The Colonial Anthropocene and a new ‘Little Ice Age’ with Francine Marquis.
On Friday 22nd April 2022, scientists, international institutions, citizen activists, and researchers around the globe participated in ‘Earth Day’. Circulating on social media and news outlets were time-lapses of polar melt, bleached reefs, and areas ravaged by wildfires. What followed were statistics on decline, polls of climate concerns, and calls from heads of state to invest in clean energy futures. Yet, as the term Anthropocene were prominent, a periodisation denoting the role of human interaction to cause these global environmental events, what struck me, as I watched live streams of protests from around the world, was an absence of conversation as it relates to colonial legacy, a Western hegemony, that still exists today. Moreover, in the process of reconstructing our Arctic future, it is worthwhile to extrapolate why research in the UK is disconnected and lagging in its colonial histories on the colonial history of the Anthropocene and. I suggest this is a legacy that is still being felt. So, despite current narratives of the need for global unity to solve the effects of climate change, it is not grounded in history, materiality, or the voices of marginalised workers. Here I discuss the late medieval event known as the ‘Little Ice Age’ relevance to today’s environmental discourse, and speak with the Brazilian artist Francine Marquis on her work.
“ The foundation of my practice is shaped by process. Whether fabricating, manufacturing, assembling, sculpting or deconstructing, preceding all of these completed works lay a series of stages that are shaped by their layers. In working in this fashion, I am physically able to represent memory–a concept which I have identified as having a fluid, shifting and hard-to-represent nature–embedding it within the materiality of place.”
What is interesting about Marquis work, is her connection to family and memory. In one piece, she built a replica of a home. Along with wood, plaster, and anything necessary for this, but the final product was in a miniature form. In the walls of plaster and wood, she filled the cavities with her grandmothers tobacco. It was sensorial connection to, her memories in childhood and her Brazilian heritage. I wonder, will Marquis have? It is not hard to view, that much of the dialogues and discourse that pushes for a need in global change and the importance of unified ecologies fail artists who define themselves in other terms… Perhaps via a domestic home, a grandmothers tobacco, a forgotten heritage. The Anthropocene requires a universal indentifier of human agency as the principle cause of climate change, but the issues are, it does not fully acknowledge the remnants of inequalities. The development of the early modern period, and the remnants of inequalities are yet to be reconciled.
“Francine Marquis is an interdisciplinary sculptural artist and writer currently studying to receive her MFA from The Burren College of Art. Her studio practice is deeply rooted in process and material. With meticulously crafted, built, fractured installations, she explores personal memories layered within place and interior spaces. Interested in the tactile phenomenological experiences shared between her work and the audience, she welcomes collaboration through physical engagement, further troubling the distinction between construction and deconstruction. Her most recent installation series, A Wall two Place, can be seen in the winter MFA group exhibition Déan Cúram / take care at the Burren College of Art Gallery, where she embeds her own memories within the materiality of architectural space”
