Events
The symposium and annual conference of the CRC 1265, ‘Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene’, explores how the concept and reality of the Anthropocene disfigure and refigure four key spatial figures of Western modernity: the place, the territory, the network, and the route.
Engagements with climate change and the planetary in the social sciences and humanities have challenged conventional analytical distinctions between global and local as well as human and nonhuman spaces. Tim Morton’s (2013) influential conceptualization of global warming as a hyperobject emphasizes how it transcends human scales of time-space experience and action, thus becoming a viscous, non-local process. At the same time, authors like Bruno Latour (2017) point out the inadequacy of the modern figure of globalization and of understanding the Earth as a globe. In times of climate crisis, he argues, the Earth emerges as Gaia: not a super-organism or system, but rather a rhizome of organism-environment relationships. As these two interventions exemplify, the multiple environmental and planetary crises associated with the Anthropocene fundamentally challenge the scalar logic and figures of modern understandings of space.
Facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation about these transformations seems crucial because of the pervasiveness of spatial categories and imaginaries. The symposium thus brings together leading scholars from anthropology, sociology, architectural theory, science and technology studies, urban studies, and human geography to collectively meet these challenges while reaching a heterogeneous public audience of researchers and practitioners.
Speakers: Alexandra Arènes, Andrew Baldwin, Jennifer Gabrys, Gastón Gordillo, Susanne Hauser, Christopher Kelty, Marcela Suárez Estrada, Tomás Usón
Registration opens on the 20th of September via the ICI Berlin:
Venue:
ICI Berlin,
Christinenstr. 18/19 – Haus 8
Berlin,
10119
Deutschland
Contact:
SFB 1265
5th Annual Conference “Spatial Figures of the Anthropocene”
Program
After the local
9:30 Registration
10:00 Welcome and Morning Lecture
Ignacio Farías (CRC 1265/ Berlin) and Silke Steets (CRC 1265/ Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene
11:00 Panel I
The Refiguration of Territories
moderated by Ignacio Castillo Ulloa
Gastón Gordillo (Vancouver)
Place, Territory, Terrain: A Spatial Triad for the Climate Crisis
Alexandra Arènes (Paris)
TERRA FORMA Connectedness: From Territory to the Terrestrial
13:00 Lunch break
14:00 Panel II
The Refiguration of Places
moderated by Nina Baur
Tomás Usón (Berlin)
Beyond Place: Encountering Difference in Disastrous Times
Susanne Hauser (Berlin):
Rethinking Place in Architecture, 1980ff.
16:00 Coffee break
16:30 Coffee Conversations
Theory: Anthropocene and Decolonial Theory (with Marcela Suárez Estrada, moderated by Sung Un Gang)
Methods: Speculation as Method (with Alexandra Arènes, moderated by Jörg Stollmann)
Current Affairs: Mobilities in and of the Anthropocene (with Andrew Baldwin, moderated by Francesca Ceola)
19:00 Evening Event
Refiguring Botanical Gardens
moderated by Martina Löw
Séverine Marguin and Jamie-Scott Baxter (CRC 1265/ Berlin)
Mimetic Spaces: Botanical Gardens in a Shifting Conservation Regime
Digital art installation: Diffracting Natures (Spatial Refigurations in the Metaverse) by Séverine Marguin and Jamie-Scott Baxter in cooperation with the artist-architect Lus Constantin
20:00 Reception
After the Global
9:30 Panel III
The Refiguration of Networks
moderated by Anna Juliane Heinrich
Jennifer Gabrys (Cambridge)
Animating Digital Infrastructures: From Networks to Phygitalities
Marcela Suárez Estrada (Berlin / Berkeley)
Internet as a Territory: Power and Colonialism in the Digital Era
11:30 Coffee Conversations
Theory: Racialized Geographies of Climate Justice (with Gastón Gordillo)
moderated by Zozan Baran
Methods: Engaging Indigenous Knowledges (with Tomás Usón)
moderated by Margherita Tess
Current Affairs: Managing Nuclear Waste (with Susanne Hauser)
moderated by Vivien Sommer
12:30 Lunch break
14:00 Panel IV
The Refiguration of Routes
moderated by Sezgin Sönmez
Christopher Kelty (Los Angeles):
Helicopter, Overpass, Non-target: Figures of Niche and Pathway in Los Angeles
Andrew Baldwin (Durham)
Mobility and the Anthropocene: Rethinking the Route via the Planetary
16:00 Coffee break
16:30 Panel Discussion
After the Local – After the Global?
with Martina Löw (CRC 1265/ Berlin), Philipp Misselwitz (CRC 1265/ Bauhaus Earth/ Berlin), Christopher Kelty (Speaker/ Los Angeles)
moderated by Jochen Kibel
19:00 Evening Event
An Atlas of Spatial Figures
moderated by Hubert Knoblauch
Book Presentation and Lecture Performance
with Ignacio Farías, Nikolaus Gansterer, Silke Steets
