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by Jamie Perera
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
Jamie Perera is an artist. His work explores radical deconstruction, re-imagining and reclamation, whilst challenging the conventions between music, sound and data.
by Jamie Perera
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
Jamie Perera is an artist. His work explores radical deconstruction, re-imagining and reclamation, whilst challenging the conventions between music, sound and data.
by Jamie Perera
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
Jamie Perera is an artist. His work explores radical deconstruction, re-imagining and reclamation, whilst challenging the conventions between music, sound and data.
by Jamie Perera
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
If we are in such times where myth itself masquerades as truth, then we have the duty, nay, the joy in deriding it, provoking it, and finding transformation in the cracks and margins.
We are in the Holocene, approximately 12,000 years that should have been one of the most geologically stable periods in human history. However we’ve abused our environment in the last few centuries, to the extent that scientists are warning that the world has entered its sixth mass extinction, an event when a majority of species on Earth die off. It is now suggested by the International Commission on Stratigraphy that we are in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has made a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. Regarding earth systems and global socioeconomic trends over the Holocene, it indeed seems likely that we are in a time of accelerating uncertainty and suffering as a species.
The cause is amorphous, but could include the following: Agriculture leading to systems of social stratification and hierarchy (1). Colonialism, with its forced acquisition of land, resources, slavery and oppression of indigenous communities. The Industrial Revolution, with its emphasis on mass production and relentless consumption. The Great Acceleration, accelerating growth on almost all frontiers including energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, and population growth, thrusting the planet into a massive uncontrolled experiment.
The extent that this has affected us depends on where we are on the spectrum of intersectionality, from marginalised groups at the forefront of climate catastrophe to billionaires promising that growth and technology will save us. But for most of us, that is, second nation people, there is opaque understanding that we are collectively doing something wrong, but with no way to change, even as it gets harder to survive in these highly volatile times. This condition could be termed as “collective aphasia” (2), which feels like no accident in a hugely unequal world, but also not entirely conscious either. Either way I put forward the notion that the Great Acceleration is also the Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche, where our relationship with place, each other and ecology diminish, in favour of some sort of trauma bond with hierarchy, colonialism, consumption and growth. As Graeber and Wengrow write “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” (3), and they are destroying us.
What is astounding to all but maybe the world’s indigenous communities is how deeply these myths perpetuate. It is one thing to understand the need to decolonise, but another thing entirely to understand that our shared reality is shaped by colonial impositions, from money, to culture, to aesthetics, to religion to gender norms, even the language I’m using to write this article - they are all conditioned by colonial legacy. The Great Hijacking of the Human Psyche runs deep; to undo it requires the ability to be a walking hypocrite as we perpetuate the very system we are trying to change.
To illustrate this I’ll write about my journey. I grew up in a British society that still refuses to acknowledge its colonial legacy (4), and allows systemic racism to exist. As a result I unconsciously conditioned myself to act and think white, becoming racist myself, erasing the Sri Lankan and Chinese culture that I came from because was afraid of being bullied. I was raised catholic, believing ideas of heaven and hell, fearing god, bowing to a higher power. I have body dysmorphia from a lifetime of seeing images of “perfect” people in films, advertising and social media. I am forced to compete in a system that pits me against my fellow human, pits me against the planet, and only allows altruism in the cracks when it is satiated. It is only in the last few years that I have realised this, and I am radically deconstructing my conditioning. Any revelation that allows me to recalibrate gives me hope, whilst simultaneously understanding that I am inexorably part of a system that is harming people and planet. What I’m finding in the margins, in the cracks created by rebellion and transformation, is joy.
The reclamation of oneself from The Great Hijacking involves the need to radically question that which seems beyond contention, to destroy, to deconstruct, to rally against our conditioned foundations, possibly to the point of fundamental ambivalence, and find meaning in what remains. What is this process of deconstruction for the sake of our collective ecology? And how does it relate to art, just another thing that has been colonised? Early 20th century Dada rejected war and capitalism for peace and egalitarianism. Black Dada Nihilismus and Black Dada rejects white dominant structures to talk about the future while talking about the past (5). In this form of “Green Dada” or “Eco-Dada”, (6) we joyfully reject archaic structures that oppress our collective ecology. 6We deride norms that endanger our future and open up new abundant space for recalibration. We challenge rationality and sense-making when all it leads to are dead ends. We find joy in challenging mainstream Western conventions whilst uplifting indigenous knowledge and templates for experiencing reality. While it has always existed (7), we define Eco Dada again here today.
1. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott
2. Inspired by Ann Stoler’s Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. “It is not a matter of ignorance or absence,” writes Stoler. “Aphasia is a dismembering, a difficulty speaking, a difficulty generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words and concepts with appropriate things.”
3. “We know now, that we are in the presence of myths” David Graeber & David Wengrow on the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress. From The Dawn of Everything
4. Lest We Remember How Britain Buried Its History Of Slavery - Gary Younge - The Guardian | Cotton Capital
5. Black Dada Nihilismus: Theorizing a Radical Black Aesthetic by John Gillespie
6. The term Eco-Dada was originally coined describing Jamie Perera’s work with Hanna Haaslahti and refined in conversation with Lucy Wood in October 2020.
7. A few proposed examples of Eco-Dada. (NB - my knowledge of art history is terrible, and I apologise for neglecting any artists who may obviously fit into this category, especially indigenous artists)
Raoul Hausmann’s Mechanical Head (The Spirit of our Time) (1920) created Mechanical Head (The Spirit of Our Time). The manikin head made from a solid wooden block is a reversal of Hegel’s assertion that “everything is mind.” Hausmann wanted to compose an image that would shatter the mainstream Western conventions that the head is the seat of reason.
Throughout the 1970s, the radical American group Ant Farm cultivated a subversive and underground stance, reproducing contemporary Amercian culture and denouncing its obsession with consumerism.
Wheatfield, a Confrontation - Agnes Denes 1982. With the help of several volunteers, Denes planted a two-acre wheat field in a landfill in Lower Manhattan. The ground was prepared with soil, planted with wheat, and then harvested. The piece survived for three months.
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation burned 1 million pounds sterling.
¡TchKunG!, a band that formed for the radical environmental movement, bringing heir message of environmentalism and deep ecology to untold thousands of young people across the Pacific Northwest and beyond, helping to create an awareness and network that showed itself during the WTO protests in late November of 1999.
In 1996 at the Reclaim The Streets Protests in London, Shepherds Bush, 25 foot tall dancers on stilts in billowing Marie Antoinette costumes hid protesters as they drilled into the tarmac and planted trees, inches away from police lines.
From 2003 Molleindustria has produced artisanal remedies to the idiocy of mainstream entertainment in the form of short experimental games. From satirical business simulations (McDonald’s Video game, Oiligarchy) to meditations on labor and alienation (Every Day the Same Dream, Unmanned), to agitprop games (Democratic Socialism Simulator, Casual Games for Protesters, Phone Story).
Daniel Boyd first rose to prominence with his No Beard series of mocking oil portraits of colonial Australian historical figures, which he started in 2005.
In 2015 at COP21 in Paris, members of the Swarm Soundsystem - a group organised by Grey Filastine - created a walking speaker array that broadcast satirical US audio archive praising oil, alongside whale noises, polar bear roars and ticking clocks.
2017 John Gerrard’s Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), a video installation in Somerset House’s courtyard. A large screen showed a digitally simulated image of dark smoke making the shape of the American flag, symbolising the oil fields of Texas and the modern world’s dependency on fossil fuels.
Jamie Perera is an artist. His work explores radical deconstruction, re-imagining and reclamation, whilst challenging the conventions between music, sound and data.