Degrowth Utopia, 2024. Curated by Grace O’Boyle, Belfast Exposed, Belfast, Northern Ireland
Degrowth Utopia Exhibition Documentation, 2024
Grace O’Boyle’s Curator’s Text:
Norm Foley, a Fogo island native and a new friend, introduced me to root cellars – a traditional storage and preservation technique in which an underground or partially underground cellar, comprising stone walls and shelving, is used to store root vegetables, such as potatoes, carrots and turnips. A door is hidden underneath a grassy mound, flanked by traditional stone masonry. Inside, the cellars are dark and chill and function to control temperatures and steady humidity. These are not remnants of old technologies, they are active practices and ways of living for many people on the island.
The landscape is dramatic, with its exposed bedrock, glowing lichen, and treeless bogspeckled with bog cotton. The village of Tilting, on the eastern end of Fogo, juts out into the vast North Atlantic sea and in its clutches the people work in harmony with the sea. The shoreline is populated with red wooden structures on stilts that stand delicately above the water, referred to as ‘stages’, these sheds process the inshore fishery’s bounty to prepare salted cod for trade.
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I spent four months on Fogo Island in the summer of 2022. Many of those long evenings I spent walking and listening to long-form podcasts. One such podcast was ‘Upstream’ by Della Z Duncan and Robert Ramin Raymond. Their slogan goes: Unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. Radical ideas and inspiring stories for a just transition to a more beautiful and equitable world. In the episode ‘How degrowth will save the world with Jason Hickel’, I was introduced to the idea of degrowth – centering the natural environment and social justice above economic expansion and exponential growth. The podcast led me to Mark Fisher’s text, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (2009). The concept of capitalist realism is defined in the text: ‘…the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’
Fisher argues that capitalism is untenable and inconsistent but that our representation of war, poverty, and climate disaster reinforce the belief that it is an inevitable part of the societal process. He further states that capitalist realism is inherently anti-utopian, as it holds that no matter the flaws or externalities, capitalism is the only possible means of operation. Rendering a space in which utopian thinking can exist is an act of radical hope and an exercise of re-imagining.
The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human.
- Ursula le Guin
The artists and friends featured in Degrowth Utopia, Joshua Jensen and Ró Dennis, share my affinity for the natural world. I often think that, subconsciously, we collect friends that reflect back at us, our hopes, creative desires and deep yearning for meaning. Both Jensen and Dennis seek to capture the intangible aura of the terrains they photograph; they do so in a soft and non-invasive way, elevating their subject matter to mythological status, and producing an utopian aesthetic.
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At the back of the Anglican church in Barr’d Islands, Fogo, there is a tall glass case that holds an engraved seal gaff. The gaff is a two-metre long wooden pole with an iron hook and spike attached to one end, used for hunting seals. On April 7th, 1917, three brothers from Joe Batt’s, Joseph, Stephen, and Walter Jacobs, and their friend, Francis Pomeroy, set out on the ice to hunt. A sudden change of wind pushed the ice floes toward the sea and away from the shoreline, the men were stranded. Fogo’s communities searched for days, but found no sign of their survival, the men were lost in the white landscape.
Months later, a man from Twillingate, a town on the northeastern shore of Newfoundland, picked up a gaff on the shore. The engraved gaff carried Joseph Jacob’s final message, before he succumbed to the subarctic climate and the treacherous North Atlantic sea: “Laying down to perish April 11”, signed with the initials “JJ”.
People are resilient, resourceful and imaginative - this was clear to me on Fogo Island, on hearing the story of the lost seal hunters, in Norm’s root cellar, in the red sheds on stilts where local industry flourishes. But when I left the island, I was left with questions. Have we laid down to perish? Has the landscape begun to usurp us?
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Across the planet, landscapes become sites of trauma, witness to the loss of natural and human life. Human overconsumption rots the earth, whilst war breaks all moral code and disregards the value of life. We are succumbing to perishment, to be swallowed whole by the terrains we extract from and carelessly abuse.
Degrowth Utopia invites the audience to participate in the act of re-imagining, and seeks to facilitate a space in which questions can emerge: How do we centre social justice and the natural world? What could this new world look like? How do we challenge the established order?
Degrowth Utopia Exhibition Document
Curatorial text: Grace O'Boyle
Contributing writer: Fiachra Gallagher
Zine Design: Anna Frizelle
Artists: Joshua Jensen & Ró Dennis