Studium Generale day 1

Stefanie Hessler: “Undercurrents: A Journey Across Water, Soil, Bodies, Spirits, Technologies and Time”

This day dives into the Caribbean roots and routes across the Atlantic, considering the ocean as that which connects rather than that which divides. The contributing artists and scholars reflect on the unevenness of those connections against the abstract flows of global capital. They draw links between the urgent ecological present and colonial reverberations affecting human and nonhuman bodies.

With: Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Julien Creuzet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Josèfa Ntjam / Hugo Mir-Valette

Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer, and editor focusing on ecologies and its various social intersections. She is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway where she has curated critically acclaimed solo exhibitions by Frida Orupabo and Jenna Sutela, among others. Most recently she co-led the large-scale research-based exhibition Sex Ecologies together with The Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory, and edited the accompanying compendium on queer ecologies, sexuality, and care in more-than-human worlds (published with the MIT Press, 2021). Hessler has curated biennales and been an independent curator for exhibitions across the world, from Athens to Recife, and Kochi to Berlin. Between 2020–2021 Hessler was chief curator for the 17th MOMENTA Biennale titled Sensing Nature in Montreal, Canada. Other recent curatorial projects include Rising Tides / Down to Earth at the Berliner Festspiele and Gropius Bau in Berlin, Germany (2020); Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II at Ocean Space in Venice, Italy (2019); and the symposium Practices of Attention at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (co-convener, 2018). She is the author of the book Prospecting Ocean (2019) and editor of, among others, Tidalectics: Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science (2018) both published with the MIT Press.

About Oceanic Imageries 

“Oceanic Imaginaries” conceives the oceans as sensors that feel, create and connect. From an ecological point of view, the oceans are 'critical zones' that require radical changes in our thinking and acting. They are also dark archives filled with suppressed stories of transatlantic trade in enslaved people or boat refugees in the Mediterranean. However, the oceans can also be experienced as immersive spaces of affect and liberation in which new forms of life can emerge. How can we liquefy our ways of being? How can we think from and with the ocean?