Panel PLACES
Date
Friday 15 July
Time
2:00pm AEST (UTC +10)
Speaker 1
Kate FITCH
Themes
Soil/Indigenous/Australia
Description
In May 2020, the global corporation, Rio Tinto, destroyed the historic Juukan Gorge rock shelters, a significant cultural site on Puutu Kunti Kurama and Pinikura (PKKP) land. This explanatory case study investigates the role of Rio Tinto’s corporate relations division, responsible for Indigenous stakeholder engagement, and attempts by the PKKP Aboriginal Corporation (PKKPAC) to protect the rock shelters. It draws on an Australian government inquiry, news stories, media statements and industry and annual reports to highlight the role of communication in enacting the corporate responsibility to race, given Rio Tinto’s previously celebrated Reconciliation Action Plan, and to consider the capacity of global corporations to prioritise social justice over profits. The findings reveal how Indigenous Australian voices are curtailed in the pursuit of mining wealth, despite Rio Tinto’s public commitment to reconciliation, and suggest Indigenous stakeholder engagement in the Australian resource sector is a fragile exercise in the neoliberal, settler colonial context.
About the Speaker
Dr Kate Fitch is a communication and media studies scholar, who specialises in critical and sociocultural approaches to public relations research. Her research has drawn on historical and social justice perspectives, including feminism and intersectionality, to understand the broader societal impact of communicative activity and promotional work. Her contributions have advanced the discipline in advocating critical feminist research and identifying the limitations of public relations theory to address gender inequality in theory and practice and in promoting more evidenced histories that recognise the impact of the professional project and the subsequent exclusion of particular narratives and activity. Dr Fitch's recent research investigates public relations in popular and contemporary culture and informs the emerging, interdisciplinary field of promotional culture.
Speaker 2
Jahkarli ROMANIS
Themes
Cartographies/Indigenous/Australia
Description
(Dis)connected to Country, 2019-Ongoing This project explores ways in which visual systems of cartography have continued to omit Indigenous Knowledges of place, sustaining colonial narratives within Australia and the myth of ‘terra nullius’ (‘land belonging to no one’). Through practice-led research, these images aim to highlight the inherent biases in contemporary digital mapping technologies, undermining the idea of Western maps being ‘neutral’ tools. Such biases include resolution discrepancies between different places, and the subjectivity of maps in their creation. The work shows where these technologies dysfunction, degrade and break down within themselves, but also highlights the political nature of the imaging technologies employed to represent the landscape. These photographs are screenshots from Google Earth’s depiction of Pitta Country, located in Queensland Australia, in transition between ‘Street View’ and ‘Satellite View’. An in-between space, a technological glitch, an open void. The work Waddi Tree is a photograph of a corroboree tree which was a meeting place for my people. It sits on top of its representation in Google Earth, reduced to a dark shadow of pixels. According to Google Earth’s permission guidelines, I am infringing copyright and am not allowed to print, sell, or use this work for commercial or promotional purposes. Google Earth continues to profit off images of stolen land.
About the Speaker
Jahkarli Romanis is a proud Pitta woman, artist, researcher, and curator based on Kulin Land (Melbourne). Raised on Wadawurrung Country in Torquay, Victoria, Jahkarli moved to Melbourne to continue her tertiary studies in 2018. After completing an Honours in Photography degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2020, she has commenced a PhD at Monash University in 2021 through the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab. Her work is inextricably intertwined with her identity as a Pitta woman and explores the complexities of her lived experience and the continuing negative impacts of colonisation in Australia.
Links
jahkarlifelicitasromanis.com / @jucromanis
Speaker 3
Ana Lara HEYNS
Themes
Water/Indigenous/Australia
Description
There is a growing concern in Australian water management and planning about the lack of involvement of Indigenous People and Knowledge. As such, there is a need to propose methodologies, policies, and strategies to deal with the spatial and environmental management of water that can close this gap. In Melbourne, the watercourses and water knowledge that characterized the landscape in pre-colonial times were dislocated and drained underground, where their lack of superficial visibility has subdued their agency in the human experience of the contemporary city. How can we understand drained waterways through an Indigenous paradigm to avoid the extractive and tokenistic approaches that have characterised the western disciplines? This research argues that Indigenous thinking through relationality has the potential to create more sustainable management of urban waterways as well as better protections for layers of cultural meaning embedded in the underground.
About the Speaker
Mexican Mestiza. Writer, dancer, podcaster, activist, and PhD researcher. She has an honours degree in Cultural Anthropology (UDLAP, Mexico) and a Master’s in Tourism and Social Anthropology (University of Brighton, UK). She has worked in public policy, ethnography, and consultancy. She has also ventured into marketing and copywriting in the tourism industry. Ana currently teaches at Monash University in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture (MADA), where she currently is finishing her PhD. She is a founding member of APR Collective, which creates spaces and encounters for social change and the expansion of knowledge. Her PhD research focuses on challenging western conventional practices to encourage designers, planners, and architects to work with Indigenous communities and Indigenous Ontologies by understanding their own position within Country’s system of relatedness. Ana’s research is Country-cantered and considers the complex space of the urban underground through an Indigenous paradigm of relationality, as it has the potential to contribute to more sustainable management of urban waterways as well as better protections for layers of cultural meaning embedded in the underground.
Links
aprcollective.com
Panel: SOLIDS
Date
Friday 15 July
Time
3:30pm AEST (UTC +10)
Speaker 1
Georgia NOWAK
Themes
Mines/Gold/Australia
Description
“The fundamental dilemmas derived from climate change is that nature is no longer an inert background from which resources are extracted for human activities; rather, it has reclaimed its role as an active agent in the fate of the planet.” - Bruno Latour
Evident in today’s planetary systems is the compression of geological time. Human activity has eroded strata and re-directed aquifers. Ecological distress is apparent at all levels of the system, interconnected and interdependent, tangible or otherwise. Ecologies can no longer be supported when material is turned from matter to commodity, from active agent to inert object. Can we envisage the survival of certain ecologies by offering value to the non-human, waterways and geologies that surround us? Through two film projects and their subsequent material investigations this presentation will examine the ecological consequence of material as commodity and offer a way of reimagining the non-human within this context.
About the Speaker
Georgia Nowak is an Australian artist and architect whose practice examines and documents environments in flux. Nowak works between the mediums of built-form sculpture and film in an attempt to navigate the complex ever-changing relationship between material, society and place. Her current and ongoing research with artist Eugene Perepletchikov is an investigation into material histories, often seen tangled into sites of contested narrative. Their latest essay film Aurum explores the human fascination with gold as a symbol of power and was awarded the inaugural Mercedes Benz Design Week award and was acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. Recently she has exhibited at the Australian Center of Contemporary Art, c3 gallery Melbourne, Galeria Bałucka, Łódż Poland and Melbourne Design Week, supported by funding from the City of Melbourne, NGV and Centrum Dialogu. Nowak is also currently a Teaching Associate within the Art, Design and Architecture department at Monash University. The academic rigour of the faculty is embedded in her practice and forms a critical component of her research driven approach.
Links
@georgianowak/ https://georgianowak.com/
Speaker 2
Kate HILL
Themes
Clay/Soil/Australia
Description
Kate’s research projects investigate the multiple layers of encounters that intersect and circulate through material-based creative practices. Specifically, she draws on the central component of her ceramics-based practice—clay—as a material with which to consider the interwovenness of her body with the environment, and the physical and theoretical space of the underground. Kate explores earthen matter cycles across particular modes of engagement—digging, movement, manipulation and disposal—and across specific scales of operation including research into local clay soils at specific sites and in her studio on Wurundjeri Country, the transformation of bodies through life-death cycles, and the mobility of soil and minerals through industrial scale mines. These material explorations are explored in relation to theorisations of the underground as teeming and as an archive, entangled with biological, geological and social politics which order it according to various regimes of value. Through exploring conceptions of the underground and the tensions of extractivist practices, Hill is interested in teasing apart the complex issues that arise in relation to how to develop and enact an ethic of care towards the underground and related communities.
About the Speaker
Kate Hill is an artist-researcher and gardener. Kate grew up on a cattle farm in rural Victoria on Bpagerang Land before relocating to narrm/Melbourne where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Art and is currently a PhD Candidate in Fine Art at Monash University. Kate’s practice explores local clay soils and the physical and theoretical space of the underground. She is part of a rubbish collecting collective and a carer of the merri merri (Merri Creek) on Wurundjeri Country. She has exhibited in Australia and Japan, has undertaken residencies in India, Canada and Japan, and has published in academic journals and art magazines.
Links
@_katehill_ / kateehill.com
Speaker 3
Andrea URUSHIMA
Themes
Forests/Wood/Japan
Description
Matter’s transformation and the historicity of landscapes: the case of wood extraction in Japan This presentation will focus on wood extraction in Japan, and in Kyoto more specifically, pinpointing the major changes that affected forestry and forest management since the pre-modern period. The talk will emphasize the systemic interlinkages that exist between matter and landscapes over time by referring to some ideas of Watsuji Tetsurō.
About the Speaker
Andrea Flores Urushima completed the Architecture and Urban Planning course (BArch FAUUSP) and worked as architect in Brazil. She holds a Master and Doctor degree from Kyoto University (Human Environmental Studies). She researches about urbanization and environmental change, especially local cultures impact to city/region’s shaping, mainly in Japan and Brazil. Recently, she is interested in linking environmental ethics and sustainability studies into urban and regional theory. Currently, she is a Lecturer at the Human Environment Design Program, Kyoto Seika University (Kyoto).
Links
researchmap.jp/andrea_urushima?lang=en / culturenvironment.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/
Panel: FLUIDS/FLOWS
Date
Friday 15 July
Time
5:00pm AEST (UTC +10)
Speaker 1
Sara Daly
Themes
Energy/Technology/Architecture
Description
Sara’s current research considers how people dress for the air-conditioned workplace and, among other things, evaluates what motivates the systemic and structural conditions behind air conditioning and dressing in workplaces. As a result, her study crosses over concepts such as dress codes, architecture, comfort, energy, and employs ethnographic methodologies. Sara’s approach sits loosely under the term design anthropology. It is being undertaken as practice-based study and comprises a combination of ethnographic research and design practice bringing together Sara's previous studies in anthropology and visual arts.
About the Speaker
Sara is undertaking a PhD with Monash University’s Emerging Technologies Research Lab. Sara has previously studied in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, and fine art. Her Masters focused on the link between tertiary art education and the devaluation of art in Australia. The projects Sara works with are connected through understanding structural inequality, its impact, and focusing on alternative approaches.
Speaker 2
Joëlle Bitton
Themes
Factories/Matter/Europe
Description
Joëlle’s current research investigates non-linear practices and creative hacks of digital fabrication, and through that, what they reveal of material culture of ‘otherness’ and of the emerging trends of ‘non-utilitarian’ and ‘counterfunctional’ designs. As we rediscover materialities, we are confronted with a growing need to understand how things are made, where they come from, which knowledge, legacies, and traditions are embedded in them, and how those things are transported, discarded, and recycled by whom, and where, etc. These questions tie with a general concern for environmental impacts of consumerism and waste, and the human rights entangled with them. The very finite materials that are being mined in remote locations by exploited labor demonstrate the extension to which extractivism damages local ecosystems. These notions of material flows are now crucial to grasp for a study of making, craft and fabrication. The specificity of digital fabrication is important in that equation: the act of using it in ways that are not predetermined is an opportunity to provoke counterfunction, oddness and otherness. Joëlle’s research thus aims to tie the larger socio-economic context of material sourcing and transformation together with non-habitual practices of digital fabrication.
About the Speaker
Joëlle Bitton is an ‘undisciplined’ practitioner. She currently teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts in Interaction Design. With her works, Joëlle explores a sense of intimacy and personal geography with machines and systems that are usually considered cold or unfriendly. She likes most to entangle strangeness and familiarity together. As such, in her doctoral thesis at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she created embodied fabrication experiences of personal data controlling CNC-machines. She has also conducted HCI research at Media Lab Europe, Distance Lab and Culture Lab/Newcastle University. She has explored the mediation of technologies in human relationships and their potential social impact, notably with the projects "RAW" and "Passages". She graduated from Université Paris Sorbonne in contemporary history on the 19th-century rise of nations correlated with the development of networks and technologies. She advocates for the de-evangelisation of technologies and of design as problem-solvers and as markers of progress, especially in the context of global warming.
Links
@msvarjak / freeradicals.io
Speaker 3
Penelope Cain
Themes
Water/Ice/Netherlands
Description
Research, video, sound, interactive and text. A molecular-level mapping, linking two physically distant, molecularly linked sites – a colonial Spanish silver mine in Bolivia and a glacier in the remote Peruvian Andes. This ongoing body of work considers these linked spaces through a series of video, sound and interactive works, each part following a specific research line and collaborating with climatologists and glacierologists. This research enabled the pulling together of interdisciplinary work with some amazing South American collaborators, to link a land-based Anthropogenic story across continents. These works could not have been made without the assistance of collaborators: – Lima-based independent arts org, Hawapi, Peru – Dr Christian Yarlequé Instituto Nacional de Investigación en Glaciares y Ecosistemas de Montaña INAIGEM, Peru – Gustavo Valdivia, anthropologist, sound artist, Peru – Quechua community of the Phinaya district – The Centre for Ice and Climate Science, Denmark and Dr Paul Vallelonga – Dr Andrew Yip, Sydney.
About the Speaker
Penelope Cain is an artist with a research science background, working interdisciplinary at the science-art interstitium, in an open-ended storytelling mode. She is interested in landscape in its broadest definition; in particular the colonised, extracted and transformed landscapes of the Anthropocene and the manifest marks and residues of humans within and on the land. Penelope has exhibited in curated exhibitions in London, Seoul, Shanghai, Taiwan and Sydney. She has been awarded residencies at the Cite International des Artes, Paris, The British School of Rome, Taipei Artist Studio. She was awarded the prestigious Fauvette Lauriero Art Scholarship (2018) and Glenfiddich Contemporary Art residency Scotland (2019). She lives and works between London and Sydney.
Links: @penelope.cain
penelopecain.com
Panel: IMAGINARIES
Date
Friday 15 July
Time
6:30pm AEST (UTC +10)
Keynote Speaker
Alonso BARROS
Description
The Rebellion of the Duendes. Duendes (from the Ibero-Lusitan contraction of “dueño de” –“owner of”) are elemental, other-than-human peoples, that under different names and traditions, and in a variety of types shapes and sizes, proliferate in folk tales and legends around the world. Universally, these beings of nature indeed “own” all kinds of material supports, rock, stone, metal, wood, bone, textiles, and sometimes even incarnate and or inhabit them. They are shy and elusive creatures, to be seen only with the corner of the eyes. The visual discovery shown here represents thousands of hours of painstaking, excruciating fervour, to imagine and extricate them from their material abode, as so many carvings, imprints and engravings, that insufflate this secret life of Rocks and Stones, with power to cull open pit mining – as opposed to underground mining.
About the Speaker
Alonso Barros is a lawyer (PUCCh) and anthropologist (PhD, University of Cambridge) with three decades of experience in advocacy and anthropology involving resource projects affecting indigenous peoples and territories in Latin America. Alonso's publications focus on modern law in society, as researched in long periods of time amongst the Mixe of Oaxaca (Mexico) and the Atacameño, Aymara, and Quechua communities and peoples. This has posed interesting methodological and epistemological questions on the work of lawyers in the plural legal field. Leaning on longue durée historical and legal data, this challenging work has translated into an historical ethnography of desert and highland peoples, mining cycles, and property regimes (bonanzas and busts) that assesses the conflicting historicities involved (time and memory politics). Between 2010 and 2012, Alonso was an LSE Fellow in Modern International Law and co-directed the London School of Economics' MSc in Law Anthropology and Society. Since 2013, Alonso works exclusively as a litigation lawyer, mediator, and arbiter on behalf of indigenous peoples and communities involved with the extractivist industry in the Atacama Desert. In 2019, Alonso curated the Atacama Lines exhibition at the Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Currently, Alonso holds a British Academy Award (IC3\100226) and contributes to the Royal College of Art as Co-Investigator in the Tackling the UK's International Challenges 2018 framework project titled "The Scale of Justice: Energy Transition, Rights and Indigenous Title." Alonso has been a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art since November 2019.
Links
@alonsobarros rca.academia.edu/alonsobarros
Panel: CONFLICTS
Date
Saturday 16 July
Time
2:00pm AEST (UTC +10)
Speaker 1
Alexis Destoop
Themes
Conflicts/Zones/Territories
Abolut the Speaker
Alexis Destoop’s work explores the workings of the image and narrative, the experience of time, and the processes of identification and memory. His practice originates from photography but has been influenced by his experience in the performing arts as well as his studies in art history and philosophy. In recent years his situated practice has focused on particular transitional environments where ecological pitfalls, economical aspirations, geopolitical tensions and colonial histories coalesce. Rather than treating landscape as a passive element or as a sublime natural object, he approaches as a complex assemblage with stratified meanings and histories. Through an intimate relation to “place”, he aims to reveal the agencies that constitutes it. This explains the decision to attend to contentious zones where global and local processes collide and intertwine, and where it becomes possible to rethink notions of centre and periphery, self and other. Blending fact and fiction, history and speculation, Destoop presents a fragmented, subjective cartography of the transitory states that constitute our present era. Recent solo shows and presentations include: Northern Drift World Premiere at IFF Rotterdam (2020), Field Meeting at Concrete, Dubai (2019), Four Directions of Heaven at Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2017) Recent group exhibitions: On-Trade-Off: Charging Myths at Z33, Hasselt (2022) Survival Kit: Being Safe is Scary at Latvian Centre of Contemporary Art, Riga (2020), Topos of Time at MMOMA. Moscow (2019), 1st Riga Biennial of Contemporary Art, (2018).
Links
@alexisdestoop
alexisdestoop.com
Speaker 2
Global Extraction Observatory (GEO)
Themes
Conflicts/Material/Lithium
Description
Expanding existing knowledge on the environmental impact of resource extraction, in this lecture-performance we will examine the unfathomable and multi-scalar implications of lithium mining. Presenting alternatives to dominant extractivist socio-political narratives, we explore new agencies for art and design regarding the formulation of sustainable post-carbon futures.
Bio: The Global Extraction Observatory (or GEO) is a research collective examining the effects of energy production and resource extraction through creative practice, scholarship, and public engagement. Led by Dr Eduardo Kairuz and Dr Sam Spurr, GEO positions architecture in an expanded field, incorporating diverse methods, narratives, and perspectives. This position affords for new creative approaches that produce new knowledge and amplify contemporary visual culture. GEO’s interdisciplinary work forms the basis of their pedagogical activities, through which they contribute to prepare a new generation of Australian architects. GEO’s achievements include presentations at national and international institutions, including the Royal College of Art (UK), the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths (UK), the Centre for 21st Century Humanities at University of Newcastle (AU), and the MPavilion (AU). Individually, Eduardo is an architect, artist, and scholar at Monash University, with experience in architectural design, photography, and sound and video installation. Having exhibited widely, his work is the subject of the book, Eduardo Kairuz: Dismantled. Sam is an architect, curator, and scholar, with experience in design, performance, and public engagement. Sam is Head of the Architecture Discipline at the University of Newcastle and was a co-director of the 2016 AIA National Conference. Sam was also a co-curator of the Australia’s section for the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design & Space and the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale. GEO’s work is the result of a collective effort and only possible thanks to the assistance of key collaborators, including Bud Rizk, D’Arcy Newberry-Dupé, Mark Romei, Victoria Jackson-Wyatt, and Nina Tory-Henderson.
Links
@geobservatory
@eduardokairuz
@spuriousspurr
g-e-o.net
Speaker 3
Open Spatial Workshop (OSW)
Themes
Conflicts/Material/Iron Ore
Description
This presentation will draw on our research into geological specimens and the convergence of material formations upon which social, historical and political entanglements rest. In this presentation we take up the temporal dimension of these formations. We are specifically interested in iron ore deposits found within the Hamersley province of the Pilbara region, part of unceded Kurrama, Yindjibarndi, Banjima lands. These deposits were formed during ‘the great oxidation event’ that occurred more than 2 billion years ago. Described as one of the most significant climate events in Earth’s history, in which cyanobacteria transformed the seas and atmosphere into oxygen rich environments. This event was catastrophic for the dominant anaerobic bacteria but pivotal in the emergence of complex multicellular life.
Bio: Open Spatial Workshop (OSW) is a collaborative art group comprising Bianca Hester, Terri Bird, and Scott Mitchell. Over the past 18 years OSW has produced a broad range of work spanning sculpture, installation, curated events, publications and video production. OSW’s activities are orientated by an ongoing interest in physical forces and how the temporalities of these forces shape our material worlds. Their works explore complex threads that connect biological, material and geophysical processes to anthropogenic activity—charting a ‘geo social’ field formed through interrelated processes of ‘metabolism’ and ‘extinguishment’. Projects emerge from exploratory workshops, collaborative writing, and long-term research. Between 2013 and 2015 OSW spent extended periods of time with Museums Victoria’s Natural Sciences Collection. This research resulted in Converging in Time (MUMA, 2017), an exhibition, bus tour and publication, which explored connections between materiality, the shaping of territories and the various politics inscribed in place. More recently their work has focused on ways of thinking about temporality and the different qualities of time. This work is related to an ongoing exploration of the great oxidation event and the formation of banded iron.
Links: osw.com.au
Panel: REPRESENTATIONS
Date
Saturday 16 July
Time
3:30pm AEST (UTC +10)
Speaker 1
Köken Ergun
Themes
Water/Air/Australia
Description
Since 2019, Ergun has been working on China's global expansion by way of its Belt and Road Initiative, which can be described as a network of economic corridors towards/from Western markets. For his work at the 2021 Jakarta Biennial, Ergun made a large mural map of the Maritime Silk Road (a key part of BRI), which shows its connections on three continents, with a special focus on the nickel trade between Indonesia and China. Currently, he is producing an animation film on the relationship between Indonesian nickel mining and China's EV (electric vehicle) industry. Titled “China, Beijing, I Love You!”, the film shows how nickel from Indonesia is shipped to China where it is used in EV battery manufacturing. How the Indonesian government is promoting this so-called "green technology" is told from the perspective of the DUST character, who is living in constant exile because she was forcibly unearthed from her home as a result of nickel mining. In his talk, Ergun will elaborate on his research and production process, examine the complex relationship between Indonesian public opinion and extractivism, as well as the Indonesian government's latest efforts to trade nickel with Tesla to be used in its cars.
About the Speaker
Köken Ergun is a Turkish artist/filmmaker. His films often deal with communities that are not known to a greater public and the importance of ritual in such groups. Ergun usually spends a long time with his subjects before starting to shoot and engages in a long research period for his projects. He also collaborates with ethnographers, historians and sociologists as extensions to his artistic practice. After working with American theatre director Robert Wilson, Ergun became involved with video art and film. His multi-channel video installations have been exhibited internationally at institutions including Documenta 14, Paris Triennale, Garage Moscow, SALT, Jakarta Biennial, Kathmandu Triennale, Para-Site, Artspace Sydney, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam and Kunsthalle Winterthur. His films received several awards at film festivals including the Tiger Award for Best Short Film at the 2007 Rotterdam Film Festival and the Special Mention Prize at the 2013 Berlinale. Ergun’s works are included in public collections of the Centre George Pompidou, Greek National Museum of Contemporary Art, Stadtmuseum Berlin, Australian War Memorial and Kadist Foundation. He holds a PhD degree from Freie Universität Berlin (performing arts and anthropology).
Links
http://indexofworks.com @kokenergun
Speaker 2
Amelia Hine
Themes
Images/Coal/Australia
Description
Amelia’s research and arts practice focuses on methods for thinking with nonhumans (such as coal, gold, underground fire, feral goats) and visualising their real or imagined impacts on the social and material world. She concentrates on Anthropocenic landscape change, specifically the extractive industries and the industrial landscapes of their extended supply chains, and the largely invisible influence of nonhumans in driving particular futures and enabling landscape disruptions. Amelia frequently undertakes fieldwork within Australian mining regions to seek out specific instances of nonhuman disruption. She has previously developed a series of digital collage animations responding to these disruptions with the aim of making visible particular nonhuman conditions. Currently she is working toward an audio installation to communicate different perceptions of the Carmichael mining lease prior to land clearing, exploring how surface landscapes are devalued in favour of their underground resources. While undertaking this work, Amelia is thinking carefully about established more-than-human methods and whether they work for research with inhumans, that is nonliving geos such as rocks, geologic strata, energy sources, and chemicals.
About the Speaker
Amelia Hine is a human geographer and emerging artist living and working in Wollongong. She is an Associate Research Fellow in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at the University of Wollongong currently working on a Discovery Project, Continuity and Change in the Australian Industrial Landscape. This project focuses on the industrial, multicommodity site of Port Kembla in Wollongong, and Amelia is engaged in researching perceptions of commodity containment and leakiness. She previously completed a postdoc at QUT focused on understanding competing stakeholder perceptions of the approvals process for the controversial Carmichael coal mine in Central Queensland. She has shown in several galleries including Metro Arts, Brisbane City Council’s Outdoor Gallery, Carriageworks, and Prototype ARI’s online lockdown series, and had her first solo exhibition, Whoever’s is the Soil, in 2021 at STABLE Gallery, a Brisbane ARI.
Links
ameliahine.com @milhine
Speaker 3
Alejandro Haiek
Themes
Flow Charts/Supply Chains/Sweden
Description
A journal of planetary diplomacies: An operative platform of environmental journalist-advocates for territorial research and geopolitical crisis. Following McHale’s 'planetary housekeeping' (referring to the planet as an indoor space), the platform seeks new forms of correlations between social landscapes, ecosystem services, and post-industrial geographies, creating a global atlas of conflict zones and environmental constraints. It looks into digital network governance, services eco infrastructures, and responsive grounds by analysing patterns from post-industrial geographies, diverse forms of ecologies, and cultural narratives, moving from the Planetary to the Molecular dimension. The research is controversial insofar as it addresses socially, culturally, and environmentally sensitive issues of governance and jurisdictions, and human labour. Looking into post-nation theoretical scenarios it unfolds new ways of digital citizenship and state sovereignty speculating concrete forms of territorial autarky and occupancy. The meta territories and self-governing zones hypothesize on self-providing performative infrastructures: planetary ecosystem services for the future, able to reorient the life-existence within the established geopolitical territorial control. The research tackles climate change through art, science, and education by revisiting the ecosystem values and violations of the boundaries of human and nature's rights, envisioning post-industrial Edens of high natural and cultural capital. With a strong pedagogical orientation, the territorial research projects open up for subjective experiences in distance learning methodologies, proposing the hybridization of immersive environments and open-source technologies. The active network operates worldwide, remotely, and decentralized, creating cooperative cartographies and collaborative, living maps, while denouncing agents of disturbance and the exhaustion of exceptional ecological resources and vulnerable lands and communities. The result is an agency/laboratory of advocacy and diplomacy research projects, performing complex social and environmental re-engineering of the past, present, and future.
About the Speaker
Alejandro Haiek Coll is an affiliate researcher at RISE (Research institute of Sweden). PhD candidate at Universitá di Genova. Magister Scientiarum in Architectural Design at Universidad Central de Venezuela (2001). Haiek is currently Lecturer and MA Studio Leader at Umeå School of Architecture, Sweden; Erasmus Scholarship Professor at the Master of International Cooperation Sustainable Emergency Architecture at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya; and Guest Professor in the X-Urban Design Studio at the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalunya.
Links
labprofab.org @the.public.machinery
Panel: EVIDENCE
Date
Saturday 16 July
Time
5:00pm AEST (UTC +10)
Keynote Speaker
Susan SCHUPPLI
Themes
Ice/Climate/Media/Forensics/Evidence
Description
Cold Matters
In this presentation Susan Schuppli expands upon ideas developed in her
monograph Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (MIT Press, 2020) to examine how environmental systems and the transformations brought about by global warming are also generating new forms of evidence; creating, in effect, a planetary archive of material witnesses. Much of this work has been developed through the multi-year “Learning from Ice” Project, which reflects upon the ways in which the different knowledge practices mediated by ice as well as the differential experiences of cold are entangled with legal questions, human rights violations but also claims for social and environmental justice.
About the Speaker
Susan Schuppli is an artist-researcher based in the UK whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change. This research resulted in the monograph Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (MIT Press in 2020) as well as various artworks. Her current research and artistic production examines the ways in which environmental systems and the transformations brought about by global warming are also generating new forms of evidence; creating, in effect, a planetary archive of material witnesses. Much of this work has been developed through her multi-year research project “Learning from Ice” as well as a recent collaboration with Forensic Architecture around the politics of cold. Schuppli’s artistic work has been exhibited throughout Europe, Asia, Canada, and the US. She is a recipient of a COP26 Creative Commission “Listening to Ice” sponsored by the British Council, that involved scientific and community-based work at Drang Drung Glacier in Ladakh, India. Schuppli is Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and is an affiliate artist researcher and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture.
Links
susanschuppli.com
cold-cases.info/
learning-from-ice.org/
listening-to-ice.org/
About the Moderators
Charity Edwards is a lecturer, urban researcher, and registered architect. She has practiced architecture for 20 years and continues to collaborate with artists, filmmakers, and scientists to create buildings, landscapes, and urban strategies. At the present, she is a lecturer at Monash University’s Department of Architecture, where she focuses on interdisciplinary teaching across architecture, and urban planning and design. She is also co-founder and member of The Afterlives of Cities research collective, which brings together applied expertise in architecture, astrophysics, digital fabrication, and speculative fiction to recover futures in space.
Charity’s research explores the destructive, uneven, and multispecies impacts of urbanisation at the scale of the planet. She foregrounds remote and off-world environments in these processes and the long-disregarded space of the ocean in particular. Charity is currently investigating how this manifests in the Southern Ocean via increasingly autonomous underwater technologies, asking why that so often conflicts with popular romantic understandings of the Antarctic region as a remote and pristine wilderness.
Charity’s academic contributions include acting as an Early Career Reviewer for the 2019 United Nations IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, and publications such as a forthcoming analysis of seabed mining media practices, co-authored with Dr Amelia Hine (University of Wollongong), for Society & Space magazine's special issue on the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development; 'The Ocean In (Planetary) Excess?’ in the top-ranking journal Dialogues in Human Geography, a new entry on ‘New Orbital Urbanisation’ with Professor Brendan Gleeson (University of Melbourne) in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Futures, and collaborative writing and critical-image making on the deathly natures of gold, again with Dr Amelia Hine, in Kerb: Journal of Landscape Architecture (#28). Other journal articles and book chapters in architecture and design have also detailed her research on the ocean and urban processes. Charity writes for a diverse audience and has been invited to speak to the public about the urbanising ocean at conferences in geography and international law; and at other cultural institutions. @charityedwards
Eduardo Kairuz is an architect, artist, and scholar, as well as a founding member of the Global Extraction Observatory (GEO). His work is concerned with the transformative effects of crisis in architecture and the city as a means to address questions of spatial and climate justice.
Eduardo's scholarly work has been published in academic journals, including Architecture Research Quarterly (forthcoming), IDEA Journal, AD, and Trans. His practice-based research has been disseminated internationally, including events like the Venice Architecture Biennale (2021) and publications like Quaderns d'Architectura i Urbanisme (2005). Solo shows include Variations at The Substation in Melbourne and Dismantled at Centro Cultural Chacao in Caracas. The latter was the subject of the book Eduardo Kairuz: Dismantled (Uro Publications, 2016). Part of Eduardo's research looks at problems of representation in the new climatic regime and how undisciplined forms of architecture and spatial practice can contribute to developing a new resistance aesthetics. Based on his PhD, this research will be published in his forthcoming book Undisciplined: Of Architectural Nomadism and the Rebellious Practice (Anthem Press, 2023).
Before joining Monash University as a Lecturer (2011), Eduardo was a Visiting Lecturer at University of Technology Sydney and an Assistant Professor at Universidad Central de Venezuela. Prior to these appointments, Eduardo practised architecture in Venezuela for many years, contributing to the design of award-winning slum rehabilitation projects that include the Communal House for Barrio La Vega and the Vertical Gym for Barrio La Cruz, Chacao.
@eduardokairuz
Nicholas Mangan's practice is driven by a desire to make sense of the world by unpacking the stories embedded in specific sites, objects, and events. This investigation explores the unstable relationship between culture and nature, evidencing the flows of matter, energy and ideologies that are produced through the tension of these two realms. A tropical mine in a conflicted state whose local inhabitants used coconuts as fuel in their resistance, a strip-mined island-nation in bankruptcy that took refugees in return for payment from the Australian government, the island of stone money that exemplified money as a social technology, and a geological sample of the earth’s oldest crust have each lent material to this process of dissection and reconfiguration. By rerouting each of these stories, new forms and latent narratives are unearthed.
Mangan’s work has been included in major biennales and survey exhibitions of contemporary art globally, From 2016 - 2018 his mid-career survey, Nicholas Mangan: Limits to Growth was presented at Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, and toured to the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Dowse Art Museum, New Zealand and KW Insititute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The accompanying book was by Berlin-based Sternberg Press. Other publications include Termite Economies (Berlin: Bom Dia, 2021), and Nicholas Mangan: Notes from a Cretaceous World (Melbourne: The Narrows, 2010).
Mangan was awarded the 2020 Australia Council Fellowship for Visual Arts, and in 2018, the Monash University Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Research Excellence by an Early Career Researcher (HASS). He is currently a Senior Lecturer, Higher Degree Research Supervisor & Honours Coordinator in the Department of Fine Arts, Monash University.