Climate Forum II

Climate Forum II – Colonial Toxicity, the Climate Movement and Art Institutions

The Climate Forum is a space of dialogue and exchange in response to climate change and ecological degradation across discursive, artistic, political and operational registers. It asks: How might the speculative and critical insights framed within the registers of the discursive, the affective, and the symbolic infiltrate and be operationalised within everyday working?

Climate Forum II is programmed by Nick Aikens and Nkule Mabaso

Morning (11h-12h CEST): Prologue, Nick Aikens and Nkule Mabaso

Early Afternoon (14h-15h30): Debt of Settler Colonialism and Climate Catastrophe
Across three cases, in Algeria, Guadeloupe and French Polynesia, the session will move through the intersections of archives and poetics in claims for environmental justice in historic and current French colonised territories.

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an interdependent curator, writer, and editor. Since 2021, she has managed the Arts and Culture Programme at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. Between 2014-17 she was the managing editor of L’Internationale Online.

Samia Henni is a historian and an exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024).

Olivier Marboeuf is an author, storyteller, artist, film producer and independent curator from Guadeloupe. He is a member of the RAYO inter-Caribbean research program in art education, and of the artistic council of the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne.

Marie-Hélène Villierme and Mililani Ganivet are co-directors of the film Nu/clear Stories, 2023, an assembly of voices and stories around the legacy of thirty years (1966—1996) of nuclear testing in French Polynesia.

Late afternoon (16h-17h30): Can the Art World Strike for Climate?
Whilst the art system has long mastered representational and discursive capture in relation to climate breakdown, this session focuses on direct action and asks how art institutions might respond to the demands of the global climate movement.

Kuba Depczyński is Curator of Public Programs at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, focusing on postartistic practices, the relationship between technology and art, art in the face of the climate crisis and contemporary ecological thought. He chairs the L’Internationale Climate Assembly.

Kinga Parafiniuk is a student of diplomacy at the University of Gdansk and activist from the Polish Tricity chapter of Fridays for Future.

Helen Wahlgren is an activist from the Swedish group Återställ Våtmarker (Restore Wetlands). Återställ Våtmarker started with highway blocks on March 28, 2022. Since then they have managed to vastly raise public awareness on the urgency of restoring wetlands.

Booking a free place

The event is online and participation is free, however, booking is required. Enquiries to contact Dr Nick Aikens, HDK-Valand: nick.aikens[at]internationaleonline.org