Forest Thinking
Art-Science series
H18:00
Entrance: via Ludovisi 48
Art-Science series
H18:00
Entrance: via Ludovisi 48
The event takes place in the exhibition spaces at Istituto Svizzero, via Ludovisi 48, Rome. Doors open at H18:00, talk starting at H18:30 (in English).
Free entrance, register here.
Forest Thinking
As part of the Art-Science series, Istituto Svizzero invites to an evening dedicated to the importance of the forest for our planet, and the value of transdisciplinary approaches to it.
As an extension and elaboration of her video-work Forest Mind (on view within the spaces of Villa Maraini in the framework of the exhibition Poetry for Revolutions. A Group Show with Manifestos and Proposals), artist Ursula Biemann will give a talk that takes up some themes from the project, including her reflections on DNA, information, and ecology, while also offering insights into the broader context of its development, including her work with the Inga People in the Colombian Amazon on the creation of an Indigenous University. The philosopher Etienne Turpin will give a response that discusses the relationship between art and science, as well as the role of the forest as an intelligent protagonist in the current climate emergency.
Their pair of brief presentations will be followed by a conversation, moderated by Professor Amelia Valtolina of the Università degli Studi di Bergamo, as well as a Q&A with the audience.
The presentations and discussion are suitable for a general audience and no advanced knowledge of scientific topics is required; all are welcome.
The event is part of the Art-Science series dedicated to the encounter between scientific research and artistic practices, curated by Maria Böhmer (Head of Science) and Gioia Dal Molin (Head Curator).
Biographies:
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist and author, whose practice centers on fieldwork, often in Indigenous territories, and the creation of networks between different fields of knowledge. Her artistic practice reflects on the political ecologies of forests, oil and water, creating critical perspectives on the dynamics of extraction and also proposing alternative ecocentric modes of relating to the natural world. Biemann recently published the online monograph BecomingEarth on ten years of her ecological video works and writing with UNAL Bogota, and the book Forest Mind with Spector Books (2022).
Etienne Turpin is a philosopher and general editor with the publisher K. Verlag in Berlin. Etienne Turpin has also worked as dramaturge and editor for many other projects, including Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2022), and her omnibus online platform Becoming Earth, hosted by the Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogota.
Amelia Valtolina is Professor of Modern German Literature at the Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Dipartimento di Lettere, Filosofia, Comunicazione), where she founded SINALEFE, the ‘Seminario Internazionale Permanente di Ricerca sulla Poesia Contemporanea’ with Alessandro Baldacci (Warsaw University) and Camilla Miglio (Università Roma Sapienza). Her research focuses on: criticism of the poetic instances of nature poetry, contemporary German-language poetry and its constellations, the relationship between philosophy and poetry, image and word. Her work has been published extensively.
Forest Learning, hike with Inga sabedores, Piamonte, Colombia, Spring 2021
Meeting with the Inga governors in Piamonte, Colombia, Spring 2021