TERRITORIO ECTOPLASMA: SESSION #6 Ectoplasm exorcism

“Progress” comes too often at the expense of those communities portrayed as backward, uneducated, animalized, or non-existent. Some of them turn this violence and discrimination into a force for their survival by means of embodied practices and more-than-human solidarity. Mobilizing design, fiction and performance, transfigurations, incantations and rituals, the session seeks to invoke and embody the “ectoplasm territories” we addressed during the week and engage them in the creation of “counterworlds.”

THANDI LOEWENSON (online)
11 - 12 PM

In this performance lecture, Thandi Loewenson brings drawing, archival, speculative, and performance practice towards advocating for anti extractivist and anticolonial strategies. Loewenson takes us to Zimbabwe during Mugabe’s last decade in power, while the country suffered from fuel shortages and the price hikes and queues for basic commodities that followed. In that context, spirit medium Rotina Mavhunga convened the top politicians and security chiefs to prove that, with the aid of the ancestral realm and through ritual performances, she could conjure fuel from rocks.

Thandi Loewenson (b.1989, Harare) is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, and operating in the overlapping realms of the weird, the tender, the earthly and the airborne, Thandi engages in projects which provoke questioning of the status-quo, whilst working with communities, policy makers, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations.

NAOMI RINCÓN GALLARDO (online)
12 - 1 PM

With Noemi Rincon Gallardo we will enter the realm of ghosts lurking in a landscape of mining dispossession and exacerbated toxicity in Zacatecas, Mexico. We will embody these landscapes from a critical perspective of extractivism through an anti-racist and decolonial feminism.

Naomi Rincón Gallardo (1979). She lives and works between Oaxaca and Mexico City. From a decolonial feminist and cuir perspective, her audiovisual work fabricates narratives of desire and dissidence in the face of contemporary processes of dispossession and heteropatriarchal violence in neo-colonial contexts. Naomi Rincón Gallardo integrates in her mythical-political practice her interests in speculative fiction, music videos, theatrical games, vernacular festivals, and the manual elaboration of props and costumes. Doctorate from the PhD in Practice Program of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She received her MA from the Education: Culture Language and Identity programme at Goldsmiths University of London. She completed her undergraduate studies at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado La Esmeralda.

INSTITUTO ESTUDIOS POSTNATURALES
2 - 7 PM

With The Institute for Postnatural Studies we explore and problematize postnature as a framework for contemporary creation by means of new approaches to artistic practice in all its formats. This session applies queer theory to environmental concerns to shed light into the interconnected, entangled conditions of life on earth and to honour the strange, multispecies amalgamation we live in community with. Together we examine Queer Ecology at the individual and the collective scale.

Founded in 2020, the Institute for Postnatural Studies is conceived as a cultural platform whose work focuses on the relationship between contemporary artistic practices and the necessary revision of the concept of nature, offering itself as a space for exchange that connects production with critical thought. From a multidisciplinary approach, the Institute develops residencies, projects and research focused on issues such as ecology, politics and the transformation of the territory.

Consult the other sessions here or download the programme in pdf here.

To register, click here

Free course fee