World of Matter Conference
Posted on by Ursula Biemann
Friday and Saturday, October 18 and 19th, 2 – 7 pm
Going Live! Launch of worldofmatter.net multimedia platform, Saturday 6 pm.
Argos – Center for Art and Media, Brussels
With Mabe Bethonico, Ursula Biemann, Elaine Gan, Uwe H. Martin, Emily E. Scott, Paulo Tavares, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan
During the 2-day conference, World of Matter presents several ongoing art and research projects that engage specific global situations in view of shedding light on the interdependence between human and non-human actants in this fragile system. Under what physicaland political conditions does material reality come into being and what aesthetic language and conceptual rethinking will be necessary to cope with the range of new problems brought into play by the current shift from epistemological to ontological concerns? In this new ecology, what stakes are there and who enacts them?
The online platform, launched during the conference, is the backbone of the collaborative project, providing an open access archive that connects different files, actors, territories and ideas. It is the result of extensive field research and media production in many situations of heightened natural and material significance such as the extractivist Amazon basin, the Indian cotton farmers, the water ecologies of the Nile, the fisheries in the Dutch polders, the mining culture in the Brazilian Minas Gerais or the rush for arable land in Ethiopia. The platform is conceived in such a way as to stimulate a variety of possible readings about the global connectivity among these sites.
World of Matter is generously funded by the Federal Cultural Foundation Germany; the web platform is funded by the Zurich University for the Arts (ZHdK) and George Foundation.
