The Shape of a Practice 2020
Negotiating Context in the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene is often perceived as either a planetary-scale concept or an extremely local concern. Yet neither of these accounts considers that the global and the local are deeply interconnected. So how can diverse local research, struggles, and practices be related to one another in order to establish a mutual ground of experience and for action within the geological age of humans? The Shape of a Practice brought together over 100 researchers, scientists, artists, and activists to share their fields and methods of work on everything from water pollution and disaster management to an interrogation of the new geological era’s colonial genealogy. In an interactive virtual environment, specifically designed for the event, as well as on-site at HKW, distinct questions, strategies, and forms of action were linked to form a topology of the Anthropocene.
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Case Studies and Seminars: The Shape of a Practice
The week-long The Shape of a Practice event, which took place in October 2020, was a product of a diverse collection of case studies.
Sensing, Reflection, Conversation, Case Study, Consensus Building, Archiving, Communicating, Agency, Network, Complexity, Knowledge infrastructure, Knowledge production, Topology
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The Shape of a Practice: Online Project Environment
A dynamic virtual landscape served as a venue for The Shape of a Practice.
Case Study, Conversation, Engagement, Topology, Agency, Knowledge production, Knowledge transformation, Local knowledge, Platform
- projectKayla Anderson, Sara Black, Jeremy Bolen, Isabelle Carbonell, Andrea Carlson, Jennifer Colten, Tia-Simone Gardner, Beate Geissler, Amber Ginsburg, Ryan Griffis, Monica Moses Haller, Derek Hoeferlin, Brian Holmes, Sarah Kanouse, John Kim, Brian Kirkbride, Sarah Lewison, Margarida Mendes, Marlena Novak, Abbéy Odunlami, Heather Parrish, Claire Pentecost, Oliver Sann, Jenny Schmid, Michael Swierz, Corinne Teed, Joe Underhill, Monique Verdin, Joslyn Willauer, Jay Alan Yim, Anna van Voorhis
The Current: Mississippi. An Anthropocene River
The installation The Current presented field studies by artists, scholars, and activists who were involved in the AC project Mississippi. An Anthropocene River.
Archiving, Case Study, Communicating, Conversation, Field Study, Film, Mapping, Sensing, Storytelling, Sound, Water, Carbon, Care, Environmental Justice, Indigenous Rights, Extraction, Race, Infrastructure
- contributionJeremias Herberg, John Kim, Bernd M. Scherer, Adania Shibli
An Anthropocene in Two Parts
The most challenging aspects of doing Anthropocene research require learning how local realities may inform broader global issues.
Conversation, Engagement, Settler Colonialism, Local knowledge, Capitalism, Race, Ecology
- contributionTia-Simone Gardner, Beate Geissler, Oliver Sann, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Anna van Voorhis
The Stories We Tell, the Images We Take
The first screening session of The Shape of a Practice featured film and performance that negotiates different research practices of archiving, and enacting embodied relationships.
Film, Conversation, Ecology, Migration, Settler Colonialism
- contributionChristina Gruber, Lynn Peemoeller, Nikiwe Solomon, Adrian Van Wyk
Approaching a Waterway
Artists discuss sturgeons pushed to the edge of extinction and the future of a chemically polluted river near Cape Town.
Conversation, Case Study, Species, Water, Extinction, System, Ecology
- contributionMaya Indira Ganesh, Sadie Luetmer, Shana M. griffin
Extracts and Exclusions
How can one negotiate between extraction, decontextualization, and the outright exploitation that could cause unequal flows of knowledge?
Archiving, Knowledge production, Extraction, Violence
- contributionDenise Frazier, Gilly Karjevsky, Jason Ludwig, Tim Schütz, Rebecca Snedeker, Spółdzielnia Krzak / Krzak Collective, Rosario Talevi
Knowing Together
How can we build communities that share knowledge about climate issues, both locally and at the planetary-scale?
Case Study, Conversation, Agriculture, Climate change, Environmental Justice, Race
- contributionImani Jacqueline Brown, Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani, Adania Shibli
Histories of Disintegration
Histories can often be told through the changes in a landscape; about what has changed and come to form, but most of all, what is excluded altogether.
Case Study, Film, Conversation, Climate change, History, Indigenous Rights
- contributionJoe Underhill
A River Semester
Reporting live from the Mississippi River, travelers question how transforming the act of sensing might remake social, political and environmental relations?
Sensing, Field Work, Conversation, Climate change, Race, Settler Colonialism, Species, Capitalism
- contributionRaphaël Grisey, Bouba Touré
Xaraasi Xanne—Crossing Voices
Raphaël Grisey and Boube Touré chronicle the practices of a self-organized farming cooperative founded by former African migrant workers and activists in France in 1977.
Film, Engagement, Conversation, Migration, Settler Colonialism
- contributionImani Jacqueline Brown, Brian Holmes, Margarida Mendes, Huiying Ng, Abbéy Odunlami
Place and Space
How do materials from different forms of research communicate with each other?
Experiment, Conversation, Case Study, Engagement
- contributionJohannes Bruder, Stéphane Grumbach, Orit Halpern, Olivier Hamant, Sandi Hilal, Karolina Sobecka, Ela Spalding
Between Spaces, between Lines
Some of the most interesting work on the Anthropocene takes place in between places, in between disciplines, and even in between the lines.
Experiment, Case Study, Migration, Climate change, System, Ecology, Economy
- contributionMyung Ae Choi, Madhushree Kamak, Jahnavi Phalkey
From a Living Exhibition to the DMZ
Space for studying Anthropocene-related changes can occur intentionally, through institutions and other projects, but it can just as easily occur by accident.
Field Work, Case Study, Experiment, Ecology
- contributionBabak Afrassiabi and Nasrin Tabatabai, Katrin Hornek, Margarida Mendes
A Trace, a Breath
Using sensory work, artists explore how the effects of opium relate to colonialist and capitalist extraction, and convey a tale of industry and the Latvian geological landscape.
Reflection, Sound, Storytelling, Conversation, Capitalism, Settler Colonialism
- contributionRavi Agarwal, Michelle Lai, Paulina Lopez, Huiying Ng
Social Witnessing
Two case studies focus on two very different landscapes, and attempt to account for the changing relationships that make them over time.
Case Study, Mapping, Film, Field Study, Ecology, Capitalism, Agriculture
- contributionRaphaël Grisey, Gilly Karjevsky, Patricia Reed, Fernando Silva e Silva, Nikiwe Solomon, Ela Spalding, Spółdzielnia Krzak / Krzak Collective, Rosario Talevi, Bouba Touré, Simon Turner, Monique Verdin
Coordinating Practice
The Anthropocene has a coordination problem. This discussion highlights the many challenges of coordinating projects at different scales, both spatially and temporally.
Conversation, Reflection, Field Work, Local knowledge
- contributionSarah Lewison, Swan Parsons, Florian Ruland, Alexandra Toland, Andrew Yang
On the Recuperative Mismanagement of a Cosmopolitan Fish
Closing the opening week of The Shape of a Practice, this meal-at-a-distance brought speakers to the transatlantic kitchen table along with so-called invasive species from the US and Germany.
Storytelling, Conversation, Experiment, History, Ecology, Species
- contributionMonica Moses Haller, Michael Swierz
A Seed, a Sound
Attuning oneself to the transformations of the Anthropocene is both an intellectual and embodied experience. But how can the embodied experiences be shared, or even communicated, to one another online?
Sensing, Storytelling, Ecology, History
- contributionMaud Canisius, Xenia Chiaramonte, Myriel Milićević, Thiago da Costa Oliveira
On the Impossibility of Representing a River
There are uncountable ways to look at a river, yet many of them are invisible in today’s cartographic depictions.
Conversation, Water, Urbanism
