[Talk] Letting go of fixitude

Special Guest Lecture at KABK 

Friday June 9, 11h

Prinsessegracht 4, den  Haag

https://sis.hotglue.me/kabk/

X-dexing is yet another invented method to try and stay close to complexity. It emerged in conversation with designer Manetta Berends and can mean different things, depending on who assumes the task: “If ‘indexing’ would be about gaining access through the illusion of completeness, the x-dex is about situated unfoldings, about letting go of fixitude and about handing over for a little longer; a form of generative relationality that is not providing with control nor indication, but a sort of playfulness and imaginative re-entanglement.” For this occasion, Jara Rocha will provide with a tour through a number of not too comfortable practices, not too assertive methods, not too modern tools and not too clear attempts coming from a loose network of networks of trans*feminist technosciences’ collectivities and processes. The aim of the session is to mumble about questions, methods and potential experiments for an ongoing praxis of disobedient action-research commited to radical interdependence and mutual co-constitution for a regenerative justice.

+ info https://www.kabk.nl/en/lectorates/design/jararocha

Keynote @ Groundings | Linnaeus University, Växjö

1-2 Dec, 2022

At the nexus of energy and agriculture, Groundings gathers a community of researchers, practitioners, and organisers in Växjö to ask what it means to ground our modes of study in collective struggle. The conference engages a diversity of research tactics in response to an ongoing shift in environmental discourse towards the extractive zones (Gómez-Barris 2017) and terminal landscapes (Diamanti 2021) of capital's energic and agricultural metabolisms as terrains across which the histories and horizons of multispecies survival, collective autonomy, and ecological flourishing are contested. Featuring keynotes from Jeff Diamanti and The Underground Division (Helen V. Pritchard, Jara Rocha, & Femke Snelting) followed by a culinary performance by local grower Zeenath Hasan, Groundings also foregrounds roundtable discussions, group readings, and other modes of collaborative study to initiate an ongoing inquiry into grounded traditions of practice-based research.

From the decolonial practices of Walter Rodney's Groundings With My Brothers (1966) to the working-class environmentalism of Sven Lindqvist's Dig Where You Stand (1978), this two-day conference aims to build a collective vocabulary and critical infrastructure around methodologies that remain accountable to the interlocking demands of decolonisation, decarbonisation, and liberation. Situated within ongoing struggles over energy and agriculture, this initial gathering asks how 'grounded environmental and territorial questions' might manifest as an 'on-the-ground set of contingent politics' (Gergan & Curley, 2021) within these fields. Whether speaking of renewable practices or large-scale farming, these terrains continue to be framed by the manifold emergent and long-standing settler colonial technologies that organize them, hardening relations to land based on domination in transnational arenas (Yang 2017) and modes of financial exploitation or extractive speculation (Dunlap 2021). Nonetheless, the current 'crisis' of energy and agriculture marks an opening for radical interventions.

Addressing both 'terrains of domination' and 'terrains of struggle,' we invite contributions across multiple formats to delineate the material, methodological, and 'epistemological grounds through which we theorize and imagine and name liberation' (McKittrick 2006; 2021). Disturbing the sediments of empire, filmmaker Filipa César's '"mining"' of historical strata' (2018) in Amílcar Cabral's agronomical texts provincialises Marxist accounts of soil metabolism while contemporary framings of 'racist environments' (Opperman 2019; Sharpe 2017), decolonial botany (Sheikh & Gray 2018), or late neoliberalism's 'polluted politics' (Onís 2021) take up lineages of anticolonial struggle to envision transformative ecologies. We might also look to feminist agroecological practices shared through generational knowledge and anticapitalist relations to land (Tamm & Wägner 1940; Sonjasdotter 2019) or to the 'grounded' place-based solidarities (Coulthard & Simpson 2016) that shape Indigenous resistance to fossil capital and colonial agronomy. Within the ancestral territory of Sápmi, which stretches across the settler states of Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia, Indigenous Sámi land is exploited through the corporate extractivism and green colonialism of wind and water energy projects. Refusing these modes of capture, Indigenous land stewardship movements such as the Áltá Action or Ellos Deatnu! counter the horizons of capitalist 'green transition' through direct actions that frame artistic practices as an intrinsic part of the struggle for self-determination (García-Antón, Gaski & Guttorm 2020; Kuhn 2020).

In taking up the provocation of militant research practices as an attempt to 'generate capacity for struggles to read themselves' (Colectivo Situaciones 2005), Groundings seeks to cement alliances between an expansive set of disciplinary coordinates including anticolonial methods, environmental humanities, artistic research, postcapitalist and decolonial design, critical geography, infrastructure studies, historical materialism, activism, solidarity studies, soil studies, queer trans*feminist technoscience, militant cinema, and beyond.

+ info, registrations and programme: https://lnu.se/en/meet-linnaeus-university/current/events/2022/groundings-from-situated-knowledges-to-terrains-of-struggle/

Groundings is supported by funding from Linnaeus University, Regenerative Energy Communities, and the Institute for Experimental Design and Media Culture (IXDM), FHNW University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern, Switzerland.

Caring Assemblies, Porto Design Bienale

in conversation with Ana Isabel Carvalho and Ricardo Lafuente (Manufactura Independente):

 

Caring assemblies. Designing for better futures is an online and physical public program that aims to question the violence and exclusions of design practices and speculate on how to build better futures at different scales, from molecules to the territories, through four conversations and a speculative fiction workshop. Organised by Bartlebooth, it is a Satellite Activity of the Porto Design Biennale.

+info about the event's context: https://portodesignbiennale.pt/en/events/caring-assemblies?edition=2021

+ better futures: https://betterfutures.bartlebooth.org/

.OBJ

.OBJ nace con la intención de proponer un espacio lúdico donde debatir sobre el valor #significante #agencial #social de los objetos a partir de #narrativas #discursos #orientaciones en relación a las artes y los diseños.

Actividades:
19.11.20 a las 19:00h Ponencia y debate con Jara Rocha
3.12.20 a las 19:00h Ponencia y debate con Salim Bayri
17.12.20 a las 19:00h Ponencia y debate con Anna Puigjaner

Debido a cuestiones de restricción en el acceso en la Escuela por normativa sanitaria la acción se limita a 10 participantes (estudiantes de Massana) y se retransmite en streaming en el canal Youtube de Massana.

Link al formulario de inscripción:
https://forms.gle/X6uncfxhhS52t2Rn9

Link a los streamings view-only:
Jara Rocha, 19 Noviembre, 19:00h
Salim Bayri, 3 Diciembre, 19:00h
Anna Puigjaner, 17 Diciembre, 19:00h

+ info: https://www.escolamassana.cat/es/obj_75341 

 

vídeo registro de la sesión:

Rock Damages

An Underground Division's performative lecture by Helen Pritchard + Jara Rocha at Sonic Acts, Amsterdam 2020.

Volumetric Ecologies: Environments, bodies and mediated worlds / Goldsmiths, U. of London / 14.06.2019

Bringing together researchers, artists and theorists to investigate the implications and possibilities of volumetric imaginaries of environments.

Building up or digging down, simulating more-than-human bodies, imagining new and fantastical volumes or managing resources, volumetrics are continuously figuring and refiguring life and living. From the fossil fuel industry to the so-called creative industries, computational practices are being deployed to imagine and materialise new volumes to exploit and inhabit. Computational arts practices such as 3D Scanning, Rendering and Animation, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have been a significant agent in shaping this volumetric turn. Consequently these new volumetric practices are in relentless dialogue with both the calculation and measurement of environments and the extraction and entertainment industries. This event seeks to explore critical volumetric practices capable of generating new political and affective ecologies and challenging dominant forms of geopolitical and industrial volumetric power.

With this in mind, Volumetric Ecologies brings together researchers, artists and theorists to investigate the implications and possibilities of volumetric imaginaries of environments. As part of the volumetric turn we explore more-than-human immersive technologies and the ways in which they figure environments across an expanded field of practice. The workshop will critically reflect on the agency of computational arts practices as a significant force in shaping the volumetric turn. The evening keynote by Deborah Levitt will explore how the world-building capacities of animation and VR technologies bring into being new forms of cosmotechnics. This two-day explorative forum presents a diversity of perspectives and practices which reimagine and recast the constructs of environment, bodies and mediated worlds through the articulation of volumetric practices.

Hosted by ICE, Computational Arts at Goldsmiths, and in partnership with the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology at Birkbeck, University of London. Organised by Helen Pritchard, Rachel Falconer and Joel McKim.

Friday June 14
11.00am - 1.00pm | Volumetric Demo open to public | VR Lab
1.00pm - 5.00pm | Workshop | VR Lab

Demo and research workshop providing an opportunity to engage with current practice and research across the volumetric field. Including work by artists and practitioners Nishat Awan, Marta Di Francesco, Clareese Hill, Hyperbation, Hyphen-Labs, Maggie Roberts aka mer, Possible Bodies: The Underground Division (Jara Rocha, Helen Pritchard and Femke Snelting), Jane Prophet and more tba.

With responses from Maria Dada, Claudia Dutson, Rebecca Coleman, Federico Fasce, Deborah Levitt, Joel McKim, Shela Sheikh, Chaired by Rachel Falconer.

+ info https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=12597

[conversa + perfo] FEM TEK Bilbao, 08Nov

>>>Primera parte: JUGANDO CON… INVENTAR(IAR)NOS. [Saioa Olmo Alonso + Jara Rocha ]
 >>>Segunda parte: POSSIBLE BODIES X,Y,Z: A MOVIE-IN-THE-MAKING. [Jara Rocha + Femke Snelting] [FEM TEK + WIKITOKI] _ Wikitoki 19h