Climate Emergency > Emergence
maat, April – December 2021

Bringing urgent focus to climate emergency, the Climate Emergency > Emergence public programme initiative energises critical analyses and creative proposals in moving beyond catastrophism and toward the emergence of environmentally sustainable futures.

Interdisciplinary in breadth and international in scope, the programme is conceptualised by a newly-formed Climate Collective, chaired by T. J. Demos, and geared toward assembling diverse cultural practitioners working at the intersection of experimental arts and political ecology.

Read the Climate Collective statement on maat ext.

The programme happens online, between April and December 2021.
The first event takes place on 30 April.

30/04/2021
Talk #1

CLIMATE EMERGENCY > EMERGENCE: AN INTRODUCTION
From 10.00 on Friday, on maat YouTube channel
with T. J. Demos, Molemo Moiloa, Susan Schuppli and Paulo Tavares.
Watch the presentations by the members of the Climate Collective.

CLIMATE EMERGENCY > EMERGENCE: A DISCUSSION
Join us on a live talk at 18.00, on maat YouTube channel
with T. J. Demos, Molemo Moiloa, Susan Schuppli and Paulo Tavares
moderated by Margarida Mendes.

30/04 – 27/05/2021
Climate Collective Video Series
Video #1

RECLAMATION
by Thirza Cuthand (2018)
Watch it on maat ext. 

T. J. Demos, chair and chief-curator of the Climate Collective, is an award-winning writer on contemporary art, global politics, and ecology. He is a professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Founder and Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies. His work centres broadly on the conjunction of art and politics, examining the ability of artistic practice to invent innovative and experimental strategies that challenge dominant social, political, and economic conventions.

Based in Johannesburg, where she is a lecturer in Exhibition Histories, at the University of the Witwatersrand, Molemo Moiloa brings an anthropological approach to the Climate Collective through her involvements in several projects regarding Pan-African museum practice. Her academic work has most recently focused on the political subjectivities of South African youth, and in 2013 she was awarded the John Blacking Prize for her Anthropology Masters dissertation.

Susan Schuppli is an artist-researcher and writer based in London exploring how non-human witnesses, such as materials and objects, enter into public discourse and testify to historical events, especially those involving political violence, ethnic conflict, and war crimes. Her current work explores how toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents and oil spills to the dark snow of the arctic are producing an "extreme image" archive of material wrongs. She is currently Director & Reader of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths in London and Board Chair of Forensic Architecture.

Paulo Tavares is a Brazilian architect, researcher and writer, professor at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo at the University of Brasília. Tavares’s design and pedagogic practice span different territories, social geographies, and media. His work is concerned with the relations between conflict and space as they intersect within the multi-scalar arrangements of cities, territories and ecologies. Tavares’s practice combines design, media-based cartographies and writing as interconnected modalities of reading contemporary spatial conditions. 

Margarida Mendes’ research explores the overlap between infrastructure, ecology, experimental film and sound practices – investigating environmental transformations and their impact on societal structures and cultural production. She has curated several exhibitions and was part of the curatorial team of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial (2018); and the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016). She consults for Sciaena environmental NGO working on marine policy and deep-sea mining and has co-directed educational platforms, such as escuelita, an informal school at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo – CA2M, Madrid and the ecological research platform The World In Which We Occur/Matter in Flux.