Suzanne Treister, TECHNOSHAMANIC SYSTEMS/Earth Eco Systems and Architectures/Rockface Green Crystal Night Homestead, 2021, watercolour on paper, 21 x 29.7 cm. Courtesy the artist, Annely Juda Fine Art, London and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York
Join us for an Online Panel Discussion with curator Sophie J Williamson, writer and artist Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, professor of philosophy Michael Marder and artist Suzanne Treister.
This discussion is part of Mystic Ecologies, a symposium investigating creative, fantastical and non-human positions on the environment and ecology. Across two days, we reflect on the environmental crisis and explore what we can learn from different perspectives.
With growing concern for climate change, sustainability and biodiversity, speakers will discuss how the visual arts can take conscious approaches to processes, materials and ideas. Presentations go beyond scientific approaches to consider illusionary, mythological and fantastical possibilities.
Find out more about the panel’s individual work and research and explore how alternative ways of thinking can be applied to conversations around the environment.
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.
About the Speakers
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.
