Ambika P3, various dates between 26 OCT – 19 NOV 2022

Ecological Futurisms returns this autumn with a series of screenings, discussions and an exhibition, including a watch party of films selected from the Global Extraction Film Festival 2022, a screening and discussion around the issues raised by the Matters of Extraction network, the exhibition On-doing Undoing by Barby Asante, as well as a celebration and commemoration of artist, writer and CREAM researcher Diann Bauer (1972–2022).

Global Extraction Film Festival watch party

Wednesday 26 October 2022, 14:00–18:00
Thursday 27 October 2022, 14:00–18:00

Ecological Futurisms is excited to hold a watch party of films selected from the Global Extraction Film Festival (GEFF) 2022.  Come along to watch a selection of films that bring to attention the impact of extractive industries, climate change and the activist work and resistance that seeks to imagine and bring about a different future. 

Ecological Futurisms supports the work of the GEFF core team, Jamaican environmental filmmaker and activist Esther Figueroa (Vagabond Media) and film scholar-practitioner Emiel Martens (University of Amsterdam, Caribbean Creativity), who have put together a significant and timely programme for this year’s festival. The festival offers the unique opportunity of streaming hundreds of films for free during its five-day duration from 26–30 October. 

At our watch parties at Ambika P3, we will watch and discuss a selection of films from the festival together on a large screen. We encourage you to join us, looking forward to seeing you there!

Find tickets and more information here.

Matters of Extraction: A Preamble

Looped screening at Ambika P3
Wednesday 2 November 2022, 12:00–18:00

Online on-demand screening
Thursday 3 November 2022, 00:00–23:59

Online discussion
Thursday 3 November 2022, 19:00–20:30

Please join us for Matters of Extraction: A Preamble, an event featuring a looped screening programme at Ambika P3 on 2 November and an online screening programme and discussion on 3 November.

This event continues online discussions to establish the network Matters of Extraction (MoE): Black Lives and Atlantic Ecologies conceived by Roshini Kempadoo in collaboration with Deborah Thomas and Alissa Trotz. MoE is focused on creativity, materialism (and its afterlife) and digital culture as tools for supporting social transformation and future imaginaries.

MoE provides a research framework that focuses on Black lives including those of Indigenous communities and People of Colour living in the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean and the African continent. The network recognises the colonial histories and global impact of current social, political, economic and climate crises and supports changes to the relationship between Earth resources and future livelihoods.

Barby Asante: On-doing Undoing

Private View
Friday 11 November 2022, 18:00–21:00. Find tickets and more information here.

Declaration of Independence – performance
Saturday 12 November 2022, 19:00–20:00. Find tickets and more information here.

Exhibition opening times: Fri 11, Wed 16, Thu 17, Fri 18 November, 12:00–19:00
During exhibition days, please enter through the University of Westminster reception, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1 5LS.

On-doing Undoing brings together Asante’s ongoing works Declaration of Independence and The Queen and the Black-Eyed Squint. Both works explore the legacies of coloniality, through performative actions that include reflecting on family histories, relationships to place, museum and archival practices and propositions for the future.

Underlying this work, Asante engages in a personal exploration of Sankofa, a principle that is part of the Ghanaian Àdìńkrá communication symbology. As part of Akan cosmology, Sankofa is symbolised by a bird standing with its feet facing forward and its head turned backwards, paying attention to an egg carefully balanced on its back. Commonly understood as “go back and get it” Asante wishes to deepen the understanding of Sankofa to imagine what it has to offer as an African diaspora memory practice, beyond the conventional idea of returning to or recovering a history in order to imagine oneself as part of the world. Instead, Asante is interested in Sankofa as a Wayfinder, which not only offers a way to explore and excavate historical facts but also as a way to think about self-determination, intergenerational healing from trauma and imagining other ways of living and being.

Declaration of Independence and The Queen and the Black-Eyed Squint are expressions of how Asante imagines her relationship with Sankofa. Both works explore the often hidden histories and experiences of womxn of colour as they navigate what Ghanaian Pan-Africanist feminist writer and poet Ama Ata Aidoo described in her 1992 poem As Always a Painful Declaration of Independence, as “the clear world of/ take/ and take/ and take.”

Diann Bauer, Scalar Oscillation, 2018

“Cohesion was meant to hold. But reality started to slide.”
Diann Bauer — An Appreciation

Saturday 19 November, 14:00–21:30

Ambika P3 and CREAM, University of Westminster, are proud to host a celebration and commemoration of artist, writer and CREAM researcher Diann Bauer (1972–2022). 

Diann’s life and work was invested in how art, images and writing must be reconfigured for a time in which complex and unpredictable systems at scales surpassing direct human experience prevail. Diann looked to address this condition not only as an object for her practice but also, in its outstripping of art’s conventional reliance on human sense-making, as a transformative demand on art making itself. 

This symposium gathers artists, writers and thinkers who have been in conversation with Diann’s work formally and thematically. We will take her work as a generative challenge to build on her proposals on collectivity, imaging, time and temporality, sentience overloading, and the changing capacities to make alliances. 

This event will be both in-person and online; a link for those who wish to join online will be sent out to registered participants closer to the event date.

—

Diann Bauer was an artist and writer. She was a member of the art collaboration Alliance of the Southern Triangle (A.S.T.) and held a research position at University of Westminster, London. Diann was also part of Laboria Cuboniks, who collaboratively wrote the manifesto Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, translated into 13 languages. She screened and exhibited internationally, including at Tate Britain and The Showroom in London, Deste Foundation in Athens, Busan Bienalle, South Korea, and The New Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park in New York. Diann also worked internationally at universities as well as cultural and scientific institutions, including CERN Geneva.

Confirmed participants

Keynote: Kim Stanley Robinson

Find tickets and more information here.