Discourse programme Claiming Common Spaces: Earth

What does the ongoing climate crisis and destruction of the environment mean for our way of life and our self-image as human beings, for our approach to planetary values and relationships? And how can the arts transform our knowledge systems and actions? The discourse program ›CCS IV: Earth‹ examines these questions with artists, theorists and activists. The topics they’ll be addressing include the role of aesthetics in the modern separation of nature and culture, resource extraction in the Ruhr, the Global South, and the deep sea, feminist practices of care in contemporary performance, and indigenous cosmologies.

With Nabil Ahmed, Denise Ferreira da Silva (within the framework of Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence / HAU Hebbel am Ufer #14), Catalina Insignares, Daniel Kötter, Bojana Kunst, Carolina Mendonça, Melanie Sehgal, Margarita Tsomou.

In English Registration: service@pact-zollverein.de

Denise Ferreira da Silva is one of the most influential and challenging thinkers of our time. Through her artistic and philosophical work, which includes a critical analysis of modern philosophy and science, she has contributed to decolonial and anti-racist thought with concepts such as difference without separability, black feminist poethics, and her reconception of value. But these approaches also prove to be extremely fruitful where they intersect with cosmopolitical thought, as they fundamentally reframe and redirect ecocritical currents and help to politically complexify underlying notions of body, thinking, justice, life, history, futurity, or the human subject among others. Denise Ferreira da Silva is Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her most recent book Unpayable Debt was published in 2022. Her artistic works include the films Soot Breath / Corpus Infinitum (2020, with Arjuna Neuman), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018) and the relational art projects Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, developed with Valentina Desideri.The discourse is the 14th edition of the series Burning Futures: On Ecologies of Existence, organized and moderated by Margarita Tsomou and Maximilian Haashosted in cooperation with HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin.

Filmstill: landscapes and bodies, © Daniel Kötter

The exploitation of earthly resources plays a decisive role in ecopolitics. And it does so both in fossil capitalism and in the “green” alternatives of it, as energy transition increases the demand for mineral resources and rare earths. These forms of extractivism are embedded in aggressive geopolitics that require new methods of epistemic, forensic, and activist practice. How can aesthetic practices uncover these crimes against humans and natures and intervene politically? Daniel Kötter (Berlin) is an international documentary film and theater director who has recently completed a series of spatial performances and 360° films about the landscapes and social consequences of extractivism in Germany, West Papua, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Estonia. Nabil Ahmed (Trondheim) is a transdisciplinary researcher and writer working at the interface between spatial practice, visual culture, and environmental science who investigates and advocates for the criminalization of ecocide in international law. Louise Wagner (Berlin) is a sociologist and environmental activist at Ende Gelände, where she focuses on raising awareness of the colonial continuities perpetuated by current gas expansion, and at Debt for Climate, which demands debt cancellation to finance a just transition in countries of the Global South.

An important condition for today’s environmental exploitation and destruction is the modern nature-culture divide. What is the role of aesthetics in its historical formation? How can contemporary aesthetic practices problematize and transform this divide? Melanie Sehgal is a philosopher (Berlin/Wuppertal) with a close affinity to artistic practices who is currently writing a book on The Arts of a New Climatic Regime. The artist and researcher Sonia Levy (London) who engages with other/more-thanhuman worlds in light of prevailing earthly precarity. Alex Martinis Roe’s (Melbourne) artistic research is focused on feminist genealogies, seeking to foster specific and productive relations between different generations as a way of participating in the construction of feminist histories and futures.

In light of the ecological crises and precarious living conditions of our time, feminist care practices have moved to the center of political and performative action. How do these practices relate to human and non-human bodies, to life and death? And how can these relations be organized differently in and through the arts? Bojana Kunst (Frankfurt am Main/Giessen) is a philosopher, dramaturg, and performance theoretician, whose new book analyses the contradictions of care through the lens of feminist and decolonial thought. Catalina Insignares (Paris) and Carolina Mendonça (Brussels) began collaborating in 2014 while studying choreography and performance in Giessen. The body and the extrasensorial have become central tools for asking questions of the world from the corner where their window is.