Cultivating Survival with Maria Lucia Cruz Correia

Abstract

Performance scholar Una Chaudhuri observed in her keynote lecture at the Psi conference in Stanford in 2013 that the logic of climate change is a very complex one, having no clear spatial boundaries, and not even a spatial logic. It is dependent on numerous choices in numerous different parts of the world simultaneously. Indeed, current environmental crises have become so complex, and so multi-faceted, that a solution is undecideable from one perspective. Should the impossibility of a climate change whodunit leave us sceptical and indifferent? I don’t think so. A sceptical or hypocritical wait-and-see attitude is no option either. This essay explores how art can move us beyond the logic of crime and punishment by developing an aesthetic of ambivalence, without ending up in a nihilist dead lock. Precisely in negotiating an ecology of agential realism, art can probe us to accept our responsibility, or rather, response-ability.In this essay, I observe how works created by the Portuguese-Belgian performance artist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia’s do not dictate moral conduct with regard to climate change. Tracing ecological matters of concern in close interaction with the visitor-spectators in her Urban Action Clinic (2015) and her Urban Action Clinic GARDEN (2015), she raises awareness of the impact of air pollution in the city of Ghent. However, the survival kits on display in these sites induce social activation instead of militant activism. Instead of putting forward one solution, Correia negotiates the ever-ongoing constitution or composition of the world and calls upon a critical and wider view of environmental thinking. Introducing agential realism as an alternative mode for the production of knowledge, she calls upon an ethics of accountability and response-ability, rejecting dictated moral conduct.