 So thank you for attending yesterday. Some of you are coming in for the first time today, so warm welcome. I was thinking last night about what my welcome and introduction this morning should be. And I decided rather than doing a formal talk, I would actually really just set up the context for the conference and the symposium, why we're doing it in the first place, what the bigger picture is, what it is a part of. And I know from some conversations we had yesterday, there was just curiosity about why we brought all these people together and what happens next. I should introduce myself. I'm Shriya Chatterjee and I'm head of research and learning at the Paul Mellon Center, which is over in Bloomsbury. And we're a research center and one of the things we do is have long-ish term research projects. And this symposium is a part of a research project that I lead at the Center on Climate and Colonialism. So for most people in this room, both climate and colonialism are things that you see as connected. You see why they're connected, why they're connected now, thinking of colonialism as ongoing, not as something that has finished and in the past, and also as something that is very related to the different ways we can see ecosystems collapse at the moment. So the primary aim of the project really was to bring people thinking about it in the present as artists, as sort of activists, people who are making and doing things, as well as historians and historians of science, climate scientists to some degree as well, who are thinking about longer term histories and pasts. And I think my own interest is very much lies in how we see and what we see and the role of the visual arts in this process. So thinking about climate and colonialism as having these sort of long-term structures and processes that are made invisible, erased voices, erased sort of lands as well. The point of not just how we see, but what we don't see, what we're unable to see and what is made invisible is also really key and intrinsic to the project. So I know we've talked about future thinking yesterday or not heard about. From Cyrus, we've talked about various ways to think or what to do with ongoing legacies of colonialism, not just legacies, but ongoing structures of colonialism and what the role of gender and the arts play in that context. And so this symposium really came about because Astrid and Aimanis, who I will introduce formally in a moment, was visiting London as a part of this project and we've been developing a strand of the project that is around exactly this relationship, gender, climate and colonialism. And so of course, this particular symposium is a collaboration with the Barbican, Barbican's Resisters Exhibition, so Alona and Colm. I know we've heard from Alona yesterday, walked through the show, so we see some of the links. And I think it's really up to us today to see how we open up those links, how we think about developing some of those links, but also how just having everybody in a room together, having conversations in the coffee breaks, making friends and how we can sort of continue these conversations, whether it is, well, come to other events that we do. We run a reading group that is online and at a time which ideally suits most time zones. So the hope is also to have a continued conversation and build groups of people who are interested and just committed to thinking critically and over longer trans-historical spaces. So yeah, and this sounds like a pitch, but yeah, I signed up to the newsletter because it's the easiest way, the Paul Madden Center newsletter, it's the easiest way to stay in touch with reading groups and logistical things like that. But I'm really hoping that this is a first step towards continued conversations. So thank you for being here and I look forward to all of you joining in. The Q and A's are not formal things. You know, we want everybody to participate. The comments are as welcome as questions. So we want this to be a place where there was a lot of whooping after a talk yesterday, which made me really happy. So yeah, I'm going to hand over to Estrida, who I think all of you know Estrida's work, but yeah, there we go. That's what we want. Estrida is Canada Chair of Feminist Environmental Humanities and I'm very envious of that title. Professor of Feminist Environmental Humanities at UBC Okanagan. Oh, you're so nice. Okay, so this is going to probably be a little bit weird. I am supposed to sort of introduce sort of midway through the program a little bit about this idea, gender, climate and colonialism. I spent a long time trying to figure out what to say and how to offer opening remarks for an event with these three words. Me here in this room in London, in Great Britain, at the Barbican or the Barbicana, meaning fortified outpost or gateway at the site, which was once the Northern edge of the Roman Londonium. Me also having arrived here from another place from unceded silk territories, a place which is thick with histories of colonialism and resistance whose violences are ongoing and diffracting in many places in this world, not least in Gaza. These are very strange times and these days I perhaps maybe like some of you have been feeling both very speechless and very speechful at the same time and I'm finding it very difficult to sometimes figure out what to say. What to say about gender, climate and colonialism and what to say that can find its footing somewhere between tense silence and more to quote Greta Thunberg, just blah, blah, blah. The question of what to say has been looming, especially large in my brain I think because I've also been reading this book, this new book by Naomi Klein, Doppelganger. Has anyone read it yet? Yeah, a couple people. Very helpfully Klein has put some of these like why do I feel so difficult in trying to think of something useful to say, feelings that I've been having into print. Indeed, one of the many insights she offers is about this disease, dis-ease. Many of us may be experiencing in terms of what she calls quote, the quicksand underpinning our age, this feeling of near violent rupture between the world of words and the world beyond them. Feeling like the words we reach for are not as easy to use as they once may have been. And if you're familiar with Klein's book, and I can only get into it so much, but like I really highly recommend it, you know that this line of thinking begins with Klein's uncanny experience of being constantly confused with Naomi Wolfe. While both became well-known left-ish writers in the 1990s, Klein extended her anti-capitalist and climate justice activism and journalism while Wolfe went down the rabbit hole of QAnon conspiracy theories. And one of the problems was that Wolfe took a lot of Klein's words with her. So Klein uses this experience to introduce the central idea of the book, i.e. doppelgangers. The doppelganger is a look-alike or an act-alike, your mirror double who is not you, but who others believe is or might be you and whom you watch incredulously as they take words, words you love deeply and aim precisely and whose meaning has been carved out through hard work and struggle, words like solidarity or bodily autonomy and then empty them out of content and context and give them back inside out, upside down backwards, unrecognizable. A word that once had purchase now, tongued around in the mouths of doppelgangers, comes to feel futile and sometimes even hostile. As Klein puts it, it becomes difficult to write or talk about serious things going on around us because, quote, all we have are these same cheapened words. Every word that might express the magnitude of our moment she continues has been booby-trapped. And I'm going to come back to booby-trapped. It's such a good word. So maybe this helps me explain my problems of late, my word problems. Maybe this is why in moments like these, some of us might shy away from saying much less, saying much less our use of words be taken for their doppelganger versions. Like how to say our bodies ourselves after vaccination, disinformation, or how to say I feel unsafe after White Karen's crying wolf, or how to say freedom after French fries and trucker convoys, or how to say feminism or even women, for that matter, after Turfism, after and with all of these things. How to say eco-feminism after eco-fascism, right? Of course, all of this word-wrenching has a flip side too. As some words dissolve and become apparitions of their former selves, others strangely become full of too much so-called meaning. Words like critical race theory or boycott divest sanctions or genocide or Black Lives Matter. These words are not allowed to mean what they plainly mean. Even something like the term white settler has a supposedly nefarious agenda when you might have thought it was just a basic fact or an accurate descriptor. So maybe some people start to use these kinds of words less too, and these words then slip away for different reasons, rather being deflated of meaning their intent is warped and exaggerated and overinflated by those threatened by their honesty. So it's been in this context that I was thinking about what to say about these words today. Gender climate colonialism. In this time and this place. Among people who don't necessarily know each other very well yet or what our intentions are among each other and when words are both over-empty and over-full. And when I'm stuck in a muddle like this though, I usually find the only way out is through. So I figured one place to start would simply be attending to these words and doing it full-on, full-frontal and as honestly as I could. And so that's what I wanna do in these last few minutes. I've taken each of these words and tried to propose a way of thinking about them or approaching them that might make them still worth saying and maybe even saying more. I'll do, I'll start, I'll go in order. I'll do gender first. And I think this might be a poem. I think they all might be poems because it seems I've accidentally started to write poetry and make art and I really don't know what's happening. But anyways, let's see how this goes. This one, gender, is I think like a proposition or maybe a prefigurative definition if that's a thing. So here we go. Gender is, yeah? Gender is something I learned about in my women's studies classes in the 1990s but also something that I still struggle to define. Gender is, that is, a word that always seems to beg further explication. What do you mean by gender? Natural, cultural, scientific, linguistic, expression, performance, preference, assigned, innate, enforced, imprinted, as distinct from sex, as determined by it, or as its unreliable performance? Gender is notoriously evasive when it comes to these questions. Gender is, you see, looking out for itself. Gender is what it is has, gender is what it has to be and does what it has to do as the longstanding target of biopolitical illogics of cis-heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, settler colonialism that seek to keep it apart from sex in the false hope of control and restraint. Gender is, however, not having any of it. Gender is just as happy if you say sex, which could easily be sexuality, which could be desire, which could be reproduction because gender is washing through all of these other words, all of them alibis for each other's persistence. Gender is the deliberate sloshing or mucking around between these words, sex, bodies, desire, reproduction, as a way to thwart those dominating illogics by calling all of it simply gender. And so gender is resistant to its attempted tethering to a binaristic model of nature and culture, bodies and their expressions, desires and their matters. Gender is a different kind of tactic. Gender is in place of taxonomies and species and tired separations of matter from meaning or life from non-life, nothing more nor nothing less than a way of being in the world, which includes both its existing formations as well as limitless possibilities. Gender is, after all, another word for genre, which opens up delicious new opportunities for what gender can be, a kind, a class, a way, a mode of being or doing. Gender is to engender, to generate, to ungender, all as pathways to abundance. Gender is place-based, context-specific, moving as we do. Gender is sensitive to environments, which means in a time of climate catastrophe, its expansiveness and undecidedness might be an amazing kind of adaptation and mitigation strategy. Have you thought about that? Gender is a biodiversity of gender. Gender is, in this insistence on capaciousness and elusiveness, to open instead to new possibilities through carnality and pleasure and queerness and feeling and irreverence and joy. And gender is art, my friend Michael V. Smith says, and gender is going to save the world by always building new ones. Okay, that's gender. Thank you. Well, okay, sure, don't, don't, okay. Let's move on to climate. Climate is more straightforward, maybe. Okay, here we go. Climate is, according to Google, the general weather over a long period. Climate is, as we are well aware, acting rather weirdly lately. Climate is, we might in fact say, acting catastrophically. Climate is, however, on this understanding, apparently independent of us all with a will of its own, which is to some extent the case, but hardly the whole story because climate is also, we know, responsive to and entangled with us humans in all of our weirdnesses, which is to say climate is, in its current expressions, perhaps better understood as a symptom of degraded interhuman relations in forms like white supremacy, cis-heteropatriarchy, ableism, colonialism, capitalism, which means those degraded interhuman relationships which are always about more than humans, too, are really what need our attention right now because climate is the conditions under which we live. Climate is the weather in the room and the air we breathe, both literally and metaphorically, drawing a connecting line between the abstract business of what's, abstract bigness of what's out there and the everyday intimacy of what's around us all the time in different ways for different bodies all weathering differently under these structures of power. Climate is, after all, just weather stretched out in duration. And climate is also, therefore, weathering how bodies weather these storms, which are meteorological and also always more than meteorological. Climate is, as the total climate, what Christina Sharpe has described as anti-blackness and what we can further understand from different and overlapping situated knowledges as anti-poor and misogynist and ableist and anti-queer and anti-trans. Climate is what Jerry Z and Tim Choi call the socio-atmospheric of power and what Kristen Simmons calls settler atmospherics. Climate is the sum of the weathers we bear over and over again, unnoticed and differently, depending on who and where and when and how we are. Climate is something whose change we have been told to fear and to control and to stop, but paying attention to the weather reminds us that some climates need changing if we are going to weather well together and colonialism. Colonialism is like decolonization, not a metaphor. That's it. Yves Tuck and Kay Wayne Yang and several people yesterday in citation have already said pretty much all there is to say. It's all I've come up with, not because this word deserves shorter shrift, it's all I've come up with because in thinking deeply and honestly about this word reminded me that while some words unfurl and reenliven through pulling them and shaping them like toffee to help them speak anew, sometimes we need to insist that a word means what it means on and with purpose. Land back means land back, life back means life back, stop killing everything means stop killing everything and colonialism means colonialism and we can't really call it something else. Persist. Repeat, sharpen, clarify. Naomi Klein comes to a similar conclusion. Well, it's likely too late, she says, to get back everything that's been lost to this emptying out of words. Quote, there is one thing that we must never surrender and that is the language of anti-fascism. She continues, the true meanings of genocide and apartheid and Holocaust and the supremacist mindset that makes them all possible, those words we need as sharp as possible to name and combat what is taking place. So, we can't give up on words because we've used them up or rung them out when we've given them away or simply can no longer live up to them. I'm reminded of something that Anishinaabe Kway, author, poet, musician and activist, Leanne Simpson said about 10 years ago in an interview with surprise Naomi Klein who asked Leanne Simpson about the difficulty of doing land activism on degraded and polluted lands, noting that it was much easier to make people care about the environment when it's beautiful and majestic. And Simpson replied by describing to Klein her love for her land, even as it is poisoned and scarred and made toxic because regardless, this land still nurtures her. I think this idea that you abandon it when something has been damaged, Simpson says, is something we can't afford to do. And words of course aren't land, but land is where all words originally come from. Words, if they are of the earth and of our bodies and of our labors, can nurture us too. And we need to find a way through doppelganger word theft and the blah, blah, blah. And a way back to words as what can nurture us and the communities and commitments we seek to be in service to. We need to find this way to resuture words to action. But I don't think the story ends here, even though maybe it should, I think I'm almost out of time. One more minute, I'll get to the punchline here. While I love Klein's book, I think this conclusion is a bit too neat or at least not quite all there is to say. Because while holding fast is the tactic we hold in one hand, this doesn't mean that the doppelgangers aren't still breathing down your neck, right? I mean, that's where this talk started with wide-eyed incredulity as one reads placards with the slogan, every child matters, a call that came from the broken hearts of indigenous people protesting the coverup of deaths of thousands of children at the hands of residential school systems in Canada, but now being used by anti-abortion picketers outside your local hospital, every child matters. While the three words I've put on the table, gender, climate, and colonialism, or that we have collectively put there in this symposium, we recall that, as Shria mentioned in the, this event is also in the context of the Barbican and of this amazing show that Olona curated, it's also about creative practice. So to finish, like what is the role that art plays in how words mean? Walking through the gallery yesterday or looking at the amazing work described by Zuzanna and Shelley and Cyrus yesterday, I am struck that while in the context of resist and persist, some of the brilliance is on insisting words mean what they mean, right? Loud and large and clear, I'm thinking of Cyrus's defend the police banner, right? That massive one painted outside of the police station. Art also, though, makes things mean more than they mean. Art says something directly and then also says something sideways. The banner said defund the police, but it was also painted, as Cyrus mentioned, in the queerest of all possible pinks. So what else and what more is defund the police meaning now? So when Klein confesses her concern over booby-trapped words, my response is, maybe art should be a booby-trap, too. But it's a booby-trap that goes through the looking glass and then back out again. If words are to find their way out of this mirror world, then we need vehicles to transport them. And those vehicles can be our laboring and vigilant and persistent bodies, but they can also be the magic trick of art, a kind of speaking that can say things both totally plainly and totally obliquely at the same time. A vehicle whose operations are shifty, but like shifty good, keeping the doppelgangers on their toes and looking over their shoulders. So what if art, which I think mostly means making something that's honest, which I think is a bit different than telling the truth, right? Could be one way to out doppelganger the doppelgangers. Calling it like it is and queering the terms of the call at the same time, being resolute about meaning and insisting it also means more. Overwhelming them with meaning, Trojan horsing it in, keep pushing the envelope when it looks like you're simply holding the line. A biodiversity of meanings. More booby traps, please. That's that. That's it. Wow. Well, huge thanks already today to Shria and to Astridia for organising this really fantastic conference. And this morning for presenting us with some incredibly productive, challenging, generative themes, questions, provocations, poems, to kick off our discussions today. And thanks also for the friendship and the kinship that this symposium is already enabling. It's really fantastic to feel the energy in the room. My name is Lucy Bradnock. I'm Dean for Research at the Courtauld Institute of Art. And I'm here to introduce our next speaker today, Catherine Fine. Catherine is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Architecture at Columbia University, New York, where she also completed a graduate certificate with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. Catherine specialises in the visual and material culture of the United States and the Atlantic world with a particular interest in representations of the human body and their relationship to social and ecological change. And Catherine's work, which has appeared in British art studies in the Oxford Art Journal in American art, reminds us really powerfully, I think that visual and material culture not only reflects but also constructs and underpins ecological, colonial and gender ideologies historically and in the present moment, and that it can resist those ideologies also. And her work reminds us that we find those ideological constructions and modes of resistance in the material, in the daguerreotype, the plaster cast, the print, as well as in the purely visual. Catherine's currently at work on her dissertation about nudity and ecology in 19th century art. And her recent publications have focused on the materiality of life casts, the haptics of abolitionist photography and miniature portraits painted on elephant ivory. And her paper today explores the entanglement of sexual, colonial and extractive desires via the pervasive and profoundly strategic model of visual allegory. We will have time for questions afterwards. And as Astrid has said, we will then have a short comfort break before our next session. So I'd like to welcome Catherine. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Lucy, for that introduction, which went well beyond what I provided you. So I'm very grateful. And thank you, Astrid, for setting up my talk so wonderfully. I really love the idea of art seeing something directly, but also sideways. And I hope that that idea can come up a little bit through the works of art I'm gonna show today. And of course, thank you to the organizers and to all of you, my fellow speakers and then audience members for a really meaningful day of discussion yesterday and what I'm sure will be another meaningful day of discussion today. I'm honored to present my work here and it maybe will be a little bit different than what we've heard so far. I'm an art historian of the 18th and 19th centuries, so I'm gonna turn the clock back a little bit. And I hope you're willing to join me in looking closely at some artworks together. We're gonna see some images today. This is a new project for me and in the spirit of collaborative inquiry and conversation that's been so wonderful here. I'm sharing today more questions than answers and I'm sincerely looking forward to your thoughts after the talk. So part one, continental allegories then. In 1792, British engraver William Blake picked up his burin and incised an image of three women into a copper plate. Line by line, he mapped the topographies of their unclothed bodies. The density of marks articulating not only light, shadow, depth and roundness, but also racialized skin. Undulating and curling lines give shape to their hair with that of a central figure bending improbably around her right hip to cover her genitals. As the women reach for one another, their arms create a figure eight and a garland drapes in front of them, doubly encircling their forms. They stand upon an indeterminate natural surface with scattered flora in front and vague outlines of mountains behind. This land occupies only the lowest register of the image. The mountains do not so much as reach their bare knees. Yet land is central to this image. When this engraving appeared in print in 1796, it was accompanied by a caption. Europe supported by Africa and America. Thus these nude bodies do not merely stand upon land, they are land. In representing continents as unclothed women, Blake drew upon a long tradition of four continents allegories in European art. Many scholars traced the formalization of four continents iconography to Cesare Rippa, whose 1603 book of visual symbols circulated widely in many European languages and included the illustrations seen here. Across multiple European empires, allegorical figures representing the continents, almost always female, became ubiquitous in visual and material culture, appearing everywhere from maps to architectural facades. By conflating female bodies with continental land masses, this imagery drew an equivalence between sexual and imperial conquest. This is exemplified by another very well-known example of continental allegory, Stradinus's Allegory of America, also dated to around 1600. In this engraving charged with eroticism, the standing, fully-clothed, Amerigo Vespucci carries an astrolabe, a sword and a staff, topped with a crucifix, as he awakens a reclining naked woman. European audiences viewed this scene knowing that this indigenous woman was to take the explorer's name. As art historian Charmaine Nelson summarizes, the four continents went hand in hand with the idea of woman as nature, literalizing the symbolic representation of woman as territory. In this visual schema, the female body, like the land of the so-called New World, was available for European men to conquer and exploit. Because this conference is taking place in London, I have to mention that this visual lexicon continues to pervade national iconography and public spaces. So one example of many, which maybe many of you are familiar with and those who are not familiar with London, you can go see this if you're interested to. The four continents can be found at the four corners of the Albert Memorial in Kensington Gardens, seen here with Europe to the west, Asia to the east. America faces into the park behind Europe and Africa behind Asia. Opened in 1872, this memorial demonstrates the continued imperial reliance on four continents imagery well into the 19th century. In other words, William Blake's famous engraving constitutes just one permutation of a colonial trope that long preceded him and would endure long after. Blake's version also draws on a different precedent. The three graces of Greek myth, goddesses of somewhat flexible identities, they have different names and different sources, but largely associated with beauty and pleasure. For European artists during and after the Renaissance, like Rubens and Canova, seen here, this tripartite subject suited their interest in representing and sexualizing the nude female body. As they displayed it from multiple angles, they evoked the sense of touch with the graces intertwined arms and caressing hands. Blake's composition reproduces these linked arms as he joins classical mythology to modern imperial iconography. Martialing these precedents, Blake's engraving appeared in a text with a relationship to colonial oppression and violence that complicates the image and has caused scholars to spill quite a lot of ink. First published in 1796, John Gabriel Steadman's narrative of a five years expedition recounts the author's time in what was then known to Europeans as the Dutch colony of Suriname. The two-volume, almost 900-page text is at once a personal journal, the travelogue of an amateur naturalist, a violent account of Dutch colonial slavery, and a heavily sanitized story of Steadman's sexual life, recasting his abuse of an enslaved mixed-race teenager as a story of romantic love. Numerous scholars, including David Byneman, Elizabeth Pulcher, Mary-Louise Pratt, Richard Price and Sally Price, Emily Sr., Sarah Thomas and Marcus Wood, have written compelling accounts of the narrative's equivocal relationship to enslavement and abolition. Because immediately upon its publication in 1796, it was adopted as an abolitionist text because it laid bare in agonizing detail the brutality of slavery. Yet Steadman himself was no abolitionist and his words and images not only recounted physical violence but enacted representational violence upon enslaved and colonized people of African and indigenous descent. I'm not showing any images today other than Blake's allegory. Although many are seemingly benign records of flora and fauna, others are voyeuristic depictions of physical and sexual violence. These were Steadman's own images. He produced watercolors and his publisher hired several engravers, including Blake, to produce the prints. Very few of Steadman's original watercolors survive so we don't know how much the engravers altered them. As was common for illustrated books at the time, the black and white prints were then hand colored, as you can see here in two different copies. This one, which is my terrible photo, I'm sorry, was Steadman's personal copy. Europe supported by African America was the final plate, accompanying Steadman's concluding wish that Europe, Africa, and America may henceforth, excuse me, Europe, African America, quote, may henceforth and to all eternity be the props of each other. If this sounds mutually beneficial, the prints caption clarifies that they are not all each other's props in turn, it is Africa and America that support Europe. The final image, however, exceeds the surrounding text and is dense with layered meanings. Whether a product of Steadman's hand or Blake's, it can be read alternately along or against the imperial grain. Europe stands in classical Contrapasto, her torso seemingly held upright by the strength of the women on either side. Is this idealized femininity or a critique of Europe's weakness and dependency? Similarly, Europe's eyes are downcast while Africa and America confront the viewer directly. Is Europe exhibiting demure modesty or helpless shame? Are Africa and America embodying sexualized stereotypes or asserting their own gazes? Perhaps then, this iconic image speaks to the contradictions not only of imperialism and abolition, but of allegory itself. And perhaps it is this very ambivalence which continues to make Blake's three continents so fascinating to artists today. Part two, continental allegories now. Nigerian British sculptor, Sokari Douglas Camp, remembers how she felt when she first saw William Blake's engraving. Quote, I saw these naked women on the internet and I went, ooh, what's this? And then I realized it was something to do with slavery. Although she learned that it was historically understood as an abolitionist image, she couldn't help but notice the hierarchy among the racialized allegorical figures and recognized how this configuration still describes political and social relationships today. Like many other leading contemporary artists, Camp's practice has often involved engagement with the European artistic canon. She has said, quote, I am influenced by cross-cultural exchange. The layers and wealth of these transpositions are at the core of the ideas that I tried to convey. And so, in keeping with this broader practice, she set out to remake Blake's image in three dimensions, deploying but also undermining the trope of continental allegory. For Camp, Blake's engraving called to mind another image. This one sent to her by her sister-in-law. In a celebratory photograph, this one seen here at upper left, Camp's sister-in-law stands at center as she and her family members attend a wedding. Their colorful clothing and gleaming jewelry inspired Camp to clothe Europe, Africa and America in bright patterned skirts and green head wraps. All while maintaining fidelity to Blake's composition and postures, which she studied carefully as she sketched, as you can see on the right. Where Blake, excuse me. Where Blake incised minute lines into a copper plate, Camp welded her sculpture in steel. In her London studio, she shaped and fused metal into three-dimensional, life-sized human forms, their bodies coming into being through fire. About 180 centimeters or six feet tall, the sculpture brings the figures off the page and into the viewer's space. Europe's eyes are still downcast, but Africa and Europe engage, excuse me, Africa and America engage the audience's gaze in front and to the right of the sculpture as they seem to move through space, their legs suggesting forward motion. Their torsos are neither bare nor clothed. Although they seem to wear green shirts, their belly buttons and breasts are clearly visible and three-dimensional floral forms might be either distinct flowers or parts of their garments. A garland still drapes from one side of the group to the other, but on each end, the artist has added petrol nozzles. Much of Camp's work focuses on the human and environmental violence wreaked by capitalist greed, both across the globe and in Nigeria specifically, and this sculpture is no different. What unites these three women is not nature, but the exploitation of it, the extraction of fossil fuel. On the back of the sculpture, in looping script evocative of but departing from the font and Steadman's text, Camp identifies a source for her sculpture as Blake's engraving. Yet she hides this text from first view. Perhaps it is in these women's past. As they turn and walk away from the inscription, they leave behind the expectations of continental allegories of racialized women in a perpetual state of colonial domination. From June 2022 to May of this year, Camp's sculpture took up residence in the sculpture hall at the Victorian Albert Museum. Perhaps some of you saw it. The only work of contemporary art in a long gallery full of old marble, these three women, Camp's extended family, but also Europe, Africa, and America, gazed out over the history of European art. They looked upon Canova's Three Graces, which stood just a few feet away. Their marble caresses soft against the sharpness of steel, their monochromatic whiteness flat in contrast to the vitality of Camp's acrylic paints. This installation also brought Camp's work to within half a mile of the Albert Memorial, where the figures of Europe, Africa, and Asia stand far apart, all subservient to the imperial throne. Within and beyond the walls of art museums, the trope of continental allegories endures. Artists like Camps take a claim for the contemporary salience of this imagery, but also the urgent need to subvert the underlying colonial ideologies and to reforge the relationship between body and land. Part three, three of three, of bodies and land. In the exhibition downstairs, 20th and 21st century artists rebel against the colonial ideologies that underpin continental allegories. They rebel against the essentialist conflation of women in nature, against the exploitation of both to satisfy capitalist greed, against the colonial subjugation of the global south, people of color, and non-normative life ways, and against the representational strategies that have made visual art complicit in sexual and environmental violence. As we study and celebrate this gathering of anti-colonial visions, and as we hear from so many brilliant artists and thinkers thinking about the present and the future, should we also look backward to the past to the visual archive of colonialism? If so, how and why should we do this? Perhaps continental allegories pose one answer. For one thing, they are still with us in the present inhabiting both museums and public spaces. At a minimum, this justifies ongoing scrutiny, if not also activism and action. But we might look at them still more closely, pointing out not only their ubiquity, but also their instability and ambivalences. Perhaps they might be deployed to work against the very ideologies they work to uphold. To this end, I would like to return in closing to the land beneath these women's unshawed feet. Camp's lush grass dances alongside her figure's toes, the unruly blades creating an impression of movement within the still steel. She translates Blake's distant, hazy mountains into spikes of obdurate metal, laying bare that they are merely an artist's abstraction, monumental geological forms relegated to background, framing aesthetic choice. In this register of grass and mountains, perhaps we can see the unrerepresentability of land. After all, it is this very unrerepresentability that made Continental Allegories so compelling for so long. They turned land into bodies so that men could claim both. But this horizontal expanse of ground reveals the incommensurability of that vision. Continental allegories attempted to resolve a problem of scale. But in this, I think that Blake's engraving fails. Instead of body as land, we see body in land in a moment of contact, of relation, of situatedness. Like so many forms of Imperial representation, this image undermines itself before our eyes. Thank you. We do have some time for questions, and so we'll open it up, roving Mike for those who want to share questions, thoughts. And I think there's a way of bringing together the historical viewpoint that we just heard with the words of Shreya and Astridah from this morning, just kind of keeping an eye out. Thank you so much. It was magisterial. And yeah, it's just so lovely to see art history right in front of you. Thank you so much. I was really curious about the libidinal economy dimension. And that also connects to Astridah's talk a little bit. I was thinking about Astridah, when you mentioned this thing about you can't bring activists or you can't bring people to care about land that isn't beautiful. And I was immediately, I thought about ableism and beautiful bodies. And really, this is not a question, it's just something that's percolating for me, thinking about not really aesthetics, because aesthetics has a different meaning from beauty, but thinking perhaps about the relationship between seduction and care and caring for something. And I'm also really interested in the eco-sexual kind of dimension that we haven't really touched a lot, we haven't really touched on eco-sexuality, but I think there's something really problematic and potent at the same time about yeah, the role of the libidinal in connecting those strands. Am I making sense? Thank you so much. And that's a really interesting way to frame something that I've been thinking about a little bit. And I didn't really broach here, both in the interest of time and because these ideas are new for me, which is how we might read those gestures of closeness among these three women who are an artist's creation. These are not real women, we can't see in this act any kind of, well, perhaps we can. How can we, does reading this image against the intentions of its creator, against the intentions of the text which it appeared, I'm talking about Blake's engraving, not Camp's, open up possibilities for us to see acts of care where they were not intended. And I think Camp has never talked about this, but I think we can see this kind of, this gesture of closeness as a sexual gesture between these, among these three women. And I don't know if that might change how we understand this image or present further opportunities to this image to work against itself. Now, the representation of three women standing closely together, caressing one another, their hands reaching across each other's bodies is not necessarily a, I don't mean to position it as a rebellious gesture within the long history of European art, but that doesn't mean we can't now apply the lens we want to today to find different meaning in it. I mean, I think just to speak to Chris's point as well, something that did strike me in thinking about beauty and kind of non-beauty in some of these representations is also thinking about fertility and barrenness, which is a relationship that artists at old times are making between women and land and how that has changed also. And I think this also brings in a question around ableism and reproductive rights. And there is a whole different strand also to be thought about perhaps along those lines in thinking about territory and consent. And then maybe I'll just briefly add a direct response to your point about, that was a quote from a question, right? That Leanne Simpson's territory, Anishinaabe land has been poisoned by all sorts of mining and mercury and all sorts of things and Naomi Klein's talking to her and says, well, wouldn't it be easier to move to BC like environmental activism is easier there because it's so beautiful and everybody wants to save nature, you know? And to which Simpson replies, well, the longer quote says, well, you don't abandon your mother because she's been abused, this land nurtures us and that's the reason we have to care for it. All the more, although I'm also thinking Alona in your tour yesterday, the sort of way that care has been bandied around as though it's this like romantic practice or something when it's hard work, unglamorous time, right? So I think those are the things that Simpson is also invoking there. And you're absolutely correct that a creepy ecology and a query ecology brings us to those questions very directly about what is it that we care for or are even in a bit of a relationship with, right? Not necessarily what's beautiful and glamorous, or in the eyes of the dominant narrative. So I think those are all just good openings to sort of keep pulling open. Thank you. Mine's a general question and I'd like to thank the speakers for really illuminating papers this morning. As someone who writes and thinks about contemporary art and its role in the midst of some of these critical urgent issues, I was struck by Astrid's conclusion. Your point, art makes things say more than they mean. Art must be oblique, it must perform a kind of sideways operation. It seems to me in the context of UK cultural politics at the moment, this has never been a more urgent issue to address. How can art mediate some of these critical issues? This conference might be construed, might be weaponized as part of what is being called the culture wars. Derogatory uses of the term woke are consistently applied to the sorts of issues that we're engaging with. It's increasingly difficult to engage in forms of protest because of the way in which legislation has been developed. And it seemed to me for some time that art has an incredibly critical role at the moment to engage, to provoke, to perform, to use metaphor, to allegory, to enable us to disseminate ideas and critiques. And I just wondered, Astrid you spoke very eloquently about it, if you'd like to add a bit more about how art, and we've seen many examples of that, can develop this critical mediating role. It can't necessarily just reflect because that makes it vulnerable within this current political climate that we find ourselves in. I think. Sorry, that was a very big, no, and I'm, you know, I'd really like to pass it also to Lucy and Shria, and I mean, Catherine and Shria, but also Lucy, if you want to add, but I mean, really I don't have a lot more to say, except I think yes, right? And, you know, we see like so many different ways of doing that, you know, I think Cyrus's presentation yesterday showed a very direct, like activism oriented way to call something what it is, but also to sort of Trojan horse, these other things in. And other maybe projects are more, more oblique, but they're still saying something directly. I mean, I would just say yes to what you're saying. I don't, I don't know really, I'd rather hear what other people have to say about it. Yeah. It was actually going to be partly my question or not question, maybe kind of long winded thought about metaphor and allegory. And I think that for me is what connected Astridha, your talk and yours, Catherine, as well, because I know some of you in the room were also part of a reading group recently when we were talking about climate coloniality. And one of the things that came up that we really sort of moved around the room is the role of metaphor. And thinking about the fact that decolonization and its use at Astridha colonialism is not a metaphor, but then what is the role of metaphor do? And I think one of the questions was the sort of the importance and urgency of metaphor and allegory as well, but not to kind of, not to let it be co-opted or misappropriated in terms like decolonization, but actually use metaphor and allegory in ways that are kind of providing these biodiversity of meanings as you said, Astridha, but also kind of using metaphor to make some of the connections visible that colonialism isn't a metaphor, right? Like I think to make the structures visible to kind of show that in some sense that there are real things happening in the past, in the kind of construction of identity, in the construction of not just identity, but also kind of national identity, national kind of movements as well. And the way we think about just very basic things is kind of due to how we've been taught to think as well. So I think really allegory has, and metaphor have very long histories and one of the things that I know I've been thinking about quite a lot is the role of, especially in the way that Catherine, you presented also as an art historian, I think thinking about the fact that art and visual culture have been tools in kind of histories of enslavement as well. And at the same time, they've been tools of emancipation, they've been used by both camps as a way and to think of that as real and how the way we make art, the way we make meaning, we make words has to kind of keep that conversation in mind as well. Absolutely, and that just makes me think that I didn't say this exactly clearly, but I think what makes Blake's image of such enduring relevance and makes it so compelling to contemporary artists is because it was used as both an oppressive and abolitionist image, and it contains those possibilities within this one instance of iconography. But also I just want to add to this, to this conversation a little bit and in response to your question, the use of humor also I think is important and Camp talks about this a lot in this work a little bit, but more for other work, it's more visible. Violence and humor and sexuality and critique and all these things can coexist and that humor I think really operates in this kind of sideways, subversive, multiple registers way at the same time. And I think we could read Camp's sculpture that I showed today as a very funny one, if you wanted to, and a very sly and clever and multifaceted humorous object, yeah. Yeah, I think that points very well made and humor and performance seems to me to be absolutely strategic and is a theme running throughout this conference. I'm just going to add a couple of thoughts, I suppose the first is you're absolutely right, it's no coincidence that the culture war comes hand in hand with the restriction on rights to protest. And I think that is a recognition that as I think we've all been saying this morning, images do not just document and reflect, but just as we use words to produce and create and understand meaning, we use images in the same way. And the slipperiness of those images and the kind of multivalence of those images is both powerful and also kind of terrifying to those who would want to control the narrative. So I think you said something in your talk, Catherine, that the image exceeds the surrounding text, which sort of put me in mind of what you were talking about Estrida, talking about words, sometimes words mean what they mean. But of course with images, sometimes they mean what they mean, but they mean different things to different people. And I think the slipperiness that you were talking about, the way that words have been co-opted, that Greta was talking about yesterday, we see that also with images. And so they really have to be at the heart of that mode of resistance because they are the thing that has constructed ideologies, underpinned them, shored them up, and the means by which those can be changed, I think. And I just, can I just quickly add too, like I think the point is that they will never not be co-opted. Like we can't sort of like safeguard any word or image or anything against co-option. So I mean, I've been thinking about this as the only thing you can do is make it mean more and more and again, and repeat and change and slip and just keep going because there's nothing you can do to safeguard it from being that way. And Catherine, as your presentation, so beautifully sort of brought to a conclusion, like a metaphor is never just a metaphor. It's always also materiality. It's also women's bodies and land, right? So even when we talk about metaphor and allegory as sort of doing something sideways, they're also doing something direct because they're always connected by some tether to the thing that gives them their metaphorical power. So there's just something just so great in that. Can I see something very bleak if you don't? We're just gonna, no more questions. We're just gonna talk. I'm just to put it out there because we were talking about this last night with Cyrus in terms of thinking about when there is slipperiness, when there is sort of space to think critically about something and you see something and you know it's not exactly what it means, but you need to have the ability to think about it differently, but with not just cuts to education, but a kind of almost consistent attack on critical thinking and arts education that's maybe also for us to think about what kind of grounds we prepare for people, for generations to be able to look at something, to be interested in looking at something, to be able to sort of play words as well. And I know this is kind of taking the very long view, but I think it is important as a part of the conversation as we create slipperiness, as we think about metaphor is to kind of make sure that we have the conditions for viewing and understanding and thinking critically about them. I think there's a question up in the front, just one last question, I'm really sorry we talked so much, but we'd like to keep talking with all of you through the day. Just two things, one is booby trap metaphor because booby stems from the word. I imagine boobs, breasts, but setting that aside. Yesterday there was references to acknowledging the lands that we're in and that was brought home to me and I'm finding it quite difficult to be in the room because I'm feeling unexpected grief for the death of Benjamin Zaffnaya, who embodies and yeah, and who embodies a lot of the things that we're touching on today. So I kind of feel like I need to acknowledge it, as a poet on this landscape and for the lifelong contributions that he made. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone.