Class of 2012
Palwasha Amanullah (Pakistan), Nadia Barhoum (US), Remco de Blaaij (Netherlands), Eva Dietrich (Germany), Daniel Fernández Pascual (Spain), Blake Fisher (USA), Mirko Gatti (Italy), Janet Hall (Northern Ireland), Samir Harb (Palestine), Irmelin Joelson (Sweden), Heejung Kim (South Korea), Steffen Kraemer (Germany), Chris Molinski (US), Corinne Quin (UK)
Applied Idleness: On the Economy of Pastoral Images
Blake Fisher
The pastoral mode reaches back to the known origins of language and human settlement. In many ways, it has been a cultural site through which the transitional condition between settlement/movement, leisure/work, and otium/negotium has found poetic expression. In other words, it has served as a register for the emergence of governance and urbanisation.
My research tracks the pastoral through a contemporary landscape of state violence -- Afghanistan during the U.S. military occupation. It follows a series of images in which Central and Southern Asian artefacts, natural resources, and poems are transformed into tactics for primitive accumulation and economic development.
My research tracks the pastoral through a contemporary landscape of state violence -- Afghanistan during the U.S. military occupation. It follows a series of images in which Central and Southern Asian artefacts, natural resources, and poems are transformed into tactics for primitive accumulation and economic development.