Project Earth and Art’s Exposability

Seeking salvage from the wreckages of colonialism and capitalism, this essay offers a transcultural historiography for art that also seeks to be useful for art practices in the present. While drawing on the writing of Walter Benjamin, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Anna Tsing, among others, it centers on Projeto Terra, an initiative by Juraci Dórea in the rural northeast of Brazil, started in the 1980s and exhibited in the art biennials of São Paulo (1987), Venice (1988), and Havana (1989). The point is not to narrate Projeto Terra into any canon but to demonstrate how studying it might anchor a heuristic articulated as art’s exposability. This heuristic attends to art’s shaping—and being shaped by—a particular durational field; foregrounding art’s capacity to expose, while being exposed. Prompted by the public outings of Projeto Terra and using writing experiments to connect different times and places, the essay reflects on the cultural use and worldwide trade of wood, leather, and beef—highlighting some of the intricacies by which the lives and deaths of humans, trees, and cows are imbricated.