After Us, The Flood, a symposium curated by Vienna-based artist Oliver Ressler, sets out to connect artistic, activist and curatorial practices addressing the exploitation, pollution and militarization of commodified water. The Speakers share a determination to protect the common, uncontaminated character of the substance that renews life on Earth. Themes discussed will range from rising ocean levels caused by global warming to the ruin of rivers by irrigation projects. The ecological wars waged by oil drillers and client industries turn the world's water toxic or squander it. But this coalition of looters is confronted by alliances like none seen before: Indigenous water protectors with lifetime eco-antagonists, ex-military survivors with social justice movements and others unwilling to die in artificial desert or sink into an overheated sea.

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PARTICIPANTS: 

Katrin Hornek (Vienna), Liberate Tate (London), Maren Richter/Grammar of Urgengies (Vienna), Elena Sorokina (Paris)

 

MODERATION:

Oliver Ressler

 

Grammar of Urgengies’presentation exemplifies with two curatorial projects, The Maldives Pavilion at 55th Venice Biennial and a current project in Malta – which deals with political, economical and ecological parameters of “Islandness” in the Mediterranean Sea –the challenges of rising sea level, the logic of rapidly growing commodification of islands and the sea as a highly politicized battlefield through the lens of tangible limitations of territorial thinking. “The Island is what the Sea surrounds...” a quote by Gilles Deleuze from his early essay “Dessert Island” tries to offer new ecologies of thinking “the un-territorialized” and the topology of the de-colonized and the unfixed as a model of possible radical alternatives. Both projects intend to take a deeper look into modes of address and spaces for “Handlung” beyond representation.