Melting Capitalism Program
Wed, Learning Center, Juho
13:00 Annette Arlander: Rainy Day in Rekdal
13:30 Jesal Kapadia: She said, It’s not the sun that rises, but the earth that turns.
14:00 Tinna Grétarsdottir & Sigurjon B. Hafsteinsson: TURFICTION (turf+fiction)
14:30 Angela Sakrison: Rowboat Phenomenology: Non-Guided Detours of a Ruined Landscape
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Rainy Day in Rekdal
Annette Arlander
Wed 13:00, Learning Center, Juho
The video shown as part of this presentation is an attempt to share a moment with a plant. Performing for camera with a small downy birch on the shore in Rekdal, Lofoten, on 19 July 2017 as a try-out for the performance the following day, resulted in the video Rainy Day in Rekdal (With a Downy Birch) (15 min. 20 sec.), where the rain unexpectedly becomes the main player. The work is part of an ongoing artistic research project called Performing with Plants, documented here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/316550/316551
Bio
Annette Arlander, DA, MA, is an artist, researcher and pedagogue. She was professor of performance art and theory at Theatre Academy Helsinki (2001-2013), professor of artistic research at University of the Arts Helsinki (2015-2016), postdoctoral fellow at Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2017), and is now professor at Stockholm University of the Arts (2018-2019). Her research involves artistic research, performance-as-research, plants and the environment. Her artwork moves between performance art, media and environmental art.
See https://annettearlander.com
She said, It’s not the sun that rises, but the earth that turns.
Jesal Kapadia, artist
Wed 13:30, Learning Center, Juho
White like a fox, cunning like a dove. A play of nature, our nature, through images, sound, words, gestures, thought, whispers – reordered, rearranged, recited, used, played out. Looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue, clearing the space for that waiting, hearing, between bursts of laughter. In something like a relationship, a structure-less structure, neither available nor unavailable. Finding resonance.
Bio
Jesal Kapadia grew up in Mumbai. Her interests lie in an ethical praxis of being-in-common, and the cultivation of an awareness of art that is place-based, diversified, multiple, small-scale, collective and autonomous. Last year with Mattia Pellegrini she presented the video She has no land but she keeps sheep at Sensibile Comune, co-organised by friends as part of Communism17 in Rome.
TURFICTION (turf+fiction)
Tinna Grétarsdottir & Sigurjon B. Hafsteinsson
Wed 14:00, Learning Center, Juho
TURFICTION explores socio-material constellations, combining fiction with practices and concerns of turf-house, multispecies relations, care and time. TURFICTION is the creation of alternative environments of equal-but-different existences with participation of humans, non-humanothers, and the biosphere (Papadopoulos 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa 2010). It is a playful attempt to generate expanded views that decenter humans and call for architecture of a contingent, cultivated and growing existence. TURFICTION is about crafting new narratives that addressrelations between living worlds and dwelling and put in dialogue concepts of multi species co-habitation, collaboration and co-prodcution. It is a reaction to the environmental havoc, predominant capitalist crushed scales of time and progress, patriarchal and anthropocentric structures that have driven the move into the Anthropocene.
Bio
Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson is professor at the University of Iceland. His latest books in English are Indigenous Screen Cultures in Canada (2010) published by University of Manitoba Press, Unmasking Deep Democracy published by Intervention Press (2013), Phallological Museum (2014) published by LIT Verlag and Death and Governmentality: Neoliberalism, grief and the nation-form (2018) published by University of Iceland Press. Hafsteinsson´s fields of research have included indigenous media and democracy, visual culture and identities, death, representation, earth and architecture, ethics and power, museums and cultural politics.
Tinna Grétarsdottir is an anthropologist, independent researcher, lecturer and curator. She has also collaborated with artists Asmundur Asmundsson and Hannes Larusson in art and exhibition making in Reykjavik Art Museum, The Living Art Museum, Kling and Bang (Iceland). In her practice she seeks new ways of combining research and art. Her fields of research include art and cultural politics, competing discourses of creativity, interspecies ecologies and Turfiction. Her recent publications are Unveiling the Work of the Gift: Neoliberalism and the Flexible Margins of Nation-Stateâ. In J. Kjerulf (ed.),Flexible Capitalism. Exchange and Ambiguity at Work. Berghahn Books. 2016. Cultural Heritage, Art and (Trans)national Enterprise, in V. Hafstein og. Rastrick (eds.).Menningararfur Islandi: Gagnrani og Greining. Reykjavik: University of Iceland Press. 2015 and Creativity and Crisis, (co- authors A. Asmundsson and H. Larusson). In G. Palsson and P. Durrenberger (eds). Gambling Debt: Iceland’s Struggle with the New World Order. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. 2014.
Rowboat Phenomenology: Non-Guided Detours of a Ruined Landscape
Angela Sakrison
Wed 14:30, Learning Center, Juho
There’s something about floating in a rowboat that puts me in speculative mindsets. The stillness in motion, perhaps. I’ve been rowing around the same landscape in the Pacific Northwest since I was 7 in dinky blue rowboat, and I’ve watched the ecosystem go to crap over that time. Recently, I started putting the oars up and letting the tides and currents take me wherever they take me as an exercise in releasing control and resisting the desire for control. I do think it’s important to practice new forms of movement in the Anthropocene, in order to encounter climate change on the ecosystem’s terms.
Bio
Angela Sakrison, cultural geographer and co-director, post-human network, Portland