Image: Untitled, 2011, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky
Reading Ghost Forests and Other Ruined Landscapes
Wednesday, January 22 2020 - 19:30
How not to surrender to grief?
Around one and a half years ago, reading Rebecca Solnit's guide to changing the world, we learned that social and ecological activism can give ‘Hope in the Dark’.
Around five months ago, burning forests in Brazil and Bolivia took us to the Yanomani worldview wondering about their value of growth ‘në rope’.
Today, borderless fires are asphyxiating our hopes.
In the first session of 2020, the Reading Club becomes our ritual to hold and share our feelings of loss. Let’s continue practicing worldviews reading together stories of encounters between humans, plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and soils. 1
Finally we have the courage to flip to the ‘Ghosts of the Anthropocene’ side of the ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet‘ anthology, which is asking:
What kinds of human disturbances can life on Earth bear? 2
We must share space with the ghostly contours of a stone, the radioactivity of a fingerprint, the eggs of a horseshoe crab, a wild bat pollinator, an absent wildflower in a meadow, a lichen on a tombstone [...]. It is these shared spaces, or what we call haunted landscapes, that relentlessly trouble the narratives of Progress, and urges us to radically imagine worlds that are possible because they are already here. 3
In ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ we read texts together related to natural sciences, art, anthropology, postcolonialism, and (post)anthropocene, chosen from a female perspective looking beyond disciplines.
Come and join us with an open mind here:
What: The Reading Club is in English language
Where: Manteuffelstr. 73, 10999 Berlin Zabriskie Buchladen für Kultur und Natur
When: Wednesday January 22, 2020, 19:30 (sharp!)
Who: small group of lovely, people who would like to meet you (rsvp only, not suitable for children)
Why: to read together, be inspired and meet people
Note: Bring your copy of the text as print out or on a digital device
Hosts: Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, artist, and Sina Ribak, researcher for ecologies and the arts
References:
1) Andrew S. Mathews ‘Ghostly Forms and Forest Histories’ IN: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet – Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (Eds.), 2017, University of Minnesota Press.
2) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet – Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (Eds.), 2017, University of Minnesota Press.
3) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet – Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, Nils Bubandt (Eds.), 2017, University of Minnesota Press.
Image: Untitled, 2011, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky