• Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster
  • Events: Dark Series
  • Images
  • BS n°19
  • Follow us on Tumblr
    •

    Dark Series

    The exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster takes the per­spec­tive of a common work as a way to re-think our ways to build and inhabit our envi­ron­ment. The exhi­bi­tion gathers a few sto­ries that embody dif­ferent ways of reacting to the trou­bled sit­u­a­tion we are living in, and pro­poses alter­na­tive modal­i­ties to relate with the world.

    The show con­siders dis­aster as a junc­ture where a new sense of col­lec­tivity arises against tragedy. A time of upheaval. Following this notion, the Dark Series – its public pro­gramme - embody a tran­si­tional moment where to envisage sub­sti­tutes, choices, loop­holes, oppor­tu­ni­ties and dilemmas related to the cli­mate change crisis. The Dark Series intends to look at not only envi­ron­mental aspects but also eco­nom­ical, social and polit­ical impli­ca­tions of this problem, in order to create a trans­dis­ci­plinary plat­form that can encap­su­late its man­i­fold res­o­nances.

    The pro­gramme is rooted in a ter­rain where it is pos­sible to imagine a geog­raphy, a cli­mate, a novel ecology, and think of new futures by com­pre­hending the issues that affect our pre­sent. The Dark Series unravels in mul­tiple shapes and in dif­ferent times­pans by means of nar­ra­tive tech­niques, artistic research, science-fic­tion, talks, and assem­blies.

    Follow the schedule of Dark Series in the Calendar sec­tion, as well as the doc­u­men­ta­tion of events on Dark Series Tumblr.

    Curated by Garance Malivel & Barbara Cueto

    Assemblies

    Saturday November 28 at 3pm30
    Assembly - For a Sustainable Future: Art and Culture(s) Facing Environmental Crisis

    In his book Technics and Civilization pub­lished in 1934, the his­to­rian and philoso­pher Lewis Mumford already called for – and hoped to see realised - a “dy­namic equi­lib­rium” regarding the human exploita­tion of the envi­ron­ment, the pro­duc­tion of the con­sumer goods, or even the con­ser­va­tion of nat­ural resources. On the eve of the opening of the COP21 in Paris, which aims at estab­lishing an inter­na­tional binding agree­ment to limit the cli­mate warming largely due to the exces­sive extrac­tion and burning of fossil fuels as well as to defor­esta­tion, it has to be said that the equi­lib­rium that Mumford called for was not achieved.

    Outside of the dis­cus­sions that will take place in Le Bourget, the second assembly of Dark Series pro­poses to look into other strate­gies of reflexion and action, in other man­ners of showing and nego­ti­ating that could allow us to re-think the devel­op­ment of our society and our envi­ron­ment. What could be the role of artistic research and of cul­tural prac­tices in this con­text? At the cross­road of art, activism and research, the par­tic­i­pants of this assembly will pre­sent their pro­posals for a more sus­tain­able devel­op­ment, to make vis­ible the urgency of envi­ron­mental issues and to con­ceive uni­fying actions at the heart of civil society.

    Participants:
    Sacha Kagan (Ph.D) is Research Associate at Leuphana University Lüneburg (Germany), Principal Investigator at the trans­dis­ci­plinary research pro­ject "The City as Space of Possibility". He is the Chair of the Research Network "Sociology of the Arts" at the European Sociological Association (ESA RN 2).
    Marie Velardi, artist, based in Geneva. After studying in Milan, Brussels, Lausanne and Geneva, she par­tic­i­pated in 2013-14 to the Programme of exper­i­men­ta­tion in arts and pol­i­tics at Sciences Po, Paris. Through her research and prac­tice, she aims at con­structing a memory of the future.
    Collective Disaster is a young, inter­na­tional and mul­ti­disclip­inary net­work, inter­ested in exploring new pos­si­bil­i­ties of col­lab­o­ra­tion and in working on ways out of dis­as­ters.
    Isabelle Frémeaux and John Jordan co-founded the col­lec­tive Laboratory of Insurrectional Imagination in which art, activism and per­ma­cul­ture inter­sect. http://labofii.net. The labofii and others have organ­ised the Climate Games, the world’s largest Disobedient Action Adventure Game, that will unfold during the COP21, in Paris and around. cli­mategames.net / face­book : cli­mate games

    //

    Saturday January 9, 2016 at 3pm30
    Assembly - Environmental Justice
    Organized in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Françoise Vergès, Chair Global South(s) at Collège d’études mon­di­ales de la Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme.

    A car­tog­raphy of pol­luting indus­tries, inten­sive agri­cul­ture, inten­sive mining, nuclear power plants, ect show the fla­grant inequal­i­ties that exist within the geo­graph­ical dis­tri­bu­tion of the pol­luting indus­tries, often built near impov­er­ished or minority areas. This assembly will focus on the con­se­quences of these risky activ­i­ties on the envi­ron­ment and on their reper­cus­sions in terms of public health. Through a series of case studies, the par­tic­i­pants will address the pro­gres­sive iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and recog­ni­tion of cer­tain sources of toxic pol­lu­tions, the North/South divide and the fre­quent colo­nial or neo-colo­nial ori­gins in the unequal access to a healthy envi­ron­ment, as well as pos­sible tools, notably legal ones, to mit­i­gate such inequal­i­ties.

    Participants:
    Bruno Barrillot (Co-founder of the Observatoire des arme­ments)
    Bronwyn Lay (Lawyer)
    Jade Lindgaard (Journalist)
    Uwe H. Martin (Photojournalist)
    Luc Multigner (Director of Research, Inserm)
    Jacopo Ottaviani (Journalist)
    Françoise Vergès (Political Scientist, Chair of Global South(s) at Collège d’études mon­di­ales of Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme)
    Alexis Zimmer (PhD in Epistemology and History of Sciences and Techniques)

    Talks

    Friday November 20 at 7pm
    Urban Development & Climate Change in the Global South
    Paulo Tavares (Architect and Urbanist) & Justine Liv Olausson (Urbanist and Political Scientist).

    As part of the public pro­gramme Dark Series unfolding during the exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster, this con­ver­sa­tion between archi­tect Paulo Tavares and urbanist Justine Liv Olausson will bring together dif­ferent per­spec­tives on global warming, here ques­tioned as a con­se­quence of the indus­trial and impe­ri­alist cul­ture of Northern coun­tries, that first affects the coun­tries of the Global South. Broaching the polit­ical vio­lence which under­lines this matter, Paulo Tavares and Justine Liv Olausson will elab­o­rate on the effects gen­er­ated both in some urban and non-urban areas of Global South. The talk will pivot around how global warming crisis affects the devel­op­ment of the com­mu­ni­ties and the pos­sible ways for them to adapt and deal with this sit­u­a­tion.

    Paulo Tavares is an archi­tect and researcher based in Quito/São Paulo.
    His work has been exhib­ited in var­ious venues world­wide, most recently at BAK - basis voor actuele kunst, ZMK Center for Art and Media, Haus de Kulturen der Welt, PROA-Buenos Aires, and Taipei Biennial. Tavares has col­lab­o­rated with many inter­na­tional pub­li­ca­tions and has lec­tured widely at dif­ferent con­texts and loca­tions, including ETH-Zurich; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Haus de Kulturen der Welt (Berlin); São Paulo Biennale, Ireland Biennale and Mercosul Biennale. He teaches design studio and spa­tial theory at the School of Architecture, Design and Arts of the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador in Quito, and is cur­rently a vis­iting scholar at the School of Architecture at Princeton University. Prior to that, Tavares taught at the Centre for Research Architecture – Goldsmiths, University of London, acting as the coor­di­nator of the MA pro­gramme.
    Justine Liv Olausson is a research assis­tant in the Architecture Design Innovation Program (ADIP) at the TU Berlin where she is cur­rently teaching the theory sem­inar Contested Properties. Fields informing her work include Social and Political Science (BA Malmö University 2006-09), Photography (Spéos Institut de Photographie 2009-10), Film (Assistant Director 2011-12), International Guidelines on Urban and Territorial Planning (UN-Habitat 2012-13) and Sustainable Urban Planning and Design (MSc KTH Royal Technical University 2012-14). She is a member of the Society for Artistic Research (Bern). Her cur­rent research areas are coop­er­a­tive com­mu­ni­ties and spaces of com­moning, with a par­tic­ular interest in land trans­for­ma­tions, social move­ments and rapidly urban­izing cities of the Global South. Recently she con­tributed to the pub­li­ca­tions Berlin Transfer: Learning from the Global South (2015), Hybrid Modernities (2015), and Lo-res: Architectural Theory, Politics and Criticism (2015).

    //

    Friday November 27 at 7pm
    Deviant Utopian Narrations
    A con­ver­sa­tion with Alice Carabédian (PhD Student in Political Philosophy at CSPRP, centre de soci­ologie des pra­tiques et des représen­ta­tions poli­tiques) in the frame­work of the Speculative Thinking Series* con­ceived with Émilie Notéris.

    I think we learn to be worldly from grap­pling with, rather than gen­er­al­izing from, the ordi­nary. I am a crea­ture of the mud, not the sky. (Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2008, p.3)
    Far from catas­trophist sto­ries about the future of human being or from science-fic­tion post-apoc­a­lyptic visions of our planet, the Culture series by Scottish author Ian M. Banks offers an orig­inal and deeply polit­ical reflexion about the con­nec­tion between humanity, arti­fi­ciality and envi­ron­ment – redrafting with irony the tra­di­tions of utopia and space-opera. By pre­senting the rela­tion to alterity from the angle of the encounter, prox­imity and eman­ci­pa­tion – rather than that of dom­i­na­tion, coloni­sa­tion or util­i­tar­i­anism – Ian M. Banks’s science fic­tion invites us to sub­vert our view­point, to decenter our­selves, and to imagine an unprece­dented rela­tion­ship to the world: a deviant utopian rela­tion.

    Alice Carabédian is a PhD stu­dent at the Laboratory for Social and Political Change at Denis Diderot University. She holds a Master in Modern Literature as well as one in Political Philosophy. Carabédian obtained a doc­toral con­tract at LCSP for con­tin­uing her research on science fic­tion lit­er­a­ture, seen as a lab­o­ra­tory of though and a medium to prob­lema­tise con­tem­po­rary polit­ical issues. Her thesis pro­poses a re-reading and a re-con­cep­tu­al­i­sa­tion of the polit­ical and crit­ical utopia through Banks’s science fic­tion oeuvre. She is the co-founder of the “Archipel des Devenirs - Centre de recherche sur l’utopie” (Archipelago of Futures – Centre for Research on Utopia).

    //

    Wednesday December 16 at 7pm
    Imagining the Post-Disaster
    Conversation with Mathieu Potte-Bonneville (Philosopher) and Pierre Zaoui (Philosopher) in the frame­work of the Speculative Thinking Series* con­ceived with Émilie Notéris.

    The time that fol­lows catas­tro­phes seems doomed to be unthink­able: we can’t imagine it nei­ther before (the par­tic­u­larity of a catas­trophe is to thwart our antic­i­pa­tions); nei­ther during (while we are too busy sur­viving it); nor after, while we are shunted between stupor, rep­e­ti­tion, and com­pul­sion. Should we then give up on stim­u­lating imag­i­na­tion, to only rely on the com­fort of a still hurt sen­si­bility or on the pru­dence of reason? Beyond the metaphors of the unpre­sentable, of the desert or fields of ruins, what uses and fic­tions remain pos­sible? From the clas­sical the­o­ries to the con­tem­po­rary fic­tions, we will inves­ti­gate if and how the imag­i­na­tion could, after the storm, help shaping the memory and the future.

    Associate, PhD in Philosophy, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville is senior lec­turer at the École Normale Supérieure at Lyon. Former pres­i­dent of the Collège International of Philosophy and co-founder of the tri-monthly magazine Vacarme, he has notably pub­lished Michel Foucault, L’inquié­tude de l’his­toire (PUF, 2004), Amorces (Prairies ordi­naires, 2004), D’Après Foucault (avec P. Artières, réed. "Points essais", 2013). He is in charge of “Ideas and Knowledges” at Institut Français, he has recently coor­di­nated the col­lec­tive book Game of Thrones – Série Noire (Prairies ordi­naires, 2015), and he often col­lab­o­rates with the pro­gramme La Grande Table at France-Culture.
    Pierre Zaoui teaches Philosophy, Literature and Contemporary art at the University Paris Diderot. He is has notably written Spinoza, la déci­sion de soi (Bayard, 2008), La Traversée des catas­tro­phes (Seuil, 2010) and La Discrétion, ou l’art de dis­paraître (Autrement, 2013). He is member of edi­to­rial board of the magazine Vacarme.

    //

    Friday December 18, from 4 to 7pm and Saturday December 19, at 3:30pm
    A.P.E. - Art, Philosophy & Ecology / Seminar & Conversation with Timothy Morton
    Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research has the plea­sure to host a double event with philoso­pher Timothy Morton to inves­ti­gate the con­nec­tions between art, phi­los­ophy and ecology.

    Timothy Morton has become a fun­da­mental figure in the con­tem­po­rary philo­soph­ical thought and one of the ref­er­ents of the object-ori­ented ontology. He pro­poses a unique anal­ysis of the entan­gle­ment between nature and civ­i­liza­tion asserting that in order to develop a prop­erly eco­log­ical view, we should relin­quish the idea of nature itself. One week after the end of COP 21 in Paris, this twofold event will fur­ther elab­o­rate on the reper­cus­sions of the global warming crisis, this time from the per­spec­tive of the object-ori­ented thought.
    Friday December 18, from 4 to 7pm: Seminar (by reg­is­tra­tion only)
    On the 18th of December, Timothy Morton will give a sem­inar to fur­ther explain the con­cepts he devel­oped in recent years, such as Dark Ecology, Hyperobjects, or the Mesh. The sem­inar will be adapted and per­son­al­ized with the par­tic­i­pants.
    Due to a lim­ited number of places this event requires reg­is­tra­tion through the fol­lowing form. The dead­line to submit your reg­is­tra­tion is on the 11th of December, and the con­fir­ma­tions will be com­mu­ni­cated by the 14th of December.
    Saturday December 19, at 3:30pm: Public con­ver­sa­tion with Timothy Morton
    The fol­lowing day, on the 19th of December, Timothy Morton will give a public talk about the inter­con­nex­ions between art, phi­los­ophy and ecology. More infor­ma­tion will be coming soon.

    Timothy Morton is the Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He is the author of Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism and Critical Theory (Chicago, forth­coming), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities, 2013), The Ecological Thought (Harvard UP, 2010), Ecology without Natur (Harvard, 2007), seven other books and one hun­dred and twenty essays on phi­los­ophy, ecology, lit­er­a­ture, food and music. He blogs reg­u­larly at www.ecol­o­gy­with­out­na­ture.blogspot.com.
    Free entrance. Both events will be held in English.

    //

    Wednesday January 13, 2016 at 7pm
    Contemporary Acoustic Ecology
    A con­ver­sa­tion with Stéphan-Eloïse Gras (PhD in Information and Communication Sciences and in Aesthetics), and Maxime Boidy (PhD in Sociology and Postdoctoral researcher at Labex Arts-H2H) in the frame­work of the Speculative Thinking Series* con­ceived with Émilie Notéris.

    After the nineties, acoustic ecology and more gen­er­ally the sound expe­ri­ence as such have been sub­ject of a growing interest, either from the per­spec­tive of its social his­tory, its tech­nical sup­ports, or its philo­soph­ical issues. A field – which is cer­tainly not homo­ge­neous and which can’t be reduced to what we call sound studies – has been estab­lished through works such as those of James H. Johnson (Listening in Paris, 1996), Peter Szendy (Écoute, une his­toire de nos oreilles, 2001), Jean-Luc Nancy (Listening, 2007), Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past, 2003) and more recently Martin Kaltenecker (L’Oreille divisée, 2010), Michael Bull (Sound Studies, 2013) or Veit Erlmann (Reason and Resonance, 2014).
    This recent atten­tion is indica­tive of the trans­for­ma­tions under­gone by our con­tem­po­rary prac­tices as artists, musi­cians, musi­col­o­gists, researchers, sci­en­tists, music lovers, internet users…, in short: as lis­tening sub­jects in gen­eral. How has the internet and more gen­er­ally dig­ital tech­nology – that is to say the vast com­put­er­i­sa­tion of expe­ri­ences and large-scale social­i­sa­tion of com­puter science – altered the con­tem­po­rary acoustic ecology?
    At the cross­roads of sound and soft­ware studies, this con­ver­sa­tion intends to high­light polit­ical and aes­thetic land­marks in order to think of a dig­ital regime for acoustic ecology.

    Stéphan-Eloïse Gras cur­rently works on her PhD in Information and Communication Sciences (GRIPIC_CELSA- Paris Sorbonne) and in Philosophy (LLCP-Paris 8) about « Listening online : muta­tions in the musical spaces in Internet », under the direc­tion of Nicole d’Almeida and Patrick Vauday. Musician, she is inter­ested in the dig­ital medi­a­tion of musical lis­tening in new tech­nical, aes­thetic, indus­trial and polit­ical con­texts, under the per­spec­tive of the crit­ical the­o­ries of sub­jec­tiv­i­ties. She was invited researcher at Brown University and at New York University, and she is cur­rently in charge of the prospec­tive and dig­ital coop­er­a­tion of Institut Française.
    Maxime Boidy is cur­rently a post­doc­toral researcher at Labex Arts-H2H at the University Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis. Translator of A his­tory of the sound moder­nity by Jonathan Sterne (La Découverte/Philharmonie de Paris, col­lec­tion The music street : sound cul­ture, 2015) he has recently co-directed the 11th issue of the review Poli-Politic of the Image ded­i­cated to Sound Politics (2015).

    //

    Saturday January 16, 2016 at 3pm30
    Film-making as History-making
    A con­ver­sa­tion with Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk (artists), and Louly Seif (editor and film­maker).

    Bétonsalon – Centre for Art and Research wel­comes artists Jasmina Metwaly and Philip Rizk, as well as editor and film­maker Louly Seif, for a con­ver­sa­tion around their film Out on the Street, screened in the exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers till January 30. The film fea­tures nine non-pro­fes­sional actors from a working class neigh­bor­hood in Cairo per­forming the events around the pri­va­ti­za­tion of a public fac­tory. Out on the Street inter­laces footage from an acting work­shop car­ried out with the workers, with scenes the same workers per­formed - both expe­ri­enced con­fronta­tions at work, with the police, or imag­ined sce­narios of what might have hap­pened.
    The con­ver­sa­tion between the two direc­tors and editor will go in depth into how the pro­cess based-approach taken during the filming con­tinued into the period of mon­tage. While dealing with the real flesh of life sto­ries, the making of Out on the Street engages with the realm of make-belief and ques­tions how to fic­tion­ally re-con­sti­tute the past. The film-makers will dis­cuss the rela­tion­ship of film-making to his­tory-making, in this case as a group of three in the editing suite.

    Philip Rizk is a film­maker and writer based in Cairo, Egypt. He studied Philosophy and Anthropology and has been working with video since 2009. Jasmina Metwaly is a visual artist and film­maker based in Cairo, co-founder of the 8784 pro­ject and a founding member of Mosireen video col­lec­tive. Together they directed the fea­ture film Out on the Street, which premiered at the Berlinale 2015 and was part of the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2015.
    Louly Seif is a free­lance film editor and film­maker born in Alexandria, Egypt. In 2011, she pur­sued a mas­ters in Aural and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths College in London and with mul­tiple inter­ests in editing, analog film­making, grading and sound recording/design, she enjoyed being a free­lancer ever since. She is cur­rently com­pleting a post­grad­uate course in colour grading at the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin (DFFB).
    Free entrance. The talk will be held in English.

    //

    Saturday January 23 at 3pm30
    Eclogitisation, or the strong pro­cess of amnesia
    A talk with Melissa Dubbin, Aaron S. Davidson (artists), Maxime Guitton (curator), and Violaine Sautter (geol­o­gist).

    Drawing from their instal­la­tion on view in the exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster, artists Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson, in con­ver­sa­tion with geol­o­gist Violaine Sautter and curator Maxime Guitton, will dwell on what we can learn from time taken at geo­log­ical scale and from the slow trans­for­ma­tion pro­cess of meta­mor­phic rocks. Taking inspi­ra­tion from J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927) and George Kubler’s The Shape of Time (1961), the talk will dis­cuss how objects, and stones in par­tic­ular, can transmit what they have wit­nessed or fore­cast what is to come. This open con­ver­sa­tion with geol­o­gist Violaine Sautter, here cast as the “ge­olin­guist” – in ref­er­ence to a short story in which science fic­tion author Ursula K. Le Guin imag­ines a char­acter able to read “the wholly atem­poral, cold, vol-canic poetry of the rocks” * – will examine how the lan­guage of min­erals can shed light on our under­standing of what we now call the Anthropocene.
    * “The Author of the Acacia Seeds, and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics”, 1974, orig­i­nally pub­lished in The Compass Rose, New York: Harper and Row, 1982.

    Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson have co-authored a body of works pro­ducing forms, objects, images and expe­ri­ences, equally incor­po­rating the mediums of pho­tog­raphy, video, sound, per­for­mance, instal­la­tion, drawing, sculp­ture and artists books since they began working together in 1998. Recent solo exhi­bi­tions include Treize, Paris (2014); Audio Visual Arts (AVA), New York, NY (2013); Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden, Norway (2012); and Nýló, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, Iceland (2012). Recent group exhi­bi­tions include Some Artists’ Artists at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (2014); The Artist’s Institute, New York, NY (2014); Art of Its Own Making at The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, MI (2014); The String and the Mirror, Lisa Cooley, New York, NY (2013); Alchemical, Steven Kasher Gallery, New York, NY (2013); and Sound Spill, Zabludowicz Collection, New York, NY (2013).
    Maxime Guitton is managing the depart­ment of cre­ation grants at Centre national des arts plas­tiques (CNAP) in Paris. Since 2003, he has been devel­oping free-lance music pro­gram­ming activ­i­ties in a variety of inde­pen­dent venues and artistic insti­tu­tions (Le BAL, CAPC, Centre Pompidou, etc.). He has been assisting com­poser Eliane Radigue between 2009 through 2011. His research fields in music have led him to be invited by art schools and art cen­tres for classes, work­shops, lec­tures and lis­tening ses­sions (ECAL, Ecole du Magasin, INHA, Bétonsalon, Musée de la Main UNIL-CHUV, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers, Meetfactory, etc.). In 2014, he curated Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson’s solo exhi­bi­tion, a drusy vein (Treize, Paris). Along with Benoît Hické, he com­pleted in 2015 the pro­gram­ming of Montagnes: la terre exhaussée, a cycle of film screen­ings, lec­tures and acous­matic dif­fu­sion about moun­tains at the National Museum of Natural History (Paris).
    Violaine Sautter is a geol­o­gist working at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris (MNHN), a research director at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and co-inves­ti­gator with the Laser ChemCam aboard Curiosity, NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). She con­ducted research for sev­eral years on dia­monds in the Earth’s deep inte­rior. In 1990 Violaine Sautter dis­cov­ered the deepest min­eral ever found on Earth at that time, a garnet coming from a depth of more than 300km. She was awarded the Bronze medal at CNRS for this dis­covery, an award ded­i­cated to find­ings by young researchers. In 2001, she was an orga­nizer of the exhi­bi­tion and co-author of the book Diamonds: In the Heart of the Earth, in the Heart of Stars, at the Heart of Power. By the begin­ning of 2000, she had begun to study Martian mete­orites. Recognized for her research in this field, Violaine Sautter was selected to con­tinue her work within NASA’s MSL on board the rover Curiosity.

    Free entrance. The talk will be held in English.

    Workshops

    October 2015 - January 2016
    Seule contre l’Univert
    First Session : Saturday October 24
    Second Session : Thursday November 12
    Evening Restitution : Friday January 29 from 6pm to 8pm
    Conceived with Eva Barois De Caevel (curator)

    « Seule contre l’Univert » is not an art­work, it is a free polit­ical activity to do in our spare time, alone and in a group, episod­i­cally or for four months. « Seule contre l’Univert » is a pro­ject openly para­noid, designed in order to think about the notion of activism at the indi­vidual level and at the net­work age. « Seule contre l’Univert » will approach through the back door (the one of a shared garden – « l’Univert » — of the 18th arrondisse­ment of Paris) notions as ecofem­i­nism, social jus­tice in urban envi­ron­ment, story-telling, pol­i­tics of coali­tion, method of cross-sec­tional anal­ysis, social ecology, the fight against the State’s pow­erful nar­ra­tion and the death of the ver­nac­ular.

    //

    Saturday October 31 at 3pm30 and Wednesday December 3 at 7pm
    Creative writing work­shop ded­i­cated to restora­tive fic­tion
    Conceived with Émilie Notéris (writer).

    In the frame­work of the exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster, Émilie Notéris ini­ti­ates a cre­ative writing work­shop ded­i­cated to restora­tive fic­tion. The author will focus on how to develop a pos­i­tive and restora­tive nar­ra­tion, from a "cloud" of key­words arising at the edge of the COP 21 (United Nations Conference on Climate Change), put in per­spec­tive with pioneer science-fic­tion texts. The work­shop pro­poses a change of out­look in order to pro­duce a “de­col­o­niza­tion of thought”, as anthro­pol­o­gist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro puts forth. At the end of the work­shop a journal com­piling the texts written in this con­text will be made by the par­tic­i­pants.
    Additionally, a series of con­ver­sa­tions con­ceived by Emilie Noteris will punc­tuate the exhi­bi­tion; they will offer to develop a new pos­i­tive eco­log­ical and post-dis­aster out­look in lit­erary, philo­sophic and acoustic fields.

    Émilie Notéris is a text worker, born in 1978. A science fic­tion author (Cosmic trip, 2008; Séquoiadrome, 2011) and essay writer (Fétichisme post­mod­erne, 2010), she also works as a trans­lator (Marshall McLuhan, Sudipta Kaviraj, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Slavoj Zizek, Hakim Bey, Malcolm Le Grice). She con­tributed to a col­lec­tive pub­li­ca­tion ded­i­cated to the series Game of Thrones (Paris: Prairies Ordinaires, 2015) and is cur­rently preparing a book on science fic­tion and queer theory. In November 2015, she con­ceives the pro­gramme EcoQueer that will open the Rencontres Bandits-Mages in Bourges (France).

    //

    Tuesday November 10 from 10am to 7pm
    Disasters Room: Lessons from Crisis Management and Post-Catastrophe Recovery
    Conceived with Fernando García-Dory (artist and agroe­col­o­gist), in part­ner­ship with Imago Mundi Foundation (Cracow) in the frame­work of the pro­gramme Place Called Space.

    The work­shop will draw con­nec­tions between dif­ferent levels of crisis, from the psy­cho­log­ical to the specific impacts at city or regional level, to the sys­temic. It will inter­twine fields from poetry to biology and pale­on­tology, from public rela­tions to archi­tec­ture and sus­tain­able engi­neering, and from theory of chaos to tac­tics of rad­ical antag­o­nism for dis­tur­bance esca­la­tion in rev­o­lu­tionary pro­cesses. The par­tic­i­pants will look at the stages of pre-crisis, emer­gency, crisis man­age­ment, and post-catas­trophe recovery, through a col­lec­tive cre­ative endeavour also fed by an exchange with experts from these fields who will give specific inputs. What is resilience and how to build it up? What imag­i­naries do these new nar­ra­tives of apoc­a­lypse allow and how are they col­lec­tively addressed?

    Fernando García-Dory´s (b. 1978) work engages specif­i­cally with the rela­tion­ship between cul­ture and nature now, as man­i­fested in mul­tiple con­texts, from land­scape and the rural, to desires and expec­ta­tions con­cerned with iden­tity, through to (global) crisis, utopia and the poten­tial for social change. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and now pre­pairing his PhD on Agroecology. Interested in the har­monic com­plexity of bio­log­ical forms and pro­cesses, his work addresses con­nec­tions and coop­er­a­tion, from microor­gan­isms to social sys­tems, and from tra­di­tional art lan­guages such as drawing to col­lab­o­ra­tive agroe­co­log­ical pro­jects, actions, and coop­er­a­tives.

    //

    Every Thursday from 12 November 2015 to 28 January 2016 (except 24th and 31st of Dec)
    Cum Venies Laetabor
    Workshop with a group of stu­dents from École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy.
    Led by Boris Achour (artist), François Bon (writer), Jeff Guess (artist), and Judith Perron (chore­og­ra­pher), teachers at ENSAPC.
    (For Students only)

    //

    October 2015 - January 2016
    Co-Workers: Writing beyond the walls
    Creative Workshop Poissy Prison / Paris Diderot University
    Directed by Julie Ramage
    January 27, 2016: Launch of the pub­li­ca­tions con­ceived in the frame­work of the work­shop and pre­sen­ta­tion of the works pro­duced in 2014 and 2015. Opening from 5 to 7pm.

    In the frame­work of the exhi­bi­tion Co-Workers: Beyond Disaster sev­eral inmates from the prison of Poissy (Paris Region) who are part of the stu­dent pro­gram « sec­tion des Etudiants Empêchés » from Paris Diderot University, were invited to do a col­lab­o­ra­tion with the writing work­shop from the Diderot University’s BA in French Language and Literature. Through a series of sound exper­i­ments, the par­tic­i­pants dis­cussed the notion of dis­aster, its mean­ings, its poten­tial nar­ra­tions and enact­ments for one another. That led them to pro­duce throughout the semester a radio­phonic col­lec­tive piece. The notion of voice is tightly gripped between law con­no­ta­tions –as its anal­ysis can become an ele­ment of proof in legal pro­ceed­ings– and its power as a flow cir­cu­lating with its own rules inside, as out­side, the prison space. The voice is reloaded within its resis­tance poten­tial, in search of new ways to com­mu­ni­cate.

    This pro­ject was organ­ised in the frame­work of the Ateliers Lettres at UFR Lettres, Arts, Cinéma, as well as of the Section des Etudiants Empêchés at Paris Diderot-Paris 7 University. It was pro­duced thanks to the sup­port of the accom­pa­ni­ment ser­vice for inno­va­tive ped­a­gogies and dig­ital edu­ca­tion at Sorbonne Paris Cité (SAPIENS-USPC).