Adaptive Theory: On the Evolution of Ecofeminism

yétundé olagbagu, protolith: heat, pressure (installation view) (2019). Two color photographs, 40 × 30 inches each. The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

The poet and activist Adrienne Rich once described the relationship between theory and practice by comparing it to the water cycle. “Theory—the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees—theory can be a dew that rises from the earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over,” she states in “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” a lecture she gave in 1984.¹ A theory, Rich argues, arises from particular material and bodily circumstances —and can then, in practice, influence those circumstances. “But if it doesn’t smell of the earth,” she adds, “it isn’t good for the earth.”² As material realities shift, theory must adapt, and making good on our ideas for a better world means making sure our theories fit the actual conditions on the ground.

Rich’s figuration strikes me as useful for thinking about the relationship between theory and artistic practice, too. When we gather a group of artists or artworks together under the banner of a movement or an ideology, we also consider how each adapts the theory in question to specific materials and forms, in a particular time and place. Last fall, an exhibition at The Brick’s new Larchmont space collected artworks by 18 artists and collectives in Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism. The show tied a heterogeneous group of sculptures, videos, photographs, performances, and installations to the loose theoretical framework of ecofeminism, which in the United States arose from the confluence of the women’s liberation and environmentalist movements of the 1970s and ’80s. Ecofeminists connected gendered oppression and environmental destruction, and they called for a relationship to nature and society founded on interdependence, not dominance —ideas that energized artistic practices, then and since. Some of the artworks on view at The Brick, like documentation of Aviva Rahmani’s 1972 performance Physical Education, were created decades ago, when ecofeminism was still inchoate; many, including videos by the Institute of Queer Ecology and A.L. Steiner and sculptures by Alicia Piller and Maria Maea, among others, date from the last few years. The show’s range of artworks, though by no means a comprehensive survey of ecofeminist art, evoked Rich’s theory-practice cycle: ecofeminist theory being reconsidered again, altered by and for today’s realities.

Some contemporary artists in the exhibition adapt ecofeminist theories to fit twenty-first-century conditions, making work that reflects today’s more fluid conceptions of gender and digital hyperconnectivity. These works are conscious of climate change as a human-driven phenomenon with origins in extractive colonialism and dire implications for all life. By adapting ecofeminist ideas to the concerns of the present, these artworks renew and revise those ideas. Extending ecofeminism’s ethos of interconnection, they unsettle distinctions between human and nonhuman, people and place. If we attend, with care, to the particular and interlocking material realities on Earth, these works suggest, we might find alternative models for inhabiting—and repairing—our precarious planet.

Life on Earth: Art & Ecofeminism (installation view) (2024). The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists and The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

Alliance of the Southern Triangle, Executive Order 27–1100100: Phase Change towards the Deluge (installation view) (2024). The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artists and The Brick. Photo: Ruben Diaz.

The term “ecofeminism” first appeared in Le Féminisme ou la Mort (Feminism or Death), a 1974 book by the French radical feminist Françoise d’Eaubonne.³ D’Eaubonne identified the subjugation of women and nature as twin consequences of “phallocracy” and asserted that “a planet placed in the feminine will flourish for all.”⁴ Around the same time in the United States, thinkers like Susan Griffin and Carolyn Merchant were exploring similar ideas.⁵ In their scholarly work, they recast the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution—usually regarded as periods of progress in the West—as movements that had stripped the natural world of spiritual value, reduced landscapes to extractable resources, and divided the world into harsh dualities (male/female, culture/ nature, human/animal, self/other) that, in turn, justified the patriarchal, capitalist subjugation of marginalized people and the natural world.⁶ Repairing the environment and ending social hierarchy, ecofeminists argued, would require a paradigm shift. Simply put, humans needed to recognize that they were inextricably intertwined with each other and with all living things—and act accordingly.

As the art historian and critic Eleanor Heartney notes, many artists who became associated with ecofeminism were already committed feminists.⁷ Many were also frustrated with the male-dominated art market and drawn to the nascent field of conceptual art.⁸ Ecofeminism led them away from institutions and into the living environment. Unlike monumental land art (think Robert Smithson’s 1970 Spiral Jetty), many iconic ecofeminist artworks were ephemeral and ecologically conscious; some affected actual environmental and community repair, like Bonnie Ora Sherk’s Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974–87), an eco-garden and meeting space built beneath a San Francisco freeway overpass.

In Life on Earth, the artist Rahmani was one of few envoys from the beginnings of the movement. Rahmani, a dedicated feminist who had made performances about sexual violence in the late ’60s, began incorporating ecological themes into her work in the early 1970s.⁹ At The Brick, softcover journals stacked on a bench contained documentation of Ghost Nets (1990–91), Rahmani’s restoration of a former dump site near Vinylhaven, Maine to its original wetland habitat. In the documentation (titled Ghost Net Journals), the artist inscribed dreams, sensations, and colored-pencil sketches beside task lists and supply inventories, creating journal entries that meld internal experience and external facts. It’s as if the habitat restoration is also a process of co-creation, where regenerated land reshapes its caretaker, and vice versa.

Still, while artists like Rahmani continued to draw on ecofeminism in their work over decades, the movement itself had to evolve. Like other second-wave movements, ecofeminism centered white, middle-class women who took their environmentalism to be universal, ignoring ongoing eco-activism by women in the Southern U.S., South America, and South Asia.¹⁰ Some ecofeminists argued that women had a special connection to nature, a stance critics identified as a mere reiteration of oppressive essentialisms that pitted female/nature against male/culture.¹¹ An association with the appropriative “Goddess movement,” which distorted the spiritual practices and aesthetics of non-Western and Indigenous cultures, further tainted ecofeminism.¹² Yet despite these failings, ecofeminism’s “philosophy of interconnectivity,”¹³ in Heartney’s words, feels, in many ways, as relevant as ever. Last September, Southern California withered over days of 105º+ heat. In November, New York City saw temperatures in the 70s rather than early winter snows. Drastic climate change demands a drastic change in us—the monocultural, anthropocentric solutions of 50 years ago won’t work.

Many of the contemporary artworks in Life on Earth not only affirm, in the tradition of twentieth-century ecofeminist projects, the interconnection of humans and their environments, but challenge the very boundaries that separate them. Metamorphosis (2020), a four-part video by The Institute of Queer Ecology, locates blueprints for human transformation in the nonhuman world. In the video, footage of moths and butterflies is spliced with images of weaponry and urban infrastructure, juxtaposing, for example, the mosaic scales of a butterfly wing with the dense patterning of a city seemingly captured by drone. Eerie echoes between the forms suggest an underlying continuity between the micro world of insects and the macro of geopolitics. A voiceover suggests that humans might emulate these species, citing the metamorphosis and gynandromorphism (the presence of male and female characteristics in a single organism) of creatures like the Eastern Swallowtail Butterfly. The work inverts typical human-insect hierarchies: Instead of destroying them, we might become more like the insects around us, and we might begin by recognizing that, in a fundamental sense, we already are them. As a caterpillar liquifies within its cocoon, so might we dissolve psychic barriers that divide us from the natural world.

Institute of Queer Ecology, Metamorphosis (video still) (2020). Image courtesy of the artists.

Otobong Nkanga, Tsumeb Fragments (installation view) (2015). The Brick, Los Angeles, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and The Brick. Photo Oliver Cowling.

protolith: heat, pressure (2022), a diptych of photographs documenting a performance by the artist yétúndé olagbaju in Point Reyes, California, plays with figure and ground to suggest a renegotiated relationship between human and landscape. The photographs show olagbaju, dressed in white with a white headscarf, standing in a rocky outcropping. Facing away from the camera, olagbaju raises both hands to a massive rock; in the left photograph, their hands hover above its surface, while in the right their palms meet stone. This is no typical portrait of a foregrounded figure, with nature reduced to a scenic backdrop. Reading the photographs left to right, right to left, a pulse forms—touch, release, forward, back—as if the rock were rising to the artist’s hands, or the pressure of their touch was moving the rock, or both, their bodies synchronized in a rhythm that recalls Rich’s water cycle. If early ecofeminist artworks sometimes placed bodies in the land to suggest a “oneness” with nature, olagbaju’s work locates that unity not in any human category, or even necessarily in the category “human,” but instead in an active orientation toward and within the land.

While olagbaju and the Institute of Queer Ecology destabilize easy human/nonhuman essentialisms, other artists in Life on Earth reach into the past, where they unearth ancient practices with potentially radical applications in the present day. Carolina Caycedo’s Nanay Ñañay Kculli ~ S’oam Bawi Wenag ~ Kiik K’úum (2024) magnifies the “Three Sisters” seeds of beans, corn, and squash—a trio planted together for thousands of years because they nurture each other in the ground as they grow¹⁴—to iconic proportions. Carved from polished wood and suspended in rope nets, the seeds hang down from the ceiling. The hovering triangle they formed seemed like an invitation to step inside, stand among them—and I did, feeling like I was joining a trinity of sisters, convened for a millennia-long chat. In their mutually nourishing relationship, and in the ancient agricultural practices that have connected these resources for ages, Caycedo finds a timely model of balance and symbiosis, a template for sustainable cooperation that humans might follow in arenas far beyond their crop fields. Caycedo’s sculpture also stands as a corrective: Some early U.S. ecofeminists invoked (often with factual errors) pre-Enlightenment Indigenous perspectives, even as they used them, in the words of scholar Grace Y. Kao, “as inspirational symbols for the environmental movement” while “fail[ing] to develop real relationships with Native communities or struggle in solidarity with them for post-colonial justice and the survival of Native spiritual practices.”¹⁵ In Caycedo’s work, balance between Earth and humanity isn’t merely symbolic, nor is it a pat lesson from a distant past—balance means accountability in the present, and it points a way forward toward a more just and sustainable future.

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The ecofeminists of the 1970s couldn’t have anticipated the role of the digital realm in our lives today —or the ways the internet simultaneously interlinks and alienates us from one another and the world beyond our screens. On a giant, freestanding screen, curved at the bottom like a wave, the three-channel video Executive Order 27 – 1100100: Phase Change toward the Deluge (2024) filled a corner of The Brick with flashing text and images. Collectively composed by the Alliance of the Southern Triangle, the piece forms a visual deluge, intercutting TikTok videos of floods in Miami-Dade County, Florida; scrolling text cut from theory and news; flashing red triangles; and glitching maps of watersheds. It was a familiar experience: Anyone with a social media account has been inundated with photo documentation of weather extremes, decontextualized quotes from fictional and nonfictional sources, et cetera. The torrent might inspire action; it might induce paralysis. What struck me was that the digital landscape presents a new reality that ecofeminism must now adapt to. The digital sphere gives and stores valuable information about climate disasters, but the infrastructure that sustains it—the server farms, for instance—contributes to those very crises. Maybe the division between virtual and physical realms is another dualism to undo; maybe the interconnection the internet facilitates between humans comes at the expense of the rest of Earth. Executive Order 27 raises these possibilities but ultimately offers little resolution. I was left wondering to what extent ecofeminist practice requires us to touch grass.

To me, the most arresting works in Life on Earth were those that brought me back to my senses. Yo-E Ryou’s sound installation, 숨 오케스트라 (Breath Orchestra), Act 1 (2024), formed strange and beautiful rhythms out of layered recordings of human breath. Ryou, who is based on Jeju Island, South Korea, made the piece in tribute to the Hanyeo shellfish divers, young women who were training in the generations-old tradition of freediving for shellfish off the Island’s coast. The artist recorded a group of young women as they learned Haenyeo traditions for the first time. The sounds—which seemed only partly or potentially human—surrounded me as I stepped inside a circle of speakers. There, as my own breath joined the chorus, I felt suspended at the center of a lung, a shell, and a wave. Breath might be our most basic form of mutual exchange with our environment. In Ryou’s piece, breath is not a solitary function, but a shared rhythm, one that binds human to air to ocean to animal to everything else.

Rain can transform the place where it falls. A doused landscape shines; later, it blooms. In the same way, a theory can reveal latent truths in the material conditions that inform it. It can transfigure those conditions, too. Ecofeminist ideas have precipitated artworks for decades, and the works in Life on Earth suggest that contemporary artists are continuing to update and adapt ecofeminist ideas. It feels important to note that Life on Earth left out works by major figures associated with ecofeminism—the omission of artists like Agnes Martin, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Wangechi Mutu, Faith Wilding, or Ana Mendieta, plus the absence of a catalog (not due out until late 2025),¹⁶ seemed like perplexing and ironic oversights in a show centered on a philosophy of connection. While the curation neglected to make substantive links between the works on view and the movement’s legacy, the artworks themselves made and extended those connections, drawing ecofeminist insights into the present and suggesting paths forward. A theory of connection, the show proposed, is also a theory of transformation: To transform means first, and always, to connect.

This essay was originally published in Carla issue 39.