Presentations and a discussion on the planetary dimensions of energy and ecology, with artist Ursula Biemann, social anthropologist Miruna Tîrcă, and curators Maja and Reuben Fowkes.
Ursula Biemann: Carbonecologies
Looking at her video essays Black Sea Files (2005) and Deep Weather (2013), the artist talk addresses crucial questions of resource geographies and the aesthetics of artistic fieldwork. Mineral resources and fossil fuels are the driving force of our consumer society but the rate at which they are extracted raises great concern for the survival of the planet. In Black Sea Files, Biemann follows the construction of a Caspian oil pipeline, recording the transformations triggered by the transnational infrastructure, whereas Deep Weather alludes to the world ecology as an interconnected system in which the effect of heavy fossil fuel extractions made in the boreal woods of Northern Canada are experienced by Delta inhabitants in Bangladesh who struggle to protect themselves from raising sea levels. These videos focus on oil and water as two primordial liquids that form the undercurrents of all narrations as they activate profound changes in the planetary ecology. Considering minute but consistent material transformations a decisive force that drives the reconfiguration of our terrestrial reality, including the political one, these video works place scientific attention, fieldwork and videography as reality-producing practices in this process.
Biographies:
Ursula Biemannis an artist, writer and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates the social ecologies of oil and water. Her video installations have been exhibited at International Art Biennials of Istanbul, Liverpool, Sevilla, Shanghai, Gwangiu, Montreal and in museums worldwide. She is currently working on Forest Law on resource ecology in Amazonia, commissioned by The Broad Art Museum, MSU Michigan. Publisher of several books, she is appointed Doctor honoris causa in Humanities by the Swedish University Umea (2008). www.geobodies.org
Drs.MajaandReuben Fowkesare art historians and curators whose interests in the field of art and ecology are manifest in their curated exhibitions, symposia and writings, exploring key ideas and practices around green curating, environmental art history and the sustainability of contemporary art. Their work also focuses on the theory and aesthetics of East European art from the art production of the socialist era to contemporary artistic responses to the transformations brought by globalisation. Current projects include a River School on the Danube on sustainability and contemporary art, a museum show of leading Hungarian artist Csaba Nemes, and a symposium on Art, Ecopower and the Liberation of Energy. They work out of Budapest and London through the Translocal Institute (www.translocal.org).
Miruna Tîrcăis a social anthropologist, with a degree in Philology, Ethnology, Anthropology and Community development. She is a founding member and President of Komunitas Association, an NGO focused on applied social sciences and urban education, an interdisciplinary approach of making the city more understandable to young people. Miruna has initiated and coordinated one of the first urban education programmes for teenagers in Romania. She has done research and studies in the following fields: disadvantaged communities and neighbourhoods, alternative communities and urban squatting, oral history of 2 Mai, a Romanian seacoast village.
