Things Fall Apart
A new ethics of environmental relations
with Ama Josephine Budge and Tabita Rezaire
For this new addition to the Climate Emergency > Emergence programme, the Climate Collective is joined by two artists, Tabita Rezaire and Ama Josephine Budge, with whom we’ll reimagine possibilities of “the human” and “being human” beyond the Anthropocene. With a focus on their recent artworks, we will consider their broader practices of healing, activism, and people gathering, as well as of farming and writing as strategies for seeking and enlivening experimental ecological futures, respectively. This session seeks to venture beyond the shadows of suffocating anthropocentricisms, to locate emergent and repressed modes of self-humanising, within Indigenous epistemes and imaginaries beyond conventional humanisations, as emancipatory strategies for creating new forms of life. Within crip, queer and post-colonial communities of thought practice, among many others, we can rethink our ways of being human, along with two artists exploring and creating imaginaries of be(com)ing human in and through our current ecological moment.
— Climate Collective: T. J. Demos, Molemo Moiloa, Susan Schuppli and Paulo Tavares
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The Climate Emergency > Emergence public programme initiative energises critical analyses and creative proposals in moving beyond catastrophism and toward the emergence of environmentally sustainable futures. Interdisciplinary in breadth and international in scope, the programme is conceptualised by the newly-formed 2021 Climate Collective: T. J. Demos (USA), chair and chief-curator, Molemo Moiloa (South Africa), Susan Schuppli (UK), Paulo Tavares (Brazil), geared toward assembling diverse cultural practitioners working at the intersection of experimental arts and political ecology.
As part of the programme taking place from April until December 2021, the Climate Collective has curated an online video screening series featuring films by a variety of international and local practitioners around themes addressed in the ongoing events. |
“maat Explorations” is a programme framework featuring an ongoing series of exhibitions, public and educational projects delving into the multi-faceted subject of environmental transformation from various scholarly and experimental vantage points – it brings philosophical and political perspectives forward, as well as sociocultural and technological investigations interwoven in speculative and critical practices in the arts and design at large.
Central to the discursive and critical effort of “maat Explorations” is the establishment of the Climate Collective, a rotating group of experts in the expanded field of contemporary art, design and technology that will each year propose a refreshed vision on the connection between creative practices, ecological thought and politics. |
Illustration: Lisa Hartje Moura
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Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing, who uses art as a means to unfold the soul. Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences – organic, electronic and spiritual – as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness. Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of resilience, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits
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Ama Josephine Budge is a British-Ghanaian speculative writer, artist, curator and pleasure activist whose work navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and feminism, working to activate movements that catalyse environmental evolutions and troublesomely queered identities. She is currently completing a PhD titled “Intimate Ecologies: Queer Speculations on Pleasure, Blackness and Art”, and her mixed-media installation, film and textual work has been commissioned and published at an international level. Budge can usually be found over-identifying with her aged Staffordshire bull terrier, writing science fiction and pretending to read theory in North-East London.
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