LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE.

MORE INFO AT SSIIMMIIAANN.ORG.

In 2024, I was invited to curate the first events of Thinking Out Loud at Simian in Copenhagen. This series series of talks delves into critical themes spanning arts, philosophy, and social sciences. It aims to showcase diverse perspectives, promoting a collective exchange of ideas and dialogue.

Taking Denmark as a starting point and examining its interconnected role within the global landscape, the second talk, titled "What Present? What Future? What Land? Coming together in the Age of Chaos" seeks to politicize sustainable practices while underscoring the urgent need to confront colonial history. In this endeavor, it seeks to reimagine and conceptualize more equitable futures through chronopolitical methodologies, at a time when the pervasive visibility of enduring systems of violence and oppression makes the very idea of a collective future seem almost unimaginable. Yet, grassroots movements and organizations, drawing from Indigenous radical traditions and emancipatory praxis, are pioneering new experiments through visual culture, aesthetics, and social activism.

Rooted in the concept of radical futurism, first introduced by the Black Quantum Futurism collective and later expanded by art historian TJ Demos in his recent book, this talk raises a pivotal question: As we resist neoliberal nihilism and fatalism, what present, what future, and what land can our communities envision for themselves?

Guest Speakers:

T. J. Demos is the Patricia and Rowland Rebele Endowed Chair in Art History in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press (and translated into Danish by Informations Forlag).

Siri Paulsen has a master’s degree in Theatre & Performance Studies from University of Copenhagen. She works as a dramaturg, sound designer and artist, often with a focus on decolonizing the relationship between Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Denmark. Siri experiments with different formats - an example of this is the free audio walk Spor af Grønland (Traces of Greenland, ed.) which is an audio walk to Copenhagen, tracing the lines in the historic Christianshavn to Greenland.

Pujita Guha is finishing up her Ph.D at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests hover around questions of the environment, social justice, and contemporary Indigenous art and media practices of South and Southeast Asia. She is also an artist and curator, and for now is the co-curator of Hosting Lands: a Denmark centered land and community driven exhibition project.

The talk was curated and moderated by Elia-Rosa Guirous-Amasse on November 2024 at Simian.