Illustration by Julia Nakanishi
Learning with the Land: lessons in post-capitalist design
June 1- June 23. 2024
adwoa toku
Mona Dai
Redistro Collective
Niara van Gaalen
Nancy Ji
Sarah Mahoney
Sam Wong
Faizaan Khan
Marie Sotto
Nikē/Vic Baneberry
Julia Nakanishi
In the face of all this direness, what kinds of practices—of teaching, research, and analysis—might we develop across disciplines toward the goal of identifying and promoting multiple routes out of crisis?
-Ruth Wilson Gilmore
learning with the land
is a conversation with a group of interdisciplinary folks and our wider communities about how our relationships to land define our social reproduction; in other words, how we organize ourselves as humans and build our environments. At a time when a turbulent climate, military violence, and environmental degradation driven by imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism are rampant, our roles as workers across industries often feel fixed within destructive systems. Within the current settler colonial capitalist economy of so-called Canada, our labour is forced to respond to the pressures of assumed exponential economic growth, often resulting in work that privileges the wealthy, undermines treaties and Indigenous rights, is inaccessible, and damages land.
A post-growth, post-capitalist perspective assumes that the expectation of exponential economic growth is inherently unsustainable in a world of finite resources and material supply. It assumes that instead of focusing on the growth of an abstract GDP (Gross Domestic Product) that benefits the few, the economy should focus on the growth of social luxury, nourishing culture, land, and community. It also assumes that trying to achieve these goals within the current capitalist system cannot provide holistic solutions.
Historically and presently, oppressive capitalist forces damage and exploit land, separating the working class and marginalized groups from it in the process. The works and events within Learning with the Land demonstrate and imagine ways in which we can resist these pressures and alienation while centering the lands we depend on to live and practice.Together we will explore working with the land, celebrating and learning from its gifts, and organizing our human relationships in ways that are reciprocal with each other and our non-human communities.