Without Winter:Curating Environmental Imaginaries
After the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, the northern hemisphere was plunged into cold and darkness under a cloud of ash, creating what came to be known as ‘the year without a summer.’ It was this phenomenon that was famously recreated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenst...
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| Format: | Conference Object |
| Language: | English |
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ICI Berlin
2019
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| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.25620/e190314 https://oa.ici-berlin.org/files/original/10.25620_e190314/DSC09519_600x450.jpg https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/without-winter/ |
| Summary: | After the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, the northern hemisphere was plunged into cold and darkness under a cloud of ash, creating what came to be known as ‘the year without a summer.’ It was this phenomenon that was famously recreated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or: The Modern Prometheus, published two hundred years ago during a period of general global climate cooling. Responding to the present, different climate disaster, philosopher Delia Hannah has edited a collection of stories, essays, and artworks dealing with environmental crisis under the title A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2018). Nadim Samman met Hannah under conditions reminiscent of the opening scenes of Shelley’s novel, at the Antarctic Bienniale he co-curated in 2017. After their meeting, Hannah and the artist Julian Charrière returned to Indonesia to climb the volcano that set this story into motion and encountered landscapes of oil palm cultivation that feature in Charrière’s film An Invitation to Disappear (2018). The event at the ICI Berlin continues these encounters. Hannah, Samman, and Charrière will be joined by literary scholar Alison Sperling to question the cultural registers of ongoing planetary climate change, and the artistic and literary engagements with destabilizing natural patterns summoning new planetary imaginaries. What does it mean to anticipate, imagine, or prepare for ‘a year without a winter?’ The event will include screenings of An Invitation to Disappear (2018) by Julian Charrière and Loveland (2011) by Charles Stankievech. Julian Charrière is a French-Swiss artist based in Berlin whose work bridges the realms of environmental science and cultural history. Marshalling performance, sculpture, and photography, his projects often stem from fieldwork in remote locations with acute geophysical identities — such as volcanoes, ice-fields, and radioactive sites. To date, his works has explored post-romantic constructions of ‘nature’, and staged tensions between deep ... |
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