archive/ß

»Life did not take over the world by combat, but by networking.« – Lynn Margulis
Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution

A conversation with Jennifer Jacquet:

A conversation with Frédérique Aït-Touati:

A conversation with Cooking Sections:

A conversation with Elizabeth A. Povinelli:

A conversation with Kazim Ali:

A conversation with Arjun Appadurai:

A conversation with Fahim Amir:

A conversation with Emanuelle Coccia:

A conversation with Melanie Sehgal:

Jennifer Jacquet is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at New York University, where she researches the evolution, function and future of shame. She holds a PhD in resource management from the prestigious University of British Columbia and is an expert in the field of human cooperation. Jacquet is interested in globalized cooperation dilemmas, such as climate change and the exploitation of wild animals via fishing and the Internet wildlife trade. As a student, she was a volunteer with Sea Shepherd, a manatee intern with Florida Fish & Wildlife, and a volunteer shark tank diver at the Vancouver Aquarium. In addition to her book Is Shame Necessary? New Uses for an Old Tool (2015), she has written articles for the Washington Post, Time Magazine and journals such as Issues in Science and Technology and Global Environmental Change.   

Frédérique Aït-Touati is a historian of literature and modern science, a seventeenth century specialist, and a theatre director. She is a research fellow at the CNRS and a member of the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She works on the uses of fiction and narrative in astronomy in the seventeenth century, as well as the history of images and scientific instruments; more recently, her research has focused on the narratives and aesthetics of the Anthropocene, particularly in theatre. Her books include Fictions of the Cosmos (2011), Histoires et savoirs (2012), Le Monde en images (2015), and Terra Forma (2019). 

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) is a duo of spatial practitioners based in London. It was born to explore the systems that organize the world through food. Using installation, performance, mapping, and video, its research-based practice explores the overlapping boundaries between visual arts, architecture, ecology, and geopolitics. Since 2015, they have been working on the site-specific long-term project Climavore, which explores the impact of food, its industry and ethics on the global climate. With their project Salmon: A Red Herring, initiated at the Tate Britain in London, Cooking Sections unmasks the deceptive reality of salmon and its (in)natural color, while the fish was removed from the menu of the museum restaurant for the duration of the exhibition. Cooking Sections was part of the exhibition at the U.S. Pavilion, 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. Their work has also been exhibited at the 2019 Los Angeles Public Art Triennial; Sharjah Architecture Triennial and 13th Sharjah Biennial; Manifesta12, Palermo; Serpentine Galleries, London; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Peggy Guggenheim Collection; HKW Berlin; Akademie der Künste, Berlin; 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale, among others. In 2019 the duo was awarded the Future Generation Special Art Prize for its socially-engaged practices and currently lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London. 

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is a critical theorist, filmmaker and Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. In her research, Povinelli explores the nature of late liberalism from the perspective of Australian indigenous and American queer worlds. She has been especially interested in the tactics of markets and governance that emerged in the late 1960s and are now in crisis. She is a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective – an award winning group of artists and filmmakers which formed in response to the Australian state’s attacks on Indigenous social and territorial structures (their video work Mermaids or Aiden in Wonderland is featured in the current exhibition Sun Rise|Sun Set). Povinelli is author of five books and numerous essays on the critical theory of liberalism. She is the former editor of the journal Public Culture. Her publications include Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism (2011) and Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016).

Poet, editor, and prose writer Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian descent and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. He is currently Professor of Literature and Writing at the University of California, San Diego. Besides several articles, Ali has published numerous books. Most recently he has published  a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020) and a memoir of his Canadian childhood, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water (Milkweed Editions, 2021). In addition his recent prose and novellas include, Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine (2015), Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies (2018) and The Secret Room: A String Quartet (Kaya Press, 2017). 

Arjun Appadurai is the Goddard Professor in Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where he is also Senior Fellow at the Institute for Public Knowledge. He serves as Honorary Professor in the Department of Media and Communication, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, Tata Chair Professor at The Tata Institute for Social Sciences, Mumbai and as a Senior Research Partner at the Max-Planck Institute for Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gottingen. His research focuses on the interrelations of modernity, globalization and an anthropology of time and space. He attributes the negative effects of globalization to a cultural process in which identities of local and imagined communities are destabilized.  In addition to numerous articles, Appadurai published the book »The future as cultural fact: Essays on the Global condition« (2013), »Worship and conflict under colonial rule: A South Indian case« (2007) among others. 

The artist and philosopher Fahim Amir deals with the transitions between natural cultures and urbanism, performance and utopia, colonial historicity and modernism. Amir teaches at European and international universities, ran the bar Schnapsloch and the publishing house Proll Positions, and worked in various projects with artists such as Deichkind, Chicks on Speed, Rocko Schamoni and Ted Gaier. As a curator, he was responsible for symposia on new music (Ferienkurse Darmstadt), live art festivals (Kampnagel Hamburg) and exhibitions (Secession Vienna). In his most recent book Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It) (2020), Amir sets politics rather than ethics against the romanticisation of nature, not declaring animals mere victims but positioning them as political agents of resistance. His other publications include Tiergarten Landscape of Transgression (This Obscure Object of Desire), 2019.

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His books include »Sensible Life. A Micro-Ontology of the Image«(Fordham University Press 2016), “Das Gute in den Dingen: Werbung als moralischer Diskurs” (Merve 2017) and »Die Wurzeln der Welt: Eine Philosophie der Pflanzen« (Hanser 2018). In his latest book, »Metarmophoses«, Coccia combines philosophy and evolutionary biology and asks what changes when we, as humans, no longer see ourselves as individuals but as part of the one life on earth?

Melanie Sehgal is director of research at the Institut für Grundlagenforschung zur Philosophiegeschichte at Bergische Universität Wuppertal. She is the author of »A Situated Metaphysics. Empiricism and Speculation in William James and Alfred North Whitehead«, published by Konstanz University Press in 2016, and has written articles on process philosophy, aesthetics and transdisciplinary practices in an ecological perspective. She is currently working on a book on aesthetic practices and techniques in and for the Anthropocene. Together with the artist Alex Martinis Roe, she leads the multidisciplinary research group FORMATIONS, which experimentally tests knowledge practices beyond modern habits of thought.