This programme is in English.

Artistic researcher Esmee Geerken cordially invites you to the Deep Ecology Talks. For this series, Geerken invites artists, researchers and everything in-between to give their view on what it means to be a human within a (non-)living planet; how to shift gears, while being entangled within complex – yet clearly unsustainable and unjust, systems? How to balance between being hopeful – acting hopeful, and facing the reality of climate change, inequality and biodiversity loss?

Deep Ecology, referring to a term coined by ecologist Arne Næss in 1973, entails the idea that the ecosystem is a web of complex relationships that needs to be regarded as a whole, with moral and legal rights to remain healthy, independent from human extractions of the ecosystem.

The Deep Ecology Talks are part of Geerkens’ ongoing research on ‘Building as being’ at Waag and part of an honours module for the Institute of Insterdisciplinairy Studies. They welcome everyone with an interest in ecology, life, diversity and the future of our science parks, cities and planet.

Take a look at the programme and register (for free)! The talk by Vibeke Mascini is at Waag, the other talks will be held at Amsterdam Science Park.

Deep Ecology Talk 3: Vibeke Mascini - Mean Sea

19 October 2022 17:15 - 19:30 hrs. | Location: Waag, Nieuwmarkt 4, Amsterdam, NL

Visual artist and writer Vibeke Mascini will give a talk on her artistic research practice. This includes a long-term collaboration with scientists, engineers, government employees and musicians, evolving around historic and futuristic concepts of electricity as a speculative agent of life.

‘Mascini has been doing research on (unlikely) sources of energy, like the body of a whale or a batch of cocaine, with the goal of making our surroundings palpable for humans.’ (Gletsjerwater, De Groene, 2022.)

By putting central the material implications of unlikely sources from which electricity is derived, Vibeke proposes installations where memories and mysterious sensorial experiences meet the newest technology of the rapidly growing field of energy storage systems. Aiming to explore the complexities of the intimate relation between source and user.

For her new project at Waag, Mascini’s report for the Weather Network Station, builds on collaborations between art and science in the pursuit of interdisciplinary knowledge. With the working title Mean Sea, Mascini continues her ongoing research into an understanding of energy as a statement of interconnectedness and entanglement—between species, media and nature, matter and energy.

Programme

17:15 - 17:30 hrs. Doors open - Welcome by Esmee Geerken

17:30 - 18:00 hrs. Deep Ecology Talk by Vibeke Mascini

18:00 - 18:30 hrs. Q&A

Vibeke Mascini (NL) is a visual artist and writer. Through sculptures, installations, video and text, she explores a scaling of abstract phenomena into a sensorial scope, with the intention to seek agency from intimacy. Currently, Vibeke works with Waag Futurelab within the World Weather Network. She is also an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2021-2023, and Sculpture tutor and a research fellow at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.

Accessibility: the Waag-building is a protected monument, so unfortunately it is not equipped with an elevator. The venue is on the second floor and up two flights of stairs, the second of which is steep. There is a gender neutral bathroom available on the first floor.

Register for these talks as well:

Deep Ecology Talk 1: Alexander Cromer - Geopoetics of deep time

Wednesday 28 Sept, 17:30 - 18:30 hrs. | Location: UvA Science Park 904. Building: Main Building Room: SP C1.112 (first floor, main entrance)

Yes, there is an ungodly amount of plastics, and other such detritus of Capitalism that are forming new physical strata, both geological and physical. But we also must consider how the lives of Black and Indeginous people were used to build and upkeep colonial systems that persist today in their many forms.

To address and begin dismantling racialized geopolitics, Spoken word performance artist and artistic researcher Alexander Cromer (US) proposes to begin considering geopoetics and geoimaginaries as a means of experiencing alternative epistemological and ontological modalities of the human, non-human, and more than human. In other words; let's get together and consider how we can utilize poetics and critical fabulations to tear down these colonial and patriarchal anti/ecologies.

Listen to the Deep ass ecologies playlist made by Alexander

Alexander Cromer (US) is a spoken word performance artist and artistic researcher based in the Netherlands. Currently he is pursuing his PhD at Leiden University/The Royal Academy of the Arts where his research revolves around ontological facets of Blackness in regards to ecology and voice. His work has been featured at institutions such as the Dutch National Opera and Ballet, the British Film Institute, and the Finnish Cultural Institute Benelux.

theblackarctic.com

Deep Ecology Talk 2: Dr. Paul Behrens - The Best of Times, The Worst of Times

Wednesday 05 Oct, 17:30 - 18:30 hrs. | Location: UvA Science Park 904. Building: Main Building Room: SP C1.112 (first floor, main entrance)

We live in a unique time of human history. The choices made in the next decade will dictate the future of life on the planet for centuries and even millennia. We are facing a catastrophe but there is still hope. Following a similar format of his popular science book, dr. Paul Behrens will present the latest science on climate change and climate impacts, along with some of the solutions necessary to make a hopeful, healthier future a reality.

Paul Behrens (UK) is an author and academic at Leiden University. His popular science book, The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science (Indigo Press, 2020) describes humanity’s current trajectory and possible futures in paired chapters of pessimism and hope, on topics including the economy, energy, land and food. His research and writing has appeared in scientific journals and media outlets such as The New York Times, Scientific American, Politico, Nature Sustainability, Nature Energy, Nature Food, PNAS and the BBC.

Deep Ecology Talk 4: Eva Hayward - More lessons from a starfish

Wednesday 23 Nov, 17:30 - 18:30 hrs. | Location: UvA Science Park 904. Building: Main Building Room: SP C1.112 (first floor, main entrance)

Eva Hayward (US) is an anti-disciplinary scholar coming out of the History of Consciousness tradition of the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her training is in the history of science, film and art history, and psychoanalytic semiotics, attentive to the persistence of sexuality and aesthetics in the structuring of knowledge, subjectivity, and power. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University.

Read Hayward's essay Toxic Sexes: Perverting Pollution and Queering Hormone Disruption

About Esmee Geerken

Esmee Geerken is an artist and earth scientist, combining both disciplines in her artistic research practice, in which she questions our experience of the material environment. Esmee graduated from Gerrit Rietveld academy and looked at the microscopic shells of unicellular marine organisms for her PhD in geochemistry at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ). Geerken is currently artist in residence at the UvA-institute of advanced studies and the Waag project T-Factor.

About T-Factor

What chances and possibilities lie within the temporary initiatives or ‘meanwhile spaces’ of urban areas? How can we enliven these initiatives in an inclusive way that offers space to a variety of life forms: people, plants, animals and microbes? For the upcoming two years, Waag will explore these questions at Amsterdam Science Park with the EU-project T-Factor.