International Conference
17. 11. ⁄ 14:30–19:15 CET ⁄ CD Club, Cankarjev dom, and online
So Close: Ecologies of Life and Death
The international conference approaches the future of life on our planet from the perspective of life’s end by drawing attention to reconsiderations of loss, decline, mourning, and death. In this way, it seeks to transcend the binary of, on the one hand, dystopian pessimism about the future and, on the other, utopian optimism in the all-powerful human capacity to overcome the end. How can we – including through art – develop the sensibilities, modes of perception, cultural practices and knowledge production we need for being and becoming with others in life and death? How can we consider the full implications of decline, make our farewells and preserve the memory of lost human and non-human lives, environments, and habitats in order to affirm the (plural) politics of the present and future of the relational web of life? Speakers: Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Thom van Dooren, Šejla Kamerić, Marietta Radomska, Boštjan Videmšek, and Mick Wilson.
Programme
14:30 ⁄ Registration
15:00 ⁄ Introduction
Panel 1
15:15 ⁄ Maja and Reuben Fowkes ⁄ Surviving Extinction: Regenerative Ecologies of the Socialist Anthropocene
The implementation of five-year-plans to collectivize, industrialize, urbanize, and modernize socialist territories devastated the homelands of the nomadic and indigenous peoples of the Soviet south, causing irreparable loss of species, habitats, cultures, traditions, and life. And yet, despite the scars in the landscape and the generational trauma, forms of extractivism and colonialism developed under the parallel system of 20th century socialisms differed significantly from those of the capitalist Anthropocene. To what extent did the socialist model of organizing nature allow for the emergence of more environmentally attuned attitudes and practices? What does the collapse of state socialism under the weight of its environmental contradictions tell us about the future prospects of global capitalism in the face of the immovable ecological facts of climate breakdown? How do artists reveal the survival of extinct species in the collective memory and dreamworlds of local communities? And how do they explore ways of reversing the terminal decline of died-out cultures and dried-out ecosystems through the regeneration of socially-just ecological relations?
15:35 ⁄ Marietta Radomska ⁄ Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning: Biophilosophical Assemblages of (Non)Living Arts
In the present condition of planetary environmental disruption, including both slow and abrupt violence (Nixon 2011; Neimanis 2020) and even war, entire ecosystems are being annihilated, habitats turned into unlivable spaces, socio-economic inequalities intensified, and shared, more-than-human vulnerabilities amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Death Studies and particularly in the concept of the “deterritorialization of death” (Radomska 2020), this talk explores contemporary crisis imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction as they are woven through the tissue of contemporary bio-, eco- and new-media art. It is in these spaces of (non)living artworks that conventional frames of human exceptionalism are questioned, ecological ontology of death exposed, and ethical territories of ecological grief and mourning the more-than-human unfold.
15:55 ⁄ Thom van Dooren ⁄ Living in Unravelling Worlds: Snail Stories in a Time of Extinctions
We are living in a period during which species of plants and animals are disappearing at a staggering rate. While some might still be saved, many have already been lost and others are slipping ever closer to the brink of extinction. In this age of extinctions, the humble snail rarely gets a mention, and yet species of snails are disappearing faster than any other animal group. This talk focuses on the plight of Hawaii’s incredible land snails as a way of exploring ongoing processes of ecological and cultural loss, and the role of storytelling in understanding and responding to this situation. These snail stories provide powerful insights into the global process of environmental and cultural change, including the largely unremarked disappearance of countless “less charismatic” species. The lecture explores the world of possibilities and relationships that lies coiled within a snail’s shell, and asks how these stories could allow us to cultivate a sense of wonder and appreciation for our damaged planet while also helping us to navigate the challenges we face and the vital importance of holding onto hope in a time of escalating loss and grief.
16:15 ⁄ Discussion
The conversation between Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Marietta Radomska, and Thom van Dooren will be moderated by Nataša Briški, Urška Jurman, and Rok Kranjc.
17:00 ⁄ Break
Panel 2
17:30 ⁄ Mick Wilson ⁄ Political Community with the Dead
The biopolitical practices of colonial modernity are first formulated as the task of managing the life of the human population. These also produce a thanatopolitics, liquidating the very life they claim to protect in “vital massacres”. The coming power that seeks to name and so respond to the sixth mass extinction, to address itself to death on a planetary scale, produces an exponential register of the biopolitical. This emerges as the life of all species, the population of populations, human and non-human, and becomes the object of that power. Given the historical arc of biopolitics, including genocide and ecocide, we must anticipate the limitless murders that will be committed in the name of a planetary caring for all of life, for all that lives, and indeed for all that has yet to live. Can there be political imaginaries of birthlifedeath beyond the bio-, thanato-, necro-political horizon, beyond death as the possession of the colonial-modern subject and its ownmost (das Wesen) possibility? Perhaps there exists other paths of birthlifedeath in political community with the dead. But how do we instantiate political community with the dead?
17:50 ⁄ Šejla Kamerić ⁄ Ab uno disce omnes – From One Learn All
Ab uno disce omnes seeks to reconcile the cultural, political, and historical void between the proliferation of statistical information and the enduring human consequences of war by attesting to the countless missing persons from the war in Bosnia and Hercegovina and the painstaking forensic process of recovering and identifying massacre victims. The project began as an academic data-gathering mission: a meticulous process much like the methodology of medical research where information is comprehensively collected, cross-checked, analyzed, and systematically categorized. With each new contribution, the process grew in complexity, raising important questions about the nature of information filtered through bureaucratic barriers and how it is subsequently perceived when juxtaposed with other sets of documents and images from a diverse range of sources. Ab uno disce omnes impels the urgent consideration of the anatomy of war, and confirms the vital importance of collecting, compiling, and navigating evidence that reveal the magnitude of human tragedy at the center of war. The project, through interwoven strands of memory, data, and statistics, encapsulates both the challenges of this volatile process and the intensity of the individual journey in attempting to comprehend the intricate web of recovered histories, reclaimed lives, and as yet uncertain futures.
18:10 ⁄ Boštjan Videmšek ⁄ I Have Seen Too Much
I have been reporting on war for more than twenty years. Very soon after I started – let’s say in Darfur in 2004 – it became absolutely clear to me that climate change was one of the crucial driving forces behind “modern wars”. In one way or another. As a cause: the bottomless greed of the petro-companies and states. As a consequence: war for water, for arable land, for the basic resources needed for survival. We have just experienced the hottest summer in history as measured by temperature. Already now, the darkest scenarios forecast in the Paris Climate Accord are becoming reality. Climate change is not only the future. It has been, already for some time, the present. And while it is increasingly impacting the geographically and generally privileged first world, the climatically and generally most exposed parts of the world are already burning and/or flooding, and more and more people are fleeing climate disasters each day. And yet we still look away, collectively. We still calculate that we can live and somehow scrape by until we die. We still direct our attention to the absolutely wrong things; you could say we choose “idiotic” priorities. We kill our fellow human beings with ease, we destroy whole ecosystems, we are intellectually lazy, and we steal the future. I have seen too much.
18:30 ⁄ Discussion
The conversation between Mick Wilson, Šejla Kamerić, and Boštjan Videmšek will be moderated by Nataša Briški, Urška Jurman, and Rok Kranjc.
Conference theme
Questions about the future of life on this planet – questions stemming from the devastating consequences of capitalist extractivism and colonialism and the exacerbating environmental, climate and social crises – have become thoroughly embedded in the field of art and in many other areas. What might our conference add to such considerations?
Read
So Close: Ecologies of Life and Death approaches the future of life from the perspective of life’s end by drawing attention to reconsiderations of loss, decline, mourning, and death. In this way, it seeks to transcend the binary of, on the one hand, dystopian pessimism about the future and, on the other, utopian optimism in the all-powerful human capacity to overcome the end. By examining issues of death and decline, the conference opens an interstitial space for reflection on the present and possible futures of life on our damaged planet.
Although the Sixth Mass Extinction is already underway, it has until recently been little more than an abstract concept in the Global North. But now, at least from a European perspective, the pandemic and the war in Ukraine have pushed death and destruction to the forefront of our attention. Apparently disasters and the victims of disasters evoke empathy in us only when they are so close that they literally touch our lives. How then might we perceive the current global and planetary catastrophes as universal? How might we expand our moral circle to include previously invisible “Others” – and not just human but also non-human “Others”?
The threat of the end, it seems, functions as a motivating force, compelling us to consider necessary changes in our society and to develop new – or renovated – concepts relating to the intertwined conditions of existence and decline while taking into account a more-than-human and planetary perspective. Although catastrophes are a constant in the history of the planet and humanity, it is fair to say that today they occur at an increasingly intense rate, are ever more intertwined, and are getting closer and closer. It is high time we focus on loss and mourning, and become more conscious of both the damage caused by the Anthropo-/Capitalo-/Plantationocene epoch and the interdependence of all life.
How can we – including through art – develop the sensibilities, modes of perception, cultural practices and knowledge production we need for being and becoming with others in life and death? How can we consider the full implications of decline, make our farewells and preserve the memory of lost human and non-human lives, environments, and habitats in order to affirm the (plural) politics of the present and future of the relational web of life?
The conference considers the meeting point of art, ecology, and forms of social organization that do not deepen the multiple crises threatening life on earth. We will draw attention both to possibilities for (co)existence through regenerative forms of micro- and macro-organization and to decline and death as integral parts of life that must be reconsidered.
Speakers and moderators
Maja and Reuben Fowkes
Founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London.
Read
Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021), The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015), and a special issue of Third Text entitled Actually Existing Artworlds of Socialism (2018). Their recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianisms at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their research on the socialist Anthropocene in the visual arts is supported by a UK Research and Innovation Frontier Research grant. www.translocal.org
Šejla Kamerić
A visual artist whose practice involves film, photography, objects, drawings, and installations. She has received widespread acclaim for the poignant intimacy and social commentary that have become the main elements of her work.
Read
Treating subjects that arise from non-linear historical narratives, as well as from personal histories, Kamerić focuses on the politics of memory, modes of resistance in human life, and the consequential idiosyncrasies of women's struggles. By insisting on empathy as the founding communicative mechanism between herself, her subjects, and her spectators, Kamerić both warns of and creates powerful political statements. She is based in Sarajevo and Berlin. Kamerić’s work is part of numerous international art collections including: TATE Modern in London, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, MACBA Barcelona, Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Kontakt Collection in Vienna, and ArtTelekom in Germany.
Marietta Radomska
An assistant professor in Environmental Humanities at Linköping University in Sweden, founding director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab, research team member of The Posthumanities Hub; cofounder of Queer Death Studies Network, and member of Bioart Society.
Read
She works at the intersection of posthumanities, environmental humanities, continental philosophy, feminist theory, queer death studies, visual culture and contemporary art. In the years 2017–22, she led two research projects on ecologies of death, environmental violence, and contemporary art (funded by Swedish research councils: VR, Formas and MISTRA). Radomska is the author of Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016), coeditor of the book series Focus on More-than-Human Humanities at Routledge (with C. Åsberg), and has published in Australian Feminist Studies, Somatechnics, Women, Gender & Research, Artnodes, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, and other publications. www.mariettaradomska.com
Thom van Dooren
A field philosopher and writer. He is deputy director of the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney and a Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo.
Read
He is the author of numerous books on the philosophy and ethics of species extinction and conservation, including A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT Press, 2022), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP, 2019), and Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia UP, 2014). www.thomvandooren.org
Boštjan Videmšek
An experienced war correspondent. He has covered all major conflicts during the last 25 years (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Darfur, Gaza, Somalia, DR Congo, Libya, Ukraine, Kosovo). During the past five years, he has turned his focus onto the consequences of climate change – and the search for solutions.
Read
His work has been published in the New York Times, Der Spiegel, Stern, Boston Globe, CNN, BBC, National Geographic, El Figaro, Forbes, and other publications. Videmšek is the author of seven books about modern conflicts and migration (three translated into English, one into German). His book Plan B: How Not to Lose Hope in the Times of Climate Crisis, addressing the most promising new practices in the fight against climate change, was named Slovenian book of the year in 2020. His new book Zadnji dve (The Last Two) – written with Maja Prijatelj Videmšek – tells the story of the last two northern white rhinos and will be published in the United States in 2023. Videmšek has written two theatre plays. He has received many international and national awards, and was chosen as a European Young Leader and an ambassador of the European Climate Pact. Videmšek is based in Ljubljana.
Mick Wilson
A professor of art and the director of the doctoral studies program at HDK-Valand, Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg. He is also a visiting professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga.
Read
His teaching and research interests encompass questions of art, knowledge, curating, and the political imaginary. His recent work addresses themes of political community with the dead, the question of the body count, the rhetoric of knowledge conflict, the exhibition as enquiry, and the aesthetics of foodways. Coedited volumes include Exhibitionary Acts of Political Imagination (2021, with C. Gheorghe), Curating after the Global: Roadmaps for the Present (2019, with P. O’Neill, L. Steeds, and S. Sheikh), and How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (2017, with P. O’Neill and L. Steeds). Forthcoming works include: Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life (with P. O’Neill, Sternberg/MIT Press) and Expo-Facto: Into the Algorithm of Exhibition (with H. Slager, MertopolisM Books).
Nataša Briški
A journalist with more than 25 years of experience working for local, national, and international media (she was a foreign affairs correspondent for POP TV based in Washington D.C. and a correspondent for BBC World Report, among others).
Read
She is a cofounder of the digital media network Meta’s List where she acts as editor-in-chief. She is actively involved in various NGO- and EU- related projects, and is a member of the Special Council of the Human Rights Ombudsman of the Republic of Slovenia.
Urška Jurman
An art historian and sociologist of culture. She works as a curator, editor, and art writer in the field of contemporary art and spatial culture.
Read
In 2013, she became the program manager of the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in Ljubljana. She is also a cofounder of Obrat Art and Culture Association and worked with this organization to co-create the community garden Beyond a Construction Site in Ljubljana.
Rok Kranjc
An eco-social transformations researcher at the Institute for Ecology in Ljubljana and a translator and editor at the Journal for the Critique of Science.
Read
He has translated several seminal books in the fields of political ecology and ecological economics into the Slovenian language. Kranjc is the founder of Futurescraft, a research and design studio for experiential futures, generative games, and other forms of engagement with alternative (regenerative, post-growth, commons-based) economies.
Conference Advisory Committee
Urška Jurman
program manager, Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, Ljubljana
Zdenka Badovinac
director, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
Rok Kranjc
researcher, Futurescraft & Institute for Ecology, Ljubljana
Alenka Gregorič
artistic director, Cukrarna Gallery, Ljubljana
The conference is organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, Ljubljana, with the support by ERSTE Foundation, Vienna.
Conference Location
CD Club, Cankarjev dom
Prešernova cesta 10, Ljubljana
(vhod: Erjavčeva cesta 5)
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