A Rhetoric of Preservation: Artistic Interventions in a Damaged World

James M. Salvo; Jasmine B. Ulmer

doi:10.25038/am.v0i25.449

Authors

James M. Salvo
Jasmine B. Ulmer

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i25.449

Keywords:

Anthropocene, media literacy, visual ecology, Walter Benjamin, folk art, extinction

Abstract

Rereading Walter Benjamin’s often overlooked theme of preservation in his work, we offer an interpretation of an art installation that appeared in the winter of 2018 in The Heidelberg Project in Detroit, Michigan, USA. By interpreting this installation and Benjamin’s insights on preservation, we make recommendations on how to make readable rhetoric that might be used to positively shape digitally disseminated climate change activist media. We examine three types of preservation: 1. preservation that makes inaccessible, 2. dialectical preservation, and 3. the preservation of the collected. In so doing, we show how performative acts of publicly available art might directly respond to the environmental crisis and how the legibility of that art might offer hope for survival in the age of climate change.

Article received: April 21, 2021; Article accepted: June 21, 2021; Published online: September 15, 2021. Original scholarly paper

Author Biographies

James M. Salvo

Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois
United States

James M. Salvo (Ph.D., the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, b. 1976) lectures in the College of Education at Wayne State University in Detroit and the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Salvo’s research interests are in new media, theory, qualitative inquiry, and ethics. His books include Writing and Unrecognized Labor: The Rejected Manuscript (2021) and Reading Autoethnography: Reflections on Justice and Love (2020). With Norman K. Denzin, he founded and co-edits the book series New Directions in Theorizing Qualitative Research for Myers Education Press. To date, the series has published volumes on Indigenous inquiry, performance, theory, and arts-based research.

Jasmine B. Ulmer

Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
United States

Jasmine B. Ulmer (Ph.D., University of Florida, b. 1981) is an assistant professor of qualitative research at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her research develops inclusive inquiry methodologies and pedagogies. Specifically, her scholarship utilizes slow ontology and photography to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. She locates her work at the intersection of qualitative inquiry and the humanities, drawing from new materialisms, feminisms, and posthumanisms. Ulmer recently co-edited a collection on Transdisciplinary Feminist Research Approaches: Innovations in Theory, Method, and Practice (2020). Her most recent book is Shared and Collaborative Practice in Qualitative Inquiry: Tiny Revolutions (2021). She has been a Humanities Center Faculty Fellow at Wayne State University, a visiting scholar at Appalachian State University, and a visiting scholar at Ghent University in Belgium. With James M. Salvo, Ulmer is a founding co-editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods and the book series Developing Traditions in Qualitative Inquiry.

References

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“Our Mission. Our Vision.” The Heidelberg Project. https://www.heidelberg.org/mission-vision. Accessed on March 31, 2021.

Ulmer, Jasmine. “Photogenic Images: Producing Everyday Images of Possibility.” Revista Brasileira de Sociologia da Emoção 16, 47 (2017): 117–33.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i25.449 DOI: https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i25.449