During calm nights in May and June, and synched by the full moon, bladderwrack releases its eggs and sperms. If you want to pay tribute to the forests of the sea and help bladderwrack reproduce, especially in the Baltic Sea, you can help it find new homes.
You don’t need to erect an underwater Midsummer pole, as (P)Art of the Biomass did together with marine biologists Cecilia Wibjörn and Maria Bodin at Tjärnö Marine Laboratory, Sweden. The only thing you need is a large rock where fertilized eggs of bladderwrack, zygotes, can settle. Or a brush, with which you can scrub a cliff clean from green algae, below the waterline, nearby where bladderwrack grows. If there’s an abundance of green algae, bladderwrack might find it hard to find a surface where the tiny zygotes can settle and grow.
Midsummer full moon occurs the 24th of June, 8:40 p.m. (CEST/Swedish time). If it’s a calm evening, the bladderwrack will spawn. Before this happens, take a walk with us to the sea.
It’s the smell of home I guess
Sound, voice and editing: Janna Holmstedt. Field-recordings from an intertidal zone and singing by Janice McEwen in Lofoten, Norway.
Find your way to the sea Seek out where bladderwrack grows on hard cliffs and stones Air-filled pods keep the algae afloat Spongy bladders are swelling when ready to spawn Prepare a clean, hard surface Scrub a cliff Sink a stone Feel the sponginess and readiness Smell the tangle And for a moment, be that stone
Photos: Malin Lobell and Janna Holmstedt
This ceremony has been composed by (P)Art of the Biomass for the Nordic-Baltic transdisciplinary State of the Art Network in which the Posthumanities Hub is a member, and was originally posted here.
Welcome to the Posthumanities Hub Seminar on Queer Death Aesthetics with speakers: Karolina Żyniewicz (University of Warsaw) and Jacob B. Riis (Aarhus University)!
Queer Death Studies (QDS) is an emerging transdisciplinary field that critically investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions and expectations surrounding the issues of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. In particular, QDS pays attention to the ways planetary-scale necropolitics render some lives and deaths more recognised, understood or grievable than others. If ‘queering’ in QDS is understood in a broad, open-ended sense as strange-making, defamiliarising, where the critical defamiliarisation implied may lead to an opening of other, more affirmative horizons, what would then ‘queer death aesthetics’ mean? During the seminar we will try to tackle this question in depth…
The event is curated by Dr Marietta Radomska and is organised in collaboration with The Eco- and Bioart Lab.
When:27th May 2021, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST
Where:On Zoom
REGISTRATION:In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 25th May 2021 at noon (CEST) the latest.
The Zoom link will be sent to you on 26th May.
More info below.
Photos included in the poster: Portrait of Karolina Żyniewicz by Pawel Jozwiak (CSW Laznia, Gdansk; LEFT) and Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (RIGHT).
Speakers:
Safe suicide – becoming immortal and dying anyway.
By Karolina Żyniewicz
How to experience immortal life and death at the same time? How to do it safely, without a risk? Are cells isolated from my body still part of me? These were the main questions which I asked to myself and to my scientific collaborators in the beginning of working on safe suicide project. The project was transmattering on many different levels, a transformation of the body and its notion, understanding of life and death coalition, cognitive production, artistic expression. In the frame of the project I immortalised my cells, B lymphocytes just in order to decide about their death. Technically speaking, it was giving to them/myself immortality to take it back in many different experiments. It was being a donor, an observer, a caretaker and a killer at the same time. The project does not give precise answers for the posted questions but it allows to envision what means being liminal, being many and being constantly reconfigured.
Bio
Karolina Żyniewicz is an artist (2009 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Department of Visual Arts) and researcher, PhD student (Nature-Culture Transdisciplinary PhD Program at Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw). Working in a laboratory (mostly at the Institute of Genetics and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw) locates her works in the field of bio art, although she tries to avoid using this term.
Are we dead yet?
By Jacob B. Riis
One of the defining characteristics in human behavioural modernity is burial of the dead in conjunction with ritual and art – art’s primordial love affair is with putrefying corpses. This project outlines a genre that utilises material corpses to produce contemporary art pieces. I currently conceptualise this art form as Necro Art, which serves to connect it to Mbembian inspired Necro Aesthetics and simultaneously establish it as its own field or genre within Art History. While perhaps being a version of Body Art originating in Viennese Actionism, Necro Art simultaneously aligns along different trajectories. It samples and shuffles in early human ritual, folkloric, pagan and rural art forms usually not present in realms of High/Academic Art, and brings the overlooked, the spectral, the magical, and the illiterate too Art History. Through focus on materiality, agency and constellations of subjectivities, each artwork conjures ghosts, reveals life where there is none, and allows its experiencer to connect with the dead, forcing us to reconsider the boundaries of life.
Bio
Jacob B. Riis, Art historian (graduated from Copenhagen University in 2014), 2009-2014 Curator Assistant at The Danish Museum of National History, Hillerød, 2014-2018 Head of Teaching and Curator at Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen, currently PhD student at Art History, Aarhus University.
Check out the exciting online event: det gode liv/The Sweetness of Living forming part of the Barents Spektakel festival, taking place on 17-21 February in Kirkenes, Norway. The symposium itself is scheduled on 20th February (Saturday) from 10:00 to 14:00 CET. It takes place both on location and online. In order to register, fill out the form here.
Here’s a short description of the event, taken from the organisers’ website:
det gode liv // The Sweetness of Living is a networking, knowledge exchange, and experience-sharing artistic research and contemporary art project that begins in February 2021 and extends into the long-term future.
The research takes its inspiration from the publication Global Warming and the Sweetness of Life: A Tar Sands Tale (2018) by Matt Hern and Am Johal, where the authors investigate philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s invocation of Alexandre Kojeve’s phrase ‘la dolce vita’.
These ideas describe a common attitude in Spain, Italy, and southern Europe that is claimed to be qualitatively different from the Protestant work ethic of northern European countries. Agamben’s claim is that this attitude describes a wholly different relationship to the future, a recovery of time, a resistance to capitalism, and the preservation of a significant way of living: in short, the capacity to define life as something outside of work.
det gode liv // The Sweetness of Living builds on these gestures, investigating and challenging what ‘the sweetness of life’ represents specifically in the Barents region / the nordic countries and north-west Russia / Sápmi. The project is grounded in the belief that the topic has become an urgent cultural question following the events of 2020, when the present societal changes taking place during the Covid-19 pandemic have urged a radical re-configuration of the priorities of life and living.
The project begins by opening up the topic through three artworks and through several discursive, performative, and processual responses under The Sweetness of Living Symposium.
Among the speakers you can also find our team members: Marietta Radomska and Cecilia Åsberg with their talk on “More than survival: weaving vulnerabilities, questioning certainties, mobilising resilience. On low-trophic theories-practices for a more-than-human world”, starting at 12:00 sharp! Hope to see you there!
Quite Frankly: It’s a Monster Conference presented by SymbioticA and Somatechnics will be held in the University of Western Australia on the 18-19 of October 2018.
2018 marks 200 years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley’s “Creature” is usually
conceived as a human creation, the stitched-together, tragic victim of
scientific and technological experimentation. We rupture these stitches,
revealing that the Creature is more than the sum of its parts. We invite
papers, panels, and artistic and scientific provocations to explore the
dynamic ecosystems evolving within and from the gaps between the
Creature’s fragments.
Keynote speakers are Karen Barad, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Kira O’Reilly and
Fiona Wood.
For more see: http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/symposiums/quite-frankly-2018
You can find the call for papers here. The submission deadline has been extended until 7th April 2018.
Quite Frankly conference is part of the Unhallowed Arts Festival which
includes a series of exhibitions (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts,
WA Art Gallery, Cullity Gallery, MOANA, Paper Mountain and Old Customs
House Fremantle), a day-long Film Festival and other performances. For
more information, see the developments of the Unhallowed Arts site: http://unhallowedarts.org/
Image source: https://www.conferenceonline.com/abstract/alogin/?clear=1&warehouse_id=1423