In their introduction to the 2018 special issue of Third Text, entitled “Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions,” art theorists Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh describe plantation spaces, tropical island colonies, and botanical gardens as “laboratories of empire.”8.1.1 From this starting point, this pathway examines how representational and nonrepresentational artistic works address the moral and ethical fissures of our time. The selections in this pathway are not satisfied with superficial repair. They look to repair as reparation, taking the genealogy of colonial violence and rupture as a foundation for the pursuit of rebuilding or building otherwise. In this understanding, repair encompasses the notion of infrastructural breakdown, as well as ecofeminist, postcolonial, and decolonial thinking. Achille Mbembe’s 2001 book On the Postcolony and more recent lectures speak to the construction of inhuman others in Western philosophical thought and reparations that instead create life in common.8.1.2 Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands,8.1.3 too, reveals the multidimensional identities and shifting borders that re-present themselves in us, while feminist and STS theorist Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s work8.1.4 looks to “soil care” relationalities as a means of suspending the capitalist present to focus on caring well.

Repair is a subjective and subject-making process: an approach rather than an objective. With repair on my mind, I look at what faces me, and perhaps you: prismatic (in)coherence in a time of emotional disarray, multitemporal living, ecological collapse, and decolonial awakening.

The summer of 2022 saw unseasonably hot weather in many places, destabilizing inextricably interdependent systems and affecting many humans that rely on such systems—both those who are predominantly to blame for global warming and those who are not. 

India passed a ban on wheat exports on May 13 as heat affected its crops, keeping them for domestic food needs. While Indian wheat exports account for less than 1 percent of all global wheat trade, this ban alongside the war in Ukraine, also a major supplier of wheat, unsettled global markets. The Chicago benchmark wheat index rose nearly 6 percent. On June 14, S&P Global reported India was “assessing domestic wheat requirement and availability of wheat” and would likely soon reopen exports to five countries—Indonesia, Bangladesh, the UAE, Yemen, and Oman.

India’s choice to balance local needs and export demands reflects the influence of both internal and external pressures in determining how nations act. India, still seen as a cross between a developing economy and a production powerhouse, is not dependent on the West’s economy to keep afloat, and it regularly advances regional priorities and alliances. While it does lean on World Bank loans—with US$13.2 billion outstanding across 388 loans as of June 2022, and sixteen approved, as-yet undisbursed new loans amounting to about US$3.6 billion—India also asserts itself so as to maintain strategic import dependencies with smaller countries. Yet other, US-centered views warn that the war unfolding in Ukraine will soon have impacts on Asian and African countries, creating another war: a hunger war.

The first question, then, is: Whose repair? Repair for whom? Repair with whom? As the rhetoric at the World Economic Forum moves toward “interdependence,” while sidestepping the culpability of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in undermining African food sovereignty, the hypocrisy of whitewashed repair shines more brightly than ever. 

Repair is social, it is ecological, and it needs to be intersectional. Reparations after coal-based pollution and contamination are, as artists and scholars Sarah Lewison and Andrew Yang reveal,8.1.5 a multiyear process requiring ongoing efforts to rehabilitate and prevent future incursion onto the land. Repair may entail acknowledging the depths of anthropomorphic, metabolic transformation already done to lands and waters,8.1.6 or gathering to study accidental conservation areas created on the border zones of post-military conflict and industrial farming.8.1.7 Such changes often require a movement of intersectional identities and politics in order to enable a reallocation of funds. 

Repair may also ask for deep, embodied connection, going beyond the bounds of what was previously “sensible” to repattern oneself and contemplate a “shared complicity” in the history of horticultural policies that have enfolded people and space: repair as horticultural novelty, invasive, or soil-regenerating. Repair includes asking questions, as artist Ellie Irons does, like: “What does an anti-racist, nonviolent restoration ecology look like in the face of mass migration?”8.1.8 It involves working with drawing as a fluid unfixing, to free infrastructural imaginations and offer new representational approaches.8.1.9 Often, material objects mediate relations between new socialities and land.8.1.10

Just as repair can renew spirits, it also involves engaging with loss. Loss may be measured, Sarah Lewison writes,8.1.11 through collective listening or witnessing—practices that facilitate preparation for repair. Or, as at this moment in time, engaging may mean learning to become incarnate witnesses to war, as my and collaborators’ contribution about witnessing with primary, secondary, and tertiary proximities to the wars in Myanmar and Ukraine, reveals. It may mean speculative offerings to expand political and historical imaginations for reconciliation, as in the map of narratives from survivors of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia, by artist Rangga Purbaya and collaborators.8.1.12 It may mean learning from people who live today under genocidal regimes formed on postcolonial ruins. 

The texts and images I have selected for this pathway reveal different points of departure and approaches toward collapse: for instance, a more accommodating attitude toward computational code by musical artist Matthijs Kouw,8.1.13 or the nonhierarchical eco-pedagogy of the Gadap Sessions,8.1.14 run by artists and curators Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani’s nomadic anti-institution Karachi LaJamia. While Kouw notes how the specialization of labor around computational modeling is also creating an epistemic opacity around code, Rajani and Malkani disrupt imperial modes of knowledge production and circulation by creating nonhierarchical pedagogical environments outside traditional student/teacher frameworks. 

The two views split at the second question: What do we do, in order to repair? While human practices combine with statistical uncertainty around scientific models to form sometimes outsized “human errors”—as when testers of an electric car plunge to their death and a company rules it an “accident (not caused by the vehicle itself)”—it is ignorance and denial, not uncertainty, that make ecological justice and reparations so difficult. “Sowing Somankidi Coura” by artists and filmmakers Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré8.1.15 makes this clear. Their fifteen-year collaboration through scriptwriting, play, and film documents the permacultural practices of Somankidi Coura—a self-organized farming cooperative along the Senegal River founded by a group of former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977, in response to the Sahel drought of 1973. Cooperative (2008), a compelling split-screen video work, follows termites, water, irrigation canals, and autonomy rent from coercive, unfair, postcolonial conditions. Traana (Temporary Migrant) (2017), a short film, documents countryside-to-city-to-France migration trajectories, revealing the effects of a postcolonial, rent-seeking state’s extractive effects of pushing migrants to the city. “Time is infinite. There will always be something to do,” says Touré, recording in his home on 58 rue Trousseau in Paris. “In Africa, we are shown positive images of Europe. But in Paris, a human is less important than capital.” 

Repair, and care, thus ask us to imagine economy wholly differently. As scholar Xhercis Méndez reminds us, theorists Laura Ann Stoler, María Lugones, and others have shown how “various categories of inferiorisation,” including the notion of “gender,”8.1.16 were created in colonies to justify dehumanization and exploitation—categories that then traveled back to the metropoles. This “colonial matrix of power,” as theorists Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh have termed it, affects us all not only as a paradigm that justifies resource extraction but also as one that tells us how to inhabit binary roles of power/powerlessness.

The word “civilization” seems to alternately evoke pride, fear, and shame. What if one acted without the pressure to defend one’s (apparent) civilization? The bags of history are there, to be carried, to be understood, to be transferred and repacked, to be acknowledged. While the exterior world continues this work of transferring baggage, transferring pain, might a different way of spreading out the load be itself a form of repair? In the midst of solutionist, techno-optimist visions, modernity’s extractive relationships with “labor” and “resource” (rooted as they are in colonialism) ask a lot of us. It will require an abundant amount of collective wisdom and leadership to center reparations, not solutions, in the futures that must emerge from environmental justice.