Abstract
This essay presents thinking about art and ecology as learnt through study of work originating in the rural northeast of Brazil in the 1980s, which then featured in biennials at the end of that decade. While drawing on the writing of Walter Benjamin, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Carolyn Merchant and Anna Tsing, it centres the sculptural assemblages of Projeto Terra as situated in the Bahian sertão by Juraci Dórea. Reworking academic conventions, it experiments with art historiography and offers some emergent heuristics.
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