11 AM
INTRODUCTION
André Mesquita, Curator, MASP
 
11:10 AM – 1 PM
Roundtable

HUDA TAYOB 
Watery edges

Coastal and port cities and towns inhabit edge conditions, always engaging with the interior and watery worlds beyond. The curatorial and research project, Index of Edges, traces the vast global worlds of encounter along the east African coasts from Cape Town to Port Said, to question architectural knowledge and archival resources, offering an alternative orientation. The project asks how architecture might learn from ways of living, inhabiting and residing in watery environments. Importantly, architecture here is understood as a way of imagining and inhabiting the world—a series of world-making practices with varied beings and bodies, sites, and oceanic territories.

RODRIGO NUNES
Politics as Ecology

The most usual association between politics and ecology is perhaps a disjunctive one: not only is politics largely accountable for the increasingly severe environmental crisis, but it has also shown itself incapable of responding to it. While both aspects are largely unquestionable, it is striking that even when we call for a reassessment of the current way of distinguishing nature and culture, we are unable to think of politics under the same terms as we think of ecology. Perhaps this has begun to change in the last decade, as more and more activists around the world have come to allude to resistance against the destruction of life and capital as encompassing an ecology of movements or an organizational ecology. This speech aims to investigate some of the consequences of this idea.

TIM INGOLD
The Earth, the Sky and the Ground Between

The ground is a surface, says the dictionary, upon which things or persons stand or move. But this leaves many questions unanswered. What kind of surface is this? Does it have one side or two? Does it cover the earth or cover it up? Can you roll it, fold it, cut it or make holes in it? What lies above, and what beneath? Does the ground separate the earth from the sky, or is it formed in their intermingling? In seeking to answer these questions, I shall argue that the ground is caught in a double movement, of opening up and closing off, formation and encrustation, thanks to which its inhabitants are at once confidently supported and precariously afloat. Herein lies the art of burial.

Mediation: Daniela Rodrigues, Curatorial Assistant, MASP

1 PM – 3 PM
BREAK

3 PM – 5 PM
Roundtable

T. J. DEMOS
Art and Ecology Today: Challenges and Strategies 

After nearly 30 years of annual UN Climate Summits—the site of global climate policy leadership—accompanied by all manner of social movements, anti-extraction, and climate justice protests, we are arguable losing the battle for a decarbonized, sustainable, and socially just world. While there is no lack of alternative plan—whether it be the Green New Deal, the Indigenous decolonial Red Deal, the Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, ecosocialist just transition, and more—and while the cultural sector of artistic practice, ecocriticism, and climate fiction has presented innumerable inspirational visions of world-building within and beyond colonial racial capitalism, the urgency of transformation mounts as we experience ever more disastrous weather events, habitat loss, and extinction crisis. What is to be done, in these emergency times, when some are calling for organizing greater labor militancy and others, the blowing up of pipelines? What are the options for cultural practitioners today

LISA BLACKMORE
Cultivating Hydrocommunities (Or, How to Eat a River in Colombia) 

In a recent interview, Aymara thinker Silvia Rivera Cusiquanqui reflects on the act of eating honey, proposing that if we eat it knowing it celebrating and honouring the bees that made it, “we become part of a metabolism of the cosmos.” This dialogue “via food, via breathing, via thought,” is what we should keep close when we think about and create community. In this presentation, I take up these ideas and Rivera Cusiquanqui’s wager that in our stressed ecological present, it is not so much political ideologies as mountain ranges, forests and rivers that are capable of summoning activist energies to think through our in-progress curatorial work with guardians of the Bogota River, one of Colombia’s most polluted water bodies. I will share our process of gathering and connecting communities along the river basin through a project that renders metabolizable a culture of river care enacted through agroecological farming, communal seed sharing and culinary traditions.  

MALCOM FERDINAND
Why a decolonial ecology is (still) needed?

In this short presentation, drawing from his previous book, Decolonial ecology: thinking from the Caribbean world, Malcom Ferdinand will plead for the need to engage directly with the colonial foundation of modernity in all spheres, and subjects related to ecological issues. In particular, he will warn against a particular reception of this proposition that still prolongs the colonial domination at play in ecological thinking.

Mediation: David Ribeiro, Curatorial Assistant, MASP

HUDA TAYOB
Huda Tayob is a South African architectural historian and is currently a lecturer at the University of Manchester, having previously taught at the University of Cape Town, University of Johannesburg, and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant, and subaltern architectures focused on the African continent. She is co-curator of the open-access curriculum Racespacearchitecture.org and the digital pan-African platform, Archive of Forgetfulness. She is a participant in the 18th International Architecture exhibition in Venice (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives along East African coasts Cape Town to Port Said.

LISA BLACKMORE 
Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies, University of Essex. In 2018, she founded entre-ríos, a confluence of projects that explores continuities between bodies of water, human bodies and territories, recognizing rivers as active subjects that produce aesthetic forms, transform landscapes and shape memory. Lisa is currently a British Academy Mid-Career for her project Imagining the Hydrocommons: Water, Art and Infrastructure in Latin America. Her publications include Spectacular Modernity: Dictatorship, Space and Visuality in Venezuela (2017) and co-edited Natura: Environmental Aesthetics After Landscape (2018) and Liquid Ecologies in Latin American and Caribbean Arts (2020), among others. 

MALCOM FERDINAND 
Malcom Ferdinand was born in Martinique in 1985. He holds a degree in Environmental Engineering from University College London (UCL) and a Ph.D. in Political Philosophy and Political Science from the Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7). He is the author of Decolonial Ecology (2019), which was awarded the Prix du Livre by the Fondation de l’Écologie Politique. He is currently a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France) and works at the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire en Sciences Sociales (IRISSO) at the Université Paris Dauphine-PSL (Paris 9).
 
RODRIGO NUNES
Nunes holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, and an Associate Professor at PUC-Rio. He is the author of several articles in national and international publications, as well as the books Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action After Networks (Mute/PML Books, 2014), Neither Vertical nor Horizontal: A Theory of Political Organisation (Verso, 2021), and Do Transe à Vertigem: Ensaios sobre Bolsonarismo e um Mundo em Transição (Ubu, 2022). His new book, Nem Vertical nem Horizontal: Uma Teoria da Organização Política, was recently published by Ubu. He was a Visiting Scholar at Brown University and a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths College, the University of Westminster, and the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, among others.

T. J. DEMOS 
Award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. He researches the intersection of visual culture, radical politics, and political ecology, and is the author of numerous books. Demos was recently Chair and Chief Curator of the Climate Collective, providing public programming related to the 2021 Climate Emergency > Emergence program at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Maat) in Lisbon. His recent book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.
 
TIM INGOLD
CBE, FBA, FRSE is Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He has carried out fieldwork among Saami and Finnish people in Sapmi territory, and has written on environment, technology, and social organization in the circumpolar North, on animals in human society, and on human ecology and evolutionary theory. His more recent work explores environmental perception and skilled practice. Ingold’s current interests lie on the interface between anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. Ingold is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2022 he was made a CBE for services to Anthropology.