Event overview
Critical Environments is a series of lectures and events, which engages with the apprehension that we are living in end times through a wide variety of thematic and disciplinary perspectives.
Through the examples of University of the Trees and Earth Forum, the talk will highlight the phenomenological and connective approach for enabling us to 'come to our senses' and to understand responsibility as an ability-to-respond. It will also make reference to Beuys' renowned statement 'every human being is an artist' and what this has to do with our work towards shaping a humane, just and ecologically viable social order.
Shelley Sacks works internationally in social sculpture and connective aesthetics, exploring the relationship between imagination, transformation and ecological citizenship, and rethinking responsibility as an ability-to-respond. She describes her long-term collaborative projects as ‘instruments of consciousness’ that foreground the link between individual and community, inner work and outer action. Her practice includes more than fifty actions, site works, installations and participatory social sculpture projects; several books and essays; facilitating social sculpture processes and involvement in grassroots cultural and political organisations in South Africa in the 70s and 80s; and collaborating with Joseph Beuys for more than a decade in the Free International University.
‘Critical environments’ names several senses. If the (Greek) krinein is to sift and kritikos is the ability to discern, then we are faced with the work of interpretation. Yet if we turn to the Latin criticare, then those environments are diagnosed as gravely ill. We know that what we call the ‘environment’ is indeed in a state of crisis – acidification renders the oceans increasingly inhospitable to life; deforestation threatens both local ecologies and global climate maintenance; the appetite for meat eats up land as well as nonhuman life. Many of us choose not to know this, or perhaps maintain the fetishistic logic of knowing that comes with simultaneous disavowal. Corporate interests ranging across agriculture, pharmaceuticals, fossil fuels, and the super-saturation of all forms of media hamper the work of interpretation and the possibility of agency and intervention.
The event is free, no booking is required and all are welcome.
Series chairs: Lynn Turner & Wood Roberdeau
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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12 Feb 2015 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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