STUTTGART.- Maps are power – whether in the colonial era, or in today’s imperial system. But how can they be deconstructed, reconfigured, shared among multiple actors and used to chart alternative futures? How can they embrace the processual flow of time and the multiplicity of embodied viewpoints? Can digital maps still reveal the territory? Can maps of power become pathways of liberation?

Brian Holmes has spent the last decade developing an online mapkit for issues in political ecology, while simultaneously engaging in his favorite research activity: roaming around the riverine landscapes of the American Midwest, the Pacific Northwest coast and the La Plata Basin in South America (he often jokes about “cartography with your feet”). Holmes was previously known in European art and activist circles as an essayist and public speaker, and over the course of these years he has invented a new but strangely familiar genre, the essay map, filled with written text, scientific visualization and multimedia imagery. Each of his projects develops its own conceptual frame, narrative structure, visual style and metaphorical register, expressive of an inquiring subjectivity. Yet at the same time, each of them stems from a territorial dialogue, with multiple inputs from artists, specialists, local inhabitants and social movements, all touched in one way or another by aspects of the non-human world. The essay map is therefore not an individual product but an embodied and immersive practice: it’s a way of reaching out, testing the water, diving in. Today Holmes is returning to Europe where he lived in the 1990s and 2000s, for a series of extended stays at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Here, he and his collaborators will show a number of ongoing explorations, while launching a new inquiry into the Neckar River watershed.

Künstlerhaus Stuttgart does not hold traditional exhibitions, but instead seeks to create permeating moods or “atmospheres.” The idea is to let a mode of expression drift away from its immediately tangible forms, into relationships, vocabularies, daily rounds and common resources. Atmospheres emerge slowly, in the transition from season to season, a bit like a garden that germinates under bare earth and yields a multiplicity of fruits at harvest time. Rivermap has been conceived on this seasonal timeline. It begins at the moment of the autumn equinox, in a little corner of an expansive fourth-floor gallery. Gradually over the following six months it will fill and overflow with images, voices, concepts, and encounters.

Learning from Cascadia sets the tone. The project – not a simple map but a full-fledged atlas – was launched over a two-year period in and around Portland, Oregon, in collaboration with cultural organizer Mack McFarland, with a special contribution by the Indigenous artist Sara Siestreem. It’s devoted to a land both real and imaginary: the Bioregion of Cascadia, stretching from Northern California far up into British Columbia. Cascadia emerged from the back-to-the-land movements of the 1970s, as a possible new framework of habitation and stewardship. Imagined by poets – and first traced on paper by a poet-cartographer, David McCloskey – the bioregion took up residence as a desire and a tangible dream in the hearts of thousands if not millions of people. Yet Cascadia is not just another ‘70s utopia. Because the Pacific Northwest is home to so many Indigenous peoples, who have sovereign treaty rights and ever-increasing support from settler allies, the region has developed emergent forms of biocultural governance, largely devoted to undoing the damages of industrial modernism and opening up new practices of ecological restoration. Learning from Cascadia offers a model for the exploration of reparative processes such as these, and for their prefiguration in places where they do not yet exist.

Holmes is the first to admit that he can never entirely finish his ambitious projects – because they are not really his. Instead they are refractions of complex collective endeavours stretching across generations and involving entire populations along with many other species, with debates and conflicts that can be bitter and protracted. Learning from Cascadia engages with this complexity by contrasting the Bioregion with two parallel figures: the Watershed, conceived by the state as a hydrological framework for territorial management, and the Megaregion, which is a straight-up capitalist concept of infinite urban expansion. Implicit in this juxtaposition is a theory of political ecology in the present, serving both to analyze to the dead ends of modernism and to document emergent practices that already offer more sustainable ways of living.

In the exhibition at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Cascadia appears as a giant map on the wall, an interactive image on a touchscreen, and as the focus of one of Holmes’ more recent texts, “Live Like A River,” presented here as a risographed pamphlet. The same unfinished inquiry reappears in a more recent mapping project, titled Biocultural Restoration in the Salish Sea. This one pursues the Cascadian dream in smaller dimensions, focusing on Vashon Island right off the coast of Seattle in the Puget Sound (which itself is in the process of being informally renamed for its original Coast Salish inhabitants). This single map, tighter in focus and easier to grasp in its entirety, has been made with the latest version of Holmes’ software, which he has developed with the brilliant Albanian programmer Majk Shkurti. The idea is to launch the Neckar River project with this example and this technology, which is entirely open source and conceived for collaboration.

Atmospheres are synonymous with mutability. In November the exhibition will change shape to include the eco-activist work of the group Casa Río in Argentina, with whom Holmes has collaborated over the past seven years. And in January, that work will be joined by two other projects carried out with videomaker Jeremy Bolen, focusing on the origins and consequences of global ecological change, aka the Anthropocene. Here, embodied and situated concerns merge with what scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “atmospheres of history”: planetary processes affecting all living beings.