- Louise.Boscacci@nas.edu.au
- University of Wollongong, School of The Arts English and Media, Department Memberadd
- Environmental Humanities, Art and the Anthropocene, Environmental Aesthetics & Ethics, Ecological Humanities, Contemporary Art and Ecology, Contemporary Art, and 12 moreAffect, New Materialism in Contemporary art, Regeneration, Anthropocene studies, Feminist Philosophy, Affect Theory, Posthumanism, Nature Writing & Ecocriticism, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Ecological Literacy, Place-Based Education, Arts and Culture, Art and Climate Change, and Oceaniaedit
- Senior Lecturer, National Art School, Sydney. PhD (UOW), BFA (National Art School), BSc Hons. 1 (JCU).edit
"May it rebel, that nerve of life, may it twist and throb." 3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling.... more
"May it rebel, that nerve of life, may it twist and throb."
3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling. This sonorous guide in refrain, before and after the Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies conference in Tāmaki Makaurau, some eight months later. Two days ago, the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown lifted in New South Wales. Only now can you light a match without visceral trepidation. Without a gut return to the climate crisis inferno of the 2019–2020 summer. Anthropocene-in-the-making? Yes. No. These are Viral Bushranger Times. Anything can happen now.
The shadows trace of the Zincland project is one mode of more-than-human wit(h)nessing that I have introduced elsewhere from an ecology and ethos of open field practice where contemporary art and writing converges with the feminist, decolonising environmental humanities and sciences. Following the conference, I had a plan to travel south, to Pōneke/Wellington and Ōtepoti/Dunedin, to continue a linked project of engaging with naturecultures of extinction, to wit(h)ness two sites of multispecies recovery and ecological restoration. If Zincland took me to Aotearoa, I had no inkling of what I might encounter in this onward momentum of and from the shadows trace. So, let me take you there. Let me pick up this passage of wit(h)nessing and translation one day after leaving Tāmaki Makaurau.
3:20 a.m. Friday, 14 August 2020: Wildes Meadow, the Illawarra highlands, Wodi Wodi First Peoples and Yuin nation Countries, south-eastern Australia. A Boobook is calling. This sonorous guide in refrain, before and after the Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies conference in Tāmaki Makaurau, some eight months later. Two days ago, the SARS-CoV-2 lockdown lifted in New South Wales. Only now can you light a match without visceral trepidation. Without a gut return to the climate crisis inferno of the 2019–2020 summer. Anthropocene-in-the-making? Yes. No. These are Viral Bushranger Times. Anything can happen now.
The shadows trace of the Zincland project is one mode of more-than-human wit(h)nessing that I have introduced elsewhere from an ecology and ethos of open field practice where contemporary art and writing converges with the feminist, decolonising environmental humanities and sciences. Following the conference, I had a plan to travel south, to Pōneke/Wellington and Ōtepoti/Dunedin, to continue a linked project of engaging with naturecultures of extinction, to wit(h)ness two sites of multispecies recovery and ecological restoration. If Zincland took me to Aotearoa, I had no inkling of what I might encounter in this onward momentum of and from the shadows trace. So, let me take you there. Let me pick up this passage of wit(h)nessing and translation one day after leaving Tāmaki Makaurau.
Research Interests:
Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist and activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc... more
Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist and activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc refinery on the east coast of Queensland connected to the catastrophic McArthur River Mine in her Country (Garrwa, Yanyuwa) near Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia. She pauses, steadies her hand, looks more closely, then speaks.
More: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/article/view/16711
More: https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/Swamphen/article/view/16711
Research Interests:
Louise Boscacci and Perdita Phillips: Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference... more
Louise Boscacci and Perdita Phillips:
Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa. For this special cross-Tasman event, and from opposite coasts of Australia, we convened panels for participants under two invitational titles: “Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn” and “Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics.” Our project averred that the work of art in the Anthropocene was under interrogation by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. Connected with this shifting ground, we argued that new energies and collaborations were emerging across the postconventional arts and ecological humanities, creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: that the human is more-than-human and the social is an eco-social domain in a preternatural age of extinction and climate destruction. We set out to feel the pulse of what contemporary artists and researchers from Aotearoa and Australia were doing, making, speculating on, or writing about in the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Our project’s defining call was to explore encounters in a new frame of particular planetary aesthetics: moving from the particular, bodily or affective encounter to trace, reveal or refigure planetary connections, relations and concerns.
In this guest editorial note, we write in the wake of the ravages of climate crisis fires in Australia, as well as the borderless COVID-19 pandemic. We flesh out the project in its beginnings above, and introduce eleven papers and three visual portfolios of art research in practice that respond to our provocations before and after the Auckland conference. Collectively these scholarly and aesthetic works consider, trace, and respond to affective encounters of the particular and the planetary in the capricious spaces of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. | https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.8.16686
Particular Planetary Aesthetics is the title and theme of this Swamphen special issue. It has its origins in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, the 2019 conference of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) held in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa. For this special cross-Tasman event, and from opposite coasts of Australia, we convened panels for participants under two invitational titles: “Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn” and “Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics.” Our project averred that the work of art in the Anthropocene was under interrogation by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. Connected with this shifting ground, we argued that new energies and collaborations were emerging across the postconventional arts and ecological humanities, creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: that the human is more-than-human and the social is an eco-social domain in a preternatural age of extinction and climate destruction. We set out to feel the pulse of what contemporary artists and researchers from Aotearoa and Australia were doing, making, speculating on, or writing about in the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Our project’s defining call was to explore encounters in a new frame of particular planetary aesthetics: moving from the particular, bodily or affective encounter to trace, reveal or refigure planetary connections, relations and concerns.
In this guest editorial note, we write in the wake of the ravages of climate crisis fires in Australia, as well as the borderless COVID-19 pandemic. We flesh out the project in its beginnings above, and introduce eleven papers and three visual portfolios of art research in practice that respond to our provocations before and after the Auckland conference. Collectively these scholarly and aesthetic works consider, trace, and respond to affective encounters of the particular and the planetary in the capricious spaces of the Anthropocene-in-the-making. | https://doi.org/10.60162/swamphen.8.16686
Research Interests: Climate Change, Contemporary Art, Feminist Epistemology, Environmental Humanities, Affect Studies, and 11 moreGayatri Spivak, Feminist Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy, Bioethics, Planetarity, Climate Crisis, Aotearoa, Art and the Anthropocene, Particular-Planetary Aesthetics, Affective Encounters, Black Summer, More-than-Human and Multispecies Studies, and Planetary Aesthetics
Chapter essay, pp. 254-265.
https://dpr-barcelona.myshopify.com/products/postcards-from-the-anthropocene
https://dpr-barcelona.myshopify.com/products/postcards-from-the-anthropocene
Research Interests:
Pp. 155-181, (Chapter 12), in: Water Lore: Practice, Place and Poetics (Routledge) ⎔ Co-author: Pip Newling ⎔ Editors: Camille Roulière and Claudia Egerer ⎔ Published: 20 May, 2022 ⎔ Book Description: "Located within the field of... more
Pp. 155-181, (Chapter 12), in: Water Lore: Practice, Place and Poetics (Routledge)
⎔ Co-author: Pip Newling
⎔ Editors: Camille Roulière and Claudia Egerer
⎔ Published: 20 May, 2022
⎔ Book Description:
"Located within the field of environmental humanities, this volume engages with one of the most pressing contemporary environmental challenges of our time: how can we shift our understanding and realign what water means to us? Water is increasingly at the centre of scientific and public debates about climate change. In these debates, rising sea levels compete against desertification; hurricanes and floods follow periods of prolonged drought. As we continue to pollute, canalise and desalinate waters, the ambiguous nature of our relationship with these entities becomes visible. From the paradisiac and pristine scenery of holiday postcards through to the devastated landscapes of post-tsunami news reports, images of waters surround us. And while we continue to damage what most sustains us, collective precarity grows.
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.
This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history."
⎔ ISBN 9781032110660
⎔ Co-author: Pip Newling
⎔ Editors: Camille Roulière and Claudia Egerer
⎔ Published: 20 May, 2022
⎔ Book Description:
"Located within the field of environmental humanities, this volume engages with one of the most pressing contemporary environmental challenges of our time: how can we shift our understanding and realign what water means to us? Water is increasingly at the centre of scientific and public debates about climate change. In these debates, rising sea levels compete against desertification; hurricanes and floods follow periods of prolonged drought. As we continue to pollute, canalise and desalinate waters, the ambiguous nature of our relationship with these entities becomes visible. From the paradisiac and pristine scenery of holiday postcards through to the devastated landscapes of post-tsunami news reports, images of waters surround us. And while we continue to damage what most sustains us, collective precarity grows.
Breaking down disciplinary boundaries, with contributions from scholars in the visual arts, history, earth systems, anthropology, architecture, literature and creative writing, archaeology and music, this edited collection creates space for less-prominent perspectives, with many authors coming from female, Indigenous and LGBTQIA+ contexts. Combining established and emerging voices, and practice-led research and critical scholarship, the book explores water across its scientific, symbolic, material, imaginary, practical and aesthetic dimensions. It examines and interrogates our cultural construction and representation of water and, through original research and theory, suggests ways in which we can reframe the dialogue to create a better relationship with water sources in diverse contexts and geographies.
This expansive book brings together key emerging scholarship on water persona and agency and would be an ideal supplementary text for discussions on the blue humanities, climate change, environmental anthropology and environmental history."
⎔ ISBN 9781032110660
This is a critical reflection on a seminar and workshop titled, "Thinking Landscape: Data, geography, arts, writing, patterns, collecting and interdisciplinarity’" convened at the University of Wollongong, Australia, 16 September 2016.... more
This is a critical reflection on a seminar and workshop titled, "Thinking Landscape: Data, geography, arts, writing, patterns, collecting and interdisciplinarity’" convened at the University of Wollongong, Australia, 16 September 2016. Seminar participants included: contemporary artists, geographers, writers, museum curators, digital humanities’ scholars, postgraduate researchers and interdisciplinary thinkers from the Material Ecologies Research network (MECO) in partnership with AUSCCER (the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research) and the Global Challenges programme, University of Wollongong, Australia. Speakers: Harriet Hawkins (Royal Holloway, University of London), Mitchell Whitelaw (ANU), Su Ballard (University of Wollongong; convenor, MECO).
Research Interests:
Co-author: Phillipa Newling. Co-investigators: Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus).
Research Interests:
More on this cross-hemisphere collaboration which began with the international exhibition of the same name in Edinburgh in April 2017: http://www.dpr-barcelona.com/index.php?/ongoing/anthropocene/ | The book, seeded by the exhibition and... more
More on this cross-hemisphere collaboration which began with the international exhibition of the same name in Edinburgh in April 2017: http://www.dpr-barcelona.com/index.php?/ongoing/anthropocene/ | The book, seeded by the exhibition and more, went to press in 2020 ; best wishes to the editors and publisher working to world it amidst the worsening Covid-19 pandemic in Spain, the UK and the USA.
Research Interests:
"Amidst climate chaos, words gather as a tipping point in after-affect. On January 4, 2020, the massive Currowan bushfire in New South Wales crossed the Shoalhaven River and raced into the Wingecarribee district of the Illawarra region... more
"Amidst climate chaos, words gather as a tipping point in after-affect. On January 4, 2020, the massive Currowan bushfire in New South Wales crossed the Shoalhaven River and raced into the Wingecarribee district of the Illawarra region south of Sydney. After two weeks of emergency warnings, a new preternatural “catastrophic” danger rating, watch and act alerts, and heatwave temperatures, the fire front arrived on a blunt southerly gale in the evening. Climate breakdown had delivered locally and personally. The next day, light rain, more drizzle than shower, visited the home fireground." (7 January 2020)
Research Interests:
This is the first of two conference panel sessions convened by Louise Boscacci (Australia), Perdita Phillips (Australia), and Sally Ann McIntyre (Aotearoa New Zealand/) for: "Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange,... more
This is the first of two conference panel sessions convened by Louise Boscacci (Australia), Perdita Phillips (Australia), and Sally Ann McIntyre (Aotearoa New Zealand/) for: "Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies." 2019 AAANZ Conference, 3 - 6 December, Auckland/ Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand. The short title in the program is: "Affective Traces, Shadow Places, and Resonant Naturecultures."
This was followed up with a second panel series: "Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics." Convenors: Boscacci, Phillips and McIntyre.
This event was a full day of three separate sessions with nine papers by the following ten speakers:
Associate Prof. Janine Randerson, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland.
Prof. Heather Galbraith and Raewyn Martyn, Massey University, Wellington.
Christopher Houghton, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Heather Hesterman, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Rob Kettels, Curtin University, Perth.
Maria O'Toole, Massey University, Wellington.
Kelly Lee Hickey, Victoria University, Melbourne.
Nicola Dickson, Independent Researcher, Canberra.
Leighton Upson, Independent Researcher/ Massey University, Wellington.
SEE THE FULL PROGRAM PDF FOR ALL ABSTRACTS.
Here are our two Introductions to our panels of artist-researchers, natureculture writers, curators, art historians and environmental humanities scholars:
"Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn.
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre.
Listen. There. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene is under interrogation by contemporary artists, theorists and historians. New collaborations across the emerging open-field of the postconventional arts and humanities are creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain in this age of extinction and climate change.
How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the impingements and implications—the effects and affects—of the Anthropocene-in-the- making? This panel highlights and explores the affective encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. Here we name, make, listen, think and intervene with three instances of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerge from the feminist ecosocial pivot towards local, embodied and affect-engaged practices that also trace and make planetary connections. Each begins with a bodily encounter, or an encounter-exchange. Through multispecies conversations and resonances we listen to the faint signals of extinct New Zealand birds in the noise of history, lost traces re-collected from encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections re-figured as ‘minor’ memorials and re-sited within their original landscapes (McIntyre); trace, wit(h)ness and sound shadow ecologies of zinc entangled with extractive colonisation of Country in northern Australia, in the here and now (Boscacci); and follow the water down mountains to the sea, as the rocks, water, weeds and humans of Albany deal with seeping, maintaining, flooding, and repairing (Phillips)."
and
"Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics. (Call For Papers)
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre
Listen. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She is heard but not seen. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene continues to be interrogated by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. In this age of extinction and climate-change, many are working to expand alternative critical frameworks and modes in which the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain.
How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making? This follow-on panel explores the bodily encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. We situate this in a developing ‘field’ of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerges from feminist ecosocial thinking and pivots towards local and affect-engaged practices. We delve into diverse contemporary practices that trace and make planetary connections and ecologies of relations in multispecies naturecultures: connections and intersections that can be unknown, unpredictable or provocative; speculations, narratives or poetic reveals. Papers by the convenors will detail encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections, shadow ecologies of zinc mined in northern Australia Country, and seepages and flows of water through granite and swamp lands.
We invite twenty-minute papers or presentations on art practices, collaborations, alliances, or speculations that take the pulse of what is happening now in the capricious spaces of attunement to the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Proposals for alternative presentations in media and methods other than a scholarly paper are welcome."
CITATION (please cite if you use this work).
Boscacci, Louise, Phillips, Perdita and McIntyre, Sally Ann 2019. ‘Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn,’ in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Conference 3-6 December 2019, University of Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand.
This was followed up with a second panel series: "Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics." Convenors: Boscacci, Phillips and McIntyre.
This event was a full day of three separate sessions with nine papers by the following ten speakers:
Associate Prof. Janine Randerson, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland.
Prof. Heather Galbraith and Raewyn Martyn, Massey University, Wellington.
Christopher Houghton, University of South Australia, Adelaide.
Heather Hesterman, RMIT University, Melbourne.
Rob Kettels, Curtin University, Perth.
Maria O'Toole, Massey University, Wellington.
Kelly Lee Hickey, Victoria University, Melbourne.
Nicola Dickson, Independent Researcher, Canberra.
Leighton Upson, Independent Researcher/ Massey University, Wellington.
SEE THE FULL PROGRAM PDF FOR ALL ABSTRACTS.
Here are our two Introductions to our panels of artist-researchers, natureculture writers, curators, art historians and environmental humanities scholars:
"Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn.
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre.
Listen. There. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene is under interrogation by contemporary artists, theorists and historians. New collaborations across the emerging open-field of the postconventional arts and humanities are creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain in this age of extinction and climate change.
How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the impingements and implications—the effects and affects—of the Anthropocene-in-the- making? This panel highlights and explores the affective encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. Here we name, make, listen, think and intervene with three instances of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerge from the feminist ecosocial pivot towards local, embodied and affect-engaged practices that also trace and make planetary connections. Each begins with a bodily encounter, or an encounter-exchange. Through multispecies conversations and resonances we listen to the faint signals of extinct New Zealand birds in the noise of history, lost traces re-collected from encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections re-figured as ‘minor’ memorials and re-sited within their original landscapes (McIntyre); trace, wit(h)ness and sound shadow ecologies of zinc entangled with extractive colonisation of Country in northern Australia, in the here and now (Boscacci); and follow the water down mountains to the sea, as the rocks, water, weeds and humans of Albany deal with seeping, maintaining, flooding, and repairing (Phillips)."
and
"Encounters with and within the Anthropocene: Speculating on Particular-Planetary Aesthetics. (Call For Papers)
Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre
Listen. A Southern Boobook Owl is calling in the fresh dark. It is 6:58 pm, 9 June 2019. She is heard but not seen. She reminds us that the work of art in the Anthropocene continues to be interrogated by contemporary artists, writers, theorists and historians. In this age of extinction and climate-change, many are working to expand alternative critical frameworks and modes in which the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain.
How are artist-researchers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand responding to the push and pull—the effects, affects and implications—of the Anthropocene-in-the-making? This follow-on panel explores the bodily encounter as a vital waymaker of contemporary art praxis and action. We situate this in a developing ‘field’ of particular-planetary aesthetics that emerges from feminist ecosocial thinking and pivots towards local and affect-engaged practices. We delve into diverse contemporary practices that trace and make planetary connections and ecologies of relations in multispecies naturecultures: connections and intersections that can be unknown, unpredictable or provocative; speculations, narratives or poetic reveals. Papers by the convenors will detail encounters with colonial-era ornithological collections, shadow ecologies of zinc mined in northern Australia Country, and seepages and flows of water through granite and swamp lands.
We invite twenty-minute papers or presentations on art practices, collaborations, alliances, or speculations that take the pulse of what is happening now in the capricious spaces of attunement to the Anthropocene-in-the-making. Proposals for alternative presentations in media and methods other than a scholarly paper are welcome."
CITATION (please cite if you use this work).
Boscacci, Louise, Phillips, Perdita and McIntyre, Sally Ann 2019. ‘Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn,’ in Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) Conference 3-6 December 2019, University of Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Research Interests:
A paper presented in the panel: "Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn." Panel Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips,... more
A paper presented in the panel: "Affective Encounters, Shadow Traces, and Resonant Naturecultures in the Anthropocene: Particular-planetary aesthetics in the feminist ecosocial turn." Panel Convenors: Louise Boscacci, Perdita Phillips, Sally Ann McIntyre. The short title of the panel in the print program (pdf here) is: "Affective Traces, Shadow Places, and Resonant Naturecultures." |
AT: "Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies." AAANZ [Art Association of Australia and New Zealand] Conference 2019, Auckland/ Tāmaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, 3-6 December. |
ABSTRACT |
"Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist, activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc refinery on the east coast of Queensland connected to the catastrophic McArthur River Mine in her Country (Yanyuwa, Garwwa) near Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia. She pauses, steadies her hand, looks more closely, then speaks. This paper presents the project ‘Greetings from Zincland: Unfolding a Shadow Country’ associated with Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, an international exhibition held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2017, and forthcoming as a book in 2020. Greetings from Zincland, a postcard I sent across the equator as a digital image, a recorded voice reading, and a critical text, is a dispatch from belonged-by country and its shadow places. It recalibrates vintage 1950’s imagery of local tourist views in the North Queensland port city of Townsville/ Currumbilbarra with one contemporary sighting of a twenty-first century becoming. It introduces and maps a scattered particular-planetary shadow country found in the glare of bleaching tropical light. With it, I unfold a wit(h)nessing story from one shadow place of unexpected connection and confrontation in the antipodean Anthropocene-in-the-making (Yusoff). If a picture postcard is a material form of encounter-exchange, an affect charged one is also an im/material dispatch. And, Auckland, you are one of my shadow places."
AT: "Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies." AAANZ [Art Association of Australia and New Zealand] Conference 2019, Auckland/ Tāmaki, Aotearoa New Zealand, 3-6 December. |
ABSTRACT |
"Melodious and unmistakable. Brolgas are overhead, crossing country. They bugle on the fly. In a Sydney gallery, Elder, eminent artist, activator Nancy Yukuwal McDinny scans the postcard I hand her. An aerial photograph of a zinc refinery on the east coast of Queensland connected to the catastrophic McArthur River Mine in her Country (Yanyuwa, Garwwa) near Borroloola in the Northern Territory, Australia. She pauses, steadies her hand, looks more closely, then speaks. This paper presents the project ‘Greetings from Zincland: Unfolding a Shadow Country’ associated with Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation, an international exhibition held in Edinburgh, Scotland in 2017, and forthcoming as a book in 2020. Greetings from Zincland, a postcard I sent across the equator as a digital image, a recorded voice reading, and a critical text, is a dispatch from belonged-by country and its shadow places. It recalibrates vintage 1950’s imagery of local tourist views in the North Queensland port city of Townsville/ Currumbilbarra with one contemporary sighting of a twenty-first century becoming. It introduces and maps a scattered particular-planetary shadow country found in the glare of bleaching tropical light. With it, I unfold a wit(h)nessing story from one shadow place of unexpected connection and confrontation in the antipodean Anthropocene-in-the-making (Yusoff). If a picture postcard is a material form of encounter-exchange, an affect charged one is also an im/material dispatch. And, Auckland, you are one of my shadow places."
Research Interests:
“Relationshapes: When we notice our breathing, we quiet it." Read on.The light touch of this clever collaboration has created a powerful model for creative interdisciplinary thinking and writing. These vignettes are truly pleasurable to... more
“Relationshapes: When we notice our breathing, we quiet it." Read on.The light touch of this clever collaboration has created a powerful model for creative interdisciplinary thinking and writing. These vignettes are truly pleasurable to read as contemporary natureculture writing, as creative non-fiction, and as communiqués of wonder. Wonder. I am mindful that wonder, politics and ethics are inextricably coupled in the present age of critical climate change. Magrane and Cokinos simply ask: “In a hundred years, will we look at some of the pieces [...] as elegies for species past? What will have persisted, what will have arrived?” | This is a review of the book 'The Sonoran Desert: A literary field guide', eds. Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos, University of Arizona Press, 2016. https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/article.php?t=thinking-walking-sonoran-desert-literary-field-guide.
Research Interests:
"Dear Rachel, The news is grim. The Earth bios is unsettling and moving in response to planetary warming. The overdeveloped world of anthropogenic climate endangerment is well underway now, at multiple scales, and in unpredictable,... more
"Dear Rachel,
The news is grim. The Earth bios is unsettling and moving in response to planetary warming. The overdeveloped world of anthropogenic climate endangerment is well underway now, at multiple scales, and in unpredictable, unforeseen and yet-to-be-known ways. “The atmosphere is being radicalised,” astrophysicist Katie Mack recently exclaimed. And yet ...
Compelled by her mid-twentieth century words, I have been making and writing postcards to Rachel Carson in the thick time of the present day. The trilogy of postcard images and short narratives that follows was sparked by a chance encounter in twilight during an austral Spring—or Ngoonungi in the local Dharawal calendar. I thought of Carson. I imagined she might also listen to the trace of that affective exchange in, and as, an aesthetics of practice that composes and speculates with more than words, and across porous boundaries of knowledge from material art-making, science, and affect scholarship."
A short extract from the chapter essay in the multi-authored book '100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder', Open Humanities Press, London: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/
Print ISBN: 978-1-78542-063-4
PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-064-1
Full citation: Boscacci, Louise. “Ecologising Affect and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene: Dear Rachel.” In 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, edited by Susan Ballard, Louise Boscacci, David Carlin, Anne Collett, Eva Hampel, Lucas Ihlein, Jade Kennedy, Jo Law, Joshua Lobb, Catherine McKinnon, Ted Mitew, Joanna Stirling and Kim Williams (The MECO Network), 195-217. London: Open Humanities Press, 2019.
The news is grim. The Earth bios is unsettling and moving in response to planetary warming. The overdeveloped world of anthropogenic climate endangerment is well underway now, at multiple scales, and in unpredictable, unforeseen and yet-to-be-known ways. “The atmosphere is being radicalised,” astrophysicist Katie Mack recently exclaimed. And yet ...
Compelled by her mid-twentieth century words, I have been making and writing postcards to Rachel Carson in the thick time of the present day. The trilogy of postcard images and short narratives that follows was sparked by a chance encounter in twilight during an austral Spring—or Ngoonungi in the local Dharawal calendar. I thought of Carson. I imagined she might also listen to the trace of that affective exchange in, and as, an aesthetics of practice that composes and speculates with more than words, and across porous boundaries of knowledge from material art-making, science, and affect scholarship."
A short extract from the chapter essay in the multi-authored book '100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder', Open Humanities Press, London: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/
Print ISBN: 978-1-78542-063-4
PDF ISBN: 978-1-78542-064-1
Full citation: Boscacci, Louise. “Ecologising Affect and Atmosphere in the Anthropocene: Dear Rachel.” In 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, edited by Susan Ballard, Louise Boscacci, David Carlin, Anne Collett, Eva Hampel, Lucas Ihlein, Jade Kennedy, Jo Law, Joshua Lobb, Catherine McKinnon, Ted Mitew, Joanna Stirling and Kim Williams (The MECO Network), 195-217. London: Open Humanities Press, 2019.
Research Interests: Climate Change, Environmental Humanities, Affect, Anthropocene, Rachel Carson, and 8 moreContemporary Art and Ecology, Art and the Anthropocene, Affective Atmospheres, Feminist Environmental Humanities, Natureculture Writing, Particular-Planetary Aesthetics, Wit(h)nessing, and Anthropocene-in-the-Making Studies
Symposium Session 1 - Future Atmospheres Now: Thinking Critical Climate Futures Louise Boscacci, Anne Collett, Teodor Mitew, Catherine McKinnon "This panel voices a series of readings from the new book 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale... more
Symposium Session 1 - Future Atmospheres Now: Thinking Critical Climate Futures
Louise Boscacci, Anne Collett, Teodor Mitew, Catherine McKinnon
"This panel voices a series of readings from the new book 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, a major creative-critical collaboration by 13 MECO researchers in art, writing and media from 2016 to 2018. Now in press, the book uses atmosphere as a mode, portal and nourishing milieu to craft responses to embodied encounters with climate change and the effects and affects of the accelerating Anthropocene.
100 Atmospheres is especially prescient. On 8 October this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the special report: Global Warming of 1.5°C. The update says “transformational” societal changes are now needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees by 2030 and to prevent the shift into a +2°C “hothouse earth” state of living by 2050. Things just got very real for many looking ahead. As scholars and creative practitioners thinking about climate futures, we are mindful that the future shared atmosphere is being composed here and now, in the critical present. We continue to ask what can art and writing do—differently, or in new interdisciplinary alliances—in engaging with this conversation? Might it also be useful to think in terms of “a new climatic regime,” as Bruno Latour recently proposed? (Bruno Latour 2017, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime)."
Acknowledgement of Country: Jade Kennedy
Symposium Opening: Susan Ballard, co-director Centre for Critical Creative Practice.
See full programme for more.
Louise Boscacci, Anne Collett, Teodor Mitew, Catherine McKinnon
"This panel voices a series of readings from the new book 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder, a major creative-critical collaboration by 13 MECO researchers in art, writing and media from 2016 to 2018. Now in press, the book uses atmosphere as a mode, portal and nourishing milieu to craft responses to embodied encounters with climate change and the effects and affects of the accelerating Anthropocene.
100 Atmospheres is especially prescient. On 8 October this year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the special report: Global Warming of 1.5°C. The update says “transformational” societal changes are now needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees by 2030 and to prevent the shift into a +2°C “hothouse earth” state of living by 2050. Things just got very real for many looking ahead. As scholars and creative practitioners thinking about climate futures, we are mindful that the future shared atmosphere is being composed here and now, in the critical present. We continue to ask what can art and writing do—differently, or in new interdisciplinary alliances—in engaging with this conversation? Might it also be useful to think in terms of “a new climatic regime,” as Bruno Latour recently proposed? (Bruno Latour 2017, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime)."
Acknowledgement of Country: Jade Kennedy
Symposium Opening: Susan Ballard, co-director Centre for Critical Creative Practice.
See full programme for more.
Research Interests:
At a time when climate panic obscures clear thought, 100 Atmospheres is an invitation to think differently. Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human... more
At a time when climate panic obscures clear thought, 100 Atmospheres is an invitation to think differently. Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human relationships with other species and the planet. The process of creating 100 Atmospheres was shared, with works (written, photographic and drawn) created individually and collectively. To think differently, we need to practice differently. The book contains thirteen chapters threaded amidst one hundred co-authored micro-essays. In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation 100 Atmospheres dwells in the deep past and the troubled present to imagine future ways of being and becoming.
100 Atmospheres is an Open Humanities Press Labs Seedbook.
Purchase or download the entire volume as a free pdf here: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/
100 Atmospheres is an Open Humanities Press Labs Seedbook.
Purchase or download the entire volume as a free pdf here: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/
More-than-human social relations in the Anthropocene: Art, Extinction and Nonhuman Futures at home and abroad. Louise Boscacci (University of Wollongong; National Art School), and Philippa Newling (University of Wollongong, AU) Panel... more
More-than-human social relations in the Anthropocene: Art, Extinction and Nonhuman Futures at home and abroad.
Louise Boscacci (University of Wollongong; National Art School), and Philippa Newling (University of Wollongong, AU)
Panel Abstract
The work of art in the Anthropocene is under interrogation by contemporary artists, theorists, historians and curators. New collaborations across the emerging open-field of the postconventional humanities and arts are creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain in this age of extinction and climate change. In the past forty years, as scientists and environmental humanists have recently documented, the abundance of thousands of monitored animal species on the planet more than halved. In Australia this year, a new scientific assessment of imperilled fauna warns of a coming wave of bird and mammal extinctions in the next two decades if there is no change to cultural business as usual. This adds to entangled histories of colonisation and species extinctions regionally, most notably of Australian mammals and New Zealand birds.
Art has long been a site of experimentation, debate and speculation, nuanced translation, and active intervention. We ask: What is the work of art and art history in confronting extinction now? How are contemporary artists in Oceania engaging with transformed and precarious naturecultures or Country? What is the role of art historians, theorists and curators in this conversation? Can new perspectives be gained from socially engaged and participatory art methodologies alongside exhibition practices and scholarship? How can art communicate, intervene or create alternative frameworks for more capacious nonhuman futures? We invite papers and presentations on practices, case studies, collaborative projects, and alternative pathways that engage with the new age of extinction at home and abroad.
Louise Boscacci (University of Wollongong; National Art School), and Philippa Newling (University of Wollongong, AU)
Panel Abstract
The work of art in the Anthropocene is under interrogation by contemporary artists, theorists, historians and curators. New collaborations across the emerging open-field of the postconventional humanities and arts are creating alternative critical frameworks to engage with: the human is more-than-human and the social is an ecosocial domain in this age of extinction and climate change. In the past forty years, as scientists and environmental humanists have recently documented, the abundance of thousands of monitored animal species on the planet more than halved. In Australia this year, a new scientific assessment of imperilled fauna warns of a coming wave of bird and mammal extinctions in the next two decades if there is no change to cultural business as usual. This adds to entangled histories of colonisation and species extinctions regionally, most notably of Australian mammals and New Zealand birds.
Art has long been a site of experimentation, debate and speculation, nuanced translation, and active intervention. We ask: What is the work of art and art history in confronting extinction now? How are contemporary artists in Oceania engaging with transformed and precarious naturecultures or Country? What is the role of art historians, theorists and curators in this conversation? Can new perspectives be gained from socially engaged and participatory art methodologies alongside exhibition practices and scholarship? How can art communicate, intervene or create alternative frameworks for more capacious nonhuman futures? We invite papers and presentations on practices, case studies, collaborative projects, and alternative pathways that engage with the new age of extinction at home and abroad.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Biodiversity loss—the depauperation of more-than-human alterity on the planet—is real, accelerating and unevenly human mediated. In response to climate change, animal and plant species from the poles to the tropics are on the move... more
Biodiversity loss—the depauperation of more-than-human alterity on the planet—is real, accelerating and unevenly human mediated. In response to climate change, animal and plant species from the poles to the tropics are on the move (Ceballos et al. 2015; Pecl et al. 2017). So too, this time of planetary transformation calls for new words and stories that push out from interdisciplinary practice, question familiar vocabularies, and reach for articulacy amidst the flux of eco-social change. This paper introduces the word-concept and practice of wit(h)nessing as a recent contribution to the living lexicon of the international field of the environmental humanities.
Research Interests:
"This thesis of practice-based research begins with a first encounter: the affective provocation of a one hundred year-old pictorial postcard. It draws on a Spinozan-Deleuzian philosophical trajectory of contemporary affect theory in... more
"This thesis of practice-based research begins with a first encounter: the affective provocation of a one hundred year-old pictorial postcard. It draws on a Spinozan-Deleuzian philosophical trajectory of contemporary affect theory in which affect is posited as the generative forces of encounter and the durational passage of those intensities and energies within a vocabulary of becomings. The travelling postcard, named within the project, ‘the Round Table postcard’, is housed in an intergenerational, familial archive in the Queensland tropics: an emplaced material object, and an electric encounter situated in idiolocal country of embodied attunement and connection. The thesis traces the postcard encounter and its becomings as an affective trace, and explores and develops this as a generative modality of creative-critical research and composition.
Embedded within the thesis is a reflective inquiry that engages with affect theory and scholarship. Focus is given to the intersectional potential of affective objects, atmospheres and energies of encounter in the thinking-making-doing of practice. The thesis teases out and articulates a connecting thread of scholarly and poetic response throughout the trace in terms of affective emplacement, synsensorial provocation and ecological discontent. Compositions involve works in ceramics, photomedia, sound, digital video, and crossmedia exhibitions of these as ensemblages. Innovative works developed in the nexus of the translucent materiality of porcelain, LED illumination and photographic ceramic printing draw on and respond to the photographic archive that hosts the surviving postcard. Research and public gallery exhibitions composed from the exploratory oeuvre of the trace are described and reflected on. Explicit connection is made between the affective and the ecological in the context of a localised Anthropocene to suggest a new modality: the shadows trace. This eco-affective trajectory leads to a case study composition of a shadow toponymy. The postcard provocations set in motion an energetic tracery through which the concept of after-affect is proposed and explored as a becoming of an unfinished, lingering affective encounter.
Throughout, the thesis returns to the moments when affect as virtual, transitory yet powerfully generative energy of attunement meets a materially fragile, ephemeral, century-old picture postcard. From the initial material-immaterial provocation, a principal of becoming as an emergent refrain of encounter is heard: a recursive, a-bodied rhythm articulated as pulse_pause. This realisation of the trace vitally informs the compositions of material practice. Final speculations point to the potential of the affective trace as a rich modality of research and practice in the meeting spaces of affect, ecology and contemporary ethico-aesthetics. It is modality that begins and travels—processually and transversally—with encounter, object and movement."
***
Recommended Citation
Boscacci, Louise J., The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter: A picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong, 2016. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725
For the full document with two Appendices, see Research Online, University of Wollongong: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
A separate portfolio of visual, object and sound works that accompany the written thesis is not online. Contact the author for more information.
Embedded within the thesis is a reflective inquiry that engages with affect theory and scholarship. Focus is given to the intersectional potential of affective objects, atmospheres and energies of encounter in the thinking-making-doing of practice. The thesis teases out and articulates a connecting thread of scholarly and poetic response throughout the trace in terms of affective emplacement, synsensorial provocation and ecological discontent. Compositions involve works in ceramics, photomedia, sound, digital video, and crossmedia exhibitions of these as ensemblages. Innovative works developed in the nexus of the translucent materiality of porcelain, LED illumination and photographic ceramic printing draw on and respond to the photographic archive that hosts the surviving postcard. Research and public gallery exhibitions composed from the exploratory oeuvre of the trace are described and reflected on. Explicit connection is made between the affective and the ecological in the context of a localised Anthropocene to suggest a new modality: the shadows trace. This eco-affective trajectory leads to a case study composition of a shadow toponymy. The postcard provocations set in motion an energetic tracery through which the concept of after-affect is proposed and explored as a becoming of an unfinished, lingering affective encounter.
Throughout, the thesis returns to the moments when affect as virtual, transitory yet powerfully generative energy of attunement meets a materially fragile, ephemeral, century-old picture postcard. From the initial material-immaterial provocation, a principal of becoming as an emergent refrain of encounter is heard: a recursive, a-bodied rhythm articulated as pulse_pause. This realisation of the trace vitally informs the compositions of material practice. Final speculations point to the potential of the affective trace as a rich modality of research and practice in the meeting spaces of affect, ecology and contemporary ethico-aesthetics. It is modality that begins and travels—processually and transversally—with encounter, object and movement."
***
Recommended Citation
Boscacci, Louise J., The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter: A picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings, Doctor of Philosophy thesis, School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong, 2016. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725
For the full document with two Appendices, see Research Online, University of Wollongong: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
A separate portfolio of visual, object and sound works that accompany the written thesis is not online. Contact the author for more information.
Research Interests:
2016 Global Ecologies – Local Impacts: The Sixth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture, Australia & New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ) in collaboration with the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI).... more
2016 Global Ecologies – Local Impacts: The Sixth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture, Australia & New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ) in collaboration with the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI). University of Sydney, 23–25 November 2016.
SESSION 9 Artists’ Roundtable 'Ecological Imaginaries', 24 November
Convenors:
- Joshua Wodak, University of NSW
- Dominic Redfern, RMIT University
This was a new presentation of my Shadow Places research begun in 2011, followed by a group discussion with the audience. The artists' abstracts were not reproduced in the programme. The research, however, is laid out in full in chapter six of my doctoral thesis: 'The Trace of an Affective Postcard Encounter: A picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings' (University of Wollongong 2016) - https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
SESSION ABSTRACT
"Creative researchers are becoming increasingly visible in the environmental humanities and this area presents unique opportunities for multidisciplinary approaches to unpacking global ecologies in relation to local impacts. Over two roundtable sessions, from Ecological Imaginaries to Ecological Transformations, the participants will share strategies and insights for creative application to the conference foci. Through a series of provocations and talking points, participants will look to the successes, and potential, of creative research to re-imagine the collective vision of our shared future.
SESSION 9 Artists’ Roundtable 'Ecological Imaginaries', 24 November
Convenors:
- Joshua Wodak, University of NSW
- Dominic Redfern, RMIT University
This was a new presentation of my Shadow Places research begun in 2011, followed by a group discussion with the audience. The artists' abstracts were not reproduced in the programme. The research, however, is laid out in full in chapter six of my doctoral thesis: 'The Trace of an Affective Postcard Encounter: A picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings' (University of Wollongong 2016) - https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
SESSION ABSTRACT
"Creative researchers are becoming increasingly visible in the environmental humanities and this area presents unique opportunities for multidisciplinary approaches to unpacking global ecologies in relation to local impacts. Over two roundtable sessions, from Ecological Imaginaries to Ecological Transformations, the participants will share strategies and insights for creative application to the conference foci. Through a series of provocations and talking points, participants will look to the successes, and potential, of creative research to re-imagine the collective vision of our shared future.
This is the abstract and background to a conference paper delivered at Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions, Australian National University, 19 - 21 June, 2014. 'The route from ecological places... more
This is the abstract and background to a conference paper delivered at Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions, Australian National University, 19 - 21 June, 2014.
'The route from ecological places and the ecological space of thought to affectus / affectio in a compositional pathway scores a refrain of after-affect. At the edge of Maralinga Tjarutja lands, Anangu elders reached out to take museum skins of desert mammals disappeared from both Country, and continent. As a scientist collaborator with these senior informants, the aim was to glean and gather collective knowledge for both community and the biogeographic record. What was not written was the profound emotional and intellectual provocation of these skin objects for elder women who had not seen the animals for decades yet retained specialist knowledge of biology, behavior and cultural emplacement in songs. What was not recorded, except in private field journals and anecdotal debriefings, was the shared grief of this encounter by the mammalogist-provocateurs. Both are humming lacunae in accounts of species loss. Whose voices should write new ecological histories? How to author the voices of deceased Indigenous custodians of ecological knowledge? In invoking ‘the affective’ as a lens of return analysis, and given the entanglement of affect, emotion, sensation and action in contemporary transdisciplinary discourse, which affect/s?'
LOUISE BOSCACCI (BSc Hons; BFA), a former biologist, is an interdisciplinary scholar and arts practitioner presently undertaking doctoral research in the creative arts at the University of Wollongong Australia (‘Finding the Round Table Place: An Illuminated Archive of Affect?’). A key interest is exploring creative and critical possibilities sparked by the affective provocation of an encounter, object or atmosphere. A recent assemblage work, ‘Pulse_ Pause: Eco-ethical Aesthetics in the Shadow Places’ (2013) composed a meeting of affective and ecological becomings of ‘place’, drawing on the rich concept of Shadow Places articulated by the ecophilosopher Val Plumwood.
[page. 17]. | See Chapter 8, "The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter: A picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings" (2016) for a fuller account: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
'The route from ecological places and the ecological space of thought to affectus / affectio in a compositional pathway scores a refrain of after-affect. At the edge of Maralinga Tjarutja lands, Anangu elders reached out to take museum skins of desert mammals disappeared from both Country, and continent. As a scientist collaborator with these senior informants, the aim was to glean and gather collective knowledge for both community and the biogeographic record. What was not written was the profound emotional and intellectual provocation of these skin objects for elder women who had not seen the animals for decades yet retained specialist knowledge of biology, behavior and cultural emplacement in songs. What was not recorded, except in private field journals and anecdotal debriefings, was the shared grief of this encounter by the mammalogist-provocateurs. Both are humming lacunae in accounts of species loss. Whose voices should write new ecological histories? How to author the voices of deceased Indigenous custodians of ecological knowledge? In invoking ‘the affective’ as a lens of return analysis, and given the entanglement of affect, emotion, sensation and action in contemporary transdisciplinary discourse, which affect/s?'
LOUISE BOSCACCI (BSc Hons; BFA), a former biologist, is an interdisciplinary scholar and arts practitioner presently undertaking doctoral research in the creative arts at the University of Wollongong Australia (‘Finding the Round Table Place: An Illuminated Archive of Affect?’). A key interest is exploring creative and critical possibilities sparked by the affective provocation of an encounter, object or atmosphere. A recent assemblage work, ‘Pulse_ Pause: Eco-ethical Aesthetics in the Shadow Places’ (2013) composed a meeting of affective and ecological becomings of ‘place’, drawing on the rich concept of Shadow Places articulated by the ecophilosopher Val Plumwood.
[page. 17]. | See Chapter 8, "The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter: A picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings" (2016) for a fuller account: https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Making a river bowl is a pulse and pause of clay wheeling. It is best done without speaking. It is best done by listening. It is necessary to feel from fingertips to arms, shoulders, lower back, thigh muscles, to the balanced balls of... more
Making a river bowl is a pulse and pause of clay wheeling. It is best done without speaking. It is best done by listening. It is necessary to feel from fingertips to arms, shoulders, lower back, thigh muscles, to the balanced balls of feet, the left on ground bracing, the right the rhythm and speed maker on the wheel’s steel pedal.
https://www.mansfieldceramics.com/yarrobil-magazine-news/feature-article-by-boscacci/
From chapter 5 of 'The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter: a picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings' (2016); PhD Thesis; University of Wollongong Australia. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
https://www.mansfieldceramics.com/yarrobil-magazine-news/feature-article-by-boscacci/
From chapter 5 of 'The Trace of An Affective Object Encounter: a picture postcard, its provocations, and processual becomings' (2016); PhD Thesis; University of Wollongong Australia. https://ro.uow.edu.au/theses/4725/
Research Interests:
EXTRACT In this paper, I gather an idiosyncratic ecology of affect-entangled aesthetics to think with the provocation: ‘Art does not need science and philosophy to function’. British painter Maggi Hambling’s intimate portrait of a... more
EXTRACT
In this paper, I gather an idiosyncratic ecology of affect-entangled aesthetics to think with the provocation: ‘Art does not need science and philosophy to function’. British painter Maggi Hambling’s intimate portrait of a collapsing pancake iceberg (Edge IV, 2015-6) calls out across the northern cryosphere to the twelve Greenland ice trophies harvested, towed and stranded on Parisian cobblestones in Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing’s melt spectacle, Ice Watch Paris (2015). Across the equator on austral grounds, Perdita Phillips’ experimental ecoaesthetic practice gnaws away at the exchange boundaries of human and nonhuman creativity. Her co-poietic work with termites, Tender Leavings (2016), moves notions of becoming-other to a generative, agential aesthetics of becoming-inhuman on a runaway-warming planet; one rich still—even as contemporary bleachings, silencings and immiserations accelerate and bewilder—with multispecific wonders and unforeseen powers.Victoria Hunt’s performative voice-breath lure and lament of controlled rage and postcolonial challenge, Erasure (2016), is a potent reminder that Earthbound and situated bodies, paused in somewheres, simultaneously imbibe and biologically incorporate themselves in the everywhere, borderless energies of planetary atmosphere.
Refereed paper at: 'The Work of Art'. Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference, Australian National University Canberra, 1–3 December 2016. Roundtable of six papers titled: 'Affect, Capital, and Aesthetics: Critical Climate Change and Art History'. Roundtable co-convenors Dr Susan Ballard (University of Wollongong, AU), Bridie Lonie (University of Otago, NZ), Dr Louise Boscacci (University of Wollongong, AU).
In this paper, I gather an idiosyncratic ecology of affect-entangled aesthetics to think with the provocation: ‘Art does not need science and philosophy to function’. British painter Maggi Hambling’s intimate portrait of a collapsing pancake iceberg (Edge IV, 2015-6) calls out across the northern cryosphere to the twelve Greenland ice trophies harvested, towed and stranded on Parisian cobblestones in Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing’s melt spectacle, Ice Watch Paris (2015). Across the equator on austral grounds, Perdita Phillips’ experimental ecoaesthetic practice gnaws away at the exchange boundaries of human and nonhuman creativity. Her co-poietic work with termites, Tender Leavings (2016), moves notions of becoming-other to a generative, agential aesthetics of becoming-inhuman on a runaway-warming planet; one rich still—even as contemporary bleachings, silencings and immiserations accelerate and bewilder—with multispecific wonders and unforeseen powers.Victoria Hunt’s performative voice-breath lure and lament of controlled rage and postcolonial challenge, Erasure (2016), is a potent reminder that Earthbound and situated bodies, paused in somewheres, simultaneously imbibe and biologically incorporate themselves in the everywhere, borderless energies of planetary atmosphere.
Refereed paper at: 'The Work of Art'. Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference, Australian National University Canberra, 1–3 December 2016. Roundtable of six papers titled: 'Affect, Capital, and Aesthetics: Critical Climate Change and Art History'. Roundtable co-convenors Dr Susan Ballard (University of Wollongong, AU), Bridie Lonie (University of Otago, NZ), Dr Louise Boscacci (University of Wollongong, AU).
Image and text.
International Symposium and Exhibition, University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 22—24 June 2017. Curators and Conference Chairs: Benek Cincik & Tiago Torres-Campos.
International Symposium and Exhibition, University of Edinburgh,
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, 22—24 June 2017. Curators and Conference Chairs: Benek Cincik & Tiago Torres-Campos.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
The will to archive continues to be a powerful impulse in contemporary culture (Featherstone 2006). This literature review critically reflects on literature on the topic of the Archive and the engagement of contemporary artists with ideas... more
The will to archive continues to be a powerful impulse in contemporary culture (Featherstone 2006). This literature review critically reflects on literature on the topic of the Archive and the engagement of contemporary artists with ideas about archives and archive-making, including the author's concept of the future archive. A refrain heard in the course of this review was a contemporary preoccupation with memory, particularly with the advent of a possible new age of forgetting as global digital connectivity promotes an unprecedented externalisation of personal and social memory into the virtual memory spaces of the Internet. Selective artistic responses entering and exploring this site of ephemeral potential and emergent creativity are introduced. Publication: 2015, International Journal of Liberal Arts and Social Science | KEYWORDS: Archive, contemporary art, forgetting, counter-archive, material trace, sound archive, ephemerality, future archive
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
At a time when climate panic obscures clear thought, 100 Atmospheres is an invitation to think differently. Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human... more
At a time when climate panic obscures clear thought, 100 Atmospheres is an invitation to think differently. Through speculative, poetic, and provocative texts, thirteen writers and artists have come together to reflect on human relationships with other species and the planet. The process of creating 100 Atmospheres was shared, with works (written, photographic and drawn) created individually and collectively. To think differently, we need to practice differently. The book contains thirteen chapters threaded amidst one hundred co-authored micro-essays. In an era shaped by critical ecological transformation 100 Atmospheres dwells in the deep past and the troubled present to imagine future ways of being and becoming. 100 Atmospheres is an Open Humanities Press Labs Seedbook. Purchase or download the entire volume as a free pdf here: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/one-hundred-atmospheres/
Research Interests:
Amidst climate chaos, words gather as a tipping point in after-affect. On January 4, 2020, the massive Currowan bushfire in New South Wales crossed the Shoalhaven River and raced into the Wingecarribee district of the Illawarra region... more
Amidst climate chaos, words gather as a tipping point in after-affect. On January 4, 2020, the massive Currowan bushfire in New South Wales crossed the Shoalhaven River and raced into the Wingecarribee district of the Illawarra region south of Sydney. After two weeks of emergency warnings, a new preternatural “catastrophic” danger rating, watch and act alerts, and heatwave temperatures, the fire front arrived on a blunt southerly gale in the evening. Climate breakdown had delivered locally and personally. The next day, light rain, more drizzle than shower, visited the home fireground
Research Interests:
A poem entitled "After the Cyclone". Resumen Poema titulado "After the Cyclone".
Research Interests:
The will to archive continues to be a powerful impulse in contemporary culture (Featherstone 2006). This literature review critically reviews and reflects on literature on the topic of the Archive and the engagement of contemporary... more
The will to archive continues to be a powerful impulse in contemporary culture (Featherstone 2006). This literature review critically reviews and reflects on literature on the topic of the Archive and the engagement of contemporary artists with ideas about archives and archive-making. A refrain heard in the course of this review was a contemporary preoccupation with memory, particularly with the advent of a possible new age of forgetting as global digital connectivity promotes an unprecedented externalisation of personal and social memory into the virtual memory spaces of the Internet. Selective artistic responses entering and exploring this site of ephemeral potential and emergent creativity are introduced.