Failed Inosculation, Part of Multimedia Project by Angela Higuera ‘22.
“Do you know what it’s like to live on land who loves you back?” - Danez Smith, Don’t Call Us Dead
For the Yale Farm summer internship, I created a multimedia project that explores my relationship to land and agriculture.
The conception of my project first occurred after reading William Cronon’s astute piece, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” His was the first piece of writing I had come across to explicitly question and undermine my own understanding of Nature and the American landscape. I’ve always been drawn to landscapes for their unique ability to convey our subdued emotional states. Contemporary photographers, such as Rebecca Norris Webb and Jennifer Garza-Cuen, were great inspirations; they both use people-less shots of American landscapes to express internal turmoil. Only after reading “Changes in the Land” by Cronon and “Uncommon Ground,” a series of essays concerning the human relationship to land, did I become attuned to the ways Webb’s and Cuen’s images reify our mythologized portrayal of Nature.
The imagery in this exhibit is accompanied by excerpts from Danez Smith’s book of poetry, Don’t Call Us Dead. Smith’s poems —in addition to discussing a plethora of challenges specific to Black Americans— offer Land as an ever shifting and complex character. “we could play Eden all day” is a line from Smith’s poem, “Summer, somewhere.” Though this current body of work doesn’t explicitly address the role that Western religion plays in my fraught relationship to land, the title is meant to suggest an alternative and liberating understanding of Christianity’s confined representation of Nature, one that celebrates the mundane and encourages human engagement with our non-human material surroundings.