happenings in space #2: oct. 12-18, 2020
on mapping and authorship, artistic approaches to ecology, a laboratory for suburbia, healing and rebuilding beirut, embodied environments, and new perspectives on black ecology.
we’re marveling at last week’s performative, multimedia talk on an architecture of reparations by Black Reconstruction Collective, we’re thinking about Zoe Leonard’s “I want a president,” we’re making sure we are registered to vote and have requested and sent mail-in ballots, we’re watching the leaves fall and the smoke clear from the skies of eugene, oregon.
Zoe Leonard, I want a president, 1992, wheat-pasted paper, 240 x 360". Installation view, High Line, New York, October 10, 2016. Photo: Timothy Schenck.
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 13
MAPPING & AUTHORSHIP — COLUMBIA GSAPP — 7:30PM EST
Mapping defines and redefines landscapes informing concerns, priorities, and values of the author. The guests are invited to address questions of authorship in mapping as an exercise of recognition to define “the other”. Consequently, this visual acknowledgement informs the construction of place and space. Mapping & Authorship is interested in exploring the implications of this tool on the Latin community in Latin America and the United States by comparing tools and techniques across time and place. Kendall Thomas, Regner Ramos, Felipe Correa, and Laura Kurgan in conversation.
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON BLACK ECOLOGY — American Society for Environmental History — 7:00 - 8:30 PM EST
Panel discussion with Rob Gioielli, University of Cincinnati (moderator, Justin Hosbey, Emory University, Tony Perry, Univeristy of Virginia, Allison Puglisi, Harvard University, J.T. Roane, Arizona State University, and Teona Williams, Yale University. In the spring of 1970, there were no shortage of critiques of the emerging environmental movement. But sociologist Nathan Hare offered a different perspective in a piece entitled “Black Ecology”: “The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance to the ultimate liberation of black people. Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been so blatantly omitted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each other.” In the rest of the incisive essay, published in the April 1970 issue of The Black Scholar, the pioneering Black studies journal Hare co-founded a year before, he laid out how ecology matters to Black people, but the emerging definition of environmentalism was too focused on reform and maintaining quality of life for the white middle class, ignoring the environmental issues caused by racism, oppression and inequality, particularly experienced by Black people in America’s central cities.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 14
TOWARDS AN AGRARIAN URBANISM — Som Foundation — 4:00 PM PDT
Architect and urbanist Charles Waldheim will discuss his work as it relates to the topic of the “Shrinking our Agricultural Footprint.” The talk will open with a brief reconsideration of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s vision of Chicago as a distributed agrarian urban field and will locate that project in a longer history of progressive urban projects that address societal and environmental reform. This brief prehistory sets the context for the topic of the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize and will reference a small number of contemporary practices who are also engaging with the relationship between agricultural production, culinary culture, and urbanization. The main body of the talk will focus on Waldheim’s current research through the GSD Office for Urbanization including projects that explicitly focus on the agrarian context for new urban propositions.
JULIE-MARIE STRANGE: PET CEMETERY: SPACES OF FEELING AND THE ANIMAL DEAD, 1880-1950 — ANIMAL HISTORY GROUP — 11:00 - 12:30 PDT
In his novella The Loved One (1948) British author Evelyn Waugh lambasted an American death culture where even pet death was commercialised into some kind of sentimental travesty. As one character in the story notes, ‘No one who really loved an animal would bring them here’. But the commercial pet cemetery had been operating in England for almost seventy years when Waugh published The Loved One. For almost the whole of those seventy years, British commentators – especially in the press – had reported on the pet cemetery with bemusement, curiosity or condescension: it was a space of sentimentality rather than sensibility, associated with excessive or inappropriate feeling. This paper examines the affective dynamics of the pet cemetery to question what it meant to ‘really love an animal’ in the context of pet death and the commercial pet cemetery.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15
SARAH KANOUSE: Being Entangled: Artistic Approaches to Complex Ecologies — Tufts University — 12PM EST
The escalating and overlapping ecological crises are increasingly understood as more than problems of technology, resource use, and maldistribution. They are also, and perhaps fundamentally, epistemic problems: ways of perceiving, thinking, and valuing the world that favor separation over relation. As a domain traditionally associated with questions of sensing and valuing, the arts can rehearse alternate ways of approaching the embeddedness and contingency of human stories in much larger material, environmental, and inter-species assemblages. This talk will screen "Ecologies of Acknowledgment" (currently on view in the Artist Response exhibition at the Tufts University Art Galleries) and use this film, along with its companion print and Fall 2019 field trip to Deer Island, as a case study to suggest reparative and relational roles for the arts in environmental work beyond documentation of threat and loss.
NICHOLAS GALANIN Artist Talk — University of Houston — 2PM PDT
Nicholas Galanin’s (Tlingit/Unangax) work offers perspective rooted in connection to land and broad engagement with contemporary culture. For over a decade, Galanin has been embedding incisive observation into his work, investigating and expanding intersections of culture and concept in form, image and sound. His practice is expansive and includes numerous collaborations with visual and recording artists. His work is in numerous public and private collections and exhibited worldwide. Galanin apprenticed with master carvers and jewelers, earned his BFA at London Guildhall University in Jewelry Design and his MFA in Indigenous Visual Arts at Massey University in New Zealand. He lives and works with his family in Sitka, Alaska.
Healing and rebuilding Beirut: Lessons from a city demanding political and social change — UCL BARTLETT
Following a massive explosion in the Port of Beirut, researchers and activists in Lebanon have redoubled their efforts to challenge violent and negligent political practices. This session looks at the role of researchers, planners and urban activists in healing and rebuilding. Panelists reflect on the city of Beirut, and consider lessons which can be drawn on and might be useful in other cities around the world.
SARA JENSEN CARR W/ MICHAEL MURPHY: EMBODIED ENVIRONMENTS — MIT ARCHITECTURE — 6:00 PM EDT
Our changing understanding of the reciprocal relationship between the environment and the body is reflected in the palimpsests of our urban landscape. Concepts of wellness, disease, and treatment have influenced urban design from the Industrial Revolution to today, and the results have ranged from successful to unintended incubations of the next generation of illnesses. As we face a rupture in the parallel histories of public health and the public realm, examining our built environment through this lens is necessary to frame today’s most urgent questions. This talk looks to the past in order to offer meditations on how the urban landscape must shift again to address the intertwined issues of our pandemic present, social justice, and climate change for a healthier future for all.
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 16
SPRAWL SESSION I: WHITE SUBURBIAS — Laboratory for Suburbia — 12-2pm PDT
Laboratory for Suburbia launches with the first in a series of online “Sprawl Sessions”—public exchanges considering strategies for site-specific art and tactical design in the complex spaces of 21st-century suburbia. This event will interrogate the possibilities and challenges for interventionist art and design practice in predominantly white suburban spaces. Featured discussants include architects Keith Krumwiede and Bryony Roberts, artists Eric Gottesman (For Freedoms), Sarah Paulsen, Dread Scott and lauren woods, historian Walter Johnson, and Gavin Kroeber, instigator and lead organizer for Laboratory for Suburbia.
BIDEN’S FIRST 100 DAYS ON CLIMATE — BARD CEP — 12PM EDT
The National Climate Seminar is a monthly, lunchtime webinar that features climate scientists, political leaders, and policy analysts, each exploring the politics and science driving critical climate change decisions. Join us each month at noon eastern for a chance to connect with experts on climate and clean energy solutions.
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS, FILM SERIES, ETC.
A SCULPTURE, A FILM, & SIX VIDEOS — Wesleyan University
An exhibition of a sculpture, a film and a survey of six recent video works presented in a nontraditional, temporal framework in the Zilkha Gallery. Nestled into a custom-built atrium, Peter Fischli & David Weiss’ Son et lumière, acts as the pivot or fulcrum for the entire exhibition, the kinetic center around which everything else revolves. Acting as a counterweight, a proto-cinematic object, and a foil, the sculpture will be installed for the entire run of the exhibition and the videos will rotate out, one work projected continuously for two weeks. The video works address continuities and discontinuities in time. They connect a deep mystical time to the present tense, visualize cycles, and reach into the future for the potential it may hold for transformation. Video works are included by Renée Green, Karrabing Film Collective, Trisha Baga, Stanya Kahn, Arthur Jafa, and Charlotte Prodger.
BLACK BOTANY: THE NATURE OF BLACK EXPERIENCE — NYBG — EXHIBITION
Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience seeks to acknowledge the complex relationship between enslaved Black people, nature and the colonial environment and reconsider the conscious omission of Black knowledge of the natural world.
LIVING THE CITY — National Urban Development Policy — EXHIBITION
Cities are full of stories—simultaneous, contradictory, overlapping, and inextricably connected. Living the City tells over fifty stories from architecture, art, and city planning projects in the main hall of the former Berlin-Tempelhof Airport. The National Urban Development Policy exhibition shows processes and opportunities for action in cities across Europe. For three months, the former airport will be transformed into a venue for city life. In a walk-through urban collage, visitors will encounter a range of stories from people and projects that are actively involved in the city and civic society.
PERFORMANCES FOR HANDS AND DESERT FLOOR | JILL R. BAKER | ANTI-AESTHETIC — VIDEO SERIES
Performances for Hands and Desert Floor performs a physical and embodied relationship with the landscape. Each piece considers performance, sound, and mark-making in landscape and was created on site in the Mojave desert outside of Death Valley National Park in Rhyolite, Nevada at the Goldwell Open Air Museum and Residency Program. Jill R Baker is a visual artist whose work employs drawing, performance, and video to document improvised interactions with the natural world.
The R.A.W. POSTLIBRARY | Karin Bolender | ANTI-AESTHETIC — RESIDENCE
Karin Bolender (aka K-Haw Hart) is an artist-researcher who seeks "untold" stories within muddy meshes of mammals, plants, pollinators, microbes, and many others. Under the auspices of the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), she cultivates a homegrown, collaborative living-art-research practice that explores dirty words and entangled wisdoms of earthly ecologies through performance, writing, video/sound installation, and other experimental arts of multispecies storytelling. The R.A.W. PostLibrary is an ecological LivingArtResearch performance-residency, exploring the hyperlocal/hyperglobal ecologies of staying-at-home, whatever “home” might mean.
UNOCCUPIED TERRITORIES: THE OUTLYING ISLANDS OF AMERICA'S REALM — CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION — EXHIBITION
At the outer edges of the USA are the tattered fragments of its dominion, known as the Minor Outlying Islands. Though officially uninhabited, each of these islands is one of the 14 Territories of the USA (along with five that are inhabited: Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa). Over the course of empire, most of these remote atolls and islets have been utterly transformed, by resource extraction and global wars. Now they are remnants of our history, where human visitation is restricted or banned outright. The islands are being reclaimed by wildlife, and evolving in their own way. Their future is driven less by national interests, and more by the collective needs of the planet.
MAKING SENSE — Penn Program in Environmental Humanities — EXHIBITION
Making Sense is an art exhibition supplementing and illuminating the scholarly talks included in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling program. The digital gallery features digital objects contributed by artists and scholars who are also participating in the Climate Sensing and Data Storytelling Convening. Objects are good to think with and those displayed here provide imaginative prompts to conceptualizing environmental challenges that often elude representation.