Watch back our Mystic Ecologies: Online Panel Discussion
This symposium investigates speculative, fantastical and non-human positions on the environment and ecology, and what can be learnt from these perspectives.
The event reflects on the impact and visibility of the environmental crisis and how this might improve the potential for co-existence with the non-human. What can we learn from our botanical, geological and elemental counterparts? How can this knowledge progress our environmentally responsible survival?
With increasing concern for climate change, sustainability and biodiversity, how can the visual arts take ecologically conscious approaches to processes, materials and ideas? Contributors share viewpoints that go beyond the cautionary or responsive. The approaches explored do not reject scientific or forensic approaches but consider illusionary, mythological and fantastical possibilities.
This online panel discussion is part of the Mystic Ecologies symposium. The symposium takes place over two days and includes contributions from artists, curators and academics.
Sophie J Williamson is a curator based in London and Margate. She is initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, an on-going programme focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological. From 2013-2021, she was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre, and was previously part of the inaugural team at Raven Row, (2009–13).
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone is a speculative writer, artist, researcher and pleasure activist whose praxis navigates that which she has termed “Intimate Ecologies” to explore Blackness, aesthetics and queer, pleasure-centred interspecies futures. Ama is an Associate Lecturer at University of the Arts London: Central Saint Martins, and teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. Ama’s wider intra-disciplinary work thinks through sustainable economies and ecologies of care and more-than-survival for BIPoC women and queer folk in the arts and academia.
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013); Phenomena—Critique—Logos (2014); The
Philosopher’s Plant (2014); Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017)
Suzanne Treister has been a pioneer in the new media field from the early 1990s, making work about emerging technologies, developing avatars and fictional worlds. The relationship between new technologies, society, alternative belief systems and the potential futures of humanity constitutes an
ongoing focus of her work.
Programmed by New Contemporaries, the South London Gallery and MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths University in partnership with Camberwell College of Arts.
This event forms part of New Contemporaries Bridget Riley Artists’ Professional Development Programme
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