Summary: Changing the Climate: Utopia, Dystopia and Catastrophe | Deborah Rose and Marshall Bell ‘RUtopia’ Professor Deborah Rose and Aboriginal artist Marshall Bell will talk about Bell’s series RUtopia (Roo-topia; R utopia). With PowerPoint and conversation, we will discuss RUtopia: a country with a mythology which tells a story of life, death and return, and with a philosophy of earth, regeneration, transformation and connectivity. We will examine the RUtopian understanding of death and rebirth within a world of creature- kin. We plan to address some of Bell’s more recent work, particularly his elaboration of art on skin, the skin of the world and the world of life’s own embodied energy. We want to contrast connectivity with the stream of modernity that wants to break with tradition, and to show how Bell (and others) find ways to make it possible for their tradition, which is the life that carries their people, to be present in this time through this creative project. Deborah Rose is Professor of Social Inclusion, Macquarie University, and the author ofDingo Makes Us Human (2000), Reports from a Wild Country (2004) and Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (in press). Marshall Bell is an artist from the Jiman Tribe and Kamilaroi nation Gunedah/Kooma clans.
