 I think we'll begin if that's okay. My name is Mark Hallott, and I'm really pleased to welcome everyone attending to this final event in our Autumn Research programme on British Art and Natural Forces. We're looking forward to a really exciting panel discussion responding to some of the questions and issues that have come up throughout this amazing project or initiative that's run, I now realise, since the 6th of October, so this has been a conference that's run over a number of months. I said my name is Mark Hallott, I'm the director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre, and I just wanted to say a word or two about the centre itself to you all before we begin the panel discussion proper. So we're actually enjoying our, or have been enjoying or marking, maybe not enjoying it's not always the right word this year, but marking our 50th anniversary as a research institute and research centre. We're based in Bedford Square, for those of you who have not visited us, just off Tottenham Court Road in London, we're part of Yale University. And we're a research centre that addresses all aspects of British art and visual culture from the Anglo-Saxon period or maybe even earlier to the present. And we support research across all those chronological areas and ranges and periods, but also across a very, very wide variety of materials. So we support research on the fine arts as traditionally recognised, on architecture, on photography, on film, on a whole range of different kinds of contemporary artistic practice. So we've really got a wide remit in terms of the research we really like to support. We have a very busy events programme, this event that you're watching is part of an events programme that stretches right through the year every year, often more than 80 or so events. And that was in the case, that was the case when we had in-person events typically, but now of course we're doing things online. And again, please, I'd like to invite all of you to look at our events programme more generally, even beyond and after this discussion and this series has ended. For instance, we've, Anna Reid, who has organised this series has also been organising an amazing series of British art talks in which artists have been engaging with or talking about the ways in which they engage with the histories of British art. And we've had artists such as Lucy Scare and Ryan Gander doing some wonderful podcasts for us. And Elizabeth Price is in the process of publishing with us three amazing short films that I'd urge all of you to watch. The first two are already up live, the third one is coming soon. We also offer grants and fellowships. So again, this may well relate to all of you watching and any of you interested in pursuing research on any aspect of British art, we give a million pounds a year away in grants and fellowships to individuals at institutions. So if you're interested in looking for support for your research, through for your publications, for your research time, please look at our grants and fellowships programme on our website. We publish books and again I think sometimes people don't realise that we're a major publisher in the arts. All the books in the past that Yale University Press published on British art were books that we supported and we financed. And now we've become even more independent as a publisher. And so we're publishing ourselves 10 to 12 or 8 to 10, 12 books a year, major monographs on again all aspects of British art. If you're interested in doing a book project or pursuing a book project, please come and talk to us about that and look at our publications that we published over the last few years. You get a flavour of all the different kinds of things we do. We also do digital publications as well. Of course, a number of you will know this already, but can I invite you again to look at the most recent issue of our digital journal, our online journal British Art Studies. Issue number 18 has just been published this week. And it's packed as always with a really interesting mix of articles and features. And so again, I'd urge you to not only read it, but then think in terms of your own research, your own interests. Is this something that you'd like to contribute to down the line? We also run and publish some major online research projects that we've been doing. London Asia is one of them that you might find out more about art in the country house and a whole major project we did on the history of the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy. That saw us publish every single catalogue of the summer exhibitions right back to 1769 and publish an essay on every single summer exhibition over the last 250 years. That's all available on our website. And at Bedford Square itself, we had an amazing archive and library, probably the best open access library on British art that's available anywhere. And we have an archive, a very full archive of materials that are specialising in art historians materials. So we have some of the papers of some of the most amazing art historians to have worked on British art over the last 50 years and more. So we're celebrating our 50th anniversary this year, as I say, and we wanted to celebrate by holding what we were thinking of as a major state of the field conference. Always imagine this taking place in the autumn of 2020. And we'd actually initially imagined a three day event, a classic major international conference with speakers from all over the world, coming to Bedford Square or somewhere nearby and presenting them research. And of course, and then we were also thinking about what that should focus on as a theme or a topic. And so it made sense to us pretty immediately and this again in conversations with Anna as our head of research to think a new and experimental ways about how art history is a discipline has addressed and being shaped by the forces of nature. So, in a sense, that gave us our topic, but we also are thinking about how best to deliver and share this research and this event, rather than an in person conference. So of course we've ended up deciding that it would make sense to hold, not to think of a single blockbuster event, but a series of events of different kinds and that's what's unfolded so amazingly and brilliantly over the last few weeks. And I'm really proud to be part of this whole project and to have seen it unfold as part of the Paul Mellon Center's events program. So this amazing series, which is now drawing to a close rather sadly in lots of ways, but there may well be interesting stepping off points for the future and projects that this might lead into in the future. This series has been as organized as I say by Anna Reid, our head of research, and I'm delighted now to turn to Anna, who will introduce today's panel discussion in a bit more detail. So thanks Anna and over to you. Thank you. And welcome to everyone. Welcome to this final panel. I wanted to say a big thank you to our audiences, to our audience in general. We've had a really large international audience for this series and above all I'd like to thank our contributors, many of whom are with us today for sharing their research in such a really such an incredibly challenging year for giving so much and for being so generous in this virtual form as well. And the range of distinctiveness of work contributed to the conference is really above and beyond what we'd anticipated, even when devising such a capacious theme, which aims to glean a very vital current state of the field and to bring front and centre complex processes of decolonisation as ecological processes, which I really think it has. The architecture historians and curators that we've heard from have touched on engagements with geomorphic forces multi species being the weather about history and architecture visual histories of disease and medicine. Activations of indigenous visual cultures extractive and racialized logics of the colonial and the capitalist questions of the museum and the curatorial speculative features. Today's event is of course a discussion event. And we're not expecting to draw any particular conclusions of course. What we're hoping to do is really to encourage really productive exchange between panellists and also audience members, based on responses to the conference. Two of our keynote speakers will be joining us today, so we have Andrew Petruccia with us and Anna Arabinden Kesson will join us. TJ Demos sadly can't join us today because of the conflicting time schedules between Australia and California. He has sent his apologies and best wishes for the panel and also has encouraged anybody with questions to contact him. As you'll know, we also did a separate Q&A with him because we knew he wouldn't be able to attend today, but he sends his best wishes. I know that exchange in this format can be quite stilted. So I wanted to say to say from the top that please be bold in your discussion between panellists and if you want to talk please just unmute yourself and make yourself known to me and I'll try to make sure that I'm following everybody and everybody and building all of the questions. We have five contributors to get us started by giving five minute responses to the series as a whole and then we'll open out to discussion among panellists and our audience also. And in advance of that we're going to hear from Shria Chatterjee. What I'm going to do is just take you through the housekeeping now for the events that we are all in order. So you'll automatically be muted when you join in to the webinar and can only communicate verbally if the host unmeets you. I think Ella and I say wrong that doesn't go for panellists but that goes for audience members. So panellists can very much unmute themselves. And there'll be contributions from a number of speakers, and then there'll be plenty of time for discussion and questions of all kinds. And so please audience members use the Q&A box to ask your questions and also you can raise your hand and make a comment verbally or I will pose a question and use the chat box if you want to have, you know, make any comments so thanks or chat or also if you have any technical problems. So this session will be recorded, but no photos should be taken and of course any offensive behaviour won't be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. So I'd like to go on to introduce Shria Chatterjee, who has been a contributor to the conference as a session chair. And she's also led in the production of a conversation piece titled the Arts, Environmental Justice and Ecological Crisis published this week online in British Art Studies. And it's a far-ranging revelatory piece produced to coincide and resonate with the British Art and Natural Forces Conference series. So I would really encourage you to look at that. It's really excellent. And Shria is a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck History Laboratory programme in Berlin. And I just wanted to say a little bit about why we've asked Shria to do this and it's really with a view to recalling the conditions of production for this series and to bring another dimension to final discussions as well. I've asked her to take 10 minutes to share some of her recent research on the visualisation of COVID and a talk titled on visualising invisible forces. So thank you Shria over to you. Thanks so much Anna. I'm going to share my screen and hope that it all works fine. Do you see everything? Okay, yeah, great. So it's been really wonderful to be involved with the British Art and Natural Forces, State of the Field Research programme, and the programme has felt tone setting in more ways than one, especially considering the unique circumstances we find ourselves in right now, meeting virtually, prepping for a unique and socially distanced holiday season and refining ourselves increasingly on edge as we watch political decisions around the ecological crisis evolve. So I wanted to speak a little bit today about the role of visualisation in general and visualisation of the virus and what the pandemic has brought to bear on how we see. So the coronavirus has really touched upon some of our history's very fundamental questions, who visualises what and how, questions of scale of representation and multi-species entanglements. It has also forced us to take stock of the fact that processes of visualisation are implicated in forms of care as much as they are in political violence, xenophobia and institutional racism. To think of the ways in which we visualise the coronavirus today is also to delve into longer histories of seeing, of colonialism and the spread of infection, themes that have been intrinsic to the British Art and Natural Forces conference. The British natural philosopher Robert Hook and later the Dutch scientist Antony van Leunhoek's experiments with magnifying glasses and microscopes have allowed us since the 17th century to know that most of life is invisible. Bacteria account for around 70 billion tonnes of carbon, counting as the second largest form of life on Earth, second only to plants as a whole. Humans come in really towards the end of the spectrum at 0.06 billion tonnes of carbon. To dominate the physical space in which you play so little apart has frustrated the Western imagination for centuries. The enlightenment thirst for seeing and knowing things gave rise to the illustration of microorganisms and particles unseen to the human eye. However, it was the application of early modern scientific methods in Europe that allowed European powers to infiltrate a diverse range of distant regions and served as a precursor to settler colonialism, slavery and various modes of domination of natural phenomena, which in their eyes included climates, land, flora, fauna and native peoples. This was the beginning of a connected globalized world in which the full of people and goods were mandated by first a mercantilist and colonial economy and then gradually an expanding capital driven international market. The scaling up of invisible organisms coincided therefore with the scaling up of the world from local and subsufficient communities to a set of global interdependencies. The global reach and high efficiency of the coronavirus was indebted to the scientific revolution. So what I'm trying to say here is that the same impulse that allowed us to see the unseeable, which equipped us with tools with which we visualize the virus today also laid the foundation for its existence and its proliferation. Giving the virus shape and form has been the first step to understanding it and relating it to a human scale. In early stages of the pandemic, scientists and scientific illustrators worked overtime to create images of this sort of snarl of nucleic acids inside a protein shell that is coated by a fatty sheath. So these for instance visualizations done by the structural biologist David Godsell, who's been working at the intersection of molecular biology and illustration long before this current pandemic. So what at first sight might make one think of a William Morris inspired wallpaper is in fact a depiction of a coronavirus just entering the lungs surrounded by mucus secreted by respiratory cells secreted antibodies and several immune systems proteins. So despite the highly aestheticized quality of Godsell's diagram. It retains all molecular information and presenting the virus is an active now visible agent that is making its way through a part of your body. It allows viewers to relate to the virus as an external body that enters and orders molecular makeup of your organs. That's mutating, not just by itself, but with you. Our virus is natural forces. Are they even natural. Biologically viruses are not considered living beings. However, they do contain genetic information coded in DNA or RNA, a characteristic shared by every other living being. This puts them in a sort of gray area. The way viruses reproduce are in collaboration with us, or rather with human or animal cells. Virologists insist that we think about the virus not as a static particle, but as a distributed process that interact with host cells. We are therefore complicit in its multi species reproduction and proliferation. The role of human action or rather specific practices in the pandemic has been made abundantly clear in the way the farming of minks and other spaces that factory farm animals have become mutation hotspots. A link, as we see from these objects of the V&A, V&A's textile collection, rather, that is not connected to histories of art and fashion, not unconnected to histories of art and fashion. So this is another visualization. Do you see a plane? Yeah. This is another visualization that's been done by scientists led by Patrick Cramer of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, which shows how the virus multiplies its genetic material, which consists of a single long RNA strand. It helps us to see the virus itself as a process. It is true, as Isabelle Stengers points out, that viruses only become visible and legible when we grasp them with specialized technological apparatuses. However, it is the ability of the human imagination to visualize the invisible, to blow up microscopic information and speculate on longer term futures of living differently. That really leads us to larger questions of how we represent and live responsibly in a time of ecological collapse. Stop this and move to the next slide. So, in West Bengal in India, a community of scroll painters who practice the folk art of Bodhachitra, literally cloth painting, and who have conventionally traveled from village to village, and more recently to urban areas performing their stories as they unroll the narrative scrolls, have most recently been painting and performing stories about the virus. This is Shona Chitrakar, who has seven frames scroll features in its first large frame, a semi-anthropomorphised figure of the coronavirus. You can see its large hungry mouth, arms, claws, and two horns at the top of its head, which the whole process gives the microscopic virus monstrous form. Around it, and far reduced in scale, humans flail around, you can see them over there, coughing and crying. Although in their early form, Bodhachitra paintings and performances retold mythological stories and often encapsulated some moral values. Shona Chitrakar and her compatriots have in recent decades made scrolls, sometimes working with NGOs, the narrative symptoms, dangers and measures to control infectious diseases such as TB and HIV AIDS. The Mithila region on the border between India and Nepal is well known for the artistic tradition of Mithila painting. Since independence from the British in 1947, the arts of Mithila have received Indian government support from the 1960s. The traditional modes of Mithila art have moved from mud walls to paper and canvas and also serves the tourist economy at the moment. While various Mithila art is reflected on the situation in different ways, this is a painting by Dalit artist Naresh Kumar Paswan, who is getting home, shows a snippet from the great COVID migration in India in which labourers and cities lost their jobs and were forced to return home to their villages on mass, on foot. Changing the structure of the city overnight and bringing the virus to areas that may have until then been affected. Through the small indigenous community at the base of Uluru in the southern part of Central Australia, unrhygnw artists at the Walcajara Art Centre have been working on dot paintings that variously depict the coronavirus and the messaging around the pandemic. Here you see Polyanna Mummu portraying a large group of the unrhygnw community with health staff. The ample visual parallel between indigenous dot paintings as we see here and micrographs of natural structures are not hard to see and have been explored in an exhibition among others entitled Stories and Structures presented by Microscopy Australia, which is what you see here. While Microscopy images expose the structural detail of the natural world, allowing researchers to access scales beyond the human eye, indigenous Australian paintings store stories and records of the dreaming, portraying how the earth came into being, how the land and its creatures were created and learned to coexist. In other words, they hold informational structures that make space for geological and cosmic time and create ways of knowing seeing the world at multiple scales. This is a painting by Elizabeth Wilson, whose work in shades of red and brown as you see here brings us to see inside the Uluru Katachuta National Park, where a line of artists shown as black horseshoe shapes are separated from a line of tourists, white horseshoe shapes, by a line of square canvases, lurking behind the artists and be noticed to them floating virus shapes envelop the scene. The decision by Parks Australia to close the park relatively early on in the coronavirus crisis wasn't welcomed by the artists. Elizabeth Wilson's painting speaks to a long history of devastation caused by novel diseases through invading Europeans. The arrival of these epidemics was doubly invisible in that the first epidemics often arrived in indigenous societies across Australia and the Americas, even before the inhabitants knew about the arrival of the Europeans. So infections traveled easily and quickly through networks of connection along indigenous trade routes from body to body unseen. Higher instances of underlying medical conditions and suppressed immune systems in these communities, compounded by the fact that in remote areas it is harder to access health care, mean that indigenous communities are also at higher risk of COVID-19. So here we see something that you might have come across already is a multi panel street mural and boarded up and deserve it South London in the summer. It's a mural by Dino, Dino X, and depicts three portraits of black doctors and nurses at work in their scrubs, while at the far end the panel shows a black health worker in scrubs now immobilized by the virus in a hospital bed on an intravenous trip. The points I wanted to be making through the quick run through of some of these images and ideas are really about the intersectional nature of the ecological crisis, and very much our daily lives during the pandemic. British art histories have long reaching colonial and global roots, and to do it justice, it is useful to think critically about where we are now and how we got there, something this conference as a whole did really well, I think. Thank you for going back to the themes of the conference program with the rest of the panelists and with all of you in the audience. Thank you. Thank you so much for such a fascinating depiction of the colonial force of disease, and also with the force of those representations and those visualizations of COVID among other diseases also and histories of them. And what I think would be really great to do, rather than pick up on your incredible observations around scale, which I know we want to discuss at length. I think it might be quite good to move on and to hear from our respondents to the conference, and then we can go back and have a broader conversation about the questions of scale as well. And in that I'd like to introduce our first respondent to the conference or, and that is one of our keynote speakers and that's Andrew Petruccio, and Andrew holds the chair of Scottish visual culture at the University of Edinburgh. And what I'd like to do is ask Andrew to give his five minutes, and then we'll, we'll hear you and then we'll move on to our next respondent, and we'll, we will, at the end of the five contributions will have our long and expensive discussion. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks, Hannah. Thanks, everyone. Hello, everyone. I'm just a, I'm squeezed between teaching early this morning and teaching at two o'clock. So I've put together a really quick thought means one thought. So, so pay attention. It won't last long. Actually that Syria your, your, your phrase but intersection, the intersectional nature of our topic. I'm kind of got a temporal response to that by coincidence. So I want to flag up a phrase that I read about a week ago I suppose so in the middle of the, of the, of the, of the general conference sorry my screens trying to shut down. Let me just stop it doing that. Okay, there we go. Yeah, so this, this phrase that I came across as being kind of semi obsessing me is goes like this. Treating the past and the future as a special case of the present. So treating the past and the future as a special case of the present. I'll come back to who said that in a minute. Obviously, echoing again what Stria said the British Art and Natural Forces. I mean it has been a really fantastic opportunity to reflect, I guess on my own interests in 20th century and 21st century art. Also to look at a lot of disciplinary approaches and the range of what is going on within art history, primarily but not exclusively focused on British art. And also seeing I haven't seen every panel and every talk, but the number I have seen some of them provide real support for my own interests in encouraging a kind of eco critical art history. And some of them have challenged me and come across the topic in a different kind of way. I would be keen on emerging generations of art historians, the newer voices, rather than the kind of established ones. So my thought focuses on, I suppose, time and history, and that's, that's come up a lot in what I've heard as a really productive theme, which is why I use that quote. The papers I'll be, you know, kind of honest about this, come at a more traditional side of the spectrum than I would be naturally kind of close to. And they use the theme of natural forces as a kind of light touch eco critical aspect that offers a kind of a slight expansion on traditional art history writing. That plays into, I guess, what I kind of caricature in the ecological eye is a kind of a monastic method of private self development. And that's always a bit of a challenge for me when I see it enacted in art history. But even in that, even in that rather more traditional papers and focuses, I mean I've actually always found fascinating insights on artistic practices from previous centuries, other parts of the globe that I didn't know about. The trigger and attentiveness that I think in itself is a kind of eco art critical principle that we kind of should nourish. But then in a different register. I've learned about a lot of art practices, but I just simply were just not on my radar at all, which is always, I think an aspect we will recognise of large conferences with a wide remit. The quantum futurism direction that TJ talked about in his keynote and in the Q&A gave me a real sense of obligation and kind of curiosity to go off and explore a dimension which is underrepresented in my own work. And then earlier this week, there was a lovely exchange about the past and the present in Siobhan Angus's great talk I thought about Anna Atkins, 19th century cyanotypes, where she was asked about the relationship between that 19th century practice and Simon Starling's work on platinum and extraction of platinum in his work one ton two and that Mark Cheatham has written about. So I put that together. The reason I was thinking about this time in history is I'm writing something for the next few months on ecoapocalypse and environmental disaster. And so that phrase treating the past and the future as a special case of the present comes from Frank Comode's book, a sense of an ending. So I've been looking at endings and collapse and Comode's phrase treating the past and the future as a special case of the present spoke to me something about the now of our history, and not about art history in only being interested in contemporary art practices, slightly more my own comfort zone, but what eco critical art history produces as an opportunity to be kind of responsive to current conditions that is not only honoring the historical periods, which every individual is focused on in various ways. But that sense of responsibility being a question of now, and not the past, and not yet the future. So that special case that Comode wrote about, I think is inherently linked to a kinds of presentness as a general condition where everything comes together. So I don't want to be lost in the past. And neither do I want to be overly thoughtful into the future, but there's a kind of a presentness that that I think has come out in all in all the talks that I've responded to. I'm sure I've done my five minutes and more. Thanks Andrew. That was, that was really lovely. And, and we'll move on now and I will introduce a respondent who was not contributed to the to the conference but who I approached to engage with the conference as a kind of outside viewer and to give some comments and feedback on it. And this is a Temi Odemusu. And she's a senior lecturer in art history at Malmo University, Sweden, and her research and curating are concerned with colonial archives slavery and visuality ethics of care and representation post memorial art and performance and more broadly exploring how art mediates social transformation and healing. So over to you Temi. Thank you so much Anna and for, and to Mark and to everybody at Paul Mellon for inviting me to be a sort of, I guess our armchair visitor to the conference and to explore art history. I don't spend much time with art history and so it's been a really nice couple of months. I have notes so I can be brief. What is in the atmosphere of British art history. Is an earthquake already here in this our discipline, or is it coming. How do we write into and out of catastrophe. The intensity of this year's events and their capacity to undo our basic daily practices and activities is something that I think is important to pause on. Social and political life we now often hear the phrase use that there is no going back to normal. There is something different now. Although this crisis has and continues to be asymmetrically experienced and endured reverberating as it has done with and as colonial aftershocks. The crisis is shared contingency uncertainty and increments or ability are in the atmosphere as relational matters. We are influencing all of our moving acting and doing in the world. And nobody is sure of what comes next. Atmospheres shanties to Joe and Sarah pink right in their book are the variability contingency and ephemerality of shared moods and their Genesis and location at least partially in encounters. Atmospheres they write erupt dissipate and transform through and as a result of their sharedness. So what comes next. Although there appears to be a decolonial turn not just in our history but generally in the humanities actually in the arts design architecture everybody is decolonising. I to share the caution expressed in in many different ways by conference speakers. The colonisation is not a metaphor writes Eve Tuck and Kay Wayne young. The colonisation is not a metaphor it is not an approximate nation of other experiences of oppression. The colonisation is not a swappable term for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The colonisation doesn't have a synonym at its heart is return of that which has been stolen return abolition recovery and repair. Also recombining the multiple contemporary art practices shared throughout this conference certainly attest to this. For example, fees a gene cutlands work reclamation animal is so beautifully by TJ demos. But in the wider world, perhaps this has been most poignantly demonstrated by the recent achievement in New Zealand to grant to our to poor or the Wanganui River legal personhood in 2017. Writes powers abilities agency as the ancestor that the river is considered to be by Maori custodians. The right to defend environmental sanctity a right also similarly acquired by the Ganges in India. In the context of our history, thinking about return and abolition tends to lead us troublingly uncomfortably towards questions of looted artifacts and human remains, which evidence colonial plunder, but also the accompanying racist logics that became embedded in collections management and exhibition in knowledge production, in what has been noticed and ignored in the showing and telling that characterizes our work. Certainly the decolonial agencies panel tentatively attested to these problems, not only through what they said, but as a virtual viewer in the way archives were remixed and re-signified through proximity, literally on the screen. Add it to this in my own attempt to find out more about the artistic interventions discussed by Birgit Arans at the National Natural History Museum. The strange and entangled algorithmic traces left seem to strengthen the discussions engagements with questions of trace and erasure was actually very difficult to find out more beyond sort of basic blog posts. The museum's library and archives online database has something called a hierarchy browser. This seemed to be a compelling provocation for what a quote unquote decolonial approach might need to do. As Anna Kesson critically noted in her keynote, sometimes we easily lose sight of the whole for the part. I've noted that in such discussions about these questions, they generally tend to dampen those shared atmospheric moods. They either turn up the heat, or they still and thicken the air, but these are reckonings we will have to have nonetheless. Overall, I think one of the most striking and hopeful dimensions of this conference has been the re-energisation of methods and approaches. Perhaps because I'm not teaching or hosted by an art history department, I understood Andrew's talk actually as a rallying call to become undisciplined. Or rather what Ariela Azulai calls unlearning with companions who perhaps we could call critical friends, artists, geographers, activists, geneticists, hackers, and undisciplining to weather the storms to come. Further still, Julius Smith's evocation to reconsider the quote grammar of our work was enticing because it concerns going over old ground, threshing to use the language of the black land project, going over the depiction, surveying, picturing, looking, seeing, feeling, sensing, sensing, with which we are so deeply invested. Grammar that is also as we've just discussed about tense past, present, future, and so on. So this conference has helped me to expand, but also to think deeply about how this arena we could call British art might work to answer different kinds of questions. And importantly to be responsive and reflexive through rapidly changing conditions and emergent needs. Thank you. Thank you, Tammy. Thank you so much for such insightful summaries of the range of material in the conference. Thank you. And I would now like to move on to our next five minute contribution. And this is one of our other armchair conference attendee. And that is Lucy Whelan. And Lucy is a research fellow at Downing College, Cambridge, a research fellow in art history. And in the new year she'll be running a session on art history theory and practice for an ecological emergency at the Association of Art Historians annual conference. So welcome Lucy and over to you. Thank you for meeting myself. Yeah, thanks for mentioning our conference there and the conference session there and and I'm running it with Andrew as well so just to, so I don't take all the credit for that really. Yeah, I hope now that that conference is online, some of the people attending this will be able to join us for that too. So thanks for having me here like Tammy I've written a few things down so I don't go over. I began by reflecting on the fact that this is a state of the field program. And it's as part of the 50th anniversary of the full melon center. And what else happened 50 years ago. Well, the same summer that the pool melon center was founded the summer of 1970. So to was the first Earth Day, which was an event that arguably launched the modern environmental movement. So I'm thinking about this sort of near coincidence of birthdays, and wondering what we could take from this. And one thing is that perhaps it's taken our history quite a while to get here. I mean, there's been the work of thinkers like Mark Cheatham, DJ Deimos others in this conference and beyond it, who have brought our history and ecological thinking together but up until quite recently, these have seemed like relatively isolated endeavors. This British Art and Natural Forces programme has, I think, been possibly the richest and broadest exploration of ecological thought the discipline has seen so far, especially in conjunction with the publication that came out yesterday that the British Art, I can't remember the name of the publication. British Art studies, the conversation piece, which is really worth reading. I'm going to put into papers on the visuality of the geological world of natural materials of climates and weathers of colonial natural histories and industrial human histories, and of the possible futures, both of art and art history. But if our history is trailed somewhat behind other humanities disciplines when it's come to when it comes to attending to the more than human, I think there are at least some advantages to be had to this lateness. We learn from other areas like literary studies, and they're the tradition of eco criticisms been going since the 1990s. And one example of this, I think, is that pertains to this conference programme is the meta issue of realism. So, in literature, there's a long sounding debate on this issue, which many will be familiar with. We can productively ask whether related discussions might be needed in the domain of the visual. So the discussion for anyone not familiar comes down to the widely held idea that critical approaches are inherently realist. They're realist because they take as a premise the idea that something like the natural world must precede the written text, or the artwork. I would suggest, and would love to hear what people think that many of the papers in this programme have paid attention to the environment in this sense, or in a similar sense by bringing to the foreground things like birds observed during an ocean crossing or life in the Arctic, or volcanoes or fossils in sandstone. I should add this doesn't entail any particular naivety about concepts like nature, which haven't been treated as realist to the contrary. We've seen in many of the papers how attending to environments and people's actually reveal how concepts like nature and their reference were constructed by colonial powers. So, so I think that leads me to ask whether this kind of tendency to realism in ecological approaches is a positive. After all, it's not visuality that's being polluted and degraded. We might also see such a shift is inevitable towards realism as inevitable in a century in which the world is, and most often the global south is destined to learn from crisis to crisis in ways tied up with the slower incidence of exported pollution, racist extraction and climate change. Perhaps it will no longer feel appropriate during the coming storm, not to talk about the real. Yet we might also be wary about seeing art as primarily a response to the fixed existing world. Scholars in literature have warned there is a danger in drawing these close connections between art and physical phenomena that ecological approaches can become anti theoretical, bringing us to art semiotic complexity and multirailants. I think either way, if and and perhaps we can have it both ways if attending to encounters with natural forces and art does shift our understanding of the relationship between art and the more than and more than human reality. That's a change to which we need to be critically alert. I have a second but much briefer reflection on the program which is to say that the rich diversity of papers has really pointed a way forward for our history. As we know that the ecological crisis that we're already well we mostly people in the global south are already experiencing will only grow worse over decades to come and we can't afford for ecological art history to become a mere trend. Andrew Patricia's arguments to a very effective to this end. He he's talked about the fact that what art history and written about the fact that our history needs not to narrow down, but down and hunker down onto green or eco themes but conversely to expand its territory outwards so that every aspect of to show that every aspect of our history relates to a world of interconnected human and more than human forces and the injustices and oppressions they produced. In that sense, I think the diversity of papers in this program which have analyzed images of everything from industrial revolution to domesticity erotic beholding have really been a testimony to what such an expansion could look like. To conclude in a sentence retaining our critical tools, as well as remaining accountable to the real world and retaining the full breadth of the discipline are all huge, huge challenges but I think it seems in this program that their challenges were already rising to. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much Lucy that sport so much more for us to delve into. Thank you so much. So it's such a rich response. I'd like to move on. We have two more respondents. And then we can. And I know that everyone has lots of questions that they want to pose serum. So we'll hear now from Julia Smith. Thank you Julia. Julia, of course, we've introduced previously but I will. She's a Luther Hume early career fellow and and her project is titled landscape identity and belonging in post imperial Britain at the Ruskin School of Arts University of Oxford. Thank you Hannah. I just would like to second my fellow respondents in thanking the home and center for this whole program but also the opportunity to come back and respond which is not always a feature of conferences and I think it's a great way of having our thoughts, a sediment and keep developing together. So I also have a little script. The words natural forces may be seen as implying a field of action that exceeds the registers of the geopolitical and the socio economic. But this research series successfully highlighted the role that art in our history have played in continues to play and framing human perceptions of the natural world. And this research and still, at least for me is showed how the underlying focus of much current research in this vein concerns the role of the British Empire in providing the optics for modern conceptions of environment and environmentalism, as well as paving the way for contemporary practices of neocolonial extraction and their attendant forms of corporate greenwashing. It is in this sense, perhaps only in this sense that the national marker of Britishness provides a rich historical lens for which to approach questions of an ecological nature that in reality know no territorial bounds. What is to be saluted here is our history general recognition that decades after the dismantlement of empire we continue to live in the dredges of colonial knowledge structures. This comes with an understanding that the possibility of interspecies planetary survival is inextricable from the bottom up rearticulation of utilitarian and racialized conceptions of nature born out of colonial capitalism and its representation of regimes. This for me begs a question of what it means to continue to pursue and promote scholarship that is firmly cited within, rather than beyond the colonial archive. As this program comes so close then I'd like to ask to myself as much as to others, what does it mean to be seduced by objects contained within such collections? What are the political implications of devoting our intellectual lives to them? What does it say if we write about them proficiently, beautifully with mastery? And what does the fact that the we remains largely dominated by white scholars from the North Atlantic Hemisphere tell us about the state of the field? What level of critical self reflection makes it appropriate to participate in securing the epistemic afterlife of colonial visual culture? A compatible set of questions was usefully raised for me by Anna Kesson when she asked what do colonial objects bring into view and what does it mean to look and think through them? In what I read as an effort to engage with and at the same time offset these objects, her keynote moved between the 19th century and contemporary art practices that make disruptive interventions in the field of colonial visuality. Analog spatial temporal disjuncture drew me to Orby Williams and Wilson Harris' metacritical retelling of Walter Rayleigh's account of his expedition in search for El Dorado. It is both pursuing these critical parallaxes or maybe riffing off what Andrew Patricia just said, intersectional temporalities that one might avoid falling into the trap of reproducing what T.J. Demo, Spacey Tuck and Kaywin Young discussed in his key keynote in terms of settler futurity. Tuck and Young's argument that decolonisation is not a metaphor, which I myself nodded to my presentation of which seems to have resonated hugely across the whole programme, poses a critical challenge to our histories all to establish tendency to separate theory and practice. The complicit in fuelling the schism is a strand of eco-critical art history that today draws on the language of new materialist philosophies replicating their cardinal elision of indigenous epistemologies, whilst claiming non-human or anthropocentric and thus arguably decolonial agency, persuades of colonial items and collections. So, in closing, I would like to caution anyone in a discipline against granting colonial institutions and their nature culture formations this new lease of life. Thank you. Thank you, Julia. Thank you very much. And our final respondents, and I'd like to welcome Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, who we already met as a speaker in the conference, and to remind you she's an independent scholar whose research focuses on intersections of art, science and sociability in visual and material culture. In keeping with everyone else, I'm going to read this. It's the only way to do five minutes, otherwise you just roll. I would like to take this opportunity once again to thank the Paul Mellon Centre and the organisers and facilitators of this conference, particularly Anna Reid, Mark Hallott, Martin Posil and Ella Fleming. Thank you for bringing together this ambitious programme and for making it run so miraculously smoothly. Of course, we have all missed the particular pleasures and discursive opportunities that come from being together in the same room. However, the virtual format has some compensations. It has made it possible for presenters and attendees to walk in from all over the world, and indeed to engage with and explore the history of British art, even if that is not necessarily the centre of their practice. I think this is an altogether appropriate development for an erstwhile national school that has a clared interest in becoming a global field and ambitions to de-centre and decolonise itself. While we as scholars have carried on the work of situating art and artists within a matrix of natural forces and material exigencies, including shipwrecks, earthquakes, the Festival of Britain, the conference as a digital entity has pointed towards the ways in which the field might be reconfigured to admit different concerns and to ask novel questions. In a sense, we have been tracing a narrative that is embedded in art history and in natural history from the early modern period to the present, from pre-disciplinarity to disciplinarity to inter and or post-disciplinarities. This narrative is not, however, a trajectory that points in a single direction. Every tracing inscribes new beginnings and imagines new endpoints. I would like to mention in particular two recastings which have figured prominently in British art and natural forces. First, which several people have touched on here, the relationship between Britain and its empire as a set of ecological as well as political and cultural issues. The specter and spectacle of empire has been eloquently described by Anna Cesson and Julia Smith to name but two. But I would like to highlight here the way in which this understanding shifts the objects of British art history, giving a fresh impetus for engagement with scientific illustration, export art, I'll use some quotations, and documentary images. I'm pretty sure this is the first conference at the PMC where Humboldt's diagram of Mount Chymorosso was shown as many times as Constable's cloud studies. Second, a number of presentations, including JT Demos' keynote and the hold of the panel on curating the sea, emphasised the value of inter and post disciplinary approaches to the complexity we face when we take on nature as our subject. At a time when we have been living more closely with the idea of the post human, and it's not here, but you might be able to see it from here. These methodologies point towards how we can go on living with and interpreting the trouble, at least until, like James Forbes and his crane in Holly Shaffer's paper, we can be reunited once again. And I think that's it, like to end on that human and inhuman reunion. Thank you so much, Tracy. That was really, really helpful as well. Where to start? I would like to just say before we do start to our audience, please do pose your questions through the Q&A box and feel free to raise your hand as well. I'll be monitoring that. So please be bold and forthright in coming forward with your questions. What I think would be great to start with perhaps to get us going is just to hone in on the kind of the theme, the question that was really at the heart of the conference so often and that we've already pointed to in these responses. And it's really these descriptions that were a current of violent forces of British colonialism. And the really one of the really forceful examples of this was, was an Arab and Dinkesson's descriptions of the picturesque and of images documenting Scottish surgeon. John Thompson's experiments with dissections on enslaved plantation workers. It was a really kind of really sharp moment in the in the conference. And we've also heard a lot about Tuck and Yang and this refrain of decolonisation is not a metaphor. But I also want to try to come back to that thought as well and say, does metaphor come off badly in that formulation. And I'd like to sort of challenges to think about the limits and possibilities of forces of decolonisation within our historical and curatorial contexts. Julia, would you like to start. Sure. I found the conference actually quite useful in terms of thinking through this sentence decolonisation is not a metaphor, which has been very present in my mind in my teaching with Dr. Iguwe, at the University of Oxford, and in our relationship to what a university of Oxford is. And I find the distinction that was was made by a thing kind of cast in following Tim Barringer's intervention for our history, but then again today. There is a kind of decolonisation must mean the re turning of territories and objects recombining and repairing an abolition so it is perhaps not the best in relation to our history as a discipline that has not had anything stolen at the outset but rather has you know framed. Some of that stealing and it's certainly embedded in colonial hierarchies of taste. But I so the conversation I still feel uneasy about the use of it within our history. But I think that metaphor can do a lot and there is obviously something to be said about the ubiquity of this term is obviously feeling a void or responding to a need, which is there for a conversation that is, you know, happening within the cultural institutional academic educational realm. But a need for it is perhaps not always the best place for a print term. But I think self reflexivity, criticality, the use of, you know, those techniques for thinking about the time and the history of our history and putting our history to decolonial ends. I think I'm interested in and I think they did the conference has shown they can be quite effective. But I don't want to read it off completely I would just always want to use it with a lot of preambles. And maybe just, we could try to use it less at this point, and you know qualify our thoughts in slightly more specific ways. I would like to respond to Julia and I can see is joined us. Would you like to respond to Julia. She is. Yeah. Hello. Sorry. My wife. That's a drop. Sorry. I couldn't be here for all of that. It's nice to see you. If you take me. I agree. I agree. I think I agree with what Julia is saying. I was thinking about the way decolonisation might work in our history in terms of gay. And what the gay create in terms of structures or formation. I think I've also been influenced by political theorists and writers like Adam Gechel who wrote this great article about decolonising and in the former British Empire in Africa. She has this great phrase about dismantling. And I think that her, she's thinking about statues, but as a form of breaking down to rebuild, to build up. And I think that's something that Tammy was alluding to. And it's what feminist scholars have been saying for decades is that we can't, we can't try and change what we have. We have to actually start again in this sense, right? Because of the kind of liberal human subject in the current conditions. So I think we're thinking about those kinds of metaphors when I'm thinking as a formative method of principle, I guess. So in that sense, I think it can be helpful. But I agree that there are different, there's different scales here to how this question is decolonising function. Thank you for getting here, that your son had a concert this evening, so thank you so much for getting to us. It's great to see you. Would anybody like to respond to those comments? Hi. This is the problem with Zoom. I'm actually going to refer to something Tammy was saying. So maybe Tammy can then respond to if it resonates. But I mean, I was really thinking about what Tammy was saying about undisciplining. And I think Lucy and Andrew were speaking a bit about expanding the discipline as well. And then in thinking about how much discipline functions as a sort of metaphor and how much it exists in the real in the same way that colonising forces can. And just thinking about this point that Julia's made about, you know, the domination of white scholars in the global north within our history. I'm just thinking about how much that points to how some of these questions maybe needed to be investigated in relation to art historiography. And, you know, the very real colonial circumstances under which and imperial circumstances under which the the discipline was forged and Anna, you were cutting out a bit. So I might have made this up about what you said, but it makes me think about, you know, feminist art history and this insistence by Linda Nocklin and Griselda Pollock and others. That you cannot impose a history of women's art on the existing canon, the canon needs to be broken down. So I guess I'm trying to bring a lot of things here. A lot of things together, but just thinking about how we look at the discipline from within in order to expand it outwards without sort of glossing over those histories and historiographies. Yeah, I was just thinking, and now that's in another direction kind of, but I was just thinking about. Okay, so Syria. When you were formulating your discussion about how indigenous communities in Australia sort of received the effects of a virus before the encounter with people had even come right at the travel that sort of the virus moved faster also than the bodies on horses or other modes of transport. So it got me thinking about, I sort of connected that infection before encounter with what Lucy was saying about retaining our critical tools. So I'm wondering if, because whenever whenever I'm in conversations about decolonising in so many other settings and of course I'm in Scandinavia so there are other issues here as well. There is this sense of helplessness helplessness that comes from thinking. So what does this mean, like we just, you know, stop reading, I don't know, Derrida or something like how do we, how do we move forward there's this sense of immobility that comes from being faced with the sort of the facts of history and that's precisely why this history has not been taught on the national curriculum because to face that violence is to is to be immobilised and to face facing horror is just traumatising. Okay, so I'm wondering if there's a way of of of considering that, of course colonialism is was continues to be a force of nature that reverberates. I'm wondering if there's a way in which we can sort of make space for an unfolding, whilst at the same time doing the work, doing the work of art history because it needs to be done you know it's like we either completely dismantle the discipline of art history completely and not just British art history but you know art history as a, you know, which then has an impact on how people are funded. The relationship between is universities and museums all sorts of things kind of like, you know, disintegrate in the wake of the destruction of a discipline right so so to not make people feel like this means like, you know, the zeros, zero, everything goes to zero which maybe a possibility but it's difficult for human minds to sort of deal with. Maybe we think about it in terms of openings spaces of possibility speculative innovative environments within which we can revive dismantle do all this work without necessarily at least at the beginning unsettling the whole until the whole realises that actually this is what is required. Right, so you know I'm thinking of us somehow and in between a transitionary situation. Because I can, I can just hear some of my more traditional colleagues just going, I'm sorry what the heck are you talking about and how is this going to work in the context of my work and why and you know, I get all of this all the time in teaching as well as in in research. Yeah, so that's my reflection. I can't hear you. Unmute. This is, this is just to say the, the kind of know the idea that that kind of faced with a sort of insurmountable, you know, possibly insurmountable either my morally or theoretical problem that art history. So it's, you know, might need to be brought to an end on the other, on the other side of this, without new requirements. It can't continue to exist without new agendas. You know, then nobody can, nobody can join the conversation and that, you know, is however people identify themselves or whatever their agenda is. In, you know, and, you know, looking back historiographically, of course, what is seen to be urgent changes, but without any urgency, you're dead in the water. Julia, come on here. Okay, thank you, Andrew. I just wanted to make a very sort of strip it back to the kind of building blocks and make a fairly basic comment, which is a major problem, especially in Britain is with historical erasure. So I think any discipline that thinks with history rigorously is can be incredibly useful. But I think I also don't want to get too lost into sort of conversations that are too internal to the discipline to sort of forget that that the possibilities what are what thinking about history through images and objects can offer in terms of addressing colonial histories and environmental crisis. So I just want to, I didn't mean to come across in any of my interventions as not having faith in what that can do. I'm just very wary of specifically the discourse of decolonisation because it's so it's been absorbed so eagerly by institutions and particularly in the contemporary art world that you just sort of start to question what it shouldn't be. You know, it should be quite difficult work. And which takes a long time and a lot of commitment and a lot of, you know, difficult conversations about what needs to be abolished what can stay what what needs to give who needs to give up what. It's very suspicious of the sort of maybe an institutional enthusiasm around it. And that doesn't mean I do use it in my work. But with all these sort of caviarists. Andrew, sorry. There's a lot, a lot here that I think is fascinating. So I was going to throw in the fact that, you know, those of us that do teach in university is always when we get negative comments from students always think that's a fantastic reflection on the criticality. We're encouraging in our student body, as opposed to giving us 100% for everything. And I was thinking about that notion of bringing together. Let me lower the tone. I'm going to bring in Schitt's Creek, the Netflix series. And I'm going to compare that with prefigurative politics and anarchism. So this is, this is my thought is that Schitt's Creek, which has many faults, but one of the great things it does it has a gay couple where living their lives in a village in American town where homophobia doesn't exist. Homophobia is just not in the narrative. And I didn't realize that until I saw the end of the series, sort of mini documentary about the making of it. And I hadn't realized that it was possible to write a fiction where homophobia in a in a small American town was just un-present. And it made me think about that notion in anarchist thinking about prefigurative politics, that you write, you write the art, in our case, you write the art history, you want to believe exists now. And it, and it, and I find that quite encouraging. And I think a lot of what the great contributions I've just heard now remind me that the Schitt's Creek model is not shit, actually, it's quite a, it's quite, it's quite an enlivening model of yes dismantling, maybe dismantling, but more focusing on the building, as if we had a relatively clearer space than we probably think we do. Anyway, I just thought of that out there. Thank you for prompting that. Thanks, Andrew. I think that takes us really beautifully back to these ideas of realism that I think Lucy spoke about and whether we are wedded to the strong realisms or what kinds of realisms, the kind of natural forces conference is really working with. And I think unless anyone has any further to add to that segment, it would be great to to move on to some further areas for discussion as well. And I wanted to talk a little bit towards the kind of granularity of the of the conference and British Art Studies as we've gleaned it through the conference and the series. The papers that we've heard from, including Shrears today, have had this real sense of dynamic play between scale of forces. So vast weather systems and the intimate domestic experience of them, microscopic processes and their global consequences, British histories and the deep time of geology, and those temporalities of scale, and the implication of the global and the local. And I would, it would be great to hear more reflections on this dynamic play. And, and Freya Wigsel, I know was wanting to comment and push questions around this issue of scale in particular as an architectural historian. Freya, would you like to comment first. Sure, everyone I've just found this a really, really thought provoking session. I am an art historian, and slightly away from home territory here but many of these issues are obviously in the architectural field. My only thought which Anna asked me to put together yesterday was really about scale, possibly because that's something I think about a lot. All the talks dealt with very, very different scales. Volcanoes, depictions of smallpox, and everything in between utensils, ship cabins, printed images, animal experimentation. I actually think quite a lot of what's already been said has given me some answers to this, particularly Shira, you already you started straight away with questions of scale. And power dimensions involved in those. But I wondered about what it might tell us about how we're trying to encounter art historic depictions now and forces of nature. I wanted to push this observation and make us throw it back on ourselves a little, if that's okay. Because you were chosen to deal with scale, you have to, but I wondered almost in some of the talks, a lot of them are slightly leaning towards small things rather than big things. And these are huge issues, you know, the forces of nature, racial inequality empire, but lots of people actually, not everyone definitely not everyone but lots of people went quite small. I wonder if you guys can reflect on that at all. I think some of you already said quite similarly and make helpful things for this. Shria, would you like to comment on, make some comments on scale to start with. Yeah, sure. I think one of the things that's been really vital to my thinking, not just about the virus work, but, but also in terms of other work that I focus on which all have to do with relationships between the local and the global is really the relationality between something very small and larger forces and so the fact this constant there's a constant dynamic relation between the small and the small often the local and very interconnected global forces is one of the driving factors of the intersectionality of the ecological crisis that we talk about. So I think, in a sense, at least in my work scale doesn't function as kind of one way to look at it but it's, it's just it's this multi scale engagement in a sense is Gabriel hecht talks about multi scalarity in a work which I find really useful because you're also thinking about, not just the scale of an object, but in some ways, the scales of history and politics in which they're produced as well so I think this is a constant sense of dynamic production that you're having to analyse and understand in in dealing with scale or in dealing with a single static object which is basically not never static in that sense. Yes, I think that those would be my. Thomas, would you like to contribute. Thank you. Yes, I think that's a really interesting question and it's got me thinking as well about about Ruskin and some of the material I presented but also going far beyond that and I think with Ruskin often it is all about the small, a rosebud or indeed a spot of forest floor, what he drew in one of the drawings I spoke about but you get the sense that that is also the ground and indeed the cosmic that the largest in the small. But what else I was thinking about is what happens to the body, the human body, I'm interested in when these clashes or distortions in scale are brought into view but you know happen. Something very strange happens. I'm not quite sure I mean, so I'm just thinking it through at the moment in terms of in terms of Ruskin, but I suppose that's a broader issue. Where is the human body in relation to these multiple scales which we have to keep in view all the time. And I don't have an answer to that. And Ben Pandora. I wanted to return to the question of the archive which I think also relates very much to the first question. And just in reflecting upon my own panel, although this extends to so many of the other topics, you could think about the archive of the single artist as I tried to do. The colonial archive of a museum's archive or even the archive of history. And I want to question what happens when we both aggregate those archives or attempt to disaggregate those archives and what different kinds of questions we can, we can ask of that and whether or not we need to be constrained by the materials of the archive. I have been really struck by the work of Sophie White, who has looked at the material culture of colonial Louisiana, and in attempting to account for absences and the material archive of the enslaved community. She actually has read legal reports from the court system and rebuilt a material culture and a story of an enslaved woman. And I think that's such a provocative idea of to find other ways of accounting for absences in the archive and rebuilding from absence into presence. So I just want to sort of pose that as a as a provocation and to think about again going from absence into presence or from small and to large and I think questioning what we can do with the archive but other voices we can uncover or invite other voices in and I think that Brigitte Aaron's addressed this so well in the museum archive of inviting artists to contribute and build that archive out even further and collaboration as a method. I think she is something that should be posed. Thank you. And Pandora, did you want to come in with me? I mean, I feel a lot could be said in response to Eleanor's comment that we're running out of time. I guess I was just thinking about how much the topic of scale relates to spectacle, which is something that came out a bit in our panel on curating the sea and in the special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies that it was launching. And Miranda Lowe, who's here, spoke on our panel and she works with these sort of narratives of deep time in a much more direct way or at least a very different way than many than many of us do, because she's a principal curator at the Natural History Museum. She's a curator of crustacea, which is probably the best job title ever. But I'm really interested in her work because though she curates some massive corals, she also works with the Blashka glass models of marine invertebrates a very tiny exquisite, massive aesthetic objects, but also ones with direct connections to anatomy. So I don't know if Miranda wants to talk about scale and her work at all. Yes, I can do. I mean, I was looking to everybody in it, actually great conversation. So Eleanor, just to pick up in what you were saying about archives. So you DM curator work a lot with archives, but a lot of my work in the last 10 to 12 years and has been picked up more recent times because of what we've all been going through, which has amplified and accelerated certain topics. I have been for a long time being interested in exploring archives exactly in the way that you mentioned there, the absence and then to create a presence for an individual and I have explored a lot of the museum archives in terms of minutes of various councils and because you touched on the kind of legal and I think that is missing that people don't explore. But for me, I mean I've invested a lot of my own spare time in it and what I really would like to happen across all sectors. For those that I'm not an archivist or anything like that, but to work with archivist to in terms of searching for that kind of material keywords and things like that museum databases and collection websites need serious looking out. But also to work more closely with social historians as well. So people like myself in terms of teasing out those hidden narratives and getting those to reemerge in a more valued way, whether in the arts sector science and while I work a lot across in terms of science and art anyway that is my passion and that Pandora said so I work with these with it or look after. Or look after and and have also over many years tried to extend the reach of learning of people becoming more aware of the marine invertebrates of glass represented by glass and how that's in the intersection of science and art as well, but I work a lot in my own scientific discipline. Looking at small things, and for me, I'm trying to always amplify so it's interesting about the small and the large scale here, because in doing the work with Pandora so the museum has hung a whale, and there was always that conversation I call them charismatic mega fauna. And so in my world when I work with small things, which I feel is real passionately of value, they don't always get put on exhibition in the way because they feel the big hook is this big thing that's all people are going to understand and recognize so. I was interested in the first presentation that we had today in looking at you know Robert hook and and the representation of small things through art and how small things do impact on on larger things human beings that the coronavirus. I work on crustacea so small things like like shrimp and krill that are in, you know, big, dense masses in the ocean but support, you know, there are their food for huge animals such as Wales so that's my kind of cross folder interactions and what I'm really passionate about, as well as recognition. We were talking earlier in terms of decolonization, which I have used that term to highlight the hidden work and the narratives of black people and people of color within the world of natural history but I'm aware, and I am trying to move away from using that word but I used it as a hook for people to take notice within my world. Thank you, Miranda. I don't know if anyone would like to respond directly to that, but we also. Oh, yes. Thanks, Anna. And it also puts me in mind, Brenda, when you're speaking also how in our history we often neglect the question of the haptic when we're looking at our objects and so I'm sorry I don't remember who brought this up but the distinction between the cloud, the console cloud studies which we see all the time and then in this conference also seeing the cloud diagrams next to that and both are now playing between that optic and haptic as opposed to focusing on the spectacle that we often think of in a canvas, a typical canvas like constables and so as you're distinguishing between the dimension and the whale, I also see the realm of the visual or the spectacle playing out in the scientific world in ways that we can focus more on the small or the way that material can really speak to us in the context of a museum setting but also in our own scholarship so I think that it's valuable to see the two sides of those coins playing out in those two fields but I think it's really important to bring closer together and kind of also contributing to that conversation about undoing disciplinary boundaries so thank you. Can I ask a question, Anna, to the to the panel as a whole. It's and it's really about. It's very interesting that beginning of the year we had a conversation or a lecture by given by David Salkin, and he talked about the, the, what was understood as the most radical area of our historical practice in the 80s in the 90s, which was around the field of landscape studies and the British landscape in particular. And he, and he referenced and particular set of studies by and Birmingham landscape man, all of which have landscape in the title and Birmingham's landscape and ideology john barrels a dark side of the landscape. Salkins own exhibition on Richard Wilson, the landscape of reaction. Michael Rosenthal's book console on the painter in his landscape. Marcia pointons work on gains were in the landscape of retirement. It was understood to be in recognize at the time as being the most challenging the most radical, most ambitious kind of British art history that's going on. But what's interesting to think about is that the end of that set this year, and all the conversations that we've been having over the last couple of months, just makes me wonder about whether there's any dialogue. I mean, whether that kind of body of scholarship is of any relevance anymore to all of you as practitioners and writers on the dance on on the natural on on natural forces on whether whether it's been forgotten and relegated. I mean, I don't whether justifiably unjustifiably. And whether whether I just be very interested in your thoughts on the relationship between the kind of work that is being done right now, and that body of scholarship and whether one supersedes the other or whether one one kind of form of practices, still engaging in dialogue with or dealing with some of the issues that we're preoccupying those scholars. It's about the historiographical self flexiveness of your work, I suppose, is the question I'm asking, and about whether that, or whether actually that feels the kind of the dim and distant past which is also not very well known or forgotten. I could speak to that perhaps. I think some of it, I think is still very, very relevant and relevant, not necessarily as theoretical models that we follow but perhaps for example john barrels on the dark side of landscape I think is a really good starting point for us to think about which is really a leftist rethinking of the connections between labor and land and the sort of pastoral as not being so idyllic after all. And so I think that is a start and I also use barrel as a starting point in my work also to think about not just kind of a local pastoral but what, but the connections that this local pastoral has to histories of colonization and slavery and so on. So, I think one of the things that barrels work does is is situate British art in in Britain, which a lot of the other studies do as well they're very situated. And I think one of the things that we're doing now is to is to build on that situatedness and break away from it, but I don't think it's a break in in a kind of destruction, but but more sort of building on rebuilding really in that sense. Tim Barangers essay in the landscape now issue of British art studies which was a couple of months ago. Last year I think is a really good kind of historiographical narrative that takes you through landscape studies and the sort of ecological questions we're asking now which some of these older landscape studies were not asking so so I have a little more to say on this but later. Go Alicia. Well, I think that, you know, they these that particularly kind of fertile group of landscape studies have had, you know, have, you know, as they are appearing in their own kind of historiography have had a very kind of fertile run. I think that there is and there are issues about it becoming a kind of shorthand, which I've seen many people in this conference kind of work to undo. When, you know, when, when can we go beyond saying something is picturesque, when can we, when can we rigorously see other forms of seeing. I think that that's something that, you know, I think that's something something that when one is taking an ecological perspective one is trying to do. But I don't think it would have been much of this would not have been possible without that work. Not only being done but also kind of really bedding into the field. William Barrell, especially are the way that they reinterpret a lot of these things as part of an economic transaction and situating them as part of a narrative of circulation I think is really key to a lot of the talks we've seen now and the process that the decades after their publication have brought has brought them out side of Britain but the, for me also they're in a British tradition that sorts of Francis Cling gender who publishes art and the Industrial Revolution in the 1940s he's also talking about the way that art can mirror the way that extraction and commodities are being brought out of the landscape so I see them as part of this continuum actually that is very rich today as well. So, just wanted to make a comment about the economic quality of their work as well. Do you want to come in as well, and then Julia. Oh, sure. I'm, I'm just going to say quickly, I mean, I'm a student of Tim's so couldn't have got away with that, you know, building on all of the things work and I, you know, I agree with everything that people have said in terms of their significance and what they have allowed us to do in terms of bringing in these different languages and theories. But I think just to go back to what we were talking about earlier about dismantling to rebuild. I think it's also really interesting that these are historians are working with the landscape in the 80s, just at the same time that a lot of black British artists are also working with landscape and coming up with very different narratives, but also like points of convergence and so I think that there's also a way that we can think about how we build on these early history. Through the work of artists who were very much engaged with art history actually, you know, in their practice. And perhaps, we've come to a point now where we can see those differences. And so now is the time to start making, making those links and having them. Thank you, Julia. Can you raise your hand. Yeah, I very much second what Anna just said. I whenever that literature has influenced me enormously and I still go back to it. But I'm really interested in what happens with the undoing of landscape as a genre and as a visual field with through specifically the Caribbean diaspora artist of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain and elsewhere, working around the same time. And so it seems to me that when we talk about the afterlife of landscape, I'm always more interested in that genealogy and that direction than moving into sort of land art or other trajectories that have been mapped out in the past because those artists were just systematically engaged with dismantling, taking apart conventions of landscape representation. And Wilson Harris, who I discussed in my presentation, he had this phrase in the 90s. He writes quite a lot about living landscapes and that by that he means an ecological animate field and he means that very much as a critique of imperialist British conceptions of landscape that he himself grew up with in Guyana. And that's kind of the working title of my project so I'm very feathered. I like the, I'd like to keep the word landscape because it offers a productive space for critical distinction. Thank you so much. Anyone has any final comments. It would be great to hear them now. We're going to put the clothes. Thomas, would you like to say something? Thank you. Yes, just building on that. It's interesting to reflect on the etymological connections between ecology and economy. They are absolutely intertwined and don't ask me to unpick that now, but the person who's really good at it is Raymond Williams in his amazing book he was. And it's really interesting to see there are kind of issues of scale involved in these linguistic in the evolution of the terms from household upwards to nation and beyond. And where again, where the individual rests in that I find an interesting question. If it is final comments, could I just add the term as well, imagination? I think it might have been mentioned before and it chimes I think with what Andrew was saying about Schitt's Creek. And about this whole issue of dismantling. It's not versus like building better, but which sounds like a horrible slogan, but maybe a kind of alternative way of thinking of that dilemma is to write in such a way that one is imagining a better future. And actually that's a kind of that has an integrity to it and importance, which can be constructive and generative. It's sort of ended up being a bit like a sort of speculative presence or something like that in reference to Andrew's comments and and also thinking back to the sort of office lift work as well that we saw, which was so powerful in the conference, the infinity minus infinity. Any further final comments? Directly connected to that. I mean, this is what Tina Camp describes as the future real conditional as the grammatical tense of a black radical feminist future is that which will have had to have happened. So this, you know, this is the kind of argument that she begins her work on on on sort of keying into the the frequencies of archive by reading differently by engaging with the politics and poetics of refusal, thinking about stillness and time and all of those things. So the language is there already. Thank you. Yeah, in the way of making final comments but also responding to Mark's great question. I was thinking about the sort of the logical extension of the scholarship around landscape from the 80s and the work of K Diane Chris Tim Beringer Douglas Fordham extending those questions to Empire and what we're able to ask about gender and about race because of because of this expansion. For myself, the, the work around landscape from the 80s is still very much a touchdown and I think Julia said this so beautifully and in her opening comments that in some ways we are still kind of framing our perceptions, European Western perceptions of the natural world through through the lens of the British Empire. And that kind of led me to think about, you know, in this extension in the kind of the scholarship that I'm seeing today that's so exciting is asking questions of different visual cultures of cross cultural dialogue and it made me think of also Shria's opening remarks and the indigenous arts of Australia and thinking about other visual cultures that have attempted to visualize the invisible or the unseeable in very different ways and what we can gain from dialogue in between cultures as well. So for approaching the natural world through the lens of British art, I think that naturally extends into cross cultural conversations as well when we consider natural forces that act across borders and different boundaries so I just wanted to pose that as a as another question cross cultural engagement. Thank you. Lucy. I can be really quick. I'm just putting together some of the things that have just been said and I think my response to mark would be marks interesting question would be partly that one reason why landscape is still important is that in the history of art at any rate. It's been a site for thinking about perception, more than many other topics or other subjects have been in the history of painting. So I appreciate that I'm speaking here from somebody who has maybe a limited perspective on this field compared to some of the other contributors. You know, kind of, I'm interested in the history of art in 20th century, but landscapes always been a site where questions of vision and how we see and what we see have played out in particular. And I think that kind of thematic interest is why landscape relate still relates now, even though we would now just see just see landscape as a kind of take of a kind of bi colonialism way of seeing an environment. But I think it's there are more interesting things to be had out of the history of landscape painting than simply the fact that it's ecologic, you know that it kind of is seeming ecologic because it's got something to do with environments. We can still mine it for thematic interesting things that relate to what we're doing and I briefly also just wanted to say that thanks to Thomas for mentioning imagination because I think a lot about that that if. Why do our history we were asking kind of why do our history in the face of some of these crisis and I really like the way that Temi put this earlier in relation to the violence of colonialism and seems to shut us want to shut us up sometimes the immensity of all of this that I feel as a kind of force of the immensity of the crisis that seems to make me just want to stop idle chatter sometimes. So I'm kind of thinking of Kate Rigby's article and and adorno talking about the. Talking about the possibility of making art in the late 20th century and anyway, so why, why do we do our history. I think actually if it was simply a matter of delivering scientific data on climate change to everybody then we wouldn't be in a crisis of climate change. We have actually what this what the ecological crisis at any rate is is a crisis of the imagination partly because yeah for the reason I just explained so so actually I think that's why all kinds of our history have a role to play at the moment. I really like what Timmy was saying also about the fact that we have to move quite so we can't. You know it's like dismantling and you can't just blow apart the airline industry sphethling it, even if you thought it would be a good idea for good emissions right this is just you can't do that and then hundreds of thousands of jobs depending on it and it's kind of silly parallel I know but. You know we've got a whole discipline here and we can't just put it in the bin but in imagination is actually what will see us out of this out of these many intersecting crises. Even if somebody's work in art history doesn't seem to relate to ecological themes. Imagination is what is needed, and that imagination can come in over something completely different completely non eco related it's the teaching and the keeping alive of imaginative speculative critical thinking that's what we need. So all forms of art historical work have value. Thank you. That was, that was a really great meditation. Thank you, and I think we need to draw to a close it's 20 past two we've kept you for 40 long already. Thank you, I'd like to just extend a thanks to everyone who's contributed and all of the different ways into our audience to it's been a really wonderful discussion today also thank you so much. Thanks, and I'm just going to finish because this is the last event of the entire series and so I wanted to say some final thanks and but a couple of minutes to do so. I have to say though, what before I do that. These final panel discussions as anyone is organized a conference or as any organizer program of events like this are the hardest things to pull off. I know that many people in Britain are less than the sum of their potential parts, but I thought today, I thought that was one of the most interesting and stimulating and brilliant final panel discussions that I've ever encountered and been at the pleasure of watching unfold in front of my eyes and ears. The contributions you everyone made the thoughts that you raised that lovely final defensive art history Lucy as well as a discipline not just as a in relation to the focus of this particular programme have made it a really fantastic event so I think everyone who's watched all our participants today will have felt they've seen something and watch something special. And that's thanks so much to all the people who participated in today's panel discussion. All last week is all our respondents been tremendous and it's been really great to have your thoughts. And this really goes in extending out to all the people who contributed to this program it has been running since October the sixth. That's a lot of time a lot of events. A dozen or so events across those months, which have involved a huge amount of organisation a huge amount of input from speakers and participants in their own right. So thanks first of all to all those who participated and, and also all those who came along and watched and then and then went back and watched and we've been in great figures on the people who've been watching the filmed recordings of the events have taken place so it's clearly creating a kind of momentum in a constituency in a discussion that has really justified. The amount of investments and time that we wanted to give it as a programme. But to finish off really I wanted to thank three people in particular I may be missing someone out here or some people more people out. And these are colleagues at the PMC and all of you will have been engaging with at least some of them. So, in many ways behind the scenes keeping everything running and all the logistics rolling and as someone mentioned how miraculously smoothly everything you've been rolled out. Well, that's really thanks to our events manager, Ella Fleming assisted and ably assisted by Danielle Convy, both of whom are close colleagues at the PMC. Huge thanks to Ella, who's really taken the lead role in in organising all the practical aspects of this course, and also hugely helped by by Danny. So thanks massively to Ella and Danny. But thanks most of all to Anna, who all of you will see on screen. Anna has put a huge amount of effort and thought and imagination. Talk about imagination Thomas and Lucy. Well the person who's brought so much imagination to her work as the head of research at the PMC this year has been Anna. This is she has met she's she's she's many of her achievements this year will long stand the test of time and be returned to and debated and discussed for years to come. But this, this, this series has certainly been one of them and, and I wanted to just express on the bar of all of us, a huge thanks to you for all the work, all the kindness, the care, the sensitivity you've shown in terms of bringing everyone together the openness to a whole range of different perspectives and methods and creating a kind of a mood or a tone around the whole programme that I think has made everyone feel welcome and and able to speak competently and never what you know, not having that discomfort about being listened to or judged in any what in my whatsoever it's been a very open and generous spirited event as a whole so. And those tell me, I thought, Lucy all those who invited into kind of comment and watch I thought your comments expressed that so really just just a tone of your own responses to the whole event was extended and expressed that very generous spirited but also incredibly ambitious spirit with which this whole event has been conducted so Anna huge thanks to you. And as I mentioned right at the beginning, they may what this I don't feel it is certainly not the end of this debate after all, and it may well be that this programme itself will have a number of afterlives of one kind or another to which all of you will be very welcome to participate and contribute so we look forward to to seeing how it all develops over the coming months and years but again thanks everyone. Thanks Ella, Danny. Thanks to Anna. Thanks very much indeed.