How can thought and artistic practices around cotton, its historical power and its stories of resistance provoke different processes of intersection between the forces of art, ecology and social transformation in a context of environmental, cognitive, political and cultural crises?
Neve Insular’s thought and artistic practice are based on 0.0003% of the land surface of the island of São Vicente, Cabo Verde, where the collective grows cotton and other species in partnership with the Associação Agropecuária do Calhau e Madeiral. A nothing-everything committed to the memory of the colonial cotton plantation and to new propositions of know-how linked to the cotton plant. ni
The Centro Cultural de Cabo Verde (CCCV) hosted the programme “Neve Insular 0.0003% - cotton and resistance”, made up of three actions - exhibition, seminars and workshops - designed by Neve Insular ni in partnership with the Instituto de Investigação em Arte, Design e Sociedade (i2ADS). The exhibition of the same name presented the collective’s work around cotton as an artistic, ecological and political practice, weaving together the memory of the colonial plantation, cultivation ecologies and new imaginaries for the materiality of the land and of island cotton.
Seminar
The seminar brought together a set of talks devoted to the relationships between cotton, territory, history and cultural practices. It included the lecture Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, by Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Princeton University, USA); “Blank archive – full of stories of cotton in Cabo Verde”, by Rita Rainho (i2ADS/FBAUP, PT); “Between useful and useless plants — everyday landscapes through colonial botany”, by Miguel Costa (i2ADS/FBAUP, PT); “Cheese stories from Cabo Verde”, by Rosilene Delgado (UTAGA, CV); and “Becoming”, by José Paiva (i2ADS/FBAUP, PT), a reflection on the metaphor of an Island Snow that transforms and melts over dry lands, opening up possibilities of fertility and imagination.
Workshops
The workshops included a cotton-processing session led by Rita Rainho [Neve Insular, i2ADS/FBAUP, Portugal], Vanessa Monteiro [Neve Insular, designer, VMD] and Rosilene Delgado [artisan, UTAGA, Cabo Verde], promoting direct contact with the raw material and the knowledge associated with its processing, understood as a reconnection with cotton culture in the islands of Cabo Verde and with the “remembering earth”, where cotton asserts itself as a seed-archive running through histories of exploitation, forced labour and contemporary practices, in the gesture of knowing-making-thinking.
The weedy conversation “Towards an epistemology of pests” — Gabriela Carvalho [i2ADS/FBAUP, Portugal] was a session of sharing and tasting with unconventional food plants, in collaboration with agroecological producers, fostering the exchange of knowledge, memories and food preparation practices.