Essays and Art

Writings and other projects, 2020 to present. Unpublished except where noted. Please get in touch with any questions or requests. Write me at holden m turner (no spaces) at gmail dot com. All works fall under a creative commons license and are embedded with anti-plagiarism scripts. 

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2024: After MOSE: working lagoonscapes + living with sea-level rise

Master's thesis in Environmental Humanities at Ca' Foscari Università di Venezia, 19 July 2024

Summary: MOSE can be a starting point for living amid rapid socio-geologic change, but not because it is an effective long-term adaptation solution. To the contrary, because it is a partially-effective social formation for the short-term, MOSE demands other social formations to bring about more participatory futures. Workers, union leaders, and others who I encountered in my research consistently tie good lagoon relations to modes of socio-ecological organization that foster long-term livability. These include respecting workers’ rights, delivering payments on time, and ensuring job security, but they also may include funding diffuse lagoon maintenance projects, making transparent and accountable governance systems, and above all supporting healthy hydrological dynamics of the entire lagoon. As the working lagoonscape enters the after-MOSE period, claims to livability must be the foundation of socially-just adaptation pathways.

From interviews and conversations with MOSE workers and union leaders, as well as materials documenting perspectives from fishers, environmental activists, and other lagoon residents, I find that many people involved with MOSE are not satisfied with the current outlook on its long-term operations and believe that some form of its governance should change toward more equitable outcomes. How exactly it should change, though, varies across groups. I have also noticed that looking ahead to the future is a crucial practice for MOSE operations. Workers are very successful at short- term forecasting, but there is high uncertainty about MOSE’s long-term operations, how it will function with more sea-level rise, and its future impacts on the lagoon system. Some scenarios now suggest that MOSE will not play a major role in long-term lagoon adaptation, a conclusion which is in tension with the high resources currently being put into the project. With wide participation and long-term thinking, however, MOSE may be a piece of transformative change. The city could use the mobile barriers to gain “breathing space” while other diffuse adaptation methods such as elevation, floating, relocation, and living with floods are created. Doing so, however, would require a re-orientation toward social trust between institutions, which is currently very low. 

English version here.

Italian version here.

See also the connected short story series on this blog.

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2024: "Enclosure in Venice: Narratives after MOSE"

Presented at the 2024 AAIS Conference, Sorrento, Italy, in the panel series "Italy's Climate Change Narratives," 8 June 2024. 

Abstract: A boat, a wall, a lagoon. Two works by Venetian artists attempt to represent the massive and contested project MOSE, a series of mobile barriers constructed at each of the lagoon’s three connections with the sea. This paper hypothesizes a new turn in the long narrative of Venice, one that city planners are already calling il dopo Mose (after-MOSE). In October 2020, after nearly twenty years of construction and nearly fifty of deliberation about how to manage nuisance flooding, the MOSE system was successfully tested for the first time. Responding to these events as well as MOSE’s everyday effects on the city’s tides, local artists imagine the barriers’ uncanny presence across time. Authors Cristophe Dabitch and Piero Macola in their graphic novel Lagune (2023) instead take the barriers as a sign of increasingly authoritarian control over a near-future lagoon and the people moving across it. Filmmaker Giovanni Pellegrini’s fabular documentary Lagunaria (2023) describes MOSE as an act of hubris that, though currently dominating the lagoon, will someday be overwhelmed by rising waters. In one text, MOSE destroys space; in the other, it falls to time. Flickering between ephemeral and insidious, the barriers are imagined above all as a piece of adaptation infrastructure that cannot last long on the path to a livable future. Both texts pair rigid images of MOSE’s walls with more hopeful scenes on boats, which seem to be the means to either escape from a bleak present or excavate what went wrong in the past. These climate parables bring the viewer back to an unanswerable question: what comes next for the lagoon?

Full text here.

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2024: "Stretching the Anthropocene Unconscious to Pre-Trinity Texts"

Presented at the 3rd Annual Environmental Humanities Conference at Cappadocia University in Türkiye, in the panel "Environmental Thought", 21 May 2024.

Abstract: The Anthropocene unconscious (Bould 2021) powerfully asserts that any text, regardless of the time in which it was written, can speak to the current collective imaginaries that have us embroiled in global biodiversity loss, rapid climate change, ocean acidification, empires of toxicity, and more. The textual evidence for this argument, however, comes almost exclusively from the post-Trinity (1945) period, reinforcing ecocriticism’s bias toward recent literature descended from the European novel and its linear temporality. The main exceptions to this temporal bias – analyses of Old English texts and Shakespeare’s plays – confirm a tendency to center white Anglophone storytelling. Veering back in time and into more critical considerations of socio-biogeochemical crisis – for instance, Yussof’s formulation of “a billion black anthropocenes” (2018) – I argue that older non-Eurocentric texts still speak to current ecological crisis through the parable form. By transmitting a durable moral message forward in time, texts that speak in parables communicate powerful intergenerational learnings without the reader having to make forced connections (as with allegorical interpretation) or remaining stuck in a historicized period (as with descriptive storytelling). Dark ecological criticism suggests that a crisis that has already happened might teach us something about the time of crisis we inhabit right now (Morton 2016). In effect, “a billion black anthropocenes” encourage thinking in parables to connect texts broadly distant in space and time: though present readers cannot directly access past social worlds, we can access old stories and glean learnings from them. To illustrate this argument, I examine three pre-Trinity authors for their parables of life and death in extreme climates: Zora Neale Hurston (1937), Jack London (1904), and Dante Alighieri (1321). All three offer ekphrastic commentary on the parable form as a narrative that lends their protagonists wisdom that traverses generations and weaves inter-species communities. Their examples suggest that the sum of past teachings resembles a collective unconscious still speaking to us, one waiting to recall something not yet lost about how to live in troubling times.

Full text here.

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2024: "Salt is a Character that Transforms"

Abstract: Ecosystems and theaters are both sites where complex systems unfold. Interactions performed in a theater, however, are better scaled to human perceptions than those performed a the multi-level assemblage like, for example, the Venetian Lagoon. While reading Antigone in Venice, I ask if recognizing complex systems interactions in a play can change how I understand the ongoing political ecologies that I’m implicated in. The play Antigone as a complex system requires its audience to attend to sisterly conspiracy against an irreverent tyrannical political order. While Antigone is condemned to a spectacular death, her ally Ismene persists silently in deep pain, waiting for a regime change to come to the city. When it does, I infer that she is brought to a point where war may transform into peaceful coexistence while mourning the loss of what came before. The political ecology of the play rests not on a claim to participation on the level of the body, but rather on diverse elements arranged in intra-acting constellations that may be more or less favorable to forms of persistence. So too with the Venetian Lagoon, where entwined salt and water act together but differently on the city’s storied matter. Like Ismene, salt is a tracer of transformation in a complex system. Inhabiting a subjectivity of the otherwise, it is more of an incommensurable hyperobject than a political body, and yet it loops back on politics. Rather than adopting a stance of preservation, defense, or declinism, performing maintenance on the aquapelagic stage is one way that human residents may think and act with salt.

Full text here.

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2024: "Shanghai Flooding"

A short video essay about Shanghai, China, and sea level rise narratives.

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2023: "Dante's Ecological Thought"

2024 update -- presented at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds, UK, on 2 July 2024 with a condensed and revised paper, full text here.

Abstract: Dante’s ecological thought (cf. Morton 2010) must be theorized in the key of “dark eros”. The love that binds his cosmos together slips too readily into a dangerous ‘bright green’ thinking unless we insist that there has never been an Eden, that there is no entirely safe place to return to in the psyche or on Earth. When belief in a harmonious whole goes unchecked, the Great Chain of Being, the Garden of Eden, and Apocalypse – to name some major Dantean tropes – have contributed to the destruction of social worlds inside and and beyond Europe. These problems have not yet been addressed in the attempts to find ecological thinking in Dante, and so the poet has had a difficult time ‘speaking’ to the Anthropocene.

One latch that opens his works to ecological thought is the subtraction or de-centering of elements that align with a patriarchal "master model" (Plumwood 1993). An ecofeminist reading of the Commedia (c. 1321) allows us to plot escape routes from the Anthropocene. I present two new figuration-tools (the nomadic spiral, the aiuola-Medusa antithesis) and three "lines of flight" (paradox, eco-textuality, power) that may help us teach each other to think ecologically with Dante.

Narrated essay here.

Full text and references here.

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2023: "Flooding marble / Stones of San Marco for the Anthropocene"

Published in the Ateneo Veneto, see citation below.

The stones of the Basilica di San Marco are not stable objects that reflect one vision of a perfect world. Rather, over their socio-geologic history the floor pieces have been cracked, eroded, and repaired many times. As we enter the Anthropocene, the time when we humans find ourselves in a strange dance with not-only-human things and beings, we find that the stone surface is a text upon which is written new and critical meaning. A cracked slab of marble at the very center of the nave speaks to Venice’s imperfections and presents us with a choice of how to respond. A peacock mosaic near the right-hand entrance suggests that things falling to pieces reveal what they were made of all along, forcing us to reconsider our urge to restore works of cultural heritage. I conclude by suggesting a new set of rituals to re-open political discussion in alliance with forces that may seem mute: the water of the Venetian Lagoon and the marble stones of San Marco.

English full text here / Italian full text here (published in the Ateneo Veneto, 2023).

Recommended citation: Turner, Holden. "Inondando il marmo. I mosaici pavimentali di San Marco per l’Antropocene". Ateneo Veneto. CCIX, terza serie 21/II. 2022. pp. 241-260.

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2023: "Iskaashito: An Environmental History of Somali Bantu Migration"

Abstract: In the mid-2000s, around twelve thousand people identifying as Somali Bantu migrated from Kenyan refugee camps to various cities in the United States under a P2 resettlement program (Besteman, 2016). Today, over three thousand members of the Somali Bantu community live in Lewiston, Maine, having actively created mutual support networks and collective farming programs. This paper sketches an environmental history of their migrations from the colonial period to the present day. Land access has strongly structured collective identity: despite land grabs and civil war completely severing ties to Somali Bantu homeland from the late 1980s up to resettlement, migrants have actively reconstituted land relations in Maine to ensure that farming remains a central part of community life. A close look at this aspect of resettlement calls attention to inseparable “fast” and “slow” violences in recent Somali history, which complicates attempts to describe Somali Bantu refugees through both the “environmental refugees” and “ecologically-friendly” migrant tropes. Later sections of this paper discuss current human- nonhuman configurations in Somali Bantu farming practices and notes crossover between the experiences of these migrants and Indigenous Wabanaki groups in the region. Thinking ecologically about migration in the Somali Bantu case centers possible future relationalities on acts of adapting and healing trauma, necessary steps “to common citizenship against the grain of the spatial injustices of climate change” (Turhan and Armiero, 2019). 

Full text here.

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2023: “Listen to the Wabanaki”: Critical Translation Issues around Wabanaki Languages 

Abstract: Wabanaki languages (including Abenaki-Penobscot, Passamaquoddy-Maliseet, and Mi’kmaq) are spoken to varying degrees of fluency among Indigenous people in what is now called Maine and New Brunswick and neighboring areas in eastern North America. Characterized by a deep focus on relationality between speaker and surroundings, Wabanaki languages (like most Indigenous languages) contain deep meanings embedded in the spoken word. Colonial translations from Wabanaki languages into English have stripped these meanings from the target texts, leaving out vital information. I use the concepts of skopos and equivalence to discuss translation challenges and possible viable approaches for conveying sacred teachings and other highly important features of the Wabanaki languages within their current political context. Social issues of high importance at the intersection of translation studies and Wabanaki communities are: the teaching and preservation of language, and advocacy for self-determination amid a dominant American culture. I conclude with a brief look at the relevance of memory and self-translation in critical translation studies to urge a re- centering on the lessons shared by Wabanaki people. 

Full text here.

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2022: "The Kennebec and Swan Island: An Ecocritical Perspective"

Abstract: Relating to the Kennebec River and Swan Island (Swango), either knowing them as relatives in the Indigenous Wabanaki sense or engaging with them through some other ethical practice, unfolds a possibility space for noncolonial futures. Ecocritical understandings of human-nonhuman relations are coming to resemble long-held Indigenous fabrics of meaning. Here, I recount in a narrative structure how these latter ontologies (modes of being) of the Kennebec and Swango were systematically erased along with the Kennebec Abenaki people who coexisted with them prior to the 17th century. My critique argues that ongoing Wabanaki erasure happens alongside a continuous resistance of colonized subjects – elemental forces and marginalized beings, especially Indigenous people – whose stories have the potential to break powerful loops of historical denial inscribed on the landscape. 

Full text here.

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2021: "Retreat Necessitates Reform: Representations of Rising Water in NYC"

Abstract: The specter of sea level rise stirs up emotional experiences that are rarely articulated in scholarly writing on the subject. By interpreting representations of coastal responses to rising waters, I discuss ways that people are imagining coastal futures in New York City. First, I present testimony written by a resident of Staten Island in 2014, two years after Hurricane Sandy. Then, I bring into analysis two representations of post-buyout Staten Island: a chapter of Elizabeth Rush’s creative nonfiction take on sea level rise, Rising (2018); and Nathan Kensinger’s documentary film, Managed Retreat (2018). In this first main section I compare their visions for the Staten Island coastline. 

I then interrupt the essay to discuss coastal futures put forward by two Brooklyn-based artists. The first art piece, Submerged Motherlands (2014) by street artist Swoon, was a massive installation in the Brooklyn Museum featuring cut paper, wooden rafts, and ink drawings. The second piece, Migration in Four Parts (2017) by Dustin Yellin, is a sculpted collage of tiny figures encased in glass. This interlude stands distinct from the main sections, even while it adds complimentary material to the discussion.

Finally, I end with Maya Lin’s intervention in midtown Manhattan titled Ghost Forest (2021). In this second main section I carry my interpretations into a critical discussion of discourse on coastal futures. Looking across many related, place-based texts, the lived realities around rising water become more imminent, encouraging broad climate talk based on a shared set of stories and symbols. While many works appear to advocate for retreat from coastal areas, the most common themes are ones of indeterminacy and transformation: qualities that challenge dominant modes of coastal adaptation in favor of actionable and equitable futures.

Full text here.

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2021: "Canto XXIX: Fulmine, Tuono, e Tempo Irreale" (Lightning, Thunder, and Unreal Time)

Abstract: Il corteo straordinario cammina davanti a Dante fra un lampo brillante (‘l balenar, 19) ed un brontolio celestiale (un tuon, 152). La scena intera, però, per il lettore passa lentamente, in modo diverso dal tono urgente che domina molti canti di Purgatorio. Fra due fenomeni sensoriali che normalmente si seguono (fulmine e tuono), Dante sceglie di prolungare temporalmente il corteo. Parole chiavi e temi principali appariscono a due a due, spesso una cosa dopo l’altra, in modo che rallenti il lettore e lo guidi avanti per aspettare il momento di unione. Qui, il fulmine anticipa il tuono, Matelda anticipa Beatrice, e la fede anticipa la salvazione. Il Poeta scrive Purgatorio XXIX per dimostrare al lettore medievale, nell’espressione di una processione soprannaturale, la promessa di una vita espansiva dopo la penitenza.

Full text here.

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2021: "Il/legality in Gulf of Maine Fisheries"

Abstract: Any action that violates, circumvents, or resists fisheries regulation is an instance of what this paper calls il/legal fishing. Rather than criminal acts, they are complex interactions in the socio-ecological system (SES). Drawing from case studies and newspaper articles, I recount reports of il/legality in six Gulf of Maine fisheries over the last twenty years (2000-2019). Broad themes across the groundfish, herring, lobster, elver, scallop, and clam fisheries point to substantial extra-legal trade, some economic pressures to violate regulations, and minimal on-the-ground enforcement capacity, though co-management regimes seem more adept at fixing market-governance mismatches. These contribute to eroding SES interactions between users and regulators, with net negative impacts on coastal towns and some fish populations.

Full text here.

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2021: "Superpoteri e Rappresentazione per la Seconda Generazione" (Superpowers and Representation for the Second Generation)

Abstract: Antonio Dikele Distefano, scrittore italiano che appartiene al gruppo di artisti della seconda generazione, ha creato la nuova serie Zero (2021) con Netflix Italia. Come Mahmoud, Ghali, ed Igiaba Scego, Dikele Distefano ha raggiunto un livello quasi mainstream in Italia. Il suo romanzo Non ho mai avuto la mia età (2018), che ha vinto il Premio Fiesole per scrittori sotto quarant’anni, è l’ispirazione per Zero (Molinarolo 2020). Netflix Italia ha annunciato la serie in luglio 2019, ma la pandemia COVID-19 ha ritardato la produzione, quindi non è uscita fino ad aprile 2021. Si è guadagnato una risposta buona sia in Italia che all’estero, e molti giornalisti hanno scritto del modo in cui Zero cambia la televisione italiana (Niola 2019, Wells 2021). In un’intervista, Dikele Distefano ha detto, “Oggi, grazie a Zero, esistono gli attori neri italiani… Prima di Zero tutti dicevano ‘ma, non ci sono.’ Ora ci sono” (AP 2021). La differenza tra esistere e non esistere, tra apparire e sparire, è al centro della questione di rappresentazione nell’Italia contemporanea. Zero interrompe l’idea che l’Italia è bianca e non-razzista, presentando invece un mondo pluralistico dove i giovani neri1 hanno superpoteri con cui possono confrontare le strutture razziste.

Full text here.

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2021: "Revisions: Punctuation"

A piece exhibited at Bowdoin College's EARTH/ART show in spring 2021. A set of text blocks were strung on a line spanning 20 feet. The otherwise identical text blocks varied in punctuation: "o i just cannot wait until the water glazesdownthefallfullpassagain" was on the far left. "O! I just cannot wait! until the water glazes down the fall, full; pass again." was on the far right. Inspired by time spent at Brookfield's dam at Pejepscot Falls in Brunswick, Maine.

howlongwillthedamstay i say give it a thousandyears and no one watching some waternice will creepup a crack on its facefacets and start pluckingout pieces like bricksnomortar then the mosses will mobover to roostup in the crannyrest spots till dribblings seep splashing through then one floodtime may come a rainhailsnowstorm for the eons bashes a lipchips the fronttooth shatters the glassfracturing the cirque into shards o i just cannot wait until the water glazesdownthefallfullpassagain

Full text here.

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2020: "Change and Resiliency in Maine’s Grain Economy"

Condensed abstract: Maine’s grain economy has been growing rapidly up to 2020... The regional grain trade is seen as different from industrial supply chains in its emphasis on food quality, health, and social responsibility... The grain network has been resilient to demand shocks from COVID-19 so far... Overall, there is reason to be cautiously optimistic for the grain economy’s future. The three points discussed here are helping to make the regional supply chain a viable food system separate from and even preferred to industrial supply chains. Continuing to grow the economy, distinguish Maine-grown grains, and design for resiliency may help to bring further benefits from the grain supply chain.

Full text here.

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2020: "(Non)performance in Seychelles' Blue Economy"

*unpublished at the time, this piece taught me valuable lessons about the research process; I hope to revise bolded arguments in the future to clarify and share what I learned from informants and advisors*

Abstract: Three recent projects in Seychelles – the marine spatial plan, the debt-swap, and local investment through SeyCCAT – have galvanized global attention to the possibilities of the Blue Economy. To what degree have they been successful? These projects have indeed delivered key partnerships and new capital flows to the island state. However, one cannot read the entire story from promotional materials alone. Scholarly research, governmental documents, and interviews with people involved in the various projects show that the reality in Seychelles is likely to be more nuanced. Together they suggest that a simplified ‘win-win’ rhetoric does not fully align with the complex realities of marine management. This paper argues that Blue Economy projects linked to conservation finance can be non-performative: they may name positive outcomes without necessarily delivering social and environmental benefits. Three non-performative moments (limits to participation, contingencies to success, and COVID-19) are used as analytical windows to identify challenges to the success of Seychelles’ Blue Economy projects and to re-politicize sustainability. In light of this reading, it is recommended that conservation and development leaders re-examine aspects of the Blue Economy approach before advocating for similar projects in other countries.