This informal reading group is hosted by Jess Holdengarde as part of her artist-in-residence project Ecologies of Perception, supported by Creative Scotland and Ilali Collective.

“I am, like so many of my generation, amazed at how much has been lost, how little we have to show for it, and how quickly we have embraced a world largely cleansed of all connections to wildness. And yet, like many others, I come not only to mourn wildness but also to rediscover it, to track its path from there to here, to find my way through and with, and to take walks into the woods, into the streets, and into less obvious dark and deep places of the wild” Jack Halberstam, Wild Things

The reading group will be given a selection of texts that investigate and challenge the role of art making in the Anthropocene. We will analyse and discuss the text provided. 

Suggested Readings: 

Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: the disorder of desire (2020)

In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses.

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015);  Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017)

By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

As human-induced environmental change threatens multispecies livability, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet puts forward a bold proposal: entangled histories, situated narratives, and thick descriptions offer urgent “arts of living.”

Zadie Smith, Intimations; Six essays (2020) 

Written during the early months of lockdown, Intimations explores ideas and questions prompted by an unprecedented situation. What does it mean to submit to a new reality–or to resist it? How do we compare relative sufferings? What is the relationship between time and work? In our isolation, what do other people mean to us? How do we think about them? What is the ratio of contempt to compassion in a crisis? When an unfamiliar world arrives, what does it reveal about the world that came before it?

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

In this investigation into loss, losing and being lost, Rebecca Solnit explores the challenges of living with uncertainty. A Field Guide to Getting Lost takes in subjects as eclectic as memory and mapmaking, Hitchcock movies and Renaissance painting, Beautifully written, this book combines memoir, history and philosophy, shedding glittering new light on the way we live now.

The text will be made available prior to the workshop. 

This session is free to attend. Please sign-up via eventbrite to allow us to share access to the texts with you. It is suggested that attendees read the texts before the session; however we will be reading some sections together on the day (optional, for anyone comfortable doing so). We will have print versions of the texts available on the day. The session will be held in English. 

Ilali Collective Studio is located at street-level with step-free access. A disabled toilet is available at the studio’s adjoining sister venue.  We can provide BSL interpretation of the event -please get in touch by 6/07/22 if this is something you require. If you have any other access needs or have any questions about the event, don’t hesitate to get in touch and we will do our best to accommodate. 

For access requirements please email mollymaewhawell@gmail.com 

This event is part of the Ecologies of Perception project, which is a period of research and exchange exploring collaborative methods of lens-based making that are rooted in developing sustainable practices, culminating in a series of public workshops and events at Ilali Collective in Berlin. The project is part of Jess Holdengarde’s artist-in-residence with Ilali Collective where she has been developing her research interest in ecology, the human relationship to the environment and human/non-human interdependency. Supported by Creative Scotland and Ilali Collective. 

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Jess Holdengarde (b.1991) is a South African artist based in Glasgow, Scotland who works predominantly in photography, film and auto fictional narrative. Concerned with our entangled relationship to the natural environment and themes of precarity and impermanence, Jess’s current practice considers the role of the artist in environmental ruin. Through plant-based chemistry and alternative methods of lens-based production she explores the natural environment as subject and resource, applying lenses of queer ecology and autoethnography. Jess holds an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and is a founding member of Fix Photography Collective. This is her first residency in Berlin. 

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www.jessholdengarde.com

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