Brian Holmes: Rivermap

Maps are power—whether in the colonial era, or in today’s imperial system. But how can they be deconstructed, reconfigured, shared among multiple actors and used to chart alternative futures? How can they embrace the processual flow of time and the multiplicity of embodied viewpoints? Can digital maps still reveal the territory? Can maps of power become pathways of liberation?

Brian Holmes has spent the last decade developing an online mapkit for issues in political ecology, while simultaneously engaging in his favorite research activity: roaming around the riverine landscapes of the American Midwest, the Pacific Northwest coast and the La Plata Basin in South America (he often jokes about “cartography with your feet”). Holmes was previously known in European art and activist circles as an essayist and public speaker, and over the course of these years he has invented a new but strangely familiar genre, the essay map, filled with written text, scientific visualization and multimedia imagery. Each of his projects develops its own conceptual frame, narrative structure, visual style and metaphorical register, expressive of an inquiring subjectivity. Yet at the same time, each of them stems from a territorial dialogue, with multiple inputs from artists, specialists, local inhabitants and social movements, all touched in one way or another by aspects of the non-human world. The essay map is therefore not an individual product but an embodied and immersive practice—a way of reaching out, testing the water, diving in. During a series of extended stays at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Holmes and his collaborators will show a number of ongoing explorations, while launching a new inquiry into the Neckar River watershed.

Künstlerhaus Stuttgart does not hold traditional exhibitions, but instead seeks to create permeating moods or “atmospheres.” The idea is to let a mode of expression drift away from its immediately tangible forms, into relationships, vocabularies, daily rounds and common resources. Atmospheres emerge slowly, in the transition from season to season, a bit like a garden that germinates under bare earth and yields a multiplicity of fruits at harvest time. Rivermap has been conceived on this seasonal timeline. It begins at the moment of the autumn equinox, in a little corner of an expansive fourth-floor gallery. Gradually over the following six months it will fill and overflow with images, voices, concepts, and encounters.

Learning from Cascadia sets the tone. The project—not a simple map but a full-fledged atlas—was launched over a two-year period in and around Portland, Oregon, in collaboration with cultural organizer Mack McFarland, with a special contribution by the Indigenous artist Sara Siestreem. It’s devoted to a land both real and imaginary: the Bioregion of Cascadia, stretching from Northern California far up into British Columbia. Cascadia emerged from the back-to-the-land movements of the 1970s, as a possible new framework of habitation and stewardship. Yet Cascadia is not just another ‘70s utopia. Because the Pacific Northwest is home to so many Indigenous peoples, who have sovereign treaty rights and ever-increasing support from settler allies, the region has developed emergent forms of biocultural governance, largely devoted to undoing the damages of industrial modernism and opening up new practices of ecological restoration. Learning from Cascadia offers a model for the exploration of reparative processes such as these, and for their prefiguration in places where they do not yet exist.

Atmospheres are synonymous with mutability. In November the exhibition will change shape to include the eco-activist work of the group Casa Río in Argentina, with whom Holmes has collaborated over the past seven years. And in January, that work will be joined by two other projects carried out with videomaker Jeremy Bolen, focusing on the origins and consequences of global ecological change, aka the Anthropocene. Here, embodied and situated concerns merge with what scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “atmospheres of history”: planetary processes affecting all living beings.

Curatorial proposal by Tamarind Rossetti and Stephen Wright.