Sarah Vanhee: Impact? It’s very unspectacular, actually
Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
is a European cooperation project on hope. The hope we’re interested in is about ‘broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act’.
The ocean holds numerous stories of kinship between the human and the more-than-human. One of those stories tells of the ancient oceanic ancestors of our present-day (human) bodies of water. Traces of many of those ancestors, such as the amoeba or the jellyfish, are still present in the human body. This last session in our Series of More-Than-Human Encounters is entirely devoted to oceanic storytelling in kinship with hydrofeminism. This form of feminism is particularly sensitive towards watery creatures and our solidarity with them.
For its second edition, the Nuits des Forêts festival reopens its call for participation to all artists, creators, performers, actors in the cultural and educational sectors, thinkers and poets, to weave an artistic and sensitive program in the heart of the forest. The call is open until January 30, 2022!
A nationwide festival intended for the general public, the Nuits des Forêts (FR) invites you to discover the forest close to home and meet the women and men who inhabit it, cultivate it, protect it and draw inspiration from it… At a time of climate change, forests are at the heart of societal debates: droughts, tree diebacks and diseases, forest fires, carbon offsets and uses of wood… Because forests are a common heritage, the Nuits des Forêts wish to create a time of exchange, bringing together forest stakeholders, wood professionals, but also experts and scientists, thinkers and philosophers, artists, and inviting all citizens to mobilize on these issues. Through the encounter between culture and nature, this event intends to make society aware of forestry issues and promote new relationships with living things, at the level of each territory.
It seems to be far away, but it’s getting closer than ever. We are able to precisely alter the genetic code of our body cells, embryos, bacteria, viruses and plants. With the CRISPR cas9 technology we can adjust the properties of any organism to our liking. A revolutionary development that will have major consequences for humans, plants and animals. The performance CRISPR zooms in on the children who are born after applying these ‘genetic scissors’. A search for identity in a world that has more and more control over the technical side of existence.
The ocean is our geographic, dreamlike and political horizon. While the United Nations proclaimed the Decade of Ocean Sciences for Sustainable Development 2021-2030, the COAL Prize 2022 invites artists from around the world to explore these submerged universes to make them accessible to as many people as possible; to reveal what is playing out in the belly of the ocean, from its abyss twenty thousand leagues under the sea to its surface, to give to see and feel what is still unknown; and to imagine new concrete actions to rekindle resilience with the water worlds.
Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux introduces an interdisciplinary project that brings together scientists, legal experts, artists and other professionals to think about the ties that bind humans and other living beings. Vibrating in the World invites us to imagine a presence on the planet that is both an embodiment of the self, and also – evoking Édouard Glissant and his philosophy of relation – the act of becoming sensitive to all living things and to our cosmic condition.
How has colonial history marked our relationship with nature? In a two late afternoons program, we gather several disciplines of knowledge to open the photographic archives of contemporary Portuguese history, trying to see them as documents that, simultaneously, reveal traces of multiple ecologies, and are the expression of how colonial history marked nature.
Based on photographs of scientific missions organised by the Portuguese Institute of Tropical Scientific Research (Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical (IICT)), and within the scope of project Photo Impulse, which focuses on photographic collections of Portuguese scientific and geodesic missions in Africa throughout the 20th century, this roundtable discussion establishes a dialogue between the epistemological perspectives of that colonial scientific past and contemporary ways of thinking philosophically, artistically and conceptually about the relationship of humans with plants and botany.
bodies of knowledge (BOK) considers the city as a rich source of valuable knowledge. Every passer-by could teach you something from their own background and life-experiences. BOK seeks to share this invisibilized or suppressed knowledge through oral transmission, that potentially could give rise to a socially more just society.
The Big BOK Multiplication tells the story of one and a half year of BOK in Brussels. BOK has been travelling as a nomadic classroom space through various parks and squares in Brussels for the past 18 months. Each week, passers-by and regular visitors could participate in the free programme, where they could learn about topics like: the central place of women in the Kurdish liberation movement, practising listening when you are used to being in the centre, Africa – a customs officer’s perspective, fighting structural injustices in mainstream education – as mothers, surviving and living with little money, saga of a happy borderline person and many more. All issues that don’t get a place, or not enough, in our schools, in mainstream institutions and in the media.
Marco Martins proposes in WILD a reflection on the use of the mask in ritualistic practices that, since time immemorial, collectively mark crucial moments in Europe, such as the equinoxes and solstices, integrating characters such as the Wild Man, the Bear, the Goat or the Devil.
Based on Marco Martins’ new performance, this debate hacks the multiple dramaturgies of masks. As a medium and stage for the figuration of the Other, masks show, hide and perform profound human technologies of the game. Face and mask differ and resonate with each other. From supernatural beliefs, masks deal with what fascinates and is feared, turning the wearer into hybrids beyond the culture/nature, animal/human and true/disguised dichotomies.
