L E F T TO RI GH T: 1. Rigo 23 painting Teko Mbarate, the Guaraní phrase for “strengthening the traditional way of life,” on
the wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. 2. Dario Robleto’s jars include physical tapes of recorded sounds.
Wetland Park, South Africa; Mount Kenya National Park, Kenya;
and Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park, which straddles
the U.S.-Canadian border.
At the initial gatherings, many artists were uncomfortable
when Rare CEO Brett Jenks implored them to help spread a
message of environmental stewardship and conservation.
This was not a group that welcomed prescription. The mainstay of advocacy work—the adherence to a deeply collective
and shared message— can be anathema to an artist who needs
freedom to interrogate assumptions of all kinds. “I remember
thinking, ‘Do they want me to go make work about tortoises?’”
said the installation artist Ann Hamilton, who ultimately
traveled to the Galápagos Islands as part of the Human/Nature
project. “I mean, that is not exactly what I do.”
Recognition by the United Nations World Heritage program
that a place has “outstanding universal value to all humanity”
does not bring with it a promise of funding for protection or
preservation. It means only that you can call that place a World
Heritage site. In some cases this lack of associated funding
doesn’t matter— nations with resources to manage their own
sites can a=ord to do so (Yellowstone National Park, managed
by the U.S. Park Service, is one example). In many other
cases, the sites remain protected in little more than name
only, their home nations hopeful the designation will attract
tourism dollars or attention. All of the World Heritage sites
that the artists visited were under pressure of some sort: a lack
of funds for management, an overabundance of tourists, the
e=ects of climate change, industrial development, intensive
agriculture or grazing, and more. The artists were free to
ignore these issues— but their commitment to creating work
about the sites ensured that they would confront them.
“I like the basic notion of World Heritage,” said the
Portuguese artist Rigo 23, “that collectively we have to ensure
that many of our most threatened places survive. When I
chose to go to the Southeast Atlantic Forest Reserves in Brazil,
I did so because Portugal played a pivotal role in Brazil’s colonization. All of my life I have nurtured a desire to go there.
Human/Nature allowed me that chance because I did not want
to go as a tourist. I wanted to have a reason to be there.”
The World Heritage program divides its list of 828 sites
into three distinct categories. There are cultural sites (such as
the Great Wall of China), natural sites named for their biodiversity (such as the Galápagos Islands or any of the seven
other sites the artists visited), and twenty->ve sites that are
considered mixed, such as Guatemala’s Tikal National Park,
named for its Mayan temples (cultural) and its location in a
large swath of neotropical forest (natural). But what happens
when you send artists, the card-carrying ambassadors of culture, out into nature?
In 1944, Richard Wright wrote in American Hunger, “I
would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo,
and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send
other words to tell, to march, to >ght, to create a sense of the
hunger for life that gnaws in us all.” So it is, perhaps, with
art-making, with the work of conservation, with the act of
simply getting by—consciously and with integrity—in this
uneven world that is our heritage. We hope for echoes. We
hunger for recognition and response. This is what the
artists of Human/Nature have done in concert. They have
made soundings in eight di=erent places in eight wildly different ways, and they are tracing them home. The best we
can do is listen.
