Climate: Our Right to Breathe
This event is part of the Ecologies of Care Seminar convened and organized by the Program for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory, and Kunsthalle Wien; supported by ERSTE Foundation.
The seminar focuses on visibility regimes and citational practices as a way of engaging with ecological concerns. It begins with a short presentation of Nkule Mabaso’s work and an introduction about visibility regimes and citational practices as a critical space for producing trenchant analyses and critiques of the ongoing planetary devastation and engagement with expanded ecological vulnerability. The lecture considers how visibility regimes and expansive citational practices structure epistemic encounters. It also provides a reading on varied ecological realities and how they can be engaged through aesthetic practice.
The introduction is followed by co-reading of a text from Climate: Our Right to Breathe, a publication that responds to “vast, mutually exacerbating planetary conditions: the accelerated collapse of the biosphere under climate change and the increasingly crushing dynamics of toxic politics” (K. Verlag, 2022, edited by: Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso, Pablo Martínez, and Corina Oprea).
Nkule Mabaso is a curator, editor, and researcher, and the director of Natal Collective, an independent production company active internationally in the research and presentation of creative and cultural Africana contemporary art and politics. She is currently a PhD candidate at HDK-Valand (Academy of Art & Design, Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts), University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her dissertation Pan-African Feminist Ecological Creative Imaginaries researches artistic and curatorial practices and artworks that are situated at the intersection of art, ecology, and African feminism. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2011, and earned an MA in curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2014. She co-edited Decolonizing Art Book Fairs: Publishing Practices from the South with Yaiza Camps, Moritz Grünke, Pascale Obolo, Michalis Pichler, Parfait Tabapsi, a publication that deconstructs the frontiers between north(s) and south(s) with an emphasis on practitioners and initiatives from the African continent and diaspora.