Ignacio Acosta in collaboration together with Sámi author and educator Anna Nutti Wiandt and field biologist and ecophilosopher Linda Ellegaard Nordström organised the Queer Sámi Language and Embroidery Workshop at Samernas Bibliotek, the Sámi library during the Regnbågsveckan Jokkmokk [Rainbow Week]. This workshop explored gender inclusive possibilities of Sámi languages. Participants gathered around the library’s collection and together compiled a list of non-binary and non-dualistic gender words such as “Bonju” [queer] and “Sån” [they/them] and embroidered them into pieces of fabric.
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In this presentation, Macarena Gómez-Barris traces the practices of Indigenous activists, intellectuals and artists that take place in extractive zones (regions of South America known for their biodiversity and a long history of exploitative extraction of natural resources), which resist and reject the terms of racial capital and the continuing legacies of colonialism.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and academic, with a focus on decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, Latina queer epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory and artistic practice.
The presentation is preceded by a visit to the solo exhibition of the artist Ignacio Acosta, From Mars to Venus. 13th Leandre Cristòfol Art Biennial – Prologue, curated by María Íñigo Clavo and Christian Alonso.
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Evening dedicated to three artists who delve into themes of memory, power, and identity through the exploration of landscapes and seascapes. This event was associated with the exhibition featuring Ingrid Pollard, the 2024 Hasselblad Award winner. In her work, Pollard revisits the landscape as a cultural construct that illuminates issues of power, representation, and the narratives that often remain obscured.
During the evening, the audience has the opportunity to hear from artists Ignacio Acosta, Jorma Puranen, and Lotta Törnroth, as they share insights into their distinctive works.
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Árbbediehto for Dummies: adapting, transferring and visualizing traditional Sámi land based knowledge.
In terms of climate change, Indigenous peoples are commonly portrayed either as victims of its negative impacts or completely ignored, or as today, due to renewed industrial colonization, desire for natural resources within Indigenous territories – depicted as being “in the way” for the necessary actions to mitigate climate change. Indigenous people and local expertise, knowledge traditions and transmission, as well as agency are in all cases obscured. This roundtable is based on the inter- and supradisciplinary research project Indigenous perspectives on forest fires, drought and climate change: Sábme, Uppsala University, Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism/Indigenous Studies, aiming at analyzing, documenting and bringing forward Indigenous Sámi knowledge and expertise with regard to land management, wildfires and extreme weather events due to climate change through the lenses of artistic research/visual documentation.
The roundtable investigated the holistic experience-earned and land based Sámi traditional knowledge system Árbbediehto (“inherited knowledge”), the science of surviving and thriving in the arctic region. We examined the challenges of Árbbediehto in times of climate change, colonization relation to transfer land based, language dependent traditional indigenous knowledge and how to reclaim and integrate Árbbediehto lost through colonization. We further examined the role of visual/artistic research in relation to Árbbediehto. How can we convey Árbbediehto to those who did not learn, and to the surrounding society to challenge and put an end to destructive settler colonial practices? Participants: Per-Eric Kuoljok, Sámi translator and reindeer herder; Gun Aira, Sámi teacher, educator and reindeer herder; Liz-Marie Nilsen, Sámi journalist and documentarian; and Ignacio Acosta, artist and researcher. After a round of short presentations we invited discussion on the theme from interested community and scholars, hoping to establish new collaborations and exchanges.
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Organised by Luis Berríos-Negrón.
The Geopolitics of the Forest hosts artist and researcher Ignacio Acosta along with forest ecologist and historian Lars Östlund to discuss fires and land stewardship in the forests of Swedish Norrland. Ignacio will make a presentation based on his research focusing on “understanding Indigenous land stewardship” and “the negative impacts of the nation state disrupting traditional Indigenous ways of managing the land, where burning is one important aspect.” As expert respondent, Lars moderates a follow-up conversation chaired by Luis Berríos-Negrón.
The Geopolitics of the Forest working group meets regularly to share their research on the geopolitics of the forest across art, architecture, political science and landscape ecology. The group are exploring how to develop holistic and interdisciplinary understandings of the human / forest relationship that can represent multiple, overlapping and conflicting interests. They aim to develop a shared critical space for new collaborative artistic research projects which deal with the ethical complexities of forestry in relation to the climate crisis, to reconsider the language and aesthetics of sustainability.
Lars Östlund is Professor at SLU’s Department of Forest Ecology and Management. He is focusing on “forest history” where he works to try and understand the relationship between people and the forests from a long time perspective.
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Ignacio presents his latest video From Mars to Venus: Activism of the Future during conference in collaboration organised between the Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre and Autograph ABP.
The arts have long been concerned with highlighting the ongoing histories of resource extraction and its repercussions. This symposium asks: what next? By bringing together researchers, artists, designers and activists from a range of backgrounds, this event considers local projects in intersectional, granular detail, to collectively re-evaluate the relationship between the arts, extraction and activism, both historically and in the present.
The two days are framed around three broad themes: Colonial and extractive histories, Reparative and fragile ecologies, Environmental justice and legal rights.
Speakers and participants include:Ignacio Acosta, Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Tobah Aukland-Peck, Eline Benjaminsen, Nancy Demerdash, Radha D’Souza, Francisco Gallardo, Hit Man Gurung, Sasha Huber, Elias Kimaiyo, Syowia Kyambi, Adrian Lahoud, Godofredo Pereira, Marie Petersmann, Julian Posada, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Gabriela Saenger Silva, Sakiya, Audrey Samson, Marie Smith, Jonas Staal, Gerald Torres, Wilfred Ukpong, Rahul Ranjan and others.
The symposium is convened by Sria Chatterjee (Paul Mellon Centre), Mark Sealy (Autograph) and Bindi Vora (Autograph).
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Coordinated by Anna Maria Guasch (Universitat de Barcelona), Nasheli Jiménez (independent researcher) and Chiara Sgaramella (Universitat Politècnica de València).
According to David Garneau (2020), Métis artist, curator, and critic, Indigenous art is an emerging category that extends and adapts First Nations Peoples’ ways of being and knowing to the contemporary moment and well beyond the sites of Indigenous territories of origin. Within this context, Indigenous peoples from around the world are increasingly seeking to establish connections in order to produce international networks and a collective consciousness. If, as jurist and Blackfoot First Nation elder Leroy Little Bear states, in Indigenous culture everything is under flux, then the concept of time is dynamic but without movement. In this regard, Chickasaw academic Chadwick Allen (2013) argues for a “trans-Indigenous” research programme within the field of Indigenous Studies that would allow for a site of enunciation embedded in the specificities of the local Indigenous while simultaneously grappling with the complexities of the global Indigenous.
Following this spirit of establishing a simultaneous interplay between the synchronic, the diachronic, and the transdisciplinary by recognizing the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts, we invite artists, theoreticians, and researchers to participate in the Research Seminar “Transindigeneity: Between Local Specificities and Global Complexities”. Some of the key questions we aim to address are: What forms of local specificities inform and/or travel from local contexts to the global stage? How can Indigenous artistic production address this migration between the local and the global? What configurations do Indigenous ways of being and knowing come into play in the global art scene today? And what points of tension are evidenced through this displacement from local Indigenous realities to global points of contact between different indigeneities worldwide?
Presentations include Devenir Universidad Ursula Biemann (artist and researcher); Arte e indigenismo: una genealogía Anna Maria Guasch (Universitat de Barcelona); From Mars to Venus: Activism of the Future Ignacio Acosta (artist and researcher, Uppsala University); Towards a Decolonial Theory of Visual Culture Nasheli Jiménez (independent researcher)
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Ignacio Acosta in conversation with Sarah Vanden Eede.
OCEAN / UNI is an initiative dedicated to art, activism, and science that invites fluid thinking with the Ocean as a way to move beyond the binaries of land and sea. Its curriculum provides students, researchers, and the public access to wide-ranging ideas and explorations through regular live sessions, reading groups, small-scale workshops or activations, and other online material, free and accessible to everyone on Ocean-Archive.org. Aiming to complement and enhance land-based understanding of the Earth, it covers a wide range of ecological, political, aesthetic, ethical, and scientific topics around the realities and futures of the Ocean.
Between October and December 2023, OCEAN / UNI dives towards the deep sea, adopting a cross-disciplinary lens to think from the furthest spaces of our planet’s expansive bodies of water.
By interrogating the idea of the deep sea as a commons and a space of shared value, easily translatable to economic wealth and benefits, the Fall semester works to re-state the deep sea as a living reality saturated with meaning and foundational to life itself: as a metaphor for the unknown, a place where exciting creatures flourish and meaning sprouts. This new exploration and mining frontier is a horizontal one, thousands of meters below the sea surface, and portrayed by extractivists as a “potato field” or “underwater desert”, ready to be harvested for the common good. Yet, the deep ocean and the seabed are rich with diverse and unknown life, thriving around vents, ridges, plains, and seamounts.
Framing the fight against this renewed extractivist assault upon one of the four global commons from an interdisciplinary, culture-led viewpoint, we want to assemble a diverse front that takes an affective, community-led approach to care and custodianship of the deep seas. Cultural relations with the deep seabed make it so much more than a “common heritage of mankind” to be partitioned and extracted from to provide short-term profit for a small number of humans. What would it take to maintain a thriving deep sea and seabed, and ultimately a future in which the Earth remains a liveable planet for allkind?
Through a series of five live online lectures and interactive “activations” held with diverse speakers—from scientists to artists, from lawyers and policymakers to activists and Indigenous leaders—Culturing the Deep Sea: Towards a common heritage for allkind aims to think around the constructions and representations that shape human–ocean relations, and look to art and critical thinking to raise alternatives. Through collective unlearning as a radical act of deep ocean literacy, we hope to empower ourselves as a community to intervene in dynamic decision-making environments around deep-sea mining that proceed alongside the program.
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Ignacio Acosta in conversation with Juliet Ferguson.
In this talk, Ignacio talks about his project Copper Geographies and how he explores the global flow of mined copper.
He describes how he presents this series of fieldwork explorations of geographically disparate landscapes historically connected by copper. Using research and investigative skills, he maps sites of transformation along the production network and commodity chain, documenting the mutation and transformation of copper from raw material to capital; through ore, smelted commodity, stock market exchanged value, assembled material and waste.
Copper Geographies discloses the uneven spatial conditions in which the material circulates by connecting the ecologies of resource exploitation in the Atacama Desert with the global centres of consumption and trade in Britain, and by making visible its return, hidden in manufactured goods, to the territories it originated from.
Ignacio also discusses his latest project Not a Pearl, a new commission by the Gewerbemuseum Winterthur for the Mining Photography exhibition. The installation, consisting of 36 silkscreen prints and texts, questions the position role of the canton of Zug in the Swiss extractive landscape as global trading hub and offshore haven for shell companies.
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Organised by Hannah le Roux.
The idea of the commons has entered urban studies as a way to describe the shared resources that shape cities. In contrast with this positive view, histories of north-south extractivism show the territorialization of indigenous common lands and praxis. This event suggests a third, intersecting definition of a commons. Using transdisciplinary and cross-site studies, it explores how Western techné reshapes and disturbs the commons on the African continent, through acts of survey, settling and servicing the land. At the same time, the use of such techné might be reconsidered with a view to reparation.
The event takes place on the anniversary of an important day in Africa’s de-colonial history: the student uprisings against apartheid that began in Soweto on June 16, 1976. The event uses as its datum a typical domestic property, lying 1632m above sea level, that was impacted by three apparently unlinked, and little remarked on moments of Swiss technical practice. These dimensions will serve as a starting point to explore other aerial, terrestrial and sub-surface positions and disturbances, amplified through creative research, in conversations that reach towards the repair of the Commons at a planetary scale.
Three sessions are bracketed by three artists projects created for this event, following the course of the day from sunrise to sunset in Soweto. We conclude with an apéro designed around Swiss/Basotho food histories. Together, they offer new perspectives on these common histories.
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