MEANDER presents: Ecological Thinking and Artistic Practice
MEANDER International Platform is pleased to offer a series of presentations by a cohort of international collectively-focused, multidisciplinary artists, activists and thinkers whose work in Brazil, Chile, Norway, Denmark, Australia and the United States explore why the commons is an important framework for understanding ecological emergency.
The event will stream online Saturday December 4 beginning at 4PM (Oslo), 12PM (Santos), 10AM (New York.
The program is co-produced by members of MEANDER International Platform with support from Arts Council Norway.
PROGRAM:
4 pm Oslo/ 12 pm Santos/ 10 am NY
Introduction by Meander Society
4:05 pm Oslo/ 12:05 pm Santos/ 10.05 am
Mixture/ Choreographic and affective alliances between women and plants
By Marina Guzzo (Lab Corpo e Arte)
Mixture is a dispositiv that proposes an assembly game using elements that you have at hand. The game intends to forge a ritual between women and plants, and to think of a choreographic mixture – as a play on the words used by the Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia (2018) which suggests a metaphysics of the mixture. Making alternative dance/choreography of interspecific, feral, non-human worlds, as a form of resistance to the anthropocene/ plantationcene/ Capitolocene, bringing together perspectives that point to cosmopolitics from other ways of being in the world: stem, roots, sap, leaves, flowers and fruits. A choreography of women interested in finding possible alliances between clothes, objects and plants. “Affective alliances” as Ailton Krenak would say, based on improbable daily life. Impossible relationships and neighborhoods. For this, the workshop has a score, which begins with a drift of “search”, of fallen plants, forgotten objects, cheerful costumes. Then assemble to transform. Transforming to make other arrangements and imagine futures and counter-domestication rituals.
4:20 pm Oslo/ 12:20 pm Santos/ 10:20 am NY
Bog Is Good: Sensing Local Peatlands
By Caitlin Franzmann, Christy Gast and Randi Nygård (Ensayos)
Ensayos is a collective research practice initiated on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego in 2010. Ensayos’ issue-based research methodologies arise from archipelagic delirium and are characterized by their sensuality and precariousness. In partnership with the existing ecological and cultural conservation initiatives on the main isle of Tierra del Fuego (WCS Parque Karukinka, Caleta Maria, Fundación Hach Saye), Ensayos entangles artistic practices, social science methods and Indigenous movements with pressing environmental research. Dedicated to policy, care, and awareness of the ecosystemic importance of peat bogs, Ensayo #6 is committed to the biodiversity conservation processes of the new Patagonian Peatland Initiative and others like it around the world. Randi Nygård (Norway), Caitlin Franzmann (Australia) and Christy Gast (USA) will give presentations about poethical issues related to their local bogs.
https://ensayostierradelfuego.net/
4:35 pm Oslo/ 12:35 pm Santos/ 10:35 am NY
A Colaboradora
By Marina Paes (Instituto Procomum)
Marina Paes presents Initituto Procomum’s Colaboradora program, which offers artists training and experience in collaborative practices with the aim of strengthening cooperation, building networks and expanding repertoires. The program offers a free school with workshops, mentorships, and participation in different events; access to the LAB Procomum, a physical space for collective use, with all the necessary resources for a project to take off; and articulation with other networks and communities. Participants are selected through a public call and are fully subsidized. Participants contribute to a time bank that encourages the exchange of services between everyone, strengthening the logic of collaboration. Colaboradora is a project for social inclusion and combating inequality, which is impossible to face without considering aspects of class, race and gender. Thus, the selected participants come from the different outskirts of Baixada Santista, with an emphasis on women, the Afro-descendant population, the LGTBQI+ and indigenous peoples. National and international guests exchange ideas and experiences with participants and with the public of LAB Procomum, so that this network can also be strengthened nationally and internationally.
https://colaboradora.procomum.org/
4:50 pm Oslo/ 12:50 pm Santos/ 10:50 pm NY
BREAK
5 pm Oslo/ 1 pm Santos/ 11 am NY
Sørfinnset skole/ the nord land in community and Sámi perspectives
By Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen (Meander Society)
Sørfinnset skole/ the nord land examines how contemporary art can function in a long-term dialogue with a small local community. The initiators of the project, Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen, present an everlasting artist’s engagement in a village in Northern Norway.
http://sorfinnsetskole.blogspot.com/
5:15 pm Oslo/ 1:15 pm Santos/ 11:15 am NY
Coletivo Etinerâncias/ Networks of care
By Raissa Capasso and Gabriel Kieling (guests)
Since 2014, Coletivo Etinerancias/ Networks of Care has operated from daily practice, strengthening autonomous experiences through methodological advice to social movements, traditional communities (indigenous villages, quilombos, coastal villages and peasants…) and spaces of resistance (occupations, settlements, slums ..) through Brazil and other territories of Abya Yala. Through coexistence, bonding, listening and supporting collective intelligence in political articulation in the field of relationships and the common. It disputes human relations and everyday times against neoliberal fragmentation from social, ancestral and digital technologies, with a set of strategies that range from cartography, systematization and exchange of experiences and knowledge to agroecology. In addition, he shares his days with midwives, herbalists, storytellers, master griots, healers… And they dedicate their paths, as apprentices and co-creators of oral and ancestral tradition, to the connection of living culture, meeting points between worlds.
https://etinerancias.com.br/
5:30 pm Oslo/ 1:30 pm Santos/ 11:30 am NY
The Fjord and the Mountain
By Kjersti Vetterstad and Kristin Astrup Aas (Meander Society)
Kjersti Vetterstad and Kristin Astrup Aas presents ongoing work on the documentary film The Fjord and the Mountain, which takes its starting point in a planned open-pit mine in the Engebø Mountain on the west coast of Norway, and depositing of mining waste in the Førde Fjord.
https://greenhouseprod.no/fjorden-og-fjellet-the-fjord-and-the-mountain/
5:45 pm Oslo/ 1:45 pm Santos/ 11:545 pm NY
BREAK
6 pm Oslo/ 2 pm Santos/ 12 pm NY
Becoming mineral
By Olive Bieringa (guest)
How can we perceive more of the whole scale of the sensitivities, intelligences and within us, the human and non-human? How can we perceive more of the commonalities we share with each other? As we ground and expand our perceptual capacities can we build new relations to transform the way we experience and live in the world? We will breathe and move together.
https://bodycartography.org/author/olive/
6:30 pm Oslo/ 2:15 pm Santos/ 12:15 pm NY
Bog as Body + Bodies as Ruins + Ruins as Rebirth
By Teal Gardner, Morgan Kulas, Justin Moore, Rebecca Schultz, Natalie Stopka, Becca Zablocki, Alejandra Ortiz de Zavallos – Nomad Interdisciplinary MFA Students at the University of Hartford & Ensayos (guests)
Students in the University of Hartford’s Nomad Interdisciplinary MFA took an Art & Ecology course with Christy Gast and Camila Marambio, who teach collaboratively as part of Ensayos, in June, 2021. The course focused on peatland conservation. Students participated in the Binational Seminar on the Peatlands of Patagonia and learned about peatland ecology through a field trip to the Crystal Peat Conservation Area in Tolland, CT. For their final project, students collaboratively responded to a prompt from the Patagonia Peatland Initiative to experiment with the ArcGIS StoryMap platform to create an interactive tool that creatively integrates art and science to tell the story of a (former) peatland. The students will present their StoryMap, which delves into the complex past, present and future of the Crystal Peat Conservation Area, followed by a Q & A.
https://ensayostierradelfuego.net/programs/3039/
6:45 pm Oslo/ 3:45 pm Santos/ 1:45 pm NY
BREAK
7 pm Oslo/ 3 pm Santos/ 1 pm NY
Yandê – Indigenous Radio
By Zulu Anápuàka M. Tupinambá Hã hã hãe (guest)
Rádio Yandê is educational and cultural. Our objective is to spread indigenous culture through a traditional perspective, but adding the speed and reach of technology and the internet. Our need to encourage new “indigenous correspondents” in Brazil makes it possible for us to build a much stronger collaborative communication compared to traditional Radio and TV media.
https://radioyande.com/
7:15 pm Oslo/ 3:15 pm Santos/ 1:15 pm NY
Wild Living Marine Resources Belong to Society as a Whole
By Randi Nygård and Karolin Tampere (Meander Society)
In 2017 Nygård and Tampere edited an interdisciplinary anthology based on and named after Section 2 in Norway’s Marine Resources Act. In 2019 and 2021 Nygård, Holm and Jørgensen continued the project with a series of events at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, where they related to the law not only with the usual legal definitions but also with a more poetic and fundamental approach to management, different ideas about the environment and our role in nature, world views, language and values. Nygård will introduce the projects briefly before we hear excerpts from interviews about the act with activists, lawyers, professors, fishermen, and in the end poetic laws for a better future.
https://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/52199/
7:30 pm Oslo/ 3:30 pm Santos/ 1:30 pm New York
Contagious Zone
By Henrique Parra and Alana Moraes (guests)
Pimentalab is a transdisciplinary laboratory based at UNIFESP that works with investigations into knowledge practices, technopolitics and social struggles. We are interested in situated research actions, thinking about ways of activating and caring for life forms (and their technologies) that emerge in situations of conflict and onto-epistemological tensions, oriented towards cooperation and production of the Common. We investigate the new configurations of contemporary capitalism and the knowledge-power relationship based on the technical order of the world – infrastructures, knowledge technologies, control devices, digital technologies and cybernetic mediation – and their modes of subjectivation, as well as collective forms of resistance, experimenting and sustaining the Common at the interfaces between territories, bodies, dissidences and technical and scientific actions. Recently, we pursued a multiscale research practice to think about the reverberations of the Anthropocene/ Technocene and the War of the Worlds it engenders, also mapping other propositions and fables of worlds, knowledge practices that emerge from human and other than human coexistence in the intersections between cosmotechnics and cosmopolitics.
www.pimentalab.net
7:45 pm Oslo/ 3:45 pm Santos/ 1:45 pm NY
ENDING
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS:
Marina Guzzo, artist, and researcher, concentrates her creations at the interface of the body and the landscape, mixing dance, performance and circus when tensioning the limits of subjectivity in cities and in nature. Since 2011, the climate crisis and the role of the artist in the production of imagery for crossing a ruined world on the Plantationoceno have been at the center of her research. She works in partnership with health, culture and social assistance equipment, thinking of art as a political action that weaves a complex network of people, institutions, objects and nature. The artist has a post-doctorate from the Department of Performing Arts at ECA-USP and a master’s and doctorate in Social Psychology from PUC-SP. She is an Adjunct Professor at Unifesp at the Baixada Santista Campus, a researcher at the Corpo e Arte Laboratory in the Society and Health Institute.
Caitlin Franzmann is a Brisbane-based artist who creates installations, sonic experiences, performances, and social practice works that focus on place-based knowledge and embodied practices. Caitlin has exhibited at National Gallery of Victoria, Institute of Modern Art, TarraWarrra Museum of Art and Kyoto Art Centre. She was recipient of the 2014 Churchie National Emerging Art Prize and was selected to exhibit in Primavera 2014: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art. As a member of the feminist art collective LEVEL from 2013-2017, Caitlin has collaboratively presented participatory works at Gallery of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. With LEVEL, she has also co-curated exhibitions and forums with a focus on generating dialogue around gender, feminism and contemporary art. She was on the management committee of Outer Space ARI 2018-2019, and is currently a core member of Ensayos, a collective research practice centered on extinction, human geography, coastal health and peatland conservation. She originally trained as an urban planner before completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at Queensland College of Art in 2012.
Christy Gast is an artist who makes textile-based sculptures, performances, videos, and collaborative works about eco-political, queer, interspecies entanglements. She is interested in places where there is evidence of conflict in human desires, which she traces, translates or mirrors through her art practice. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Performa, Artist’s Space, Harris Lieberman Gallery and Regina Rex in New York; the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, Bass Museum of Art, de la Cruz Collection, Locust Projects, and Nina Johnson in Miami; as well as Mass MoCA, the American University Museum, L.A.C.E., High Desert Test Sites, Centro Cultural Matucana 100 (Chile), the Kadist Foundation (Paris) and Milani Gallery (Brisbane).
Marina Paes is a psychologist, cultural manager, and coordinator of the Colaboradora Arts and Communities, free school of the Procomum Institute.
Søssa Jørgensen lives in Skiptvet, Norway at the farm Øvre Ringstad. Parallel to individual work that includes video, photography, drawing and performance, Søssa has worked long-term with radio and sound art in collaboration with peer Yngvild Færøy. Together with Geir Tore Holm and artists from Thailand, Sørfinnset School/ the nord land was initiated in Oarjelih Bájjdár/Gildeskål, Norway in 2003, this ongoing project focuses on the exploitation of nature, exchange of knowledge in the field of a broad aesthetically understanding of ecological realities of society, humans and nature.
Geir Tore Holm artist, grew up in the Sámi community Olmmáivággi/Manndalen, Gáivuotna/Kåfjord. He lives and works at Øvre Ringstad Farm in Skiptvet, Østfold. Graduated from Kunstakademiet i Trondheim in 1995. With Søssa Jørgensen he established Sørfinnset skole/ the nord land in Gildeskål, Nordland in 2003. Geir Tore Holm was head of project in the founding of Kunstakademiet in Tromsø – UiT in 2007. From 2009 till his dissertation in 2017 he was a fellow in artistic research at KHiO–Oslo National Academy of the Arts with the project Poetics For Changing Aesthetics.
Raissa Capasso is a Community Social Psychologist, Post Graduate in Traditional Chinese Medicine, Actress, Educator and Feminist. It also works with Methodological Advice and Latino self-management practices and mobilizes the construction of policy from the daily experience of Women.
Gabriel Lieling is a Latin American traveling apprentice. Urban Architect, Artist, Educator, Poet, Guardian of Creole Seeds…Researches and co-creates social, ancestral and digital technologies and methodologies and mobilizes the Latin American Network for Knowledge and Community Sciences.
Kristin Astrup Aas is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a MA from The Danish Academy of Arts, Architect school in Copenhagen, with emphasis on the ephemeral and sense perceptions in creation of place. She has worked in urban planning with conservation of green spaces, and as an architect on projects concerning homeless, refugees, and shelter and settlements in disasters. She has a certificate on Permaculture Design from Norway and has been working with practical ecology in urban farming projects, cultivation of heirloom seeds, and wild city foraging. Since 2016 she has been involved in collaborative work with other artists in film, theater, performance, and in writing on the topics eco-philosophy and environmentalism.
Kjersti Vetterstad (b. 1977) is a visual artist living and working in Oslo (NO). She is educated from the National Academy of Arts in Bergen (NO) and Konstfack in Stockholm (SE). Through media spanning from performance and installation to sound, video and film, Vetterstad explores themes such as time, place and impermanence, and questions related to identity and alienation. In recent years her works have revolved around issues of environmental challenges and questions related to the boundaries that define the relations between the human and the more than human world. Vetterstad is chair of MEANDER Society and one of the founding members of MEANDER International Platform.
Olive Bieringa is a dance, performance and visual artist working at the intersection of social and creative practice, pedagogy, and healing. She is a teacher, and practitioner of Body-Mind Centering and a program director of Somatic Education Australasia. She collaborates with Otto Ramstad as the BodyCartography Project whose mission is to engage with the vital materiality of our bodies and minds to create live performance that facilitates a re-enchantment of embodiment, relationship, and presence. She is a doctoral candidate at the Theatre Academy, Uniarts Arts, Helsinki.
Zulu Anápuàka M. Tupinambá Hã hã hãe
Creator – Founder and CEO Rádio Yandê, Mani Bank and Yby Festival By Abya Yala, Son of Pindorama, Tupinambá Nation, elder and grandfather, Communicator, businessman, indigenous digital culture in Brazil, Tecno-shamanist, Indigenous Organic and Virtual Artist, indigenous ethnomedia, CEO, Executive Producer, Rádio Yandê (indigenous web radio) , Casa Yandê, Contemporary Indigenous Music Award, Yby Festival, Indigenous Maker, specialist in HiperMuseums, Bussines RedSkin Money, Indigenous RePangeia. And in my spare time as a hobby I’m an alien.
Karolin Tampere (b. Tallinn, Estonia) is an visual artist and curator based in Lofoten, Norway. Part of her practice is to work with sound, write for artists, commission new works and strive to present artistic practice, presence and work with a transdisciplinary approach in often periferic locations. She has a particular interest in collaborative, social and performative practices, sound and listening. Tampere has currently the position as curator at the North Norwegian Art Centre in Svolvær, and together with Hilde Mehti, Neal Cahoon and Torill Østby Haaland she co-curated LIAF2019 – Lofoten International Art Festival.
Randi Nygård is an artist and writer who lives and works in Oslo, Norway. Her practice concerns our basic relations to and view on nature. Aiming to create both wonder and enthusiasm for the natural environment, she highlights how humans have a profound impact on but also deep affiliation with nature. She demonstrates our tendency to understand the natural environment merely as material resources, and how we in doing so fail to remember that life is everywhere around us. Nygård graduated with an MFA from the Art Academy in Trondheim in 2006. Nygård is also a member of Ensayos and MEANDER.
Henrique Z.M. Parra – sociologist, associate professor of undergraduate and graduate courses in Social Sciences at the Federal University of São Paulo. He is coordinator of Pimentalab (Technology, Policy and Knowledge Laboratory), researcher at LAVITS (Latin American Network for Studies in Surveillance, Technology and Society) and member of the Tramadora collective.
Alana Moraes de Souza holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the National Museum – UFRJ. Master by the Sociology and Anthropology program at UFRJ. (2012). Graduated in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (2010). Experience in the field of Anthropology, with an emphasis on Political Anthropology; Gender Studies, Social Movements and Knowledge Practices. Specialist in contemporary Latin American politics at the Institut des Hautes Etudes de l”Amerique Latine (IHEAL), Nouvelle Sourbonne Paris III with a Master Île-de-France scholarship. She is a researcher at the Technology, Policy and Knowledge Laboratory (Pimentalab) at Unifesp, where it develops research and extension actions.
You find more infromation about the four collectives and initiatives that constitute MEANDER International Platform here: https://meanderinternational.org/category/collectives/
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