Session: 6h
Day: Friday 17 April
Time: 9.15–11.00
Room: JK2–3 0.19
Chair:
Kitija Balcare (University of Latvia), “Ecotheatre as In-Between Space: Wounded Landscapes and Traps within Them”
Abstract: Art, including theatre, plays a crucial role in reimagining the values essential for addressing ecological crisis (Chaudhuri, 1994). The spatial dimension of the performing arts provides a unique platform for exploring the interconnectedness of species. In this context, embodied experience – through the body, its expressions, and materiality – becomes central. Ecotheatre, as a space of collective imagination, integrates the environment – whether real or imagined – into the narrative, assigning it an active, dynamic role (Balcare, 2022). This approach is receptive to posthumanism perspectives that emphasize interconnectivity, transcending human-centred boundaries. Posthumanism challenges the human-constructed separations, positioning all beings – human and non-human – within an ongoing corporeal, spatial, and material relationship (Alaimo, 2010, 2023).
The author will examine several examples of ecotheatrical landscapes in Latvian theatre, focusing on the presence of “traps” within them. The analysis will explore memory as a trap, the body as a trap, the museum as a trap, and the destroyed ecosystem as a trap. Within a posthumanism framework, traps manifest in physical, existential, and ontological forms. In the physical realm, both humans and non-humans can become ensnared in toxic environments or constrained spaces. Existential traps emerge through the interplay of memory and body, while ontological traps arise from human exceptionalism, fostering a sense of separation from non-human world.
As climate change and environmental degradation transform once habitable landscapes into uninhabitable or “wounded landscapes”, they not only exacerbate socio-economic inequalities but also intensify the vulnerability of non-human worlds (Radomska, 2024). Disillusionment arises from the discrepancy between expectation and reality, and it is within this “in-between” space that hope can be reimagined – confronted with unfulfilled potential, the audience is invited to imagine what might have been (Heddon, 2018). In ecotheatre, this “in-between” space becomes a critical site where disillusionment is coupled with the possibility of hope, creating a space for active engagement.
Bio: Kitija Balcare, Ph. D. (c.), researcher at the Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia, theatre critic, lecturer at Latvian Academy of Culture. Research interests include posthumanism, ecocriticism, with particular focus on ecology and sustainability in the performing arts. Currently researching how ecotheatre evolves as a form of environmental activism. Lead of the scientific committee for project Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift (STAGES). Outside academia, worked for a decade as an environmental journalist.
Agnė Narušytė (Vilnius Academy of Arts), “The Inflamed Body as a Future Landscape: Installation by the Artistic Duo Pakui Hardware and Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė in Venice Biennale”
Abstract: The modern fear of socio-political infection created many territories of dreary landscapes, fenced off by barbed wire and marked by surveillance towers guarding skeletal bodies condemned to death. Postmodern thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, on the contrary, saw potential in the mingling with alien elements. Then, our bodies as ‘assemblages’ would be able to mutate and thus adapt to the changing Earth constantly transformed by multiple catastrophes accelerated by the climate change. The Lithuanian artistic duo Pakui Hardware (Neringa Černiauskaitė and Ugnius Gelguda) offered a vision of such abandoned stability and hybrid identities in their installation Inflammation at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024.
The historic church Chiesa di Santʼ Antonin, still carrying lost meanings of the past in its décor, was transformed into a future storage of plastic waste. But on those lifeless ‘dunes’, artificial beings emerged. Shining orange glass organs, linked with metal tendons, seemingly managed to use the poisonous matter to create a kind of life. They were also feeding on paintings by Marija Teresė Rožanskaitė created in the 1970s and 1980s. By focusing on heart surgery, on sterile and technological medical environments and their associations with cosmic space, the artist also reflected on the way Soviet occupation dealt with disobedient subjects. The tubes carrying imaginary fluids connected the paintings of the past and the mutating life of the future, feeding the mutated half-artificial organs and transforming the church into a body. The paper will analyse this system of temporal and spatial, socio-political and corporeal entanglement forming the infected landscape of the future.
Bio: Agnė Narušytė, PhD, is an art critic, curator, researcher, professor at the Vilnius Academy of Art and the editor of the cultural weekly 7 meno dienos. Her authored books include: The Aesthetics of Boredom: Lithuanian Photography 1980–1990 (Vilnius Academy of Arts Publishers, 2010), Lithuanian Photography: 1990–2010 (baltos lankos, 2011), and Chronometers: Imagining Time or Chronopolitics, Heterochrony and Experiences of Acceleration in Lithuanian Art (Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2021).
The Wondersearch Collective (Issy Clarke, Styn Grieten, Saskia Stehouwer, and Harry Wels), “The Dandy Explorer: A Tale of Many Voices”
Abstract: We, the Wondersearch Collective (Issy Clarke, Styn Grieten, Saskia Stehouwer, and Harry Wels), celebrate the dandelion as a non-human trailblazer reinhabiting deserts of concrete and tarmac. Through images, illustrations, objects, dreams, poetry and prose, this presentation takes you on a journey. We follow the parachuted pioneer from the moment of finding the crack in the pavement and putting down roots, to the time, decades ahead, when this tiny start-up, initiated by dandelion, has transformed into a rich multispecies community. In contrast with many of the human explorations of the past, the dandelion’s ‘exploitation’ of a crack in the pavement does not make the world less liveable for a more-than-human collective. Quite the reverse: the dandelion catalyses a metamorphosis from life-denying concrete and tarmac to life-supporting soil, using the incredible strength of its roots to break open human-made surfaces, all the time offering its own body for food and healing. We approach this tale for our times in a spirit of enchantment, and approach the dandelion, and those who follow its path, as respons-able others demonstrating their resistance and inspiring our wonder by co-creating generative communities in de-animated places.
Bios:
Saskia Stehouwer studied Dutch and English literature at the University of Amsterdam. She has published four volumes of poetry: wachtkamers (waiting rooms), which received the prestigious C. Buddingh’-prize; vrije uitloop (free range); the compostable poetry book bindweefsel (connective tissue) which was handwritten on homemade paper from kitchen scraps and plants; and wonen op de rand van het wonder (living on the edge of the miracle. Saskia is one of the founders and core members of the Klimaatdichters (Climate poets).
Isabella Clarke is an independent researcher who has written and presented on non-human animal cultures and relationships with the more-than-human. She is particularly interested in wild Animals and Plants. Her studies embrace the factual and scientific, the theoretical and ethical, and the speculative and imaginal. She works as a broadcast journalist (covering sports) and volunteers for various conservation organizations in her home country, the UK. She is also on the Stewardship Council of The Kerulos Center for Nonviolence.
Harry Wels calls himself a ‘multispecies organizational ethnographer’ and is Associate Professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the African Studies Centre Leiden at Leiden University and Extra Ordinary professor at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies. He has this idea that there is no time to waste to keep on studying and reflecting on our multispecies entanglements and share and discuss his thoughts about this with students and colleagues.
Eliane Beaufils (University Paris 8), “The Art of Alliances with Ecosystems”
Abstract: In Cross Fruit and Faire Commun, the collective least invests in urban sites in Geneva together with local residents. There, it develops permacultural and feral practices grounded in both new and vernacular forms of knowledge (such as planting fruit trees or caring for shared spaces with animals and plants in a park).
The group of artists gathered around curator Nada Schroer in the Rhineland for Walking With Water Ghosts traces waterways threatened with disappearance due to the loss of springs that have been excavated by mining companies. They examine existing and anticipated hydrosocial ruptures, the possibilities of regeneration, and the more-than-human forces of resistance that may unfold.
In both cases, the collectives establish new human–nonhuman commons together with residents, theater spectators, and local political actors. They provide them with tools for cultivating these commons: gestures, texts, agricultural implements, and (para)institutional scores. Their embodied calls to engagement first confront participants with the question of how they can and should contribute to ecological commons. The interventionist dimension of art is extended through the transmission of means and sites for enacting directly effective modes of action.
This contribution examines how art works to connect the call to action with the potency to act (Berardi 2017). It will first focus on the connections forged with places, people, and performative means within complex dramaturgies over the short and medium term. It will then turn to the temporalities at play: while one project unfolds over two years, the other takes place within a single day. Thus the care of more-than-human coexistence and the alliances between humans and non humans take different forms. This analysis makes it possible to evaluate each project’s potential to transform space and its inhabitants (or their modes of living) in the short or medium term.
Bio: Eliane Beaufils is Professor of Performance Studies at the University Paris 8. Since 2018, she has been conducting research on Anthropocene theatricalities in the projects Theater facing Climate Change and Stages for a new world led at EUR ArteC with Flore Garcin-Marrou. In this context, she has published around twenty articles and two collective works, Dramaturgies des plantes, Tangence, n° 132, 2023 and, co-edited with Climène Perrin, L’Écologie en scène. Théâtres politiques et politiques du théâtre, Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2024.