Gayatri Kodikal (DAI, 2020) contributes to a special convening of artists, writers, ecologists, thinkers, curators, activists, and other art practitioners, all of whom, in their disparate practices, consider the forest as both fact and metaphor, at once life form and a kind of epistemology. Titled Genders of the Forests, and held on 24 and 25 May 2023, the symposium will examine the various forms our ecological relationships with forests take, from language-making and care and pedagogy to human-nonhuman communication, at once nonbinary and myriad in possibility. Convened by the Institute Art Gender Nature.
Acknowledging forests means to address both their extant meaning and their rapid extinction, and to render visible the differences between the rural, the countryside, forestry, and nature itself. Avoiding reductionistic solutions means imagining new realms for the arts in relation with the nonhuman in an era in which our art systems are being profoundly transformed due to climate collapse, retracting economies, and energy transformation. The forest—as an image and as a reality, as a site of growth, relation, and destruction—presents us with unexpected ground from which to imagine the world from within its coverage.
With contributions by Jumana Emil Abboud, Paula Baeza Pailamilla, Chiara Camoni, Gauri Gill, Pujita Guha, Monica Ursina Jäger, Pauline Julier, Gayatri Kodikal, Franziska Lauber, Alexandra Navratil, Claire Pentecost, Lucia Pietroiusti & Filipa Ramos, Mathilde Rosier, Ana Vaz, and Yvonne Volkart & Felipe Castelblanco
Genders of the Forests continues the biannual Master symposia series at Institute Art Gender Nature, Basel, begun in 2018, which centers questions of gender, language, ecology, social justice, and artistic practice, in an intimate environment of artistic inquiry and generous conversation.
The symposium is dedicated to the memory of artist Silke Otto-Knapp.
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About Gayatri Kodikal