May 12–13, 2017
Conference:
Friday, May 12, 10:30–6pm
College 9/10 Multipurpose Room
University of California, Santa Cruz
Santa Cruz, CA
Saturday, May 13, 10am–4:30pm
Resource Center for Nonviolence
612 Ocean Street
Santa Cruz, CA
Related exhibition:
May 20–June 24
Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson
Unearthing Disaster I & II
Minnesota Street Project
1275 Minnesota St.
San Francisco, CA
Opening: May 20, 5–7pm
with artists’ remarks at 5:30pm
In this two-day conference, invited guests including Angela Anderson and Angela Melitopoulos, Caleb Behn, Nick Estes, Brian Holmes and Claire Pentecost, Mary Hsia-Coron, Ann López, Jason Moore, and Anne Quirynen will join attendees to explore the current and proliferating cultures of EXTRACTION.
Here, extraction designates capitalism’s fundamental logic of withdrawal—of value, nutrients, energy, labor, time—from people, lands, culture, life-forms, and the elements. It signals that these withdrawals are made without corresponding deposits except in the form of pollution, waste, climate change, illness, and death, which are unequally distributed along racialized, gendered, sexualized, and class-based lines. Extraction, therefore, determines the conditions of living and dying in the era of fossil fuel capitalism and catastrophic climate change.
Under the rubric of extraction, this influential and diverse group of thinkers, artists, and activists will give presentations, screen artworks and films, and lead discussions interrogate how this politics of disaster visualized, negotiated, and contested in places as far-ranging and interconnected as British Columbia, North Dakota, Chicago, and California. They will consider the roles artists, legal activists, Indigenous water protectors, media theorists, writers, architects, designers, and other cultural producers play in envisioning and negating extractive politics and policies.
This conference is organized by UCSC professors T.J. Demos of the Center for Creative Ecologies and A. Laurie Palmer, with Rachel Nelson of the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Chessa Adsit-Morris.
Unearthing Disaster I & II, a video installation by Berlin- based artists, Angela Melitopoulos and Angela Anderson, is being presented by the UCSC Institute of the Arts and Sciences and Minnesota Street Projects in conjunction with EXTRACTION, curated by IAS founding director John Weber.
Unearthing Disaster I & II are two-channel video installations, produced respectively in 2013 and 2015, that poetically document the destruction of a pristine, mountainous forest region in Northeastern Greece by Eldorado Gold, a Canadian mining company.
Angela Melitopoulos produces experimental video, installations, documentaries and sound pieces about mnemopolitics, time, geography and collective memory. Melitopoulos studied at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Nam June Paik, and holds a Ph.D. in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University in London. She is a professor in the Media School of the Royal Art Academy of Fines Arts in Copenhagen. Melitopoulos’ videos and installations have been awarded and exhibited in many international festivals, exhibitions and museums. Currently she is undertaking a film project for dOCUMENTA14.
Angela Anderson is an artist & filmmaker working at the intersection of the fields of philosophy, ecology, economics, migration, media and feminist & queer theory. Recent exhibitions include Framer Framed – Amsterdam, the 2015 Thessaloniki Biennale and Holbaek Images (both with Angela Melitopoulos). She is the exhibition designer for Forum Expanded (Berlin International Film Festival) and holds an MA in Film and Media Studies from the New School, and is currently a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
The EXTRACTION conference and the related exhibition are sponsored by the Center for Creative Ecologies, the Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS), the Center for Documentary Arts and Research, the UCSC Arts Research Institute, Colleges Nine and Ten, the UCSC American Indian Resource Center, the McEvoy Family Fund of the IAS, the IAS Alumni Fund for Visiting Artists, UCSC Arts Division, and annual donors to the IAS.