Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics
Book Launch

Join us on Thursday, January 23 at 7pm to celebrate the launch of Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics (TBA21–Academy/Sternberg Press, 2024), a richly illustrated book that traces the TBA21–Academy fellowship program of the same name, curated by Sofia Lemos between 2021 and 2023.

Inspired by how rivers bend and curve, connecting entire ecosystems, the artistic fellowship Meandering unfolded the cultural, historical, spiritual, and ecological trajectories of waterways from source to sea. From 2021 to 2023, artists, scientists, and writers set out to trace the Guadalquivir River from the sierras and forests of southern Spain to the heartlands of the Americas and the undersurface of the Mediterranean, engaging with it as a site of social and environmental transformation. Building on the region’s ecomythologies and environmental histories, global in scope, the publication delves into the artistic imaginaries, collaborative research, and community-oriented practices that shaped this journey.

In recent years, contemporary artistic practice has consistently drawn connections between experiences of environmental racism in riverbank communities tied to the afterlives of slavery and climate injustices perpetrated by depredatory corporations. This program will bring Lemos and the interdisciplinary scholar Macarena Gómez-Barris together in dialogue. Responding to the publication, their conversation will consider the ways in which histories of rivers’ destruction and dispossession co-exist with the resilient and vibrant aspects of river life, guided by a decolonial approach to artmaking that does not merely extract from and deplete ecological life but offers a regenerative cultural practice.

Sofia Lemos is a curator and writer whose practice explores the intersections of art, performance, and discourse. From 2021 to 2024, she served as Curator at TBA21–Academy, where she launched a program focused on ecology and community practice, featuring fellowships, commissions, and convenings with artists, musicians, performers, and thinkers. Previously, from 2018 to 2021, she was Curator of Public Programmes and Research at Nottingham Contemporary, where she led live programmes and collaborative projects, including the multi-year Sonic Continuum, exploring the relationship between the sonic and social change. She edited Meandering: Art, Ecology, and Metaphysics (Sternberg Press, 2024), Sonic Continuum: On the Sound and Poetics of Time (Nottingham Contemporary, 2021), and co-edited Metabolic Rifts (Anagram, 2019). Lemos contributes regularly to publications and exhibition catalogues.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is an interdisciplinary scholar, speaker, and author of four books and dozens of essays and interviews on environmental media, decolonial theory and praxis, queer femme and creative and embodied research methods and what she deems “antidotes to the colonial Anthropocene.” Her work addresses artful living and survivance in spaces of social and ecological suffering. It includes The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), where she theorizes decolonization in relation to five extractive scenes of ruinous capitalism upon Indigenous territories, and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press, 2018) that thinks from submerged perspectives and art-making, social movements, and creative intellectual labor to imagine worlds anew. She is also the author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (UC Press, 2009), which traces fascism, the rise of neoliberalism, and memory’s obliteration as central to the nation-state. Her forthcoming book At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. Gómez-Barris is Chair of Modern Culture and Media and Director of the Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown University.

Photo: Fernando Sendra, Courtesy TBA21–Academy