Artist, writer and curator Julie Poitras Santos’ site-specific practice employs walking to investigate the relationship between site, story, and the peripatetic. Her interests include the relationship between natural histories and individual story, walking as a form of listening to site, and material agency in an age of climate change. Her work has taken the form of installations, videos, texts, actions, and public projects. Poitras Santos is an Associate Professor of Studio Art in the MFA program at Maine College of Art & Design in Portland, Maine, USA.

Poitras Santos’s artwork has been exhibited at the Göteborg Biennial for Contemporary Art (Extended), Sweden; Portland Museum of Art, ME; Queens Museum, NY; Bates College Museum of Art, ME; Center for Maine Contemporary Art, ME; Karlskrona Konsthall, Sweden; Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain; Reykjanesbaer Art Museum, Iceland; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO, among others. Her writing has been published in numerous exhibition publications, and in the Brooklyn Rail, Leonardo: MIT Press, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, The Café Review, and Living Maps Review. Currently, Poitras Santos is working on SOIL CULTURE, a collaborative project with philosopher Maria Patricia Tinajero, supported by the Collective Futures Fund.

As a curator, her work is interdisciplinary and community focused. In 2016, Poitras Santos initiated Platform Projects/Walks, an ongoing platform for curating walking artworks within local communities, supported by a Kindling Fund Grant from the Andy Warhol Regional Regranting Program. Making Migration Visible: Traces, Tracks & Pathways (2018), co-curated with anthropologist Catherine Besteman for the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design (ICA at MECA&D), was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2020, Poitras Santos organized Platform Projects/Walks: ecologies of the local for Speedwell Projects, bringing artists and scientists together for conversations about climate change. Poitras Santos served as Director of Exhibitions for the ICA at MECA&D from 2019-2023. Other notable curatorial projects include, Acoustic Resonance (2020); Monitor: Surveillance, Data and the New Panoptic (2021); and Liveable Worlds (2023).

juliepoitrassantos.com | platformprojectswalks.com

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FIELDWORK Q&A – January 2024

How is fieldwork part of your practice?
A form of writing with the body, walking can be seen to create a text, a series of inscriptions in the land. At the same time, the land guides our steps; we read the ground with our feet—networks of pathways trace the landscape as a living exchange. I’m drawn to investigate this interdependent exchange as an immersive text, a complicated relational body. Reciprocity and relationship form the heart of ecological thinking, and fieldwork for me is an ecological activity, encompassing dialog and connection as much as data collection. Considering the agency of the wild and our entanglement within it, engagement and participation form a central part of my practice, touching on experiences of desire, yearning, longing, and loss. Fieldwork serves as research for my artistic projects, it encompasses how I learn a place, engage with it, and attend to the surroundings. I frequently work with others; cross-disciplinarity affords a broader view, provoking surprising questions and complex answers. For my projects, fieldwork can include engagement with archives, herbariums, libraries, historians, ecologists, geologists, biologists, farmers, builders, wanderers, shopkeepers, or gardeners. Knowledge is woven into the stories a community tells and its engagement with the land.

How would you describe your fieldwork activity?
Walking affords a slow engagement with place, allowing me to access information through sensual processes like seeing, listening, or touching. In addition to using my body as a perceptual tool, I also employ tools for expanded seeing, including microscopes, hand lenses, cameras, stereoscopes, and drones. I walk with others, and invite knowledge sharing and storytelling from the communities I work in. While documentation of this process occurs through note taking, image making, and capturing video or audio, some information eludes classical recording practices and even language. This fugitive material is embodied and translated, through my own intuitions, within the work.

How are you currently sharing your fieldwork?
I’m interested in stories that travel, which has led me to narrative and time-based forms such as video, audio, texts, and other printed matter. I’ve long thought of my practice as aligned with the traditions of peripatetic storytellers that weave together the world by forging connections between people and places. That said, my investigations encompass both home and away, and I’ve lately felt an internal movement toward an infinitely more localized response encompassing material forms such as sculpture and objects, and a pull toward the grounding nature of earth and clay.

FIELDWORK
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