The Anthropocene, Cabinet of Curiosities Slam, Nov. 8-10, 2014, Call for Submissions
The Anthropocene, Cabinet of Curiosities Slam
Nov. 8-10, 2014 University of Wisconsin, Madison
Call for Submissions
We are in the midst of a great reawakening to questions
of time—across the spans of geological, ecological, evolutionary, and human
history. It is a reawakening
precipitated, not by a nostalgia for the past, but by a sense of urgency about
the future. The Anthropocene, coined in
2000 by ecologist Eugene Stoermer and popularized by Nobel Prize-winning
atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen, is one of the most resonant examples of how
the urgency of the future has prompted scientists, artists, humanities scholars,
and social scientists to engage creatively with the emerging legacy of our
geomorphic and biomorphic powers. The advent of this new scientific object—the
Anthropocene—is altering how we conceptualize, imagine, and inhabit time. The Anthropocene encourages us to reenvisage
(in Nigel Clark’s phrase) future and past relations between “earthly volatility
and bodily vulnerability.” What images
and stories can we create that speak with conceptual richness and emotional
energy to our rapidly changing visions of future possibilities? For in a world deluged with data, arresting
stories and images matter immeasurably, and play a critical role in the making
of environmental publics and in shaping environmental policy.
The Anthropocene is just one among many moments in time
when new scientific objects have altered humanity’s relationship to the past,
present, and future. The
coming-into-being of scientific objects such as fossils, radioactivity, genetic
mutations, toxic pesticides, and ice cores, to name a few, have precipitated
different narratives and imaginings of the human past and the human
future. What might a cabinet of
curiosities for the age of the Anthropocene look like? What objects might jolt us into reimagining
environmental time across diverse scales, from the recent past to deep
history? How might certain kinds of
objects make visible the differential impacts—past, present, and future—that
have come to shape the relationships among human and non-human beings, living
in an era of extreme hydrocarbon extraction, extreme weather events, and
extreme economic disparity?
The Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History, and
Environment (CHE) and the Center for German and European Studies (CGES) at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison are pleased to be partnering with the Rachel
Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC) in Munich and the KTH
Environmental Humanities Laboratory (EHL) in Stockholm to host an international
workshop that invites artists and writers, scientists and humanists, scholars and
activists, to participate in “The Anthropocene, Cabinet of Curiosities
Slam.” The workshop will take place in
Madison, Wisconsin from Nov. 8-10, 2014.
In the spirit of poetry/spoken word slams, contributors will be asked to
pitch in a public fishbowl setting an object for the Anthropocene that asks us
to rethink humanity’s relationship to time, place, and the agency of things
that shape planetary change. How is the
appearance and impact of homo sapiens as a geomorphic force registered in the
sediments of history, the objects around us, and the things yet to be? What emotionally layered Anthropocene objects
can surprise, disturb, startle, or delight us into new ways of thinking and
feeling? What objects speak to
resilience or adaptation, to vanishing biota or emerging morphologies? Based on the audience response at the slam,
contributors will be invited to participate in the design of an Anthropocene
cabinet of curiosities as part of a larger exhibit on the Anthropocene being
planned by the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Presentations will also form the basis of a collected
series of short essays to be published as part of the CHE, RCC, EHL
collaborative project on Environmental Futures.
To apply, please submit a 200-word abstract of your
proposed object and its importance in opening up questions of time, agency,
and/or intergenerational equity in the Anthropocene, along with a visual
rendering of the object. Please also
include a CV or artist profile.
Materials should be submitted to Garrett Dash Nelson, ggnelson@wisc.edu, by Friday, April
11th. A limited amount of funding is
available to cover the travel costs of participants.
For more information, please visit
Gregg Mitman
Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of the
History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies Department of
Medical History and Bioethics University of Wisconsin - Madison
1300 University Ave., Room 1426
Madison, Wisconsin 53706-1532
Phone: 608/ 262-9140
Fax: 608/265-0486
www.gmitman.com
(web)