Summary: With the third Symposium "Women on Earth" we were seeking to understand the relations between feminism and species coexistence. The issue of nature—and of all that is naturalized or deemed unnatural by hegemonic discourses and policy—is of particular importance to gender issues, as is science. But a scientific and technical approach to the climate emergency cannot be accurate without taking into consideration how gender, racial, and economic violence foster our emergent ecocides, nor by how women—often poor and Indigenous women—are overwhelmingly at the forefront of this violence as the very first recipients of. What kind of political and cultural transformation must occur to make these entanglements obvious and of vital concern? How to counter this violence in all its manifold forms? Our guests were: Rossella Biscotti, Neha Choksi, Ingela Ihrman, Institute of Queer Ecology, Sophie Jung, Lysann König, Thomas Lempertz, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė), Katrin Niedermeier, Heather Phillipson, Mathilde Rosier, Lena Maria Thüring. In this episode Neha Choksi, Sophie Jung and Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė (New Mineral Collective) are in conversation with Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez about ways of dealing with violence and aggression both on artistic and institutional level. Artist Sophie Jung (lives in London and Basel) works across text, sculpture and performance, navigating the politics of representation and challenging the selective silencing that happens by concluding. Her focus is on disrupting dominant scripts through subversively introduced tremors. She employs humor, shame, the absurd, raw anger, rhythm and rhyme, slapstick, hardship, friendship and a constant stream of slippages. Her sculptural work consists of bodies made up of both found and haphazardly produced attributes and defines itself against the dogma of an Original Idea or a Universal Significance. Her writing is done in an intersectional-feminist spirit of écriture feminine. Artist Neha Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay, India. Working in performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, she disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of everything—from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Involving a confluence of disciplines, in various formats, often collaboratively and in unconventional settings, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization. Artists Tanya Busse (born in Moncton, NB, Canada, lives in Tromsø, Norway) and Emilija Škarnulytė (born in Vilinus, Lithuania, lives in Tromsø, Norway) are New Mineral Collective (NMC), a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as desire, body mining, and acts of counter prospecting.
