As part of Caves, Dwellings & Vibration, Kathryn Yusoff delivered the keynote presentation Rethinking Geologic Subjectivity in Broken Earths moderated by University of Nottingham’s Director of the Centre for Critical Theory Andrew Goffey. Yusoff’s research examines how inhuman and nonorganic materialities have consequences for how we understand issues of environmental change, race and subjectivity.
Seeing Through Flames is a series of auditory assemblages that turn listening into a collective channel of exchange. These sessions open out the ideas and themes of our research strand, Emergency & Emergence, and survey different possibilities of forming solidarity through sound and music. By looking at politics of spiritual transformation and collective imagination, these study-as-listening sessions explore the potential for the poetic and vibrational undoing of the knowledge that underpins concepts of the dominant modes of being, as well as the oppression those modes create to make ourselves and our planet anew.
‘What is care?’ asks María Puig de la Bellacasa: ‘Is it an affection? A moral obligation? Work? A burden? A joy? Something we can learn or practice? Something we just do?’ Recent social, political and environmental crises have brought new attention to these questions, and to the ways that we perceive and experience forms…
Postnatural Supernatural comprises three short films that consider tree spirit beliefs within rural communities of the Philippines and how these intersect with colonisation, deforestation and bird decline. Each film blends narration, poetry and sound with paper-based artworks, photographic collage and performance.
These poems, written during the COVID-19 pandemic, explore themes of contagion, care, mutual aid and grief.
‘Seeing Man’ is a long narrative poem set in the Siwa Oasis, Egypt. Borrowing its title from Mary Louise Pratt’s term ‘seeing man’ to describe the European male subject whose imperial eyes ‘passively look out and possess’, this poem explores themes of travel, Orientalism, ecotourism, hospitality, and queer care.
This essay by Delphine Grass reflects on the politics of motherhood, attention and national indifference in the context of migration and climate change through the lens of Simone Weil, Hans/Jean Arp and children’s care games.
‘Metastases’ is a personal essay about the death of a sibling in the midst of a global pandemic. Through a mix of memory and theoretical meditation, it explores the distance at the heart of shared experience and the transformative potential of grief.
Anna Johnson’s life writing offers an insight into the complexity and ambivalence of early motherhood. Her fragmented poetic-prose immerses the reader into the affective registers of care, giving space to experiences so often excluded from narratives of motherhood.
The poem’s speaker recounts her baby’s first illness at week three, questioning Adam Smith’s conceptualisation of sympathy and care, and exploring the porous boundary between mother and infant.
This essay explores the relationship between poetry and breath in response to our contemporary crisis of breathlessness.
This poem marks a return to the lyric voice as a means by which to process emotional experience. As an awe-struck bystander to pregnancy and childbirth, the author offers all that he can: a deepened sense of care, of which the poem forms a part.
This pseudo-pantoum’s sections degrade as the text evolves, mimicking tissue decay. The text references one of Heidi Bucher’s latex artworks, braiding it with the considerations of care brought by a loved one’s sudden, open-ended medical diagnosis.
This study of a walnut shell was written during a workshop with Seán Hewitt and is dedicated to a dear friend, C. M.
Two children bump into my legs, I look down and see they’re holding plastic guns, they point at each other and simulate they are shooting. Clicking their tongues against their teeth, they make “bang bang” and machine guns noises. The adult accompanying them smiles at me and says ai, quin parell de bandolers! with a…
In this chapter from the film, ‘Nuestro Juramento’ (2022), Colectivo Ayllu takes us on a journey from the seashore to various monuments through which they draw upon long memories of colonial pain and contemporary realities of violence. The film invites us to go through spaces of pain and healing that coexist simultaneously in a city with a colonial present and past, whilst opening up possibilities of escape and collective healing.
The podcast series, developed in conversation with academics, economists, lawyers, activists and journalists, explores how risk associated with the supply of Critical Raw Materials is unevenly shaping international relations while perpetuating colonial legacies in Europe’s periphery and the Global South. The discussions aim to look beyond these extractive practices to the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise.
In this essay, Ella Finer presents a poetic and sensorial call for remembering and reminds us of the debts we are compelled to forget. Published into the historic and unprecedented days of the heatwave in the UK, into the unabating political uncertainty and governmental fires, this essay exposes the burning present, past and future.
In Department of Absorption, artist Asad Raza presents his proposal to utilize waste products of the landscape to remediate the land in Nottingham.
In this online presentation, art historian and cultural critic, TJ Demos speculates on what comes after growth through looking into practices of Indigenous and Afrofuturism. This keynote concluded After Growth: A Symposium on Post-Capitalist Imaginaries at Nottingham Contemporary, 19-20 March 22.
In this essay, anthropologist and writer Shannon Mattern maps out disappearing landscapes, and fictional and fabricated terrains to offer a critique of atlases of abundance and loss.