Morag Colquhoun
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Morag Colquhoun's MPhil/PhD Art research project
Trofannolismo: reimagining a planetary Tropicália
Trofannolismo is a planetary re-imagination of 1960s Brazilian Tropicália (Oiticica, 1966-7) from a perspective of rural Wales. It combines the Welsh word for tropical with the Spanish/Portuguese suffix -ismo. Working with film, montage, play and alternative education practices, my project expands the possibilities of planetarity as a way of understanding transcultural affinities via an extended engagement with more-than-human communities, including children, young people, horses, and rural workers in Wales and South America.
Trofannolismo 'island egg / wy yr ynys / huevo de la isla', albumen crystoleum in progress
Responding to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s (2003) suggestion that Raymond Williams’ cultural theories provide a map for planetarity, I extend Williams’ ideas with Caribbean and Latin American thinking around autopoiesis and communal autonomy (Wynter, 2015). This addresses Cornel West’s (1992) insight that the visceral agency of Williams’ fiction is informed by its rural Welsh specificity but its capacity to speak to wider contexts is limited by gaps regarding imperialism. Drawing on family archives, I find that hierarchical models of trusteeship, which developed in British imperial ecology (Anker, 2001), are still at play in the improving tendencies of socio-cultural interventions and ‘unexamined environmentalism’ (Spivak, 2003). Expanding Williams’ ideas of border and education (Dix, 2013) into soft borders as a space of learning on the other hand provides a model for planetary practice in which hard borders of abstraction and separation are disrupted by rhythm, language and tactile free play with loose parts (Nicholson, 1971). In these emerging spaces, top-down aspirations for the wellbeing of future generations can be brought into play with grassroots movements for ecological self-determination, locally and planetwide.
Supervisors
- Ros Gray
- Stephen Johnstone