Ground
Works

here-ing: Place-based, Artistic Research at a Biological Field Station

Melinda Adams, Janine Antoni, Suzan Hampton, Hayden L. Nelson, Joey Orr, Sheena Parsons, Karl Ramberg, Keith Van de Riet



Abstract

here-ing is an environmentally embedded artwork by Janine Antoni commissioned by the Spencer Museum's Arts Research Integration (ARI) program in collaboration with the University of Kansas Field Station and School of Architecture & Design. Working across architecture, art, audiology, and environmental science, this project offers embodied and culturally responsive practices, including place-based and artistic research methods, for reconstructing healthier native grasslands and understanding the ecological relationship between the environment and human body. here-ing is a three-acre labyrinth stretching across three former farm fields and designed in the shape of the anatomy of the human ear. The creation of here-ing was a multi-year process that began with a prescribed burn, plotting the design into the fields, and carving a large-scale finger labyrinth onto a native limestone boulder placed at the trailhead to orient visitors and increase accessibility. Visitor footsteps on the labyrinth trail create and maintain the path for those who come after them. If the path ceases to be walked, it will be reclaimed by the tallgrass prairie and only remain through story. Visitor participation in creating the piece ultimately demonstrates the nature of good land stewardship: a committed relationship to nature and place that bridges diverse cultures to better nurture the land. Since its inception in 2021, here-ing has continued to evolve through public participation, re-seeding, and ongoing workshops and education around collaborative Indigenous-led cultural burns to stimulate healthy native species regeneration.

Impact Statement *

Janine Antoni's environmentally embedded participatory project brought artistic questions around embodiment, and slippages between inner and outer landscapes, to bear on scientific research concerned with preserving and reconstructing the prairie. Both artistic and Indigenous methods acknowledge the importance of reciprocity between the human and more-than-human. This research included widely accepted ecological approaches, while also expanding more traditional scientific experimentation to include the human body in its studies.

here-ing: Place-based, Artistic Research at a Biological Field Station

Published:

December 2, 2024 (310 views)

License:


here-ing: Place-based, Artistic Research at a Biological Field Station © 2024 by Melinda Adams, Janine Antoni, Suzan Hampton, Hayden L. Nelson, Joey Orr, Sheena Parsons, Karl Ramberg, and Keith Van de Riet is licensed under CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

Project Metadata:

Project Site · Sites and Institutions
Video 1. Teaser for here-ing documentary; see Supporting Materials for full film.
Anna C. Lavatelli (2024)

introduction

Aldo Leopold’s posthumous Sand County Almanac became a foundational piece of twentieth-century conservation literature arguing that, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” (sidenote: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), xviii-xix. ↩ ) here-ing, an environmentally embedded artwork in Lawrence, Kansas, by New York-based Bahamian artist Janine Antoni, exemplifies Leopold’s land ethic to return both to the land and to ourselves. “We listen with our steps, the land speaks,” Antoni explains, and in doing so challenges the patriarchal power relationship between human and land predicated upon settler-capitalist extractivism. (sidenote: Joey Orr and Janine Antoni, “We Listen with Our Steps, the Land Speaks,” PLAT Journal 11 (2022): 4. The political scientist Wilfrid Greaves writes that “Settler capitalist economies have been built on the coercive dispossession of Indigenous territories in order to facilitate the ecologically unsustainable extraction of natural resources, and both practices are incompatible with Indigenous survival precisely because of their ‘ontological relationship to land.’” Wilfrid Greaves, “Damaging Environments: Land, Settler Colonialism, and Security for Indigenous Peoples,” Environment and Society 9, no. 2 (2018): 107-124, quote on p. 117. ↩ ) Created entirely through walking, here-ing provides a means to better know the land, bear witness to its present state, and advocate for its conservation. 

Antoni’s career-long commitment to embodiment was central to this interdisciplinary ecological project, using artistic practice to discover new questions and theories. here-ing presented an opportunity to invite “the public to return to the body through intimately relating to the land.” (sidenote: Janine Antoni and Joey Orr, “Where We Find Ourselves,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 60, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 128. ↩ ) As Antoni explains, “When humans form a relationship of reciprocity with the earth, both humans and the environment can flourish.” (sidenote: Antoni and Orr, “Where We Find Ourselves,” 128. ↩ ) The labyrinth Antoni conceived was an essential component to developing this reciprocal relationship: “The point of the labyrinth is actually to lose the goal and to bring you into the present and into wholeness...[it] should be about coming into the body and feeling the body in space.” (sidenote: Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Janine Antoni (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩ )

Our interdisciplinary project centers on these principles, in collaboration with Antoni. Team member Dr. Keith Van de Riet, Associate Professor of Architecture at University of Kansas (KU), explained that one of his goals is to encourage the next generation of designers to take on the ethical responsibility of environmental and civil stewardship through the integration of ecological and social contexts. (sidenote: Keith Van de Riet. (n.d.). https://spencerart.ku.edu/ari-fellows/keith-van-de-riet ↩ ) According to team member and curator Dr. Joey Orr, “The environmentally embedded artwork takes into account human movement on the land within the parameters of a gentle prairie reset. It is a novel approach born of artistic and scientific collaboration that operates beyond the constraints of both disciplines.” (sidenote: Janine Antoni. (n.d.). here-ing. https://www.janineantoni.net/hereing ↩ ) Team member and N’dee San Carlos Apache scholar Dr. Melinda Adams explains that cultural fires (or “good fire”) are not only ecologically important, but also provide social and cultural benefits. (sidenote: Melinda M. Adams, “Indigenous Ecologies: Cultivating Fire, Plants, and Climate Futurity,” Artemisia 49, no. 2 (October 2023): 20-29. ↩ ) To Adams and practitioners of good fire, a return to cultural burns reignites the relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous allies with the land. Good land stewardship and good fire are interrelated processes that are both “rooted in relationality, reciprocity, re-membering, and futurity.” (sidenote: Adams, “Indigenous Ecologies,” 23. ↩ ) All of these accounts make explicit that reciprocity between the human and more-than-human is central to the research goals.

Figure 1. Over the course of the project, paths of the outer, middle, and inner ear were traced on three former farm fields to comprise the entirety of the labrynth path. Drone image of the path of the outer ear at the KU Field Station.
Bird’s-eye view of a grassy, verdant field with a path in the shape of the anatomy of the human outer ear.
Janine Antoni and Dan Hughes (2022)
Figure 2. Drone image of a degraded field in the early stages of restoration, with the path of the middle ear at the KU Field Station.
Bird’s-eye view of a brown and green field with a path in the shape of the middle ear.
Janine Antoni and Dan Hughes (2023)
Figure 3. Drone image of the path of the inner ear at the KU Field Station.
Bird’s-eye view of a bright green field with a path in the shape of the inner ear.
Janine Antoni and Dan Hughes (2023)

Research context

An interdisciplinary model built on shared questions opens the possibility of an arts and humanities perspective in the context of environmental science. (sidenote: Stacy A. McNulty, David White, Mary Hufty, and Paul Foster, “The Organization of Biological Field Stations at Fifty,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, Vol. 98, No. 4 (October 2017): 370. For more on field stations as sites of discovery, see also Edward O. Wilson, ”The Importance of Biological Field Stations,” BioScience 32, no. 5 (May 1982): 320; Thomas Eisner, ”For Love of Nature: Exploration and Discovery at Biological Field Stations,” BioScience 32, no. 5 (May 1982): 321-326. ↩ )  For example, artist Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991-ongoing) took place in a landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota where special hyperaccumulator plants were planted to extract heavy metals as a means of remediation. Artist Patricia Johanson’s ongoing practice creates practical habitats and solves infrastructure issues. According to team member and KU Field Station Manager Sheena Parsons, “A lot of what we do in science isn’t that much different than art...it’s a pretty creative process, whether you’re designing an experiment or adapting equipment.” (sidenote: Lavatelli, A. (Director), here-ing documentary, in post-production. ↩ )  Similarly, Antoni observed that Parsons‘s approach to ecology is “very much like an artist,” remarking that “There is not as big of a leap between science and art as we think. At their core, both require questioning and imagination, it is only the form of the inquiries that diverge.” (sidenote: Antoni and Orr, ”Where We Find Ourselves,” 137-138. ↩ )  This project specifically brings the human body into relationship with environmental restoration through the process of a gentle push from degraded, low-diversity prairie to a healthier diverse grassland. Including the human body in the research is one of its contributions. Although this violates the notion of strict replication in scientific experimentation, it enacts a process of cultural cultivation and human connection in the context of place-based scientific methodology.

A historical perspective on the land intrinsically links the process of colonization to both Indigenous dispossession and environmental destruction. White settlers migrated to northeastern Kansas in the 1850s and quickly transformed high-diversity tallgrass prairie into low-diversity agricultural lands. (sidenote: For the history of agriculture in eastern Kansas, see, for instance, James C. Malin, Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas: A Study in Adaptation to Subhumid Geographical Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1944); Hilmer H. Laude, ”The Fruitful Plains,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 61, no. 1 (1958): 14-31; Joseph V. Hickey and Charles E. Webb, ”The Transition from Farming to Ranching in the Kansas Flint Hills: Two Case Studies,” Great Plains Quarterly 7, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 244-255; Courtney L. Wiersema, ”A Fruitful Plain: Fertility on the Tallgrass Prairie, 1810-1860,” Environmental History 16, no. 4 (October 2011): 678-699. ↩ ) By the mid-1870s, all of the Indigenous Nations in eastern Kansas had ceded their lands for smaller reservations in Kansas or in Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). One of the major environmental consequences of colonization was the transition from the Indigenous practice of burning every few years to the Western practice of fire prevention, which allowed invasive and woody species to overtake the native prairie that had not been converted to agricultural lands. (sidenote: For Indigenous dispossession in Kansas, see Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts Over Kansas Land Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954); Ronald D. Parks, The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). For more on the environmental consequences of Indigenous dispossession, particularly in the shift of fire regimes, see also Stephen J. Pyne, The Great Plains: A Fire Survey (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017); William D. Nikolakis and Emma Roberts, ”Indigenous Fire Management: A Conceptual Model from Literature,” Ecology and Society 25, no. 4 (2020): 11. ↩ ) The site was reseeded to native warm-season grasses in the 1980s when the federal Conservation Reserve Program began, which incentivized farmers to remove land from agricultural production to minimize soil erosion and protect ecosystem health. (sidenote: For detailed overviews on the ecological reserve lands of the University of Kansas, see Henry S. Fitch and W. Dean Kettle, “Kansas Ecological Reserves (University of Kansas Natural Areas),” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 91, nos. 1-2 (1988): 30-36; W. Dean Kettle, et al., “Land-Use History in Ecosystem Restoration: A 40-Year Study in the Prairie-Forest Ecotone,” Restoration Ecology 8, no. 3 (September 2000): 307-317; Henry S. Fitch, et al., “A Half Century of Forest Invasion on a Natural Area in Northeastern Kansas,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 104, nos. 1-2 (April 2001): 1-17. For more on how settler agriculture predicated upon intensive cash-crop agriculture degraded the Plains and the environmental issues that caused, see, for instance, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Andrew C. Isenberg, “Seas of Grass: Grasslands in World Environmental History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, Andrew C. Isenberg, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 133-153. For more on the Conservation Reserve Program, in particular, see also, Christopher P. Dunn, et al., “Ecological Benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program,” Conservation Biology 7, no. 1 (March 1993): 132-139; Dianne L. Hall and Michael R. Willig, “Mammalian Species Composition, Diversity, and Succession in Conservation Reserve Program Grasslands,” The Southwestern Naturalist 39, no. 1 (March 1994): 1-10. ↩ ) The land remained a low-diversity field until here-ing began in 2021.

Project Development and Process

Antoni incorporated a prescribed burn into her first art action at the field, addressing both invasive and prairie species in a performance that encouraged participants to relate to the land. Antoni has reflected, “The burn brings the path back the way the burn brings the field back. And we think of the burn as destructive, but it’s actually bringing nutrients to the earth...And that’s a whole other idea I think about a lot with the creative process is that there is a destructive part to the making.” (sidenote: Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Janine Antoni (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩ ) Following the initial burn, Antoni designed the labyrinth’s path and architecture students used site analysis and surveying techniques to map the artist’s drawing onto a three-dimensional, publicly accessible landscape (Figures 4 and 5). Audiology neuroscientist Dianne Durham and otolaryngologist Hinrich Staecker consulted on the functions of the ear both for the path’s design and its educational components. Ecologists shared their research findings on walking tours throughout the labyrinth, specifically aimed at the participatory creation of the path. Visitors began walking the path into the land.
Figure 4. A field work sketch (left) and drone image of the path of the outer ear (right).
Two photos. Left : a marked-up sketch on graph paper of an ear. Right: a bird’s-eye view of a labrynthine path on a green field.
Keith Van de Riet and Janine Antoni (2022)
Figure 5. Keith Van de Riet (Architecture) and Sheena Parsons (KU Field Station) use a transit, an instrument for land surveying, to begin laying out the grid with Architecture students. Graduate research fellow Suzan Hampton and curator Joey Orr stand to the right.
Two people stand in a field of tall grass beside a survey instrument on a tripod, talking. Seven people stand around them. Everyone is wearing sunhats.
Photo by Ryan Waggoner © Spencer Museum of Art (2022)

Adams led a second, Indigenous cultural burn, which began with the sharing of Indigenous worldviews and practices on good fire. The demonstration served to welcome Indigenous students to the space and to initiate Adams’ physical geography-fire ecology research at KU. Unlike the first burn, which followed Western fire protocols and depended solely on fuels and drip torches, the cultural burn was a slower affair that followed Indigenous fire protocols, including carrying fire, although drip torches were used to mitigate windy conditions. (sidenote: Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Melinda Adams (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩ )

Figure 6. Drone image of the Indigenous cultural burn sweeping over the design of the outer ear in a field at the KU Field Station.
Bird’s-eye view of a field with a labrynthine pattern traced in it. The field is brown but for a large, tapered patch that is black and smoky.
Janine Antoni, Melinda Adams, Dan Hughes (2023)
Figure 7. Raking the fire during the Indigenous cultural burn. Rakes are used to move the fire and experiments are underway about raking’s effects on soil composition.
A rake pulls fire across a brown field. Two people stand move in the background, somewhat obscured by smoke.
Janine Antoni, Melinda Adams (2023)
Figure 8. Dr. Melinda Adams leads a group in her experiment on the effects of post-burn raking on soil composition.
People bent over rakes work in a burnt field.
Photo by Ryan Waggoner © Spencer Museum of Art (2023)
Figure 9. Drone image with the path of the outer ear clearly legible after the Indigenous cultural burn at the KU Field Station.
Bird's-eye view of the design of the outer ear in a burnt field.
Janine Antoni and Dan Hughes (2023)

Volunteers seeded the site and two large native limestone boulders were placed at the entrance to the labyrinth. Local stone worker Karl Ramberg carved a "finger" labyrinth, mirroring the walking labyrinth, into the limestone, providing an overview as well as a sensory experience for those who cannot access the path.

Figure 10. After collecting a variety of seeds, volunteers gathered in a community effort to mitigate invasive species infestation in the middle field at the KU Field Station.
Nine people’s hands, all cupped and holding seeds, converge at the center of a circle.
Wendy Holman (2024)
Figure 11. Sheena Parsons and volunteers rake fresh seeds into the middle field of here-ing at the KU Field Station.
A woman in overalls rakes a field while others work in the field behind her.
Wendy Holman (2024)
Figure 12. The finger labyrinth carved into native limestone at the KU Field Station.
A large rock with the anatomy of the human ear carved into it.
Janine Antoni, Karl Ramberg (2023)

Reflection and Significance

Ultimately, the fields of ecology, environmental biology, audiology, architecture, history, and art all informed this research aimed at reconstructing the prairie ecology through direct human and nonhuman interaction. Significantly, this project uses recognized research methods that nonetheless challenge the separation of humans from scientific experimentation through the integration of disciplines. The artwork and the ecological push toward a healthier grassland are reciprocal processes: Antoni says, “Just like hearing and balance exist in the same place in the body, in my work, two things are happening simultaneously, that are interrelated, but can be experienced separately...the place where those two things come together is that through the healing of the landscape, we’re healing ourselves, I guess that’s what could be a definition of the word ‘reciprocity.’” (sidenote: Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Janine Antoni (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩ ) Indeed, one participant in the first burn reflected, “I witnessed people gathering together to pay homage to [this] place...I really just tried to lean into that feeling of, like, disorientation and the unknown and welcoming the unexpected. And I feel renewed at the end, and it’s surprising.” (sidenote: Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Imani Wadud, KU Graduate Student (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2022. ↩ ) here-ing's innovation is to put this ecological emphasis on embodiment and public participation in conversation with scientific research on biodiversity and prairie ecosystems.

The creation and maintenance of the artwork through the public’s participation by walking forges a deeper sense of place and regional identity in a remnant landscape. The Field Station will coordinate future burns and will work with Adams to coordinate cultural burn workshops to build stronger relationships with local Indigenous communities. The ecological aspects of the site are overseen by the Field Station, who will be responsible for coordinating future burns, maintaining the perimeter of the area, access trails, firebreaks, and, as relates to the Middle Ear, strategizing and implementing methods to mitigate the growth of low diversity invasives and promote the restoration of biodiverse prairie. Even so, here-ing's lifespan is indeterminate, existing only as long as visitors continue to walk the path. But the path’s ephemerality is, in part, its point as an environmental artwork: human engagement is essential to its existence. The fragility of both the artwork and regional ecology became a shared understanding. Rediscovering a relationship with the land is an essential component to cultural creation and the formation of regional identity. The process of walking gives visitors a greater appreciation for this endangered environment that keeps them returning to the land. As Antoni explained, “The symbol of the ear is an excuse [to bring visitors to the site]. And then the field takes care of the rest.”

Figure 13. Visitors walk the path of the outer ear in early October, 2023.
A group of people walk through a field of light brown prairie grass. The grasses are almost as tall as the people.
Photo by Ryan Waggoner © Spencer Museum of Art (2023)

References

Adams, Melinda M. “Indigenous Ecologies: Cultivating Fire, Plants, and Climate Futurity.” Artemisia 49, no. 2 (October 2023): 20-29.

Antoni, Janine. (n.d.). here-ing. https://www.janineantoni.net/hereing

Basso, Keith H. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Dunn, Christopher P., et al. “Ecological Benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program.” Conservation Biology 7, no. 1 (March 1993): 132-139.

Eisner, Thomas. “For Love of Nature: Exploration and Discovery at Biological Field Stations,” BioScience 32, no. 5 (May 1982): 321-326.

Fitch, Henry S. and W. Dean Kettle. “Kansas Ecological Reserves (University of Kansas Natural Areas).” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 91, nos. 1-2 (1988): 30-36.

Fitch, Henry S., et al. “A Half Century of Forest Invasion on a Natural Area in Northeastern Kansas.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 104, nos. 1-2 (April 2001): 1-17.

Fu-Tuan, Yi. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979.

Gates, Paul Wallace. Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts Over Kansas Land Policy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954.

Hall, Dianne L. and Michael R. Willig. “Mammalian Species Composition, Diversity, and Succession in Conservation Reserve Program Grasslands.” The Southwestern Naturalist 39, no. 1 (March 1994): 1-10.

Hickey, Joseph V. and Charles E. Webb. “The Transition from Farming to Ranching in the Kansas Flint Hills: Two Case Studies.” Great Plains Quarterly 7, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 244-255.

Holl, Steven, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto Perez-Gomez. Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture. Second Edition. San Francisco: William K. Stout Publishing, 2007.

Greaves, Wilfrid. “Damaging Environments: Land, Settler Colonialism, and Security for Indigenous Peoples.” Environment and Society 9, no. 2 (2018): 107-124.

Isenberg, Andrew C. “Seas of Grass: Grasslands in World Environmental History.” In The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History. Edited by Andrew C. Isenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Kettle, W. Dean, et al. “Land-Use History in Ecosystem Restoration: A 40-Year Study in the Prairie-Forest Ecotone.” Restoration Ecology 8, no. 3 (September 2000): 307-317

Laud, Hilmer H. “The Fruitful Plains.” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 61, no. 1 (1958): 14- 31.

Lavatelli, Anna (Director). here-ing documentary. In post-production.

Least Heat-Moon, William. PrairyErth: (a Deep Map). New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River. New York: Ballantine Books, 1966.

Malin, James C. Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas: A Study in Adaptation to Subhumid Geographical Environment. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1944.

McNulty, Stacy A., et al., “The Organization of Biological Field Stations at Fifty,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America 98, no. 4 (October 2017): 359-373.

Nikolakis, William D. and Emma Roberts. “Indigenous Fire Management: A Conceptual Model from Literature.” Ecology and Society 25, no. 4 (2020): 11.

Orr, Joey and Janine Antoni. “We Listen with Our Steps, the Land Speaks.” PLAT Journal 11 (2022): 3-7.

Parks, Ronald D. The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014.

Pyne, Stephen J. The Great Plains: A Fire Survey. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017.

Rozum, Molly P. Grasslands Grown: Creating Place on the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021.

Wiersema, Courtney L. “A Fruitful Plain: Fertility on the Tallgrass Prairie, 1810-1860.” Environmental History 16, no. 4 (October 2011): 678-699.

Wildcat, Daniel R. On Indigenuity: Learning the Lessons of Mother Earth. Golden, Col.: Fulcrum Books, 2023.

Wilson, Edward O. “The Importance of Biological Field Stations,” BioScience 32, no. 5 (May 1982): 320.

Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 

Footnotes

  1. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, with Essays on Conservation from Round River (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), xviii-xix. ↩
  2. Joey Orr and Janine Antoni, “We Listen with Our Steps, the Land Speaks,” PLAT Journal 11 (2022): 4. The political scientist Wilfrid Greaves writes that “Settler capitalist economies have been built on the coercive dispossession of Indigenous territories in order to facilitate the ecologically unsustainable extraction of natural resources, and both practices are incompatible with Indigenous survival precisely because of their ‘ontological relationship to land.’” Wilfrid Greaves, “Damaging Environments: Land, Settler Colonialism, and Security for Indigenous Peoples,” Environment and Society 9, no. 2 (2018): 107-124, quote on p. 117. ↩
  3. Janine Antoni and Joey Orr, “Where We Find Ourselves,” Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 60, no. 1 (Spring 2023): 128. ↩
  4. Antoni and Orr, “Where We Find Ourselves,” 128. ↩
  5. Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Janine Antoni (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩
  6. Keith Van de Riet. (n.d.). https://spencerart.ku.edu/ari-fellows/keith-van-de-riet ↩
  7. Janine Antoni. (n.d.). here-ing. https://www.janineantoni.net/hereing ↩
  8. Melinda M. Adams, “Indigenous Ecologies: Cultivating Fire, Plants, and Climate Futurity,” Artemisia 49, no. 2 (October 2023): 20-29. ↩
  9. Adams, “Indigenous Ecologies,” 23. ↩
  10. Stacy A. McNulty, David White, Mary Hufty, and Paul Foster, “The Organization of Biological Field Stations at Fifty,” Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, Vol. 98, No. 4 (October 2017): 370. For more on field stations as sites of discovery, see also Edward O. Wilson, ”The Importance of Biological Field Stations,” BioScience 32, no. 5 (May 1982): 320; Thomas Eisner, ”For Love of Nature: Exploration and Discovery at Biological Field Stations,” BioScience 32, no. 5 (May 1982): 321-326. ↩
  11. Lavatelli, A. (Director), here-ing documentary, in post-production. ↩
  12. Antoni and Orr, ”Where We Find Ourselves,” 137-138. ↩
  13. For the history of agriculture in eastern Kansas, see, for instance, James C. Malin, Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas: A Study in Adaptation to Subhumid Geographical Environment (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1944); Hilmer H. Laude, ”The Fruitful Plains,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 61, no. 1 (1958): 14-31; Joseph V. Hickey and Charles E. Webb, ”The Transition from Farming to Ranching in the Kansas Flint Hills: Two Case Studies,” Great Plains Quarterly 7, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 244-255; Courtney L. Wiersema, ”A Fruitful Plain: Fertility on the Tallgrass Prairie, 1810-1860,” Environmental History 16, no. 4 (October 2011): 678-699. ↩
  14. For Indigenous dispossession in Kansas, see Paul Wallace Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts Over Kansas Land Policy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1954); Ronald D. Parks, The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 1846-1873 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). For more on the environmental consequences of Indigenous dispossession, particularly in the shift of fire regimes, see also Stephen J. Pyne, The Great Plains: A Fire Survey (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017); William D. Nikolakis and Emma Roberts, ”Indigenous Fire Management: A Conceptual Model from Literature,” Ecology and Society 25, no. 4 (2020): 11. ↩
  15. For detailed overviews on the ecological reserve lands of the University of Kansas, see Henry S. Fitch and W. Dean Kettle, “Kansas Ecological Reserves (University of Kansas Natural Areas),” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 91, nos. 1-2 (1988): 30-36; W. Dean Kettle, et al., “Land-Use History in Ecosystem Restoration: A 40-Year Study in the Prairie-Forest Ecotone,” Restoration Ecology 8, no. 3 (September 2000): 307-317; Henry S. Fitch, et al., “A Half Century of Forest Invasion on a Natural Area in Northeastern Kansas,” Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science (1903-) 104, nos. 1-2 (April 2001): 1-17. For more on how settler agriculture predicated upon intensive cash-crop agriculture degraded the Plains and the environmental issues that caused, see, for instance, Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Andrew C. Isenberg, “Seas of Grass: Grasslands in World Environmental History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Environmental History, Andrew C. Isenberg, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 133-153. For more on the Conservation Reserve Program, in particular, see also, Christopher P. Dunn, et al., “Ecological Benefits of the Conservation Reserve Program,” Conservation Biology 7, no. 1 (March 1993): 132-139; Dianne L. Hall and Michael R. Willig, “Mammalian Species Composition, Diversity, and Succession in Conservation Reserve Program Grasslands,” The Southwestern Naturalist 39, no. 1 (March 1994): 1-10. ↩
  16. Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Janine Antoni (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩
  17. Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Melinda Adams (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩
  18. Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Janine Antoni (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2023. ↩
  19. Production here-ing documentary transcript, Anna Lavatelli (interviewer), Imani Wadud, KU Graduate Student (speaker), Spencer Museum of Art, 2022. ↩
x

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the supporting funders: Mellon Foundation, the Kansas Creative Arts and Industries Commission (KCAIC), the Heritage Conservation Council of Douglas County (Kansas), The Kress Foundation Department of Art History & the Department of Visual Art at KU, and a private donor. Thanks also to Dr. Adams' Spring 2023 Pyrogeography class, Lori Brack, Sara Bear, Matt Bellamy, Dianne Durham, Bryan Foster, Terry Frankenfeld, Wendy Holman, Dan Hughes, Anna C. Lavatelli, Maggie's Farm in Lawrence, Kansas, Christine McDonald, Theo Michaels, Tweesna Rose Mills, Sydney Pursel, Saralyn Reece Hardy, Hinrich Staecker, Ryan Waggoner, Nathaniel Weickert.

Supporting Materials

Below please find videos that document the research goals of some of here-ing's project team, as well as published articles that document the work's central themes and ideas.

In this video, KU Field Station Manager and project team member Sheena Parsons explains the importance of conducting periodic, controlled burns.
The University of Kansas (2024) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrlIcdBcP2s
Although discussing an earlier waterfront project in this video, project team member Dr. Keith Van de Riet (KU School of Architecture & Design) explains his ongoing methods for how the built environment can increase rather than decrease biodiversity.
Spencer Museum of Art (2019) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoNAXRtGK_s
Documentary film about here-ing.
Anna Lavatelli (2024)
This is a national peer-reviewed interview between here-ing's curator, Joey Orr, and here-ing's artist, Janine Antoni.
This is a PDF of a conversation between artist Janine Antoni and curator for research Joey Orr about the here-ing project at the University of Kansas.
3_2023_ANTENNAE_ISSUE_60_Antoni_Orr.pdf

15.699 MB · Download / View

(2023)
This is a published essay between here-ing's curator, Joey Orr, and here-ing's artist, Janine Antoni.
This PDFis a poetic description of of the here-ing project by artist Janine Antoni at the University of Kansas.
2_2022_PLAT_ISSUE_11_ANTONI_JANINE_ORR_JOEY.pdf

2.585 MB · Download / View

(2022)
This is an article discussing here-ing for regional audiences.
This PDF is a discussion of artist Janine Antoni's work here-ing at the University of Kansas.
4_2023_KC_Studio_A_Walking_Labyrinth_in_Lawrence.pdf

5.109 MB · Download / View

(2023)





Completed

 Between July 2021 and October 2023

Website:

 Project Site

Sites and Institutes

 Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas
KU Field Station, University of Kansas
Kansas Biological Survey and Center for Ecological Research, University of Kansas
School of Architecture & Design, University of Kansas
University of Kansas
Tallgrass Artist Residency, Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission

Keywords

 Arts Research Integration Cultural Engagement Eco Art Art And Ecology Environment Fire Field Based Grassland Placemaking Prairie Plants Public Collaboration

Disciplines

 Art Architecture Audiology Ecology And Evolutionary Biology Environmental Studies History

Views

 310 views