Sharing Space in a Pandemic

An interview with Rae Root and Joseph Sussi of Topozone by Erin Langley and Tyler Stoll

This interview was conducted in conjunction with the Topozone reading group as part of programming for Common Ground at antiaesthetic.com.

What is the origin of Topozone? Is there an overarching mission or goal?

We first thought to start a reading group because we personally wanted to explore more art and related theory that deals with critical spatial practice, geography, and landscapes. However, we wanted that exploration to include learning from peers, and interdisciplinary conversation, like a kind of conceptual cohort around those ideas. When we started making the reading lists and formulating the different “zones,” it also became clear that the group could also be a good place to try out collaborative writing and other forms of learning, which it’s hopefully heading toward in the future.

So we’ve had “The Locus Zone,” which was really foundational spatial theory and then “De-Zoning the City,” which was an overview of the different ways urban theory has built on those foundations. Future topics include “Cartographic Counter-Zones,” “Disrupting Zones: Interruption, Intervention, Occupation,” “Petrozones” and a lot more. 

The overall goal of the group is to learn together about the ways visual culture intersects with places, cities, landscapes and environments, and to do that learning in an informal, collaborative setting. 

What are your individual research interests? Do you see Topozone existing as an extension of, or a supplement to/parallel to your own research?

RAE: Topozone largely parallels my own research interests in cultural geography, especially looking at artistic projects that engage sites/publics/environments toward spatial justice. I’m currently finishing a master’s thesis about the photographic practices of Oregon’s lesbian land communities, which works a lot with queer ecology, and I’m starting some new projects that deal with art and gardening, as well as speculative and participatory design. For me, Topozone is both an extension of some of my research interests and a healthy challenge and stretching into areas that are more Joe’s expertise or more the expertise of other members. 

JOE: Session by session, Topozone can be either or for me. I don’t always see it as something that is coming out of or directly relating to my research, but a growing body of work that I respect and have interest in learning about. My interests in cultural geography, environmental justice, and the politics of visualization allow for a broad net of relevancy. I see it more as an opportunity to fill gaps in my knowledge that the discipline of Art History doesn’t always consider, and to catalyze and supplement my own research when I see those connections being met. For example, prior to organizing the reading group, I was less familiar with urban theory and a lot of its seminal texts, which Rae is much more familiar with. That experience allowed me to learn a lot from both the group and Rae, where my research can contribute and where it can’t. What I am finding is that a lot of my interests in environmental justice issues, like toxicity, water pollution, unnatural disasters, climate change, can be enriched by areas that I don’t always immediately connect as being relevant, and that’s the real benefit of meeting with people from other fields of specialty. Other times, sessions can really reflect what I am doing, like our plans to have a session on cartography, “Cartographic Counter-Zones,” which I am really invested in. 

Do you see Topozone challenging standard research norms in academia? How?

Yes and no. The group’s emphasis on collaboration and interdisciplinarity is certainly antagonistic toward academic individuality and disciplinary silo-ing. A lot of the writers we are reading and artistic projects we are looking at certainly push the limits of their disciplines and the “academic,” but I think all of those things are becoming more and more common—common enough that Topozone is able to be modeled after other collaborative groups we admire, such as World of Matter, LA Urban Rangers, Smudge Studio, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Critical Art Ensemble, Adjustments Agency, and the Institute for Infinitely Small Things. 

What does a typical Topozone gathering look like?

Typically we gather (whether in person, or more recently via zoom) after doing a selection of readings themed around a particular “zone.” Joe and I usually bring a bunch of related artworks and images, but we do a lot of informal googling and searching of artists that come up naturally in the conversation. Though there’s readings “assigned,” it’s totally informal and there’s no expectation that attendees do them in their entirety. So in contrast to a formal seminar, then, the meetings tend to be very visual and object-focused and collectively driven. 

Is Topozone location-specific? In other words, (how) are conversations rooted in environmental, cultural, and historical issues unique to Eugene, the Willamette Valley, the Pacific Northwest, etc.?

RAE: Topozone is becoming more and more location-specific, I think. In the fall I wrote a guide to art spaces in Portland, and I met and learned a lot about a lot of artists there, whose work we saw more of at PNCA’s Art and Environmental Justice Symposium I presented at as well. My master’s research focused on the very site-specific practice of photography on women’s lands in Southern Oregon, and as we’ve been getting more involved with Eugene Contemporary Art we’ve been meeting more artists from Eugene and the surrounding areas. We’ve been incorporating some of this work into Topozone meetings, and thinking through it about more local issues in spatial justice. 

JOE: Over time Topozone has become more and more site-specific and relevant to what is happening in Eugene and the Pacific Northwest. When you think of Eugene, the image of it being this forest city in the middle of Oregon, the Ducks, University of Oregon, and all the associated accumulated natural imagery, all those things relate to the ways we talk about visual politics in our meetings. It shows all the ways that we visually interpret a place, and how those images keep things buried, and even erase the ways that uneven distributions of violence circumvent our understanding of place. Eugene, and the Pacific Northwest largely speaking, are not without their own history of violence, which we are always trying to learn more about and include in our discussions. I am very drawn to the work of local environmental justice group Beyond Toxics, and we have discussed their work in Topozone meetings. I had the opportunity of taking a bus tour with Beyond Toxics as part of a course I took called “Unnatural Disasters” taught by Dr. Emily Eliza Scott, a professor in both the Department of the History of Art and Architecture as well as Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, where they demonstrated how environmental racism and injustice is perpetuated and capitalized on in Eugene. It was both surprising and all too familiar to see how that injustice has been perpetuated by companies like the Seneca Jones Lumber Company whose slogan is “Our Legacy Is Growing.” 

How has the focus and practice of Topozone shifted with the COVID-19 pandemic?

As shops, restaurants, movie theaters, and bars were closing in that first week, along with services like doctor’s offices shutting down, we quickly realized the magnitude of how public spaces were altering and becoming more and more inaccessible in a way that we hadn’t experienced before. How did our quotidian, day-to-day lives suddenly become more restricted, reflective, and subject to question? How did these extreme shifts in how we are engaging with public space alter our understanding of ourselves and the domestic spaces many of us are now spending extensive periods of time? How does that domestic sphere fit within the matrix of the infrastructure of the city?

There was a lot coming out in the beginning about how the pandemic was a moment for people to be productive: to make something, to pick up a hobby, to fix yourself. What all these vague encouragements failed to address was how difficult that process would be, especially for a majority of the population who were forced home without paychecks, or for those without homes, as well as for essential workers. This characterization of the domestic space as a safe haven ignores both these populations, the effect of the pandemic on everyone’s mental health, and any  alternative in the dichotomy between public and private space. In thinking through a lot of these messages, we want to ask how this new form of lived experience shifts the geography of our surroundings and alters assumptions of public and private spaces as separate? We don’t have answers for any of these problems, nor do we attempt to come up with any, but we are interested in thinking through these frictions and tensions.

As part of Common Ground, you hosted conversations titled Self-Zoning as Emergent Care. How do you define self-zoning (Specifically and expansively)? Does this concept relate to self-quarantine?

Yeah, basically we had been organizing all these sessions around the idea of different spatial or geographic zones, and for these sessions we wanted to think of the body as  zone during a pandemic: quarantining inside a domestic zone, zoning off six feet of physical space in public, and also the kinds of emotional distance created by those measures. We wanted to think about how committing to staying home is a method of care for our communities, but also how we can expand traditional forms of care to traverse those distances. Self-zoning speaks to how this very isolating experience is intimately bound to a larger community  of care, to how we can be connected physically even in our discrete spaces. While the positioning of quarantine as an opportunity for productivity is certainly problematic, self-zoning suggests that there are still openings for agency through reflection, through alternative forms of collectivity, and through shifts in our perception of domestic and public space. This framing attends to both the futurity of our relationship to the public amidst the pandemic, as well as the deliberate responsibility we have in this situation to care and be careful for others. 

What were some important takeaways from those conversations? How do you see these interactions fitting into the stated purpose of Common Ground: i.e. broadening understandings of ecology, “the field,” and what is natural?

We explored self-zoning through one session drawing on readings and one drawing on participants sharing artworks and media. We read Shannon Mattern’s Maintenance and Care, Carmen Maria Machado’s short story Inventory, an article from Olivia Laing about art in times of emergency, Sarah Kanouse and Heath Schultz’s Notes on Affective Practice, and a piece of Stacey Alaimo’s about the relationship between the domestic sphere and nature. We also looked at the 2010 exhibition Landscapes of Quarantine, from the Storefront for Art and Architecture, which was curated by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley. 

For the image share, all the participants talked about why they had brought in different images and artworks, which spanned from how artists were altering their practice during quarantine to childhood movies folks were revisiting. A lot of the discussion circled around the ways people are interacting with domestic space and “natural” spaces, and the breaking down of the boundaries between the two. We talked about the privilege of who gets to stay home, who has access to spending time outside, and how spending more time inside can make us more aware of the nonhuman occupants of our homes. Devon Bodenhamer shared about work she’s been making that explores the entanglement of herself, the materials of her apartment, and her dog. Jill Baker, the artist in Common Ground’s online exhibition, shared about Marja Helander’s Trambo and Andy Goldsworthy’s Hedge crawl, dawn, frost, cold hands, which prompted a lot of discussion about how production and nature are not mutually exclusive concepts. The pairing exposed how nature is culturally constructed as well as a political tool. The ongoing disentanglement of the division of nature and culture shares affinity with the purpose of Common Ground: expanding the notions of nature and ecology into quotidian experience as well as how these issues manifest in areas traditionally unassociated with “nature” exposes structures of power that benefit corporate wealth and privatization. 

How do you envision the future of Topozone?

While Topozone started as a way to learn with and from others, recently it’s also become a route for more collaborative writing and production too. We recently hosted the panel Art, Architecture and Antagonizing Sustainability at the HOPES Conference for Sustainable Design, with the artist and writer Esther Choi, curator S. Surface and art historian Emily Eliza Scott. We’re also starting a new collaborative research project about gardening and growing as an artistic practice, especially during times of crisis. The “research” for this project is both traditional art historical research and time spent gardening ourselves in a community garden plot in Eugene. Hopefully Topozone can continue to expand beyond traditional reading, researching and writing through projects like these and those we got to take part in with Common Ground. 

More immediately, we’re thinking about which “zones” make the most sense to do remotely and are the most relevant in these times. We’ll start soon on “Zones of Consumption and Cultivation,” which thinks about ecologies of food in conjunction with our ongoing gardening project. Over all, we want to continue asking questions about the visuality of nature, landscape and place, but we do want to adapt those questions and our ways of answering them to make it resilient and resonant for life during a pandemic.   

Topozone is organized and directed by Rae Root and Joseph Sussi, both graduate students in art history at the University of Oregon.

Erin Langley and Tyler Stoll are both current graduate students in art at the University of Oregon, and artist members of Eugene Contemporary Art.

Common Ground is a platform for a host of conversations and events alongside an exhibition with works by Eugene Contemporary Art artist members and invited artists on the topic of art and ecology.