World of Matter Blog

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.

Invitation to World of Matter Conference

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Book Launch at the Venice Biennial

Posted on by Ursula Biemann

Maldives Pavilion, May 31 at 2 pm

Presentation with Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, and Emily E. Scott.
Location: Gervasuti Foundation, Via Garibaldi, Fondamente Sant’Anna, Castello 995, between Arsenale and Gardini. (former Iraqi Pavilion)

Provisões, publication by World of Matter edited by Mabe Bethônico

Provisoes cover

The book Provisões (Portuguese/English) compiles texts and visual materials produced by World of Matter members and several Brazilian guest speakers for its inaugural public symposium in April 2012. Held in Belo Horizonte within the Brazilian mining state of Minas Gerais, a location largely characterized by the massive extraction and export of mineral and agricultural resources, and imbued with a long colonial history of violent human and species displacements, the conference Provisões presented a rich opportunity for World of Matter to engage with audiences about ‘resource ecologies’, both near and afar. Rather than a polished or conclusive document, Provisões functions as a workbook, conveying the project’s evolution toward the launch of its comprehensive, multi-media web platform, as well as its first mise-en-scène in the exhibition space at HMKV Dortmund, in Germany, both later this year.

Contributors: Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Elaine Gan, Rogério Haesbaert, Renata Marquez, Uwe H. Martin & Frauke Huber, Peter Mörtenböck & Helge Mooshammer, José Augusto Pádua, Emily Eliza Scott, Paulo Tavares, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan, Kaká Werá.

PROVISÕES – uma conferência visual [World of Matter]
Portuguese/English, 298 pages, black and white, illustrated
ISBN – 978-85-61659-24-0

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Welcome to World of Matter

Posted on by Uwe H. Martin

World of Matter is an international media, art and research project investigating the complex ecologies undergirding resource exploitation.

During the construction phase of our multimedia web platform we will use this temporary blog to announce our events and circulate information on the development of our art projects, research texts and the upcoming exhibitions in Dortmund, New York, and Stockholm.

Since early 2010, the core group of nine has come together for a series of week-long research meetings to develop a common ground for the project. One of the first declared tasks was to expand the notion of natural resources – or “commodities” as traders call them – from hitherto geophysical and economic-industrial contexts toward the aesthetic-philosophical arena. Yet we are aware that if we solely attempt to “culturalise” the discourse on the ecologies of natural resources by multiplying images or forging new terminologies, we fail to address a deeper problem. If we are to speak about a more-than-human world, it will not suffice to build a socio-cultural vocabulary through a human-centric discourse that views the Earth primarily as a provision, object of scientific research, or sphere of human perceptions, experience, and control. To de-centre such anthropocentric perspectives, a more critical shift in thinking is needed. World of Matter traces this move from a notion of resources understood as a system of supply lines for humans towards a deeper attention to the situated materialities of stuff like gold, rice, oil, fish, land or water and the complex multispecies entanglements within which they emerge. This considers a planetary perspective on a world that matters.

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