Health, Body, Love Program
Fri, Otakaari 1X, Auditorium A2
13:00 Hanna Husberg, Agata Marzecova, Liu Xin: Imaginaries and technoecologies of urban air
13:30 Anu Koskinen: Human bodies in climate change
14:00 Nikita LIN: AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS, OR WHERE LOVE FAILED
14:30 Maija Tammi: Immortality x 3
***
Imaginaries and technoecologies of urban air
Liu Xin: “Bodies that filter air”
Agata Marzecova and Hanna Husberg:
“And then came this number PM 2.5: Imaginaries and datapolitics of air in Beijing”
Fri 13:00, Otakaari 1X, Auditorium A2
Bringing together perspectives from visual arts, environmental sciences and social sciences this micro-panel critically engages with urban air as a natureculture phenomenon. Investigating the emerging imaginaries of the Chinese race (people of smog) on Chinese social media Liu Xin’s paper examines how bodily practices of filtering air in the epoch of Airpocalypse enable different theorizations of race. Drawing on field research in Beijing Marzecova’s and Husberg’s paper explores the techno-scientific imaginaries of air put in motion by PM 2.5 data. The air pollution index has enabled imagining and describing invisible changes in air quality, constructing a distinctively new sense of air, while naturalizing the data and the technological infrastructures of the measurement.
Bio
Hanna Husberg is a Stockholm based visual artist, currently developing her doctoral research project Troubled Atmosphere – On noticing air at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Through a practice of audiovisual and installation projects she investigates how one can perceive, relate to, and imagine the environment in times of anthropogenic climate change.
Agata Marzecova is a Tallinn-based scientist with specialisation in environmental geochemistry (Msc., 2005) and paleoecology (PhD., 2018), studying the ecosystem changes during the transition from Holocene to Anthropocene. She has contributed to several artistic exhibitions and interdisciplinary projects that deal with the nature-cultural phenomena.
Liu Xin is a postdoctoral researcher in Gender Studies, at the Faculty of Arts, Psychology and Theology, Åbo Akademi University. Her research examines the question of race from feminist poststructuralist, new materialist and postcolonial perspectives.
Human bodies in climate change
Anu Koskinen
Doctor of Arts in theatre and drama
Fri 13:30, Otakaari 1X, Auditorium A2
This corporeal presentation is based on an artistic research project called To the stage with Foucault- How to embody the ecocatastrophe? I ponder human body and practices of the self in climate change and their relations with different forms of performance. I present seven ethical/corporeal practices by which human beings can construct themselves when seeking meaningful ways to live in climate change. They are direct action, individual responsibility, green growth, survivalism, victimising oneself, denialism and nature mysticism. The project takes place in Performing arts research center in the Theatre academy of the University of arts Helsinki, and is funded by Kone foundation.
Bio
Anu Koskinen (born 1973) is a Finnish actor, researcher and teacher. She has been working in the field of theatre, in front of a camera and in several projects of participatory theatre in different contexts, like prisons. Her research interests include relations between performance and ecology, prison theatre, acting techniques, gender in acting and actors affective work. Her interest in post- strucural theory and research methods inspired by Michel Foucault Ìs philosophy is a connecting link between her different research projects.
AN ANTHROPOLOGIST ON MARS, OR WHERE LOVE FAILED
Nikita LIN,
Researcher/Producer, CHRONUS ART CENTER, SHANGHAI
Wed 14:00, Otakaari 1X, Auditorium A2
Taking its title from the British neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, this presentation will revisit the notion and movement of eugenics dating from the 19th century and culminated in the Nazi Regime, with perspectives borrowed from the more recent development in the fields of life engineering and artificial intelligence. How do we confront our ephemeral life in an age of increasing quantification/datafication? Will there be a happy ending if randomness of all kinds (diseases, conflicts, deaths ect.) are exterminated from the human world? Does the non-human world care? These questions, for which no answer would be provided, somehow draw our attention to the pessimist philosophers – Schopenhauer, for example, who proclaims that life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.
Bio
Nikita LIN, researcher/producer, works and lives in Shanghai. Her research interests and curatorial practice in contemporary art lie at the intersection between art, science and technology. LIN obtained her MA from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2014.
Immortality x 3
Maija Tammi,
Doctor of Arts
Wed 14:30, Otakaari 1X, Auditorium A2
The presentation introduces three artworks that examine immortality from different perspectives. The first artwork looks at immortality through biologically immortal human cancer cell lines that are continuously grown in laboratories all over the world. The work presents the infamous HeLa cells but also other cell lines. The second work observes a fresh-water polyp Hydra, which does not age at all, and can also clone itself. The third work looks at the human escapologist desire of cheating death, through portraits of human-looking android robots.
Bio
Maija Tammi is a Finnish artist and Doctor of Arts, whose photographs, sculptures and video converse on topics around disgust and fascination, science and aesthetics. She regularly collaborates with scientists and musicians. Tammi’s work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia and North America, and she has three published books Leftover/Removals (2014), White Rabbit Fever (2017) and Sick Photography (2017). Tammi has a Masters in visual journalism and she obtained her practice-based doctorate from Aalto University in 2017.