https://critical-ecologies.org Critical Ecologies Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:42 +0000 https://critical-ecologies.org en https://critical-ecologies.org/home Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:28 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/home CRITICAL ECOLOGIES A research stream at Goldsmiths, University of London that investigates global warming, environmental justice, colonial dispossession,&nbsp;climate migration, species extinction, media ecologies, and extractivism from an arts and humanities perspective FIND OUT MORE HERE &nbsp;︎︎︎ https://critical-ecologies.org/about Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:29 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/about ABOUT The issue of climate change and environmental transformation is clearly one of the most significant challenges we face today. What is at stake in the ecological crises of the 21st century that raises specific questions and areas of concern for the arts, humanities, and cultural production? Who and what suffers or benefits from these crises and through what legal, economic, and political&nbsp;structures? How can we represent and narrate multi-scalar and multi-temporal phenomena to plan for and respond to uncertain futures? An era looms for which we have no clear template, but in which we strive for experimental propositions.&nbsp; The CRITICAL ECOLOGIES research stream formalises connections between existing areas of research and practice by bringing together established environment-focused initiatives from across Visual Cultures/Research Architecture; Anthropology; Art; Design; Sociology; Media, Communications and Cultural Studies; and English and Creative Writing to develop collaborations, funding bids, and curricula. Our core aspiration is to evolve new academic platforms capable of shaping public debate. CHAIR Wood Roberdeau, Visual CulturesSENSS Lead: Sustainability and Climate Emergency (2023-25) Homepage image credit: Rehana Zaman,&nbsp;Your Ecstatic Self, 2019 CURRENT MEMBERS Louise Ashcroft, Art James Burton, Media, Communications and Cultural StudiesRick Crownshaw, English and Creative Writing Matthew Fuller, Media, Communications and Cultural StudiesRos Gray, ArtAyesha Hameed, ArtGraham Harwood, Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Carolyn Kirschner, Design Nirmal Puwar, Sociology Julia Sauma, AnthropologySusan Schuppli, Research ArchitectureJol Thoms, ArtLynn Turner, Visual CulturesTuur Van Balen, Design Becca Voelcker, Art Lenka Vráblíková, Art and Visual Cultures AFFILIATES Ifor Duncan Mariam Motomedi-Fraser Adom Philogene Heron Audrey Samson Martin Savransky Shela Sheikh Pauline von Hellerman Nicole Wolf LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR MEMBERS Goldsmiths, University of London 8 Lewisham Way, New Cross London, United Kingdom ︎ https://critical-ecologies.org/members Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:29 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/members <img width="636" height="636" width_o="636" height_o="636" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0553ef39e2346c2ec9402e0863ee7ebf9b94d88c72114d96cba107dffc7d305f/Members_Louise-Ashcroft-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141177" border="0" data-scale="60" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/636/i/0553ef39e2346c2ec9402e0863ee7ebf9b94d88c72114d96cba107dffc7d305f/Members_Louise-Ashcroft-B-W.jpg" /> LOUISE ASHCROFT&nbsp;(Art) makes performances, projects and videos that chronicle her playfully antagonistic disruptions of the bizarre economic and social realities of advanced capitalism. For example, mailing London soil to its hedge fund owners in Australia; leading ‘backwards shopping’ workshops in Westfield mall; or planning how she'd spend the rest of her life together with strangers while helping them tidy their homes. Louise runs the humorous performance night Unperforming, is cofounder of the free, alternative art school AltMFA (est. 2010) and ran Chisenhale Studios' Into the Wild artist development programme for five years. www.louiseashcroft.org <img width="500" height="500" width_o="500" height_o="500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/25848fccebfd246cd4447b41475f62bfffd9cfae0095a877279cead9fd4fa461/James-Burton-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141142" border="0" data-scale="61" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/25848fccebfd246cd4447b41475f62bfffd9cfae0095a877279cead9fd4fa461/James-Burton-B-W.jpg" /> JAMES BURTON (Media, Communications and Cultural Studies) researches and publishes on a wide range of topics in cultural theory, philosophy and literature, with particular interests in fabulation, science fiction, posthumanism and post-natural ecology. With Erich Hörl, he edited General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (2017). His publications include The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick(2015), “From Exegesis to Ecology” (2015), “Towards a Parasitic Ethics” (with Daisy Tam, 2016) and “Metafiction and Ecology: Making Worlds with Worlds” (2017). In 2019, James co-organised a series of workshops entitled Organic Systems (Science Fiction and Ecology). <img width="380" height="380" width_o="380" height_o="380" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e5d52523395efc669db929cb7a0c586c163e05579e8c08bcb97ecc5d8be245b0/Rick-Crownshaw-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131154141" border="0" data-scale="63" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/380/i/e5d52523395efc669db929cb7a0c586c163e05579e8c08bcb97ecc5d8be245b0/Rick-Crownshaw-B-W.jpg" /> RICK CROWNSHAW (English and Creative Writing) has published extensively on witnessing, postmemory and trauma studies in American literature and culture. More recently Rick has turned his attention to the Environmental Humanities and literature of the Anthropocene. He has co-edited, with Stef Craps, a special issue of Studies in the Novel (2018) on climate change fiction and is currently finishing a monograph, Remembering the Anthropocene in Contemporary American Fiction, which focuses on the potential of cultural memory and trauma studies in analyzing literary narratives of climate change, extinction, pollution and toxicity, the resourcing of war, American petrocultures and post-oil worlds. <img width="857" height="857" width_o="857" height_o="857" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c6b80154a277d6413154f6a531cb37786a7f09d4818319b43f04bb581ad5f409/Matthew-Fuller-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141145" border="0" data-scale="62" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/857/i/c6b80154a277d6413154f6a531cb37786a7f09d4818319b43f04bb581ad5f409/Matthew-Fuller-B-W.jpg" /> MATTHEW FULLER (Media, Communications and Cultural Studies) addresses questions of ecology in relation to culture in numerous ways, for instance: ecology as a way into materialism, in Media Ecologies (MIT Press, 2005), and artistic engagements with seeds as agents of political force, as in the ‘Digger Barley’ project, Manifesta Biennale, 2008. In the environmental humanities and posthumanities he co-authored, with Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys (Minnesota UP, 2019). He was a researcher on Simon Pope’s&nbsp;“Discussion Island” project examining more-than-human forms of resilience around rising water levels in Toronto Bay.&nbsp;In 2018, Fuller was Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Seed Box, Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, Linkoping University, Sweden. <img width="451" height="451" width_o="451" height_o="451" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c4074733e000ce3f96d1c997b5736dc0a65419f28ebd6eb6849430b55d49b58/Members_Ros-Gray-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141194" border="0" data-scale="62" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/451/i/9c4074733e000ce3f96d1c997b5736dc0a65419f28ebd6eb6849430b55d49b58/Members_Ros-Gray-B-W.jpg" /> ROS GRAY (Art) is author of Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution (Boydell and Brewer, 2020). She has analysed the ecological and planetary resonances of work by artists including Renée Green, Antonio Ole and Kiluanji Kia Henda. With Shela Sheikh, she co-edited the Third Text special issue, ‘The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions” (2018), exploring environmental violence and the politics of the soil. She is Coordinator of the Goldsmiths Allotment. She led the development of the MA Art &amp; Ecology and is leading the planning of an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths. She convened the CHASE series of lectures and workshops, “What Can a Garden Be?”.&nbsp; Ros is co-director (with&nbsp; Anna Colin) of the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths. <img width="320" height="320" width_o="320" height_o="320" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a27ce6b31987e7d3c861488d98343f7eadef13a8085be7b09b1a8385bfaaf496/Asha-Hameed-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141931" border="0" data-scale="63" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/320/i/a27ce6b31987e7d3c861488d98343f7eadef13a8085be7b09b1a8385bfaaf496/Asha-Hameed-B-W.jpg" /> AYESHA HAMEED (Art) produces performance, audio, video and written work that explores contemporary borders and migration, critical race theory, and visual cultures of the Black Atlantic, particularly thinking about afrofuturism’s possible intertwinement with the Anthropocene. She has performed and exhibited internationally. Her publications include Futures and Fictions, co-edited with Simon O’Sullivan and Henriette Gunkel (Repeater, 2017), Visual Cultures as Time Travel, with Henriette Gunkel (Sternberg Press, 2018), and contributions to Forensis (Sternberg Press, 2014), Unsound/Undead (Urbanomic, 2019). <img width="655" height="655" width_o="655" height_o="655" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ee11c1dcfef549de234fedf6243cbf29abcb783d26f5c4e76e31e610d8eff30a/Members_Graham-Harwood-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141173" border="0" data-scale="63" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/655/i/ee11c1dcfef549de234fedf6243cbf29abcb783d26f5c4e76e31e610d8eff30a/Members_Graham-Harwood-B-W.jpg" /> GRAHAM HARWOOD&nbsp;(Media, Communications and Cultural Studies) is part of the artist group YoHa, with Matsuko Yokokoji. YoHa’s work involves the use of art as a mode of enquiry into technical objects. Most recently their investigations have been carried out within the fields of health, war, oceans and death. Currently YoHa is engaged in the flows of the sea, a distance from the norms of land, its state actors and fixed capital investments. Recent work in this area includes: Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone with Critical Art Ensemble, Fran Gallardo and Andy Freeman, and Wasted: Voyages in the Thames Estuary (2021). <img width="576" height="576" width_o="576" height_o="576" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8f90f2059ee8337923527193aaaf259b66100d28011f7b55ab3de6944a53d155/ck.jpg" data-mid="205210243" border="0" data-scale="66" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/576/i/8f90f2059ee8337923527193aaaf259b66100d28011f7b55ab3de6944a53d155/ck.jpg" /> CAROLYN KIRSCHNER (Design) is is a designer and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores the growing entanglements of ecologies and machines in the context of the climate crisis. Working with scientific tools and technologies she produces fragments from alternate or expanded worlds, with a particular interest in realms which lie beyond the reach of human senses. Carolyn’s work has been shown at&nbsp;the Centre Pompidou (2023), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2022), and A/D/O in Brooklyn (2020). Publications include Perspecta (2021), The Polar Silk Road (2021), and The Visual Ecologies of Placemaking (2024). <img width="712" height="712" width_o="712" height_o="712" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b14a3733ed6075d551587a2571eda8648bc3cfef45b54accb7136809ef1c0ffc/Members_Nirmal-Puwar-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141187" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/712/i/b14a3733ed6075d551587a2571eda8648bc3cfef45b54accb7136809ef1c0ffc/Members_Nirmal-Puwar-B-W.jpg" /> NIRMAL PUWAR&nbsp;(Sociology) brings together a range of methods including interviews as well as collaborative, creative and site-specific interventions to re-route space, nation and institutions. At Goldsmiths she co-founded the Methods Lab to mutate methods as well as outside/inside relations within and beyond the walls of the academy. Meeting Places,&nbsp; Walking Through Litterand Mint feature in her creative non-fiction works on memory and place. Her latest collaborative project on Brutalist Architectures: mourning, mapping, mobilising engages with site-specific conversations to detail the lack of regard for environmental heritage in the face of urban development without civic accountability. <img width="902" height="902" width_o="902" height_o="902" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ecbb7432dddd2705b90100b26ff4152e798fdab8896083f667bbe9a2d8f3af8d/Members_Wood-Roberdeau-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131138850" border="0" data-scale="62" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/902/i/ecbb7432dddd2705b90100b26ff4152e798fdab8896083f667bbe9a2d8f3af8d/Members_Wood-Roberdeau-B-W.jpg" /> WOOD ROBERDEAU (Visual Cultures) explores modes of everyday experience through phenomenology and philosophical post-humanism to ask how a poetics of space and place or the ‘lived environment’ might resonate with climate change and futurity.&nbsp; He is particularly interested in questions concerning cultural production and reception in times of climate crisis and activism that explore a poetics of encounter, observation and participation. He has published on culinary materialism and the alimentary, visual practices, 'vital materialism', and the rural vs. the urban as a complex spatial paradigm for eco-critical thinking.&nbsp; Wood is a also a member of the Centre for Art and Ecology and the Kitchen Research Unit at Goldsmiths. <img width="686" height="686" width_o="686" height_o="686" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cf0c72e1c286954d77b7a5c2db3cde2b082a00f6f9fb300a1043aad125ad3b4f/Julia-Sauma.jpg" data-mid="131429017" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/686/i/cf0c72e1c286954d77b7a5c2db3cde2b082a00f6f9fb300a1043aad125ad3b4f/Julia-Sauma.jpg" /> JULIA SAUMA&nbsp;(Anthropology) (she/her) is a Brazilian-British and Deaf researcher whose work aims to develop detailed studies of how collective life is maintained within and against violent structures in metropolitan and frontier contexts in Brazil. She is particularly interested in the crucial and pragmatic reshaping of self and collectivity that takes place to ensure the permanence of refuge as an affective-ecological space. For the last fifteen years she has been collaborating with Amazonian quilombo (maroon) families from the Erepecuru River (Pará State) in their struggle to protect their communities and maintain a joyful collective life in the face of anti-Black ideologies and State-endorsed environmental destruction. <img width="451" height="451" width_o="451" height_o="451" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f5f82c70879d6c48b717733c9889d296ced61e8a779f31fe08f089d1d7e2c4b8/Members_Susan-Schuppli-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141186" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/451/i/f5f82c70879d6c48b717733c9889d296ced61e8a779f31fe08f089d1d7e2c4b8/Members_Susan-Schuppli-B-W.jpg" /> SUSAN SCHUPPLI&nbsp;(Centre for Research Architecture, Visual Cultures) is an artist and researcher whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Current research focuses on the politics of cold. Creative projects have been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. Recent commissioned projects include Learning from Ice, Svalbard Arctic Archipelago, Cold Cases,&nbsp;and the COP26 British Council Creative Commission Listening to Ice. She has published widely within the context of media and politics and received the ICP Infinity Award for Critical Writing and Research in 2016. <img width="1198" height="1198" width_o="1198" height_o="1198" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/07f328b0a2eb1ea42267538d6f5322c044e4b9df0e965aff9f7f683cec173812/Members_Jol-Thoms-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131141176" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/07f328b0a2eb1ea42267538d6f5322c044e4b9df0e965aff9f7f683cec173812/Members_Jol-Thoms-B-W.jpg" /> JOL THOMS &nbsp;(Art) is an artist whose practice situates, locates, and critically analyzes the history of the philosophy of science in relationship to metaphysical concepts of nature, technology, cosmos and the human using experimental theory, video, performance and installation. His fieldwork takes place within remote landscape-laboratories on the edges of known realities and quantum ecologies. He is the initiator and current director of Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care with/in Oceanic Space located 2.5km deep in the Pacific Ocean, which transmits new artists compositions to and for the sea during each full moon. He has participated in significant international exhibitions, performances, conferences, residencies and film festivals. https://radioamnion.ne. Jol is also a member of the Centre for Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths. <img width="358" height="364" width_o="358" height_o="364" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cc20da7054c2ce40ef4d33b1dc58ddcb5e2fdbaf2ee15c40ebddb49614802ff4/Lynn-Turner-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131142656" border="0" data-scale="67" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/358/i/cc20da7054c2ce40ef4d33b1dc58ddcb5e2fdbaf2ee15c40ebddb49614802ff4/Lynn-Turner-B-W.jpg" /> LYNN TURNER (Visual Cultures) explores how animal and sexual differences matter in visual and aural culture as well as continental philosophy, literature and psychoanalysis. She is co-author, with Astrid Schmetterling, of Visual Cultures As…Recollection (Sternberg Press, 2013), co-editor, with Lindsay Kelley, of “bon appetit” (2013), a special issue of parallax on the poetics and politics of food called ‘bon appetit,’ (2013), editor of The Animal Question in Deconstruction (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), co-editor, with Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (EUP, 2018), and author of Poetics of Deconstruction: On the Threshold of Differences (Bloomsbury, 2020). <img width="1674" height="1674" width_o="1674" height_o="1674" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/527abc94965d75fe2cc6ad0f0334d29d13d856e4d84ab5223d9718149539c794/Members_Tuur-van-Balen-B-W.jpg" data-mid="131139468" border="0" data-scale="64" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/527abc94965d75fe2cc6ad0f0334d29d13d856e4d84ab5223d9718149539c794/Members_Tuur-van-Balen-B-W.jpg" /> TUUR VAN BALEN (Design) is part of the artist duo Revital Cohen &amp; Tuur Van Balen. Their work explores processes of production as cultural, social and political practices; following geopolitical, geological and biological strains within the manufactured landscape to make objects that question the context of their own becoming. In recent years they made work in Chinese factories, a Japanese fish laboratory and a Coltan mine in DR Congo. Animal bodies (human or otherwise) are a recurring consideration; they are fascinated by how these are shaped by the apparatus they operate in. Rehearsals seem to return as well. www.cohenvanbalen.com <img width="604" height="683" width_o="604" height_o="683" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7523f0defdc23611bbcf81cc944975d3bfe9f7715b4e5a42bae5a66ce7dafedf/becca-voelcker-headshot-s-crop.jpg" data-mid="238577525" border="0" data-scale="65" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/604/i/7523f0defdc23611bbcf81cc944975d3bfe9f7715b4e5a42bae5a66ce7dafedf/becca-voelcker-headshot-s-crop.jpg" /> BECCA VOELCKER (Art) is a writer and historian of art, film, and visual culture. Much of her work considers land and senses of place. She earned her PhD at Harvard University in 2021 and is now Lecturer in the School of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Becca was named a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2024 and now regularly contributes to BBC Radio. Her first book, Land Cinema in an Age of Extraction (University of California Press), is a cross-cultural history of eco-political cinema, published in late 2025 to coincide with a Land Cinema film season she curated at the Barbican. www.beccavoelcker.com <img width="1036" height="1120" width_o="1036" height_o="1120" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a071b66f198e864f835ff9d769d07d99647f1c0b59c545b04968569fe0cfaaa7/Lenka-pic-1-1.jpg" data-mid="168370528" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a071b66f198e864f835ff9d769d07d99647f1c0b59c545b04968569fe0cfaaa7/Lenka-pic-1-1.jpg" /> LENKA VRÁBLÍKOVÁ (Art and Visual Cultures) explores the role fungi have played in the cultural imagination of European heteropatriarchal postcoloniality, with the aim of generating new notions of belonging in a world defined by unequally distributed social and ecological precarity. Together with Elspeth Mitchell (University of Leeds), she facilitates “Out of Office” walks that combine feminist reading with mushroom hunting. In 2021 and in collaboration with Woods - collective for cultivation, art and theory based in Czechia, Lenka and Elspeth co-curated “Mycorrhizal Encounters,” a series of online conversations with artists, mushroom farmers, activists, and scholars. Lenka's publications include "Out of Office: mycorrhizal encounters and the art of feminist un/learning" (2022, with Elspeth Mitchell), "Feminist Ethnomycology and the Politics of Visual Culture" (2022, with Elspeth Mitchell) and “Othering Mushrooms: Migratism and its racist entanglements in the Brexit campaign” (2021). Lenka is also a member of the Centre for Art and Eology at Goldsmiths. https://critical-ecologies.org/activities-1 Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:31 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/activities-1 PUBLIC EVENTS What is a Garden? (series) Living Extinctions Public Programme (series) RESEARCH SEMINARS WORKSHOPS AUDIO &amp; VIDEO PUBLICATIONS CRITICAL FRIENDS https://critical-ecologies.org/public-events Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:38 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/public-events PUBLIC EVENTSScroll to explore our public-facing activities︎︎︎ 14 March 2024, 5-7pm RIVER CINEMA I Film Screenings and Discussion: Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d277dc7c7fc71f35db3e6df78ea851c1ad9abef241d422fee30de78a77d2703f/RiverCinemaI_playing.jpg" data-mid="206007113" border="0" data-scale="85" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d277dc7c7fc71f35db3e6df78ea851c1ad9abef241d422fee30de78a77d2703f/RiverCinemaI_playing.jpg" /> Maddi Barber, Urpean Lurra (Land Underwater), 2019, 50 mins In 2003, the Itoiz reservoir flooded seven villages and three nature reserves in the Pyrenees. Solidari@s with Itoiz documented the fight against its construction on video. Today, activists, former inhabitants of the area and the director of the film still dream about the region’s past and the land that remains underwater. A militant and dreamlike film that transports us into the collective mourning of a land engulfed by water. Sonia Levy, We Marry You, O Sea, as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion, 2023, 18 min 12 secs We Marry You, O Sea, as a Sign of True and Perpetual Dominion engages with Venice and its Lagoon "from below", bringing attention to the city's submerged, life-giving, and altered bio-geomorphological processes rather than on its often-recounted political and military histories. Underwater filmmaking exposes a fractured and troubled environment that complicates mainstream historical narratives that start above the water's surface. The film draws its title from the utterances spoken during The Marriage of the Sea, a ritual observed until the Venetian Republic's decline. In this ceremony, the Doge, the Republic's patriarch, would wed the lagoon by casting a golden ring into the water, declaring dominance over the sea. The artist reframes Venice's enduring relationship with its permeating waters, reflecting on its ongoing legacies of quests for mastery over watery environments. Imani Jacqueline Brown, What Remains at the Ends of the Earth? 2022, 11 mins 29 secs What remains at the ends of the earth? investigates the intersecting histories of land inhabited by Black Louisianans, and the vast network of fossil fuel infrastructure that overlays these sites today. What remains at the ends of the earth? aims to bring visibility to the ways fossil fuel production inherits the racist spatial, economic, and environmental logics imposed by slavery. The video animation pictures animated GIS lines and points representing pipelines, canals, and wells, as well as environmentally threatened coastal marshes with sacred groves of trees planted by enslaved people to memorialize their dead. In the face of ecological devastation, these trees are now a bulwark against soil erosion caused by the activities of petrochemical companies in this fragile ecosystem. The prints chart oil and gas pipelines. Rendered by Brown, these networks come to resemble twinkling stars in a night sky—a reminder of the constellation of extractive values that guide modern consumption. By mapping these intertwining legacies, What remains at the ends of the earth? suggests a way forward through landscape reintegration and economic reparations. Screenings followed by a discussion with the artists Programmed by Dr Ifor Duncan Hosted by the Department of Visual Cultures, Centre for Research Architecture, and the Critical Ecologies Research Stream Maddi Barber has a degree in Audiovisual Communication and an MA in Visual Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her work has been screened at festivals such as Visions du Réel, San Sebastian (Zabaltegi), FidMarseille, Reykjavik, Curtocircuito, Zinebi, Ji.hlava, Porto Post Doc and Las Palmas, among others. She is currently working on the development of her first feature film, Claros de bosque. Sonia Levy's inquiry-led practice operates at the confluence of knowledge practices, employing filmmaking as a tool for site-based inquiries and interdisciplinary collaborations. Her work considers shifting modes of engagement with more-than-human and queries Western expansionist and extractivist logics. She is the 2023-2024 recipient of the European Marine Board artist-in-residence. She was the 2022 selected artist of the S+T+ARTS4Water residency hosted by TBA21 in Venice and the 2021 commissioned artist at Radar Loughborough and Aarhus University's "Ecological Globalization Research Group". Sonia is an Associate Lecturer for Media Studies at the RCA School of Architecture. Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, USA, based in London. Her work investigates extractive environmental and economic systems (from colonial genocide and slavery to contemporary fossil fuel production), as well as police and corporate impunity, to expose the layers of violence and resistance that comprise the foundations of settler-colonial society. Imani is an advanced researcher at Forensic Architecture and is currently a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London, as well as an Associate Lecturer in MA Architecture at the Royal College of Arts. She received her MA with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019. 07 June 2023, 4-6pm THE SEEDS OF VANDANA SHIVA: STORY, POLITICS, LIFE AND THE RAVAGES OF BIOTECH Film Screening and Discussion: Professor Stuart Hall Building LG01 <img width="960" height="540" width_o="960" height_o="540" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/efa395766a1244282408a7125894a86baf4927bf93cf9a3994561b053e4ec6d0/shiva.jpg" data-mid="178909431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/960/i/efa395766a1244282408a7125894a86baf4927bf93cf9a3994561b053e4ec6d0/shiva.jpg" /> In view of the questions and observations raised by the life of Gandhian eco-activist Dr Vandana Shiva, this screening and discussion shares reflections on the historiographies, cultural conditions of possibility, and ecosophical precepts of ecofeminist movement. The Seeds of Vandana Shiva (2022) stories the layered interfaces of kinship, knowledge, and activism, in relation to the rhizomatic, developmentalist penetration of biotechnological capitalism. The film as a site of engagement with Shiva's ecofeminist work opens up analysis of resistance (from the Chipko movement to farmers protesting biotechnological domination), epistemology and research (from submerged perspectives to global institutional knowledges), and the role of media and mediatisation in the politics of earthly survival, including in the form of the film itself. The discussion will be led by respondents Dr Becca Voelcker (Lecturer, Art) and Dr Wood Roberdeau (Senior Lecturer, Visual Cultures and Co-lead of the Critical Ecologies Research Stream) and chaired by Dr Sarah Cefai (Lecturer, Media, Communications and Cultural Studies) Co-hosted by Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and Critical Ecologies, Goldsmiths, with thanks for funding to Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. 13 February, 2023, 6-9pm SYMPOSIUM: SPECTRES IN CHANGE SITE-SENSITIVE ART-SCIENCE RESEARCH IN THE ARCHIPELAGO SEA George Wood Theatre Event Recording here:&nbsp; Documentation - MA Art &amp; Ecology (journalofartandecology.com) <img src="https://img.evbuc.com/https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.evbuc.com%2Fimages%2F430133989%2F129194473793%2F1%2Foriginal.20230123-133801?w=940&amp;auto=format%2Ccompress&amp;q=75&amp;sharp=10&amp;rect=0%2C591%2C4032%2C2016&amp;s=a2da36e8ffbc94457ae47353fb70f04b">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; image courtesy of Matterlurgy ‘How do you know what you know?’ has been the guiding question for artists and scientists coming together on the island of Seili in the Baltic Sea since 2017 to share methods, protocols and rituals of ecological enquiry. As a microcosm reflecting acute planetary challenges of the present against complex historical trajectories, the island has acted not only as a site but as a conspiring catalyst and mediator in the multidisciplinary dialogues. Prior to the establishment of the Archipelago Research Institute, the island served as a hospital, a site of confinement for lepers and most recently as a mental asylum exclusively for women. Long-term scientific mapping of the rapid transformations in the marine ecosystem is haunted in Seili today by centuries of institutionalised othering. In the symposium, curator Taru Elfving introduces the collaborations addressing the myriad spectres of Seili. Insights into the ongoing work include Post Glacial Rebound by FoAM Earth, a soundwalk encouraging listening as the biological time of generations intersects with the slow time of tectonic forces, and the Band of Weeds’ interspecies cantata The New Pangaea, composed of field recordings of plants signalling diverse modes of migration to and disappearance from Seili. Artist and filmmaker Lotta Petronella presents her work-in-progress Själö Poeisis, a critical study of power structures on the island through plants, especially the common plants - the weeds, the vulgaris. The project consists of an artist book, a tarot herbarium, lecture performances, a choir work, an apothecary, botanical sessions and sleepings with plants. Matterlurgy will share their work Field Casting, a research project and exhibition that investigates scientific ‘fieldwork’ as a site and subject of study, zooming in on the practices, tools and perspectives embroiled in the production of climate data. They will discuss the relationship between field practice and automated data collection and highlight knowledge as an event that is materially entangled with the lives of humans and nonhumans. FRAUD discuss Fields of May, a permanent installation within the Archipelago Research Institute in Seili. It is built with discarded naval wares from the museum-ship Sigyn (1887), a vessel which bore witness to transatlantic colonialism and the timber trade, as much as to the changing nature of Finnish forests. As an architecture of engagement that draws from legal and juridical traditions, Fields of May coalesces a diverse ecology of practices and historical-material specificities with the aim of cultivating the conditions of possibility that might conjure worlds attuned to non-extractive rhythms. Spectres in Change symposium is chaired by Dr Ros Gray and hosted by the MA Art &amp; Ecology and the Critical Ecologies research stream. The symposium is organised in collaboration with CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago, which has been leading the research project Spectres in Change in Seili since 2017, in partnership with Archipelago Research Institute of Turku University and supported by Kone Foundation, Swedish Cultural Foundation in Finland and Oskar Öflund Foundation. Participant biographies: Dr Taru Elfving is a curator and writer based in Finland focused on nurturing undisciplinary and site-sensitive enquiries at the intersections of ecological, feminist and decolonial practices. She is artistic director and co-founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago. Her previous curatorial research projects include Hours, Years, Aeons (Finnish Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2015), Frontiers in Retreat (HIAP Helsinki 2013-18), and Towards a Future Present(LIAF Lofoten 2008). She has a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. Lotta Petronella is a filmmaker, artist and curator based in Turku, Finland. She is co-founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago and has worked with and on islands for nearly two decades. Since her internationally awarded film Själö - Island of Souls (2020), she has been leading the collaborative research Själö Poeisis in Seili. She will premier new work at Helsinki Biennial in 2023. Petronella is also a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and tarot scholar. Matterlurgy is a collaborative practice between London-based artists Helena Hunter and Dr Mark Peter Wright. Their work engages with the environmental sciences: its methods, processes and technologies for sensing, translating and predicting climate change/damage. Working across disciplines and media, they combine the production of artworks with co-constructed events, exhibitions and live performances. Recent works include Air Morphologies (Wellcome Collection/Delfina Foundation), Hydromancy (John Hansard Gallery/Onassis Stegi) and Sensitives Streams (Arts Catalyst/Whitechapel Gallery). FRAUD (Dr Audrey Samson &amp; Dr Francisco Gallardo) is a duo whose practice examines the extractivist gaze embedded in the management of raw materials. Their work develops modes of art-led enquiry into thinking materially about decolonization as a geosocial process. Somerset House Studios alumni, the duo has been awarded Artangel's Making Time Fellowship (2023), the State of Lower Saxony – HBK Braunschweig Fellowship (2020), the King’s College Cultural Institute Grant (2018), and has been commissioned by the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020), RADAR Loughborough (2020), and the Cockayne Foundation (2018). Dr Ros Gray is Programme Director of the MA Art &amp; Ecology and Reader in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is concerned with ways in which artists engage with ecological crisis, with particular focus on cultivation practices, soil care, and decolonial, feminist and queer approaches. Recent work includes co-editing of the Third Text special issue The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions and the podcast The Coloniality of Planting for Camden Art Centre’s series Botanical Minds. She was Principal Investigator of the Natural Environment Research Council’s Creative Climate Partnership Sensing Soil. She is a member of the Critical Ecologies research stream. 17 January 2023, 5-7pm EVERY DETAIL OF THE BACKGROUNDArtists Revital Cohen &amp; Tuur Van Balen and author Daisy Hildyard will talk about their work and workings. In this lecture / screening / reading, they will attempt to disentangle threads of raw materials, infection, global supply chains, reproduction, gambling and a fungus that eats compact discs. Richard Hoggart Building room 312 <img width="1280" height="853" width_o="1280" height_o="853" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/99a7a81ccb15bc466a73ba6cbbc5e4be2319f75bbd2981a95fb457a785d5161b/thumbnail_3EE5155A-F3F1-4A5C-85BE-C1E050F099D7.jpg" data-mid="165963630" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/99a7a81ccb15bc466a73ba6cbbc5e4be2319f75bbd2981a95fb457a785d5161b/thumbnail_3EE5155A-F3F1-4A5C-85BE-C1E050F099D7.jpg" /> This lecture is co-hosted between the Critical Ecologies research stream and the Centre for Research Architecture. Speaker bios: DH Daisy Hildyard is author of two novels – Emergency (2022) and Hunters in the Snow (2014) – and one work of nonfiction, The Second Body (2017). Emergency, most recently, tells stories of the global connections, and the human-nonhuman relationships, within a small rural area of the north of England. Her writing has received awards including a ‘5 under 35’ honorarium (National Book Awards, USA) and a Somerset Maugham Award (Society of Authors, UK). She contributes to publications including The Guardian, Granta, The Times Literary Supplement, The London Review of Books, frieze, and art-agenda. She lives in North Yorkshire. RC &amp; TVB From genetically engineering sterile goldfish to choreographing a factory assembly line, Revital Cohen &amp; Tuur Van Balen’s work is performed within particular networks. These networks – whether they connect raw materials, mythic conditions, animal genetics, constructions of uncertainty, or colonial inheritances – offer a point of departure for the artists, from which they explore friction, entanglement, porousness, reflection, and self-implication. Recent exhibitions took place at Ghost 2565 Bangkok; Serpentine Galleries (London); the 13th Shanghai Biennale; Walker Art Center (Minneapolis); Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Renaissance Society (Chicago); Para Site (Hong Kong); HKW (Berlin); and Congo International Film Festival (Goma). It is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Mu.ZEE, Ostend; and M+, Hong Kong. Revital Cohen &amp; Tuur Van Balen live and work in London. 20 October 2020, 5–7pm Ann Wilson (Coventry Tree Warden Network), Sebastian Hicks (Coventry University), Michael Truesdale (Stop HS2/HS2 Rebellion Campaign), Sarah Butler (Manchester Metropolitan University), Adele Mary Reed (Photographer) and Nirmal Puwar (Goldsmiths). Chaired by Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths) BRUTALIST ARCHITECTURES: MOURNING MAPPING MOBILISING Launch symposium Hosted by Goldsmiths Methods Lab (Dept of Sociology) and Critical Ecologies Online event <img width="1791" height="1194" width_o="1791" height_o="1194" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e2df379fec6dc2e96a8811beb5ce963a6efc019bd4a5e8309a7acc634fc26938/Paul-Chokran-Trees-resized.jpg" data-mid="132265576" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e2df379fec6dc2e96a8811beb5ce963a6efc019bd4a5e8309a7acc634fc26938/Paul-Chokran-Trees-resized.jpg" /> Image Credit: Paul Chokran, drawing features in the film “ In Memoriam” by Adele Reed "The trees were gone, with logs all over the place and mounds of sawdust blowing in the air." In Memoriam: Tree Felling at The Plaza (8’30”), produced by Adele Mary Reed, is a composition of the findings gathered during the lockdown months of Spring and Summer, 2020. To mourn the trees on the site, and to situate the specific case in a broader map of tree felling, that necessitate multi-scalar mobilisations, panellists will discuss local and global issues raised by contemporary brutalist architectures.&nbsp;Though the trees were classified as protected, the city council raised no objections to the bulldozing making way for university developments at the junction of Cox St and Jordan Well in Coventry, West Midlands. A relation of kith and kin, developed from being passersby to civic green heritage, was unnecessarily severed, with trees that had stood tall for over fifty years, shifting, growing and sounding with the wind, sun and rain, suddenly gone.&nbsp;To observe the shock of the sudden and unnecessary perplexing break, of what was part of the everyday and is no more, sociologist Nirmal Puwar, photographer Adele Mary Reed and urban sketcher Paul Chokran engaged in an inter disciplinary site-specific collaboration. The tree felling and the scene left behind became an installation as well as an illustration of disregard for both civic and environmental heritage. Via regular, prolonged site visits involving examinations and conversations over the devastation and smaller details of the ruins of stumps outside the front of the Graham Sutherland building and Coventry University’s Arts Faculty, Puwar, Reed and Chokran between them developed and reflected upon images, words, sounds and collections of materials. 14 January 2020, 4–6pm Lotte Arndt and Gaëlle Choisne FERTILE PUDDLES – DRY SHELVES: ON TOXIC CONSERVATION AND THE EMERGENCE OF COUNTER-HEGEMONIC GESTURES A research seminar on art and museums, conservation, colonialism and vegetal life, Council Room, Laurie Grove Baths <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/073c13fbb28729ac61078ae11907e7624f6faf1e67b9da72645cf94127f0f6c9/France-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925085" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/073c13fbb28729ac61078ae11907e7624f6faf1e67b9da72645cf94127f0f6c9/France-resized.jpg" /> Image Credit: Gaëlle Choisne, Temple of love - Absence, installation view, 2019. Courtesy of the artist © Blaise Adilon Funded by the two-year project “Floraphilia: On the Interrelations of the Plant World, Botany and Colonialism”, curated by Aneta Rostkowska. The Floraphilia project is realized by the Academy of the Arts of the World/Cologne and funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Hosted by Goldsmiths’ Critical Ecologies Research Stream. Convened by Lotte Arndt, Wood Roberdeau, Aneta Rostkowska and Shela Sheikh. Lotte Arndt: Please don't touch /&nbsp;When entering a museum, visitors are used to behaving in a specific manner: they would not speak loudly, they would keep a distance from the artworks, if they would try to touch or get accidentally close to an art work, a guide or a sound would indicate for them to step back. They would see in a corner of the museum a machine measuring the humidity in the air. The light intensity would be strictly controlled. They wouldn't be aware of the work done when the museum closes its doors, and conservators would control the stability of the exhibition and storage conditions. Everything would be done in order to protect the exhibits and make their life spans last. What do these protocols say about notions of conservation in the European museum? Taking the classificatory order of anthropological and natural history museums as a starting point, this presentation interrogates Life and Non-Life divisions as negotiated through artistic interventions in museum storages and displays. Lotte Arndt (Paris, France) is a writer and curator who lectures at École supérieure d’art et design Valence Grenoble, and accompanies the work of artists who critically interrogate the postcolonial present and the blind spots of modernity. She co-curated Sammy Baloji: Extractive Landscapes (2019, with S. Rudolph) at Museumspavillon, Salzburg; Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (2017, with L. Morin) at Bétonsalon, Paris; and Candice Lin: A Hard White Body, a Soft White Worm (2018, with P. Pirotte and L. Morin) at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main. With Malick Ndiaye, Marian Nur Goni and Emmanuelle Chérel she is currently working on a project on (post-)ethnographic collections in different African and European museums (2019-2021). Recent projects include: Summer Akademy Salzburg (July, 2019, with Sammy Baloji); L’intrus. Curatorial Intensive (with N.M. Llorens, Tabakalera, Donostia, December 2018); Tampered Emotions. Lust for Dust, Triangle France (June 2018); One Sentence Exhibition, Kadist (August 2018); and the research programme The Vacation of the Museum. Decolonize Ethnographic Collections with Cinema (2016-2018). In Winter 2016, she was Goethe fellow at Villa Vassilieff, Paris, and subsequently guest editor of the online magazine Qalqalah (2017). Her PhD is dedicated to postcolonial negotiations in Paris-based cultural magazines related to Africa (2013). She is a member of the research group Global Art Prospective (INHA Paris) and of the editorial committee of art center La Criée, Rennes. She publishes on artistic strategies that aim to subvert eurocentric narratives and institutions, and co-organizes cultural programnes, screenings and discussions in artistic and academic spaces. Major publications include Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (with Yesomi Umolu), Chicago University Press, 2019; Magazines Do Culture! Postcolonial Negotiations in Paris Based Periodicals Relating to Africa (in French), WVT, 2016; Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect (with Mathieu K. Abonnenc and Catalina Lozano), B42, 2016; Hunting &amp; Collecting (with Asger Taiaksev), MuZEE, Galerie Imane Farès, 2016. Gaelle Choisne: Temple of Love /&nbsp;Cric crac is a Haitian Creole expression. When someone wants to tell a story, the "Cric" is the invitation to start and if the audience agrees to listen, they say "Crac". In my homonymous work and other projects that I will present, I refer to travel and architecture, organic material and waste as means of reconstruction and construction. I focus on matter as site of narration and transformation: the materials are in tension, struggling, resisting, cohabiting, disagreeing, fragile or in harmony. My lecture performance engages with my work, my ghosts and my luvs by focusing on human–non-human interactions in spaces of resistance: it connects a colonial museum in Haiti with the practice of a plant healer and permacultural cohabitance. Gaelle Choisne (1985, France) holds a diploma from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon. In January 2017, she joined the Rijksakademie, after a year of residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris. Her work has been presented at biennials, group exhibitions and workshops in France and internationally, such as at the Beirut Art Center for the 13th Sharjah Biennial (2017), the CAFA art museum in Beijing (2017), the Lyon Biennial, Jeune Création and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2018). She has had several solo exhibitions, for instance at the Centre d’Art Contemporain - La Halle des Bouchers in Vienne (2015), La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse in Montreal (2015), Untilthen gallery in Paris (2018) and the Hunter East Harlem Gallery (2018). She presented her first Parisian solo show, entitled Temple of Love, at Betonsalon, in September 2018. In 2019, she was a resident of the Atelier Van Lieshout in Rotterdam, and proposed two new solo exhibitions at The Mistake Room LA and the National Zacheta Art Gallery in Warsaw. She was awarded the production grant of Crédit Municipal de Paris and participated in the Curitiba Biennale in Brazil and the Lyon Biennale, in France. Choisne’s work tackles contemporary issues such as climatic, political and societal disasters, the exploitation of resources and the remains of colonialism in opulent installations that combine esoteric Creole traditions, myths and popular cultures. Sculptress and video artist, she draws from her travels the materials that compose her installations and her films. Commercial exoticism, literary imaginaries and tribal beliefs constitute the themes of a dynamic, generous and social work. She conceives her exhibitions as open and inclusive platforms, genuine spaces of sociability and collective work, in which she invites citizens, researchers, musicians and artists to collaborate in research workshops, practical ateliers, cooking classes or improvised concerts. She develops these problematics in France and internationally, in particular through plastic and architectural creation workshops with school children and residents of Port-au-Prince (Haïti) and initiates projects focused on the handling of recycled materials and the elaboration of politically engaged urban planning methods. Floraphilia is a research and exhibition project dedicated to the social and political aspects of the history of plants, botany and botanical gardens. In various ways the project refers to plants’ co-option throughout colonial history and history in general, as well as to their economic, feminist and migratory contexts. Floraphilia encourages a rejection of the common conceptualization of a plant as a mechanistic thing that only reacts to simple stimuli, leading us to a vision of significant continuity between humans and plants, which – dynamic, breathing and growing – possess intentionality and even memory. The project took place in Cologne (with the exhibition “Floraphilia. Plants as archives” and the symposium “Botanical garden as a colonial site” in 2018), in Warsaw (with the exhibition “Floraphilia. Revolution of plants” at the Warsaw Biennale in 2019) as well as in Berlin and Aalst. Background readings:&nbsp; Gaelle Choisne, Temple of Love (English and French) Candice Lin: A Hard White Body Lotte Arndt, Reversing the Burden of Proof as Postcolonial Lever 22 October 2019, 6–8pm Gabrielle Hecht INSIDE-OUT EARTH: RESIDUES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE IN AFRICA Professor Stuart Hall Building LG02, Public lecture <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e120ce5db93037938b73792c871d5ad4e67acff0bae5c17b13c8631ea9838fe/Hecht-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925094" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3e120ce5db93037938b73792c871d5ad4e67acff0bae5c17b13c8631ea9838fe/Hecht-resized.jpg" /> Image credit: Ilan Godfrey, Riverlea mine dump, Main Reef Road, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2011. (c) Ilan Godfrey We are turning our planet inside out, releasing molecules and materials long trapped in the earth. Mining conglomerates descend kilometres underground to extract metals that power electronics, making mountains of unwanted rocks. Dredgers scoop sand from sea beds to terraform military bases and luxury islands. Offshore oil erupts, leaks, flows, combusts. All that was buried melts into air, seeps into waterways, settles on soils, and penetrates bodies.&nbsp;But who is “we”? While the Anthropocene continually inscribes itself in all our bodies – we all have endocrine disruptors, microplastics, and other toxic things chugging through our metabolisms – it manifests differently in different bodies. Those differences, along with the histories that generated them, matter a great deal. This talk digs into the entangled residues of mining, apartheid, and contemporary inequalities on South Africa’s Rand plateau, which encompasses Johannesburg, Soweto, and hundreds of kilometres of abandoned mine tunnels. How do toxic residues inflect politics in the “hollow Rand”? Gabrielle Hecht is the Frank Stanton Foundation Professor of Nuclear Security at CISAC, Senior Fellow at FSI, Professor of History, and Professor (by courtesy) of Anthropology. Her current research explores radioactive residues, mine waste, air pollution, and African Anthropocenes. These interests are coalescing into a series of essays, provisionally titled Inside-Out Earth: Residual Governance Under Extreme Conditions. The first of these have appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Aeon, Somatosphere, LA Review of Books and elsewhere. Hecht’s 2012 book, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade, offers new perspectives on the global nuclear order by focusing on African uranium mines and miners. It received awards from the Society for the Social Studies of Science, the American Historical Association, the American Sociological Association, and the Suzanne M. Glasscock Humanities Institute, as well as an honourable mention from the African Studies Association. An abridged version appeared in French as Uranium Africain, une histoire globale (Le Seuil, 2016) and a Japanese translation is due out in 2021. Hecht serves on numerous advisory boards, including for the Andra, France’s national radioactive waste management agency. This public lecture is part of the "Decolonising the Nuclear" workshop, generously supported by the CHASE Doctoral Training Partnership, Critical Ecologies Research Stream, Mountain of Art Research (MARs) in partnership with Arts Catalyst, Art Action UK, MFA Curating and Goldsmiths University of London. For full information, see the Arts Catalyst website. 27 September 2019, 5–7:30PM GOLDSMITHS UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE UNION (GUCU), UNISON (THE PUBLIC SERVICE UNION), GOLDSMITHS STUDENT UNION AND LEWISHAM NATIONAL EDUCATION UNION (NEU)LEWISHAM CLIMATE EMERGENCY ASSEMBLY EVENT The events are intended to address local and global climate emergency issues, including Lewisham's public health crisis caused by air pollution.&nbsp;Lewisham Climate Emergency Assembly invites everyone at Goldsmiths, school pupils, teachers, parents and local residents to Goldsmiths. 5.00-5.30pm Rally in front of Richard Hoggart Building (RHB)Speakers include: Sakina Sheikh (Lewisham Labour councillor and works for Platform), Adam Abdullah (Lewisham Young Major), Alex Kelbert (Black Lives Matter UK), Liam Geary Baulch (Climate activist and former Goldsmiths student), Habiba Kamara (Goldsmiths student), and others. 5.30-6.30pm Workshops in The Stretch, Goldsmiths Student Union Workshop discussions in small groups to share ideas for further actions on air pollution and climate emergency in Lewisham and draw up a Climate Emergency Charter for Lewisham.6.30-7.30pmNetworking opportunities and refreshments of vegetarian food and non-alcoholic drinks. 7 June 2019, 4–6pm Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, Yoriko Otomo, Laura Cull O’ Maoilearca&nbsp; EDINBURGH COMPANION TO ANIMAL STUDIES BOOK LAUNCH &amp; CONVERSATION Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre, Whitehead Building, Goldsmiths <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5de6b27515e5b65535dad8f38080f57dcc8571c69569ab669ebbfb6e641ed4fa/Black-Tiger-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925202" border="0" data-scale="92" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5de6b27515e5b65535dad8f38080f57dcc8571c69569ab669ebbfb6e641ed4fa/Black-Tiger-resized.jpg" />In anticipation of the paperback publication of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies, Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Yoriko Otomo will be sharing insights from their contributions to this 34-chapter volume in conversation with special guest Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca.&nbsp;Conversation followed by a wine reception. Co-hosted by the Critical Ecologies Research Stream and the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths.&nbsp; The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies critically investigates current topics and disciplines that are affected, enriched or put into dispute by the burgeoning scholarship on Animal Studies. What new questions and modes of research need come into play if we are to seriously acknowledge our entanglements with other animals? World-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, such as Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Art, Biosemiotics, Ethology and Geography, set the agenda for Animal Studies today. Rather than a narrow specialism, this book shows how we think of other animals to be intrinsic to fields as major as ethics, economies as widespread as capitalism, and relations as common as friendship. Laura Cullomaoilearca is Reader in Theatre and Performance and Director of the Centre for Performance Philosophy at the University of Surrey. She is author of Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance (2012); editor of Deleuze and Performance (2009) and co-editor of Encounters in Performance Philosophy (2014) and Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (2013). She is a founding convener of the professional association, Performance Philosophy and joint editor of its affiliated book series and journal. Yoriko Otomo is the editor of Law and the Question of the Animal (Routledge, 2014), co-editor of Making Milk: The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food (2017), and author of Unconditional Life: The International Law Settlement (2016). She is a Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts, Research Associate at SOAS, Governor for the Network for International Students and on the board of Minding Animals International. Undine Sellbach is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee. She is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (2018) and is currently completing a book about Speculative Ethologies (2020). She has recent essays in Angelaki, Parallax, Deleuze and the Non-human, and Poetic Biopolitics and is author of the children’s book The Floating Islands (2006). Her creative work is documented on her blog. Lynn Turner is the editor of The Animal Question in Deconstruction (2013), co-author of Visual Cultures As… Recollection (2013), and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (2018). She is Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. 4 June 2019, 2–5pmVivien Sansour, Kay Lewis-Jones, Marleen Boschen SAVING SEEDS / EATING HISTORY Richard Hoggart Building room 142 A Critical Ecologies symposium. Chaired by Shela Sheikh. <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3208552fbbd01c8b37dfd19476109922cf6c86dd02de068cf7f60c729ac39e5f/Savins-Seeds-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925211" border="0" data-scale="79" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3208552fbbd01c8b37dfd19476109922cf6c86dd02de068cf7f60c729ac39e5f/Savins-Seeds-resized.jpg" /> Amidst ecological crisis and the devasting loss of biodiversity, crucial questions arise regarding food security and sovereignty, as well as the challenges of conservation frameworks. At stake here is the co-dependency of humans and plants through histories of cultivation, ingestion and domestication. In this symposium we explore a range of seed saving practices as biocultural archives of human-plant relationships, and as sites of care and custodianship for different futures. What does it mean to “save” a seed, what does seed saving reveal about the “saviour” and who are seeds being saved for? A seed holds the scales of the global, national and local within its coat. The presentations engage with organisations such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library to consider seed saving as a form of story-telling, memorisation and preservation within the wider geopolitics of planting and cultivation. &nbsp;&nbsp; Vivien Sansour (Palestine) is the founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. She works with farmers worldwide on agricultural issues, seed conservation, and cultural practices relating to crop diversity. A storyteller, Vivien’s work brings to life old cultural tales and reconstructs them in contemporary presentation. Vivien uses image, sketch, video, soil, seed, and plants themselves as partners in the creative process. Her first solo show, Terrain: Palestinian Agri-Resistance, a collection of rural portraits of agri-Cultural Palestine was exhibited in The Jerusalem Fund Gallery in Washington, DC (2012). Vivien was selected artist for Confrontation Through Art residency in Nicosia, Cyprus where she was part of the collective exhibit, “Where The Sky And The Earth Touch”. As part of her work on seed autonomy Vivien has created the Traveling Kitchen Project where she launched a mobile kitchen that journeys across Palestine to engage people in discussions about heirloom varieties, biodiversity, and stories. She is working to bring threatened varieties ‘back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past’. A public speaker, Vivien has presented her work as an artist, independent scholar, and conservationist in several venues locally and globally including SALT Art Center in Istanbul, Georgetown University, Qalandiya International, Columbia University, and the Berlinale film festival. She is currently an artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation in London. Her exhibition, Marj and Prairie, will open at the Chicago Architecture Biennale in September of 2019 and her work; “Autonomia” will be presented at the Venice Biennale closing in November of the same year. An avid lover of nature and the arts, Vivien co-founded El Beir, Arts &amp; Seeds studio in Bethlehem. She is co-director with Riad Bahour of the feature film, El Bizreh Um El Fay, which won best project at RamallahDoc 2015 and is set for release in 2020. Vivien attributes her work to the generosity of farmers across the globe because they have “inspired my imagination as an artist and my ability to love science as a practice of observation that can change the world.” &nbsp;She is currently an artist in residence at the Delfina Foundation in London. &nbsp; Kay-Lewis Jones (UK) completed her PhD from the University of Kent’s School of Anthropology and Conservation in 2018. Her research focused on RBG Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership: tracing the human-plant relationships at play in the process of seed conservation and considering what it means to be a wild seed in the Anthropocene. Kay has a degree in Social Anthropology from LSE and an MSc in Ethnobotany from the University of Kent and RBG Kew. She guest edited the 2016 issue of the Environment and Society: Advances in Research on People and Plants. She is one of the founding editors of The Ethnobotanical Assembly, a quarterly online magazine for research, writing, and thinking about people-plant relationships. Kay currently works in environmental policy analysis. &nbsp; Marleem Boschen (UK, Germany) is a curator, artist and doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she addresses seed saving practices as infrastructures of vulnerability and resilience and as sites of care towards more-than-human futures and a decolonial commons. She is currently co-curating “Soil is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty, Agropoetics and Struggles for Liberation”, an exhibition, performance and research project at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin which takes place throughout the summer of 2019. 21 January 2019, 6–8pm TJ Demos TO SAVE A WORLD: GEO-ENGINEERING, FUTURISM, AND THE UNTHINKABLE Professor Stuart Hall Building room 326,&nbsp;Public lecture <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/72fe29069bac3d86b6c8e2721fc2c47a1971f22f0fcdd9e44d8a1cbcd2b907c7/demos-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925019" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/72fe29069bac3d86b6c8e2721fc2c47a1971f22f0fcdd9e44d8a1cbcd2b907c7/demos-resized.jpg" />Image: still from Arthur Jafa, Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016 What if we measure geo-engineering climate-change fixes by social-justice and speculative approaches to Afrofuturism (including Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016), where climate signifies more than just the biogeophysical? What are the stakes of competitive accounts of the not-yet? How is technoscientific rationality currently colonizing what’s to come? What hope do we have to decolonize our future? Picking apart these questions, T. J. Demos will speak about his current research in progress concerning the end/s of the world/s and what comes next…T. J. DEMOS is Professor of Art and Visual Culture, and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). &nbsp; 26 November 2018, 5–7pm Jennifer Wenzel READING FOR THE PLANET: NATURE, LITERATURE, JUSTICE Professor Stuart Hall Building LG01,&nbsp;Public lecture <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/68a40f2b912423c19208f34cc437c8dc36a63fb6dd3970ecbb65700d14492279/Jennifer-Wenzel-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925204" border="0" data-scale="64" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/68a40f2b912423c19208f34cc437c8dc36a63fb6dd3970ecbb65700d14492279/Jennifer-Wenzel-resized.jpg" /> &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Image: Alejandro Durán, Rayo (Ray), 2011&nbsp; This talk situates the Anthropocene and the recent revival of interest in "world literature" as instances of broader dynamics of world-imagining. It offers an expanded narrative of globalization, by looking back to moments of capitalist expansion that precede neoliberalism and by recognizing the environment (particularly in colonial peripheries) as globalization's material condition of possibility and its product. The talk also argues for the relevance of the literary to environmental thought and practice. Far beyond the domain of literary study, our ideas about nature are mediated by literary tropes and narrative forms and genres in way that precede and exceed representation in any particular text: cultural logics shape what "counts" as nature or crisis. A supple understanding of the workings of cultural imagining and narrative logics, therefore, might foster more robust accounts of global inequality, in order to energize movements for justice and liveable futures. Jennifer Wenzel is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond (Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal, 2009) and co-editor (with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger) of Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham, 2017). 17 March 2018, 5.30–6.30pmElizabeth A. Povinelli THE TOXIC EARTH AND THE COLLAPSE OF POLITICAL CONCEPTSKeynote lecture&nbsp; <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a57adbab7cc450bcd8cf1f71afb9d0e1f51ae4573b917abd88c0a8555a7fef32/mermaids-resized.jpg" data-mid="131925086" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a57adbab7cc450bcd8cf1f71afb9d0e1f51ae4573b917abd88c0a8555a7fef32/mermaids-resized.jpg" /> Image: Karrabing Film Collective, The Mermaids: Aiden in Wonderland, 2017 Our first guest keynote lecture begins with four axioms that emerge when politics enters the interstitial spacing among the whole earth, Gaia, and autonomous worlds. The four axioms are: the ‘extimacy’ of existence; the collapse of western distinctions and hierarchies of existence, most significantly that between Life and Nonlife, the biological and geological; the distribution of the effects of power and the power to affect a given terrain of existence; and the multiplicity and collapse of forms of the event. How does the straining of quasi-spaces and fuzzy things and of the efforts and forces of embankment of existence demand an accounting from western political concepts for their refusal to register their historical and current effects on the toxic earth? Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and The Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her work has explored the governance of late liberalism as it manifests in settler colonial contexts across five books, most recently, Geontologies, A Requiem for Late Liberalism, which was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award; and six films and several installations with the Karrabing Collective. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennal. https://critical-ecologies.org/research-seminars Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:40 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/research-seminars RESEARCH SEMINARS Scroll to find out about internal staff &amp; student presentations︎︎︎During term time, we organise research seminars on a regular basis for Critical Ecologies members and staff/postgraduate students from across the university to present and discuss work-in-progress. If you are a Goldsmiths staff member or doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths and would like to be notified about upcoming seminars, please email us here.: criticalecologiesstream@gold.ac.uk 24 June 2025 Wood Roberdeau (Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures) explores modes of everyday experience through philosophical post-humanism to ask how a poetics of space and place might resonate with climate change and futurity. He is particularly interested in questions concerning cultural production and reception in times of climate crisis and activism that explore the poetics of encounter, observation, and participation. At Goldsmiths, he chairs the Critical Ecologies Research Stream and is a member of the Centre for Art and Ecology, the Centre for Critical Global Change, and the Kitchen Research Unit. From 2023-25, he has served as the SENSS doctoral training pathway lead for Sustainability and Climate Emergency.&nbsp; Wood is currently working on a proposal for a monograph tentatively entitled Earth Pavilion: Critical Eco-poetics in Visual Culture. Wood will present two twenty-minute papers (recently delivered at conferences in the Netherlands and Cornwall) that correspond with the themes and theoretical framework of the book, which has organically begun to form after having taught his Eco-poetics module to students on the MA Contemporary Art Theory programme at Goldsmiths. The first paper analyses the 2018 film SGAAWAAY K’UUNA (Edge of the Knife), a memorial response to contemporary eco-critical conditions in colonised ‘British Columbia’, primarily by addressing the threat of extinction not only to the topophilian relationship the Haida Nation have to Haida Gwaii, but also, significantly, to their language at risk of being lost. The second paper proposes ‘tsunami listening’ as a way of engaging with eco-poetics and geo-phonics through an analysis of Japan’s contribution to the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, and in response to lived environments following the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, Fukushima, and their message for a contemporary recalibration of relations.Jol Thoms (b. Toronto) is an artist, sound designer, curator and researcher based in London, UK where he is Studio Lecturer on the MA Art &amp; Ecology and MA Art &amp; Politics at Goldsmiths University. His critical practice crosses and reconfigures boundaries between the non/human, cosmological and the scientific using strategies from quantum field theory, experimental audio-visual arts, environmental humanities, and feminist anti-colonial science studies. Thoms is founder of the lunar-sound ritual Radio Amnion: Sonic Transmissions of Care in Oceanic Space that, since June 2021, has commissioned and transmitted &nbsp;artists’ voices and soundings 2.5 kms deep in/to the Pacific Ocean during each full moon. Recently he has presented at the opening ceremonies of the 60th Venice Biennale; in McaM, Shanghai; The 23rd Triennale Milano; and RADIUS Centre for Contemporary Art &amp; Ecology, Delft, amongst others. Jol has been leading a transdisciplinary network of artists, lawyers, activists and scientists to renew methods of representation for living, thinking ecosystems, in relation to emergent EU policy landscapes of so-called ‘Rights of Nature’, or ‘legal personhood’ for ecosystems. Originally he was considering how we might reconsider representation of Land within this context, however in his research he got quite more interested in the history of international law and its relations to colonialism, extraction, and our current permacrises. An article by legal historian Juan Auz outlines why international environmental law will never be able to do what the planet requires, specifically because it has been developed by the hoarders and exploiters of ecosystems. Jol is developing an online repository with some interviews and essays, links, and bibliography as a resource for other people working in these interrelated fields. This is partially supported by the EU Commissions Joint Research Centre in Ispra, Italy, where their Biodiversity Scientists etc work. https://science-art-society.ec.europa.eu/resonances-iv/projects/naturarchy-mapping-framework. 05 June 2025 Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) makes videos, sound works, textiles, and performances. She is also a creative writer, critical essayist and poet. She has appeared on the BBC on several occasions as an artist and thinker. Hameed’s work explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her speculative approach examines the mnemonic power of the media she uses and intermixes: their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement, recurrent in her work, offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature. Recent commissions include solo exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall and &nbsp;Kunstinstituut Melly, as well as contributions to Indigo Waves at Zeitz MOCCA, the Liverpool Biennale, two Gothenburg Biennales, Momenta Biennale, &nbsp;Lubumbashi Biennale and the Dakar Biennale. &nbsp;She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021).She has two books coming out in 2025: Radio Brown Atlantis (Cara) and Black Atlantis (Strange Attractor/MIT Press); and a book of poetry with 87 Press in 2026. She currently teaches on the MFA in Art at Goldsmiths University of London, &nbsp;is Professor of Artistic Research at Uniarts Helsinki, is a Kone Foundation Research Fellow, and was Artist in Residence at the Camden Arts Centre. Ayesha will share two short films around 15 minutes each in order to talk about a new project she is commencing on floods and grief. Ilemūria, 2023, is a Tamilisation of Lemuria, a Mesozoic land corridor imagined by 19th century paleoscientists to have subsequently sunk under the sea, to explain the geological similarities between Madagascar and India. Taken up by Tamil revivalists in the 19th and 20th centuries, Lemuria was absorbed into ancient poetic imagery of kaţalkōl, great floods that sunk coastal towns, and reimagined as Kumari Kandam, a lost Tamil continent that was the cradle of all human civilisation.A Dravidian rather than an Aryan origin story, whose dispersal was precipitated by the catastrophic floods of kaţalkōl. An Atlantis before Atlantis.Set in Kozikhode (formerly Calicut), once an ancient port in the Indian Ocean world, through fieldwork in its coastal mangroves and the Malabar Institute of Plant Sciences, Ilemūria explores personal and environmental trauma and the possibility of survival with and through other species and adjacent worlds.2. In the Shadow of our Ghosts (with Hamedine Kane) 2018On 29 April 2006, a 20-foot boat was spotted off the south-eastern coast of Barbados. On board, coastguards found 11 bodies, preserved and sun-dried. The ghost ship had been drifting for four months in the Atlantic Ocean. The film presents an inadequate narrative of a story that relies on media sources to evoke the complicity of the weather, ocean currents and state violence in the boat’s journey. The glide between film and forms tests the measurement of tragedies related to crossings and immigration, the power of the sea and the abiding horror of the symbol of the ghost ship.Tuur Van Balen is an artist based in London, mostly working with film and sculpture, and often as part of an artist duo with Revital Cohen. Animal bodies (human or otherwise) are a recurring consideration; in particular how these are shaped by the apparatus they operate in. They made work in Chinese factories, a Japanese fish laboratory, a Coltan mine in DR Congo and a hospital for thoroughbred racehorses. Rehearsals seem to return as well. Recent exhibitions took place at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno; Ghost 2565, Bangkok; Serpentine, London; Bodies of Water, 13th Shanghai Biennale; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Para Site, Hong Kong; HKW in Berlin and Congo International Film Festival, Goma. Their monograph ‘Not What I Meant but Anyway’ was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (2022) and their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and M+ Museum, Hong Kong, among others. Tuur is also a reader at Goldsmiths, mostly working in the design department. Tuur will share a recent short film, talk about current research around ‘moving image as a choreographic practice’ and show some work-in-progress film. Daughter of Dog is occupied with loss and its debris. The film is composed as an elegy, haunted by plants, animals, magical thinking and forms of aggression. The work revolves around a text that threads personal reflections with references related to beliefs and rituals that originated in Jerusalem, to scripture, memory, biology, complicated love and civil engineering.The film moves in circles around associative, interweaving images: moths that look like twin snakes, a robot dog being kicked around a room, the cavities and digestive fluids of carnivorous plants, black dogs painted as skeletons, dancers rehearsing a choreography adapted from a pogo dance tutorial. The soundscape is composed of recorded live drum beats, which are electronically destabilised and rearranged. The work is haunted by a restless and capricious energy, where grief takes the form of hyper alertness and is fragmented, destabilising and messy. 31 March 2025 Linda Schilling Environmental Publics: The Spatial Politics of Environmental Decision Spaces Linda's presentation examines the architecture of spaces and events for Public Consultation in the context of Environmental Impact Assessment. It seeks to understand the speech acts enabled or hindered by such design arrangements. In doing so, it foregrounds the need for architecture to design the emergence of political subjects within protocols of existing global environmental frameworks, highlighting the role of architecture in shaping public discourse and political agency in the context of environmental controversies. Linda Schilling is an architect, urban designer, and educator between Santiago and London. Her research interests are the spatial arrangements of extractive activities and their ecologies. She is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) with her dissertation titled Landscape Ledgers: A New Reading of Environmental Conflicts through Environmental Impact Assessment Records for Extraction Infrastructure in Chile 1993-2022, and a graduate tutor for the MA in Research Architecture 2024-2025 cohort at CRA. Stavros&nbsp; Papavassiliou Remote Sensing Under Fire: Towards a Critical Practice Stavros’s presentation will reflect on initial investigations as part of ongoing doctoral research into, on one hand, a particular set of controversies in 2023 around wildfire satellite data in Greece and, on the other, the inner workings of the European Forest Fire Information System. These form the first steps in reconsidering a remote sensing practice informed by complex human-fire relations, which are normally flattened in technocratic wildfire management by securitising the climate crisis. &nbsp; Stavros Papavassiliou is a London-based architect specialised in remote sensing. He is a current PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research evaluates the role of the strictly technocratic view of remote sensing technologies in ecological mobilisations of the far-right through investigations of historical and contemporary instrumentalisations of forest fires in Greece, Turkey and Cyprus. 31 January 2025 Lynn Turner Film screening, hosted and introduced by Lynn (Visual Cultures). Kala Azar, dir. Janis Rafa, Greece, 2020 (91 mins) In a big city somewhere in the south of Europe, a couple takes care of dead animals and abandoned roadkill as an act to give meaning to their life. This is artist and film-maker Janis Rafa’s first feature length film. 02&nbsp; June 2024 Carolyn Kirschner NO_POLE Carolyn will present excerpts from an ongoing design and research project (“NO_POLE”). The project explores the role of remote sensing technologies in the Arctic Ocean in the context of escalating geopolitical tensions and a rapidly warming climate. In a remote region that is primarily mediated through its digital records, the project considers ways in which these instruments can be used to shape, distort, and expand ecological imaginaries of the far north. Carolyn Kirschner is a designer and researcher with a background in architecture. Her work explores the growing entanglements of ecologies and machines in the context of the climate crisis. Working with scientific tools and technologies she produces fragments from alternate or expanded worlds, with a particular interest in realms which lie beyond the reach of human senses. Carolyn’s work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou (2023), ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2022), and A/D/O in Brooklyn (2020). Publications include Perspecta (2021), The Polar Silk Road (2021), and The Visual Ecologies of Placemaking (2024). 14 May 2024 Josephine Berry PLANETARY REALISM: ART AGAINST END TIMES The devastation left in the wake of modernity and globalization is revealing a fragile and unfamiliar planet, and humanity has awoken into a new real. If the old ‘realist’ tools of objectivism have contributed to capitalist society’s divorce from the natural world, how are artists finding new ways to make us really see – and feel – the planet? Surveying a body of planet-facing art, communal practices and activism, this book investigates art’s power to break with capitalist realism and decarbonise the imagination. With chapters on feeling as world-making, the rupture of petroleum landscapes, artists’ urban exodus, and migration as survival, Planetary Realism delves deeply into art’s necessary reimagining of life on Earth.This will be the first presentation I have made of the book which I only recently finished - I will give an overview of its ideas, and likely focus on the chapter ‘Mending the Aesthetic Rift’ that discusses ex/artists living eco-political and communal lives in France and the Pyrenees.Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and political thinker. She has written on public art in the neoliberal context of creative cities (No Room to Move: Radical Art in the Regenerate City, 2010, co-authored with Anthony Iles), and more recently on the function of autonomous art within contemporary biopower (Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry, Sternberg 2018). She is Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London and lecturer at Goldsmiths College in MCCS. She was a member of the editorial collective of London based cultural politics magazine Mute from 1995-2014. She is series co-editor for Goldsmiths Press’ Spatial Politics series. Lenka&nbsp; Vráblíková THE CZECH ARE EXCELLENT MUSHROOM HUNTERS: THE VISUAL POLITICS OF FUNGI IN (POST)SOCIALISM Mushroom foraging is a passion shared nationwide across all demographic and social groups of Czech society: over 70% of the population visit forests for mushroom foraging at least once a year, gathering almost 11 kg of mushrooms per household. The presentation explores how mushroom foraging as ‘nation’s precious hobby’ (Šiftová 2020) has figured in the negotiations of belonging in Czech (post)socialist cultural politics. The first part of the presentation provides an analysis of the instrumental role mushrooms and their foragers have played in the articulation of Czech national identity and the country’s self-positioning within the broader frame of the current hegemonic geopolitics rooted in European colonialism. In the second part I close-read art works and other cultural practices that engage with fungi to envision new forms of belonging beyond the constraints of this hegemony, including art installation ‘Nothing Nowhere into Something Somewhere’ (Anetta Mona Chisa &amp; Lucia Tkáčová, 2015) and poem ‘The Czech are Excellent Mushroom Hunters’ (Milan Kozelka, 2013).Lenka Vráblíková is a lecturer at the Departments of Art and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture studies, contemporary art, transnational feminisms, political ecology, feminist deconstruction, and critical pedagogy. Her research focuses on examining the role fungi and their foragers have played in the cultural and political imagination of European heteropatriarchal postcoloniality, with the aim of generating new notions of belonging in a world defined by unequally distributed social and ecological precarity. Her work in ‘feminist visual ethnomycology’ (together with Elspeth Mitchell, University of Leeds) also includes facilitation of “Out of Office” walks that combine feminist reading with mushroom foraging. Lenka is a co-founding member of transnational Feminist Readings Network, a member of Woods – collective for cultivation, theory and art (Czechia), Critical Ecologies Research Stream at Goldsmiths (UK), and the advisory board of KAFKÁRNA, Center for Arts and Ecology UMPRUM (Czechia). 27 February 2024Susan Schuppli This presentation focuses on the frozen water trade; specifically the ways in which European and American merchants tried to cool the tropics through the financialisation of temperature, shipping natural ice extracted from glaciers and winter lakes to colonial elites around the world. Schuplli will present an excerpt from a new film on the topic. Susan Schuppli is an artist and writer as well as Professor in and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. 4 March 2020 Pete Jiadong Qianga POSSIBLE MAXIMALIST ECOLOGY WITHIN THE QUEER MAXIMALISM HYPERBODY My research tries to establish a new inventive methodology of Queer Maximalism by reusing the creative practices from ACGN (Anime, Comic, Game and Novel), fandom communities and autoethnography in VR (Virtual Reality) space in game engine. Both visually and acoustically, this new entanglement will redefine the concept of Portal with multiple HyperBodies intermediating between physical and virtual spaces.The particular part of research of Hyper-Sexual Body in Beijing and London is introduced to establish the idea of spatial autoethnography and lead to creative practices of shipping and modding in VR spaces from diverse Chinese gaming and fandom communities, within this maximalist environment of shipping and modding, it tries to create a possible maximalist ecology constantly intermediating between physical and virtual spaces.Pete Jiadong Qiang is currently a PhD student in arts and computational technology at Goldsmiths and trained in architecture at Architectural Association School of Architecture. His work focuses on the specific investigation of the bridges and interstices between pictorial, architectural and game spaces. His works range from architectural drawings, paintings, moving images to photogrammetry, augmented reality (AR) drawings, virtual reality (VR) paintings and games that form an idiosyncratic research methodology between the physical and virtual spaces with ACG (Anime, Comic and Games) and fandom contexts. Pete Jiadong Qiang is often referred as architectural Maximalism. Peter Ainsworth COPRESENCE AND AFFECT OF INSIDE EXPLORER: THE VIRTUAL AUTOPSY OF GEBELEIN MAN, ROOM 64: EARLY EGYPT - BRITISH MUSEUM My recent practice focus is relational to the Early Egyptian gallery of the British Museum. Particularly the display case containing a 5000-year-old predynastic natural mummy known as Gebelein Man (presented in a diorama representing a reconstructed grave-pit), whose remains became part of the collection in 1900 and has been on display consistently since this point. This has become a focus in my work because placed in relation to the installation is an ‘interactive visualization display’. Described by the creators (RISE Interactive) as a ‘Virtual autopsy’ or ‘Inside explorer’ the exhibit consists of an annotated graphically rendered CAT scan that may be interacted by the museum spectator through a large touch screen. Influenced by understandings of metonymy and copresence I am considering relationality in the museum space; particularly how such displays are experience through post-photographic technologies. My interest is towards thinking of whether or if research of photographic or perhaps what might be termed ‘electromagnetographic’ technologies may be considered through understandings that are substantially different from normative discussions of likeness, similitude or indexicality considered in photography theory. Furthermore, whether there is scope in this engagement to highlight photographic mediation as a way to think the museum in an eco-phenomenological sense. By and large the work and analysis were completed in front of the display and the research is a combination of observational analysis and practice-based experimentation. The practice has taken various forms – including video, stills, photogrammetry and AR works created in or surrounding the object and all made with a mobile phone camera. The process of making in this context has been both within the normative documentary tradition of filmmaking but also informed by intuitive work conducted on-site. Considered relationally to problems in the usage of interactive photographic technologies in the museum space, the display of human remains, concepts of history and the logic of using medical imaging systems through a contemporary understanding of digital humanities and in consideration of how the photographic medium may be thought with. Peter Ainsworth is an artist working with lens-based media and lecturer in Photography at LCC UAL. The work that he makes explores photographic practices, in the context of new technology relationally to contemporary philosophy, digital anthropology, architecture and museum practices. His current work is exploring 3D scanning technologies, photogrammetry and Augmented Reality through mobile devices as a way to think with the contemporary museum space. Specifically, in this context understandings of knowledge creation; such as the relation between concepts of object, artefact and image and how these may be thought through practice. He is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in the department of visual cultures at Goldsmiths with working title, Metonymy, Copresence and Affect in Contemporary Post-photographic Practice. 17 March 2020 Susan Schuppli SCREENING OF LEARNING FROM ICE DOCUMENTARY&nbsp; Learning from Ice investigates polar environments as a vast information network composed of material as well as cultural ‘sensors’ that are registering and transmitting the signals of pollution and climate change. The film trilogy coalesces disparate – and oftentimes imperceptible – data sources across a wide range of spatial scales that, when taken together, create a more comprehensive picture of our current ecological condition. It is organised around the concept of “learning from ice” and highlights the many different practices that have produced knowledge of environmental change in the North, from the study of past climates using ice cores, the lived experiences and observations of indigenous people, to techniques of material investigation. Part I: Ice Cores documents activities in the Canadian Ice Core Archive and the OSU Ice Core and Quaternary Geochemistry Lab in the US as well as glacial retreat at the Athabasca Glacier in the Columbia Icefields and ice core drilling at Mount Oxford, Nunavut.Generously supported by the Toronto Biennial of Art, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts. Susan Schuppli is a researcher, media theorist, and artist based in London whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change. Current work is focused on the politics of cold. She is the Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths and an affiliate artist-researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture. Schuppli has published widely within the context of media and politics and is author of the new release Material Witness (The MIT Press, 2020). Ifor Duncan HYDROLOGY OF THE POWERLESS II Hydrologic knowledges have long been mobilised in the interests of extraction and manifest as Hydrosocialities of control, predominantly through the role rights of access play in the exploitation and subjugation of populations. These most noticeably include irrigation practices as crucial technologies of colonial expansion (Dilip Da Cunha, Donald Worster, Daanish Mustafa, Aaron T. Wolf). Here I propose hydrologic practices as, in turn, dictating the modes of resistance and politically transformative possibilities. These often explicitly Feminist practices are aesthetic and social in form, and include: the existence of River contracts drafted by communities in the act of taking responsibility for local river health; irrigation practices adopted in Rojava used to resist Turkish policy and infrastructure that limits supply; the activism of the River Sisters in Poland; and the multiple forms of action against hydropower extraction taking place across the Americas - most notably outlined by Macarena Gomez-Barris (The Extractive Zone, 2017) and including the aesthetic modes adopted by Carolina Caycedo and the strategies instigated by Movimientio Rios Vivos and The Association of People Affected by the El Quimbo Hydroelectric Project (ASOQUIMBO), and Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens ((MAB) Brazil The Movement of those Affected by Dams). As work in progress developing beyond my PhD thesis, I intend to propose that the banks, course, flow, and channels of bodies of water are themselves sites of political action. Ifor Duncan is a London-based writer and researcher. He recently completed his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research concerns the complex relationships between political violence and watery spaces; specifically, the ways hydrologic properties are instrumentalised within border regimes, as technologies of obfuscation, or weaponised against marginalised communities. Ifor currently teaches at Goldsmiths and the Royal College of Art. 18 February 2020 Michael RichardsonNONHUMAN WITNESSING: DRONE WARS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Witnessing has always been inseparable from making meaning that matters ethically and politically, of producing responsibility and demanding justice. Yet how can witnessing face up to violence and catastrophe that eludes human knowing? How can crises of war and climate be witnessed when they are distributed geographically, massive in scale or insensible to the human? Thinking across drone war and ecological crisis offers one set of answers. Entangled within a wider set of interlocking intensifications of technology, capital and ecological violence, drone warfare is war for the Anthropocene: distributed, networked and aerial yet animated by nonhuman agencies, racializing in its colonial logics and destructive of bodies, ecologies and atmospheres alike. Reading from an unruly archive of military technologies, new media arts and decolonial fiction, this paper argues that understanding witnessing as bound up with nonhuman entities can provide new and potentially transformative modes of relating to crisis. Michael Richardson is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of the Arts &amp; Media, UNSW. His transdisciplinary research investigates witnessing and testimony at the intersection of affect, power and war in culture, media and politics. He is the author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (Bloomsbury 2016), holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (2019-2021) for the project “Drone Witnessing: Technologies of Perception in War and Culture” and is co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub. Michael is a visiting fellow in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies during February 2020. 18 June 2019 Cydney Phillip&nbsp;IF THIS DIRT COULD TALK: ECO-MEMORIALISATION AT THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE The extractive economy of memory in the US South – based on the exploitation of natural resources and predominantly African American bodies – becomes legible when reading the memorial landscapes of the region. This talk will examine The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, and the ways in which the site interrupts this hegemony by utilising the environment to memorialise the evolution of racialised violence in the American South. Juxtaposing the ecological modes of remembrance exhibited at the memorial with the petro-chemical memoryscapes active elsewhere in the region, this presentation will contrast notions of organic and artificial memory. This presentation will attempt to synthesise how the regions oily politics have enabled slippages in memories and ethics, and how these politics have prompted activists to pursue alternate modes of remembrance that are ecologically mediated and challenge dominant petrochemical memoryscapes. Cydney Phillip is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, investigating how expressive cultures of the US South reveal how the legacies of slavery are environmentally mediated. Her research is funded by CHASE and brings together critical race studies, eco-criticism and new materialism to apprehend environmental, racialized violence as it is expressed ecologically – through imbrications of human and more than human domains – in Southern literature, photography, and heritage sites. She excavates the ostensibly natural topographies found in these works and the mnemonic landscapes of the US South in order to reveal the ways in which they materially evidence the plantation system and its continuums. Samaneh Moafi CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY NATURE The Centre for Contemporary Nature is a research division within Forensic Architecture which explores the relationship between human rights violations and environmental violence. Historically, nature has been understood as a static, eternal backdrop against which human social, political, military or industrial activity unfolds. Our notion of ‘contemporary nature’ seeks to challenge that understanding. In the era of massive environmental damage and rapid, anthropogenic climate change, nature is moving at the same speed as human history, racing alongside it, interacting and becoming entangled with it. Environmental change and human agency appear locked in a feedback loop, with consequences far beyond our control.Following the Second World War, ‘culture’ and ‘humanity’ were seen as a common and unifying project, pitted against the calamity of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide. In such contexts, conflict was understood as specifically human-on-human violence. Today, however, social, political and military conflicts are increasingly enmeshed in their environmental circumstances. The extensive destruction or loss of ecosystems is beginning to be conceptualised as ‘ecocide’, a term which encompasses new forms of violence that may be slow, indirect, and diffused. If the twentieth century’s response to conflict was the commitment to ‘contemporary culture’, and the proliferation of centres for its study, we propose that, in response to modern forms of conflict, we must organise ourselves urgently around a concept of ‘contemporary nature’. Samaneh Moafi is an architect and researcher. She is currently based at Forensic Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London where she oversees the Centre for Contemporary Nature (CCN), a research stream with the goal of developing new investigative techniques for environmental violence. Her work and contributions have been exhibited globally in forums such as the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art (2019), Tate Britain (2018), MACBA (2017) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2016). Previously, Samaneh has taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College of London (2014-15), University of Technology Sydney (2012-13), Royal College of Arts and the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture. She holds her PhD from The Architectural Association and her Masters and BA degrees from University of Technology, Sydney. Her PhD thesis engaged with struggle and resistance from the space of the home with a particular focus on the intersection of gender and class in Iran. Her articles on gender and domesticity have appeared at the Avery Review and the Funambulist among other places. 6 June 2019 Martin Savransky ON COSMOECOLOGY: SOME PRELIMINARY THOUGHTS I am currently finishing a book project titled Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse. This book weaves together the speculative pragmatism of William James with debates on the politics of alterity in contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and postcolonial studies, in order to dramatise the stakes of a radical pluralism today. What I would like to present in this session are some very preliminary thoughts on the project that follows on from this book, exploring some of its implications at the heart of our environmental condition: a project on the notion of “cosmoecology”. As I currently envisage it, cosmoecology is a name for a problematic that haunts our present: the patterns of ecological devastation that mark our present and impending futures are such that, whatever the future, we can no longer be modern. As such, the contemporary environmental condition relays an ancient and many-storied question with renewed force, a question that, buried under the dreams of progress and the enthroning of technoscience, the moderns have all but forgotten: the question of the art of life. But what might it mean to reclaim the question of the art of life today? There are at least two dimensions which seem paramount at present. First, the question of the art of life is as much ethological as it is cosmological: it belongs to the cosmoecological connections through which habits and habitats, beings and worlds, are woven together; connections which demand a pluralistic experimentation beyond the bounds of the secular metaphysics that still underpins much environmental thought and politics. And second, if the art of life concerns the question of what makes a life worth living, today we can no longer ignore the fact that this also belongs, simultaneously, to the question of what a death worth living for might be. Hence the experiment I am envisaging under the sign of cosmoecology: an experiment on the pluralistic arts of living and dying well with others on a devastated planet. Martin Savransky is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology. He develops a pluralistic philosophy of difference that experiments with the possibles created by a multiplicity of divergent practices of thinking, knowing and living with others in and out of Europe: how they might enable us to envisage modes of inhabiting worlds otherwise, and of making worlds more inhabitable. He has a keen interest in early American Pragmatism, radical pluralism, ecological humanities, speculative and empirical philosophy, postcolonial and anti-imperialist thought, religious and non-secular practices, and the history and philosophy of the human sciences. Publications include The Adventure of Relevance (Palgrave, 2016) and Around the Day in Eighty Worlds: Politics of the Pluriverse (Duke UP, 2021). James Burton FABULATIVE AND PROCESS-BASED APPROACHES TO EXISTENTIAL RISK “Existential risk” (ER) has been used to refer to the threat of a destructive event that would be global in scope and terminal in intensity, such that, in the words of Nick Bostrom, it “would either annihilate Earth-originating life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential”. I’ll take a critical look at some of the philosophical habits displayed by Bostrom and other members of the Future of Humanity Institute in establishing and using the paradigm of ER, arguing, first, that their categorial schema itself risks imposing a reductively static approach on thinking about the possible future destruction of earthbound life; and second, that the largely analytic bent of these approaches devalues a range of potentially invaluable resources for thinking existential risk from the realms, for example, of mythology, speculative fiction and other fabulative modes. (Part of the point of this argument is to contribute to laying the foundations for an approach to ER incorporating such resources – which is where there’s lots of scope for discussion in the session about how this could/might work – or whether indeed it already exists in various transdisciplinary forms, many of which crisscross Critical Ecologies.) James Burton is Lecturer in Cultural History in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths. He researches and publishes on a wide range of topics in cultural theory, philosophy and literature, with particular interests in fabulation, science fiction, posthumanism and post-natural ecology. With Erich Hörl, he edited General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (2017). His publications include The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick (2015), “From Exegesis to Ecology” (2015), “Towards a Parasitic Ethics” (with Daisy Tam, 2016) and “Metafiction and Ecology: Making Worlds with Worlds” (2017). In 2019, James co-organised a series of workshops entitled Organic Systems (Science Fiction and Ecology). 28 May 2019 Ele Carpenter, Warren Harper, Bridget Kennedy &amp; Andy Weir Ele Carpenter, Bridget Kenndey, Warren Harper, Andy Weir will introduce their research in art and nuclear culture to the critical ecologies research group, and discuss future projects and collaborations. Dr Ele Carpenter is Curator of the Nuclear Culture project. Her curatorial research investigates nuclear aesthetics through commissioning new artwork, publishing, curating exhibitions, site visits and roundtable discussions in partnership with arts organisations and nuclear agencies. Ele regularly participates in European workshops on the role of culture in long-term radioactive waste management, and was interviewed for 'Radioactive Art' on BBC Radio 4 (2 March, 2017). Ele Carpenter is convenor of the Nuclear Culture Research Group and was a Reader in Curating. She is a Visiting Research Fellow, Institute of the Arts, University of Cumbria. Recent curated exhibitions and roundtable discussions include: ‘Perpetual Uncertainty’ Malmö Konstmuseum, Sweden (24 Feb – 26 Aug 2018), Z33 House of Contemporary Art, Hasselt, Belgium (Sept - Dec 2017), Bildmuseet, Umeå University, Sweden (Oct 2016 - April 2017). Ele is editor of The Nuclear Culture Source Book (2016).Warren Harper is a curator, writer and researcher based in London. His work has reflected on the recent and historical cultural shifts of his home county of Essex, from its architecture, industry and how communities engage with or are impacted by these changes. He is a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths Art Department where his practice-based curatorial research project will investigate the relationship between the nuclear landscape of the Blackwater Estuary, home to the Bradwell Nuclear Power Station, and its communities and technologies. In 2016 he participated in a residency programme with Arts Catalyst and S-AIR in Hokkaido, Japan, to research nuclear power and alternative energies. There he initiated, alongside James Ravinet, research-led project Institute for the Recognition of Peripheral Interests (IROPI). www.iropi.org www.warrenharper.info Bridget Kennedy is an Art practice-led PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, focussing on industrial heritage and the legacy of the nuclear power industry. Her interest in nuclear culture began in 2014 through Power in The Land, a visual arts project, during which she investigated the cultural significance of the closure of Wylfa nuclear power station on Anglesey, North Wales. Creating artworks for Power in The Land opened up new areas of interest such as deep time, geophilosophy, and a re-examination of the Anthropocene. The geographical focus of her research has now shifted to Sellafield, Cumbria. Here she is looking for ways to create a new imaginary of nuclear futures via a performative installation practice. Andy Weir is an artist and writer. He has been interested in nuclear temporality since making artwork on geological repository sites, Deep Time Contagion, in 2012. Since then, he has developed research around problems and potentials of using art to ‘interface’ long-term radiological futures, focusing on concepts, affects and politics of ‘deep time’ in relation to geotrauma, futurologies, subjectification and the time of contemporary art. Recent texts from this research include ‘Thick Dia-chronic Crash. Incision Into Delay’, in Realism Materialism Art, ‘Cosmic Alreadymades’ in Journal of Curatorial Studies, and ‘Instituting Art at The Outermost’ in Project Anywhere. He is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Art University Bournemouth, PhD Candidate and MFA Graduate at Goldsmiths. His Pazugoo project was featured on the Perpetual Uncertainty exhibition curated by Ele Carpenter, which led to the Malmo Konstmuseum acquiring a Pazugoo figure for their collection in 2018. 11 December 2018 Helen PritchardFROM CRITTER CHIPS TO CRITTER COMPILERS - QUEER ENCOUNTERS WITH DARK ARTS AND LIVING SENSORS Today so-called "Critter Chips" and "living sensors" are used in hundreds of applications from environmental remediation to cosmetic testing. These living sensors upload, move and stream trillions of data points to big data repositories as part of practices intended to manage and control environments. Through empirical research in a toxicology lab this presentation discusses lab practices in which living is entangled with modes of harm. I outline how practices of computation, in the context of monitoring pollution for the protection of some, holds more-than-humans in injurious states. At the intersection of geography, computational aesthetics and feminist technoscience, this talk focuses on that which is beyond affirmation, as an ethical model for collective living. &nbsp;I ask what type of activity is this computational execution that derives from injury and how we might fabulate on computing otherwise? Here, I am interested in sites of politics that emerge from engagements with that which we can hardly know and can never flourish with: the darker, murkier “in-between”. Illuminating relationalities and hauntings of otherness that are torques of recognition and misrecognition, reorganisations of desire, anxiety and affinities that make appear and disappear shimmering affinities of affect and ethico-political kinships. As a response, in punk solidarity, I place Vinciane Despret’s provocation, to “think like” microbial life, in conversation with queer theory’s affirmative attention to injury and harm. I propose that by engaging with difficult/troubling/hardly-knowable-barely-sovereign arrangements of living sensors might just provide an ethics of engagement that is not predicated on the creativity of engagements but instead on their dark arts. Helen Pritchard was the head of BSc Digital Arts Computing and a lecturer in Computational and Digital Arts at Goldsmiths. As an artist and geographer Helen’s interdisciplinary work brings together the fields of Computational Aesthetics, Geography, Design and Feminist TechnoScience. Her practice is both one of writing and making and these two modes mutually inform each other in order to consider the impact of computational practices on our engagement with environments. Central to Helen’s work is the consideration of co-research, participation and environmental practices. Helen’s practice often emerges as workshops, collaborative events and computational art. She is the co-editor of Data Browser 06: Executing Practices, published by Autonomedia, NY (2017). Rachel O'ReillyTOPSOIL CITIZENSHIPS OF SETTLER COLONIAL MINE POWER Since the 2011 install of the gas fracking industry through the unceded Gooreng Gooreng land and seas of the colonial port city of Gladstone, Australia, artist, research curator and poet, Rachel O’Reilly has used drawing, poetry, film, theoretical essays and film history lectures as part of The Gas Imaginary project to diagram and periodise the settler coloniality of power informing modernist versus unconventional extractive industries in Australia. Attending to the de- and re-compositional dramas of fracking’s install, the romance of investment property ontologies, and the minimalist environmental and water policies that rest on a history of land law innovations dating from the mercantile era, the project makes sense of how corporate governments install infrastructure through gender normativity, imagistic non-indexicality, informatic poverty and industrialized languaging. This talk will briefly address O’Reilly’s concepts of ‘topsoil citizenship’ and ‘form-finding research’ that puts O’Reilly’s theoretical writing on fracking and infrastructural aesthetics in dialogue with critical legal scholarship (Brenna Bhandar, Sarah Keenan, Cheryl Harris, Aileen Morton-Robinson). Rachel O’Reilly (Brisbane/Berlin) is an artist, poet, critic and research curator whose work explores relationships between art and situated cultural practice, non-colonial aesthetic philosophy, and feminist political economy. She is currently a PhD candidate in the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths. She was a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Akademie and teaches the theory seminar ‘At the Limits of the Writerly’ at the Dutch Art Institute. She was previously curator at the Australian Cinematheque/Gallery of Modern Art and Fifth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, for which she archived the films of Kumar Shahani. Recent co-curatorial projects include EX-EMBASSY, Berlin, ‘Infrastructural Rifts: Souls and Soils of Disaster Developmentalism’ at DAI, and ‘Planetary Records: Performing Justice between Art and Law’ for Contour Biennale, Mechelen. Publications include: ‘Neutrality: From the Letter from Melos to Non-Aligned Movement(s)’ with Jelena Vesić (Haus der Kunst Goethe Fellow) and Vladimir Jerić Vlidi, and ‘Infrastructures of Autonomy on the Professional Frontier: Art and the Boycott of/as Art’, with Danny Butt, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Rachel’s artistic work has been presented at the Institute of Modern Art, Eflux, Van Abbemuseum, Qalandiya International, Savvy Contemporary, Tate Liverpool, and as part of Frontier Imaginaries. She was a member of the Place, Ground and Practice group of the International Society for Electronic Arts, and Future South(s), an online network hosted by UNSW. Her writing has been published by Cambridge Scholars Press, MIT Press, Postcolonial Studies, Eflux Journal and in networked e-books. She began her PhD in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in 2018. 27 November 2018 Sean Cubitt TRUTH AND CLIMATE CHANGE Studying large-scale trends like climate must address whether there has been, will be, or is at present a change. These involve different practices of truth: observation, instrumentation, indirect observation, measurement and graphic and textual archives in information gathering; accumulation, verification, matching, inference, deduction, and modelling in data processing; human logic and affect combined or in conflict with automated network data crunching; and dissemination through technical papers, popular science, environmental communication, campaigning, editorial and conflicting receptions. Expert systems demand access and expertise to use them, and those excluded are confused and resentful. What modes of truth are on offer, and what alternatives might there be, both to common cognate terms for truth (plausibility, adequacy, clarity, degree of certainty) and to the locally specific practices of paleoclimatologists and other specialists in the field? Sean Cubitt is Professor of Film and Television at Goldsmiths, University of London and Honorary Professorial Fellow of the University of Melbourne. His publications include The Cinema Effect (MIT 2004), Ecomedia (Rodopi 2005), The Practice of Light: Genealogies of Visual Media (MIT 20014) and Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technology (Duke 2017). He is series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His current research is on political aesthetics, media technologies, media art history and ecocriticism. FRAUD (FRAN GALLARDO + AUDREY SAMSON)FINIS-TERRA An art-led enquiry into the enunciative modality of the computational perspective of machine learning and the resulting patterns of accumulation which form topologies of investment, or divestment, according to valuation in the calculations of finance capital and security. We are exploring an ontology of Spring that includes the Arab Spring, Spring Garden Carpets and Silent Springs. FRAUD is a métis duo (Fran Gallardo and Audrey Samson) that develops forms of art-led enquiry that examine financialization through extractive data practices and cultivate critical cosmogony building. Somerset House Studios alumni, recent work includes: “EURO–VISION”; “Carbon Derivatives,” presented at the Salon Suisse (the 57th Venice Biennale), Whitechapel Gallery (2018) and Somerset House (2018); and “Shrimping Under Working Conditions,” shown at Kunsthall Trondheim (2017) and the Empire Remains Shop in London (2016). https://fraud.la 13 November 2018 Marleen Boschen GRIPPING TALES OF WRESTING SEEDS? THE MAKING VISIBLE OF CARE AND CONTROL IN SEED BANKING PRACTICES In the face of anthropogenic climate change and catastrophic loss of biodiversity seed banks have emerged as beacons of hope for the conservation of ‘nature’ and as insurance policies for future food security. How are images used to construct seeds as vulnerable subjects - both in need and worthy of ‘saving’ by human hands? Looking at a selection of image material produced by the Crop Trust (the main organisation responsible for the management of the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard in the Norwegian Arctic) as well as media features and art works I point at the affective dimension of this techno-scientific rescue project in how the seed vault comes to perform and embody hope, while also constructing a gaze that centres it as the legitimate carer for these precarious seeds. The issue of legitimacy when the seed-as-subject about to be frozen (visually and physically) cannot speak asks us to consider how we as viewers see these human-plant relationships as practices of care that are always also about control. How are practices of banking seeds embedded in broader geopolitical and neocolonial risk mitigation, resilience and adaptation to a warming world? And how are other kinds of seed saving creating different concepts of ‘nature’, property, the commons and more-than-human agency? Marleen Boschen is a CHASE-funded PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. Sam NightingalePARA-PHOTO-MANCY: NOTES TOWARD BIOCHEMICAL IMAGES I am developing experimental modes of image production that utilise the inherent photochemical capacities of plants and minerals to produce biochemical images. I will present some early research on this project, which I carried out in the isolated region around the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in northern Lapland this September. Using a camera-less technique these images (if they can be called that) are not produced or communicated through light energy, but by biochemical ('alchemic') energy: a photo-material entanglement with the site that enfolds moss, lichen, fungi, mud and lake water into the image as its means of production. What are these forms of 'elemental media' generated by the environment itself, who is the audience, who do they address and what's their relation to image and materiality? Sam Nightingale is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. https://critical-ecologies.org/workshops Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:42 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/workshops &nbsp;WORKSHOPS Scroll to learn more about our various practice-based sessions︎︎︎ WHAT CAN A GARDEN BE? &nbsp;2020-21 In this series of workshops, talks and seminars, we will hear from artists, curators and researchers whose artistic research is grounded in practices of sustainability, decoloniality, permaculture, queering nature, place-based knowledge, building community and resilience in opposition to colonial imaginaries. The lectures will provide the stimulus for PhD workshops addressing key research methods, such as collaboration, working with ephemeral infrastructures, decolonial strategy, transdisciplinary research that challenges art–science divisions, knowledge sharing and mapping. Developing an Art Research Garden at Goldsmiths in the midst of global climate emergency, ecological breakdown and a pandemic that has accelerated racialised policing of green spaces, raises crucial questions about the histories of exclusion and extraction that the Western colonial garden has maintained, be it in the form of pleasure parks, private gardens, nature reserves or botanical gardens. From provision grounds to indigenous land pedagogies, from urban community gardens to the olive grove as place of gathering to share knowledge, and from re-wilding projects and to climate justice work, what other examples can we look to in thinking about what our garden could be? Rehana Zaman and Priya Jay's / Research as Ceremony October 2021 • 6:30PM 8:00PM Daniella Vaz Gen / Sensing the Elements: Fire Tuesday 6 July 2021y • 6:30PM 8:00PM Fiona McDonald / Feral Practice Tuesday 9 March •&nbsp;6:30PM 8:00PM Harun Morrison / Beacon Garden, Dageham Tuesday 19 January • 6:30PM 8:00PM Nida Sinnokrot / Palestine is Not a GardenTuesday 17 November 2020y • 6:30PM 8:00PM DECOLONISING THE NUCLEAR, A TWODAY CHASE WORKSHOP Tuesday - WednesdayOctober 22-23 • 2019 10:30 AM 4:30 PM The development of nuclear technology has always relied on colonial practices of resource extraction, atomic testing on indigenous lands, exporting nuclear installations, deployment of nuclear weapons and radioactive waste storage. Many communities are already living through the slow violence of atomic tests, radioactive accidents and contaminated landscapes. Nuclear technology is at the heart of the military industrial complex, often outside democratic decision-making processes, yet it is often neglected in contemporary discourses around decoloniality, climate crisis and the Anthropocene.This year the Nuclear Culture Research Group is considering what it means to decolonise our creative and academic research practices within nuclear culture. In an academic context this starts with tracing our own stories, expanding our networks and literature, working with and alongside communities, and leads to rethinking forms of knowledge and creative practices from completely new, or perhaps very old, perspectives. However, nuclear decoloniality starts with an attempt to re-couple the nuclear with colonial histories that have been neglected in order to isolate research into discreet work-packages for spurious reasons of security or in-depth scientific research. The workshop invites scholars of nuclear culture and artist-researchers to share knowledge, ideas and practices, to widen the scope, to extend and examine our nuclear languages and create a space for people working closely with different kinds of nuclear decoloniality from around the world. This event is a small first step on a long journey to find ways to work together. Workshop Participants include: Lise Autogena, Alex Ressel and Kerri Meehan, Fathima Nizaruddin, Ignacio Acosta, Gabrielle Hecht AMY CUTLER: HACKING THE NATURE DOCUMENTARY Saturday, 10 November 2018 • 2:00 PM &nbsp;5:00 PM • Room RHB 143 As much as we need to rescue the word ‘nature’ from itself, we also need to rescue the nature documentary from itself. This talk and workshop considers the potential for new critical collectivity in the ‘useful fictions’ of the twenty-first century nature documentary. Rather than by abandoning the field for a more experimental eco-cinema, how can the work of the GeoHumanities critically inhabit existing, popular templates and their forms of global dissemination? Such media are undoubtedly connected to the production of contemporary geographical imaginations (and geo-fictions) in the Anthropocene. Yet, they are often passively consumed or chronically under-analysed. Given the power these narrations have to inform and police our own intimacies, as well as their role as trans-global environmental representatives, how can we open them up to new critical remits by hijacking their fables of love, labour, gender, environment, industry, order, ethics, desire, time, and species? How can we resist the nature documentary’s conformity in a time when we should be seeing a myriad of possibilities for geography, nature-cultures, and posthuman natures? This session includes an introduction to the rhetoric of natural history film-making and its media flows (production, curating, programming), which is then used as a frame for interdisciplinary provocation. We treat the nature documentary format not as a closed system of knowledge, but as a collaborative concept or device that can ‘broadcast’ new meanings.Dr Amy Cutler is a geographer, film-maker, and Early Career Research Fellow in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway, University of London. CRITICAL ECOLOGIES WORKSHOP&nbsp; Saturday, 17 March 2018 • 10:00 AM &nbsp;11:00 AM A day of interdisciplinary presentations and discussions on London-based organisations and eco-critical interventionsParticipants include: Nicola Triscott (Arts Catalyst), Jacqueline Hannam (Soil Scientist, Cranfield University), Sakina Sheikh (Platform), Helen Walker and Harun Morrison (They Are Here), Annie Randall (Grow Heathrow), Goldsmiths AllotmentThe ongoing research of Critical Ecologies includes questions of global warming, environmental justice, colonial dispossession, climate migration, nuclear cultures, media geology and e-waste from an arts and humanities perspective that takes scientific research and practices seriously. We formalise connections between existing areas of research and practice by bringing together established environment-focused initiatives from across Anthropology, Art, English &amp; Comparative Literature, Media &amp; Communications, Sociology, and Visual Cultures/Research Architecture to develop collaborations, funding bids, and curricula. Our core aspiration is to evolve new academic platforms capable of shaping public debate. https://critical-ecologies.org/critical-friends Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:42 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/critical-friends &nbsp;CRITICAL FRIENDS Scroll to explore our research networks, creative partnerships &amp; collaborating organisations that work with our members.︎︎︎ ARTS CATALYST, LONDON / SHEFFIELD Arts Catalyst produces artist projects, research and public programmes at the intersections of art, health, ecology and economics. Find out about our online programme and future updates by subscribing to our e-newsletter. CENTER FOR CREATIVE ECOLOGIES, SANTA CRUZ The Center for Creative Ecologies provides a place to consider the intersection of culture and environment. The aim is to develop useful interdisciplinary research tools to examine how cultural practitioners—filmmakers, new media strategists, photojournalists, architects, writers, activists, and interdisciplinary theorists—critically address and creatively negotiate environmental concerns in the local, regional, and global field. These concerns include anthropogenic climate change and global warming, and relate to factors such as habitat destruction, drought, species extinction, and environmental degradation. Drawing on such wide-ranging fields as visual culture and art history, political ecology and economics, Earth jurisprudence and new materialism philosophy, Indigenous cosmopolitics and climate justice activism, the Center energizes the formation of the emerging environmental arts and humanities. CONTEMPORARY ART ARCHIPELAGO, &nbsp;FINLAND CAA is a curatorial collective supporting site-sensitive artistic work at the intersection of ecological, feminist and decolonial enquiries. CAA has been initiating and leading long-term multidisciplinary projects in the Turku Archipelago, off the south-west coast of Finland in the Baltic Sea since 2009 in collaboration with diverse scientific research organisations and other actors in the region. The research projects by CAA are all committed to bringing local practitioners and experts into dialogue with international colleagues and peers, drawn together to address environmental and societal urgencies both in their local specificities and planetary resonances. CREEKSIDE DISCOVERY CENTRE, DEPFORD Creekside Discovery Centre is committed to maintaining Deptford Creek for people and wildlife and promoting ways we can all be conservation heroes. We run a series of low tide walks, talks and hands on learning activities aimed at schools, the local community, Londoners and building professionals involved in regeneration developments. DARK ECOLOGY / SONIC ACTS, AMSTERDAM Dark Ecology was a three-year art, research and commissioning project, initiated by Sonic Acts and Kirkenes-based curator Hilde Methi, and in collaboration with Norwegian and Russian partners. Dark Ecology unfolded through research, the creation of new artworks, and a public programme that was presented in the zone on both sides of the border in 2014, 2015 and 2016. The programme included lectures, presentations of newly commissioned artworks, guided walks, a discursive programme, concert evenings, and workshops. www.darkecology.net FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE / CENTRE FOR CONTEMPORARY NATURE Forensic Architecture’s Centre for Contemporary Nature presents two projects concerned with direct attacks on plants and vegetation, in the context of political conflict. One is a conflict at the threshold of the desert, the other at the threshold of the rainforest. Along the border fences of Gaza, Research Fellow Shourideh C. Molavi explores the effects of Israel’s use of herbicide on Palestinian farms, while in the forest frontiers of Colombia,Research Fellow Hannah Meszaros Martin investigates the military deployment of herbicide against coca plantations, and the resulting impact on the livelihood of local farmers. Together, these two cases, thousands of miles apart, demonstrate the entanglement of human and environmental violence HORNIMAN MUSEUM &amp; GARDENS, SOUTH-EAST LONDON Located in Forest Hill the museum&nbsp;is named after Frederick Horniman, who inherited and ran his father’s business, Horniman’s Tea, and was elected as an MP for the Liberal Party in 1895.&nbsp;The Horniman family did not own tea plantations, but were merchants, buying mostly Chinese tea on the London market at auction. They made huge profits, using their reputation to promote their brand of pure, unadulterated tea. This drew on anti-Chinese sentiment in Britain to build mistrust in other sources of Chinese tea.&nbsp;The Victorian and colonial context in which Frederick Horniman and his staff collected and documented objects also needs critical reinterpretation today, working with international partners and community members to ensure their cultural heritage is displayed and cared for respectfully and ethically. LONDON MINING NETWORK, UK Supporting communities harmed by London-based mining companies.&nbsp;We act in solidarity with groups badly affected by London-linked mining companies. Communities include La Guajira in Colombia, opposing Cerrejon coal mine – the biggest coal mine in the world – jointly owned by three London-linked mining companies: AngloAmerican, Glencore, and BHP. Groups working for justice for Marikana community in South Africa – still reeling from the massacre of 34 striking mine workers in 2012, where Lonmin platinum mining company has still not provided sufficient reparations to those affected. We also work with groups challenging gold and uranium mining in Spain, and West Papuan and Indonesian groups opposing the Grasberg mine in West Papua, part owned by London-listed Rio Tinto. MAAT CLIMITE COLLECTIVE, LISBON Bringing urgent focus to climate emergency, maat Climate Collective energises critical analyses and creative proposals in moving beyond catastrophism and toward the emergence of environmentally sustainable and socially just futures. Interdisciplinary in breadth and international in scope, our programme assembles diverse cultural practitioners working at the intersection of experimental arts and political ecology in a year-long project of collective deliberation. The goal: to unveil horizons of thought and action vital for a liveable future, dedicated to unpacking the complexities – socio-economic, juridico-political, techno-environmental and cultural – of climate transformation. NUCLEAR CULTURE The NUCLEAR-CULTURE-RESEARCH-GROUP email list is for artists, curators, and academics in the nuclear arts, humanities and sciences, as well as nuclear professionals, to share their research and opportunities around nuclear culture. PLATFORM ARTS ACTIVISM EDUCATION RESEARCH, LONDON Platform is different. We combine art, activism, education and research in one organisation. This approach enables us to create unique projects driven by the need for social and ecological justice.&nbsp;Platform’s current campaigns focus on the social, economic and environmental impacts of the global oil industry. Our pioneering education courses, exhibitions, art events and book projects promote radical new ideas that inspire change.&nbsp;How we work is important to us. We operate through collective decision-making. Our team includes campaigners, artists and researchers who act together and with networks to achieve long-term, systemic goals. Everyone in Platform is committed to our core values of justice, solidarity, creativity and democracy. You can read our statement on values here. SAKIYA, PALESTINE Sakiya is a progressive academy for experimental knowledge production and sharing, grafting local agrarian traditions of self-sufficiency with contemporary art and ecological practices. This circular system of knowledge production and sharing integrates agriculture within the framework of an interdisciplinary residency program, where cultural actors, such as farmers and crafts/small industry initiatives, assume a prominent role alongside visiting and local artists and scholars. Sakiya’s core programs engage food production, exhibitions, symposia, publications, and education/training workshops, exploring the intersections between art, science, and agriculture in a sustainable and replicable model. THE SEED BOX, SWEDEN The Seed Box is an interdisciplinary and international Environmental Humanities research program funded by Mistra (The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research) and Formas (The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning). The long-term goal of the program is to establish a research hub and humanities lab at Linköping University. Focused on research, education, and artistic practices that address pressing environmental challenges, this program will bring together practitioners from different fields and create an interface between academia and other parts of society. SOUTH LONDON BOTANICAL INSTITUTE Founded in 1910 in Tulse Hill, the South London Botanical Institute has a beautiful botanical garden and runs a wide range of courses, workshops, school visits and events for all ages.&nbsp; &nbsp;See short films about our activities on YouTube and find out more about us. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; https://critical-ecologies.org/publications Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:40 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/publications PUBLICATIONS︎︎︎ Scroll to view books and journals relating to ecology produced by our members &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="1349" height="1533" width_o="1349" height_o="1533" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/00f1919d16a3509a0e6fa2eea546e9fe057cfff22a8b1eb2a8709ac0fcb3d651/IMG_2073.jpg" data-mid="205579074" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/00f1919d16a3509a0e6fa2eea546e9fe057cfff22a8b1eb2a8709ac0fcb3d651/IMG_2073.jpg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp; Wood Roberdeau, “Experiments in Eco-poiesis: herman de vries and and Art of Immediacy” in The Anthropocene Laboratory. eds. Fröydi Laszlo and Anna Risell, Gothenburg: Förlaget 284, 2023 This book is a kaleidoscopic vision of a strange time, where our only choice is generously sharing knowledge to inspire a positive change for our threatened Earth. The more than 20 different participants in this book come from both the scenic and the visual arts and academics from the humanities and the natural sciences. The languages of the book are both Nordic and English, translated to fit both English and Nordic readers. In this chapter, Wood&nbsp;seeks to determine how de vries’s definition of ‘art’ continues to inform the challenges facing a human and more than human set of co-produced proximities and direct entanglements, the testimony or witnessing of which proves a positive environmental relationality within this ‘lab’ that some have called the Anthropocene. &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="500" height="664" width_o="500" height_o="664" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f9e02b744347ae7d5c57197a183709ef5e8cc85be09613f62d62bc56b9a530a5/23031.postcards.2.9788494938870.jpg.jpg" data-mid="205574159" border="0" data-scale="80" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/f9e02b744347ae7d5c57197a183709ef5e8cc85be09613f62d62bc56b9a530a5/23031.postcards.2.9788494938870.jpg.jpg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Benek Cincik and Tiago Torres-Campos, eds. Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2022 This book includes various responses to the geopolitical conditions of our tangent times through collections of visual materials and theoretical explorations with critical positionings. The book expands on the Anthropocene theory by exploring its relations with the aesthetic concerns in contemporary representations through their geopolitical ramifications. We conceptualize postcards as documentary space-time snapshots, which convey complex assemblages of dynamic, non-linear, unpredictable, ad-hoc networks between interdependent and transcalar actors in deep time. The postcards we assemble raise questions about the ethical and political challenges of the dominant modes of technoscientific knowledge production, modes that are constituted through existing power relationships, subject positions, and differences, and that perpetuate current inequalities. They catalyse speculative and creative geopolitical imaginaries and collective subjectivities that recalibrate existing value systems and indicate alternatives. Contributions from Ifor Duncan, Wood Roberdeau, Susan Schuppli&nbsp; T &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;<img width="700" height="980" width_o="700" height_o="980" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cbbcff57766129cc5029048b454c973eae039881dc26950e86e8ca4f9fd670f3/material-witness.jpg" data-mid="131232521" border="0" data-scale="77" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/700/i/cbbcff57766129cc5029048b454c973eae039881dc26950e86e8ca4f9fd670f3/material-witness.jpg" />&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Susan Schuppli,&nbsp;Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. MIT Press 2020 This book introduces a new operative concept: material witness, an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness moves through a series of cases that provide insight into the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which stake holders gather.&nbsp;These cases include an extraordinary videotape documenting the massacre at Izbica, Kosovo, used as war crimes evidence against Slobodan Milošević; the telephonic transmission of an iconic photograph of a South Vietnamese girl fleeing an accidental napalm attack; radioactive contamination discovered in Canada’s coastal waters five years after the accident at Fukushima Daiichi; and the ecological media or “disaster film” produced by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Each highlights the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing, raising questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;<img width="500" height="750" width_o="500" height_o="750" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c0ee2d243f08378b2657b4bb249f46eaa5329106312462475888116fcbbfb50/animal.jpg" data-mid="131232739" border="0" data-scale="78" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/9c0ee2d243f08378b2657b4bb249f46eaa5329106312462475888116fcbbfb50/animal.jpg" /> The Edinburgh Companion to Animal StudiesEdited by Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach, Ron Broglio,&nbsp;Edinburgh Press, 2019 This volume critically investigates current topics and disciplines that are affected, enriched or put into dispute by the burgeoning scholarship on Animal Studies. What new questions and modes of research need come into play if we are to seriously acknowledge our entanglements with other animals? World-leading scholars from a range of disciplines, including Literature, Philosophy, Art, Biosemiotics, and Geography, set the agenda for Animal Studies today. Rather than a narrow specialism, the 35 newly commissioned essays in this book show how we think of other animals to be intrinsic to fields as major as ethics, economies as widespread as capitalism and relations as common as friendship. The volume contains original, cutting-edge research and opens up new methods, alignments, directions as well as challenges for the future of Animal Studies. Uniquely, the chapters each focus on a single topic, from ‘Abjection’ to ‘Voice’ and from ‘Affection’ to ‘Technology’, thus embedding the animal question as central to contemporary concerns across a wide range of disciplines. <img width="1291" height="1759" width_o="1291" height_o="1759" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ab442988b0f82644ae544e3376d1deea790abdc6a3f6bb123061e77bed14edee/third-text.jpg" data-mid="131247586" border="0" data-scale="79" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ab442988b0f82644ae544e3376d1deea790abdc6a3f6bb123061e77bed14edee/third-text.jpg" /> The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic InterventionsEdited by Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh, Third Text, March-May 2018 This special issue presents new research on, and in some cases generated through, contemporary art practices that both explore and intervene in the cultures, politics and systems of representation, as well as their attendant desires and violences, generated through human interaction with the soil. Our proposition is that, in order to do full justice to Fanon’s diagnosis of ‘the wretched of the earth’, we must understand more deeply the extent to which this is due to the fact that the earth itself is wretched, and that part of this condition has been the destruction of ‘ecological’ relations with the earth. The phrase ‘the wretched earth’ signals our ongoing engagement with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist writers such as Fanon, but also the need to go beyond their reconfigured humanism to think about the multiple human and nonhuman cohabitations that constitute the soil and, more broadly, our more-than-human commons.&nbsp; <img width="2073" height="2560" width_o="2073" height_o="2560" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8dcb9db874b6ad5884303c85f425c24bec9a230d53ab51d05548e547308241fa/Rurality-Cover.jpg" data-mid="131564360" border="0" data-scale="77" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8dcb9db874b6ad5884303c85f425c24bec9a230d53ab51d05548e547308241fa/Rurality-Cover.jpg" /> Wood Roberdeau. “After Baruchello: Agricultural Encounters in Contemporary Art” in Rurality Re-imagined: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers, Wild Things, ed. Ben Stringer, San Francisco: Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2018 This chapter identifies a cultural turn towards political ecology, in the sense that Bruno Latour defines it, primarily due to the contentiousness within pre-established categories of art (or artifice) and nature (as a site of labour and perseverance). Following ‘the ecological thought’ of Timothy Morton via Arthur Schopenhauer’s problematic claim that art provides an escape route from reality to a space-time of pure ‘knowledge’, the chapter addresses selected agricultural art projects by John Gerrard, Gianfranco Baruchello, Atelier Van Lieshout, Futurefarmers and Fernando García-Dory. Considering Morton’s observation that the essentialism we sometimes afford to an artwork is exactly what might help to deconstruct our delusions surrounding the nature/culture dichotomy, I argue this ‘non-knowledge’ is grounded in ‘ecomaterialism’, ‘postmedievalism’, and ‘uncivilization’ in order to think a reconfiguration of the limits of the everyday, the urban, and the rural for the Anthropocene. <img width="568" height="852" width_o="568" height_o="852" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd7fa5b514fd4781abb2e35320e4acf3cdc9901577de9caa3bf56bc30d6cdc59/new-ecology.jpg" data-mid="131248155" border="0" data-scale="76" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/568/i/cd7fa5b514fd4781abb2e35320e4acf3cdc9901577de9caa3bf56bc30d6cdc59/new-ecology.jpg" /> General Ecology: The New Ecological ParadigmEdited by James Burton &amp; Erich Hoerl, Bloombury Academic Press, 2017 Ecology has become one of the most urgent and lively fields in both the humanities and sciences. In a dramatic widening of scope beyond its original concern with the coexistence of living organisms within a natural environment, it is now recognized that there are ecologies of mind, information, sensation, perception, power, participation, media, behavior, belonging, values, the social, the political… a thousand ecologies. This proliferation is not simply a metaphorical extension of the figurative potential of natural ecology: rather, it reflects the thoroughgoing imbrication of natural and technological elements in the constitution of the contemporary environments we inhabit, the rise of a cybernetic natural state, with its corresponding mode of power. Hence this ecology of ecologies initiates and demands that we go beyond the specificity of any particular ecology: a general thinking of ecology which may also constitute an ecological transformation of thought itself is required. <img width="500" height="750" width_o="500" height_o="750" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6c86a8d360e6793e7801a3da0843c11e28ef72734362850d7c65bdd95731cecf/9780748683130_1.jpg" data-mid="131824431" border="0" data-scale="75" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/500/i/6c86a8d360e6793e7801a3da0843c11e28ef72734362850d7c65bdd95731cecf/9780748683130_1.jpg" /> The Animal Question in DeconstructionEdited by Lynn Turner, Edinburgh Press, 2013 This book explores the political and poetic understanding of the deconstruction of the 'animal question'. It asks how deconstruction understands relations between humans and other animals. This collection of essays reveals that across Jacques Derrida's work as a whole, as well as that of Hélène Cixous and Nicholas Royle, deconstruction has always addressed questions about animality. https://critical-ecologies.org/audio-video Sun, 23 Jan 2022 13:26:42 +0000 Critical Ecologies https://critical-ecologies.org/audio-video AUDIO &amp; VIDEO Scroll to listen &amp; watch .our events︎︎︎ 31 July 2020Rosy Gray &amp; Shela SheikhTHE COLONIALITY OF PLANTING For the final podcast in “The Botanical Mind” series at Camden Art Centre, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh discuss how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They will discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise these spaces through planting with reference to ongoing projects in London. LISTEN HERE&nbsp;︎ 21 January 2019Elizabeth A. Povinelli THE TOXIC EARTH AND THE COLLAPSE OF POLITICAL CONCEPTS This lecture begins with four axioms that emerge when politics enters the interstitial spacing among the whole earth, Gaia, and autonomous worlds. The four axioms are: the ‘extimacy’ of existence; the collapse of western distinctions and hierarchies of existence, most significantly that between Life and Nonlife, the biological and geological; the distribution of the effects of power and the power to affect a given terrain of existence; and the multiplicity and collapse of forms of the event. How does the straining of quasi-spaces and fuzzy things and of the efforts and forces of embankment of existence demand an accounting from western political concepts for their refusal to register their historical and current effects on the toxic earth? Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and The Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University and one of the founding members of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her work has explored the governance of late liberalism as it manifests in settler colonial contexts across five books, most recently, Geontologies, A Requiem for Late Liberalism, which was the 2017 recipient of the Lionel Trilling Book Award; and six films and several installations with the Karrabing Collective. Karrabing films were awarded the 2015 Visible Award and the 2015 Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival and have shown internationally including in the Berlinale Forum Expanded, Sydney Biennale; MIFF, the Tate Modern, documenta-14, and the Contour Biennal. 21 January 2019 T.J. Demos: TO SAVE A WORLD What if we measure geo-engineering climate-change fixes by social-justice and speculative approaches to Afrofuturism (including Arthur Jafa’s video Love is the Message, the Message is Death, 2016), where climate signifies more than just the biogeophysical? What are the stakes of competitive accounts of the not-yet? How is technoscientific rationality currently colonizing what’s to come? What hope do we have to decolonize our future? Picking apart these questions, T. J. Demos will speak about his current research in progress concerning the end/s of the world/s and what comes next… T. J. Demos is Professor of Art and Visual Culture, and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017), Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013). http://havc.ucsc.edu/faculty/tj-demos