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 at 'Visuality and Extraction: Materiality, Interpretation, Power' Symposium 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 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 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 will engage in sensory, embodied interactions with the land. 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 will be 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 will unfold 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.