Master Symposium 2023 - Genders of the Forests

Genders of the Forests

To consider the various forms our relationships with forests takes means to explore different forms of language-making and human-nonhuman communication, at once nonbinary and myriad in possibility. It also means interpreting their destruction: from fire, mining, conversion of the land, unsustainable or illegal logging, extraction and exploitation in every sense. Acknowledging forests means considering both their communicative meaning and their rapid extinction, which render visible the differences between the rural, the countryside, the forests, the city, and what we sometimes call nature itself. Understanding the forest’s multiplicity bears a similitude, perhaps, with the understanding of our multiple gender identities, and the many roles and functions of artistic practices, artists, and cultural conditions outside the modern and after the modern city. Imaging and imagining new futures, at once more equitable and able and full of real possibility, makes us look for new forests, new forest cultures, new poetic and pragmatic and technical languages that expand the practice of what is sometimes called forestry, sometimes called art. To avoid reductionistic solutions means imagining new realms for the arts in relation with the forest and the nonhuman in an era in which art systems are being profoundly transformed due to climate collapse, retracting economies, and energy transformation. The forest—as an image and as a reality—presents us with an unexpected ground to imagine the world from there and here.

Moderated by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez

Students are expected to read the materials that will be distributed beforehand; to actively participate in the discussion; to research and look after examples of the subjects exposed in the symposium in their immediate context; to be attentive at the cultural and contextual differences that exist in the different countries.

Registration deadline:

10. March 2023