What does it mean to say that everything is relational and everything is connected? What possibilities and perils emerge when we understand entanglement to be a fundamental condition of life?
Contemporary thought, aesthetic practice, and cultural production have been conceiving of the world and life within it in terms of processes, relations, and modes of becoming, rather than as fixed objects and immutable essences. This pronounced relational turn responds to a current historical moment in which long-upheld boundaries between human and non-human, nature and culture, and biology and technology, have become untenable. Moreover, we are becoming increasingly conscious of the complex web of interdependencies that connects all earthly life forms, and of how fraught the relations that sustain them can be. However, despite a general agreement that more just and equitable modes of being-in-relation are absolutely necessary for human, non-human, and planetary survival, (multispecies) entanglement can also produce forms of exposure and proximity that may be difficult to navigate. In other words, relationality is as desirable as it can be dangerous or troublesome.
By bringing together perspectives from gender studies, multispecies design, contemporary art history, media studies, philosophy, and artistic research, this one-day symposium explores both the pleasures and the perils of thinking through and practicing (multispecies) relationality. The day is dedicated to critical reflection and discussion about some pressing questions raised by the relational turn within academic discourse and cultural production: If everything is entangled with everything else, in what terms can we begin to understand modes of being in relation? What happens if we take relation(ality) as our starting point, both theoretically and materially? And how might we cope with living with that which constantly feels too close for comfort?
This event is organised in partnership with the Environmental Humanities Center at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and with financial support from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the Dutch Research Council (grant VI.Veni.221C.026 as part of the research project CINEAGRI — Global Elements of Cinema).
Please register via link below.
About the organisers
Manuela Zammit is a lecturer on the Bachelor’s Media, Art, Design and Architecture (MKDA) and a PhD candidate in art history within the department of Art & Culture at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She is also an independent writer and editor in the fields of contemporary art and culture. Her (academic) research frequently addresses the aesthetics and politics of relationality, critical thresholds, zones of convergence, and contemporary diasporic subjectivity.
Medha Guru holds an RMA in Environmental Humanities and is currently pursuing a PhD within the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focuses on understanding Dutch urban gardens as relational multispecies entanglements and engages ethnography, biography, and more-than-human life writing to tell stories of radical hope and resistance.