Anthropocene Vernacular: Industry, Indigeneity, and Empire
Anthropocene Vernacular: Industry, Indigeneity, and Empire
September 13th -
October 4th, 2019
The Luminary, in collaboration with leading Berlin-based cultural institution Haus der Kulteren der Welt will host Anthropocene Vernacular: Industry, Indigeneity, and Empire, a far-reaching public program spanning the region through experimental tours, a harvest dinner, a mobile exhibition, public mappings, and a barge laboratory–alongside a range of research, writing, and publications.
Opening Reception:
September 13th from 7 - 10 pm
These projects traverse locations as diverse as superfund sites, Mississippian mounds, suburbs, and front porches.
These projects traverse locations as diverse as superfund sites, Mississippian mounds, suburbs, and front porches. The Luminary will act as a hub for these disparate events and the projects will be hosted within our library and project space throughout the fall ahead of the on-site program. Organized by Matthew Fluharty and Jesse Vogler, Anthropocene Vernacular features projects from Jennifer Colten, Derek Hoefferlin, Gavin Kroeber, Native Women’s Care Circle, Lynn Peemoeller, and Treasure Shields Redmond.
The St. Louis region is an irreducible landscape that carries the memories, meanings, and anxieties of millennia of settlement overlain on a metropolitan area grappling with the persistent, interconnected legacies of industry, race, and empire. Here, the Mississippi River is a hydraulic cleave through a territory that is rife with contradiction: once the meeting point of the tribes of the Osage and the Illinois, the Cahokia and the Missouri; once a boundary between empires; once a line between the free and the enslaved; still a real and conceptual divide to collective imagination and action. Along this river, which troubles the totalizing binaries of corporations and individuals, environmental devastation and renewal, rural and urban geography, distant past and uncertain present, these latent histories and liminal boundaries rise to the surface and resist any form of clean analysis, any easy narrative closure.
Organized by Matthew Fluharty and Jesse Vogler, Anthropocene Vernacular foregrounds the ways that the rewriting of human geo-logics is not simply something out there—in the spectacularly disturbing landscapes that have come to signify our contemporary anthropocenic epoch—but, rather, is deeply interwoven right here, in the decisions, assumptions, and textures of everyday life. Artists, researchers, and community organizers will share through a series of projects the multigenerational story of how this region’s people have cultivated an embodied, everyday culture in the midst of the intense convergence of social, environmental, and economic crises. This grounded practice asks epistemological questions about how the normative academic approach to the Anthropocene has bracketed-out of its field of vision the very center of this age’s ongoing dynamics—the expression and knowledge of those communities who have experienced, and indeed survive within, these landscapes of the Anthropocene. This Field Station presented as part of Haus der Kulturen der Welt's large-scale project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River, will focus on how the vernaculars of peoples, places, and landscapes have undergone layering and blurring in order to shape the region over time.
Schedule of Events
Ongoing through November 1st
Significant and Insignificant Mounds
Billboard Installation at 1898 N 10th St St. Louis, Missouri
Project Directors: Jennifer Colten and Jesse Vogler
Friday, October 4
Territories, Watersheds, Infrastructures
Barge Opening at Continental Cement from 3 - 6 pm
Project Director: Derek Hoeferlin
Project Partners: Continental Cement, Big Muddy Adventures, Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts + Representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers with Dustin Whited, Continental Cement Company Big Muddy Mike Clark, Christine Ingrassia & Roo Yawitz, Big Muddy Adventures, Todd Antoine & Lonny Boring: Great Rivers Greenway, Colin Wellenkamp, Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative, Eddie Brauer & Chuck Theiling, US Army Corps of Engineers, Kristin Fleischmann Brewer, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Rachel Bartels, Missouri River Waterkeeper Alliance
Friday, October 4
Anthropocene Vernacular reception and The American Bottom Gazette Launch Party
Issue 2 Launch Party at The Luminary from 7 to 9 pm
Saturday, October 5
Laboratory for Suburbia/Significant and Insignificant Mounds
Bus Tour from Weldon Spring disposal site to Cahokia Mounds from 10 am to 6 pm
Project Directors: Jennifer Colten, Gavin Kroeber, and Jesse Vogler
River Stories Landscape Memory, Community History, and Multigenerational Storytelling (podcast)
Project Director: Treasure Shields Redmond
Project Partners: Griot Museum of Black History
Sunday, October 6
River Blessing with the Native Women’s Care Circle at Lincoln Shields Recreation Area at 9 am
Sunday, October 6
Monsanto Town
Panel Discussions and Community Cook-out from 11 am to 3 pm at Sauget Village Hall
11:00p-12:00p :: Exhibition Opening and Community Discussion
12:00p-1:30p :: Village Cook-out
1:30p-2:30p :: Personal and Collective Narratives: A Panel Discussion
Project Directors: Matthew Fluharty + Jennifer Colten
Project Partners: Village of Sauget, PANEL PARTICIPANTS FORTHCOMING
Monday, October 7
Empire and Extraction: Laboratory for Suburbia
Bus Tour from Wood River, IL to Valmeyer, IL from The Luminary from 9 am to 4 pm
Project Directors: Jennifer Colten, Matthew Fluharty, Gavin Kroeber, and Jesse Vogler
Monday, October 7
Post-Natural Landscapes
An Edible Narrative, 5:30pm-8:00pm at Granite City Art and Design District—Pilot Plot
Project Director: Lynn Peemoeller
Project Partners: Chef Rob Connoley; Natalie Mueller, PhD; Gayle Fritz, PhD; Granite City Art and Design District
Each project will identify a specific site and context to serve as a platform for exchange of ideas, doubts, and visions. These platforms range from experimental tours, a harvest dinner, a mobile exhibition, public mappings, and a barge laboratory–alongside a range of research, writing, and publications. These projects traverse locations as diverse as superfund sites, Mississippian mounds, suburbs, and front porches. In coordination with community and institutional partners, each project will work to create an accessible and responsive framework through which to engage a diverse range of regional individuals, organizations, and neighborhoods.
The Luminary will host the Anthropocene Archive and a hub for these disparate events in our library and project space. Within this hub space will be a publishing site, a gathering of the regional projects and thematic connections to HKW's full Mississippi. An Anthropocene River project spanning from Minneapolis, MN to New Orleans, LA.
Support for this project comes from the Haus der Kulteren der Welt (HKW), PNC Arts Alive!, Art of the Rural, and Illinois Humanities, and The Divided City, an urban humanities initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a joint project of the Center for the Humanities and the Sam Fox School, College of Architecture and Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis. Mississippi. An Anthropocene River is a project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin, in collaboration with numerous international partners, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of the initiative #WunderbarTogether as well as by the Max Planck Society.