Join us for a Talk with T.J. Demos - Counterinsurgent: Cop City, Abolition Ecology, and The Aesthetics of Counter-Reform, moderated by Vivian Sky Rehberg.
When: Monday, December 16, 2024.
Time: 18:00 – 20:00 hrs.
Location: Auditorium, Willem de Kooning Academy, Wijnhaven 61.
Register: here
Important: If you are unable to attend, please cancel your registration in the registration tool to allow someone else to take your place.
If “climate apartheid” is on the rise, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, then Cop City Atlanta—the multimillion-dollar new police training facility built by clear-cutting the city’s largest green space—offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City’s contested construction (which is ongoing) an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism. It also spotlights the forces of contemporary counterinsurgency—including its aesthetic modalities—that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmental movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change. How might a prehensive climate-justice-directed art history, and an insurgent arts of the possible, meaningfully respond?
Talk with T.J. Demos
T. J. Demos is professor of art history and visual culture at UC Santa Cruz, and directs its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes about contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (2016), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (2017), and most recently, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (2023). 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).
Moderator - Vivian Sky Rehberg
Vivian Sky Rehberg is a writer, researcher and educator. You will find her work in the archives of existing and defunct magazines and online platforms (including Frieze, Artforum, Art Agenda, Mousse, A Prior, e-flux criticism and e-flux journal), and between the covers of artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, and anthologies. She is Senior Research Lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy-Piet Zwart Institute, and an associate of the Rotterdam Arts and Sciences Lab (RASL).
Please note:
The invitation to T.J. Demos for this talk is at the suggestion of artist Jonas Staal, and with the support of BAK, Utrecht. On December 14 and 15, Jonas Staal is organising Climate Propaganda Congregation following his latest book on the subject, with a nice line-up of different speakers, including TJ Demos. All students are welcome. To sign up for the Climate Propaganda Congregation, click here.
