The Jan van Eyck Academie cordially invites you to Environmental Identities #4: Feminist Naturecultures, a week-long event exploring the correlation between gender and the natural environment, particularly by looking at female subjectivity and drawing from feminist viewpoints.

15 – 22 September 2020, Online Screenings

Another Awaiting Stone (2019) by Kanthy Peng

Who’s Afraid of Ideology? (2017-2019) by Marwa Arsanios

Both screenings can be accessed via Vimeo. 

22 September 2020, 16:00pm (CEST), Conversation – livestreamed via Zoom (password: 590138) and YouTube

With Kanthy Peng, Marwa Arsanios, and Prof. Dr. Wendy Harcourt. Moderated by Bruno Alves de Almeida, curator of public programme, Jan van Eyck Academie.

The online screening features the short films Another Awaiting Stone (2019) by current Jan van Eyck Academie participant Kanthy Peng and Who’s Afraid of Ideology? (2017-2019) by artist Marwa Arsanios. These works are the instigators for a public conversation that gathers their authors alongside Prof. Dr. Wendy Harcourt, professor of Gender, Diversity and Sustainable Development at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University, the Hague.

Intertwining artistic practices and academic research, the programme looks at how the association between gender, environment, power, and knowledge permeate the lived relations, daily needs, and embodied interactions of women. Drawing from the film Another Awaiting Stone, Kanthy Peng presents her reflections on how East-Asian folklores have long served to shape a specific type of female identity through the connection between nature, culture, history and image production.

Image-making and the conventions of documentary portraiture are disrupted in Who’s Afraid of Ideology? In this two-part film, Marwa Arsanios explores the lived experience of women in three war-torn places, their structures of self-governance and knowledge production, thus unpacking the entanglement between ecology, feminism, gender struggle, social organization, nation-building and war.

In relation to these works, Prof. Dr. Wendy Harcourt reflects on the on-going debate within political ecology and feminist studies through the viewpoint of Feminist Political Ecology and shares her research on how gendered subjectivities, ideologies and identities are shaping our livelihoods and environments.

Feminist Naturecultures is the fourth event of the Environmental Identities programme, a series of public conversations, screenings and other online and offline performative events, which pursues a multi-layered understanding of the co-defining relation between self- and social identity and the natural environment.