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Tag: Covid-19

Symposium ‘det gode liv/The Sweetness of Living’ at Barents Spektakel Festival, 20th Feb 2021!

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!

Braiding Friction | biofriction

It is our great pleasure to announce details about the upcoming online event series ‘Braiding Friction’, conceived by the Biofriction network with Hangar.org, Cultivamos CulturaGalerija Kapelica / Kapelica Gallery and Bioart Society . As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and postponed activities, Biofriction has set up a series of Working Groups and online events. The aim is to answer to the need of an informed discussion on the science and politics of the pandemic and the possible role of artists and researchers, to unpack and understand the enormous complexity we are confronted with. The group hosted by the Bioart Society is called Non-Living Queerings and consists of philosopher Marietta Radomska, biologist Markus Schmidt, and artists and researchers Terike Haapoja, Margherita Pevere, and Mayra Citlalli Rojo Gómez. The launch event which will introduce all groups will take place on 2nd of June 18h (CET) with consecutive public events following. For more, see Biofricition website.

EDIT: You can now watch the recording of the session on the Biofriction YouTube channel:

STAY TOGETHER APART – AND A CRISIS QUOTE OF THE DAY 

“As far as the posthuman debate is concerned, there are no grounds for plunging into melancholy metaphysical ruminations about the end of the world. We need energizing projects that express generative narratives and do not wallow in the rhetoric of crisis. Especially when the crisis in question is to a certain extent the lament of white European cultures feeling vulnerable after they have become aware of how anthropogenic global risks are likely to affect them. They need to develop some decolonial perspective.”  Rosi Braidotti (2019: 69) on the role of the humanities and its crisis in Posthuman Knowledge (Polity Press)

At the height of the COVID-19 crisis in the Swedish medical system, it might appear hard-hearted to urge us all to not wallow in the melancholia of crisis. However, the energizing projects Braidotti refers to, and we add, the societal collaborations presently exercised in the most surprising places, is exactly what is needed now in society at large. Take the environmental humanities, medical humanities, technohumanities, bioart, collaborative natural sciences and their convergences internationally: many of us have persistently called for radical socioeconomic change, and now we are faced with just that. At a large scale. It is just that it happened in a way that we are not in a position to easily absorb just yet. Theory can wait, slow as it is at its best.

Clearly the impact of COVID-19 is a significant challenge – especially in relation to the vastness of what we do not know, and the humbleness called for by that insight. Yet also, the impact of COVID-19 also takes us to the threshold of societal re-assessments, reimaginings and new beginnings. And we are swiftly learning new things about ourselves, about how we can “stay together apart (in the trouble)” with social distancing and solidarity. (If we can play with the conceptual work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad).  Let us all continue with care, concern and curiosity with one-another.  In this there is hope. Call someone you have not talked to for a while, check in with your students, PhD students, or old supervisors, volunteer at the hospital, do shopping for the elderly or other vulnerable members of society, tend to your garden, and focus the force on the piles of books you have always wanted to read.

The world is changing, again, but it is not coming to an end.

Stay safe and well in there!!

Cecilia, Janna and Marietta for The Posthumanities Hub

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