Liquid Archives:
Art&Environment in Global Flows

PictureMichael Arcega, Walnut Traverse, 2008


It is first of all the affirmation of a world in process, an archipelago.  Not even a puzzle, whose pieces when fitted together would constitute a whole, but rather a wall of loose, uncemented stones, where every element has a value in itself but also in relation to others: isolated and floating relations, islands and straits, immobile points and sinuous lines – for Truth has always has ‘jagged edges.’” Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or The Formula,” in Essays: Critical and Clinical (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 86.

Liquid Archives muses on the importance of contemporary art about oceans, straits, islands as useful “geopoetic imaginaries of the possible (and impossible) conditions of global coexistence in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of  Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Édouard Glissant, and others, Hamilton Faris  explores current artistic allegorizations of islands as “isolated and floating relations” (Deleuze).  This collection of essays gathers  artists who posit the environment, and specifically islands and oceans as non-human witnesses to historical ebbs and flows of habitation, colonization, resource extraction, development and more.   In highlighting geologic alterity, the artists explore, as we all must, a new common, if unstable and moving, ground of the earth as island.  


Ocean Archives muses on the importance of contemporary art about oceans, islands, and straits as useful geopoetic imaginaries of the possible (and impossible) conditions of global coexistence in the twenty-first century.