Sheila and Sylvia Kokunda from Land Body Ecologies are presenting as part of “Photography, Archives and Ecologies in Anthropocenes” a workshop at The Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum convened by Curator and Researcher Bergit Arends.
“Which uses have historic archives of environments, particularly when coloniality and imperialism are embodied in collections of the natural world? To address this question the multi-disciplinary workshop explicates the connections between artistic practices, photography, archives, and environmental imagination in the presence of the narratives of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene suggests the endangerment of the world through humans and, at the same time, the dissolution between the categories of nature and culture. Its narratives offer deep time perspectives into past and future. Through the critiques of the concept, such as Black Anthropocenes, environmental histories can however be considered afresh. Black Anthropocenes challenge white, European-centric perspectives on modernity and re-articulate junctures of historical events.
At the workshop we discuss photographic practices (notably ecological, socio-documentary, contemporary re-performance and re-uses of archival photographs) within these scientific, social, and political contexts. Archives provide compelling insights not only into environmental changes, but into ideologies and cultures of nature, human-nature relations, and the effects of change. The archive is considered within an expanded field: the documentary and object archive as historical repository; the environment as archive of the Earth; and the memory of the human body as archive. The widened conception of the archive and photographic practices reframe and activate histories towards multiple and de-centred environmental imagination.”
Other contributors include: Martha Fleming, Matthew Gandy, Joy Gregory, Harun Morrison & Diego Molina.
The workshop takes place on Friday, 10 March 2023 from 13:30 to 18:00 (GMT)
Bwindi Baskets - Image by Sylvia Kokunda, ABEG