Uncivilised Paradigms
Training Kit

Uncivilised Paradigms is a free online course open to 50 participants, selected through an international call, that embarks from socially engaged practices, New Genre Public Art, critical pedagogy and activism, in dialogue with contemporary artistic practices. The premise of Uncivilised Paradigms is that artistic practices are not only able to deconstruct complex interdependent socioecological crises but are in fact, able to develop ideas and stories for reciprocal states of being to dismantle them. Uncivilised Paradigms focuses on moving from debilitating mindframes and narratives.
Through a series of seminars, working group sessions and master classes, the programme explored artistic practices, proposals, and research from the Euro-Mediterranean region that can lend themselves as tools to learn from. The aim of this course was two-fold – to reflect on our epistemologies while also developing practical tools that answer the question: what does ‘being ecological’  in times of multiple and converging crises mean?
The course intended to thead questions concerning environmental issues within the geopolitical realities of the globalised Mediterranean – such as, aridity lines, increased levels of toxicity in waters, electronic colonialism in seabeds and desertification – to issues arising within our societies and their institutions. Uncivilised Paradigms casted a spotlight on practices that dismantle the nature-culture divide; challenge hegemonic and anthropocentric ideas of being with our worlds; question the social construct of civilisation; and that actively resist socio-political and environmental forms of oppression and injustice.
Fifty young participants, from thirty-nine different countries, have been selected, through an international call, to take part in Uncivilised Paradigms
Adrian Abela, Brigita Antoni, Ermina Apostolaki, Mya Berger, Adna Camdzic, Riccardo Centazzo, Iliada Charalambous, Aadita Chaudhury, Gian CRUZ, Felicia Cucuta, Yara El Turk, Amalie Elfallah, Carrie Foulkes, Rory Hierzer, Mati Jhurry, Ariana Kalliga, Katerina Kallivrousi, Margherita Kay Budillon, Libby Langsner, Yusi Liu, Paul Majer, David Mann, Lizaveta Matveeva, Anas Mghar, Chun Minji, Sebastiano Moltrer, Azal Narmon, Yubing Pan, Emmi Pennanen, Jaxon Pope, Federico Rudari, Bárbara Sánchez Barroso, Luana Santos, Edanur Seçim, Giacomo Segantin, Olivia Siino, Agata Szymanek, Filippo Tartaglia, Hoyee Tse, Sebastian Varra, Dora Vasilakou, Nikolaos Verginis, Eva Lín Vilhjálmsdóttir, Gerta Xhaferaj, Julia Yanase, Farida Youssef, Damianos Zisimou, Rahman Zikri, Volynova Nastia, Pētersone Tīna.

Uncivilised Paradigms list of lecturers

Stefano Mudu  “The Migratory Cycle of Images. A theoretical model for understanding artistic reactivations”
Marie Hervé “What to do with all this mess? Some photographic navigation paths”
Evagoras Vanezis “Narratives of becoming-with”
Joachim Aagaard Friis “Art and the Anthropocene”
Klodiana Millona “Sticky Entanglements. Landscape as an active agent”
Elena Silvestrini and Nadia Nadesan “Design Justice”
Malaika Cunningham, “Participatory Performance & Democratic Space”
Alice Bonnot, “Towards Permacultural Art Production”
Denise Araouzou, “Artistic production in a relational world”
Jovan Čekić, “Ecology of Strangers – Art and Ecology of Attention”
Ivica Mitrović, “Speculative design: past, present, and future / from the Mediterranean Speculative Approach”
Maja Stanković, “From Land Art to Networked World”
Liinu Grönlund, “Keep Holding On”
Jay Jordan, “Moving Between Everything: art & activism, nature & culture: A non binary guide to creative rebellion”
Ibrahim Nehme, “Magnetizing new futures in the Arab world”
Marwa Arsanios, “On Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4”
Svetlana Racanović, “Dare to impact. Spring cannot be canceled”
Other lecturers involved: Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi.

Uncivilised Paradigms/First session
Curatorial Lab with «A Natural Oasis?» project

A Natural Oasis?” is a two-year nomadic school dedicated to the development of new curatorial research paths in the field of contemporary visual and performing arts starting from the geopolitical peculiarities of the artistic scenes of those Southeuropean and Mediterranean territories which are commonly considered remote, marginal, small, insular or liminal.
Founded in 2013 thanks to the support of BJCEM and its partners, the program has been imagined and designed by Alessandro Castiglioni and Simone Frangi, who have been serving as directors and scientific coordinators of the project since its first edition. The purpose of this programme is to build a transnational cultural platform able to critically question the ideas of territorial remoteness/marginality/smallness/insularity through the lenses of artistic research, triggering a reflection on the fictional procedures that empowered the idea of continental Europe in its geopolitical and cultural immunity via the exclusion and/or the vampirization of its ‘provinces’ and its ‘externalities’. “A Natural Oasis?” aims to develop curatorial and theoretical discourses assuming geo-cultural areas as polemical fields in which a precise ecology of fluxes describe their cultural, economical and political morphology. By deconstructing the fetiche of the southern or exotic ‘natural oasis’, the project tries to counter-ritualize those processes of ‘naturalization’ and ‘metaphorization’ of mediterranean territories enacted by white and eurocentric rethorics linked to tourism and to the neo-colonial and ecological fractures it produces. The project focuses as well on the controversial shortage of professionals in ‘peripheral’ cultural and artistic systems in relationship with on-going processes of educational centralization and with the concentration of artistic legitimation processes in big European and Mediterranean “centres”.
“A Natural Oasis”  is based on the tools that social sciences provide to contemporary cultural practices and support specific context-aware figures in the frame of a global contemporary artistic scene. The aim of the project is the development of situated practices in the context of a specific locality with a transnational and transmediterranean perspective. “A Natural Oasis?” bases its working methodology on the tactics of conversational and dialogical research and on the main strategies of oral history. In this view, working sessions will be characterized by a discursive approach based on study and in-depth analysis of the context of the travels but also on storytelling and more fluid transmission of diverse knowledge. The project privileges an idea of knowledge(s) production and transmission through slow and sustainable traveling experiences in certain territories accompanied and tutored by local partners.

More info: https://www.bjcem.org/a-natural-oasis-2022/

Stefano Mudu 

The Migratory Cycle of Images. A theoretical model for understanding artistic reactivations.

In her collection of essays entitled “On Photography” (1977), critic and theorist Susan Sontag introduced the notion ‘ecology of images’ to oppose the greed with which we produce and consume visual products. The author thus claimed that new productions should be avoided until the whole existing visual production had been used. Interpreting her words, this lecture aims to outline the rules of a visual production that has increasingly re-used existing images as materials to build new artistic objects, often adapting them to a novel critical and narrative framework. A context in which, according to French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, art is no longer interested in “elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material”; it rather works “with objects already informed by other objects”.
Stefano Mudu is a PhD candidate in Visual Culture at Università Iuav in Venice. He is the author of “Spazi Critici” (Mimesis, 2018), editor of the volume “Altrove. New Fiction” (bruno, 2020), and regular contributor for publications in the field, such as Flash Art. In the last two years, he has worked as a researcher in the curatorial team for “The Milk of Dreams”, the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani.

Marie Hervé

What to do with all this mess? Some photographic navigation paths

From the practice of the family album to journalism and masses of images stored on our mobile phones, photography since its invention has had a growing presence in our social, political, family and intimate life, soon becoming the cornerstone of Western media and communication systems. Our research will consist in observing these potentialities and uses of the image by taking up the term “iconomie” as described by the economist Gilson Schwartz, and more recently by Michel Volle : images within « the economy of icon, information and knowledge ».
Marie Hervé is a visual artist and writer, living and working between Torino (and Marseille. Her work crosses photography and literature, through installation and editorial practices. She is the co-founder of MYTO Publishing and is currently developing projects within the Mediterranean area.

Evagoras Vanezis

Narratives of becoming-with

How can we re-work narratives to accentuate material flows and invest in processes of becoming? The starting point of the lecture is Donna J. Haraway’s use of the ancient visual and narrative motif of Potnia Theron (the Mistress of the Animals) in her tentacular mobilisation of the chthonic (of, in, or under the Earth and the seas). This leads to a reflection on how the inhabitation of narratives from unexpected angles can be utilised as a methodological tool to explore human and non-human interconnectedness.
Evagoras Vanezis is an independent curator, researcher, and writer based in Nicosia. His practice incorporates a strong interest in rethinking processes of relationality to the world, working along poetic and fluid materialisms. He organizes various exhibitions, programs and publishing projects. Recent projects include “Anachoresis: Upon Inhabiting Distances”, the Cyprus Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (co-curator, 2021) and “Formworks,”, Thkio Ppalies Project Space (2019 – 2022).

Marie-Nour Hechaime, Curator, Sursock Museum

Museums in the Planetary Age: A Critical Look within the Arab World

“The questions that confront writers and artists today are not just those of the politics of the carbon economy; many of them have to do also with our own practices and the ways in which they make us complicit in the concealment of the broader culture.” Amitev Gosh, The Great Derangement, 2016. The most recent definition of a museum proposed by ICOM, stresses its necessary sustainable character denoting an environmental turn. However, ‘sustainability’ as criticized by thinker Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to a certain set of anthropocentric values that should be re-thought within the age of the ‘planetary’. The lecture proposes to look at recent curatorial and museum practices, to take as a case study a few Museums within the Arab region (such as the Sursock Museum, the Palestinian Museum, and the Museums in the Gulf), and posits that environmental struggles could not be de-linked from decolonial practices.
Marie-Nour Hechaime works as a curator at the Sursock Museum in Beirut since 2020. She is interested and invested in projects and productions at the intersection of arts, activism and societal issues that strive to articulate and exercise points of interrelation between disciplines, as well as alternative modes of generating knowledge and collaboration.

Joachim Aagaard Friis

Art and the Anthropocene

Taking as its premise that the proposed geologic epoch of the Anthropocene is necessarily an aesthetic event, this lecture explores the concept of the Anthropocene, art that adresses aspects of this concept, and the relationship between contemporary art and the current era of ecological crisis. Lastly, I talk about some implications that the concept of the Anthropocene has for my own practice-driven art research.
Proposed reading: Davis, H. og Turpin, E. 2015. “Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction” in: Art in the Anthropocene. I: Davis, H. og Turpin (red.), E. London: Open Humanities Press, s. 1-31.
Joachim Aagaard Friis works as a PhD fellow at the University of Agder. In his practice-driven project he explores how the art curator can work pedagogically with themes related to ecology and the concept of the Anthropocene. He works as a freelance art curator and critic parallel to his studies.

Klodiana Millona

Sticky Entanglements Landscape as an active agent

Even though the creation of landscape has been narrated as a natural and neutral phenomenon, landscape formation and its engineering has served to imperial expansion and agriculture has been used as a technology for its supremacy. Through the concept of material witness as introduced by Susan Schuppli in her book “Material Witness- Media, Forensics, Evidence”, —in which she explores nonhuman entities that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into history,— this lecture will address landscape as an active agent and a living archive against the flattening and colonial condition of the soil. The presentation will go through Sticky Entanglements — Seeds as bio social archive, a  long term collaborative research which looks at the critical materiality and hidden narratives of genetically modified crops, by revisiting the Japanese Empire seed engineering project in colonial Taiwan and position it within broader twentieth-century processes of ecological imperialism.
Klodiana Millona is a spatial practitioner, researcher and educator, currently based in Rotterdam. Her work focuses on the politics of invisibility in space and invisibilized spatial practices within dominant narratives of the built environment, interrogating through entangled readings spatial ecologies of ruptures.

Uncivilised Paradigms/Second session
Allelopraxiscurated by Denise Araouzou

Elena Silvestrini and Nadia Nadesan

Design Justice

The Design Justice Network challenges the ways that design and designers can harm those who are marginalized by systems of power. We use design to imagine and build the worlds we need to live in — worlds that are safer, more just, and more sustainable. We advance practices that center those who are normally excluded from and adversely impacted by design decisions in design processes. We do this by following processes and creating work that is rooted in shared principles of design justice, growing our network of design practitioners and advocates, convening to maintain and deepen our connections, creating critical publications, and curating exhibitions. Design justice rethinks design processes, centers people who are normally marginalized by design, and uses collaborative, creative practices to address the deepest challenges our communities face.
Elena Silvestrini (she/her) is group facilitator and inclusive process designer interested in queer feminist theory and practice. She is based in Rome (Italy) and is the co-founder of the Design Justice Network Mediterranean node. Elena is the Facilitation and Training Lead at Platoniq Creatividad y Democracia, a Spanish community-centered design organisation, which uses technopolitics: technology for bottom-up political action. Elena focuses on justice-oriented participation methodologies and training implementation. Her work engages with feminist approaches to technology, appropriating tools of oppression for self defence, and power dynamics and values in design process. In 2015, Elena started Chayn Italia, a collective project fighting gender based violence through critical engagement with technology, collaborative practices, and capacity building. Elena is a 2021 Fellow at NewNew, running a training project for women’s aid centres on the dual role of tech in domestic abuse.
Nadia Nadesan is a researcher, writer, media maker and urbanist working with open source software for more decentralized and accountable tech. Her roots are in film, anthropology, and social movements with advocacy in environmental and gender justice. Currently at Platoniq her work revolves around ideating and designing consentful tech, accountable platform governance, and accessible civic engagement with Platoniq. She is a founding member of Design Justice Mediterranea and centers  Design Justice principles in her work to forward an agenda towards justice especially with and for queer, migrant, and racialised communities. She has participated as a writer and researcher in projects such as ‘To Exist is to Resist’ under Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Basel and previously coordinated communications for projects like WOOP, a leadership programme for racailised non binary persons, trans and cis women. As a Coding for Resistance Fellow at Futuress she explores the intersection of queer archives and consentful tech.

Malaika Cunningham

Participatory Performance & Democratic Space

This lecture will lay out the gap between an ideal of democracy and our current (hollow) lived reality of democracy (speaking from a UK context, although much will be applicable to other European nations). She will then discuss the potential role of participatory performance practice in closing this gap through the creation of artistic formal and informal democratic spaces.
Malaika Cunningham is a theatre practitioner and democratic theorist based at artsadmin as an Artist/Researcher. Her research explores the role of participatory theatre spaces for political discourse, exchange between strangers and imagination. She has also written on political engagement, participatory arts, and co-productive policy-making. In her research, she brings together her practice as a theatre maker and her academic background in political theory. She completed her PhD in summer 2020 at the University of Leeds as part of CUSP. She has also recently worked as a post-doctoral researcher with the AHRC-funded FailSpace project led by Dr Leila Jancovich at the University of Leeds. Alongside her research she is Artistic Director of The Bare Project, with whom she is currently developing The People’s Palace of Possibility, an interactive installation about utopias, seeing ourselves as citizens and political change.

Alice Bonnot

Towards Permacultural Art Production

In this presentation Alice examines how permaculture principles and other ecological and regenerative ways of thinking can be applied to art practices and help contemporary artists and art practitioners to significantly reduce the impact of their practice on the environment.
Alice Bonnot is an independent art curator, sustainability consultant, writer and speaker specialising in the development of environmentally sustainable curatorial and artistic practices with a drive towards eco solutions. She is the founding director of villa villa, a sustainable and climate-conscious arts programme and environmental sustainability consultancy dedicated to supporting contemporary artists, curators, writers, thinkers, and other cultural and environmental practitioners and organisations committed to more ecologically sensitive practices. As a curator, Alice focuses on developing environmentally respectful, low-carbon contemporary art exhibitions that address socio-political and environmental issues, as well as broader concerns relating to society. Her current research deals with subjects such as deep ecology, intersectional environmentalism and ecofeminisms. She teaches the course ‘Curating an ecologically sensitive exhibition’ and is regularly invited to speak about art and ecology.

Jay Jordan, The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination

Moving Between Everything: art & activism, nature & culture: A non binary guide to creative rebellion

Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during Copenhagen’s UN climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, building an illegal lighthouse on the site of an airport control tower, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station and refusing to be censored by London’s Tate Modern museum, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been walking on the tightrope between art and activism since 2004. Always entangled into social movements.
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (labofii) believes in the beauty of art’s capacity to transform the world rather than simply represent it. The labofii inhabits the zad of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where the french governments plans to build a climate wrecking airport were defeated by creative rebellion in 2018.

Ibrahim Nehme

Magnetizing new futures in the Arab world

Ibrahim Nehme is a creator, curator, and speaker based in Beirut. His work is a cross-pollination between journalism, activism, and artistic expression. He is interested in producing and disseminating media that helps in raising the frequency of the collective consciousness.
In 2012, he founded The Outpost magazine with the intention of imagining a new narrative on and from the Arab region. Subtitled as ‘a magazine of possibilities’, The Outpost was highly commended and recognized around the world. The Guardian called it “a successor to the Economist” and wrote that it is “a reminder of the power of the imagination to shift perspectives.” It won the Subscribers’ Choice Award at the Stack Awards 2015 and Magazine of the Year at the Magpile Awards in 2014.
The Outpost stopped publishing its printed edition in 2016 and Ibrahim spent the next three years researching the relationship between cultural output and social impact. This research subsequently led to the birth of Radio Mansion in Beirut and The Outpost café in Amman. During this time, he also helped conceive of ‘a Dance Mag’, a magazine about dance in all its forms and flows, and organized workshops in creative writing, futurecasting and podcasting.

Marwa Arsanios

On Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 4

Marwa Arsanios is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher who reconsiders mid-twentieth-century politics from a contemporary perspective, with a particular focus on gender relations, spatial practices, and land struggles. She looks at histories of resistances in their contemporary resonance. Arsanios approaches research collaboratively and seeks to work across disciplines. She is the co-founder of the Research Project 98weeks.
The Who is Afraid of Ideology? series weaves an intersectional path through the resistance of women on the frontline in places such as Northern Syria and Colombia to claim the unmediated right to land and water. Part 4 of the series is set in a quarry in the mountains of northern Lebanon. It is only the beginning of a much longer effort that aims to set the groundwork for a different future. Arsanios’s main goals in this endeavor are to communalize a section of private quarry in the mountains with the help of an agricultural cooperative, to work on the solutions for bettering the soil quality, and to make the local community part of the process.

Uncivilised Paradigms/Third session
“Dare to Impact” curated by Svetlana Racanović

We need to ‘kick the habit’ of sedative discourse (F. Guattari).
In his The Three Ecologies, Felix Guattari introduces the notion of ecosophy as ethico-political articulation of three coexistent and interrelated registers: the environment, social relations and human subjectivity (mental ecology). The imbalances and interruptions within this circuit Guattari relates to Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) that have caused disequilibrium of the world natural environment, pushed us to the threshold of ecological disaster and captured us in the position of passive subjectivity in conformity with production-consumption cycles of global capitalism. Our ecological consciousness and sense of responsibility towards the world we live in and its future that we shape is also under treat of pollution, depletion and extinction like any rare species. As with its endangerment, the care and protection of our world and ourselves depends from the quality of intersections of these three ecologies.
In a series of talks and presentations of theoreticians and artists and the following discussions with the master class participants, those intersections will be enlightened, discussed, questioned and appreciated. We will be focused on certain “art-eco footprint”, art practices and experiences in which ecological consciousness-based and responsibility driven agency have come from human subjectivity, a mental ecology as ecology of ideas and sensibilities and understood, in Guattari sense, as both auto-producing (autopoiesis) and collective (sympoiesis), intra and inter-actions capable to transform relations within three ecologies circle into “ecology of care and a caring for ecology”.

Jovan Čekić

Ecology of Strangers – Art and Ecology of Attention

We live in complex, networked world which is a fluid, unstable and perpetually changing, so much so that traditional images, are no longer able to represent this complex world. We enter in a “Society of Control” (Gilles Deleuze) where knowledge and technical progress alone become the moving cause behind the mutations of capitalism. In a Society of Control attention has become the hegemonic form of capitalism. Attention, connects us with the world, shaping and defining our experience and determines what we see. Or as Yoda says, “Your focus is your reality.”In that networking, we need new ecosophical approach and new concept of environment, which does not separate humans or non-humans – from the natural environment. There are the thinkers like Gregory Beteson, Arne Naess or Félix Guattari, and others, which sees the world not as a collection of isolated objects, but as a network of phenomena that are fundamentally interconnected and interdependent. For them Ecosophy is ‘relationalist’ approach where entities do not exist outside of the relations that constitute them. In this world, the contemporary artists (following Duchamp’s dictum; “I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists”) become nomadic singularity that connects in different ways to other hubs and networks. With distinctive creative strategy, artists must have the courage to shift our attention to phenomena sometimes marginal within “attentional landscape”. Also artists must be capable to render various toxic influence in different environments which can cause interruption and destabilization of interaction between heterogeneous entities. To do so artist also have to become stranger in every environment, in order to be capable to see more than others within our toxic culture. Because of that kind of insight, in different environment, artist become stranger in his own language and culture.
Jovan Čekić – Philosopher and Conceptual artist, University professor from Belgrade, Serbia. Professor and founder of department for Digital Arts and New Media  at the Faculty of Media and Communications, University Singidunum, Belgrade. Graduated Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade. Ph.D, Social Scientist, Faculty of Media and Communications, 2009. Research and teaching areas include philosophy, art and art theory, media theory and criticism. His work is published in numerous periodicals. Since 1975 exhibit as conceptual artist, and has numerous solo and group exhibitions. From the very beginning until 1997, held a position editor in chief of New Moment, a magazine for advertising and visual culture. In 1998, publishes a books Presecanje haosa (Cutting Through Chaos) (Geopoetika, 1998), Art Sessions: Era Milivojević (Geopoetika 2001) and Izmeštanje horizonta (Displacement of horizon) (FMK 2015), Nastajanje post-humanog kapitalizma (Formation of post-human capitalism) (Arkzin 2019). Editor of the Art editions in the publishing house Geopoetika. He has taught at Academy of Fine Arts, Belgrade (2004) and at Academy of Fine Arts, Cetinje (2003-2007). 2004 and 2003 BELEF, art director and selector, 2002, Art director and selector, of International Biennial of young artists, Time Codes, Vršac.

Maja Stanković

From Land Art to Networked World

Our special field of interest are relations between art and ecology. The starting point for this lecture is hypothesis that contemporary art is of key importance for the formation of ecological awareness. When we talk about contemporary art we are talking about not only the current art production, but also about the art from the sixties, because that is the time when the concept of contemporaneity appeared. This concept introduces up-to-date issues in art vocabulary which are avant-garde and innovative. One of the key features of the art from that period related to our subject is Land art. What started in the mid 1960s with a small number of committed conceptualists, today could be observed as a beginning of environmental conciseness. It is perceived as a preparation for ecological thinking and a new kind of relationship between an artist and nature, blurring the boundaries between a human and nature or culture and nature or society and nature. Our primary objective is to demonstrate that Land art was not only one of the most unconventional art movements, furthest from the institutional framework and conventional notion of art. From today’s perspective, Land art as hybrid art practice is a crucial for introduction of a new way of connecting different fields, disciplines and approaches related to networked society, networked paradigm in which we live today, at the beginning of the 21st century.
Maja Stanković, Art Historian, Art Critic and Curator, University Professor, Belgrade, Serbia. She holds PhD in art history at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, at the Department of Modern Art (2013). She is a professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, at the Department of Digital Arts. Since 2004, she has authored numerous texts published in scientific journals, as well as solo and group exhibition catalogues and co-authored the collection of papers on contemporary art Images/Singular/Global (2013) and the collection on video art Image/Movement/Transformation (2013). Her special field of interest includes contemporary art, theory and digital humanities. She has published a book Liquid context: Contextual Practices in Contemporary art (2015). Currently, she is preparing the book Networked Image (2022).

Liinu Grönlund

Keep Holding On

In her presentation, Grönlund uses her most recent video work Scope as a starting point, a short video with simple elements. Notes, notebooks, small everyday visions, memories and meaningful images we carry with us like a personal archive, can come together very condensed in a work of art. Thinking of her own experiences Grönlund is wondering how the personal can keep the political dimension, the radical, something that is the original purpose of the essay form. In this broken world, how to keep working, we think of this together with the help of images and texts of different artists.
Liinu Grönlund, Visual Artist, Helsinki, Finland. She hold MA in documentary film directing & scriptwriting, Aalto University, Helsinki and MFA from the Academy of Fine arts, Helsinki. She works mainly with moving image, sometimes with installation, photography and drawing as well. Her work often takes the form of an essay film. Grönlund has collaborated with scientists for several years, often portraying biologists’ work. She is currently thinking of horses, little animals, collaborating with friends, recording her family’s stories. Grönlund’s work has been exhibited this year at Infringements of a species curated by Deimantas Narkevičius, 5th Floor online, Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, and at Turku Art Museum solo show together with Okku Nuutilainen.

Books, Articles, References, food for thoughts

 

At kuratere en antropocæn sensibilitet by Joachim Aagaard Friis and Ida Schyum
Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness By Hendrik Folkerts
On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis By Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh
The Total Work of the cultural institution, Yazan Khalili with Rayya Badran
Kunstinstituut Melly, formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art
Yale changes Calhoun College’s name to honor Grace Murray Hopper
A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy by Jem Bendell
An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative by Roland Barthes and Lionel Duisit
Formworks, an experimental curatorial format led by Evagoras Vanezis
Radical ecology: the search for a livable world by Carolyn Merchant
Designs for the Pluriverse Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds by Arturo Escobar
Attuning-with’, affect, and assemblages of relations in a transdisciplinary environmental education by Kathryn Riley and Peta White
Posthuman Glossary by Rosi Braidotti (Anthology Editor) and Maria Hlavajova (Anthology Editor)
Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis The Ecopedagogy Movement by Richard Kahn
Environmental literacy, ecological literacy, ecoliteracy: What do we mean and how did we get here? By B. B. McBride, C. A. Brewer, A. R. Berkowitz, W. T. Borrie
Creative Engagements with Ecologies of Place Geopoetics, Deep Mapping and Slow Residencies by Mary Modeen, Iain Biggs
Climate Justice
Center for Climate Justice, University of California
The challenging role of researchers coping with tensions, dilemmas and paradoxes in transdisciplinary settings by Marlen Gabriele Arnold
Dark Ecology For a Logic of Future Coexistence by Timothy Morton
Systems Thinking / Systems Art by Edward A. Shanken
On Keeping a Notebook, Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays, by Joan Didion
Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman
Design Justice Network
Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Ecofeminist Practices Between Internationalism and Globalism by Marwa Arsanios
Arendt, H. [1959] (2019) The Human Condition: Second Edition (M. Canovan & D. Allen Eds.): University of Chicago Press.
Baiocchi, G. (2006). Performing democracy in the streets: Participatory Budgeting and Legislative Theatre in Brazil. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion: dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. London: Routledge.
Boal, A. (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed (C. A. McBride & M.-O. L. McBride, Trans.). London: Pluto Press.
Boal, A. (1998) Legislative theatre: using performance to make politics (A. Jackson, Trans.). London: Routledge.
Cohen-Cruz, J., & Schutzman, M. (2006) A Boal companion: dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. London: Routledge.
Freire, P. [1968] (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books.
Hall, P. A., & Lamont, M. l. (2013) Social resilience in the neoliberal era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hammond, M. (2016). Governance in the Anthropocene: The Role of the Arts.  Retrieved from https://inhabitingtheanthropocene.com/
Hammond, M. (2019). A Cultural Account of Ecological Democracy. Environmental Values, 28(1), 55.
Hammond, M. (2021). Imagination and critique in environmental politics. Environmental Politics, 1-21. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2021.1880062.
Hammond, M., & Ward, H. (2019). Sustainability Governance in the Anthropocene: the arts as key to deliberative citizen engagement. In M. Arias-Maldonado & Z. Trachtenberg (Eds.), Rethinking the Environment for the Anthropocene: Political Theory and SocionaturalRelations in the New Geological Epoch: Taylor & Francis.
Hay, C. (2002) Political Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hay, C. (2007) Why We Hate Politics. Cambridge: Polity.
Lorde, A. (2017) Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Silver Press.
Plastow, J. (2009). Practising for the revolution? The influence of Augusto Boal in Brazil and Africa. Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 7(3), 294-303.
Young, I. M. (2000) Inclusion and democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dramaturgies of Participation in The People’s Palace of Possibility. 2021 By Frances Babbage, Malaika Cunningham, Joseph Houlders & Zelda Hannay.
Jana Sankritti (Indian Theatre of the Oppressed orgs): https://janasanskriti.org/actingandactivism-page  

TOgether Project (finished now, but useful for signposting) – European T.O. project) https://rivistedigitali.erickson.it/educazione-interculturale/archivio/vol-15-n-2/together-project-a-community-of-practice-for-the-development-of-the-theatre-of-the-oppressed-in-europe-evaluation-of-a-research-action-path/
Leading Legislative Theatre group (NYC)

villa villa is a sustainable and climate-conscious arts programme and consultancy: useful resources for those who wish to be better informed about environmental and social sustainability in the arts
Umbigo Magazine #80
Guest Column: Queer Ecology by Timothy Morton
KLAXON #13 – ACTING WITH THE LIVING
We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan
deep ecology environmental philosophy
Council of All Beings by Work That Reconnects
Deep ecology environmental philosophy by Peter Madsen
Are We in the Middle of a Sixth Mass Extinction? by Gibbons, A.
Social scientists build case for ‘survival of the kindest’
Casa delle AgriCulture Tullia e Gino
Mustarinda magazine
Sakiya Academy
Teaching to Transgress by Bell Hooks
The Action Research Planner Doing Critical Participatory Action Research by Stephen Kemmis, Robin McTaggart, and Rhonda Nixon
Fisher, Jean.2008. Migration’s Silence Witnesses. Maria Theresa Alves’ Seed of Change. Accessed on August 20, 2022
Manna, Jumana. 2020. Where Nature Ends and Settlements Begin. E-Flux Journal, Issue #113. Accessed on August 20, 2022
Manna, Jumana. 2022. “Foragers” 
 Schuppli, Susan. 2014. “Can the Sun Lie?”
Tomic, Milica and Sekulić, Dubravka. 2019. “Life of Crops. Towards an Investigative Memorialization.” in the booklet of the conference in the framework of Aflenz Memorial in Becoming. Graz, Austria.
Bhandar, Brenna. 2019. Cultivating the Soil: Use, Improvement and the Colonial Conditions of Our Present. Accessed on August 20, 2022
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2017. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Weizman, Eyal. 2017. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Booklyn,NY: Zone Books.
Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Durham; London: Duke University Press
Gómez-Barris, Macarena. 2017. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Durham: Duke University Press
Shiva, Vandana. 2016. The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky
Kunuk, Zacharias, and Ian Mauro. 2010. “Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change.” Isuma TV.
Sheikh, Fazal, and Eyal Weizman. 2015. The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change
Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University
Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gray, Ros & Sheikh, Shela. 2018. The Wretched Earth: Botanical Conflicts and Artistic Interventions. The Wretched Earth, Third Text, 32:2-3, 163-175T
Tavares, Paulo. 2014. “Nonhuman Rights.” In Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture, 553-572. Berlin: Sternberg.
Fujihara, Tatsushi. 2018. “Colonial Seeds, Imperial Genes: Hōrai Rice and Agricultural Development” in Engineering Asia: Technology, Colonial Development, and the Cold War Order. London: Bloomsbury
The consumer society – myths and structures by Jean Baudrillard (1970)
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction By Walter Benjamin
Image, Icon, Economy The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary by Marie-José Mondzain

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