INTERVIEW WITH:
GABRIELA BENISH-KALNÁ

Imagining a Just Future: Gabriela Benish-Kalna on Art, Ecology, and Advocacy

For Gabriela Benish-Kalná, art is more than an aesthetic practice—it’s a means of social and environmental transformation. In this interview with Cluster London, she discusses her work with the ArtMill Center for Regenerative Arts, her experience in frontline activism, and how her practice bridges photography, ecology, and advocacy.

Through analogue photography, installation, and social practice, Gabriela challenges the divide between nature and culture, using art to reimagine a more just and regenerative future.

Hi Gabriela! What motivated you to work with the ArtMill Center for Regenerative Arts, and how does it align with your personal mission as an artist and activist?

After years of frontline activism and working in grassroots movements, I decided to turn towards solutions-oriented and hope-based communication, to use art as a means of imagining and creating a more just future. I returned to the rural flour mill where I grew up, started a small farm with permaculture gardens, horses, chickens, ducks, pigs and other animals and took on the directorship of our non-profit organization ArtDialog to be part of the paradigm shift from sustainability to regeneration. I’ve refocused on turning theory into practice, fostering resilience, healing our ecosystems that in turn heal us, and on holding this space for artists, activists, and communities of struggle to reconnect to the natural world, to heal and find a sense of belonging in our community that transcends borders and disciplines.

You work extensively with analogue photography to document your experience of solastalgia. What drew you to this medium, and how does it enhance the themes you explore?

I started studying classical photography right after a difficult 3-year period on the frontlines of the Water is Life movement, an indigenous-led resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline in Standing Rock. I found healing in the processes of analogue, in spending hours in the darkroom and the slowing of the fast-paced world around me. I got to explore the theoretical side of analogue photography, concepts such as the optical unconscious, the inherent essence of a photograph, or the similarities between latent images and memory. After delving deeper into the historical complicity of the photographic medium in colonial endeavours and new ways of using it as a force of decolonisation, my artistic practice shifted more towards social practice. I still return to photography at times as a means of slowing down, listening and connecting to the ecosystems that I work to regenerate in my trans-disciplinary practice and on-the-ground work at ArtMill.

Your art aims to challenge the “Great Divide” between nature and culture. What specific narratives or visual strategies do you employ to convey this message?

The ontological turn happening in the European academy and arts - the rise in post-humanist thinking, the recognition of non-human actors and actants as having agency - comes as a response to the separation of humans from the natural world long felt in Euro-Western society.

Through observation of my environment, I try to capture through symbolism the visual cues and silent communication of our more-than-human kin. Observation, be it visual, auditory, or sensory, is the first step in regenerating the environment, in becoming an ally in a movement, be it in permaculture principles or grassroots organising. I use photography as an effective observational tool and a step towards immersion in my surroundings.

The narratives I use always come organically. Some parts of Solastalgia are natural objects taken from their environment and placed in a white cube, mimicking our nature/culture divide, with other images directly contrasting and breaking this aesthetic. In the series post_dirt I work with text, drawing extensive mind maps on the walls of galleries that trace connections between agricultural revolutions and social inequality, pointing towards the interconnected movements that offer new ways forward. The chaotic visual and accompanying objects, like the cement box filled with heirloom seeds from the ArtMill seed bank, designed to withstand a nuclear explosion, narrate the overwhelming and complex reality we face in any movement for a just future.

As the Director of ArtDialog, how do you integrate art education into climate adaptation efforts?

At ArtMill, we bring together different fields through artistic practice; experiential education, regenerative agriculture, social sciences, life sciences and ecology, activism and advocacy, to catalyse eco-social transformation. We create space for artistic and social practice to move away from the doomsday narratives of civilisation collapse and to bring closer the many solutions already present. All of our programmes, be it international study abroad, exhibitions, workshops or artist residencies, show these alternative models in action. Our newest programme brings climate adaptation scientists and researchers together with artists to make scientific data more accessible to the public via the arts and to create new curriculums to foster eco-literacy in students. ArtMill’s approach emphasises the need for these trans-disciplinary solutions and strategies to adapt to our changing climate, which requires disciplines and cultures to come together and co-create. And in this sense, climate adaptation is more than just the study of the changing behaviour of different species, it’s about creating communities of resilience. Our students and community members get to experience this while becoming part of a larger international network, with initiatives and organisations all over the world fighting in their own fields and home sites to make this world more just.

I think experiencing this and becoming part of something larger than oneself is something to be very hopeful about. And I strongly believe that hope catalyses action more powerfully than fear.

You have worked with various social and environmental justice initiatives. How do you see your art contributing to these movements, and what role does art play in advocacy?

I believe art to be a powerful catalyst to social change. Our organisation started with an anti-regime exchange exhibition right before the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia which overturned the oppressive communist rule. If we want to transform society, we must transform the culture within it, hold space for the voices that are unheard, and use artistic forms to ignite, inspire and change the wider discourse. Art and its theories can be utilised to function as a language that transcends the narrow cultural view of the Western order; to be a tool used as an amplifier, a bridge between worldviews and perspectives. Art is the fertile ground of imagination, it pushes the limits of what is possible and allows for visualisations still unseen or in direct opposition to popular discourse and to this modern-day phenomenon of the doomsday narrative. In order to move forward and implement tangible solutions, we must first be able to imagine them, to imagine a better and different future.

“If we want to transform society, we must transform the culture within it, hold space for the voices that are unheard, and use artistic forms to ignite, inspire and change the wider discourse.”

What advice would you give to emerging artists who want to engage with social and environmental issues through their work?

I think the most important thing to start with is to learn the historical and cultural contexts in which the specific issue exists within. To really dive deep and educate ourselves, to first ask ourselves the question “whose story is this?” If it’s not our story, then it’s crucial to acknowledge that we are entering a fight that’s been going on for centuries, to recognise the deep interconnectedness of a crisis, be it to colonialism or the larger systems of oppression and capitalist extractions. To avoid creating environmentally or socially oriented art because it’s becoming a trend in the art world, but to really try to add to the fight for environmental and social justice, to try to use art as a force of regeneration, especially if we’re coming from the Euro-Western world.

Thank you for reading,
Alexandra, Ema & the Cluster Team.

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INTERVIEW WITH:

GABRIELA BENISH-KALNÁ

Imagining a Just Future: Gabriela Benish-Kalna on Art, Ecology, and Advocacy

“If we want to transform society, we must transform the culture within it, hold space for the voices that are unheard, and use artistic forms to ignite, inspire and change the wider discourse.”