Film Screening and lectures NARRATIVES ABOUT EARTH

19:00  Screening of the film Urth by Ben Rivers (2016)

The last woman on Earth. Filmed inside Biosphere 2 in Arizona, “Urth” is a cinematic meditation on ambitious experiments, constructed environments and visions of the future. Writer Mark von Schlegell contributes a text, read as the final log instalments of a woman
sealed inside an unforgiving environment. The film considers what an endeavour such as Biosphere 2 might mean today and in the near future, in terms of humankind’s relationship with the natural world.

Ben Rivers is an artist and experimental filmmaker based in London. His practice as a filmmaker treads a line between documentary and fiction. Often filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society. The film footage serves Rivers as a starting point for narratives about alternative existences and other worlds.
 

19:20 “Anthropause” and resurgent natures? A lecture by Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr Adam Searle and Jonathon Turnbull have been working collaboratively on various projects that examine how human-nature relations have been reconfigured during the Anthropause. Beginning with a theoretical exploration of narratives on nature's resurgence in locked-down cities, they have gone on to empirically investigate the role of digital technologies and online nature groups in facilitating convivial human-nature relations.

Adam Searle is an environmental and cultural geographer at the Université de Liège, where he examines the relationships between humans, nonhumans, and technology. His research background is in ecological and environmental sciences, however he has since become more interested in the production of scientific knowledge.

Jonathon Turnbull is a cultural and environmental geographer based at the University of Cambridge. His PhD research concerns the return of nature to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone in Ukraine, where he has been working for the last two years with scientists studying different aspects of the Zone's ecology, especially dogs and wolves.
 

20:10 Screening of the film 21% by Ursula Biemann in collaboration with Mo Diener (2016)

In the midst of the oxygenic forest, a science-fictional character manipulates a multitude of ingredients – minerals, forest fruits, liquids and other substances. Ranging in scale from the cosmos to the kitchen, the video undertakes an empirical inquiry into the capacity of chemical elements. The video focuses on the materiality and processes, by which human and other organic bodies are kept alive, intensifying their relation to the subtle, multiple, living world.

Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research-oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water.

20:30 Planetary as Practice Lecture Jennifer Gabrys

Jennifer Gabrys will give a lecture that addresses the topic of the planetary and outlines the concept of being planetary as a practice that informs the ethos of her research group at the University of Cambridge.

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge. She leads the Planetary Praxis research group, and is Principal Investigator on the ERC-funded project, Smart Forests: Transforming Environments into Social-Political Technologies.