This post introduces Siobhan Angus and Warren Cariou’s recently published Environmental Humanities article, “Tar Remedies: Methods of Return and Re-vision on Colonized/Contaminated Land.”
Siobhan
In 2021, I participated in a workshop at the Rachel Carson Center titled “Hazardous Hope: Exploring New Ways of Narrating Toxic Bodies and Landscapes,” organized by Ayushi Dhawan, Maximilian Feichtner, and Jonas Stuck. This workshop raised important yet challenging questions about the role of hope in the context of pollution and toxicity. The discussions were generative and prompted me to reevaluate my preconceived notions of resilience, toxicity, and social change. When Ayushi Dhawan and Simone Muller organized a special issue of Environmental Humanities, I approached Warren about collaborating on the piece that ultimately became “Tar Remedies.”
Hope presents a complex challenge in the context of pollution and environmental degradation, a reality I feel acutely as I teach students. I increasingly find myself at a loss for words when attempting to explain how we arrived at this point and why, collectively, we continue to fall short in taking the necessary actions on the scale required. However, it’s important to distinguish hope from optimism. While optimism is the blind belief that things will improve, hope embodies the conviction that they must. Hope serves as a reminder that we can—and must—act differently. There is too much at stake not to.
While optimism is the blind belief that things will improve, hope embodies the conviction that they must.
I invited Warren to co-write this piece with me because, in his bitumen photographs, I find a sense of hope. I first encountered Warren’s work early in my PhD journey, where I explored mining photography, and his practice significantly shaped my understanding of extraction and resilience. Warren’s photographs taught me to perceive the non-human world more expansively, revealing the intricate ways extraction is woven into our lives. Finding moments of hope within mining histories can be difficult, but Warren’s thoughtful engagement with bitumen reminds me of our deep entanglement with the natural world and the possibilities for fostering better relationships with both the land and one another. As I write, I often catch my reflection in one of Warren’s petrographs titled “Prayer Tree.” It serves as a poignant reminder of my obligations as a white settler to this land and, in its shimmering beauty, evokes the enchantment of the world around us.
Hope is grounded in an awareness of the high stakes of the present, as well as a recognition of what we have already lost and what we cannot afford to lose. In “Prayer Tree,” I see the histories that coexist alongside extractivism, illuminating a pathway forward.
Warren:
Extractivism is decontextualization: taking a substance or an energy source or an idea out of its place so that it can be transformed into a unit of perceived value within the colonial capitalist worldview. In my various attempts to understand the effects of oil extraction upon the land and the Indigenous communities of my home territory, I have struggled with the problem of re-contextualizing something that has been radically altered and separated from its natural place. How do we perceive petroleum, beyond its ubiquitous (and decontextualized) use within contemporary society as a source of fuel, building materials, medicines—and also its equally ubiquitous presence as a waste product in our atmosphere and our waterways? In my petrography project I have tried to re-establish an intimate relationship to bitumen, the raw material for much of Canada’s oil industry, and I have tried to utilize it as a medium of representation. But when I began this project, I often operated largely by intuition and by experiment, not really understanding what I was doing or what I could do in this work.
This project also helped us to see how critical analysis and artistic practice can inform and contextualize each other, and how both are intrinsic aspects of creative and engaged responses to contemporary environmental crisis.
In our conversations over the last several years, Siobhan has given me a number of crucial contexts—political, aesthetic and historical—to better understand what I am actually trying to do in my bitumen photography practice, and how it might be done in more evocative and persuasive ways. Her commitments to ethically engaged scholarship, decolonial approaches to energy and representation, and class-conscious analysis of extractive industry have all resonated with my own values, and have given me a renewed sense of hope about the future of this kind of work. Our collaborative article for the “Hazardous Hope” special issue of Environmental Humanities was a valuable opportunity for us to learn from each other and to highlight some of the things we had been talking about for years. This project also helped us to see how critical analysis and artistic practice can inform and contextualize each other, and how both are intrinsic aspects of creative and engaged responses to contemporary environmental crisis. Criticism is often thought to come after the process of creation, and to be separate from it, but our experience has shown that there is much to be gained from taking a relational and reciprocal approach that emphasizes the collaborative potential of critical and creative engagement. This more holistic approach fits well with the values of humility and mutual respect that are part of my Métis culture.
Siobhan Angus and Warren Cariou
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- Collaboration and Hope in “Tar Remedies” - November 5, 2024