When
Where
Hybrid event,
Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference, Royal Geographic Society and Imperial College, London, UK,
External
The conference will take place at the Society and Imperial College London, and online, from the evening of Tuesday 29 August to Friday 1 September 2023
Session at Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference, Royal Geographic Society and Imperial College, London, UK, August 29 to September 1, 2023.
Organised by Dr Nicholas Ferguson (Kingston School of Art and Richmond the American University in London)
Geographies of Climate Responsive Artistic Research
The spectre of environmental catastrophe is rapidly reshaping geographies of artistic research. Artists based in the Global North are scrambling for residencies in locations where the effects of climate change can be acutely felt. Similarly, intervening in the entangled domains of ethnography, politics and science, they are visiting indigenous peoples in search of wisdom that might negate late modernity’s disconnect from nature. Artists from around the entire globe are migrating to and from protest camps in contested sites or to metropolitan centres where, in the vicinity of museums, monuments, and other symbolic institutions that underscore relations between climate change and imperialism, they can bring conceptually creative and/or sensuous approaches to climate activism. All of these necessitate still more carbon emitting journeys, thousands daily and many by air, to disseminate new knowledge on a burgeoning international circuit of exhibitions, speaking engagements and art fairs.
This panel critically engages with these mobilities. We seek 20-minute papers or performances that examine the movement and spatiality of climate responsive artistic practices. We ask:
What are the mobilities of climate responsive artistic research? How do they modify patterns of travel historically inscribed in art and exhibition making? What are the opportunities, limitations, and contradictions of these mobilities in the context of the climate emergency? And to what possible futures for geographies of artistic research do these conditions point?
Keywords: art and climate change; art and climate activism; art and mobility; decarbonising art; geographies of creativity
300-word abstracts by Wednesday March 22 to Dr Nicholas Ferguson, Kingston School of Art: n.ferguson@kingston.ac.uk
We are intending the session to be live and in-person. If you are only interested in presenting virtually then please email us in the first instance. It may be possible request a live hybrid slot, but the RGS guidance suggests that there will be a very limited number of slots for this option.
Further details on the RGS Annual Conference are available at:
https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference/
