Territory
The final section of my paper departs from what has gone before, in that it focuses not on the physical manipulation of earth – like the processes of burial, excavation, displacement and cultivation – but on the means by which earth becomes culturally and politically inscribed. More so than the other three elements – Air, Fire and Water – Earth carries connotations of nationality and identity, indicating the material specificity of a location, nation or state. This concept was explored in a series of works collectively entitled Geographical Mutations, made by Cildo Meireles in 1969. Working at the height of the military dictatorship in Brazil during the late 1960s and early 70s, Meireles instigated a series of minute interventions in the landscape which, like his contemporaneous indoor Virtual Spaces, deal simultaneously with the phenomenology and ideology of space. Geographical Mutations: Rio-Sao Paulo Border involved working on the border between the two rivalrous cities, digging a hole on each side of the border and exchanging soil, plants and debris between the twinned excavations. Earth and plant material from each site was also collected in a leather carrying case, with an internal division replicating the topography of the border. In a further dislocation, the soil could thus be transported around Brazil and ultimately, out of the country.
The same year, Meireles gave another group of works the collective title Nowhere is My Home, suggesting that the repressive regime in Brazil had rendered him an exile in his own country. The fugitive materials of Geographical Mutations, and the logic of concealment and subterfuge operative within the leather carrying case, suggest an outlawed existence also explored by the other Brazilian artists at the time, notably Helio Oiticia. It is also evident in Condensations 2 – Geographical Mutations: Rio-Sao Paulo Border, one of many silver rings containing soil from both sides of the border and a diagram detailing the work’s construction. Like the ingenious gadgetry of some undercover agent, the ring conceals its earthy treasure under a shield of amethyst, distilling the vast terrain of Meireles’ homeland into a discreet and fragile entity. In a phrase which echoes comments made about Arte Povera in Italy, Meireles has suggested that: “certain characteristics of Brazilian art – economy of materials, power of synthesis and a good deal of its creative potential – refer to the country’s very socio-economic and cultural precariousness.”
This sense of precariousness: an inherent fragility of territory, habitability and mortality, has been comprehensively explored by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum since the late 1980s. Her Hanging Garden (2008) consists of seven-hundred-and-seventy jute sacks filled with earth and stacked to head level to form a ten meter long barricade. An extended version was installed in the Tuileries Gardens in Paris, disrupting this refined and elegantly landscaped space with its utilitarian associations of pre-empted violence and self-defence. Yet like Haacke’s Grass Grows of forty years earlier, this earth was seeded, causing the sandbags to sprout tufts of grass. Hatoum’s title, Hanging Garden, evokes the Babylonian paradise once said to have occupied the middle-Eastern landscape now ravaged by violence. This simple work encapsulates many of the themes I have covered, with decidedly ambivalent results. The barricade suggests an imminent threat of death and burial, while its displacement into the Tuileries Gardens, where it appeared as if transported from another world, engages with Hatoum’s consistently explored themes of exile and homelessness. But just as Hatoum’s title mournfully excavates the lush history of the Middle East, the sprouting grass also has a redemptive effect, suggesting that life persists against the odds. Between comrade and enemy, attack and defence, life and death, the barricade occupies a liminal zone, thus posing as many questions as it answers.
The final work I want to consider also draws together many of the themes of my paper. Invited by German parliament to propose a work for the Reichstag in Berlin in 1998, Hans Haacke sought to engage directly with the culturally and historically loaded site of the newly refurbished building. Above the main steps is the 1916 inscription Dem Deutschen Volk, or To the German People. Noting the racial specificity of this address and the use of the word “Volk” by the Nazis to shore up restrictive notions of national identity, Haacke suggested that a neon sign reading “Der Bevölkerung” (“to the population”) be erected in the courtyard of the North Wing of the building. The sign was to be installed in a rectangular trench, to which each Member of Parliament would contribute a bag of soil from his or her constituency. The proposal was hotly debated in parliament and was eventually passed by a narrow margin. Interestingly, one objection to the work came from the Green Party, who described it work as “bio-kitsch,” possibly unaware of Haacke’s sustained engagement with issues of ecology since the 1960s. Other MPs suggested that the use of soil from across Germany was evocative of Nazi “blood and soil” propaganda, in which German racial identity was claimed to be tied, literally and metaphorically, to the land. Yet Haacke’s point was exactly the opposite: that the German population should be constituted in terms of habitation, rather than ethnicity. When the project was accepted, politicians bought earth from historically loaded sites including the graves of important historical figures, or former concentration camps, and some invited their constituents to vote on the location from which the soil should be sampled. Two members of the Green Party later claimed that they had spiked their soil with marijuana seeds, leading to newspaper reports of marijuana growing in the Reichstag. Once the trough had been filled, Haacke specified that it should be left to the elements, so that seeds contained within the soil would begin to grow, watered by the rain; whenever a politician joins or leaves parliament he or she is requested to bring or remove a bag of soil. The piece stays true to Haacke’s 1965 aim to “make something which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is non stable,” yet here that ecological responsiveness is aligned with political response-ability. Der Bevölkerung contends that in order to survive, parliament must remain an open, rather than a closed system; constantly adjusting in order to serve the needs of the population.