveal the cultural wrath of the U.S. military's physical reach.
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Panel at CAA 2023, the 111th annual conference of the College Art Association. Sponsored by the S... more Panel at CAA 2023, the 111th annual conference of the College Art Association. Sponsored by the Society of Contemporary Art Historians.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (chair), Jessy Bell, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Erina Duganne
Abstract: In 2021, a number of artists, curators, and cultural workers drafted the "Art of Internationalism" platform for Progressive International—a global coalition of left-wing activists and organizations reengaging internationalism for the 21st century—calling for artists to participate in "the craft of organizing transnational, planetary solidarities." While the manifesto is meant to influence future creative work, there is also an established internationalist inclination in contemporary art. From OSPAAAL's mass distribution of Third World solidarity posters, the 1974 Venice Biennale's united focus on Chile, the collaborative efforts initiated by Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and Decolonize This Place's recent action-oriented movements to Globalize the Intifada, artists have long played a vital role in imagining, producing, and enacting an anti-imperialist internationalist politics of decolonial liberation. Revisiting October's "Questionnaire on 'The Contemporary'" (2009) with the spirit of "Art of Internationalism"'s revolutionary optimism, this roundtable invites contributions that consider contemporary practices engaging a politico-aesthetic internationalism, with particular attention to how place-based work speaks with and embraces similar movements elsewhere. Proposals from cultural workers outside or at the margins of the hegemonic art system are especially welcome. How can an internationalist focus trouble the consensus that contemporary art only went "global" in 1989, a designation often depoliticized in its function as explanatory timeframe? If such periodization too easily capitulates to economic globalization and liberal multiculturalism, might a return to internationalism rupture our most fundamental understandings of what constitutes and delineates the "global-ness" of contemporary art?
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International symposium co-organized with Cassandra Coblentz and Ziying Duan. Hosted by the Orang... more International symposium co-organized with Cassandra Coblentz and Ziying Duan. Hosted by the Orange County Museum of Art.
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Panel at ASAP/13, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Prese... more Panel at ASAP/13, the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (co-chair), Marianna Davison (co-chair), Scott Volz (co-chair), Nida Sinnokrot, Zachary Korol-Gold, Martabel Wasserman and T. J. Demos
Abstract: In his 2021 book, "A People's Green New Deal," Max Ajl articulates an edge-based logic of emancipation, stating: "A front can only build from existing states: the already-existing ecological society in the interstices and shadow-zones of colonial-capitalism, arenas which can or do rely less on imperialism for their social reproduction" (101). What practices constitute these interstitial activities? Which political-aesthetic projects can be found in the shadow-zones? And what sorts of fugitivity, collectivity, and care-work participate in the struggle for another way of being? Following Ajl's championing of radical agricultural movements, Indigenous land rights, and feminist praxis, this panel considers the edge formations of ecological art and culture beyond imperialist hegemony. We seek, in particular, to engage the already-existing ecological societies that make life in community gardens, yards, co-ops, and small farms, examining the subversive qualities offered by such projects.
Beginning with the formal emergence of ecological art in the 1970s, numerous artists have utilized the garden plot as a site of aesthetic inquiry, employing plants to address food production, cultivate biodiversity, and decontaminate soils, among other practices. These early endeavors have been characterized by art historian T. J. Demos as "restorationist eco aesthetics," which he describes as "art that envisions and enacts the repair of damaged habitats and degraded ecosystems" ("Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology," 2016, 39). Although novel for their time, Demos argues such works were merely cosmetic, repairing individual deteriorated sites but failing to expand beyond local contexts and link pollution to global systems of colonialism and capitalism. Nonetheless, this critique provides the grounds to analyze how artists have newly considered repair and reparations in ways that exceed the confines of the "garden" itself. Considering gardens as geographically and ethically expansive entities, we aim to reimagine the emancipatory possibilities of restoration through broader conceptualizations of the garden as a site of anti-colonial resistance, where mutual aid is nurtured, food sovereignty is propagated, and abolitionist futures are imagined.
Organizing this panel in response to the conference theme of "Edge Play," we take inspiration from bell hooks in considering the "margin as space of radical openness" (1989), in which both the historically enclosed nature of the garden and its hitherto limited engagement are wrested open by critical art practice and scholarship. Participants will speak on their work in redefining the liberatory means of the garden as a conduit of sociocultural revolution, gardening the edge of what is deemed possible.
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UCI Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies 20th Annual Graduate (Virtual) Conference. Hosted by the Clim... more UCI Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies 20th Annual Graduate (Virtual) Conference. Hosted by the Climate Futures Collective.
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Climate Futures Collective by Aaron Katzeman
Description of Climate Futures Collective Research Group at the University of California, Irvine.
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Art Practice by Aaron Katzeman
Pamphlet published as part of solo exhibition "Tantalus Trip: Respect the Rain Forest" (2018). Th... more Pamphlet published as part of solo exhibition "Tantalus Trip: Respect the Rain Forest" (2018). The exhibition can be viewed online at hillsideslides.com/tantalus-trip.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles by Aaron Katzeman
Reviews by Aaron Katzeman
Conferences and Panels Organized by Aaron Katzeman
Abstract: Artistic representations of those who work the land have varied across time and space. During the 1800s, peasants were commonly portrayed in European paintings as toiling, albeit righteous, laborers. Similar depictions abound in social documentary photography of the 1900s. Agnes Varda's 2000 film "The Gleaners and I" revisited historical representations of peasants to draw connections between the poor then and now. More recently, collectives including Critical Art Ensemble, Futurefarmers, and SeedBroadcast, among many others, have examined the increasing privatization of seeds and modernity's growing detachment from food production. Despite their varying criticality, though, none of these have necessarily engaged the peasantry as a political class. The Bolshevik, Mexican, and Chinese communist revolutions, however, actively produced a new status of the peasant as an agent of history through agitprop, posters, and murals. Campesino and fellahin movements have since advocated for agrarian reform across Latin America, the Arab region, and the Global South broadly speaking. Black and/or Indigenous efforts continue to attempt to rekindle relations with land threatened by racial colonial capitalism, while members of the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina struggle against the corporatization of agriculture by promoting agroecology, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. To cultivate a global method of agrarian art history, this panel asks: How have historical formations of revolutionary peasant and agrarian movements influenced artistic practice? And how have these artistic engagements echoed the social, ecological, and political experiments such movements represent? Submissions addressing any periods, geographies, and media are encouraged.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (co-chair), Zoe Weldon-Yochim (co-chair), Scott Volz, Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez
Abstract: The U.S. military is everywhere and nowhere, hidden in plain sight. Although the Pentagon confirms just over 750 military bases operating in 80 countries worldwide, the actual number of U.S. military installations—including bases but also training ranges, proving grounds, supporting infrastructure, and more—is well over a thousand and, by some estimates, puts U.S. military presence in over 150 countries. Extending across the globe, into the atmosphere, and through telecommunications networks, the U.S. military's combatant commands pierce physical, outer, and digital space, locating national interests well beyond the terrestrial boundaries of earth itself. Maintaining this vast range of domination across disparate geographies not only suggests the U.S. military to be of exceptional environmental concern—it is, after all, the single largest institutional polluter on the planet, a violence that ensures the perpetuation of petrocapitalist hegemony under U.S. empire—but also a uniquely unifying subject matter for artists and activists alike, who coalesce and organize around shared inflictions. Utilizing varying media and strategies, practitioners have long scrutinized the Department of Defense’s role in administering geographies according to perceived military and economic threats, weapons testing needs, speculative extractive zones, and other forms of commodity frontiers ripe for enclosure. By way of distinct case studies, this panel traces critical artistic responses to U.S. militarism emerging in relation to settler colonial and imperialist ventures, from the origins of U.S. foreign policy in genocidal Indian Wars and the Nevada Test Site in Newe Sogobia (Western Shoshone lands), to the islands of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi and Vieques in Puerto Rico. In doing so, papers examine how visual practices have grappled with the expansive socio-ecological costs of U.S. militarism in specific local, regional, and global geographical contexts, helping to reveal the cultural wrath of the U.S. military's physical reach.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (chair), Jessy Bell, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Erina Duganne
Abstract: In 2021, a number of artists, curators, and cultural workers drafted the "Art of Internationalism" platform for Progressive International—a global coalition of left-wing activists and organizations reengaging internationalism for the 21st century—calling for artists to participate in "the craft of organizing transnational, planetary solidarities." While the manifesto is meant to influence future creative work, there is also an established internationalist inclination in contemporary art. From OSPAAAL's mass distribution of Third World solidarity posters, the 1974 Venice Biennale's united focus on Chile, the collaborative efforts initiated by Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and Decolonize This Place's recent action-oriented movements to Globalize the Intifada, artists have long played a vital role in imagining, producing, and enacting an anti-imperialist internationalist politics of decolonial liberation. Revisiting October's "Questionnaire on 'The Contemporary'" (2009) with the spirit of "Art of Internationalism"'s revolutionary optimism, this roundtable invites contributions that consider contemporary practices engaging a politico-aesthetic internationalism, with particular attention to how place-based work speaks with and embraces similar movements elsewhere. Proposals from cultural workers outside or at the margins of the hegemonic art system are especially welcome. How can an internationalist focus trouble the consensus that contemporary art only went "global" in 1989, a designation often depoliticized in its function as explanatory timeframe? If such periodization too easily capitulates to economic globalization and liberal multiculturalism, might a return to internationalism rupture our most fundamental understandings of what constitutes and delineates the "global-ness" of contemporary art?
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (co-chair), Marianna Davison (co-chair), Scott Volz (co-chair), Nida Sinnokrot, Zachary Korol-Gold, Martabel Wasserman and T. J. Demos
Abstract: In his 2021 book, "A People's Green New Deal," Max Ajl articulates an edge-based logic of emancipation, stating: "A front can only build from existing states: the already-existing ecological society in the interstices and shadow-zones of colonial-capitalism, arenas which can or do rely less on imperialism for their social reproduction" (101). What practices constitute these interstitial activities? Which political-aesthetic projects can be found in the shadow-zones? And what sorts of fugitivity, collectivity, and care-work participate in the struggle for another way of being? Following Ajl's championing of radical agricultural movements, Indigenous land rights, and feminist praxis, this panel considers the edge formations of ecological art and culture beyond imperialist hegemony. We seek, in particular, to engage the already-existing ecological societies that make life in community gardens, yards, co-ops, and small farms, examining the subversive qualities offered by such projects.
Beginning with the formal emergence of ecological art in the 1970s, numerous artists have utilized the garden plot as a site of aesthetic inquiry, employing plants to address food production, cultivate biodiversity, and decontaminate soils, among other practices. These early endeavors have been characterized by art historian T. J. Demos as "restorationist eco aesthetics," which he describes as "art that envisions and enacts the repair of damaged habitats and degraded ecosystems" ("Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology," 2016, 39). Although novel for their time, Demos argues such works were merely cosmetic, repairing individual deteriorated sites but failing to expand beyond local contexts and link pollution to global systems of colonialism and capitalism. Nonetheless, this critique provides the grounds to analyze how artists have newly considered repair and reparations in ways that exceed the confines of the "garden" itself. Considering gardens as geographically and ethically expansive entities, we aim to reimagine the emancipatory possibilities of restoration through broader conceptualizations of the garden as a site of anti-colonial resistance, where mutual aid is nurtured, food sovereignty is propagated, and abolitionist futures are imagined.
Organizing this panel in response to the conference theme of "Edge Play," we take inspiration from bell hooks in considering the "margin as space of radical openness" (1989), in which both the historically enclosed nature of the garden and its hitherto limited engagement are wrested open by critical art practice and scholarship. Participants will speak on their work in redefining the liberatory means of the garden as a conduit of sociocultural revolution, gardening the edge of what is deemed possible.
Climate Futures Collective by Aaron Katzeman
Art Practice by Aaron Katzeman
Abstract: Artistic representations of those who work the land have varied across time and space. During the 1800s, peasants were commonly portrayed in European paintings as toiling, albeit righteous, laborers. Similar depictions abound in social documentary photography of the 1900s. Agnes Varda's 2000 film "The Gleaners and I" revisited historical representations of peasants to draw connections between the poor then and now. More recently, collectives including Critical Art Ensemble, Futurefarmers, and SeedBroadcast, among many others, have examined the increasing privatization of seeds and modernity's growing detachment from food production. Despite their varying criticality, though, none of these have necessarily engaged the peasantry as a political class. The Bolshevik, Mexican, and Chinese communist revolutions, however, actively produced a new status of the peasant as an agent of history through agitprop, posters, and murals. Campesino and fellahin movements have since advocated for agrarian reform across Latin America, the Arab region, and the Global South broadly speaking. Black and/or Indigenous efforts continue to attempt to rekindle relations with land threatened by racial colonial capitalism, while members of the transnational social movement La Vía Campesina struggle against the corporatization of agriculture by promoting agroecology, food sovereignty, and environmental justice. To cultivate a global method of agrarian art history, this panel asks: How have historical formations of revolutionary peasant and agrarian movements influenced artistic practice? And how have these artistic engagements echoed the social, ecological, and political experiments such movements represent? Submissions addressing any periods, geographies, and media are encouraged.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (co-chair), Zoe Weldon-Yochim (co-chair), Scott Volz, Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez
Abstract: The U.S. military is everywhere and nowhere, hidden in plain sight. Although the Pentagon confirms just over 750 military bases operating in 80 countries worldwide, the actual number of U.S. military installations—including bases but also training ranges, proving grounds, supporting infrastructure, and more—is well over a thousand and, by some estimates, puts U.S. military presence in over 150 countries. Extending across the globe, into the atmosphere, and through telecommunications networks, the U.S. military's combatant commands pierce physical, outer, and digital space, locating national interests well beyond the terrestrial boundaries of earth itself. Maintaining this vast range of domination across disparate geographies not only suggests the U.S. military to be of exceptional environmental concern—it is, after all, the single largest institutional polluter on the planet, a violence that ensures the perpetuation of petrocapitalist hegemony under U.S. empire—but also a uniquely unifying subject matter for artists and activists alike, who coalesce and organize around shared inflictions. Utilizing varying media and strategies, practitioners have long scrutinized the Department of Defense’s role in administering geographies according to perceived military and economic threats, weapons testing needs, speculative extractive zones, and other forms of commodity frontiers ripe for enclosure. By way of distinct case studies, this panel traces critical artistic responses to U.S. militarism emerging in relation to settler colonial and imperialist ventures, from the origins of U.S. foreign policy in genocidal Indian Wars and the Nevada Test Site in Newe Sogobia (Western Shoshone lands), to the islands of Oʻahu in Hawaiʻi and Vieques in Puerto Rico. In doing so, papers examine how visual practices have grappled with the expansive socio-ecological costs of U.S. militarism in specific local, regional, and global geographical contexts, helping to reveal the cultural wrath of the U.S. military's physical reach.
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (chair), Jessy Bell, Paloma Checa-Gismero, Erina Duganne
Abstract: In 2021, a number of artists, curators, and cultural workers drafted the "Art of Internationalism" platform for Progressive International—a global coalition of left-wing activists and organizations reengaging internationalism for the 21st century—calling for artists to participate in "the craft of organizing transnational, planetary solidarities." While the manifesto is meant to influence future creative work, there is also an established internationalist inclination in contemporary art. From OSPAAAL's mass distribution of Third World solidarity posters, the 1974 Venice Biennale's united focus on Chile, the collaborative efforts initiated by Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America, and Decolonize This Place's recent action-oriented movements to Globalize the Intifada, artists have long played a vital role in imagining, producing, and enacting an anti-imperialist internationalist politics of decolonial liberation. Revisiting October's "Questionnaire on 'The Contemporary'" (2009) with the spirit of "Art of Internationalism"'s revolutionary optimism, this roundtable invites contributions that consider contemporary practices engaging a politico-aesthetic internationalism, with particular attention to how place-based work speaks with and embraces similar movements elsewhere. Proposals from cultural workers outside or at the margins of the hegemonic art system are especially welcome. How can an internationalist focus trouble the consensus that contemporary art only went "global" in 1989, a designation often depoliticized in its function as explanatory timeframe? If such periodization too easily capitulates to economic globalization and liberal multiculturalism, might a return to internationalism rupture our most fundamental understandings of what constitutes and delineates the "global-ness" of contemporary art?
Participants: Aaron Katzeman (co-chair), Marianna Davison (co-chair), Scott Volz (co-chair), Nida Sinnokrot, Zachary Korol-Gold, Martabel Wasserman and T. J. Demos
Abstract: In his 2021 book, "A People's Green New Deal," Max Ajl articulates an edge-based logic of emancipation, stating: "A front can only build from existing states: the already-existing ecological society in the interstices and shadow-zones of colonial-capitalism, arenas which can or do rely less on imperialism for their social reproduction" (101). What practices constitute these interstitial activities? Which political-aesthetic projects can be found in the shadow-zones? And what sorts of fugitivity, collectivity, and care-work participate in the struggle for another way of being? Following Ajl's championing of radical agricultural movements, Indigenous land rights, and feminist praxis, this panel considers the edge formations of ecological art and culture beyond imperialist hegemony. We seek, in particular, to engage the already-existing ecological societies that make life in community gardens, yards, co-ops, and small farms, examining the subversive qualities offered by such projects.
Beginning with the formal emergence of ecological art in the 1970s, numerous artists have utilized the garden plot as a site of aesthetic inquiry, employing plants to address food production, cultivate biodiversity, and decontaminate soils, among other practices. These early endeavors have been characterized by art historian T. J. Demos as "restorationist eco aesthetics," which he describes as "art that envisions and enacts the repair of damaged habitats and degraded ecosystems" ("Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology," 2016, 39). Although novel for their time, Demos argues such works were merely cosmetic, repairing individual deteriorated sites but failing to expand beyond local contexts and link pollution to global systems of colonialism and capitalism. Nonetheless, this critique provides the grounds to analyze how artists have newly considered repair and reparations in ways that exceed the confines of the "garden" itself. Considering gardens as geographically and ethically expansive entities, we aim to reimagine the emancipatory possibilities of restoration through broader conceptualizations of the garden as a site of anti-colonial resistance, where mutual aid is nurtured, food sovereignty is propagated, and abolitionist futures are imagined.
Organizing this panel in response to the conference theme of "Edge Play," we take inspiration from bell hooks in considering the "margin as space of radical openness" (1989), in which both the historically enclosed nature of the garden and its hitherto limited engagement are wrested open by critical art practice and scholarship. Participants will speak on their work in redefining the liberatory means of the garden as a conduit of sociocultural revolution, gardening the edge of what is deemed possible.