The Wind in the Trees: From Tradisexion to Womanifesto

"The Wind in the Trees" is a metaphor used by Josephine Barker to draw attention to the state of our planet, which is now approaching, or perhaps has even gone beyond, the tipping point towards catastrophic disequilibria. If we, art historians, artists and scholars/educators in the arts and humanities were to respond, what options do we have for confronting this planetary crisis?

In this presentation, Datuin briefly looks back on more than 30 years of research, curation and teaching in the field of feminist art criticism and art historiography, with focus on Womanifesto as case in point—paying attention not just to the visible but also the murky and at times unknowable, invisible interiors of what Legaspi-Ramirez terms as women’s ‘maintenance work’, of archiving, organizing, curating and writing on and about women.  In this personal journey of reflection and self-critique, Datuin hopes to demonstrate in their current research, writing and pedagogical directions the ways by which they are rethinking and redirecting their own practice towards a planetary, body-centered, affective, sensuous and tactile level, as suggested by Barker’s method of examining cinema’s tactile eye in terms of skin, musculature and viscera. By situating and linking the already existing patterns of social inequality in terms of geography (ie Southeast Asia), race, class and gender with ecological damage, Datuin wishes to suggest a transdisciplinal, bioregional approach to art making and art-writing. This approach involves a process of ‘reinhabitation’—one that involves crossing the divide between science as the realm of natural phenomena and the humanities as the realm of the interpretation of the ‘records left behind by man’ (Panofsky) where nature becomes a mere lifeless and inert object of symbolic and iconographical resource. Datuin suggests a critical art-historical method and practice that not only goes ‘Against Interpretation’ (Sontag), but also makes us think about talking to each other across generations and geographies as well as to scientists, historians of science, ecologists, meteorologists, herbalists, engineers, fishers, farmers, and so on, so that we can work together and spark a bioregional collaboration that is attuned, not just with political realities and vernacular cultures but also keenly attentive to Barker’s term the ‘Wind in the Trees’, and the manifold textures and shapes of the human and non-human worlds.