Public
Journal Data
| Type | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University Publishing Group Inc |
| ISSN | 0845-4450 / 2048-6928 |
| Scopus | 21316 |
| OpenAlex | S4210185545 |
| Website | https://api.elsevier.com/content/serial/title/issn/0887-3852 |
| Total publications | 28 |
| Coverage period | 2015 - 2026 |
| Country | GB |
| Language | EN |
| Indexing | Scopus indexed |
| Cited by | 6 |
| Impact factor | 1.2 |
| SJR | 0.312 |
| SNIP | 0.121 |
| h-index | 1 |
The generic title "Public" provides no specific indication of its subject matter. Without further information, it is categorized as a broader social science or humanities venue where anthropological content would be occasional rather than structural
Art, Politics, and Modernism · Art, Technology, and Culture · Artistic and Creative Research · Canadian Identity and History · Cinema and Media Studies · Cuban History and Society · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · Digital Games and Media · Diverse Musicological Studies · Diversity and Impact of Dance
Landed
This work was developed as part of a series titled Landed , which examines the layered relationships between the land and generations of its human inhabitants. It reflects upon my lived experience as a first-generation settler who arrived in Turtle Island/Canada under the “landed immigrant” program, due to conflict in my country of origin. The work engages with the ecological and social symbolism of the soil (or “zemlja” which has the double mean…
The Indifference of Nature
Recent estimates suggest that approximately one-third of Ukrainian land has been degraded, including at least a quarter of the country’s agricultural land, since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. This interview with Ukrainian artist Kateryna Aliinyk explores how her paintings and other artworks make the environmental devastation of the conflict visible through a focus on what war buries in the soil. The interview probes how Alii…
The Alibi of Capital
This book review examines Timothy Mitchell’s The Alibi of Capital as a sustained intervention into contemporary debates on climate crisis, economic growth, and political responsibility. The book offers an incisive reconceptualization of economic growth as a political alibi that legitimizes extraction through appeals to the future. Mitchell’s account compellingly explains how responsibility for ecological harm is displaced rather than outright den…
Milpa Relationalities
The milpa is a millennia-old sustainable farming practice and way of life. Often seen as a method for growing corn, beans, and squash (the three sisters), its significance goes far beyond agriculture. Milpa is a biological, ecological, and cultural approach to living well with human and non-human worlds that co-create place. While many have become disconnected from soil, others maintain deep ties. Soil (re)mediation is not just about restoring hu…
Resonating Soils
How might we learn to listen to soils beyond dominant conceptions of passive substrate toward more dynamic, relational understandings? This article examines soil bioacoustics, an emergent conservation method that records subterranean sonic activity, to explore tensions between instrumental and relational approaches to environmental knowledge. Drawing on sensory ethnographic fieldwork on farms in Devon, UK, I trace how listening encounters both re…
Oltreterra Art Project
Started in 2023, Oltreterra art project was an interdisciplinary contemporary arts project, focused on the artistic experimentation of the ancient Sienna pigment. For this project, the artist, Samantha Passantiti, made a cycle of artworks with the pigment, first used in the 13th century, taking it from the same area where it was originally extracted. With this material, the artist experimented with the tradition of natural Sienna pigment, very im…
Jenine Marsh
This review of Jenine Marsh’s solo exhibition at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) evaluates the dominant themes in the artist’s material and conceptual oeuvre. I address Marsh’s ongoing interest in utopian gestures, coin-wishing, and her critique of capitalist acceleration, framing these themes in the context of her immersive approach to sculptural installation at KWAG. I also consider how her past project, Wellspring (2023) at Nathan Ph…
Heraa Khan
A review of Heraa Khan’s exhibition: ‘Still the Grass Grows,’ at the Art Gallery of St. Albert (4 September to 18 October, 2025). Battle considers the implications of Khan’s painting technique, rooted in the Indo-Persian tradition of masavari miniature painting. She links the imagery in Khan’s work to sensations of grief in the face of the climate crisis, and the uneasy equilibriums formed in our relationships with land.
The Expanded Field of Soil Remediation
Scientists and policymakers increasingly frame soil degradation as a “global soil crisis,” positioning it as a biophysical problem requiring technical remediation. Such responses often extend rather than transform the social conditions producing degradation. We argue that the soil crisis is better understood as a crisis of relation: a breakdown in the social, political, economic, and ecological relations through which soils are sustained. From th…
Cultivating Soil Relations
This curators’ introduction to the exhibition catalogue section of PUBLIC 73 describes the (Re)mediating Soils art exhibition, an ongoing, multi-sited, cumulative national exhibition made possible through the art–science collaboration of the (Re)mediating Soils project, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery (Blackfoot Territory/Lethbridge, Alberta), the Yukon Arts Centre (Whitehorse, Yukon), the Woodstock Art Gallery (Woodstock, Ontario), and …
Moscow Recordings
This suite of poems with accompanying graphite drawings emerges from my recent stay in Moscow. Over three months, I navigated the landscapes of my home city, memories, and present-day realities, grappling with the complexities of dissent and connection. In a terrain marked by silence and repression, I sought common ground with underground subcultures, family, and strangers. Each poetic text becomes a pathway through layered experiences, an attemp…
Re-claiming
This narrative essay weaves memory, ecology and philosophical questioning to explore relationality. It alternately expands into fractal possibilities of selfhood and contracts to the fine scale of microbial relations, returning periodically to ground the reader in acts of tending and attending to soil, plants and compost. The piece centres soil not only as metaphor but as a real vehicle for interconnection by considering how all beings – includin…
Dirt, Death, and Decay
Lengthy efforts are often made to preserve art in a frozen “original” state, to stall nature’s processes of deterioration, but artists are creating works intended to decay, (d)evolve, and embrace death. When soil occupies the white cube through the works of contemporary artists Precious Okoyomon, Daniel Lie, and Delcy Morelos, notions of mortality and the passing of time are inescapable. In their hands, soil no longer functions as a medium for hu…
Boiling Rocks
Boiling Rocks is an art project exploring soil remediation, inspired by the community science initiative Prospering backyards (Pb) in Southeast Los Angeles. Pb addressed lead contamination from a battery smelter, involving collaborations between art, science, and community. The project provided free soil health workshops and testing, leading to the identification of zeolites as a method to reduce lead bioavailability. Boiling Rocks translates thi…
Experiencing The Relationality of Soil
The numerous connections between soils and socio-ecosystems are often overlooked. In this article, we posit that neglecting affective relations with soil in traditional soil sciences restricts the co-creation of effective soil knowledges to shape sustainable futures, and, therefore, hampers fruitful interactions between science and society. Although the value of relations with soil can be logically explained, we propose that more powerful transfo…
Repairing the Soil
This article shows how contemporary artworks “repair” soils by combining technical, emotional, and political remediation within a context where international frameworks and cultural policies acknowledge the importance of both soil protection and artists’ roles in raising awareness of ecological issues. As part of the Soilscape project, we have compiled an inventory of 98 artistic soil-related initiatives and used field data (interviews, observati…
What the Soil Knows
The soil is a long continuum, a multi-hued fabric clothing landscapes planet-wide. Not only does the soil traverse space, it connects also across time; in all terrestrial ecosystems, soil has been there from their origins, evolving slowly in response to happenings there. The soil thus knows, for example, the land’s successive plant communities, the winds and waters that reshaped its surface, the grazing animals and teeming microbes long decayed. …
Making Soil Count
This paper critically examines the EU’s “Soil Deal for Europe” through a feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) lens through the exploration of how digital tools such as the EU soil dashboard and Living Labs shape our understanding of soil health. We argue that current soil governance relies on technocratic, data-driven frameworks that obscure ecological complexity and marginalize embodied, local knowledge. By analyzing the sociotechnical …
The Art of Disturbance
Soil tells a story of both injury and possibility. Urban soils, particularly in frontline communities, are deeply impacted by Los Angeles’ industrial legacy, and the 2025 wildfires exacerbated this contamination crisis. Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, and Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab, spent the last decade examining this history and transforming a tow yard on the LA River’s industrial corridor through bioremediation. We are now investigating persi…
Black Gold
Black Gold is a series of paintings by visual artists Hughen/Starkweather that investigate soil compost and food waste. The series began with a research-based artist residency at San Francisco Recology. The artists traced collected discarded, single-use, plastic food packaging to create complex abstract patterns. The resulting artworks reference impacted landscapes and biochemical processes. The series title, Black Gold , creates a deliberate ten…
Soil Amendment Plinth
The “soil amendment plinth” is a concept and prototype that emerged over several conversations between Amanda White and Kirsty Robertson, in which we discussed how galleries and museums are traditionally unfriendly to the porous, messy nature of artworks that include living things. Here we are imagining an appropriate support for artworks that are compostable and purposefully impermanent, constructed from materials that are well known soil amendm…
Becoming Ecological
The sense of being at an impasse in our approach to climate change provides the exigence for Derek Gladwin and Kendrick James in Becoming Ecological: Navigating Language and Meaning for Our Planet’s Future . They argue that preoccupation with “the facts” of climate science has become a barrier to action. To overcome this barrier, they make the case for a reconsideration of the concept of “change” as a process of Weberian becoming , and for reinve…
Séance
In this review of Séance: Technology of the Spirit , the 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (26 August—23 November 2025) at the Seoul Museum of Art, I reflect on the curatorial team’s decision to pursue an exhibition-as-séance model that centres an alternative art history of spiritualism and disavows “nationalism in the biennial context.” Reflecting on the exhibition’s historical precedents and the clear presence of East Asian artists, I consider how …
Conspicuous Consumption
Our work examines the complexities and paradoxes of decolonization and Indigenization, including multiple understandings, conflicting aspirations, contradictory desires, institutional instrumentalizations, heterogeneity within and between Indigenous communities and enduring limitations of efforts in this area. We start this article with an overview of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective and the “T…
Atmospheric Noise
This article reviews Mariana Peterson’s Atmospheric Noise , which draws jarring, cacophonous resonances between the science and engineering of acoustics, urban political economy, governmentality, the metaphysics of sound and the social construction of ecology and environment in the city of Los Angeles
Atmospheric Noise
This article reviews Mariana Peterson’s Atmospheric Noise , which draws jarring, cacophonous resonances between the science and engineering of acoustics, urban political economy, governmentality, the metaphysics of sound and the social construction of ecology and environment in the city of Los Angeles
Part 8
Entries: Phosporescence, Fog, Atmosphere, Air, Water, Pixels. Includes text by Christine Davis, Scott Lyall, Esther Leslie, Gernot Bohme, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers. Artworks by Christine Davis, Ian Cheng, Fujiko Nakaya, Jean-Luc Moulene, John Sabraw, June Pak, Rafael Ochoa, Jack Goldstein. Also includes End Notes and Masthead for issue
Aesthetics, Violence, and Indigeneity
This essay considers the intersectionality between the field of art history focused on the subject category of Native American or Indigenous art and Indigenous Studies. Methodological gaps in the field of art history are discussed through the canonical genre of landscape art with a comparative reference to key exhibitions; Land Spirit Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada, (1992), The West As America: Reinterpreting Images of the…
Ancient Sunlight
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an anthropologist, queer theorist, and filmmaker, whose ground-clearing work has developed a critical theory of late liberalism that would support what she calls ‘an anthropology of the otherwise.’ In her most recent monograph, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, she probes the politics that undergird the distinction between Life and Nonlife, tracking its pernicious vocation both within contemporary regimes of po…
Conspicuous Consumption
Our work examines the complexities and paradoxes of decolonization and Indigenization, including multiple understandings, conflicting aspirations, contradictory desires, institutional instrumentalizations, heterogeneity within and between Indigenous communities and enduring limitations of efforts in this area. We start this article with an overview of the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures arts/research/ecology collective and the “T…
Atmospheric Noise
This article reviews Mariana Peterson’s Atmospheric Noise , which draws jarring, cacophonous resonances between the science and engineering of acoustics, urban political economy, governmentality, the metaphysics of sound and the social construction of ecology and environment in the city of Los Angeles
Landed
This work was developed as part of a series titled Landed , which examines the layered relationships between the land and generations of its human inhabitants. It reflects upon my lived experience as a first-generation settler who arrived in Turtle Island/Canada under the “landed immigrant” program, due to conflict in my country of origin. The work engages with the ecological and social symbolism of the soil (or “zemlja” which has the double mean…
The Indifference of Nature
Recent estimates suggest that approximately one-third of Ukrainian land has been degraded, including at least a quarter of the country’s agricultural land, since the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. This interview with Ukrainian artist Kateryna Aliinyk explores how her paintings and other artworks make the environmental devastation of the conflict visible through a focus on what war buries in the soil. The interview probes how Alii…
The Alibi of Capital
This book review examines Timothy Mitchell’s The Alibi of Capital as a sustained intervention into contemporary debates on climate crisis, economic growth, and political responsibility. The book offers an incisive reconceptualization of economic growth as a political alibi that legitimizes extraction through appeals to the future. Mitchell’s account compellingly explains how responsibility for ecological harm is displaced rather than outright den…
Milpa Relationalities
The milpa is a millennia-old sustainable farming practice and way of life. Often seen as a method for growing corn, beans, and squash (the three sisters), its significance goes far beyond agriculture. Milpa is a biological, ecological, and cultural approach to living well with human and non-human worlds that co-create place. While many have become disconnected from soil, others maintain deep ties. Soil (re)mediation is not just about restoring hu…
Resonating Soils
How might we learn to listen to soils beyond dominant conceptions of passive substrate toward more dynamic, relational understandings? This article examines soil bioacoustics, an emergent conservation method that records subterranean sonic activity, to explore tensions between instrumental and relational approaches to environmental knowledge. Drawing on sensory ethnographic fieldwork on farms in Devon, UK, I trace how listening encounters both re…
Oltreterra Art Project
Started in 2023, Oltreterra art project was an interdisciplinary contemporary arts project, focused on the artistic experimentation of the ancient Sienna pigment. For this project, the artist, Samantha Passantiti, made a cycle of artworks with the pigment, first used in the 13th century, taking it from the same area where it was originally extracted. With this material, the artist experimented with the tradition of natural Sienna pigment, very im…
Jenine Marsh
This review of Jenine Marsh’s solo exhibition at the Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery (KWAG) evaluates the dominant themes in the artist’s material and conceptual oeuvre. I address Marsh’s ongoing interest in utopian gestures, coin-wishing, and her critique of capitalist acceleration, framing these themes in the context of her immersive approach to sculptural installation at KWAG. I also consider how her past project, Wellspring (2023) at Nathan Ph…
Heraa Khan
A review of Heraa Khan’s exhibition: ‘Still the Grass Grows,’ at the Art Gallery of St. Albert (4 September to 18 October, 2025). Battle considers the implications of Khan’s painting technique, rooted in the Indo-Persian tradition of masavari miniature painting. She links the imagery in Khan’s work to sensations of grief in the face of the climate crisis, and the uneasy equilibriums formed in our relationships with land.
The Expanded Field of Soil Remediation
Scientists and policymakers increasingly frame soil degradation as a “global soil crisis,” positioning it as a biophysical problem requiring technical remediation. Such responses often extend rather than transform the social conditions producing degradation. We argue that the soil crisis is better understood as a crisis of relation: a breakdown in the social, political, economic, and ecological relations through which soils are sustained. From th…
Cultivating Soil Relations
This curators’ introduction to the exhibition catalogue section of PUBLIC 73 describes the (Re)mediating Soils art exhibition, an ongoing, multi-sited, cumulative national exhibition made possible through the art–science collaboration of the (Re)mediating Soils project, the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery (Blackfoot Territory/Lethbridge, Alberta), the Yukon Arts Centre (Whitehorse, Yukon), the Woodstock Art Gallery (Woodstock, Ontario), and …
Moscow Recordings
This suite of poems with accompanying graphite drawings emerges from my recent stay in Moscow. Over three months, I navigated the landscapes of my home city, memories, and present-day realities, grappling with the complexities of dissent and connection. In a terrain marked by silence and repression, I sought common ground with underground subcultures, family, and strangers. Each poetic text becomes a pathway through layered experiences, an attemp…
Re-claiming
This narrative essay weaves memory, ecology and philosophical questioning to explore relationality. It alternately expands into fractal possibilities of selfhood and contracts to the fine scale of microbial relations, returning periodically to ground the reader in acts of tending and attending to soil, plants and compost. The piece centres soil not only as metaphor but as a real vehicle for interconnection by considering how all beings – includin…
Dirt, Death, and Decay
Lengthy efforts are often made to preserve art in a frozen “original” state, to stall nature’s processes of deterioration, but artists are creating works intended to decay, (d)evolve, and embrace death. When soil occupies the white cube through the works of contemporary artists Precious Okoyomon, Daniel Lie, and Delcy Morelos, notions of mortality and the passing of time are inescapable. In their hands, soil no longer functions as a medium for hu…
Boiling Rocks
Boiling Rocks is an art project exploring soil remediation, inspired by the community science initiative Prospering backyards (Pb) in Southeast Los Angeles. Pb addressed lead contamination from a battery smelter, involving collaborations between art, science, and community. The project provided free soil health workshops and testing, leading to the identification of zeolites as a method to reduce lead bioavailability. Boiling Rocks translates thi…
Experiencing The Relationality of Soil
The numerous connections between soils and socio-ecosystems are often overlooked. In this article, we posit that neglecting affective relations with soil in traditional soil sciences restricts the co-creation of effective soil knowledges to shape sustainable futures, and, therefore, hampers fruitful interactions between science and society. Although the value of relations with soil can be logically explained, we propose that more powerful transfo…
Repairing the Soil
This article shows how contemporary artworks “repair” soils by combining technical, emotional, and political remediation within a context where international frameworks and cultural policies acknowledge the importance of both soil protection and artists’ roles in raising awareness of ecological issues. As part of the Soilscape project, we have compiled an inventory of 98 artistic soil-related initiatives and used field data (interviews, observati…
What the Soil Knows
The soil is a long continuum, a multi-hued fabric clothing landscapes planet-wide. Not only does the soil traverse space, it connects also across time; in all terrestrial ecosystems, soil has been there from their origins, evolving slowly in response to happenings there. The soil thus knows, for example, the land’s successive plant communities, the winds and waters that reshaped its surface, the grazing animals and teeming microbes long decayed. …
Making Soil Count
This paper critically examines the EU’s “Soil Deal for Europe” through a feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) lens through the exploration of how digital tools such as the EU soil dashboard and Living Labs shape our understanding of soil health. We argue that current soil governance relies on technocratic, data-driven frameworks that obscure ecological complexity and marginalize embodied, local knowledge. By analyzing the sociotechnical …
The Art of Disturbance
Soil tells a story of both injury and possibility. Urban soils, particularly in frontline communities, are deeply impacted by Los Angeles’ industrial legacy, and the 2025 wildfires exacerbated this contamination crisis. Lauren Bon and Metabolic Studio, and Metabolic Studio’s Farmlab, spent the last decade examining this history and transforming a tow yard on the LA River’s industrial corridor through bioremediation. We are now investigating persi…
Black Gold
Black Gold is a series of paintings by visual artists Hughen/Starkweather that investigate soil compost and food waste. The series began with a research-based artist residency at San Francisco Recology. The artists traced collected discarded, single-use, plastic food packaging to create complex abstract patterns. The resulting artworks reference impacted landscapes and biochemical processes. The series title, Black Gold , creates a deliberate ten…