Artistic Strategies of Ecological Care Work: Marwa Arsanios, Cecylia Malik, and Diana Lelonek

I Marwa Arsanios

In one of her films in the tetralogy Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–2022), Marwa Arsanios focuses on Jinwar, a village for women and children in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava) established in 2016, where traditional agricultural practices, the preservation of ancient seeds, and the independence of female care within village structures of self-governance are central.^[35] My investigation focuses on the different strategies of care work within an agricultural context rather than on the political narratives associated with the film, such as the Kurdish independence movement.

The tetralogy’s parts I and II are closely connected: After a short prologue read by the artist, a narrator explains the significance of the mother as the first ecological teacher and issues a warning to not damage the earth:^[36]

She taught me that we as humans have a place in nature, like trees and birds. I have the right to exist, like all other species in the same place. […] Our ecological consciousness within the movement evolved within our communal life in these conditions of war. There’s always a strong parallel between the massacre of nature and that of women. We, the women’s movement, had to protect our existence.^[37]

Especially in times of war, agricultural knowledge is often lost. War is the cause of destruction and often perpetuates it further. In the film a woman explains the need to cut down trees as combustible material.^[38] Here, environmental damage and deforestation is necessary in order for women to survive, implying the complex tension between the need to survive and the time and possibility of “ecological leisure.” The film follows different female voices telling their individual experiences during their time with the guerrillas. They lived in the mountains and explain their right to self-defense as a right derived from nature itself.^[39] Characteristics of the film are interviews, passages with non-diegetic sound leaving behind traditional modes of documentary, varying camera settings as well as stage directions given to some of the interviewed persons. Another characteristic is the discrepancy between sound and image. In the beginning, for example, the viewer only sees part of a winter landscape that underlines the close relationship between humans and nature. It harbors the hidden guerrilla members and is the site of their cultural practices. The shot of the winter landscape is followed by an interview of some women telling their stories about ecological consciousness and their experiences of living in the mountains. The first part ends with drawings of medicinal herbs, followed by an image of the same winter landscape with stones that liken a graveyard (fig. 1).

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Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, pt. I, 2017, film still, 16:54

In the second part, Arsanios focuses on the village of Jinwar (fig. 2). The film begins with close-up shots of a herbarium book. Different plants’ healing powers and effects are explained by a woman’s voice while she flips through the pages. We see construction works in Jinwar and listen to discussions about land ownership. The commune itself is built on state-owned land that was taken over by the autonomous government after the Syrian regime’s forces were pushed out of the north. After the withdrawal of the army, the land was mostly given to cooperatives. Arsanios also focuses on different forms of property in the fourth part of the tetralogy, Reverse Shot (2022). This film is set in a quarry in the mountains of northern Lebanon. It deals with the communalization of a private quarry in the mountains with the help of an agricultural cooperative and the involvement of the local community in the search for solutions to improve the quality of the soil. Tasting, touching, and caressing soil embodies an affective involvement, as Puig de la Bellacasa explains, exposed in all three artworks to be discussed here.

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Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, pt. II, 2019, film still, 23:05

At the heart of the village project is sustainable, self-sufficient agriculture, which aims to heal the relationship with the land. In one scene we can see women planting the communal garden. As a result of the Syrian regime’s policy to industrialize agriculture since the 1970s, Jinwar is an area of quasi-desert and wheat monoculture.

Vandana Shiva is among the authors who show that the fight against monoculture is a central theme of ecofeminism. She has pointed out the piracy of patents on plants in the twenty-first century:^[40]“Seed companies deliberately breed seeds that cannot reproduce, turning women farmers from seed keepers to seed consumers”^[41] – thus, one could add, rendering them unable to care for their own seed production, leading to an interruption in the cycle of care. Her book Ecofeminism, published together with Maria Mies, is a programmatic text, relying on the main argument that the patriarchal-capitalistic system has built its primacy on the suppression, colonization, and exploitation of women, non-Western countries, and nature. In a dualistic model, Shiva opposes the ecological care initiated mainly by women to the Green Revolution, which since the 1960s has aimed to increase harvests through techniques such as monocropping and multiple cropping, while retaining control over seeds.^[42] Similarly to Shiva and Puig de la Bellacasa, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing underline the challenges of the Plantationocene, as they call it, and its different, contrasting forms of temporality: “The plantation system speeds up generation time. The plantation disrupts the generation times of all the players.”^[43] According to them, the capacity to love and care for a place “is radically incompatible with the plantation,” especially with monocultural expansion.^[44] According to them, the Plantationocene began in the seventeenth century and is articulated in the exploitation of human labor, more than human-work, and natural resources as well as in industrialized, scalable ecologies and the global circulation of biota.

One protagonist of the film describes the distribution of work within Jinwar and its self-governmental structures with a poignant phrase: “We took over men’s place.”^[45] Another habitant explains: “When women are autonomous they become equal to men.”^[46] Besides typical female care work such as setting up houses with furniture, cultivating food and medicinal plants, harvesting, preserving seeds, planting trees, teaching, sewing, and cooking that are shown in the film, this includes also guarding and construction work – usually male-dominated (care) work. The goal of the village is to change the territory and create fertile soil (fig. 3): “The first we took care of was agriculture,” one woman explains while walking in the fields, thus underlining the inherent structure of different, necessary (care) work.^[47] Arsanios included a few scenes with construction sites during the foundation of Jinwar in which men are mainly visible assisting in building houses. The different types of care work complement each other, as one woman explains, having worked as a sewer herself long before she joined Jinwar.^[48] Housework and farm work, that is, care work in the broader sense, remain visible here – in contrast to the history of housework formulated by Gisela Bock and Barbara Duden in 1977 – because Jinwar embodies a counter-model to the agro-economy; moreover, the women themselves are in the foreground as the central theme of the film.^[49] The two authors consider unpaid, mostly taken-for-granted domestic work as invisible as well as dependent on the working man in capitalism, the beginning of which is traced to industrialization and the division of labor. But in the community of Jinwar, the film’s narrative suggests, autonomy is guaranteed by non-patriarchal structures of conviviality such as self-sufficient farming and the waiving of individual salaries in favor of a “common pot of money.”^[50]

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Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, pt. II, 2019, film still, 41:41

The ecofeminist Val Plumwood describes this social concept of a female, non-hierarchical community and its corresponding utopias in her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature:

The story of a land where women live at peace with themselves and with the natural world is a recurrent theme of feminist utopias. This is a land where there is no hierarchy, among humans or between humans and animals, where people care for one another and for nature, where the earth and the forest retain their mystery, power and wholeness, where the power of technology and of military and economic force does not rule the earth, or at least that part of it controlled by women.^[51]

All parts of Arsanios’ film – especially part III, Micro Resistances (2020), about the (dangerous, life-threatening) battle for seed conservation against transnational companies, extraction, and corruption in Tolima, Colombia – document care work for a wounded planet, initiated by women fighting against the loss of biodiversity and desertification (fig. 4): “We take care of all native seeds of the territory. Seeds that are not contaminated.”^[52] This exemplarily demonstrates that care time is neither unproductive nor reproductive, as is often assumed.^[53]

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Marwa Arsanios, Who Is Afraid of Ideology?, pt. III, Micro Resistances, 2020, film still, 26:59

Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s concept of care is, in my opinion, particularly suitable for analyzing these artworks that seemingly follow her arguments. The “knowing-caring allows an affective engagement” is here transferred to the relationship between humans and more than humans.^[54] Obviously care is never neutral. According to the author, reclaiming care means keeping it grounded in practical engagements with material conditions that are inherent to a certain site and that expose tension, such as the films depict.^[55] This tension is expressed in the so-called soil time.

The formation of soil is the result of deep time – a term introduced by John McPhee in 1981. The concept – which describes deep temporal dynamics of the earth’s shaping and erosion in slow geographical processes that go beyond human imagination – dates back to James Hutton, an eighteenth-century geologist.^[56] This form of temporality – literally embedded in the re-creating of fertile humus, the healing of contaminated, exploited soil – stands in contrast to the production rhythms of the agricultural industry and its productionist ethos as depicted in Lelonek’s work on abandoned slagheaps that I will address further on.

In her ecological critique of linear and anthropocentric temporalities, Puig de la Bellacasa analyzes the conflict of different temporalities.^[57] She calls for “decentering unilinear, anthropocentric, temporalities in order to make time for a multiplicity of others.”^[58] In Arsanios’ film, this approach appears as a disruption of previous temporalities centered on human agency.^[59] Just like Puig de la Bellacasa, the artist refers to Karen Barad (especially her critique of Niels Bohr), Vicki Kirby, and Donna Haraway, amongst others.^[60] Thus, she critically reflects on the entanglement of human and nature, leaving behind approaches that followed a “prescriptive essentialism” of “nature as a container.”^[61] At the beginning of the first part, for example, a voice remembers her mother telling her about the right of humans to be in nature as part of it, like all other species.^[62]

Puig de la Bellacasa further elaborates on these heterogeneous forms of care that are also mentioned in the films:^[63] 1. The unidirectional care of the male-dominated agricultural industry, “caring” for food production via monoculture and treating soil as a “service provider.” 2. Soil as a living entity, as a matter of care, closely entangled with human ontology – we are also part of soil communities, not only victims – as embodied by the women collectives in Jinwar and Colombia. Looking back to history and its (often constructed and simplified) dichotomous models, the films evoke that mostly (indigenous) women are closely intertwined with pre-industrial forms of agriculture, including structures of temporality such as the moon cycle, without any critical questioning: “Then we, as indigenous people, rely on the moon phases.”^[64] Thus, the cinematic, schematic narrative remains bound to the dichotomous model. This is expressed in a plea for self-sufficient farming, to stand against seed accumulation and one-sided cultivation, such as of sugarcane in Colombia, which, like commercial fish farming requiring immense amounts of water, threatens the small farms struggling for independence. Their own (care) work is less reflected than presented and, in some scenes, documented by the camera without commentary, for example the concept of the manageable home orchard, which allows domestic and agricultural care work to be done well side by side, the transmission of ancestral knowledge, the care of elders, cooking, sewing, and not least self-care. One of the protagonists, an evicted woman, tells of her husband’s murder and how she subsequently wanted to care for herself and for other women “who wanted to replicate the model” in order to “maintain myself, plan my life.”^[65]

The herbarium shown in the film evokes the figure of the herb witch who, in defiance of masculine, rational conventional medicine, trusts in the power of centuries-old plants and laws of nature. Arsanios’ film mirrors this dualism of gender-specific attributions of sustainable, traditional, female agriculture and plant knowledge versus industrial, exploitative male agriculture, raising the question of how to deal with this seemingly essentialistic juxtaposition as seen from the perspective of ecofeminism. Arsanios remains an outside observer, not an autochthonous woman; the artist is “also a social subject defined in various languages and marked by multiple differences (sexual, ethnic, and so on).”^[66] Hal Foster’s 1995 essay “The Artist as Ethnographer?” offers an important addition to the above-mentioned problem as he emphasizes: “the quasi-anthropological artist today may seek to work with sited communities with the best motives of political engagement and institutional transgression only in part to have this work recoded by its sponsors as social outreach, economic development, public relations […] or art.”^[67] Thus, the often-existent assumptions, that the site is located elsewhere and that the other is outside, need to be critically addressed, as does the question of access to essential information and sites. Nonetheless, I differentiate two more levels of care discussed in the films: First, the care work that is done and documented in the communities, regaining fertile soil and healing the wounded landscape.^[68] Second, the so-to-speak artistic care work done by Marwa Arsanios of providing visibility, at least in an international art context.

In the films, ecological care and domestic care are closely connected and provide models for non-patriarchal, sustainable life forms. These heterogeneous types of care work are observed as care, supplemented by rather atypical (female) care work such as guarding and self-protection. 

II Cecylia Malik

Whereas the film tetralogy Who Is Afraid of Ideology? (2017–2022) is characterized by observing and thus making visible care work predominantly as soil work in favor of biodiversity and sustainable forms of life, the Polish artist Cecylia Malik initiates an “informal civic movement” that demonstrates against the lack of ecological care.^[69] In her hometown of Kraków in 2017, Malik responded to extensive forest clearing facilitated by a change in the so-called Szyszko’s Law with the protest performance Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps (fig. 5). Under the then Minister of Environment, Jan Szyszko, the Nature Conservation Act was changed “to allow trees to be cut down on private property, without even the obligation to report the tree removal to the relevant authorities. The only exceptions were business operations and nature monuments,” as Jakub Kronenberg, Edyta Łaszkiewicz, and Joanna Sziło explain in their paper “Voting with One’s Chainsaw.”^[70] This resulted in an enormous removal of trees and a huge, critical public debate during the first half of the year, until the government reestablished some of the previous restrictions, such as the requirement to have a permit to cut down a tree, to stop this kind of uncontrolled deforestation.^[71] The latter is well known to increase climate change and soil impoverishment, as Puig de la Bellacasa underlines.

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Cecylia Malik, Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps, 18 March 2017, photograph, Okulickiego Street, Kraków

Similar to Arsanios, this case also raises the question of private versus public, communal land ownership and its ecological care. Malik, who considers herself to be an “urban activist,” states: “[…] with my son Ignaś, I covered all the tree felling sites, where trees were being cut down on the basis of the so-called Lex Szyszko.”^[72] She was told local stories, such as the site-specific, historical background of the municipal Wolski Forest by her grandmother, and passes these on to her son, continuing the tradition and taking up the narrative of the mother as the first (ecological) oral teacher (fig. 6). The action spread to other areas of Poland through social media channels and digitally distributed media images, which in their viral effect generated the temporary formation of a group with comparable images, co-organized by Anna Grajewska (fig. 7). Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps therefore seems to be particularly suitable for a media strategy and digital dissemination, thereby evoking the question of the political effectiveness of “instagrammable” art that primarily generates images designed for online presentation and worldwide circulation. Retrospectively, the authors Kronenberg, Łaszkiewicz, and Sziło also use an image of Malik’s performance in their paper on landscape and urban planning to illustrate the controversy, which demonstrates that these images of Malik’s action and its title provoke a highly suggestive rhetoric that seems to need no further explanation. According to the artist’s website, a petition was sent to the president and the prime minister, as well as to the Pope, followed by a trip to Rome as the “culmination of a month-long crowdfunding campaign. The protest pilgrimage was to request the intervention of the Pope, as the Minister of the Environment and his anti-green policy is supported by the Polish Catholic Church and Catholic media.”^[73] The artist thus uses the existing (infra)structures, connections, and role attributions of state and church.

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Cecylia Malik, Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps, 10 March 2017, photograph, Warsaw

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Cecylia Malik, Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps, 10 March 2017, photograph, Sodowa Street, Kraków

Her work demonstrates that acts of care do not only concern maintenance and affective relations but, as Puig de la Bellacasa states, “acts of care can even be considered as a kind of resistance” – in Malik’s case against deforestation, similar to Arsanios’ documented initiatives against male-dominated agroindustry.^[74] Ultimately, the protests led to a de-tightening of the law. Furthermore, this performance included a protest against the deforestation of the Białowieza forest, which is one of the last primeval forests remaining within Europe, situated in Poland and Belarus. In the images, the cut-down trees, their lives taken away, are juxtaposed with the life-giving mothers. Women breastfeeding their children are shown purposefully using their motherhood to fight for the necessity of protecting nature for future generations. Within the context of European, Christian iconography this specific image rhetoric remains legible (fig. 8) and the term ecological care fits especially well since it evokes the allegory of Caritas, one of the three theological virtues, often depicted with two or three children. At the top of her head a fire burns, as illustrated in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia.^[75] At the same time, the pathetic rhetoric of the image also recalls the Pietà, who mourns the death of her own creation, her son to whom she gave birth. Caritas, Pietà, and Gaia, the latter the personified, birth-giving, and nourishing earth in Greek mythology, seem to merge into one overarching figure. Malik’s artistic action is obviously located in a Polish cult of motherhood based on Catholicism, an image that functions in an essentializing, restricting way. Does this invocation of a collective, European-influenced pictorial memory evoke greater emotion and attention in the sense of ancient rhetoric’s delectare – movere? Whereas “delectare” (Lat.: to delight) serves the excitation of gentle affects, benevolence, and pleasure, “movere” (Lat.: to move, to shake) serves the excitation of strong affects such as fear and hate. This type of effect can develop a tremendous manipulative power. The conception of “caring thinking” as touch, which Puig de la Bellacasa further explores, allows for an intensification of involvement and proximity. Being literally present is an essential part of Malik’s work: seeing mother and child sitting on the tree stump, accompanied by a dog, evokes a pictorial relationship based on traditional role models.^[76] Perceiving, experiencing, and caring are generated here through the sense of touch in a “sense of material-embodied relationality.”^[77]

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Cecylia Malik, Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps, 4 March 2017, photograph, Polish Pilots Park, Kraków

Like Arsanios’ films, Malik’s performance contrasts different forms of temporality: the slow growth of the trees versus the fast gestures of destruction and its long-lasting ecological consequences, the long years of maternal care for a child growing up versus the ephemeral moment of photographing, brought to stasis in the digitally floating images taken by multiple authors. With Polish Mothers on Tree Stumps, Cecylia Malik realized an artistic project that generated digital media images from a protest performance. Ecological care engages her closely with motherhood and domestic care in the sense of securing a healthy ecological environment for future generations and preserving vital resources as well as locally specific natural heritage.

III Diana Lelonek

Together with friends and the local people of Bytom, Diana Lelonek harvested sea buckthorn, a pioneer plant growing in the neighboring anthropocentric wastelands after the end of coal mining, and subsequently created local food products from it such as jams and juices. These products were sold during the Climate Summit in Katowice in 2018, in an effort to create a positive counter-narrative (not only) for the local population and to provide a product for the region to identify with, while the state has not proposed any fruitful concepts for its development.^[78] This multimedia work, entitled The Seaberry Slagheap Stand (Action) (fig. 9), deals with the degradation and modification of post-coal landscapes and the question of how to “re-brand” these anthropocentric wastelands, in this case the Konin Coalfield.^[79] Konin is a coal-mining area in Poland, around 300 kilometers north of Bytom, between Poznań and Łódź. After the end of Konin’s use as a coal-mining site, sea buckthorn was planted as a pioneer plant that grows well in post-mining landscapes. Sea buckthorn is atypical for this region and can be considered a visible sign of renaturation for fertile soil; for Lelonek, it functions as “artistic material” entangled with the local landscape and its population. Furthermore, she developed the idea to create a natural reserve park in the region’s overgrown slagheaps dating from the 1970s – a project she has not yet realized. The artist planned to sell the handmade jams and juices directly at the climate conference next to the other market booths of local producers (fig. 10), before she was invited to present Seaberry Slagheap Stand at the group exhibition The Most Beautiful Catastrophe, curated by Jakub Gawkowski at Kronika Center for Contemporary Art in Bytom on the occasion of the COP24 climate summit in 2018 in nearby Katowice. Another presentation was offered to the artist at the climate conference, making her specific exhibition history a vivid example of the complex interweavings between curatorial offerings and political infrastructures.

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Diana Lelonek, Seaberry Slagheap, 2018, installation view from the exhibition The Most Beautiful Catastrophe. Bytom, Kronika Center for Contemporary Art

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Diana Lelonek, Seaberry Slagheap, 2018, documentation from the performance in Konin

It is typical for the host country and city to organize a cultural program during the climate conference. In Katowice, part of this program was The Good Climate Pavilion, made of straw and wood on the city’s market, where Diana Lelonek was also invited to participate.^[80] As she would have had to share the exhibition space with presenters from one of the largest producers of coal in the European Union; the Polish governmental organization State Forests, which is responsible for the destruction and logging in the protected parts of Białowieża, and McDonald’s, she cancelled her participation at short notice. Greenwashing was apparent in the entire exhibition’s program.^[81] Since Lelonek declined to take part in the state-organized exposition, the financial support promised to her through the “Green coal” initiative was revoked.^[82] After the cancellation, Lelonek was asked to present Seaberry Slagheap Stand (Action) in an exhibition run by federal NGOs, amongst them Greenpeace, where Paweł Szypulski, also involved in art as a curator, heads the anti-coal campaign. Close to the conference building, next to a train stop, this frequented location allowed her to converse with many participants and passers-by. She also sold her products at a booth of the local municipality.

The group show The Most Beautiful Catastrophe opened the same day as the start of the climate conference. The exhibition’s goal was to invite people from outside the art scene, including climate activists, for panel discussions. The curator, Jakub Gawkowski, organized a workshop on green anarchism and civil disobedience and a roundtable with activists and representatives of grassroots civic movements such as Marta Senk, Mikuláš Černík, and Monika Sadkowska.^[83] Lelonek’s presentation and sales display within the exhibition corresponded well with the ecological context, as it consisted of wooden crates and pallets, suggesting up-cycling and zero-waste approaches, as well as echoing the aesthetics of organic markets’ local product offerings. The logo itself combines three different, partly subversive contextual signets that merge with each other (fig. 11): a coal excavator used for mining, an abstract form of the sun, and the logo of Polsat, a private Polish television channel owned by Zygmunt Solorz-Żak, one of the richest people in Poland, which mainly offered pro-government reporting during the rule of the PiS party.^[84] The ambivalence becomes apparent on the four different labels that link the jams and juices – including images of danger and ecological catastrophe – even if, at first glance, the viewer’s visual experience may be deceived by the similarity to the labels of handmade organic products.

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Diana Lelonek, Seaberry Slagheap, 2018, labels for juices

Due to sea buckthorn having become an increasingly endangered plant species, Lelonek’s approach is even more pertinent, fertilizing the devastated soil and thus setting a positive example for the local (and the broader) population and claiming, I would argue, an artistic strategy of ecological care (fig. 12). After her initial gesture, it remains questionable if the project will be continued without her, or if the site-specific landscape primarily functions as stage setting within an artistic framework and its media relations. Here, too, it is useful to draw on Hal Foster’s considerations: He points out this problem, often associated with similar site-specific cooperative interventions “with the community (which tends to be constructed as readymade for representation)” that are too short in their temporal structures, “leading to limited engagement of the sited other.”^[85] According to Foster, the risk of “ethnographic self-fashioning” occurs if “the artist is not decentered so much as the other is fashioned in artistic guise.”^[86] Applied to the projects presented here, the following remains to be noted: In comparison to Lelonek, Arsanios only documents and observes the construction of Jinwar and its ecological care practices, since it is not her own initiative. Malikgenerates a short-term attention curve that then ebbs; the echo of the virally distributed images lingers and contributes to a re-tightening of the law. She is present as co-author and as main protagonist in several images. Diana Lelonek deals with “wounded” nature, with post-industrial landscapes and contaminated soil in the sense of Gilles Clément’s Manifeste du Tiers Paysage (2004).^[87] The work of Arsanios and Malik can also be compared with Clément’s ideas. The French garden architect calls areas comparable to the three artists’ stages – areas that have been abandoned by humans but have gradually been reclaimed by plants, animals, and microorganisms – a “third landscape.”

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Diana Lelonek, Seaberry Slagheap, 2018, installation view from the exhibition The Most Beautiful Catastrophe. Bytom, Kronika Center for Contemporary Art

With hopeful counter-narratives, Lelonek positioned herself against the dystopian, often male-dominated discourse of the Anthropocene and widespread iconographies of destruction, and suggests a concept of ecological care followed by specific, collaborative actions. Val Plumwood emphasizes that concrete, experienced actions and special relationships, such as those expressed in the artworks discussed here, protect against an overly abstract understanding of nature.^[88] Lelonek’s approach is rooted in a market economy, where harvesting and consumption is also thought of as a solution. And yet it remains to be considered that her artistic setting in the form of a sculptural object meets especially the aesthetic expectations of a European, ecologically educated middle class as well as the Western paradigm of the white cube as exhibition context. The assumed healing of the “wounds” functions in a double sense: in reference to Puig de la Bellacasa, sea buckthorn enriches the soil and is a habitat for organisms. It has medical and therapeutic properties but is a transplant from Asia. Recently, the so-called “superfood” became quite popular due to its high levels of vitamin C and antioxidants. Here, making time for care “appears as a material effort for speculative ethical commitments in more than human worlds.”^[89]

IV Conclusion

In her book Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, Joan Tronto argues:

On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity and includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.^[90]

All three artists presented here show that caring is not restricted to human interaction with others. Caring also takes place in relation to objects and to the environment, as in the case of ecological care (for soil). It requires a sociopolitical, cultural ecology of care-giving practices and might vary among different cultures.^[91] Tronto distinguishes four interconnected phases of care: 1. Caring about involves the recognition that care is necessary; it assumes the position of another person or group – in this case an ecosystem or more than human species – to recognize the need. 2. Taking care of involves the recognition that one can act, which includes notions of agency and responsibility, such as Marwa Arsanios’ project through film or Cecylia Malik’s through photographs. 3. Care-giving concerns physical work; it requires that care-givers come into contact with the objects of care, as Diana Lelonek does in her collective harvesting and selling of products on local markets. 4. Care-receiving recognizes that the object of care will respond to the care it receives.

While care work is often understood as a private virtue, here the different strategies of ecological care become public and require infrastructural, sociopolitical frames. All three artists deal with “soil time,” as Puig de la Bellacasa names it – they disrupt a status quo and follow a different sense of time. According to Puig de la Bellacasa, timescapes are devices to consider the entanglement of epochal, practical, and embodied timescales,^[92] bringing the relational and situational character of time to the fore. Lelonek’s work is an artistic mise-en-scéne of healing the contaminated, exploited earth; Malik’s is about the devastated soil and deforestation; and Arsanios’ is about making the earth-fertile by preserving ancient seeds and conserving (female) knowledge.

Ecological care is mirrored in an expanded concept of soil as expressed in Puig de la Bellacasa’s study: soil is considered a living entity, closely entangled with the (human) body as bacterial matter with fluid boundaries, which references Haraway’s strategy of composting.^[93] The third part of Arsanios’ tetralogy starts with exactly this thought and evokes a close entanglement of soil, which means the “housing earth,” bacteria and seeds.^[94] As is well known, fertile soil is largely created through composting processes. When studying contemporary soil art, the ecofeminist’s strategy enlightens these dynamic forms of artistic material as being the result of an entanglement between humans and more than human beings. According to Haraway, “human” does not come from “homo,” but from “humus.” She creates a new ecological ethic that addresses the strategy of composting, a recycling of existing material that, when decomposed and metabolized, results in a new “product.” We are nothing more than compost: “Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist.”^[95] Etymologically, compost is based on the past participle of the Latin verb “componere,” i.e., “compositum,” formed from the prefix “com-” (together) and the verb “ponere” (to put), and means “that which is put together.” The term refers to the substances deposited, the result obtained by decomposition, and the collection site. Haraway’s Terrapolis consists of and exists for humus, the material of the guman – an old Indo-European word for “tiller of the soil.”^[96] Here again Haraway’s plea for the time-basedness and mutability of the human being is echoed. We will not survive as individuals, but only in sympoiesis, in “becoming with” other species.^[97] What is significant about the compost metaphor is the plurality of protagonists involved. Since the 1960s, the preoccupation with earth as an artistic material can be linked to the earth art genre, although the relationship between author and material has changed towards a broader perspective on the material’s agency.^[98]

In these relationships of recognition, mutuality, and respect, ecological care can also be entangled with activism, or artivism. This brings up the question of accessibility and sustainability in the sense of a possible after-life of each artistic project and the created images: In Lelonek’s case, it is a one-off action that then lives on via the vendor booth’s structure, photographs, culinary products, etc.; in Malik’s case, media images that went viral echo the protest performance and address a wider audience; in Arsanios’ case, a film shows the artist and her team as interviewers and ethnographic observers, drawing attention to these agricultural practices and ecological role models. So, what can art achieve when compared to scientific theories such as those of Puig de la Bellacasa? Perhaps art is more successful in creating an emotional, affective attachment and thus engagement, since artists are not strictly bound to pure facts. Instead, they are able to follow a speculative approach and develop futurist counter-narratives. I would argue that all three artistic positions engage with the potential to “disrupt the reduction of soil to be a resource for humans” and underline the significance of the temporal “co-care’s recalcitrance against industrial, rationalized and automated production rhythms.”^[99] And yet, it remains questionable whether the sociopolitical claim and the intended mediation can exert a longer-term imprint on ecological reality, or if it instead remains in the context of art-immanent structures and within an educated audience. Consequently, Puig de la Bellacasa opposes this closure in her question “Can we think of care as an obligation that traverses the nature/culture bifurcations without simply reinstating the binaries and moralism of anthropocentric ethics?”^[100] Whereas in the above-mentioned artworks the nature/culture bifurcations are critically discussed to allow for more than human perspectives, all three artists draw on the connection of woman/ motherhood with nature, fertility, sustainability, and earth/soil, as the text tried to show. A critical questioning of these narratives, including why, for example, traditional, non-industrial agricultural practices are connoted as feminine, is not discussed. This conflation has been problematized in Western ecofeminist theories since the 1980s. The historic discourse has been mainly shaped by male-dominated values and remains entrenched in a dichotomous model, which should be addressed and critically reflected when analyzing comparable works of art. The gender-specific attributions and role models culminate in the topos of the mother as the first ecological teacher and in the herb witch. Despite their different biographical, sociopolitical, and conceptual backgrounds, Arsanios, Malik, and Lelonek demonstrate that ecological care and domestic care go hand in hand. They further show that ecofeminism is linked to alternative ways of life beyond agro-industry and patriarchal structures, and that global projects try to unlearn these binary restrictions to find sustainable, soil-bound solutions.

I would like to express my deep gratitude for the helpful comments by Henrike Haug and Marta Smolińska as well as for the fruitful discussion at the corresponding conference in Bochum, to the editors Tonia Andresen, Friederike Siegler, and Änne Söll, and the two reviewers.