Stewardship

2021 Type: Glossary

Usually informed by recent movements across the Global South that embody living alternatives to the Euroamerican idea of property, from the Amazon rainforest to Standing Rock. What such sites of resistance share is a shift away from anthropocentric claims of land ownership, towards an idea of humans being only one constituency among many, one single piece of a complex, sprawling biotope of species and (conflicting) interests.
Apparently, humans need not be proprietors who either exploit the land or enjoy the landscape, they can be stewards co-responsible for the ecosystemic well-being of the land around them, in the aim of regenerative biodiversity over monocultural extraction.

Tirdad Zolghadr is a curator and writer. He teaches at the Graduiertenschule UdK Berlin. Writing includes fiction as well as curatorial research, e.g. REALTY: Beyond the Traditional Blueprints of Art & Gentrification (Hatje Cantz 2022). Recent curating includes an associate curatorship at KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2017-20).