15.11.2024 to 15.11.2024 - MQ Freiraum
Symposium: Becoming Earth
FREE ENTRY, ART
Symposium
BECOMING EARTH
Decentralized practices in the ecosystems of art and nature
Fri 15.11.2024, 16 – 20h
MQ Freiraum | Free entry l in English
Limited seats, registration requested: veranstaltung@mqw.at
International symposium on contemporary artistic practices in dialogue with ancestral knowledge in dealing with nature in the framework of the exhibitions Ursula Biemann – Becoming Earth and Rodrigo Braga – Nullpunkt at MQ Freiraum and as part of the Vienna Art Week.
Participants: Rodrigo Braga, Ursula Biemann, Hernando Chindoy, Alfredo Ledesma, Marcella Marer, Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira and Cristina Rodriguez
About: The geographical, political, cultural, and social conditions in which we live shape our existence and deeply influence our relationship with nature. An Indigenous person from the Amazon has a different life history and ecological experience compared to someone living in Europe. How do these ecological, intellectual, and spiritual influences affect the way we address the ecological crisis and the approaches and solutions we choose? How can art serve as a guiding thread to explore, recognize, understand, and learn from these differences?
As part of this international symposium, organized in connection with the exhibitions Ursula Biemann – Becoming Earth and Rodrigo Braga – Zero Point at MQ Freiraum, artists, writers, researchers, and an Indigenous leader will discuss how art can help us understand the interplay between different knowledge systems, forms of communication, and social and ecological realities. On 15.11.2024 over the course of four hours, we will address key questions on how to think about art and nature in the context of decentralized discourses. Through the lenses of lived experiences, cultural memory, and Indigenous knowledge, we will explore how the relationship between humans and nature evolves.
Key questions: What is the place of art when we talk about ecology, the environment and the climate emergency?
Can we talk about art and ecology in a global way? How to include decentralised knowledge when approaching art and ecology? How to include decentralised living experiences to the discourses of art and nature? How to include the rights of the nature in the artistic discourse? Can artists be activists for the environment?
Schedule:
16h – 16.15h
Welcome by Bettina Leidl, director, MuseumsQuartier
Introduction by Verena Kaspar-Eisert, chief curator, MuseumsQuartier
16.15h – 16.35h
Interweaving – sensitizing performance by Alfredo Ledesma
Alfredo Ledesma's performance invites the audience to enter into the symposium and activate their aesthetic and spiritual sensorium. It promotes a collective sensitization that seeks to dissolve the boundaries between human and nature. The short collective action is intended to strengthen reflection and feeling-thinking in harmony with nature and non-human beings. The reflective foil that Ledesma uses becomes the sound object of the wind and symbolizes the interconnectedness of all life.
16.30h – 17h
Vibrating Skins: Towards an Epidermal World Environment by Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira
In this presentation the notion of skin goes beyond its biological and social functions, proposing an intermediary environment between individuals and collectives. Individuals, in this account, do not only protect their own skins; humans ally with nonhumans within a possible epidermal world environment, which implies a series of mediations. Epidermal readings seek to overcome dichotomies – such as nature and culture, image and text, non-human and human – and allow for a strategic enhancement of environmental consciousness. This talk maps an ecology of images in various artistic practices that think and feel the skin – among them, Uyra Sodoma, Mario Cravo Neto, Rodrigo Braga, Rosana Paulino, Nuno Ramos, Ricardo Aleixo, and Lenora de Barros.
17h – 18h
The Capsule of Fables by Rodrigo Braga
"The capsule of fables" is how Rodrigo calls the hybrid object between an egg and an eye present in his exhibition Nullpunkt at MQ Freiraum. Based on this element, the artist will discuss the issues evoked by the Point Zero series, as well as some other key works from his career, dealing with the relationship between humanity and its environment.
Q&A with Rodrigo Braga
moderated by Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira
18h – 18.20h Coffee break
18.20h – 19h
Forest as a Field of Mind by Ursula Biemann
In this lecture, Ursula Biemann will talk about her collaboration with Indigenous Inga leaders and educators, cocreating the project Devenir Universidad - a platform for biocultural education in the Putumayo region of Colombia. Devenir Universidad engages with the living cognitive territory of the Amazonian rainforest and the ways in which the indigenous communities can protect and transmit knowledge generated over millennia. Biemann will also discuss her recent artist film, Forest Mind (2021), which unites diverse strands of knowledge on the metaphysics of plants, on plant-human relationships, and the coding of life with its form of storing information. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, the video takes an ecocentric worldview in search for the intelligence of nature.
19h – 20h
Earth medicine for a pluriversal art by Hernando Chindoy and Cristina Rodriguez
How can museums and art spaces be collective tissues that contribute to reducing the burden of inequality and extractivism, combining contemporary practices with ancestral healing practices? Chindoy and Rodriguez are land protectors, social and environmental leaders, in this presentation they will explore their cosmovisions (cosmologies and perspectives) about the land, humanity and the ancestral knowledge of their Inga people.
Q&A with Hernando Chindoy and Cristina Rodriguez
moderated by Marcella Marer
20h – 21h
Informal Get-Together
Ursula Biemann is an artist, author, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia, where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forests and water. In her multi-layered videos, the artist interweaves vast cinematic landscapes with documentary footage, SF poetry and academic findings to narrate a changing planetary reality. Biemann’s pluralistic practice spans a range of media including experimental video, interview, text, performance, photography, cartography, props and materials, which converge in formalized spatial installations. Her work also adopts the form of publications, lectures, and curatorial as well as collaborative research projects. Her earlier writing and experimental video work focused on the gendered dimension of migration. With Black Sea Files (2005) Biemann shifted the primary focus to natural resources and their situated materiality. In 2010 she co-initiated the collaborative World of Matter project on global resource ecologies. Her solo exhibition “Becoming Earth” can be seen at MQ Freiraum until 23.02.2025
Rodrigo Braga born in Manaus (Amazon, Brazil) in 1976 is an artist working with photography, video, installation, drawing and painting. His work addresses the conflicting relations between human beings and the environment, working with performative actions or manual constructions directly in natural landscapes, or even in nature within urban spaces. Exhibiting in several countries and institutions such as MoMA PS1 and Palais de Tokyo, he has participated in the 30th International Biennial of São Paulo. He received some of the most important prizes of contemporary art in Brazil, such as the Pipa Prize - Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro and the Emerging Talent Prize of São Paulo Art Museum - MASP. His work is held in private and public collections, such as Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo and La Maison européenne de la photographie. His solo exhibition “Nullpunkt” can be seen at the MQ Freiraum until 23.02.2025
Hernando Chindoy is an indigenous leader from the pueblo Inga in Colombia and former governor of the Resguardo Indígena Inga de Aponte. His work is focused, among other things, on the support and encouragement of traditional medicine and knowledge, as well as raising awareness of the interconnectedness between human lives and biodiversity. Along with this goes his legacy on manual eradication of illicit cultivars in the Inga territory, and his ongoing advocacy for a deeper and more open approach to the relationship between plants’ intelligence, indigenous autonomy, and legislation. From 2017 to 2022, Hernando spearheaded the creation of the National Organization AWAI of the Inga Indigenous people in Colombia, during which time he also contributed to the creation of the Inga Panamazonic Biocultural Pluriversity AWAI. Hernando Chindoy holds several recognitions for his labour as a social leader, among which stand out the Equator Prize 2015 (PNUD) for his work ‘Wuasikamas-El modelo del Pueblo Inga en Aponte‘, the title of Experto en Pueblos Indígenas, Derechos Humanos and Cooperación Internacional from the Universidad Carlos III, and a Ph.D. Honoris Causa from London University of the Arts. In November and December 2024 Hernando Chindoy is taking part in the MQ Artist-in-Residence program.
Ana Cristina Rodriguez Muñoz is a Colombian mother, seeder and pollinator of the word for life. Guardian of Wuasikamas territory, engaging plant medicine, mothering, ancestral knowledge and feminist collective practices. This, as part of the project for the building of ËCONEÊRÃ, a virtual pluriversity which aims to be a space of education from and for indigenous, black and peasant communities in specific territories of the Americas. It seeks to strengthen the agency and ecological consequences of colonialism in their territories, which entails constant oppression from structural violence.
Marcella Legrand Marer is a curator and researcher. She collaborates with photography magazine ZUM from Instituto Moreira Salles and with book publishers in Brazil and France. She curated the photography programme at the Maison de France in Rio de Janeiro and has collaborated on FotoRIO, Paraty em Foco, Valongo, ZUM and SOLAR festivals. She has organised more than 15 exhibitions between Brazil, France and Portugal, including Graines, the exhibition at Centquatre in Paris; Des Oiseaux at Château d'Eau in Toulouse and Condor at Terreiro do Paço in Lisbon. She is currently doing a PhD at the University of Zurich in Cultural Analysis and her research is centred on aerial photography in the Brazilian Amazon. She has one master's degree in Arts and Languages from EHESS Paris and one in Corporate Responsibility from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira is associate professor at ETH Zurich and has previously worked as assistant professor in Brazilian Studies (Literature, Culture, Media) at the Romance Studies Department of the University of Zurich. As an art critic he writes about Latin America art and is interested in the social dimension of texts and images throughout cultural memory. De Oliveira is a PhD in Literature Theory and Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Minas Gerais. Some of the books he has published are: Beschweigen, Bezeichnen: Mira Schendel und die Schrift unmittelbaren Erlebens; A invenção de uma pele: Nuno Ramos em obras; Invented Skins: Epidermal Readings in Brazilian Art and Literature.
Alfredo Ledesma Quintana belongs to the third generation of a Peruvian silversmith family from the Andes. He also has roots in a peasant community in the “ceja de selva” of the region Amazonas in Peru. His family taught him art as a means of transmitting different visions of life in harmony with other living beings, and caring for nature's rights. Through decolonial relearning and inspired by the indigenous traditions of his family tree, he explores what forms of values, thoughts, ideas and visual perception, traditional cosmovisions and ways of life exist in Andean and Amazonian societies. Alfredo Ledesma is currently doing the PhD in Practice at Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His artistic practice involves sculptures, performances, videos, installations and textiles, addressing the rights of nature, inspired by his grandmother's indigenous Andean traditions.
