 Hello, and welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming to today's program with the photographer and conservationist, Subhangar Banerjee. I'm John Smalley, and I'm a librarian here at the library in the General Collections and Humanities Department on the third floor. While we're waiting for a few more people to arrive, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community. On behalf of the public library, we want to welcome you to the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramatish Ohlone, who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. As the indigenous stewards of this land and in accordance with their traditions, the Ramatish Ohlone have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. As guests, we who reside in their traditional territory recognize that we benefit from living and working on their homeland. We wish to pay our respects by acknowledging the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramatish community, and by affirming their sovereign rights as first peoples. I should mention that today's program is being filmed and recorded. If you have questions for the presenter, please hold your questions until the end of the presentation when there will be a short Q&A. Also, this program comes at the end of a month-long series of programs at our library devoted to nature, the environment, and climate. If you want to know more about our programs, there are flyers at the back of the auditorium and also newsletters. So you can pick those up on the way out. Or visit our calendar on our website. Our website is sfpl.org. So now I'll say a few words about today's presenter. The Indian-born American photographer, writer, and conservationist, Subhankar Banerjee, will be speaking about art, social transformation, and a library, a classroom in the world, a project in the 2022 Venice Biennale Art Exhibition. Spread across two venues, the historic Palazzo Bembo, along the Grand Canal, and the Giardini della Marina Arese along the waterfront of the Venice Lagoon. The installation addresses the two most consequential challenges of human history, the biodiversity and climate crises. Banerjee served as the director and co-curator with Jennifer Garcia-Peacock of an expansive team of artists and scholars who collectively span three generations, represent multiple ethnicities, and hail from several continents. Banerjee is professor of art and ecology, as well as founding director of both the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities and the Species Imperil Project at the University of New Mexico. His place-based and community-engaged interdisciplinary and intersectional efforts aim to advance multi-species justice to mitigate the intense, fine biodiversity and climate crises. Co-editor of the Rutledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, published last year, Banerjee was most recently co-host with US Senator Tom Udall of the University of New Mexico, the Biodiversity Webinar Series, the co-curator of Species Imperil along the Rio Grande, and convener of the last oil a multi-species justice symposium. His photographs have been exhibited in more than 50 museum exhibitions around the world. I should mention we have several books of his that you can check out from our library. We are most honored today to have Subhankar Banerjee as our guest. Please give him a warm welcome. Thank you, John, for that warm welcome and the introduction to the subject. Thank you all for coming this afternoon. I'm taking this off. It's a little hard to speak with the mask on, and it's, as all of you know, it's no easy task to organize an in-person event in the middle of the pandemic. So I really want to thank John, the library, and the friends of the library for hosting this event. And of course, it is being recorded, so we'll be able to share with more people in the coming days and months. That said, how often do you get a chance to speak about a library that we have created in a place like Venice? Inside another library, your hello library here in the city of San Francisco. So when I received the invitation from John, I could not say no. It's a unique opportunity, and I am very grateful. I'm, of course, speaking to you standing here. We are all here on the traditional territories of the indigenous peoples. Thank you, John, for the acknowledgement that you made during your remarks. I'll get to it. There is a lot to cover. It's a complex project, but please bear with me, because this is a very unusual talk I'm giving, probably the first of its kind, because usually it's easy to talk about your own work. You come, you tell stories, you show images, and so on and so forth. But today, I'm not doing that. Today, probably I'll be talking about my own work, probably less than 5% of the time. So I'm very honored. At the same time, a little nervous to talk about a large team with which we have had the honor to work with. So it is really their work that I've had the honor to present to you. And this is the first talk on the Venice project, and will be the only public talk that we will be giving this year. So I'll begin quickly with the image, just to situate you, as you can kind of guess that that title slide image looks like a library of sorts. We are going to see more of that. And there are two students in the foreground, we'll talk about them, and their work a bit later, Gabby and Claudia from Davidson College. And peaking behind from the postcards is Dr. Jennifer Garcia-Peacock, who as John mentioned earlier, co-curated the project with me. Jennifer is a scholar of and teacher of Latinx environmental art and visual culture, teaches at Davidson College in North Carolina. But she was born and grew up in your state, not very far from here, in Chico. And she is here with us, so I want to acknowledge Jennifer is here with her signature hat, as you can see. And I also want to acknowledge her parents, Tim and Darlene Peacock were sitting with us, her brother, Stephen Peacock, and cousin Michael Garcia who are with us this afternoon. Thank you, thank you all for coming. The project, as John mentioned, was co-curated by the University of New Mexico Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities, that I'll speak about a little bit later and the Environmental Studies Department at Davidson College. It was co-curated by Jennifer and I. It's presented into historic sites, I'll get to more in a moment about that in Palazzo Bembo and the Marina Resa Gardens in Venice. And it is part of a rather large project of the 2022 Venice Biennial Art Exhibition, Personal Structures, organized and hosted by the European Cultural Center in Venice, Italy. It opened on April 23rd and after seven month run, it'll close on November 27th. Estimated we hear that over half a million people will have a chance to see the exhibit this year. You can find lot more information from personalstructures.com with that, without any further due, I will talk a little bit about the project but that's of course, as I said, is a hard thing to do with so many team members, their work, it may feel a little fragmented, but first I want to set the stage of talking a little bit about not so much what is this project, but why is this project and what led to us doing what we have done this year. I like to think of this project purely as a product of the pandemic. So what do I mean by that? So let's get to that, but the journey begins about 20 years ago in your great city of San Francisco. So March 19th, 2003, US Senator Barbara Boxer on the Senate floor, as you can see it's live from C-SPAN II, a screenshot held up a picture of a polar bear taken in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And she passionately argued against, during a Senate hearing, passionately argued against oil and gas exploration and development in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which the indigenous Gwich'in people regard as the sacred place where life begins, it's Iquatsangwanda Godlet, and the indigenous Inupiaq people regard as home. That day, to the surprise of the conservationist, Senator Boxer's passionate testimony resulted in a 52 to 48 win for the indigenous peoples and their environmental allies, which was not expected. The expectation was that at best it will be a 50-50 vote, so then Vice President Dick Cheney sat in his Senate office, Vice Presidents always have a office in the Senate all day, hoping that it'll be a 50-50 tie, and he will break the tie, and President George W. Bush will get his wish delivered to him to open up the Arctic Refuge. That did not happen. Long story short, because of this, the picture behind was taken by me two years prior to that in the refuge, and because of this fiasco, what ended up happening is my exhibition, soon-to-open exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History was censored that led to a Senate hearing, which then later led to a Senate investigation for which I had to go to Washington, D.C. I was called a liar by a very influential senator on the Senate floor, late Ted Stevens of Alaska, called me a liar, and I was not a citizen at the time, so it was a very scary time. That said, something nice happened that brings the story back to San Francisco. Few months later, three months later, the exhibition that Smithsonian had censored was reconstituted in its entire content and all of its context, and was presented at your California Academy of Sciences here in your great city of San Francisco. Interestingly enough, Cal Academy built a beautiful website back then with galleries and context and stories and images, but as I was preparing for this talk and I went to look for it, there is absolutely all of that is gone, so it would be nice if Cal Academy someday would probably put that back if nothing else as a public history archive. So the only evidence that it did happen that you can find online is this article from the New York Times that says, Seasons of Life and Land, an exhibit of 49 photographs from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge went on display over the weekend at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. The article was published on September 16th on September 13th, I believe it was a Saturday. The Cal Academy opened the exhibit to the public, hundreds and hundreds of people came, but right before the public opening the same evening, they did a small private reception in which Senator Boxer came and told us a little story. She said that day, March 19th, when this happened in the morning at the US Senate, that evening when she went back home, her granddaughter, and she recounted the story to us, her granddaughter said, Grandma, I'm very proud of you. And she was just taking her jackets off or whatever. And she said, why? And she said, well, you have helped protect the polar bears. Senator Boxer was the first woman ever to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And I had the honor to call her friend back in the day. She has since long retired. We are going to take it back a little further, another 10 years prior to that. At the Historic Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, United Nations recognized both crises that John had alluded to, the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis as really two significant crisis of human history. Today we know it is probably the two most consequential one and accordingly had set up two separate organizations to deal with each one separately. One was the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the other was Convention on Biological Diversity. The first one to look at the climate crisis, the second one to look at the biodiversity crisis, both were set up the same year 1992. Fast forward to now, we know that the climate crisis today we can more or less say that has global acknowledgement. Not that adequate actions are taking place, but there is global acknowledgement among the general public and the politicians all over the world. And but no such luck yet for the biodiversity crisis which continues to fester from public inattention. We do have Greta Thunberg shouting our house is on fire but we do not have a Greta Thunberg yet who is shouting that our house is getting lonely. With that said, a little bit fast forward beyond 2003 all the way to 2016, after 15 years of being an independent artist and activist and writer, often not having enough money to even buy adequate amount of food, I finally threw in the towel and said, need a little security and joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico in 2016. Following year January, Donald Trump enters the White House and becomes the US president and announces one of his top priorities to make America energy dominant, not energy independent, energy dominant. That's his phrase, not mine. And his Secretary of Interior, Ryan Zinke, goes to Alaska that year, May of 2017 and announces this, the only path for energy dominance is a path to the great state of Alaska. And of course then they started instituting extremely reckless, extremely expansive programs to execute their aims. So I had the honor to convene this conference which looking back we can say was the first national response to President Trump's energy policy at my university. But the way we did it, and speakers came from Alaska, from San Francisco, from all over the country and Canada, but we did not frame it as an energy issue. We instead framed it as you can see a multi-species justice issue. And that allowed us to look at both the climate crisis but also the biodiversity crisis and also indigenous rights, environmental justice and a whole host of other topics. So species conservation was always in our mind from the beginning. Following year 2019 fall, I had the honor to co-organize this really major project, very expansive project called Species in Peril along the Rio Grande. I co-curated the exhibit with Dr. Josie Lopez. The main exhibit happened in 516 Arts in Albuquerque, New Mexico which is a contemporary museum and gallery in downtown Albuquerque. But there were another about a dozen companion exhibits that took place throughout in Northern Chihuahua, West Texas, throughout New Mexico, Southern Colorado and associated public programming. And at the time I had written in the catalog essay, all of this is publicly available, which I will share with you in a moment where you can find those things. At the time I had said that this is the first time two nations, communities across two nations have come together to address the biodiversity crisis in such an expansive manner through the lens of culture which is arts, humanities, stories. We did not ignore science. It was informed by science as well. So that happened 2019. So then comes COVID. March, cities, states, local communities, universities are beginning to institute lockdowns. In the middle of that in April 2020, encouragement from my colleagues, not just in academia, but in our communities, I had the honor to find, found this project called Species in Peril. And as you can see, it says cultural responses from the local to the global. We founded it as a public service initiative within an academic institution. The project was founded in April 2020 to foster conversations, creative production, public scholarship and grassroots initiative to bring attention to the intensifying crisis of what scientists call biological annihilation, which includes species extinctions but also extreme population declines. Later that year, Senator Tom Udall and I co-organized this webinar series. Of course, pandemic is full force, organizing something in person is impossible. So we decided to go with a webinar format. What was really important here, the first line of the overview text that we jointly wrote? Did you know that the root causes of the no-ending site coronavirus pandemic are situated in the intensifying biodiversity crisis, specifically the loss of wildlife habitats and the trade off wildlife. This connection has not yet received the attention it deserves in the media or in public policy. I had the honor to work with who has become an extremely dear friend to me, Rene Romo, who lives in Las Cruces and then was the staff member of Senator Udall and now is the staff member of Senator Ben Ray Lujan, also from New Mexico. So Rene and I worked very closely along with the office of Senator Udall, office of then Congresswoman Dave Holland, who is now Madam Secretary of the Interior. You can see there were four webinars we did one each month, September, October, November, December. The first one I facilitated with Senator Udall, Congresswoman Holland and Dr. Enric Salah, National Geographic, but the one that got so much, so much attention from the public, which just really we were heartened, is the third one. Every one of them had like more than 300 attendees, but this one, indigenous kinship and multi-species justice, some of the faces you may recognize on the upper left is indigenous scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer. To the right is my very dear friend from Yukon, Canada, which in our leader and conservationist Norma Cassie on the lower left is Von Sharp, who is the president of the National Congress of the American Indian, and the session was chaired by my former student, Elspeth Iralu, who has just finished her PhD in American studies from UNM. At the same time that April, when we organized the species in peril project, which was the organizer of the webinar series, I also instituted not as a public service, but more as an academic entity centered for environmental arts and humanities. And if you just do an internet search on UNM art on the very front page, you will see center. And if you click on that, the page comes up and every project that I have talked about until now and others are all archived there. You'll be able to find everything from documents to videos of events and so on. And it is the center that got the invitation. Again, COVID had gone nowhere in 2021 to institute to participate in the Venice Biennale project. So I'll now take you to Venice and along the way, I'll talk about the process. So we were very thrilled. Jennifer and I, as I mentioned, after eight months of work with a team about whom I'll mention in a moment, after eight months of working together, the project opened on April 23rd. And during one of those trips, and we went out there in March, one of those trips, depending on what terminal you're coming through and in the small airport of Venice, this is what I saw is, as you can see, is the luggage claim connecting flights, one of the venues where we are presenting our two-part project. That very deep orange building is called Palazzo Bembo, a very historic building built in the 15th century. Along the Grand Canal is prominently featured in the airport is where our library is built. So just like your library here, which is a hallowed place, the building is also a very historic place. And in one of the evenings, Jennifer and I were having dinner right across from that building, as does a kind of touristy restaurant. And we were very tired after the all-day work. We saw just, if you look at the floor, just below the top floor on the right, there is a window with lights on. The installation of our library was very much going on, late into the night while we were having dinner. So this is installation very much. It took one month to do all of the installation for the library and the classroom. I don't want to go into these details. I'll show you where you can find all of these texts and documents. You don't have to remember anything. But two quick very things is that you will see some orange and you will see some blue because what COVID did above all else when the pandemic hit, many of us around the world had hoped that the pandemic would bring people together, bring nations together, bring communities together. Looking back, it has not done that. Quite the opposite has happened because rich nations like the United States, Canada, Europe very early on started hoarding the vaccines and absolutely all along refused to share the patents with the rest of the world. India and South Africa repeatedly pleaded to for the release of the patents. US, Europe, Canada did not do that. And part of the big part of the reason we are still very much in the middle of this pandemic is because the Global South never had a chance to properly vaccinate their populations. So that said, so when I say that our project is a pandemic project, we mean it. We are not going to be able to solve any of that problem is way beyond us. Our project is a very humble project, but our goal was to very deliberately go into it thinking that we are building something, a bridge between nations and peoples and communities and so on across time. And that's what we have done. And there are many different approaches and it's an art project. So color in this case, through orange. And this is a very simple statement. Through orange, we connect Albuquerque where I live and teach to Venice via Bollywood. And it was Jennifer who found a popular Bollywood song in early 1970s that was played on the Grand Canal. That helped us to bring popular visual culture. And the blue is similarly, as I'll be talking about indigenous art is on quick to see Smith. The blue of the blue sky of New Mexico and the blue of the lagoon of Venice and many other blues helps us connect. So these are just simple framing devices, conceptual framing devices, visual framing devices. So there it is. So this is our library, very modest, a library, a classroom, and the world. And our team, I'll go into that in a moment. As you can see, it's two large panels. I'll quickly pass through this. And just show you what it looks like. Then I'll come back to it. So I'm just making a 90 degree turn. And I make another 90 degree turn. And then we go a little bit behind that upper left shelf. And we see this make haste slowly. And then we come back to this. So why a library and what led us to build a library? So there were two very specific points of reference that we wanted to address and honor. The first of which was Palazzo Bembo, which was built in the 15th century, was the birthplace of Pietro Bembo, who is widely regarded today as the founder of modern Italian language. Pietro was a polymath. And one of the things that many things Pietro did that has had influence and continues to resonate half a century, half a millennia later, is he and his publisher, Aldus Manutia, started a extremely amazing and fruitful collaboration just as the 15th century was giving away to the 16th, late 1490s, all dying press. And they collaborated because books used to be big. You find it in fancy libraries like San Francisco Public Library and Libraries of the Kind in churches, like folio format, big and large and heavy. They wanted to make books accessible. And for the first time, books became tiny. But this was not done as a casual project. So many credit them for being the forerunner of what we call today, paperback. This is the start. So Pietro and most many people do not know this. Pietro and Aldus Manutia's actually changed the way we read and we think. Because now you can take a little book and put it in a backpack as Jackson Larson talks about and go to the mountain and read a book, which was not possible. So that's what they did. So that was one of the things that Pietro did. The second thing he did, his father established a library in that very building, which he then expanded in a very massive way. And that was called the Bembo Library, one of the really notable libraries of Europe at the time. Interestingly enough, Fenice Biennale never really honored Bembo's library or Pietro Bembo or anything like that. So this was a unique opportunity for us. So one of our PhD students, Jackson Larson is a PhD student in art history at UNM, wrote a little booklet in that exact same size that Pietro did, which at the time was called octavo. So he created a little octavo, make haste slowly. Another thing, as you may have noticed in the announcement for this talk, is we are very explicitly pushing back against our frenzy time. And we don't even have time to talk to each other. Communication is extremely brief. And everything is happening so fast on screen. So make haste slowly, which was a very unique thing. And their emblem, the symbol, was a combination of a dolphin, which is a very agile, fast animal, and a ship anchor, which slows you down. So they acknowledge both the idea of progress, but doing it with care, caution, and slow, slowly. The other influence of the library, direct reference to the library, is this. So in 2016, I was a visiting scholar at Clare Hall College at the University of Cambridge. And during my residency, my very dear friend, Peter Goddard, who was the former master of the St. John's College at Cambridge, now famous for, of all things, Harry Potter series, where a lot of Harry Potter series was filmed inside St. John's. So Peter took me to, and Peter was also the former director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, took me to this library and said, you have to see this. It's a very modest, small one room. That's all it is. And he said, specifically, I want to pay attention to two small bookshelves. So as you can see, the shelves were, presumably, we guess, there is no really visual evidence of any kind, where something that I have not come across before or since, where you can stand in front of a bookshelf and actually read on the top surface. So it was designed that way. 20 of those shelves were built in the 16th, 17th century. 100 years later, 18 height were increased because of more books were coming in, but two remains. So our library explicitly is built, the bookshelves, are built out of the last two remaining dwarf bookcases of the old library at St. John's College, which, of course, looks like this. These are our bookshelves, very simplified form. It's not ornate, but it's functional. It's functioning the exact same way. So one more thing that we wanted to do is, as you can see from a simple image like this, is we wanted all visual works to be presented on the shelf. But why? Because we, you know, both of us, Jennifer and I, coming from kind of the academic side of the art world, we recognize that art over the last two centuries or whatever has become a principal aid to the ever increasing accumulation of wealth, power, and fame. It's more about power and fame and money than what art can do for us. Including the museum, not very far from here, very famous museum that you have in your city, basically promotes that set or operates in that same mode. We didn't want that. We want art to be thought of as knowledge. We want art to be thought of as something that can contribute explicitly, intentionally, to social and environmental transformation. So art as knowledge. So then, all of these little references I see, to library, to bookshelves, to so on and so forth. So you come to read art, not just come to see art, to be entertained, to be intrigued by art, but to read art. So that's what we have done here in addition to various other things. The other thing is that the entire team that we have built, as John mentioned, is composed of three generations, multiple ethnicities, indigenous, Latinx, Asian, white, and we hail from multiple continents also. But what unites us is that none of us come from the center of the art world. We come from the periphery. And so I'll read a little bit of how we introduced our team. Before I talk about John Quick-to-Smith briefly, we come to Venice, not from the center of the art world, but from its periphery, New Mexico, not New York, Bengal, not Berlin, Davidson, not Dusseldorf, Las Cruces, not London, Peterborough, not Paris, Finland, not France, Salish, not Shanghai, from this corner, like the facing pages of an open book, which you can see at that corner, like the facing pages of an open book, we draw your attention to the fact that visual art is also knowledge that can contribute to justice-based environmental transformation and not merely aesthetic objects that aid in the ever-increasing accumulation of wealth, power, and fame. So here is John Quick-to-Smith. She is, as many of us think of, is the matriarch of indigenous art in North America. She has inspired countless generations of, or not countless, multiple generations of indigenous artists all across North America. And yet, to our great surprise, we found out that it was only two years ago, 2020, that the U.S. National Gallery of Art, Big News, has acquired the first ever work by an indigenous artist. First ever painting by an indigenous artist. It was a shame, royal shame for this nation. That 2020 was the first year that happened. That means indigenous artists were not regarded as artists. They were regarded as craftspeople by this nation. So violence happens in many forms, not just massacre, not just evictions, but also this form of violence is very much ongoing in this nation. So this is how John Quick-to-Smith, in her own text, she writes. So when I first invited her, we have long been friends. She sent a very short paragraph about why books matter to us, her, and why library matter to her. And she really wanted to participate. And I was kind of surprised. She's a famous artist, John Quick-to-Smith. And she wrote a simple paragraph, and I was in tears. I'll read just a little bit, not that paragraph. She then went back and reworked it, and that is the thing. Through a childhood, filled with such hardships as hunger, illness, and parental neglect, I found that reading books was my source of fleeing my sordid circumstances. Books enabled me to learn about the world and to have dreams about the possibility of escaping into a place of my own making. But there were some obstacles, such as the high school coach or counselor who told me that Indians don't go to college. But she nevertheless was determined to go to college, which she did, a small college in Washington state, where at the end of the year, the professor told me that women could not be artists, and that I should become a teacher. Then from Washington, John Quick-to-Smith applies for the master's program in art at my university, University of New Mexico. After finishing college, I applied to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and was told that Native Americans don't study fine arts. These were told to her by predecessors of faculty in my college, my university. Even though I insisted on studying painting, they, meaning the faculty of the time, told her that I should study crafts in the art education department. Only after I acquired a gallery in New York did they finally accept me into the fine arts department. So how violence is perpetrated has many different forms. So she wanted to honor this is the first time. So one of the things when Jennifer and I started talking with the artist is that each one of them wanted to create a particular form that they had not done before. Each one of them have done that, including myself. So John wanted to create a folded book to honor Aztec codices. And so this is a folded book. Very simple, because we didn't have an enormous amount of time, very short time, middle of pandemic. No one can meet in person, and so on and so forth. So this is what she created, a two-part. And also we had restrictions that it has to fit in that shelf. So two-sided. So it's like this is what the one side looks like. This is the other side, all original work. And here she talks about dragonflies. Native Americans trigger dragonflies with respect because they unite earth, sky, and water. Again, an invocation of building bridge. And then she talks about, I love, the nightlife, which also inspired our color blue. And I'll leave it at that. I'm not going to go into the details of the artist. There is a lot to cover. How much time do I have? OK. So the next artist is a Chicano artist, Zick Pina. So let me take you back a little bit. So the Biodiversity Webinar series that I had mentioned earlier, all of these actually has led to the Venice Project. The last webinar of the four was called Transforming State Wildlife Management to Protect Biodiversity in the US. And it was chaired by my very dear friend and who has dedicated his life to wildlife conservation, Kevin Bixby, on the lower bottom right. His organization he founded in Las Cruces was René Romo Lives. They're all very close friends. In Las Cruces, Kevin founded Southwest Environmental Center more than a quarter century ago. In 2018, his organization started a campaign against the ongoing expansion of the border wall by the Trump administration. And they commissioned artist, Zick Pina, who was born in Las Cruces but grew up in and was living in El Paso, Texas at the time. So Zick created this thing all against the wall, a piece that I just really love because so many things going on in such a simple thing. Look at who is on the lead and how he has accommodated since idea of multi-species justice. The campaign is being led by both human and non-human. So agency to the non-human. There are many things going on without going on and on. This particular work and another work we included in Species in Pedil along the Rio Grande. The other work was The River, about which Jennifer Garcia Peacock has written an entire essay that is coming out in an academic book from Rutledge on art and activism. Very complex work. The readings that she has done on this piece is extraordinary. But when we hosted Zoom meetings, all of our process meetings were over Zoom with Zick, Jennifer made a suggestion that do you want to maybe work in a panoramic format and Zick being a moralist staying outside of the mainstream art world since all his career? He said, I have only done very small, like those prints I showed you. They're probably 10 by 12, really small. But in my mind, I always have something on the left and something on the right. So Jennifer's suggestions immediately resonated with him and he went to work. And he has created this sort of a panoramic format. And in his own words, he has various different inspirations and references, including Jose Guadalope Posada's famous sort of skull. But one of the things about Zick's work is the combination or the juxtaposition of tragedy with comedy. So or you address tragedy with comedy. Throughout history, artists have done that. But Zick does it in a way that is absolutely delightful. Because it's both satire and humor and there are subtle differences between the two without going into all of that. But his work, and you can see some of these characters, those non-human characters on the left, are coming back as the character that you saw in River. They're all coming back with different sort of mood and whatnot. But here is, I'll make a slight transition into something else, another idea, which is that these artists all worked independently. They had no communication with each other. It was just not possible, given the time frame and the pandemic. And they're all living in different places as well. But what happened? Our idea of creating a circle, as you saw, we did not present the library as a typical library in a linear format shelf after shelf. But as a circle, but what we did not anticipate is that the visual works will create their own connections across these artists, way beyond our anticipation or expectation. But here, in the left upon of six panels, you turn the corner, you come to Translatnik's artist, Alexandria Zuniga de Dochas, and you see exactly two fish. They had no communication with each other while they created these works. Or at sort of the right side of Alexandria's work, you see fireflies, which was also the right side of Jean-Claude II Smith's work, What is Life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night, as was said by Crowfoot Blackfoot, 1890. So basically, they are creating their own connections above and beyond anything, either the artist or the curators had anticipated. So this is a bit of an uncanny magic. So that's Alexandria's work or the shelf. Now I'll just share with you. So this is one side of the shelf, other side. Is when you go to a place like today, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for example, right? The idea is the questions that often people think about is what is this art? You're entertained, you're intrigued, or how was it made? Those questions, as it happens, that we think of are also very comfortable for capitalism to coexist with. But then if you bring in questions like who is this art for, it becomes very complicated, right? If you say, well, this art is not for the cultural elites, this art is not for the multimillionaires, collectors, and so on and so forth, it takes art into a slightly different space. So much of the work that you have seen so far that I've shared with you without going into any detail are very community engaged and for communities, including Alexandria's work. But here is another thing I just wanted to share with you right at the beginning when I founded the Species in Peril project. I also did a little newsletter and the very first article as you can see volume one, number one, it says the most widely known visual representation of justice is a balanced scale. Imagine this now, we get up on the right scale pan with our Catalan pigs and all the rest of the wild mammals on earth from land and the seas, blue whales and elephants included, jump up on the left scale pan. The scale tips disproportionately to the right with a verdict 96% by 4%, meaning just us humans and our cattle and pigs by weight have displaced all of the mammals of the earth by 96% to 4%, and that is a scientific fact. I would call it mammalian injustice of an order that no science fiction writer has yet dared to conceptualize, not to my knowledge, but this is not science fiction. This is just as real as the current coronavirus pandemic because it was written in the middle of the pandemic. So Alexandria is a former student of mine. So this one, we work together very, very closely and I'm not going to go into the details. There's a lot of heart history references going on here, but you can begin to see resonance across Zikapinia and Alexandria Zuniga's De Dochas that neither of them actually work together to discuss an example. So on the left, in Zikapinia's work, you see a person pushing the rear end of another person looks like probably a settler colonial person who is trying to get a better look at the land beyond that will be colonized and above that person's head is a person who is trying to get a better look to shoot whoever is out there. So that the land could be colonized, whatever the narrative may be. On the right, in Alexandria's work, you see a human being from the other end is pushing the rear end of a polar bear so that it could get up on the scale pan. It's humor, but it's humor to simultaneously hold tragedy and comedy together for totally two different purposes. The left is Skaldagari. The right is survival, right? Ongoingness of survival. So that is what we did, is that without the artist or the curators imagining any kind of connections among us are already have created so many different connections. And this is what Jennifer and I like, we work with students, like go find your own connections that even the curators had not thought of. Way back on the backside corner, you see a yellow little on that strip of the wall, yellow. I'll come to that. So Alexandria was a student. I'll go quickly through this just to show this community engagement for communities. The semester that Senator Udall and I organized the webinar series, I was also teaching a biodiversity class. And Alexandria created a little simple drawing. We demand that US adopt a biodiversity action plan. The following year, President Biden was become the president. And what ended up happening is that Defenders of Wildlife, which is a national organization, created a postcard campaign in which Alexandria's work was featured. But more importantly, we think of young people not even going anywhere near a postcard of the old school or actually they've created postcards national campaign. And you can see those postcards right there on the wall, which then we turn the corner and come to the postcard project, which my dear colleague and friend, long time, very influential historian of environmental visual culture, Finis Dunaway, who teaches in Canada, and I co-created the postcards. And these postcards were designed by my dear friend, David Mendez, who tragically and suddenly died in the middle of the project. So I'm also honoring and remembering David's extraordinary and invaluable contribution. I'm not gonna go into this again, as you can see a lot of work in there that have gone into that postcard project. But one thing I will mention, just as we were creating this postcard project in late November, United States Congress hosted a hearing. And that hearing brought extraordinary levels of, and that hearing was chaired by one of your California congressman, Jared Huffman, brought to the public's attention an extraordinary level of violence that NGOs, US and European NGOs, wildlife NGOs and environmental NGOs are causing and perpetrating in the Global South. Murder, rape, torture, violence of a scale and scope that just boggles our mind. This hearing did not get any coverage in US media. This was the only article that exists on it that I wrote, which was published in Counterpunch. So fortress conservation, if you have any interest, what in the hell is fortress conservation? You can Google my name and fortress conservation. This will come up. Anyway, fine, sir, I am also now finishing a, I'm not going to go on and on, but the backside of the postcards, there was just too much. Okay, I will leave it at, oh, there was supposed to be a thing there. This comes, now we just switch quickly to the other part, the library. So this was the title slide. As you saw, those are Jennifer's students. They came to Venice and to the right is also Jennifer's students, Marcia writing on the postcard. This is our classroom. Just like the library had two distinct references, so did our classroom. And the first of which, as I said, this is a pandemic product. That during the pandemic, Jennifer Garcia-Picoc does not teach in a traditional sense of using PowerPoints and so on and so forth. And she does not teach with lectures. She teaches in a conversational style. So in the pandemic came between those two things because she just goes and writes on the chalkboard even before pre-pandemic or the whiteboard. So when the pandemic came, she took her classes out of doors and her college bought her this type of outdoor chalkboards onto which she and her students would fill up by the end of a class. That was a key inspiration to going outdoor and our outdoor classroom because it was about conversation. And the other is December 2019. Jennifer and I were both at Shantini-Ketan. This is where Domindranath Tagore built at the early 20th century outdoor classroom which is still operational. Nothing really of the past, very much active. These two gave us the inspiration to build our classroom. But as we are building our Venice classroom, Davidson College built Jennifer a classroom in their eco-preserve. This is her students, six students who would come three months later to Venice. So we did a sketch and all of that. And as we were presented with a very challenging location to build this classroom with three angled trees and kind of bounded. But somehow I spoke with my architect friend, longtime dear friend, former architect Julian Sears in Washington State and his wife who is a master gardener. Karen Sears, we got to work. Here is the sketch. And as I just pulled back from it and looked at it, it looked like Venice. So what we have built is a Venice within Venice classroom. Because after all, our classroom is a gift to the city of Venice. And the city of Venice has embraced us as such because that classroom next year is becoming a national historic site in Venice. The start is very simple. We are there, out there and with this very simple string, the boundaries are marked that Nicola and Matteo, members of the European Cultural Center, absolutely delightful people, brilliant people, amazing people that we had a chance to work with. And that's getting built. And there was a third small source of inspiration because during the pandemic, Jennifer and I probably saw more than nearly 200 films, cinema. That was one way we kind of survived the pandemic. And one such films and all time favorites of both of us is the 1987 film, Where is the Friends House by the late great Iranian film director, Abbas Kiorostami. And in that film, there is a little thing, very humble, the grandmother in rural Iran taking care of her little garden, container garden on the second floor. It's about tending. So we wanted that to be part, a significant part. And in fact, very strangely, we didn't know this before going to Venice, the plaster and all that, as you can see, looks very much like Venice because Venice maintains that look, but it's a rich city. We are looking at a poor village, so it's a very different thing. But middle of the pandemic, my mother died and Jennifer's grandmother died. So there are many different resonances going on here. So this is also an honoring, the grandmother honoring tending, the idea of tending. So this is Jennifer. So this is like, I think early April, like I said, it was a really a month long process. That is our center and her college, all prominently mentioned in both English and Italian. And there came during the opening, my chair in the blue suit, who was probably the most ardent and unwavering supporter because this is the first time the University of New Mexico was invited to speak, invited to participate in Venice. Not an easy project for university in a poor state to take on. And because of Susanna Anderson-Reedle's unwavering support, we took it on. So during the opening, Susanna came, my dean who is in the middle, Harry Smith, to Harry says, right is his wife, Melanie, who is an actress and a faculty member in the theater department, and you can see Jennifer. And essentially what Susanna is talking about is how can we take art out of the capitalist institutions that we call museums today and to the community? And that is what is happening in Venice this year. You go to libraries, you go to churches, you go to little buildings all over the city that is art, that is Venice Biennale. And she has the knowledge, this is Jennifer's student. So Jennifer, with her faculty member, Dr. Annie Merrill, who is the chair of the Environmental Studies Department, came to Venice in May with six students. This is the only photo I took and then I'll show you some other photo taken by, no, also this one. So this is what our classroom looks like because we wanted to build something in the middle of a moment that is when people are losing their loved ones, great suffering, death, pain, all of that is surrounding us, something that is uplifting, something that is beautiful, something where people would come, sit down and have a conversation. And I think we have done that. It looks really beautiful. And it is not just for humans, it is also for non-humans. This was very deliberately and intentionally planned. And these are Jennifer's students. And she can talk. This is something, this is how she teaches. Her entire teaching is founded on something called idea maps. So the students create idea maps on those blackboards and whiteboards. And here they have done it in Venice, putting together their little journals, which Dr. Merrill writes about in a reflection. And this is what it looked like before they went to Venice in back in Davidson. With that, many people ask me, what's the connection between the library and classroom? And there are many approaches, themes, visual art, but the students are also connecting the two spaces. Thank you. Thank you, Sir Pankar, for a wonderful presentation. We do have time for about 15 minutes of questions. Does anyone in the audience have a question for a presenter? Yes. Yes. Let me give you the mic. You mentioned the first librarian, I think it was B-E-M-B-O. Bembo. Bembo. Uh-huh. Was he located in Florence? He was located in Venice. So he's a Venetian, but he's a Venetian. So he was born in that Palazzo Bembo and grew up there. And his father was an influential, you know, civic servant. But Bembo ended up becoming a cardinal in Rome. So he traveled a bit, became a cardinal in Rome. And the picture I showed you of Bembo is actually painted by Titian, great 16th century Venetian artist, which is actually in the National Gallery Apart in the US. So, but then he went back to Venice and moved his library just north of Venice to Padua, where there is a university. It's interesting because they say that Da Vinci, many of the things to make money, for example, he got hired to make basically weapons of war. And he would not have been able to do that. For instance, the helicopter and the first flying machine was his own. But everything else was in a book that was already published about artifacts of war. So the first tank and a lot of things like that. So they say without a library there would have been. No what? There would have been no Leonardo Da Vinci. Aha. Because it was his exposure to all these different, because he started out obviously in Florence in the famous Venet, but for him to make money, Philip of Bell of France was attacking one of the city-states and he went in there and his job was to make weapons of war. So fascinating you bring that up. So in our wall text, all of which is available from, everything I showed you is available from the Personal Structures website. The press release and all of the wall text approaches. So, and we acknowledge in our wall text that while Bembo was expanding his library and so on and doing all his literary work, warships were being built on the very waterfront where we have built our classroom. Because Venice was a, and that's why it's called Arsenale, where Venice Biennale takes place, was a very belligerent place. It was the most powerful maritime war machine of Europe at the time. Thank you, Subankar. Thank you. I had a question for you that perhaps correlates with the first question. In one of your books, Arctic Voices, there's a striking quotation in the beginning that reads in part. When we think of wars in our times, our mind turns to Iraq and Afghanistan, but the bigger war is the war against the planet. So I wonder if most people are aware that this war on the planet is going on and what is your thought? Thank you for bringing that up. That particular quote is actually by Vandana Shiva. So I quoted Vandana Shiva when she was accepting the Sydney Peace Prize. That's what she mentioned. And it resonated with me at the time. Today, when I wrote that in Arctic Voices, situation was different. Today, if you look at the climate justice movement where we have come, how far we have come, it's quite extraordinary. And this language of war is invoked that what we are doing, now we know. 30 years ago, someone might say, oh, we didn't know. Of course, it's on new and others new. We didn't know. Now we know, and yet we are perpetuating this. So it's a war against the planet narrative is very much a useful one because end of the day, our survival depends on the natural world around us. And we have known that, like look at what is happening in California with your fires. Look at what is happening in my home state of New Mexico with the fires and the drought. So it is, it is like unless we acknowledge that although I don't personally like the language of war very much, but it is the truth. It is the truth that the one against our non-human relatives that war does not get as much attention. So that's where the efforts of all of our cohorts of the Venice project, we have focused on that because we are also kind of unleashing an extraordinary horror and war against our non-human relatives. Those crises are certainly related. They are. Yeah. Are there questions from the audience? If you don't mind, I have another question for you. Okay. You, Professor Benerjee, you've photographed and written extensively about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I'm curious, how did you become interested in the Arctic, a part of the world that few of us have visited? So I mean that's a long story of course but I'll give a brief, quick answer is kind of like opposites attract. I knew that I had left my scientific career behind and wanted to combine photography. At that time, not really so much. I didn't know that much about conservation even though I was likely involved. But photography to speak about places. And an experience I went to Subarctic Canada where many wildlife photographer goes to take pictures of polar bears. So did I. But instead of unlike them, they come back with beautiful pictures of polar bear dancing and so on and so forth which show up in the cover of books and National Geographic. I came back with a rather horrifying image of one polar bear eating another. And that basically grounded that I needed to understand the North and what is happening there. And then long story short, five months of conversation and Robert Thompson, who is in UPA, lives in Cactovic, took me under his wings and we just traveled the refuge over a two year period as well as my friends from the Gwichinside and it just became a journey. There was no really specific intention to do these that are other things or even a book or anything like that. I was not a published photographer. So it just one step and so what I tell my students is that don't think of products. So even our Venice product, Jennifer and I really, really do not think of this as a product of any kind even though I used the word earlier that product of the pandemic for a very specific reason but we don't think we are interested in the process. So what is the process? So it's like Jennifer teaching her students, getting them ready for Venice all semester long and then showing up there and then they are engaging their own way. So what I'm interested in the project I did with Rene Romo back in New Mexico with Senator Udall by diversity webinar series, we think of each of these to not end. They become generative, they launch something else. That's why I gave such a long preamble to all of those other projects because none was really independent. They all lead to the next one and the next one because we are always interested in the generative potential of collaboration rather than the finality of a product which is how art is thought of, right? That once you make it final, you can say, okay, now it can go on the auction market and fetch 50 million dollars. But if there is no finality and you're making it vague and keeping it going, it can have a ongoingness of its own life. Thanks. You know, something else that strikes me, you've lived on different continents and for a while you were doing engineering, then photography and some forbidding environments and eco-activism and more recently teaching. I'm curious, how do you see your teaching in what is the role of teaching in eco-activism? For you, how do you see it more generally? When it comes to teaching, I would defer to Jennifer. She is the teacher extraordinaire. Do you want to comment on that? So she is the teacher extraordinaire because she really cares about teaching so much. For me teaching, you know, game like struggling, I'm like, oh no, I have to teach and then I go to the classroom. But having said, because I don't have academic training, I now hold all this post at a university but my academic training is in none of those fields. I'm not academically trained in arts and humanities. So teaching comes with struggle for me but only thing is that with my students, from day one I tell them, you are co-creators of knowledge. Here there'll be no hierarchy, none of that. It'll be conversation that's one area that Jennifer and I overlap. We don't do lectures, it's just a conversation with our students and so then teaching becomes joy. Once you think of it as a conversation, once you think of your students as your peers and co-creators of knowledge, then the semester becomes a joyous experience rather than, oh my goodness, this is what I have to deliver this lecture and that lecture and this and that and they'll have to do this homework and that homework. None of that exists in my class, any of my classes. So like Alexandria, that example I gave, the Translate Next artist, Alexandria was a student in my class and when we started working the Venice project, we are peers. I'm sharing some artistry idea that I know a little bit more than maybe Alexandria but Alexandria is bringing in visual ideas and design that I don't know about and it's all, so that's how, for me, teaching is again a generative process that leads to something else but teaching to the level that Jennifer teaches is truly another level, another layer of seriousness and rigor, yeah. Thanks, are there questions? Yeah, let me see if I can articulate this but I'm curious, what has this project generated as far as conversations or co-creating or further discussions about the library classroom in the world? So thank you so much for bringing that up and there are many generative threads that are already happening. One of which, I included the image but somehow it didn't show up in the file, I don't understand. So on the postcards, the back of the postcards we did on those postcard shelf is something called a dear reader note where we invite the visitors to write on the postcard. So there is an actual table, corner table and then you have a chair and so on and so forth. We provide the colored pencils and you know, I mean, I quickly glossed through it. Venice Biennale is like nothing like that you come across in the US, nothing like that. I mean the entire city takes over and it's an extraordinary, the scale and the scope is truly mind blowing. There are 202 projects as part of the Venice Biennale this year and one of which is personal structures in which we are a part and personal structures alone has more than 200 projects. So probably like 500 artist scholars are participating in this. So the overall scope is grand and then in our exhibit as you saw we are not presenting sort of the traditional idea of art. There is nothing on the wall, whole lot of text to read, whole lot of text to read on the postcards. Who would do that? We did not think that anybody would even want to spend beyond five minutes. They'll just pass through, gloss through. To our great surprise, within two days of the opening, postcards were written in five different languages and as of today there are more about a dozen languages people have written postcards. We gave no instruction on what language to write, what content to write. Mostly these are very personal. Early ones were really about pain and suffering and mourning and loss. Everybody, somebody lost, somebody loved one. So that is one example, but then there are all of these other, like we're talking about the teaching part of it. The classroom part has generated so much positivity for the city after this pandemic that the city is doing all sorts of stuff in that space. All sorts of things are happening and readings and conversations. And then of course the European Cultural Center want to build a long-term relationship with Jennifer and Ahai. So we are already talking about conferences and other things where we can keep the conversation alive. And at the moment I may have mentioned that Finis and I are also doing an academic journal article on the Postcard Project on Fortress Conservation, which tragically in the United States, the visual culture of posters and postcards that are thought to be very benign, harmless are actually agents of causing great violence. Very simple things like postcards and it has done so for nearly 150 years now. And including the most recent of which is the President Obama's Netflix series. Ken Burns says series before that for PBS, these are actually in a way are perpetuating violence that we don't think of it as violence. So we are taking these type of things on also to both advance the scholarly part of the dialogue. Thank you for that answer. I had one more question for you that I think ties in with what you were saying in one of your essays. You warn against voyeuristic, touristic, purely aesthetic and sort of distanced approach to photographing land. Could you say a few words about how photography or perhaps arts more generally can take a more responsible approach to representing our world? Oh, that is a perfect segue to what I was just saying. So when places like Yellowstone was created and on and on, all of this whole narrative about like visual culture, like photographers, painters, all came into these places and created beautiful pictures of nature. What we now look at as environmental innocence. So they deliberately excluded the cultural aspect and which enabled them, whoever is advocating these projects to effect indigenous people, scrutinize their traditional activities. And this is not something a relic of the past. This is going on in global south as we speak as well as in the global north. So photography of like then this idea because the whole idea of National Park, founding of which Ken Burns called America's Greatest Idea is a project to create these places as a playground, quote unquote playground. Playground was the word used by the United States government when these places were created. They are playgrounds. So to promote the idea of playground, a certain kind of visual culture is necessary. And that is what photography has done. Either it's a spectacle or it's this horror or it's sort of this perpetuating a kind of a form of violence. So we need more nuanced, more complex way to think about where we don't exclude cultural aspects because all of these places are either inhabited or are being used or are something or other. People have built relationships with these places, with these animals for thousands of years. There's nothing new. But somehow we have, we continue to ignore that. Thanks, certainly your photography does, I think in a sense, give a voice to some of the inhabitants and the non-human inhabitants. And the non-human. Tens of millions, for example, in the Arctic. So that's a remarkable gift that you have given the rest of us. We have time for maybe one more question. Is there someone in the audience who has a question? If not, I want to extend my great thanks to you. Thanks for a marvelous lecture and we hope you will come back. Thank you. Thank you, John.