Attachment to Land
- daadgalerie
- presentation
- Talk
07.12.2018 / 19:00
With Agnieszka Brzeżańska
and Ewa Ciepielewska
Aleksandra Jach in conversation with Agnieszka Brzeżańska and Ewa Ciepielewska about the project »Flow«
This series of events is centered around the question of the land. In the years to come, migrant flows will only increase as a result of climate change. People are being forced to leave their lands by the extreme weather conditions as well as the extractivist politics of governments and corporations. Those who do stay have to make up new ways of living and acts of resistance. But how this can be done is neither from a global perspective in the form of post-national institutional bodies, nor as a return to nation-state politics and ethnic roots: none of the existing models can provide a solution for planetary challenges. Climate change is not an abstraction, but a material phenomenon which wipes out any walls or borders trying to prevent the flows of people.
This is why the question of land needs to be disjointed from inoperative modern categories and economies, and instead thought through material-spiritual practices of everyday life. The artists invited to this series will touch upon alternative ways of attachment to land; they draw from their personal experiences or collective alliances with the human and the beyond human. The artists claim the conditions of belonging somewhere and the rights to not being dispossessed. Just as they consider the danger of biologically constructed identities and the pressures placed on groups who choose not to adapt to hyper-modernization.
With respect for their diverse points of view, what these artists are seen to have in common is the act of thinking about a terrestrial level of existence. These often very subtle gestures, actions, and imaginaries offer a manifestation of a land ethic that is tangible, relational, and, on some level, universal. If politics starts with identifying a territory, the invited artists encourage us to think about new ways of defining shared spaces.
»Attachment to Land« is a series of Talks and Presentations with Agnieszka Brzeżańska, Carolina Caycedo, Ewa Ciepielewska, Aleksandra Jach, Xu Tan, and others.
Image credit: Agnieszka Brzeżańska und Ewa Ciepielewska, FLOW, 2017, Photo: Szymon Rogiński
