SPATIAL FIGURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Registration will open on 20 September 2023

The symposium and annual conference of the CRC 1265, ‘Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene’, explores how the concept and reality of the Anthropocene disfigure and refigure four key spatial figures of Western modernity: the place, the territory, the network, and the route.

Engagements with climate change and the planetary in the social sciences and humanities have challenged conventional analytical distinctions between global and local as well as human and nonhuman spaces. Tim Morton’s (2013) influential conceptualization of global warming as a hyperobject emphasizes how it transcends human scales of time-space experience and action, thus becoming a viscous, non-local process. At the same time, authors like Bruno Latour (2017) point out the inadequacy of the modern figure of globalization and of understanding the Earth as a globe. In times of climate crisis, he argues, the Earth emerges as Gaia: not a super-organism or system, but rather a rhizome of organism-environment relationships. As these two interventions exemplify, the multiple environmental and planetary crises associated with the Anthropocene fundamentally challenge the scalar logic and figures of modern understandings of space.

Facilitating an interdisciplinary conversation about these transformations seems crucial because of the pervasiveness of spatial categories and imaginaries. The symposium thus brings together leading scholars from anthropology, sociology, architectural theory, science and technology studies, urban studies, and human geography to collectively meet these challenges while reaching a heterogeneous public audience of researchers and practitioners.

AFTER THE LOCAL: 5 Oct 2023

9:30 Registration

10:00 Welcome and Morning Lecture
Ignacio Farías (Berlin) and Silke Steets (Erlangen)
Spatial Figures in the Anthropocene

11:00 Panel I
The Refiguration of Territories
moderated by Ignacio Castillo Ulloa

Gastón Gordillo (Vancouver)
Place, Territory, Terrain: A Spatial Triad for the Climate Crisis

Alexandra Arènes (Paris)
TERRA FORMA Connectedness: From Territory to the Terrestrial

13:00 Lunch break

14:00 Panel II
The Refiguration of Places
moderated by Nina Baur

Tomás Usón (Berlin)
Beyond Place: Encountering Difference in Disastrous Times

Susanne Hauser (Berlin):
Rethinking Place in Architecture, 1980ff.

16:00 Coffee break

16:30 Coffee Conversations

Theory: Anthropocene and Decolonial Theory (with Marcela Suárez Estrada, moderated by Sung Un Gang)
Methods: Speculation as Method (with Alexandra Arènes)
Current Affairs: Mobilities in and of the Anthropocene (with Andrew Baldwin)

19:00 Evening Event
Refiguring Botanical Gardens

Séverine Marguin and Jamie-Scott Baxter (SFB Re-Figuration of Spaces)
Mimetic Spaces: Botanical Gardens in a Shifting Conservation Regime

Digital art installation: Diffracting Natures (Spatial Refigurations in the Metaverse) by Séverine Marguin and Jamie-Scott Baxter in cooperation with the artist-architect Lus Constantin

20:00 Reception

AFTER THE GLOBAL: 6 Oct 2023

9:30 Panel III
The Refiguration of Networks
moderated by Anna-Juliane Heinrich

Jennifer Gabrys (Cambridge)
Animating Digital Infrastructures: From Networks to Phygitalities

Marcela Suárez Estrada (Berlin / Berkeley)
Internet as a Territory: Power and Colonialism in the Digital Era

11:30 Coffee Conversations

Theory: Racialized Geographies of Climate Justice (with Gastón Gordillo)
moderated by Zozan Baran Manderbach
Methods: Engaging Indigenous Knowledges (with Tomás Usón)
moderated by Margherita Tess
Current Affairs: Managing Nuclear Waste (with Susanne Hauser)

12:30 Lunch break

14:00 Panel IV
The Refiguration of Routes
moderated by Indrawan Prabaharyaka

Christopher Kelty (Los Angeles):
Helicopter, Overpass, Non-target: Figuring Pathways in Los Angeles

Andrew Baldwin (Durham)
Mobility and the Anthropocene: Rethinking Routes via a Return to the Real

16:00 Coffee break

16:30 Panel Discussion
After the Local – After the Global?

with Martina Löw (SFB, Berlin), Philipp Misselwitz (SFB / Bauhaus Earth, Berlin), Christopher Kelty (Speaker, Los Angeles), moderated by Jochen Kibel

19:00 Evening Event
An Atlas of Figures We Live By

Book Presentation and Lecture Performance
with Ignacio Farías, Nikolaus Gansterer, Silke Steets

Organized by
Ignacio Farías and Silke Steets for the Collaborative Research Center ‘Re-Figuration of Spaces’ (SFB 1265) in collaboration with the ICI Berlin

How to Attend
At the venue: Registration will open on 20 September 2023

The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin.
If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.