When we set out to organize Land Chapters, we knew we wanted to explicitly address the human relationship to nature. Immediately that intention unearthed a large and murky web of the ways in which we categorize human, nature, and relationship.

Instead of trying to constrict a boundary around these terms, we welcome their impossibility of being tamed into a cohesive experience. In fact, the need to categorize these terms has historically erased many peoples’ and species’ stories, experiences, and complexities of survival and continuation. It has silenced the small creek into a roaring paper mill, it has given European names to mountains that were given names by their protectors and story keepers.

Here in Vermont, one of the region’s greatest mountains known today as Camel’s Hump was given the original name of Tawapodiiwajo, Abenaki for “mountain seat,” alluding to traditional stories of the hero Glooscap using the mountain as his personal seat. Tabaldak gave Glooscap the power to create a good world. Glooscap learned that hunters who kill too much would destroy the ecosystem and the good world he had sought to create and went on to seek the advice of Grandmother Woodchuck (Agaskw) who then plucked all the hairs out of her belly (hence the lack of hair on a woodchuck's belly) and wove them into a magical bag for Glooscap to use and eventually learn the lesson that they needed to hunt to remain strong.

What other stories and histories are layered in these names, re-namings, un-namings? How do we resist adding a new boundary to the terms that have spliced our lives into multitudes of subjugation? What if locating yourself in nature is not about place at all but about memory, perception, sound, proposals, movement?

Echoing the first generation of land artists who used earth matter to make their work, we have invited artists to consider the ways in which we influence and are influenced by “the land.”

Rather than impose an intervention, we encouraged an anti-heroic response: an embrace, dialogue, and open exploration, not just of this particular piece of land with its own storied history, but to all natural environments that keep us in the mire of speculation when it comes to what we deem natural environments. The work included in this exhibition is on unceded land of the Abenaki Nation and also brings into focus territories across North America and abroad including the Mexican-US border, Puerto Rico, and Italy.

There is no fixed sequence to this exhibition to guide you from one point of experience to the next. Rather, each work included is to be viewed as a point on a map that unfurls itself into different responses to our curatorial prompt; a map with no one name but many names, lands without borders, experiences without dogma.

We live in a different era of earth collapse than the land artists who preceded us. Romanticizing our connection to nature can feel patronizing to a dying earth and species. In place of romance as an answer, we believe this work offers nature as a question. We believe this work pushes against the instinct to other and fetishize nature, that it instead engenders curiosity, posing a question rather than an answer.

We hope this project finds its way into your own relationship with the world(s) around and within you.

Estefania Puerta and Abbey Meaker, 2021