interrelational ecology salon
“Certainly in graduate school and beyond it was the culture of enterprise that mattered, what we were taught would determine our success in life. At no point in my liberal arts education was farming ever mentioned… No one mentioned black farmers at Stanford University in my classes. Everywhere I journeyed the world of environmental activism was characterized by racial and class apartheid. “
bell hooks,
Belonging: a culture of Place
Belonging: a culture of Place
April, 2022: Congratulations to our co-founder Terike Haapoja on her Guggenheim award! Wonderful work reflecting on animals and Marxism.
lecture series
spring/ fall 2020 ︎online:
we are pleased to announce our fall 2020 speakers!
please scroll below for more info.
12.12.2020
saturday, 1 pm Eastern Time
10 am, Pacific Time
to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com
Kyong will speak with us on re-imagining nation state borders within his research exhibition “Imagining Eurasia”.
Kyong’s new book Imagining Eurasia: Visualizing a Continential History (2020)
Dec 5, 2020
saturday, 1 pm Eastern Time
10 am, Pacific Time
Artist and activist Arleene Correa Valencia will discus the ethical, political and aesthetic
strategies she has adopted in her practice to expose the effects that our current socio-political and ecological climate have on undocumented and agricultural labor
communities in the Napa Valley.
to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com
Che Gosset
Speaker
Abolitionist Enchantment: Black Trans Art and the Afterlife of Slavery
Oct 3, 2020
saturday, 12 noon EST
to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com
This talk examines Black trans visual art and cinema and how Black trans artists trouble the politics of visibility. Taking Saidiya Hartman’s argument that the afterlife of slavery is an ‘aesthetic problem’ as their point of departure, Gossett suggests that Black trans artists and aesthetics demonstrate a disenchantment with an antiblack politics of representation and instead think abolition as an aesthetics of existence. Gossett further argues that these artists and aesthetics resist visibility—capture—through ‘critical fabulation’ and speculation. In resisting visibility, they also refuse to disappear.
to register please email
interrelationalecoloy
[at] gmail [dot] com
Sammy Kayed
Speaker
participatory approaches to socio-environmental issues,
Beirut, Lebanon
sammy’s bio
Sept 12, 2020
saturday, 12 noon EST
My talk will first introduce Lebanon’s sociopolitical climate, our spectrum of environmental threats, perpetuation of socio-environmental issues enabled by heavy reliance on a foreign aid model, seemingly inevitable privatization, and the public state of mind toward the environment. I will describe how I see Lebanon as a forerunner of what many communities will soon face and how the country can act as a ‘sandbox’ for alternative development models. I will discuss how we approach community led solution creation at AUB-NCC and the Environment Academy in this difficult context. This will be followed by discussion on the physical environmental impacts of the August 4th Blast, the heartwarming and disturbing faces of the ad-hoc response, the sense of helplessness that the Beirut Blast seemingly made official, the enabling environment for blame passing, and the mass exodus to rural areas that the blast exacerbated. I will end on how we can maybe harness crisis and organic drivers to create a renewed vision of what Lebanon can become with horizontal and participatory approaches toward making that vision come true.
to register please email
interrelationalecology [at] gmail [dot] com
Aug 20
We are thinking of our loved ones in the Bay area, California, sending our love and prayers for the end of these fires. As we reflect on the evacuation and displacement of those we love, we think of interspecies communities dispossed by settler colonialism and environmental racism over the ages, all over the world.
Reflecting also thousands of years of indigeous wisdom and fire tending forest practices: “Indigenous farmers always carried flints ... they burned the undergrowth in forests so that the young grasses and other ground cover that sprouted the following spring would entice greater numbers of herbivores and the predators that fed on them, which would sustain the people who ate them both.” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
coyote in san franciso, march 2020
Aug 6
The Interrelational Ecology Salon would like to express our deepest sympathies and condolences to Beirut. We understand Tuesday's explosion to be the latest in a long series of injustices suffered by the Lebanese people. We call on imperial/ neoliberal powers, past and present, and their beneficiaries, to make reparations to the people of Lebanon, divorced from colonial constructs of “charity”.
We understand this catastrophe to have far reaching impact on the interspecies communities surrounding the port; the trees, land, sea, water, sea creatures, land creatures, air, climate and neighboring countries, the scale of these effects presently indeterminate.
If you can, please support relief efforts here.
May 2
Elizabeth Yeampierre
Speakerwhat this time is demanding of us
A few weeks into quarantine, we were joined by attorney, internationally celebrated climate justice leader, indigenous and Puerto Rican intergenerational community organizer, and director of UPROSE for climate justice, Sunset Park Brooklyn. Of her upcoming talk she wrote:
"I would like to talk about what this moment means within the context of Climate Justice and a Just Transition.
What is expected of us and whether we really can go beyond our historical social conditioning to build the just relationships this time is demanding of us.”
Please see this brilliant letter by Elizabeth “#500not50 years of Earth Day”.
"I would like to talk about what this moment means within the context of Climate Justice and a Just Transition.
What is expected of us and whether we really can go beyond our historical social conditioning to build the just relationships this time is demanding of us.”
Please see this brilliant letter by Elizabeth “#500not50 years of Earth Day”.
April 10
Nicolas Mirzoeff
Speaker
Palestine, whiteness and Jewishness within the frame of climate catastrophe
NYU professor of media and culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff will be discussing land, Palestine, whiteness and Jewishness within the frame of climate catastrophe.
March 7th
Reading Group
Racial Capitalocene
by Françoise Vergès
text:
from the book Futures of Black Marxism
edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson
and Alex Lubin
Verso, 2017
“Racial Capitalocene: is the anthropocene racial?”
from the book Futures of Black Marxism
edited by Gaye Theresa Johnson
and Alex Lubin
Verso, 2017
December 7
Artist Terike Haapoja will discuss the project Museum of Nonhumanity by Gustafsson&Haapoja that investigates mechanics of animalization. Museum of Nonhumanity is a touring museum installation that approaches animalization as a nexus that connects xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, and the abuse of nature and other animals.
As an temporary, utopian institution Museum of Nonhumanity stands as a monument to the call to make animalization history.
