The Nexus of Life: Ecological Crisis and Creative Understanding Hosted by the Faculty of Arts Collaborative Research Group Concepts and Theories of ‘Life’ and the Sydney Environment Institute, in association with the Department of Anthropology Interdisciplinary Symposium Friday 1 September 2017 8.45 – 5.30pm Charles Perkins Centre, Level 6 Seminar Room The University of Sydney Voicing the Earth – Poetry Reading and Music Performance 5.30 – 7.00PM Old Teachers College, Teachers College Assembly Hall Room 300, Level 3 Janet Laurence 'Fabled' altered camera trap image Fauna and Flora Aceh camp After Eden, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2012.
Transcript
The Nexus of Life: Ecological Crisis and Creative Understanding
Hosted by the Faculty of Arts Collaborative Research Group Concepts and Theories of ‘Life’ and the Sydney Environment Institute, in association with the Department of Anthropology Interdisciplinary Symposium Friday 1 September 2017 8.45 – 5.30pm Charles Perkins Centre, Level 6 Seminar Room The University of Sydney Voicing the Earth – Poetry Reading and Music Performance 5.30 – 7.00PM Old Teachers College, Teachers College Assembly Hall Room 300, Level 3
Janet Laurence 'Fabled' altered camera trap image Fauna and Flora Aceh camp After Eden, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney, 2012.
___________________________________________________________________________ CONVENERS: Ute Eickelkamp, Luke Fischer and Harriet Johnson Planetary life is now in a ‘critical condition’ – an emergency that encompasses the biophysical environment as much as the cultural and social foundations of human knowledge and practice. The challenge of the global ecological crisis, or life in the Anthropocene, calls for an expanded vision of the human-environment relationship. Seeking collaboration beyond the academy and disciplinary boundaries, this symposium brings together philosophers, historians, anthropologists, biologists, artists and poets whose work critically and creatively engages with the systems of representation and the institutional structures through which contemporary societies understand life and its limits. Concluding event: Voicing the Earth, a poetry reading and music performance. Poets: Judith Beveridge, Michelle Cahill, David Malouf and Peter Minter. Musician: Veronique Serret (violin)
WORKSHOP: The Nexus of Life: Ecological Crisis and Creative Understanding Friday 1 September 2017 University of Sydney
Wireless Internet Access Guest Username: NexusofLife Guest Password: 70414690 8.45 Welcome 9.00 – 10:30 Session 1 Interdisciplinarity and Critique
Chair: Cat Moir, University of Sydney
Libby Robin, Australian National University ‘How are the Humanities Innovating in Response to Environmental Change?’ Dieter Sturma, Bonn University ‘Asymmetric Recognition and the Sublime’ Harriet Johnson, University of Sydney ‘Beginning Somewhere Else: Adorno’s Negative Universal History’
Cat Moir, University of Sydney ‘Natural History and the Art of Empire: Ferdinand Bauer’s Images of Extinction’ Monica Gagliano, University of Western Australia ‘Beyond Anthropomorphising the Antropos – and how to learn from plants about it’
11:45 – 12:45 Session 3 The Crisis of Extinctions Chair: Ute Eickelkamp
Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, UNSW ‘Extinction Studies: A Discussion’
WORKSHOP: The Nexus of Life: Ecological Crisis and Creative Understanding 13:30 – 14:45 Session 4 Cosmological Diversity
Chair: Sebastian Job
Linda Connor, University of Sydney ‘Anthropology and Ecological Crisis: Introductory Remarks’ Jadran Mimica, University of Sydney ‘Life and Death in an Ouroboric Life-World (Yagwoia, Papua New Guinea)’ Ute Eickelkamp, University of Sydney Ontic Loss and the Scope for a New Humanism in Central Australia
Sebastian Job ‘5-MeO-DMT in the Anthropocene: or Ecological Catastrophe as the Human Truth Event’ Peter Minter, University of Sydney ‘Unlandscaping Ecopoetics: the Environmental Lyric and Transcultural Geopoethics in Contemporary Poetry’ Luke Fischer, University of Sydney ‘Ecopoetics and the Metaphoricity of Being’
16:30 – 17:30 Session 6 Collaborating with Nature: Artistic Practice and Scientific Research
Chair: Monica Gagliano
Janet Laurence, Artist ‘The Alchemical Afterlife Within Natural History Museums’ Prudence Gibson, UNSW ‘The Wasteland as an Aesthetic”
_________________________________________________________________________________ 17:40– 19:00 Voicing the Earth – Poetry Reading and Music Performance
Old Teachers College, Teachers College Assembly Hall Room 300, Level 3 Chair: Luke Fischer Poets: Judith Beveridge, Michelle Cahill, Peter Minter and David Malouf Musician: Veronique Serret (violin)
ABSTRACT & BIOGRAPHIES _________________________________________________________________________________ Libby Robin ‘How are the humanities innovating in response to environmental change?’ The task of reconceptualising planetary change for the human imagination calls on a wide range of disciplinary wisdom. The Environmental Humanities is not so much a new discipline or method, as a fresh combination of humanistic perspectives. Since the 1970s a range of humanities sub-fields, such as environmental philosophy, environmental history, political ecology, ecocriticism, cultural geography and environmental anthropology have explored ideas about people and environments. Environmental humanities extend the idea of the human within the transdisciplinary mode of environmental studies. Environmental humanities projects often demand collaborative authorships between researchers with many different backgrounds, including natural sciences, arts and creative practitioners beyond the academy. The trend to multidisciplinary collaboration has increased with increasing concerns about global warming and climate change in the 21st century. Shared problems, places and scales of conversation are a strong basis for collaborative work. Experiential learning, trust and willingness to accommodate judgments based on different methods are keys that unlock both transdisciplinary insights and practical outcomes. The talk will survey a range of current collaborative activities in museums and art practice that work closely with the scholarly humanities to critique and explore action for climate change. Climate change affects different ecological places differently. Micro-climates and macro-climates work together to make for different risks and different concerns. The local, and the human scale are qualitative and typical of work led by humanities initiatives. These complement the quantitative planetary scale syntheses driven by natural science, models and algorithms. The ‘hyper-object’ of climate change is complex at many scales. Historians have a specific role to document how knowledge itself is transforming rapidly in response to the biggest questions of our times. History is a tool that can tease out power relations between ‘experts’ and communities, and map the changing ways different disciplines and institutions speak for the future.
Libby Robin is a historian of science and the environment and Professor in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University, Canberra. She is co-convenor (with Thom van Dooren) of the Australian Environmental Humanities Hub (www.aehhub.org). She has worked extensively with museums in Australia, Sweden and Germany. She was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2013. Her recent books include The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (Yale 2013, with Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde), and Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change (Routledge 2017, with Jennifer Newell and Kirsten Wehner). Her next book, The Environment: A History (with Paul Warde and Sverker Sörlin), will be published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2018. Her current work includes an ARC project with Iain McCalman and a range of museums on ‘Localising the Anthropocene’.
Dieter Sturma, Bonn University ‘Asymmetric Recognition and the Sublime’ The relationship between the human life form and other life forms is determined by epistemic as well as practical asymmetries. Norms and obligations are determinations of the space of reasons and cannot simply be derived from nature. Nature as such is not a source of normativity.The fact that only persons can formulate moral obligations does not mean that moral obligations can only be addressed to persons. With the help of asymmetric recognition it becomes possible to expand the context for moral obligations extensively.
In expanding the circle of those to whom moral obligations may be addressed it is helpful to refer both to the use of the predicate ‘good’ and to the graduated comparability of various conditions and perceptions or experiences. A moral obligation may be said to exist if it is possible to ascribe varying degrees of better or worse states – something that is trivially true of all life forms. Even if the potential addressees have no reflective perspective there can be good reasons in ethical evaluations to reject interventions or infringements as unjustifiable if they lead to a worsening of their states. Contrary to common belief, the practice of instrumentalization not only lacks ethical justification in the case of persons but also in the case of other life forms capable of moving independently in their environment and establishing and controlling their own modes of behavior. There are certain ways of treating living creatures and objects that simply strike us as wrong. While it is not possible to speak of intrinsic values of nature, we can think of reasons for moral reactions in and towards nature, because normative attitudes are responses to given circumstances. These kinds of reactions are a clear indication of similarities and correspondences between humans and other life forms. From the perspective of life one might say we share a common destiny. Walter Benjamin once stated that “the hierarchy of the creaturely world […] reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate through many gradations.” It is our task to reach normatively into this abyss. Asymmetrical attitudes towards non-human nature are manifested in the experience of the sublime, which expresses independence of the Other of nature for us. Accordingly, the sublime tells us something about our place in nature. The experience of the sublime is based on the asymmetry between reflection and nature. This asymmetry resists its full integration into ethical or aesthetic experience. In the sublime the independence of realms of nature expresses itself in consciousness. The nature of the sublime shows the concurrent presence of two organizing systems in self-consciousness: the natural space and the social space of reasons. A central element of an intercultural discourse on the environmental crisis is sensitivity for normative innovations which emerge from interculturally and transnationally shared experiences. The discourse has to be structured as an egalitarian exchange of giving and asking for reasons. Values and reasons have to be made comprehensible and justified in a way that does not depend on already sharing the worldview from which they are formulated. Accordingly, ethics of nature must be understood as a multicultural project of mutual revisions in the light of normative principles.
Dieter Sturma is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bonn, Director of the Institute of Science and Ethics (IWE) at the German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE), and Director of the Institute for Ethics in the Neurosciences (INM 8) at the Research Centre Juelich. His main areas of research are philosophical anthropology, philosophy of mind, ethics and applied ethics (especially biomedical ethics and environmental ethics), 18th century French philosophy, classical German Philosophy and contemporary philosophy.
Harriet Johnson ‘Beginning Somewhere Else: Adorno’s Negative Universal History ‘ “The project of universal history does not come to end. It begins again somewhere else’ so Susan Buck-Morss concludes her analysis of the subterranean influence of the 1804 Haitian slave revolt on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. The very notion that universal history breaks off in one site and resumes elsewhere militates against its connotations as a continuous, totalizing process. This is what Adorno means by a ‘negative universal history’: the universal is to be approached not by subsuming particular facts within our universal systems of homogenizing premises but by “attending to the edges of systems”. In Adorno’s hands, preponderant universals are to be both denied and construed. Denial involves critically unmasking how universalizing abstractions participate in reification. Rationality is reified/reifying when it mystifies historico-social forces as brute ‘natural’ necessities. Construal, by contrast, aims to unleash a universal’s speculative excess of the given: for instance, the cleft between the promise of universal freedom and an unfree social actuality. In this discussion, I critically examine Chakrabarty’s attempt to enlist negative universal history to tackle the historico-philosophical
consequences of climate crisis. He suggests that the Anthropocene demands ‘disjunctive thinking’. We need to retain nuanced analyses of the particular role of globalized capitalism in biospheric change. We must also attend to a new universal experience of danger and so dwell with the speculative excess of a situation which tests the parametric conditions of planetary life.
Harriet Johnson is a sessional lecturer in the Departments of Philosophy and Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Her doctoral research, which explored the critical theory tradition and its conceptions of natural history, was undertaken between Sydney and the Humboldt University in Berlin. Her dissertation (awarded 2017) is titled Late Nature: Adorno and the Perplexities of Immanent Critique.
Cat Moir, University of Sydney Natural History and the Art of Empire: Ferdinand Bauer’s Images of Extinction From 1804 to 1805, the Austrian naturalist and scientific draughtsman Ferdinand Bauer spent eight months documenting the flora and fauna of Norfolk and Phillip Islands. Among the drawings Bauer made were those of the plant streblorrhiza speciosa, of which he documented the last known fruiting specimen, and the Norfolk Island kaka parrot, which was already so endangered in Bauer’s time that his drawing is believed to have been made from a captive bird. Bauer’s images of species on the point of extinction highlight the ambivalent role that the visual has played in the entangled intellectual and environmental histories of colonialism. Scientific illustration expanded knowledge of the natural world considerably, contributing to the globalization of environmental knowledge. Yet it also documents a process by which living beings thriving in their colonial environments were transformed into dead images and objects for display in the metropole. This paper uses the framework ‘world-ecology’ to conceptualise these dynamics, and invokes the concept of a dialectic of enlightenment to understand the role scientific illustration as an epistemological tool has played in the world-ecology of colonial science.
Cat Moir is an intellectual historian specialising in the history of ideas in the German-speaking world from 1750 to 1989. Her current research interests include the history of materialist and biological thought in Germany, and the intellectual history of German scientists in Australia and the Pacific.
Monica Gagliano, University of Western Australia Beyond anthropomorphising the Antropos – and how to learn from plants about it
Monica Gagliano is a research associate professor of evolutionary ecology, an adjunct senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia and a former research fellow of the Australian Research Council. She is the author of numerous scientific articles in the fields of animal and plant behavioral and evolutionary ecology and is coeditor of The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lexington, 2015) and The Language of Plants (Minnesota University Press, 2017). She has pioneered the new research field of plant bioacoustics and extended the concept of cognition to plants, reigniting the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical standing. For more information, visit www.monicagagliano.com
Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, UNSW Extinction Studies: A Discussion What does it mean to inhabit a period of mass species extinction? What forms of life and death—human and not—are possible at such a time? What modes of understanding, of witnessing, of responsibility, of humanity, are adequate—or at the very least liveable—in the shadow of this “great unravelling” of life? These are some of the questions that animate work in the emerging field of extinction studies. Drawing the humanities into conversation with the biological sciences and ethnographic research with communities caught up in extinction in various ways, work in this area seeks to better understand what extinction means, why it matters, and how we might better respond to the challenges of this time. This session will take the form of a discussion of this field between two of its founding scholars, Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren, drawing on their recently published edited collection, Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations (Columbia UP, 2017, with Matthew Chrulew).
Deborah Bird Rose, FASSA, is an Adjunct Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales, and founding co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities. She is the author of numerous acclaimed books including Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (University of Virginia Press, 2011), the prize-winning ethnography Dingo Makes Us Human (Cambridge University Press, 2009, third edition) and Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation (UNSW Press, 2004). Thom van Dooren is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities and ARC Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales. He is also co-editor of the journal Environmental Humanities. His most recent book is Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, 2014). www.thomvandooren.org
Linda Connor, University of Sydney ‘Anthropology and Ecological Crisis: Introductory Remarks’
Linda Connor is Professor of Anthropology and Chair of Department at the University of Sydney. Having first research field focused on the religious life in Bali, on the basis of which she produced ethnographic films on healing and cremation, as well as an ethnographic film monograph, first published in 1986 (Jero Tapakan: Balinese Healer. An Ethnographic Film Monograph. L. Connor, P. Asch and T. Asch, Cambridge University Press). In recent years she has focused on the study of anthropogenic climate change, culture and place, with research undertaken and supervised in Australia, Indonesia, and Nepal, and with current collaborators in Germany and India. She is currently an investigator on an Australian Research Council-funded project on The Coal Rush and Beyond: A Comparative Study of Coal Reliance and Climate Change (www.coalrush.net). Her latest books, both Routledge 2016, are the monograph Climate Change and Anthropos: Planet, People and Places, and the co-edited volume with Jonathan Marshall, Environmental Change and the World’s Futures: Ecologies, Ontologies, Mythologies.
Jadran Mimica, University of Sydney Life and Death in an Ouroboric Life-World (Yagwoia, Papua New Guinea) The Yagwoia life-world has evolved within a spatio-temporal vortex that is 50,000 - 60,000 years old. It belongs to the Papuan provenance of human presence in the Australo-Pacific region located, to put it in the bio-geographic terms, east of the Wallace line. Prior to the European colonial expansion the historical transformations initiated in the Axial Age in the Euro-Asian civilizational fields, never exercised any radically effective cosmo-ontological influence in these regions. The present planetary situation, in reference to which this symposium on The Nexus of Life: Ecological Crisis and Creative Understanding is framed, can be said to be both the consummation and “the phase transition” of the entire historical trajectory marked by the “breakthrough” into and the pursuit of “transcendence” which characterized the history of Axial humanity. It seems informative in the context of this meeting to bring into view a cosmic perspective on ecology from within a non-Axial region, and to highlight those configurations and meanings of a Papuan mode of human existence that endured for millennia without cleaving to any vision of life that would have brought about the kind of existential projects akin to the Axial humanity in all its historical crises and transformations. Suspending the presentation (for lack of time) of the development and vicissitudes of their current situation within the encompassing horizons of the planetary geopolitical field, I focus on the cosmo-ontological specificities of the Yagwoia life-world through an interpretive framework that combines existential phenomenology, psychoanalysis and archetypal psychology. As a cosmological system their life-world is a self-generative bodily totality (world-body) which incessantly reproduces itself through its internal constitutive parts: concrete ecology, individual humans and their group-containers. This dynamics is simultaneously self-devouring and self-copulating. Its most apposite characterisation is the archetypal image of the ouroboros, the serpent that eats its own tail. By foregrounding their mortuary practices, I outline the Yagwoia existential process as a self-unity of the ceaseless auto-metamorphoses of life-death - the anabolic and katabolic moments of their cosmic abode. However, following the arrival of the Australian colonial administration in November 1950 there began the steady process of the erosion of the originality of the Yagwoia life-world presently eking out a marginal existence on the margins of the margins of the world system.
Jadran Mimica is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. He has conducted ethnographic research and produced interpretations of the cosmology of the Yagwoia people of Papua New Guinea since 1976. He is best known for his monograph on Yagwoia mathematics, Intimations of Infinity: The Cultural Meanings of the Iqwaye Counting and Number Systems (Berg, 1988). He teaches on wide-ranging issues covering knowledge of world ethnography, the history of philosophy and science, and Western cosmology. His radical critique of the Western epistemic dominance presents a salient contribution to this meeting.
Ute Eickelkamp, University of Sydney Ontic Loss and the Scope for a New Humanism in Central Australia As a colonized and perennially marginalized people in Australian settler society, Aboriginal people continue to seek recognition of their full humanity. At once over-governed and neglected by the state, many families I know in Central Australia live in inhumane conditions – with poverty, malnutrition, high levels of preventable chronic illnesses, family violence and youth suicide, to mention but the most severe socio-economic indicators of their predicament. Remarkably, notwithstanding their everyday hardships, many have become contemporary artists of international acclaim who bring deep aspects of their cultural traditions into a dialogue across cultures – not unlike during the humanist movement. But if the abiding creative passion of Aboriginal thinkers,
musicians, dancers, painters, composers and storytellers reaches deep into time, this is not a renaissance of a bygone antiquity, nor do the people enjoy the social privileges of those who forged the European humanism half a millennium ago. As I want to suggest on the basis my ethnographic inquiries with Anangu thinkers in the APY Lands in northern South Australia, desert dwellers are working to sustain a nexus of life in crisis. In their own cultural terms, their existence as Anangu – meaning cosmically embedded ‘human being’ – is endangered. The reality of Tjukurpa, the land-based cosmology of Dreamings, is straining under the weight of a domesticated life in settlements, the Western materialist culture and modes of knowing, the transforming desert ecology, and the diminishing social space of engaging Country in situ. One of the effects is ontic loss: ‘Everything had Story’, a woman friend told me, ‘but now, this ant that bit you is just an ant!’ To put it boldly: Ancestral power is under siege. Although the Anangu gained freehold title over their traditional estates, Tjukurpa is in the grip of a shrinking habitat. The shrinking of this cosmic ecology has also to do with the white judgmental gaze, fear of primitivism and fear of a punishing if loving God. A stressful inversion is going on, ‘giving people a headache’ and taking lives: Ancestral spirits are internalised as Nature becomes external object. It seems urgent to ask: Whence a new humanism?
Ute Eickelkamp is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. Since 1995, she has undertaken fieldwork with Anangu families in Central Australia that have led to ethnographic analyses of the symbolic articulations of a transforming Aboriginal desert society. Drawing on German humanities traditions and developmental psychoanalysis, she has built up a body of works that reveals how Indigenous Australians accommodate or not the existential pressures they chronically live with as a marginal group in a settler society. Her current work explores how Anangu thinkers, including vernacular Christians, speak about nature, history and being. She recently explored these themes in a collaborative workshop, Placing Spirit, Minding the World: Towards an Intercultural Ethic of Care, that brought together Indigenous artists and educators, and non-Indigenous philosophers, poets and anthropologists. Her Australian work at large – on art, play, children’s social imagination, religion and ontological ruptures – could be described as an anthropology of transitions. The idea of nature has emerged as a key problematic; she is presently orienting towards interdisciplinary research on rapidly changing ecologies, including beyond Australia in the postindustrial world of Germany’s Ruhr Valley. Her publications include Don’t Ask for Stories: The Women of Ernabella and Their Art (1999); the co-edited Contexts of Child Development: Culture, Policy and Intervention (2008); and Growing Up in Central Australia: New Anthropological Studies of Aboriginal Childhood and Adolescence (2011).
Sebastian Job, National Institute of Dramatic Arts 5-MeO-DMT in the Anthropocene: or Ecological Catastrophe as the Human Truth Event There is a well-established discourse coming from many directions that emphasises the need for a shift to an understanding that humans are not above nature, but rather are, and have always been, of it. Among those kinds of people once referred to as ‘counter-cultural’ it is common to hear this shift referred to as a ‘planetary initiation.’ In undergoing the global ecological trial by fire we will either grow up, lose our preposterous sense of superiority and accept our more humble, finite, station among the other creatures, or we will get weeded out. There is no doubt that these are truth claims, and they have some force. However these claims take a different tack among the people I study. The cultural historian Walter Hanegraff has grouped these
people under the label ‘entheogenic esotericism,’ and they form, roughly speaking, a psychonautic or entheonautic subsection of the evolving counter-culture. Several moments of this entheonautic discourse on the planetary initiation seem noteworthy. First, far from being a castrating, finitising shift, the invitation to understand ourselves as part of nature is viewed in these circles as actually an invitation to comprehend ourselves in our infinitude, namely the part-whole identity infinitude of the gaian-solar-galactic-universal process. With shamanic medicines such as ayahuasca and its analogues, this is an infinitude that is regularly experienced as one’s truth. Secondly, approached with entheogenic intent the psychoactive experience regularly affords various degrees of encounter with a state which goes beyond, or rather within, part-whole identity infinitude. This more intimate and yet explosive state is particularly characteristic of the potent psychoactive 5-MeO-DMT, and is typically evoked by reference to a borrowed ‘mystical’ or ‘gnostic’ nomenclature. Here we find words like ‘nonduality,’ ‘Buddha nature,’ ‘Clear Light’, ‘God’, and ‘Jesus consciousness.’ Entheogenic revelations of this 'Absolute' kind are often criticized as ‘mere experiences’ by those who have taken a more sober route to similar conclusions. But in any event, it does not seem trivial that here the reports of mystics of varied cultural backgrounds more or less converge with the reports of entheonauts. Nondual consciousness (to give it its most innocuous title), is such an uncanny ‘state’ it is bound to be misunderstood by any and all of the disciplines honoured by the contemporary secular academy. It can be handled, as Hanegraaf does, by enclosing it within a sympathetic academic nominalism. However, the most challenging aspect of such states is lost in this way. This concerns their imperious and dogmatically asserted truth status. Without pretending that one can establish before the fact what such a claim might mean or how it might be justified, in this talk I want to entertain the hypothesis that these 'Absolute' states open up the prospect that the truth of human being is what is essentially at stake in the ecological catastrophe. Or to put the point the other way and more forcefully, only to the degree that in this ‘initiation’ our true being becomes self-consciously entertained as what is really at stake in the ecological catastrophe will we enter into what is most fertile, if also most dangerous, in this crisis. Sebastian Job teaches at NIDA (the National Institute for Dramatic Arts) and is an Honorary Associate in the Department of Anthropology, University of Sydney. He did his PhD fieldwork in Russia looking at the conscious and unconscious motivations of racist nationalists, and has done fieldwork in Mexico among Aztec revivalists. His main current research focus is on the psycho-spiritual, cultural, political and educational potential of traditional and new psychoactive substances. Examples of his published work can be found at Academia.edu Peter Minter, University of Sydney Unlandscaping ecopoetics: the environmental lyric and transcultural geopoethics in contemporary poetry. In this paper I will elaborate a poetics of unlandscaping as a stage in a broader ecopoetics/geopoethics of decoloniality. Beginning with a close reading of meenamatta lena narla puellakanny: Meenamatta Water Country Discussion. A Writing and Painting Collaboration between Palawa elder, writer and activist Pura-lia Meenamatta (Jim Everett) and painter Jonathon Kimberley, I will discuss the promise of a transcultural geopoethics that translates between lyrical poetic language, painterly gesture, epistemes and cosmologies. I will discuss how my writing practice and poetry has sought to enact such an environmental and aesthetic philosophy.
Peter Minter is a poet, poetry editor and writer on poetry and poetics. He teaches Indigenous Studies, Australian Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Sydney, with a research focus in countermodernity, decoloniality and ecopoetics.
Luke Fischer, University of Sydney Ecopoetics and the Metaphoricity of Being This paper will illustrate ways in which certain kinds of metaphor in poetry can reveal significant relationships between diverse natural beings and phenomena (including the human). These metaphors reveal the complex unity of the world while at the same time acknowledging differences. They overcome the problems (epistemic and ethical) both of dissolving difference into an amorphous unity and of over-emphasising difference at the expense of interconnection. In order to make this argument, the paper will draw on forms of holism (primarily developed during the period of European Romanticism) that complement contemporary ecological holism but extend beyond the framework of ecosystems and direct dependencies for survival. Luke Fischer is a poet, philosopher, and scholar. His books include the poetry collections A Personal History of Vision (UWAP Poetry, 2017) and Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013) and the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (Bloomsbury, 2015). He co-edited a special section of the Goethe Yearbook (2015) on ‘Goethe and Environmentalism’ and is currently co-editing a volume of essays on the philosophical dimensions of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Oxford University Press). He has received various honours and awards for his poetry and scholarship and he frequently convenes poetry and music events. He is an honorary associate of the philosophy department at the University of Sydney. For more information see: www.lukefischerauthor.com Janet Laurence, Artist The Alchemical Afterlife Within Natural History Museums As an artist, I have the opportunity to pose questions in my work about ways to perform acts of care for our broken world - in particular, for the other species that our human-centric view has excluded, or destroyed. Museums traditionally treat the animals and plants they collect as mere specimens/objects. Within the context of a museum collection, these specimens are often detached from the conditions and environments in which they once lived and thrived – I want to bring into view, and focus on, an intimacy with these plants and animals, with their own individual existences.
Using an aesthetic language inspired by empathy and care, I offer these species a healing or renewed way of existing within the contemporary museum. Playing with an alchemical language to suggest the metaphorical possibility for transformation, I want the works to offer the viewer a new way of experiencing museum collections.
Janet Laurence is a Sydney-based Australian artist who exhibits nationally and internationally. Her practice examines our physical, cultural and conflicting relationship to the natural world. She creates immersive environments that navigate the interconnections between organic elements and systems of nature. Within the recognised threat to so much of the life world, she explores what it might mean to heal, albeit metaphorically, the natural environment, fusing this with a sense of communal loss and search for connection with powerful life-forces. Her work is included in museum, university, corporate and private collections as well as within architectural and landscaped public places. Institution/Awards: Laurence has been a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill and Australia Council fellowships; recipient of the Alumni Award for Arts, UNSW; visiting fellow at the NSW University Art and Design; Australian representative for the COP21/FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate 2015 exhibition; visiting fellow of the 2016/2017 Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) foundation fellowship; and artist in residence at the Australian Museum.
Prudence Gibson, UNSW The Wasteland as an Aesthetic
The wasteland is conventionally a space on the urban periphery that humans abandoned, neglected or otherwise misused. It is a symptom of the Anthropocene and is a site where one function was fulfilled and now there is potential for a new function. Whether it is a place where weeds sneak up through concrete or where there is ‘always a dead tree’, or whether it is a botanical or agricultural place that has been reclaimed or repurposed, the wasteland exists outside order, outside enforcement, outside civic planning. Ownership is sometimes difficult to determine. These wasteland spaces have a mysterious allure due to their spontaneous changeability, their radical disorder and their defiance of resolute human constructs. In response to the age of ecological threat, this paper will address the work of artists Tega Brain, Anais Tondeur and Pierre Huyge who are working with the aesthetics of the wasteland
Prudence Gibson is Post Doctoral Fellow at UNSW, Sydney. She is author of The Rapture of Death 2010, Boccalatte Publishing and has published over 300 essays. Her 2015 book Janet Laurence: The Pharmacy of Plants was published by New South Press. She co-edited Aesthetics After Finitude, Re.press 2016 and Covert Plants, Punctum Books forthcoming September 2017. The Plant Contract, which addresses plant studies and art, will be published in January 2018 with Brill Rudopi.
_____________________________________________________________________ ‘Voicing the Earth’ Judith Beveridge lives in Sydney. Her seventh collection of poetry, a new and selected poems, will be published by Giramondo in 2018. Her previous volumes have won a number of prizes including NSW, Victorian and Queensland Premiers’ Poetry Awards, the Grace Leven Poetry
Prize and the Wesley Michel Wright Prize. She has also been a recipient of the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medal. She was poetry editor for Meanjin from 2005-2015. Her work has been studied in schools and universities. Michelle Cahill writes poetry, fiction and essays. Her second collection Vishvarupa was shortlisted in the Victorian Premier's Literary Award, The Herring Lass is her most recent book. She co-edited Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. Her debut fiction, Letter to Pessoa was awarded the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for New Writing. She has a poem forthcoming in the The Forward Book of Poetry 2018. Michelle lives in Sydney and has read in England and the United States. David Malouf is an internationally acclaimed author of numerous works across various genres, including poetry, novels, short stories, essays and libretti, and has been widely translated. His awards include the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His most recent poetry collection, Earth Hour (UQP, 2014), won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and the NSW Premier’s Award for Poetry. He lives in Sydney. Peter Minter is a poet, editor and writer on poetry and poetics. His many books include the award-winning Empty Texas and blue grass, and his poetry has been widely published and translated internationally, most recently, In the Serious Light of Nothing. He was a founding editor of Cordite, co-edited the pioneering anthologies Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, and has been the poetry editor for leading Australian journals Meanjin and Overland. He teaches Indigenous Studies, Creative Writing and Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Luke Fischer is a poet, philosopher, and scholar. His books include the poetry collections A Personal History of Vision (UWAP Poetry, 2017) and Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013) and the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (Bloomsbury, 2015). He co-edited a special section of the Goethe Yearbook (2015) on ‘Goethe and Environmentalism’ and is currently co-editing a volume of essays on the philosophical dimensions of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (Oxford University Press). He is an honorary associate at the University of Sydney. For more information see: www.lukefischerauthor.com ______________________________________________________________________________
