Randi Nygård “…and even where there is only a rustling of plants, in it there is always a lament. Because she is mute, nature mourns.”[1] Walter Benjamin I sit there I sit there in a wet lightening movement of earth and darkness which is me in me I give up, I think Now…
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The Lost Nature
Gabriel Bogossian In 1956, the Cuban poet José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) published Pascal and Poetry, the first of two essays where the same fragment by Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) resonates as a statement on the illuminative role of poetry: “Once true nature is lost, anything can be nature”. Known for the use of imprecise quotes…
Read MoreLiquid Loss: Learning to Mourn Our Companion Species and Landscapes
Teresa Dillon “The world tells a big story: living arrangements that took millions of years to put into place are being undone in the blink of an eye.”[1] In 2015, a team of biologists, zoologists and ecologists[2] published a paper that examined whether human activities are causing a mass extinction. Using “conservative assumptions”, they…
Read MoreTo breed or not to breed. Making kin toward climate justice
Vanina Saracino in conversation with Les U. Knight, founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement[1] In 1969, while the first human was stepping onto the lunar surface and the whole Earth had been fitted into one photo for the first time, the global human population counted approximately 3.5 billion people. As we write, it…
Read MoreAdvocate Of the Unheard
Nathanja van Dijk in conversation with Mikhail Karikis From the power of sound to ecofeminism, from art to the activist imaginary: artist Mikhail Karikis and curator Nathanja van Dijk discuss Karikis’s projects Children of Unquiet (2014) and No Ordinary Protest (2018) in which the artist focuses on the post-millennial generation’s visions of the future in the…
Read MoreDigital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art: Discussion Paper
Tanya Toft Ag Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art This discussion paper introduces a panel and audience conversation at the Screen City Biennial 2019. The theme of the discussion departs from the book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) edited by Tanya Toft Ag. Based on testimonials collected from 78 artists,…
Read MoreNavigating the Uncharted Waters
Kati Ilves in conversation with Kristina Õllek [1] The Earth Overshoot Day—the date by which humans have used a year’s worth of the planet’s resources—gets closer with each year. It was the 29th of July this year, meaning that in only seven months the renewable biological funds were emptied. What might be called as living…
Read MoreMermaid Physics: The Myths of Emilija Škarnulytė
Andrew Berardini “…we find no vestige of a beginning,—no prospect of an end” James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1795) A mermaid swims through the ruins of a nuclear submarine tunnel. The beginning or end of a story, a myth at the edge of our imaginations. Above the surface, the sweep of her…
Read MoreA poetics to keep us on edge, or: An ecophilosopher’s reluctant ode to virtual reality
Martin Lee Mueller Today seemed a day like many others, almost. I sat by the bus window, daydreaming, when the bus began climbing the steep zig-zag road up towards the neighborhood where we live. The climb is my favorite part of the commute: Suddenly, as if summoned by a magic spell, the Oslo fjord…
Read MoreWet Code
Myriagon (Tuomas A. Laitinen & Jenni Nurmenniemi) Wet Code Through experimental merging of hydrophilic future fiction, research on more-than-human underwater communication, and hydrofeminist thought on watery embodiment, we ask questions about knowledge formation in relation to varied aquatic bodies. Within Myriagon, our shared practice, we have been looking into how languages evolve and mutate…
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