The old dream that plastic would improve the world is one of many failed projects of modernity. This two-day event, which is co-organised by College Senior Fellow Małgorzata Sugiera and Dorota Sajewska (Ruhr University Bochum), consists of two closed writing workshops (hybrid) and two public talks (on-site).
The panel will focus on how artistic and discursive/speculative projects and practices could help us unmake waste by looking for an alternative modernity to counter the naturalised binaries which still produce disposable materials, bodies, and ways of living. In the artist talk on 15 May, artist-collector Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek reflects upon her search for artistic methods and field practices gathering rubbish at Żabie Doły, a nature and landscape protected area.
The old dream that plastic would improve the world, which has turned into fear of a world awash in plastic waste, is one of many failed projects of modernity. However, plastic is not the type of waste left by the Moderns with which we have to cope today. As Zygmunt Bauman argues in “Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts”, modernity as "a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste and waste disposal" is constituted by boundaries introduced between the normative and the disposable, the primitive and the progressive, the pragmatic and the irrational. That is why we speak today not only about industrial, extractivist and radioactive waste which we carry in our bodies. We also speak about wasted lives, lifeworlds and people – "waste of order-building" in Bauman's phrasing. In this context, the debate will focus on how artistic and discursive/speculative projects and practices could help us unmake waste by looking for an alternative modernity to counter the naturalised binaries which still produce disposable materials, bodies, and ways of living.
The panel is organised and chaired by Małgorzata Sugiera, professor of Performativity Studies at Jagiellonian University Kraków and current Senior Fellow at the College, and her tandem partner Dorota Sajewska, professor for Theatre Studies at Ruhr University Bochum.
From mind-mapping to the final result, Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek reflects upon her search for artistic methods and field practices of an artist-collector gathering rubbish at Żabie Doły, a nature and landscape protected area at the heart of the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Area. She will give an account of losing orientation and discovering the unexpected in post-industrial landscapes – of the never-ending process of building a collection of artificial matter found in areas grounded in the violences of the Anthropocene – of simply being happy at Żabie Doły!
The talk is chaired by Mateusz Chaberski, assistant professor in the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland.
12:00–14:30
18:00–20:00
Chair: Dorota Sajewska (Ruhr University Bochum) and Małgorzata Sugiera (Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland)
12:00–14:30
18:00–20:00
with Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek (Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice)
Chair: Mateusz Chaberski (Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland)
Mateusz Borowski is professor at the Department for Performativity Studies at Jagiellonian University, Kraków. He holds a PhD from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and the Jagiellonian University. Currently, his main areas of interest are speculative fabulations in the context of ecological disasters. He published, among others, “Strategie zapominania. Pamięć i kultura cyfrowa” (Strategies of Forgetting: Memory and Cyberculture, 2015) and, with Małgorzata Sugiera, “Sztuczne Natury. Performanse technonauki i sztuki” (Artificial Natures: Performances of Technoscience and Arts, 2017) as well as, as a co-author, “Performanse pamięci w literaturach i sztukach” (Performances of Memory in Literatures and Arts, 2020). He is currently Principal Investigator in the OPUS 22 research project "After Climate Crisis. Non-Scalable Survival Strategies in Speculative Fabulations of the Last Two Decades" (2022-2026) funded by the Polish National Science Center and leader of the Polish team in the CELSA Research Fund Grant "Re-Familiarizing the Body and its Umwelt: the Uncanny Imaginary as a Tool to Cope with Contemporary Societal Challenges in post-2004 Europe" (REFAM).
Ulrike Gerhardt is a visual culture studies scholar and curator. Her research focuses on cultural memory and reverberations of the post-socialist transformation, damaged eco-systems, and critical materialities. Since the spring 2024, she has been working as a research associate at the Institute for Art and Visual Culture at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. She has also been the artistic (co-)director of the queer-feminist and nomadic video art platform D’EST since its founding in 2016, nowadays leading the platform together with Suza Husse. Together, they curated a series "Postsozialismus als Methode. Anti-Geografien kollektiver Begehren", among others working with krëlex zentre, Fehras Publishing Practices and Nhà Sàn Collective. Her study on Eastern futurist memory practices within post-socialist video art will soon be published (Berlin: De Gruyter).
Bettina Knaup works as a freelance curator, producer and writer at the intersection of art, politics, and knowledge production with emphasis on live art, performance, and gender. She (co-)curated numerous international festivals, exhibitions and projects, including the International Festival of Contemporary Arts City of Women (Ljubljana, 2001–2004), performing proximities (Beursschouwburg, Brüssel, 2008), and performance platform. body affects (Sophiensaele, Berlin, 2012, with S. Bake). Her archive and performance project re.act.feminism toured Europe from 2008 to 2013 (i.a. Akademie der Künste Berlin; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Wyspa Institute of Art, Gdańsk; Tallinn Art Hall, with B.E. Stammer) and was re-launched in 2022 within the framework of Manifesta 14 in Pristina. She regularly publishes, teaches and collaborates with other artists and curators. From 2016 to 2021, she was a PhD research fellow at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University, London. Based on her doctoral dissertation “performing (as) waste. sticky care in feminist materialist performance and curation”, she works on a collaborative, long-term, transnationally oriented residency and research project that focuses on waste infrastructures. In this context, she collaborates with artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, whose works she curated in the exhibition “The Great Repair” (Akademie der Künste Berlin; Pavillon de l'Arsenal Paris, 2023-2024).
Agata Kowalewska is assistant professor at the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and holds a PhD in philosophy and a BA in fine arts. She uses multidisciplinary research, art, and storytelling to understand spaces of human-nonhuman conflict and nonhuman cultures. Often working in collaboration, Agata has written on ferality and feralizing as an alternative to rewilding, ecological aesthetics of (counter-)catastrophe, sea fire (toxic glowing dinoflagellates thriving in the dying Baltic), urban wild boars, porcine sex and the politics of purity, hybrid beaver cultures, bark beetles, and why we should let some trees die.
Joanna Zdzienicka-Obałek is an interdisciplinary artist, graduate and employee of the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Between 2008 and 2012, she worked on the ARCHIVE, the cycle in which she depicts passing days in standardised cubes, mostly upcycling objects of everyday use. She works using different media to create objects and new ways of constructing widely understood images of her relationship with nature. Time and phenomena determined by time, such as memory, hoarding instincts, collections, are very important to her. She explores and uses them accentuating the process of creation. Her projects are closely tied to specific geographical coordinates. Her forms build a connection between poetry and matter, biology and art. She is also co-organiser of the “Seasonal Studio” project: a series of open workshops and lectures focusing on human–nature relationships.
Mateusz Chaberski is assistant professor in the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Currently, his academic interests are critical relationality studies, cultural (re)presentations of Central European post-extractivist landscapes and speculative fabulations of worlds after the Anthropocene. In 2019 he published “Asamblaże, Asamblaże. Doświadczenie w zamglonym antropocenie” (Assemblages, Assemblages: Experience in the Foggy Anthropocene). Together with Mateusz Borowski and Małgorzata Sugiera, he edited “Emerging Affinities: Possible Futures of Performative Arts” (Transcript Verlag 2019) and with Ewa Bal “Situated Knowing: Epistemic Perspectives on Performance” (Routledge 2020).
Prof. Małgorzata Sugiera
Jagiellonian University Cracow (Poland) | Performativity Studies
Małgorzata Sugiera is Professor and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and Head of the Department for Performativity Studies. She was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, the American Andrew Mellon Foundation, and the International Research Center “Interweaving Performance Cultures” at Freie Universität Berlin. Her research concentrates on performativity theories, environmental and decolonial studies, particularly in the context of the history of science. She published twelve scholarly books in Polish, translates scholarly books and co-edited several books in English and German, most recently with Dorota Sajewska for “Crisis and Communitas: Performative Concepts of Commonality in Arts and Politics” (Routledge 2022).
Website
Prof. Dorota Sajewska
Ruhr University Bochum | Theatre Studies
Prof. Dorota Sajewska
Ruhr University Bochum | Theatre Studies
Dorota Sajewska is professor at the Institute of Theatre Studies of Ruhr University Bochum since 2023. Her research focuses on performative arts and theories from a comparative perspective, considering local as well as global, European and non-European manifestations of social, cultural and aesthetic performances. Previously, she was assistant professor at the University of Zurich, where she was also a member of the Centre for Art and Cultural Theory. From 2018 to 2023, Dorota Sajewska led the SNSF-funded research project “Crisis and Communitas” on performative concepts of commonality in art and culture (www.crisisandcommunitas.com). Alongside her academic work, Dorota Sajewska has been involved in the international theatre and arts scene for over 20 years as dramaturge, programme coordinator for theatre festivals, and author of theatre and film scripts, lectures, and performative installations.
Website