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23 mars 2023 : T.J. DEMOS (historien de l’art, Directeur du Centrer for Creatives Ecologies, UC Santa Cruz).
* La séance se tiendra en anglais
Les recherches de T. J. Demos portent sur les intersections entre l'art contemporain, la politique radicale et l'écologie, en particulier lorsque l'art, l'activisme et la culture visuelle s'opposent au capitalisme racial, colonial et extractif, et lorsqu'ils œuvrent en faveur de la justice sociale, économique et environnementale. Il est l'auteur de nombreux ouvrages, dont : Beyond the World's End : Arts of Living at the Crossing (Duke University Press, 2020), Decolonizing Nature : Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), et Against the Anthropocene : Visual Culture and Environment Today, (Sternberg Press, 2017). Au printemps 2020, il était boursier du Getty Research Institute et il a entrepris un nouveau projet de livre sur les futurismes radicaux, et a dirigé le projet de recherche du séminaire Sawyer financé par Mellon, Beyond the End of the World, pendant la période 2019-21. T. J. Demos a également été commissaire de plusieurs expositions, notamment Beyond the World's End au Musée d'art et d'histoire de Santa Cruz (2020-21) ; Rights of Nature : Art and Ecology in the Americas, au Nottingham Contemporary (2015) ; Specters : A Ciné-Politics of Haunting, au Musée Reina Sofia de Madrid (2014) ; et Beyond the World's End au Musée d'art et d'histoire de Santa Cruz (2019).
Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-come
There is widespread consensus that we are living at the end—of democracy, of liberalism, of capitalism, of a cool planet, of civilization as we know it. Catastrophic climate breakdown, pandemic emergency, mass species extinction, financial collapse, global nuclear war, apocalyptic populism—the diagnoses are seemingly endless, prompting multiple questions: What hopes for survival, and for whom? How can we imagine the unimaginable? And what will life look like beyond the many ends portrayed in pop-culture and dystopian sci-fi? Addressing these questions requires politicizing time itself. In this presentation and discussion, professor, writer and curator T. J. Demos (University of California, Santa Cruz) will discuss his new book, Radical Futurisms, forthcoming from Sternberg Press, as well as situate it in relation to his past research trajectory (including such books as Decolonizing Nature of 2016; Against the Anthropocene of 2017; and Beyond the World's End of 2020). Drawing on artistic visions of justice-to-come emerging from the traditions of the oppressed—Indigenous, African-American, multispecies, anti-capitalist—and materialized in experimental visual cultural, new media, aesthetic practices, and social movements, his new book poses speculative questions about what comes after end-of-world narratives and what's required to get there.