VISIONARY INSTITUTE
How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Planet: A Non-Extractive Approach to Art and Knowledge
Pedagogy Against Extraction: Earthbound Learning as Radical Visuality
Art Walk, for 'Visuality and Extraction: Materiality, Interpretation, Power' Symposium at the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture, at Durham University June 2025
Recontextualising Joseph Beuys ’iconic performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, and Lygia Clark’s Walking (Caminhando)-a participatory proposition that embodies process, transformation, and continuous becoming- this project re-animates enigmatic gestures from the mystical to the material, from art’s symbolic engagement to its potential for ecological renewal. This work invites participants into a conversation with the living world, engaging in slow, durational acts of attentiveness through foraging walks and experimental art interventions. It proposes a departure from institutionalized extractivist frameworks, instead constructing a post-scarcity, land-based practice animated by the possibility of living, loving and working well.
Art here is not a commodity but a commons, a site of speculation, experimentation, and radical gift and pedagogy. This project explores how artistic research—when practiced as an intuitive, embodied, and joyful multispecies encounter—can resist reductionist epistemologies and expand possibilities for knowledge creation. By excavating the esoteric and ecological undercurrents within radical art education, this work critiques technocratic academic paradigms that have marginalized experimental and embodied approaches. It asks: Can artistic research cultivate an ethics of care? How might non-linear, multimodal, and multispecies methodologies reshape knowledge and practice? This project builds an alternative model of inquiry—one that is akin to foraging-an open-ended yet rigorous, fostering more equitable, ecologically attuned futures beyond the extractive gaze.
This project takes the form of an experimental, art-based hybrid event—part foraging walk, part workshop, part performance, and part radical storytelling. Stepping outside institutional constraints and their extractivist frameworks, this participatory happening reorients artistic research towards sustainable futures, challenging the paradox of the resource curse. Drawing from the methodologies of Beuys and Clark, participants are gifted artworks- plant prints (Rioutous Species) and Pierogi-charms with Fukuokas Gifts (seed pellets) and engage in sensory, embodied interactions with the land via testing/ smeling/ gluing, Camingando-making (Quanta Quntessence Metamorphic tinctures, Synergetic Balms, glue sticks made of pine rasin, beeswax and honey and stored inside hollow elder branch, academic paper made of plants discarded in my studio). By attuning to foraged materials and ephemeral gestures, this gathering cultivates a radical attitude toward resources, imagining anti-extractive land practices and post-scarcity art-making.
The event is both site-responsive and adaptable, encouraging active participation in the making of meaning. We may create art materials from foraged matter, transforming dirt into pigment, or craft balms from wild-harvested plants, reinforcing the ethos of reciprocal engagement. The session unfolds as a hyper-textual happenstance, where scholarship, storytelling, and collective making merge into an intuitive, convivial learning experience. Rather than dictating predetermined outcomes, this format fosters the joy of embodied intellectual contemplation.
There is no photo documentation from the actual event, the pictures below are taken in my studio and they show ART objects featured in the performance: Rioutous Species-plant prints and Pierogi-charms with Fukuokas Gifts (seed pellets) , Quanta Quntessence Metamorphic tinctures, Synergetic Balms, glue sticks made of pine rasin, beeswax and honey and stored inside hollow elder branch, Camingando-making -academic paper made of plants discarded in my studio) and custom made peasant smock made of tarpoulin, Earth Forum kit.