11:30 – 12:15

Geoengineering projects sustain a state of affairs. But how can we think about infrastructures designed to deal with polluted air in the world we all share? Maybe by testing other modes of paying attention, treating or engaging with it; through infrastructures that acknowledge a broken world, but might trigger other ways of living in it; or with infrastructural experiments to test if collectively sensing pollution, rather than simply seeing information about it, can produce new responses and affects. To sense air physically, as well as emotionally, culturally, poetically...

12:15 – 13:00

Industrial chemicals form the infrastructure of modern life. The regulation of these chemicals – in particular the dominant permission-to-pollute regime – is built on logics that produce environmental and epistemic injustices. In light of this, what kind of interventions might enable different ways of ‘doing’ regulation; regulatory experiments that instead foreground justice? Regulation remains dominantly imagined as the work of civil servants and regulatory scientists. This talk invites a cultural and political expansion of the regulatory imaginary. Attending to regulatory geographies beyond the work of regulators opens up new sites for intervening in toxic legacies.

14:00 – 14:45

‘Human actors strive to interpret, define, or contain the toxic, but how are they also acted upon? Or [...] what happens when the dump is in us? What is the duality of contamination that emerges when we think of toxicity as an ongoing and morphing process?’ (Chloe Taft, ‘What is TOXIC?’, TOXIC: A Symposium on Exposure, Entanglement, and Endurance, 2016, New Haven)

Practitioners from various disciplines have long been engaged in exposing experiences of toxicity. At the heart of many such endeavours is the necessity of finding ways to make visible the complex entanglements of toxicity: of seemingly distant geographies and places; of the different reasons and interests that lie behind the manufacturing of toxicity; of the ways found to bypass national and transnational legislations; of the forms of collaboration between state apparatuses and organised crime in facilitating corporate interests at the expense of people. This talk starts with the toxic events in Alampi’s hometown, in a little village in Calabria, and moves on to discuss platforms such as Toxic Commons and the exhibitions Deadly Affairs at Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp and The Long Term You Cannot Afford at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin. What may emerge are similarities, more than differences, and proximity, more than distance. Everything being closer, way closer than one may think.

14:45 – 15:30

Dani Admiss looks at how a collaborative climate justice project Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline initiates a collective rethink about what forms of repair are needed in the art sector and beyond. The current solutions of climate repair are flawed; carbon accounting and offsetting practices reiterate a narrative where one party repairs for another and scarcity narratives (such as the half-Earth ‘solution’) propose a redistribution that imposes violence for many and a feeling of loss for others. Admiss will talk about some of the commissioned projects by Luiza Prado and Chanelle Adams within the context of the Sunlight project. She will also think about how repair can be meaningful to people in their own lived experiences and communities, as well as within environments that are shaped by humanity but exist far beyond them.

15:30 – 16:15

Through years of research through public ‘workshopologies’ on the project Open Source Estrogen, biohacking methodologies have proven to serve far more than spreading didactic knowledge. These protocols, which produce an existential knowing in our bodies and environments, inevitably lead to a form of collective worlding and knowledging – strategies that may help us out of ecological ruins. Combining biohacking with performance in a new dramaturgical workshop, Performing the Sublime Sea of Co-Mattering, participants embody the very agency of toxic molecules and their ongoing process of worldbuilding, emerging on the other side with a radical breakage from the past.

16:30 – 17:15

‘As the weather image grew, Miel’s consciousness expanded, bending to the curvature of the Earth. Far from an out-of-body experience, the feeling was one of being profoundly situated: sandwiched between the sun-warmed Land, particle-laden air, cloud, satellite and cosmos.’ S. Dyer, S. Engelmann, ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another’, Ecoes #3, Sonic Acts Press, 2022.

Last year, on the first day of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, a network of people operating DIY satellite ground stations around the world captured a collective snapshot of the Earth and its weather systems: a ‘nowcast’ for an undecided future. Tuning into transmissions from three orbiting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, volunteers collected imagery and submitted field notes from their geographical locations. Combined, these contributions generated a feminist and fractal image of the Earth, and a record of conditions of climate crisis from Buenos Aires to Kinshasa to London. As open-weather, we ask: What does it mean to collectively image the Earth, and in doing so, reimagine the planet?

17:15 – 18:00

What do we need to trouble in order to travel towards futures in which trans* and disabled people thrive? Reflecting on our work on crip, trans*, and kinship time, this lecture makes time against the ways that the turbo-capitalist clock is imposed on all of us to uphold oppressions. Troubling normative time within climate change discourses, we work with zeitgeber (time-givers) that describe how external cues influence our internal clocks. Zeitgeber creates the collective feeling towards the future that the amount of (tick, click, timed, paced) clocked time is changing. It is not too late to travel (in present) futures in which trans* and disabled people thrive.

11:15 – 11:35

From the perspective of the Oosterscheldekering – a protective barrier that connects the Zeeland islands and is designed to protect the Netherlands from flooding from the North Sea – water is being a threat, a potential source of disaster, an alarming sound. By exploring such sites visually and sonically, filmmaker Aura Satz is reimagining emergency sirens in an age of intersecting human-made and ecological disasters.

11:35 – 11:45

Resisting or allowing, the sea floods the land sooner or later. Not more than 250 years from now, the drowning of Amsterdam is going to be a fact, performance collective Walden foretells. Their performative installation EILAND, or Island, speculates how future inhabitants of the capital will deal with that ‘end-time’. Water here becomes an ‘ending force’, a moving border pushing back the geographical coastline, but also a potential source of imagination for how one might want to deal with this near future.

11:45 – 12:05

Thinking of the future imaginary of water invites a journey back into its unsettled past. In 1609, Dutch East India Company lawyer and state ideologue Hugo de Groot crafted the notion of mare liberum, or ‘the free sea’, turning the ocean into a commodity ready to be exploited. Tracing the colonial undercurrent of our maritime imagination across time, interdisciplinary researcher and writer Mikki Stelder is interested in how the ocean’s very materiality actively resists notions of commodification perpetuated by today’s legal narratives.

12:05 – 12:25

Following that question of our (Western) attitude towards water, Daphina Misiedjan explores its being as a right. As researcher of environmental justice and human rights, she looks at drinkwater as a fundamental life source and its unequal distribution in the world. What does our abundant use of drinkwater here mean elsewhere in places where there is little, to none? Does access to water mean one has the right to use it? And, what about nature’s rights? Who has got the right to water?

14:00 – 14:4

Oil, the 20th century’s most important non-renewable resource, lies at the centre of discourses on ecological peril and financial oppression, though its colonialist history has faded from view. In a lecture performance enacting a liquidation of Mideast history, speculative exploration, extractive economics, and fictional representation, the artist debuts a one-person collective called Oil Research Group (ORG). ORG is propelled by the concept that ‘data is the new oil’, coined in 2006 by British mathematician (and customer loyalty card inventor) Clive Humby. Oil is a finite source at the very core of both global financial markets and #nofuture petroleum wars; information, seemingly infinite, also ‘leaks’ into the collapsing tripartite structures of governance, markets, and society. The digital self is sticky, like a bird after an oil spill. Moving along the axis of four Ds: dirt, debt, death, and data, ORG traces the finitude and preciousness of our dominant technologies, along the way testing assumptions about the material and immaterial ways in which we are connected, addicted, fossilised, and one hopes, liberated in their wake.

14:45 – 15:30

On the shores of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands lie three nuclear installations forming an eclectic nuclear geography. Gravelines, Doel and Borssele nuclear power stations started operating in the 1970s on the unstable marsh soils of reclaimed land – that is new land created out of the water. Today, rising sea levels due to global warming threaten the power plants imminently, requiring the construction of dykes and elevated buffers, which are currently being implemented. We explore these swampy geographies as places where the future-oriented temporality of the nuclear sector crumbles. Both nuclear reactors, as the cathedrals of the 20th century, and polders, as the epitome of hydraulic engineering, are archetypal figures of modernity. Both symbolise the conquest of natural environments and consolidate national identities. Yet, despite their ‘solidity’, the existence of these three nuclear infrastructures is under threat. As examples, they confirm the importance of countering progress and linear historical narratives of nuclear progress, and help us understand how atomic technologies permeate our lives. Rather than an undefined, deep nuclear future, we are interested in how these nuclearised polders leave the vast temporal scales of nuclear waste behind, offering an opportunity to consider how such technologies are already and urgently affecting the present.

16:00 – 16:45

Architecture situates ‘building’ as an ecological ‘emptying’ of territories and an infrastructure for continuous cycles of ‘catastrophe’, such as forced migration. One thing that remains in the wake of catastrophe in this day and age, is the continuation of building as a marker for the end of catastrophe. This implies that we should all wait while building finishes, that our problems and the imposed difficulties are never urgent enough, thus constituting 'building' as the suspension of time for some, an imposed waiting as the infrastructure for the built environment. This talk shows an essayistic video titled: The Line That Follows which challenges conventional linear perspectives on time – vantage points still used today for the representation of built forms as induction of future realities – by including practices of space-making rooted in other sensibilities. An analogous constellation, composed of manipulated perspective drawings derived from routes taken in Khartoum, abstracted forms, text, sound, and ritualistic practices – all placeholders for propositions of an unemptied space and an aspiration for an architecture that listens.

16:45 – 17:30

While there have been many attempts to think and make maps differently, the atlas is usually understood as a compendium of maps rather than a form of knowledge production. How can we rethink and remake the atlas otherwise to tell stories that do not follow the logic of colonisation and of property? The recent forensic or evidentiary turn in the arts has been ushered in through the scopic view of satellites and the ubiquity of image material across digital platforms. Such practices of digital witnessing allow us to ‘see’ further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, but at the same time they create the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. The empty geometric volumes of digital cartography also intensify the absence of materiality and the removal of experience from traditional atlases. How might we rethink notions of testimony and evidence in relation to the digital, knowing also that the witnessing of violence requires forms of empathy and affectivity that are not always readily available within computational forms of knowing? How can we think the digital not as a tool or a method, but as a realm of possibility that may allow certain lives and worlds to become (il)legible, mourn-able and addressable on their own terms? This presentation is an attempt to rethink the atlas as an archive that is produced through the entanglements of matter, moisture and our own and other’s inhabitation.

17:30 – 18:00

Five Stories on Heat is a storytelling performance by Kent Chan that ruminates upon art's shared histories and futures with heat. The performance blends narratives of artmaking during the Vietnam War, Malayan and Hopi myths, with potential film plotlines and the first exhibition of Singaporean art in Europe. Like a mosaic, Chan’s storylines skip from East to West, from the past to the future. His work engages with the concept and representation of ‘the tropics’ in relation to colonialism, politics and identity and highlights that ‘the tropics’ aren’t just solely defined meteorology and geography, but also Western narratives about aesthetic and cultural superiority.