“Only once we imagined the world as dead could we dedicate ourselves to making it so.” – Ben Ehrenreich
On invitation of Kunsthaus NRW, Krista Jantowski (artistic researcher at the Reading Room / Greylight Projects) initiated Meeting You In The Margins, a carefully curated selection of books that approach environmental destruction, processes of extraction, and histories of empire, as both material realities as well as a cultural logic. Thinking from different localities and disciplines, the authors of the books question how we have come to see the world, by interrogating the interplay between histories of extractivism, the knowledge it has produced (as well as obscured) and our cultural imaginings. This collection is on display and open to read at the library of Kunsthaus NRW, as we invite readers to reflect on art’s role in shaping what we talk about when we talk about “nature”, “environment” or “crisis” by using the margins of the books as a space for thinking, responding and meeting other readers.
As a visual interlude to this project, she has invited visual artist Rachel Bacon to participate in What The Flag?!. Her practice explores an expanded understanding of drawing within larger issues concerning landscape, geology, extraction industries and the aesthetics of the climate emergency. Site visits to open-pit mining areas and research into the effects of climate warming form the starting point for painstaking, semi-sculptural drawings often made on crumpled paper with graphite.
Rachel Bacon: “I’ve been working for the past few years on research exploring damaged landscapes of open-pit coal mines. I see sculptural and graphic processes embedded in extractive practices, and explore in my own work how drawing might suggest alternative ways of perceiving environments that are multi-perspectival, decelerated, and reparative. The flag is an image of a coal mine in Limburg from the 21st of December 1945, found in the Fotocollectie Anefo in the Nationaal Archief. In the background was a slag heap, which has been flattened by making a straight line from the edges of the heap, so that the miners’ houses seem to sink beneath the earth and the pile of tailings disappears.”
www.rachelbacon.com
Title: The disappearing mountain (Limburg, 1945), 2024
Artist: Rachel Bacon
From: Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster (DE)
To: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, Aachen (DE)