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Issue 11 BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL ISSUE 11: BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL Christopher Green From the Editors Dana Liljegren ARTICLES 1. Max Bonhomme Human scale and the technological sublime. An iconology of the ‘crisis of civilization’ in the 1930s 2. Julia Bozer Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of Chile, 1975 3. Trangđài Glassey- Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland: Stateless Trầnguyễn Bodies Intimating the Waves, the Woods, and the Walls 4. Alyssa Bralower Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies Allison Rowe SPECIAL FEATURE 5. Anne Spice Give us our Knives ARTIST PROJECT 6. Jackson Polys Morph Target Displacement Mapping: Zack Khalil Removals / Pre-Creative Acts Adam Khalil DISPATCH 7. Teresa Retzer The resurgence of Blood and Soil: symbols and artefacts of Völkische Siedlungen and Neo-Nazi Villages in Germany REVIEWS 8. Stephanie Lebas Huber Review: De Wereld van Pyke Koch 9. Crystal Migwans A Monumental Undertaking 10. Horacio Ramos On Representation, Appropriation, and Everything in Between Cover artwork: Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, Morph Target Displacement Mapping: Removals / Pre-Creative Acts (details), 2019. © Jackson Polys, Zack Khalil, and Adam Khalil. Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture From the Editors CHRISTOPHER GREEN DANA LILJEGREN “Whose blood and soil?” asked a subheading in a recent article by The Economist about the rise of Native American politicians in the United States.1 The question was posed to suggest that the stunning victories of Native American Congressional and local state representatives in the 2018 midterm elections represented a challenge to the Trumpian dogma that white nativists have a proprietorial claim to America. A year prior, white supremacist overtures fully emerged into the light when alt-rightists chanted “Blood and Soil,” the infamous Nazi slogan advocating racial purity located in the earth of the homeland, during the summer 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. In opposition, political activists and environmentalists have made inherently anti-fascist counter-claims to land and ancestry. As oppositional claims to land, heritage, and state have rapidly crescendoed, how might we evaluate the nature of the soil over which such claims to and identifications with (the) E/earth are fought? “The very notion of soil is changing,” Bruno Latour has recently written in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime. “The soil of globalization's dreams is beginning to slip away.”2 Latour describes how Brexit, Trump’s election, and the migration process are all the result of modernization making two complementary movements contradictory: "attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other."3 The articles we offer in this issue of Shift examine concrete historical examples through which these contradictory attachments to soil and access to the global world have been formed, barred, and inflected. Issue 11, “BLOOD AND EARTH AND SOIL,” seeks to take a broad view of the interaction and interrelation of bloodlines, labor, and the natural world as they have been expressed in visual and material culture across time. In examining more recent art, the contributions herein consider possibilities in which the contradictions of the local and global can be made complementary. Latour suggests that we look to what he terms the Terrestrial to bring together the opposing figures of the soil and the world, a soil that belongs to no one and a world that forbids us to limit ourselves to a single location inside constructed boundaries. In its title, Issue 11 of Shift anticipated Latour’s provocation to 1 “Off the reservation,” The Economist, November 29, 2018. 2 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime (Cambridge, UK; Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2018), 4. 3 Latour, Down to Earth, 12. ii SHIFT center the Terrestrial. By inserting “EARTH” into the midst of the racially defined nationalist slogan “Blood and Soil,” we seek to decouple and escape any essentialist illusions in the pairing of land and heritage. But even as critical theorists search for a glimpse of the commons on our collectively shared planet, techno-capitalist oligarchs seem poised to abandon the planet to the forces of material extraction. They look to the oceans (as in “Seasteaders” seeking to colonize special economic zones), or to outer space (as in Elon Musk’s spectacularized extraterrestrial pollution with branded explorations into commercial space travel) and propose to use technology to escape, as much as save, humanity. Is a healthy dose of technoskepticism called for? In his article “Human scale and the technological sublime. An iconology of the ‘crisis of civilization’ in the 1930s,” Max Bonhomme gives us historical context for similar questions in Europe in the 1930s. He argues that the visual culture of France in this period expresses an anxiety towards the technological through scale relationships between man and machine. Against the backdrop of a widespread return to the rural, Bonhomme nonetheless finds that critiques of mechanization were accompanied by a “humanist” iconography that aimed to reconcile man, machine and land. In the confrontation between nature and technologies of organization and control, like the passport or map, new possibilities of identity arise. Julia Bozer’s article “Juan Downey’s “Anaconda” Map of Chile, 1975” interprets the Chilean artist Juan Downey’s 1975 installation Map of Chile as a multilayered geopolitical critique. She traces the formal and cultural roots of the installation, which featured a live anaconda slithering across a map of Downey’s home country, and finds in them a critical confrontation of the international relations of the inter-American Cold War. She connects his use of maps, natural resources, and the very movements of the snake’s body to a breakdown of borders and demarcations that revealed to Downey new ways of thinking through the relationship between structures of space and power. Trangđài Glassey-Trầnguyễn draws on years of research into the Vietnamese diaspora to further consider how the relationship between borders and migratory bodies is expressed in visual art. Her article “Un/Earthing Borderland-Motherland: Stateless Bodies Intimating the Waves, the Woods, and the Walls” asks how the earth maps out human bodies, and how the earth in turn is mapped out by human movement. By highlighting three contexts of Vietnamese migration, Glassey-Trầnguyễn considers the shifting status of distinct groups of immigrants and the ways in which journeys over sea, land, and wall are experienced, remembered, and visualized. Alyssa Bralower and Allison Rowe reflect on the limits of institutional memory and archival collections to make visible the histories of violence and erasure that are embedded in the land of public American universities. Their article “Land Grant: Complicating Institutional Legacies” traces the curatorial process of an exhibition held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the logic underlying the display of university-owned objects and artworks. The exhibition revealed the legacies of settler colonialism that are still at work within land-grant university systems and from within the institution questioned the university’s foundational entitlement to public lands. In the Green and Liljegren | From the Editors iii haunting cyanotype of a lone university researcher surveying the land amid a cornfield, Bralower and Rowe argue, one can find the link between the scientific studies of the academy and a long history of colonial displacement. As a curatorial case-study, Land Grant offers a lesson in working with and through the parameters of the university art museum to weaponize the collection and the archive towards fugitive mores. Anne Spice’s special feature, “Give us our Knives,” poetically dissects the captive nature of the museum, science, and collecting, as well as the violence behind them as tools of colonial oppression. In recent months Spice’s work has taken her to the frontlines of Indigenous struggles against the resource extraction industry and its state support. At Unist’ot’en Camp in presently named British Columbia, members of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation blocked access to their territories by pipeline corporations seeking to exploit the unceded land. In early January 2019, heavily armed RCMP officers enforced a court- ordered injunction to dismantle the checkpoint and allow pipeline workers access to the bridge and territories which Unist’ot’en Camp had been safeguarding. Spice asks in her present contribution to make the link between settler fantasy storytelling, Indigenous genocide, and the museum. Particularly when the settler colonial courts are the ones enforcing dispossession, how can one “make ethical and legal sense of white possession?” Her presence on the frontline of an ongoing and violent conquest that ended with neither Wounded Knee nor Standing Rock makes that link explicit. Yet she also proposes a “speculative future Indigenous retrospective” in which she looks back from a future space in which the museum and anthropology have been abolished. From such a position, Spice posits, emerge vastly new possibilities to build living webs and links with the collected ancestors and material culture presently locked behind glass cases. Spice’s provocations are followed by an Artist Project by Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys, whose design graces this issue’s cover. In their ongoing investigations into the process by which culture is collected, studied, and consumed by the museum and dominant society, these artists have turned digital capture technology back onto the presumed captor. Through film, video installation, and curated public programs, Polys and the Khalils seek out fissures in the technologies of display and control to lay bare the multi-faceted natures of appropriation and the fantasies of removal as a creative or scientific act. The project presented here builds on Spice’s essay with images that suggest the spectral removal of monuments, calcified equestrian remains, and the digital transmutation and transportation of appropriated culture.