Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

The Everglades is an ecology under duress: flood control, sugar cultivation, and urban sprawl threaten this distinctive wetland complex. But all is not lost. Pockets of the Everglades retain their historic multispecies character. Drawing on scholars such as Anna Tsing, Frantz Fanon, and Martin Heidegger, this seminar will develop an analysis of the Everglades as a waterscape caught in the throes of planetary transition: from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. We will explore the Everglades deep-time emergence alongside its high-modernist distortions. Much of our discussion will hinge on the Everglades Agricultural Area–a mega Anthropocene patch maintained by Big Sugar. The EAA fragments the hydrology of the historic glades, exposes communities of color to catastrophic flooding, and forms the major obstacle to large-scale restoration.