ARC3311H1S 
Instructor: TBD 
Meeting Section: L0101 
Mondays 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. 

Land is more than location, ground, setting, and soil. Land is relation. It situates subjects of all kinds, and puts forward commitments to sharing, fostering, and caring for others with and through land. Humans more than other species have made lasting marks on the land. Agriculture, settlement, weaving, trade driven by extractive industries, manufacturing, planting and urbanization are just a short list of the human activities that depend on land while marking it and often depleting it. In settler colonial contexts, Indigenous peoples, with their community wellbeing inextricably linked to the vitality of lands and waters, have faced pressures by settlers and the enclosure of common lands in the context of legal regimes premised on private ownership and the generation of individual wealth. If land is relation it then suggests a methodological turn that can describe how we enter into relation with its own modes of legibility and existence.  

 This seminar seeks to situate a range of ‘land practices’ to document how the land holds memories, marks, and modes of orientation across subject positions that include humans, but also exceed our capacity to articulate relationships to land. Assembled as a collaborative, open-access platform, with the active, curatorial participation of students,  the seminar will begin from the premise that lands hold and build relations. Lands speak while also ephemerally hosting meanings that can be read. Land practices will be defined and documented over the course of the semester, with select weeks threading through a special focus on community-land relations in Colombia, from the Pacific coast to the southern Andes. Designers, artists, and researchers from Indigenous, Afro-Colombian and other communities in Colombia will contribute to the seminar discussions.