Yearly Archives: 2017

OPEN CALL: NKA Foundation, MUD HOUSE DESIGN COMPETITION

NKA Foundation seeks to garner advisors, partners and supporters to run the 5th Annual Earth Architecture Competition: Designing a Rural Arts Centre for Senegal. Additionally, they are putting together a list of jury team members and advisors to push the 5th edition as far as it can go.
OBJECTIVE:
The objective is to design a modern mud type that will be built as a unit of an artisanal village, a residential vocational training center for unemployed rural youth of ages 16 to 25 years to undergo a 2-year skills development training in the vocational arts and earth architecture. We want the school plan to emphasize sustainable architecture and cost efficient construction. Thus, we want the buildings to fully integrate earth architecture and passive solar design.
The challenge for the contestants is to design one of the following types for the school: a classroom type, cafeteria type, office building type, dormitory type, group toilet type, cafeteria type, theatre type, dwelling type for the local teachers, and guest house type for our international visiting staff. Contestants are to design the school type for construction by maximum use of earth and local labor. Total costs of constructing the design entry is not to exceed $10,000 (USD) for materials and labor. The construction site will be Diakounda village in Sediou Region of the Casamance in Senegal.
Last Year’s Participants and More Information on the Competition:
Here are the submitted entries in the 4th edition and more information on the competition itself: http://nkaprojects.boards.net/thread/59/submitted-design-entries

What’s Next?
As the construction of the best design entries is priority, from February 2017 to July 2019, NKA is collaborating with some of the design teams in the competition and new partners to organize construction workshops to build the design entries based on last year’s site at Abetenim in Ghana.
The building workshop to construct the 1st prize winning entry will be held from March 1 to May 24, 2017; the workshop to build the 2nd prize winning entry will be from June 2 to August 25, 2017; and the building workshop for the 3rd prize winning design will run from July 8 to September 30, 2017. Whereas, workshop to realize the design entry that were awarded Honorable Mention will run as follows: Infinitely Reproducible Class from February 6 to May 6, 2017; Classroom from March 1 to May 24, 2017; and Classroom Type from 8 July to 30 September, 2017. Through an open call for participation, each workshop will bring together students and recent graduates of architecture, landscape architecture, engineering, interior design, and anyone interested in construction to join the workshop and play a part in line with their expertise.
The Building Challenge:
How do you learn to design what is build-able? It is by designing and building your own design!
Nka Foundation has come to know that by immersing the young designers in the full circle of designing and building their design. The designers will not only garner project management skills, we anticipate that at the completion of the design-build process, the emerging architects will learn to design what is build-able to make a well-rounded graduate. For the professional, you will find the hands-on earth building experience a pause from your office work to rediscover the rudiments of architecture and nuances that can refresh your practice.
Thus, NKA seeks inviting schools of architecture and design, architecture associations, volunteer-sending organizations, Without Borders organizations, service learning / Co-op university programs, and community-spirited individuals to join us as project partners and supporters in building the top design entries in rural Ghana.
Read more: http://nkaprojects.boards.net/thread/59/submitted-design-entries#ixzz4dmk8eiHB
Contact:
To participate, contact  info@nkafoundation.org / www.nkafoundation.org .

Opportunity: Magnetic North’s ‘Rough Mix’ – Artist Residencies

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

This opportunity comes from Magnetic North- for more information please visit their website.


 

Deadline: 17 April 2017 at 13:00

Magnetic North’s 2017 multi-art form creative development residency Rough Mix will take place in Peebles from 19th-30th June. It will run at the Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre and is open to both early career and experienced artists.

The residency is a paid opportunity for artists from any art form based in Scotland, the rest of the UK or internationally. All participants receive a fee and travel costs within the UK. There are two prioritised places: one for an artist identifying as Deaf or disabled and one for an artist from a Black, Asian or Minority Ethnic background.

ROUGH MIX is a creative lab for early-stage ideas and practice development: a two-week practical opportunity for artists to try out new ideas or new ways of working. It brings together a small core group of practitioners from different disciplines and gives them time to start developing new projects in a supportive and collaborative atmosphere. The practitioners work together with a group of performers and two early-career artists over a two week period before giving a work-in-progress showing at the end.

The residency is supported by Eastgate Theatre and Arts Centre and the National Theatre of Scotland.

Location: Scottish Borders

Full information about how to apply can be downloaded from the Magnetic North website. For further information, please contact roughmix@magneticnorth.org.uk

The deadline is Monday 17 April 2017 at 13:00.


The post Opportunity: Magnetic North’s ‘Rough Mix’ – Artist Residencies appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

About Creative Carbon Scotland:

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

Opportunity: Series of talks, ‘Pecha Kucha – Making Economy’

This post comes from Creative Carbon Scotland

This opportunity comes from TAKTAL – for more information please visit their website.

Deadline: 20 April 2017 at 19:00

Our current economy, proliferated on resource consumption and monetary gain, is leading us towards an unsustainable future of scarcity and social hierarchy.

Increasingly there is a need for another option, an alternative economy that produces more sustainable relationships between communities and their environment.

Across Scotland there are numerous projects that implement alternative economies either by sharing resources or empowering people to create. Moving away from a monetary-based value system, these alternative models generate value through the distribution of skills and the sharing of resources.

Creative and craft-based practices are often at the heart of these projects, producing the idea of an economy based on making. These projects champion peer-to-peer educational structures, the sharing of resources and sustainable community development by empowering people to connect, share and make together.

Other projects challenge the economy by creating disruptive alternatives, commonly in the form of local currencies or co-operative ownership structures.

In this series of talks we’ll hear from both strands of projects that either represent a craft-based ‘making’ economy or that endeavour to make their own, through community ownership, collaboration and equality.

The event will be held in:
The Whisky Bond
2 Dawson Rd
G4 9SS

19.00 – 21.00

Tickets are available at £4/£6. Click here to book tickets for this event.

Join the event on Facebook

For further information, please contact abigale@taktal.com , call 07739 177923, or visit http://taktal.com

The deadline is Thursday 20 April 2017 at 19:00.


 

The post Opportunity: Series of talks, ‘Pecha Kucha – Making Economy’ appeared first on Creative Carbon Scotland.

Creative Carbon Scotland is a partnership of arts organisations working to put culture at the heart of a sustainable Scotland. We believe cultural and creative organisations have a significant influencing power to help shape a sustainable Scotland for the 21st century.

In 2011 we worked with partners Festivals Edinburgh, the Federation of Scottish Threatre and Scottish Contemporary Art Network to support over thirty arts organisations to operate more sustainably.

We are now building on these achievements and working with over 70 cultural organisations across Scotland in various key areas including carbon management, behavioural change and advocacy for sustainable practice in the arts.

Our work with cultural organisations is the first step towards a wider change. Cultural organisations can influence public behaviour and attitudes about climate change through:

Changing their own behaviour;
Communicating with their audiences;
Engaging the public’s emotions, values and ideas.

Go to Creative Carbon Scotland

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Screening/Reading: Donna Haraway Storytelling for Earthly Survival

This post comes to you from EcoArtScotland

Screening
Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival
Glasgow Film Theatre, Rose Street, Glasgow
Sunday 23 April 2017 17:15

In this portrait of Haraway, filmmaker Fabrizio Terranova explores her playful, humorous and sincere approach to narrative when dealing with the substantial issues facing human beings as co-habitants of planet earth. Over several weeks Terranova lived in Haraway’s Californian home, filming her and dog Cayenne, within their own domestic universe. Combining this original footage with projections and archival material, Terranova has created a filmic fable in tune with Haraway’s own unique and engaging approach to storytelling.

Director Fabrizio Terranova will join us for a Q&A following the screening.

Special Screening Price: £5.50 for all tickets

Buy Tickets here

Reading Groups
Chapter Thirteen, Pearce Institute, Govan
Hosted by Elsa Richardson and Kirsteen Macdonald
All Welcome / Free Entry / More Information here

19.04.2017 18:00
An introduction to Haraway’s writing through her seminal feminist text A Cyborg Manifesto and recent essays on the nature of human relationships to the environment in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.

26.04.2017 18:00
Haraway’s thinking on non-human relationships and propositions for kinship with readings sourced from Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness and When Species Meet.

Organised by Kirsteen Macdonald / Chapter Thirteen with support from
The Glasgow School of Art Sustainability in Action Group
gsasustainability.org.uk


About EcoArtScotland:

ecoartscotland is a resource focused on art and ecology for artists, curators, critics, commissioners as well as scientists and policy makers. It includes ecoartscotland papers, a mix of discussions of works by artists and critical theoretical texts, and serves as a curatorial platform.

It has been established by Chris Fremantle, producer and research associate with On The Edge Research, Gray’s School of Art, The Robert Gordon University. Fremantle is a member of a number of international networks of artists, curators and others focused on art and ecology.

Go to EcoArtScotland

The Journey to an Eco-Play

This post comes from the Artists and Climate Change Blog

This article was originally published on HowlRound, a knowledge commons by and for the theatre community, on September 18, 2016.

When I started to think about writing a play about climate change, a comment made by a philosopher-scientist struck me with such blunt emotional force that I got the shivers: “These are things that we can easily put out of our mind. And so we do.”

And so we do. We have no difficulty noticing the day-to-day hate speech that fills the news, or social injustice, or the madness of out-of-control gun policies; it’s hard to avoid the micro-aggressions and violent acts directed against women or people of color or migrants just struggling to survive. But a catastrophe that is only going to have full impact in the future? How do we respond to that? When is the future? Who can see a polar ice cap melting? Who can see a river disappearing? Or a species of bird that suddenly just fails to show up one year? Who does this matter to anyway?

And is any of this something that should be/could be in a play? This was the brain-swirl as I thought about writing plays set in the American West. Because it occurred to me: Well, here in California, we actually can see a river disappear. We can note that butterflies aren’t returning to their favorite nesting spot, or the wetlands of the Pacific Flyway are drying up and fewer migrating birds can make their way. For playwrights—not that we’re ghouls—our storytelling often thrives on doom, and in the arena of climate change, there is plenty of doom to go around.

Still, as counterpoint, while beginning to write an eco-play, I was introduced to the teachings of the Deep Ecology movement, led by Arne Naess in the 1970s and making a resurgence now. Naess pointed out that to use scare tactics, to operate from a place of fear and humiliation, never really has a lasting impression on people, especially in the area of the environment. The fear/shame tactic isn’t solution-related—it just provokes a quick knee-jerk reaction, but does it truly drive anyone to make any kind of transformative change? Naess believed it was better to operate from a place of joyful action.

Petroglyphs carved into rock by Paiutes in the Coso Range, immediately south of Owens Lake. Photo by: Paula Cizmar.

The process of digging into an eco-theatre play is so complex. There’s the geography, the people, the recent and ancient history, the science of it, public policy, nature itself, the artists who have travelled this road before, the ongoing investigations and new revelations. I have likened writing an eco-play in the past to going down a rabbit hole. But it’s so much more than that. Dig a bit at an ancient site and whole underground civilizations are revealed. Start off with one idea, peer under a rock, and discover a whole new perspective that challenges what you thought was right in the first place.

That’s what happened with my play The Chisera (AKA Lost Borders). It started off as a piece inspired by a woman naturalist. But that led to whole new ways of looking. It should come as no shock that I believe we must all be united and work together to save this planet, and I believe in renewable energy. And of course, I am opposed to the wasting of resources. Living in the drought-stricken American West, I am particularly sensitive to water issues. (Which is a whole other can of worms, by the way, and pardon the mixed metaphors, but I invite everyone on the planet to write about water, because it affects everything. It intersects with power, economics, politics, of course; but it also affects issues of race, immigration, gender equality, human rights, etc.)

Mary Austin.

The play had always begun with my love of the Owens Valley in California and my love of Mary Hunter Austin, an early-twentieth-century nature writer ahead of her time. The Owens Valley is one of those places on this planet that make you feel the deep mystery of being alive. How to describe it? Snowcapped, rugged peaks on one side. Lower, redder, smoother peaks on the other. And in the middle, a high plateau—not very wide—with a small river winding through it and a canopy of blue overhead. But it’s not merely geography that makes it so special: It’s the pervasive feeling that this place was here for eons, that you can feel a deep connection to the thousands of people who loved it for centuries, and that it is one of those places where you can sense the presence of some deeply alive spirit. Mary Austin loved it. Writing in the early 1900s in the Eastern Sierra, she was one of the few people who truly understood the region—the mountains, the river valley, and the desert—in a holistic way. She understood it the way the native Paiutes understood it, because unlike many white settlers, she actually talked to them. Learned from them.

Here’s what set me off in the first place:

East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders… Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit… This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, and squeezed up out of chaos, chrome and vermillion painted, aspiring to the snow-line…Here are the long heavy winds or breathless calms on the tilted mesas where dust devils dance, whirling up in a wide, pale sky. Here you have no rain when all the earth cries for it, or quick outbursts called down-pours for violence. A land of lost rivers, with little in it to love; yet a land that once visited must be come back to inevitably. If it were not so, there would be little told of it. —Mary Hunter Austin, Land of Little Rain

The lush area around the Owens River after a rainy season—and after a mandatory reclamation project was initiated. Beyond the riparian area is dry desert. Photo by Paula Cizmar.

This was a starting point—but I always knew that I didn’t want to write a historical play. Somehow I wanted there to be a story told from the present point-of-view, too. I needed a character who could mirror the past in her actions. Or even a character who would be happy ignoring the borders of time and space. The past figures into every inch of the American West, and I wanted somehow to tap into how we, in the present, owe a debt to those in the past from whom we took something valuable—so that we can figure out how to not repeat these mistakes in the future.

The Owens Valley is one of those past/present/future places: It’s where the Water Wars were fought in the early twentieth century—small bands of citizens versus the Department of Water and Power—and it’s where, since 1913, a significant portion of the water for the city of Los Angeles has been taken. Some would say stolen. I usually do.

So the play started to evolve with all my various personal requirements (strong roles for women, the landscape, the language reflecting the geography, past and present interwoven, characters who drive the piece and make change)—and it also started to take on an ethical quandary: How do you build something that will cause someone or something to grow while at the same time do no harm to others? There are hundreds of these stories: Reroute a river to prevent flooding and an endangered fish loses its spawning grounds. Build a dam in a wilderness area to light up an urban area downstream and lives upstream are changed and a culture is lost. And in the case of many places in the US, the culture that is lost is that of the people who were here first. In the Owens Valley, a large portion of the people who lost out were the Paiutes.

An old mining shed on the shore of the dried up lake bed of Owens Lake, with the Inyo Range in the background. Photo by Paula Cizmar.

But I didn’t want the play to be a polemic. I wanted it to be personal, with flesh and blood characters. And I wanted to hear directly from the people who still battle the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power today. So I headed once again to the Owens Valley—really, it doesn’t take much of an excuse for me to go there—and was fortunate to be offered friendship and rock solid information from members of the Lone Pine Paiute Shoshone Reservation’s environmental office: Mel Joseph, Jeremiah Joseph, and April Zrelack. Ideas, ideas, and more ideas—and images of what the place once was, what it is now, what it could be; ideas about how everything intersects.

The interconnectivity of it all is staggering. Economics. Politics. Race. And the land itself. It is not possible to alter one teeny portion of the environment without inflicting consequences on another. Often, the place from where we propose to take a resource—or build a questionable structure—is suffering from job loss and poverty, and has been for a long time. Why else would a community accept a new toxic waste storage facility, for example? These types of institutions create jobs—and that is what the community is desperate for and ends up accepting.

But I wanted to go beyond the simple, clear-cut binary of People = Good, Power = Bad. There needed to be a struggle, a choice that was difficult. I learned from my Paiute advisers that a solar plant was proposed for the area—and my “I-love-renewable-energy” mind was immediately excited. The present-tense portion of the story, I thought, could be a scientist doing an environmental impact study for a new solar plant. Great! Solar = Good. Except, as I kept listening to the people of the tribe, I began to wonder: Is that equation accurate? With renewable energy like solar, we get cleaner air, less dependence on burning carbon; we avoid the problems of nuclear waste, we can harness the truly natural, renewable resources the planet provides and go green. Go clean. Except. Where does the solar plant get built? Do we put it in the backyard of a wealthy neighborhood? And what exactly is industrial solar?

In The Chisera, that’s the problem that comes up: The Owens Valley, a hundred years after the first lost environmental war, is now faced with another potential for harm: an immense industrial solar plant—the kind, I learned, that would not only cause massive destruction of habitat in its construction, but would also burn major amounts of natural gas to fire it up every day. And it is to be built on land sacred to the Paiutes. To provide power for a city 200 miles away. The question becomes: Will it do no harm? Is it really green? Is it really clean? Or are those convenient sales pitch buzzwords that jumbo power companies use to rationalize coming in once again and exploiting an area?

All of this was tremendously complicated for me emotionally, because I don’t just love wild rivers and jagged rocks and the strange wonderful beauty of deserts and its creatures. I also love cities, places to come together and communicate, places to socialize, places that truly do celebrate the awe-inspiring accomplishments of humankind. And I’m not a Los Angeles hater; it’s one of the most diverse cities on the planet with new immigrants arriving every day and over 150 languages spoken, and who wouldn’t want to be a part of that? In the desert, I can take in the vastness of this world. In the mountains, I can look at the sheer rugged beauty and fearsomeness of the landscape. At the ocean’s edge, I can meditate on the depths of the human spirit and our connection to nature. But in the city, I can be inspired by the sheer audacity of humanity’s ability to evolve, grow, build, startle, expand, achieve, dream. No good/bad, no love/hate. Just a lot of wondering and wonder.

That’s what The Chisera takes on. I think that’s what all of eco-theatre looks at. How do we live in this world ethically? How do we love this earth and explore the wilderness areas without turning them into theme parks? How do we turn on the tap and watch water flow out without thinking of who is really paying the price for it?

And what do we do to make it all fair?

(Top image: The unirrigated desert floor, with snowcapped peaks of the Eastern Sierra in the distance. Photo by Paula Cizmar.)


About Artists and Climate Change:

Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.

Go to the Artists and Climate Change Blog

Call for Papers: III INSULA International Colloquium

Beyond Nature/Artifice

Funchal | UMa-CIERL

8 to 12 November 2017

Submissions deadline by 30th May 2017


“There is no singular ‘nature’ as such, only a diversity of contested natures; and that each such nature is constituted through a variety of socio-cultural processes from which such natures cannot be plausibly separated.” – Macnaghten, P. and Urry, J. (1998), Contested natures


In “Ideas of Nature,” Raymond Williams in 1980 emphasizes two issues that we call upon for the III INSULA International Colloquium- Beyond Nature & Artifice​: (1) the need to think the “natural” not just as a set of physical phenomena that exist in the world, but also as a plural concept, subject to historical and socio-cultural modelling with effective implications on how such a world is constructed; and (2) the need to rethink the human and the anthropological as parts of what is meant by Nature.

In this same line of thought that rejects a dogmatic character to the concept of “Nature”, Bruno Latour (1999) proposes the replacement of a singular “Nature” by plural Natures. This positioning therefore presupposes the existence of a denser, more elastic and articulated relationship between all the elements that constitute the world. A relationship that also integrates both the human or that which is (re)constructed by human, whether in the material, or in virtual or imaginary form.

If such issues gained relevance in the last decades of the 20th century, already marked by the dynamics of the contingency, of the transgressive and globalisation, as well as by the values of complex subjectivity, the simultaneous juxtaposition of the near with the distant or even of the empirical with the virtual, the first decades of the 21st century were to make them even more urgent, given the emergence or dissemination of phenomena such as cloning, transgenic industry, global warming, suspicions of the anthropocene or even the democratization of the access to technology.

Focusing our attention on island spaces, representations, narratives and discourses, the III INSULA International Colloquium. Beyond Nature & Artifice presents itself as a place of reflection where it will attempt discussions on the concept of Nature(s) in contemporaneity, now understood as part of a dialectic in which what conventionally is seen as “natural” articulates to what is conventionally understood as “artificial”, and/or cultural. As a result of the encounter, the contamination, the amalgam and / or hybridization of these differences, a different (concept of) Nature emerges, one that is more complex and expanded than the sum of the two traditional oppositions.

In this encounter between the real and the virtual, fiction, simulation and simulacra, where islands are both physical entities, conceptual devices and multi-dimensional artefacts that project us towards an expanded reality and an expanded concept of Nature (of/in islands):

  • Can insular spaces contain other Natures, or an expanded Nature, where elements of different dimensions encounter?
  • How may the “island” be represented in this context? And what discourses and practices then emerge?
  • What is the implication of this concept of Nature(s), in the way individuals perceive and recreate the “island” and its imaginaries?
  • In what way an expanded Nature implicates encounter, adaptation, transformation and/or actualization of material, artistic, cultural and political phenomena?
  • How can the Nature(s) of the insular spaces, the features and processes implicated in them, constitute samples that present themselves as opportunities for the understanding, development and management of other spaces?

III INSULA International Colloquium: Beyond Nature & Artifice welcomes proposals for presentation (20 minutes), in Portuguese, English, French and Spanish from all areas of Science, Arts and Humanities. ​The following topics​ are suggested (not restricted to):

  • Commodification of Nature(s);
  • Control, Resistance and Governance;
  • Environment and Humanities;
  • Ethics and Values;
  • Identity, Society and Culture;
  • Landscape and Creation
  • Mobility, Migration, Negotiation and Colonization;
  • Oneiric Universes, Imaginaries and Representation;
  • Reality, Simulation and Simulacrum
  • Sustainability;
  • Territories and Heritage;
  • The Expanded Nature(s) of Islands
  • Utopia, Dystopia, Collapse, Apocalypse, Conflict and Revolution;

Submission of Proposals

Proposals for paper or panel must be submitted by email to the coordination of the colloquium (insula3@mail.uma.pt) by 30.05.2017​. It should include the following information:

  • Title of the paper/panel;
  • Abstract/Summary up to 200 words. If presentation is on a language other than English, a summary in English is required;
  • Author(s) name(s), email address, affiliation and a short curricular note (up to 100words).

The organising committee will inform authors on the status of their submission by 31.07.2017

Download the Informational PDF Here:  Call for Papers_INSULA2017​


III INSULA International Colloquium. Beyond Nature/Artifice ​stems from a partnership between UMa-CIERL​, Island Cities & Urban Archipelagos Conferences​ (ICUA) and Island Dynamics​.

+ info. ​INSULA 2017: ​http://www4.uma.pt/cierl/?page_id=1916

+ info. ​ICUA 2017: ​http://islandcities.org/icua2017.html

 

Call for Papers: Experimental Histories II

Experimental Histories II:

Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene Symposium

5 & 6th June 2017, Hobart

Convenors: Penny Edmonds, Hannah Stark, Katrina Schlunke

CALL FOR PAPERS

This two-day symposium will explore what the era of the Anthropocene means for how we critically, artistically and affectively approach historicised objects (including animals and non-sensate things). It interrogates present and future problems—species mass-extinction, climate change, anthropogenic environmental impact—in relation to how the past is re-imagined, interpreted, commemorated, subverted and displayed. The symposium therefore considers human history and its commemoration in museums, galleries, archives and historical sites in relation to the deep histories of nonhuman time and the more-than-human effects that a human centred approach have often ignored or hidden. To attempt to know the materialised past ‘experimentally’ is to situate objects in the uncanny moment where the Anthropocene has rendered the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Taken for granted animal exhibits in museums become unmoored from their reassuring scientificism when extinct species are displayed. Items made from animals or plants in other times are now analysed for hints of how we might re-imagine the human/earth relationship. Objects that once authenticated other ways of life are now re-enlivened to expose alternative ways of knowing the past, to understand this anthropocentric present, and to find new ways to imagine the role of humans in shaping earth futures. We invite papers from scholars, artists, curators and scientists that interrogate the new meanings of objects in the Anthropocene.

Guest speakers include:

  • Pru Black, University of Sydney
  • Fiona Cameron, University of Western Sydney
  • Stephen Muecke, University of New South Wales
  • Kate Wright, University of New England

We seek expressions of interest for new and unpublished work to be delivered as 15 minute papers on this theme.

Please email your 250 word abstract to Assoc. Professor Penny Edmonds penny.edmonds@utas.edu.au by April 10th,2017. One bursary is available for a UTAS (Launceston) postgraduate student. We anticipate the publication of a volume based on this new work.

‘Experimental Histories’ is cross-disciplinary research cluster and Strategic Theme Area, of the College of Arts and Law,University of Tasmania, comprising humanities scholars, artists, and curators.