Online gesprek
Aline Baiana, Ada M. Patterson, Clementine Edwards, Tal Beery + Binna Choi: Climate Feelings
Crisis Imaginaries
From June to September, Framer Framed in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Niederlande, will host a series of four events focused on the global climate crisis.
As the world shifts and shutters in response to the Covid19 pandemic, many have reasserted the importance of responding to climate change at a similar scale. We have watched the two crises intertwine, with early indicators showing a correlation between environmental degradation and an increased chance of animal to human virus contagion; likewise, more severe cases of Corona often appear and affect areas suffering from worse air pollution, with the same patterns of vulnerability exacerbated. What can we learn from our current crisis and take with us for our present and future crisis? Together, we will critically examine the notion of crisis as a spectacle that calls for strong leadership, threatening to devolve toward authoritarian tendencies, and as a narrative constructed from differential viewpoints.
- "All this has been risked – for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet this is precisely what we have done. We have done it, moreover, for reasons that collapse the moment we examine them."
(Rachel Carson – Silent Spring [1962])
The third event in the series Crisis Imaginaries will be an online panel discussion on YouTube on 25 August 2020 at 17:00 with Ada M. Patterson, Aline Baiana, Clementine Edwards and Tal Beery, moderated by Binna Choi.
Climate change is more than science: it is a social phenomenon that carries human emotion along with it. Every action, every word, every personal and political decision about the climate is directed, influenced and controlled by our emotional response to it. Everyone who has grieved the loss of a beloved person, space or life knows that the pain of this experience includes the realization that a future once envisioned is no longer within the potential of reality. Why are we then not publicly mourning the loss we experience through the climate catastrophe? And on the other hand, is there room for positivity amidst a sense of dread?
While our immediate reflex may be to shy away from the intense experiences of climate change as they structure our felt reality, channeling emotions may be key to inciting action. So let's turn toward our anxiety and despair, but also to any lingering hope. How do the affective impacts of the climate crisis sit within our bodies and how can we navigate them as activists, artists, as individuals and collectives?
- Ada M. Patterson
Ada M. Patterson (Bridgetown, 1994) is a visual artist, writer and educator based between Barbados, London and Rotterdam. They work with masquerade, textiles, performance, video and poetry, telling new stories or rethinking old stories in new recuperative ways.
Trying to account for the complexities of bodies otherwise unaccounted for, bodies queered by crisis, bodies named invisible, dispensable or ungrievable, bodies confronted with the very real material conditions of a world not built for their survival, their ongoing work hopes to imagine elegies for bodies and moments always already out of time.
- Tal Beery
Tal Beery is a New York-based artist and educator. He is co-founder of Eco Practicum, an artist-run school for ecological justice and founding faculty at School of Apocalypse, examining the connections between creative practice and notions of survival. Beery is also a core member of Occupy Museums, a collective fighting the economic and social injustices propagated by institutions of art and culture. His curatorial research considers the relationships between art and epochal change. Beery's written work and interviews have appeared in numerous publications and his personal and collaborative works have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US and Europe, including the 2012 Berlin Biennale, Brooklyn Museum, and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
- Clementine Edwards
Clementine Edwards is a Rotterdam- and Naarm-based artist whose practice is led by sculpture. Her art looks at how certain experiences and relationships might be enriched and expanded through material and at the reproductive potential of non-sentient materials. She works within the lens of post-traumatic stress disorder. By addressing the historical present of the materials she engages with within her own situated present-tense, and by applying pressure to those presents, Clementine can then understand them as embodied and interlocked within her social network, as part of a queer and complex web that holds her up.
Clementine's ongoing research line is material kinship, which has its genealogy in so-called Australia. She locates material kinship within the context of climate colonialism in an attempt to situate both her own body, as a white femme, and the black and brown bodies upon which her settler-colonial privilege is built. With uncontested access to personhood via whiteness, Clementine is then in a position to recuperate non-sentient material as oddkin – in a post-Haraway sense – and approach the subject as intimate world-building in the context of climate crisis.
- Aline Baiana
Focusing on ontological conflict in convergence with indigenous, feminist, ethnic, environmental and social justice studies, Aline Baiana’s work reveals the importance of uncovering other histories and often highlights the collective trauma and environmental impact of the enduring crimes of colonization. In 2019 Baiana participated in the Sharjah Biennial14 with an installation drawing parallels between the construction of hydropower plants in Brazil and Lebanon, both of which would endanger rivers and the areas of biodiversity they support. In 2020 she will participate in the 11th Berlin Biennale. Born in 1985 in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, Aline Baiana currently lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.
- Binna Choi
Binna Choi (b. 1977) is the director at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons in Utrecht, where she engages with both its artistic program and the organizational and (de)instituting practice as her curatorial and collaborative art practice. In doing so, the commons are both an end goal in systemic change and methodology, by which she means equal, loving, and sustainable modes of caring and sharing common resources. Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills, Common Grounds: Song / Value, Site for Unlearning (Art Organization) are some of her recent curatorial works, next to the process of restructuring and rearticulating the institution itself. There earlier she conceived a long-term trans-disciplinary project Grand Domestic Revolution (2010-2012) and the multi faceted program Composing the Commons (2013-2016). In 2018 Choi also co-initiated Unmapping Eurasia, a long-term, movement based curatorial project with You Mi. Arts Collaboratory trans-local art organizational ecosystem and Dutch Art Institute Roaming Academy is where she for years has been involved in with different capacities. Besides, Choi is the member of Akademie der Künste der Welt (Cologne) where in 2020 she in close collaboration with Christian Nyampeta curated Gwangju Lessons over the 18 May Democratic Uprising and takes it to Asia Culture Center as part of the MaytoDay project by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation. In 2016, she was a curator for the 11th Gwangju Biennale
Crisis Imaginaries is a project by Framer Framed and the Goethe-Institut Niederlande.