UC Santa Cruz

Working between the fields of visual studies and environmental humanities, this dissertation examines works of contemporary visual art and culture that probe the relationship between ecological crises and the production of global and planetary memory. Through analyses that span social practice art, installation, performance, film, museum display, architecture, and sculpture among others, each chapter—on seeds, ice, and whales, respectively—considers the varied social, political, and environmental implications of global and planetary memory practices “at the end of the world.” Geographically centered primarily—though not exclusively—in the Arctic, the dissertation begins by investigating the role of spatial imaginaries and colonial legacies in shaping institutionalized global memory practices of conservation, preservation, and archiving while analyzing artists’ engagements with sustained and reclaimed forms of cultural memory transmission. The project then conceives of various life forms as bearers of memory involving centuries—if not millennia—of environmental and cultural information. In doing so, I argue that “planetary archives” offer novel temporal and spatial ways of producing historical knowledge. Methodologically, my dissertation contributes to visual studies scholarship—particularly scholarship on contemporary art and climate change—by positing nonhuman modes of perception as a means of advancing formal visual analysis—and by advocating for creative approaches to scholarly writing through its use of essayistic modes and the epistolary form. Ultimately, my dissertation contends that through the investigation of contemporary visual-cultural works engaging with emergent memory practices (whether through representation, enactment and/or critique), this era of climate catastrophe warrants an investigation of the expanded role of the “planetary” and the political possibilities afforded to us when we remember differently.