Promise No Promises!

With the third Symposium "Women on Earth" we were seeking to understand the relations between feminism and species coexistence. The issue of nature—and of all that is naturalized or deemed unnatural by hegemonic discourses and policy—is of particular importance to gender issues, as is science. But a scientific and technical approach to the climate emergency cannot be accurate without taking into consideration how gender, racial, and economic violence foster our emergent ecocides, nor by how women—often poor and Indigenous women—are overwhelmingly at the forefront of this violence as the very first recipients of. What kind of political and cultural transformation must occur to make these entanglements obvious and of vital concern? How to counter this violence in all its manifold forms?

Our guests were: Rossella Biscotti, Neha Choksi, Ingela Ihrman, Institute of Queer Ecology, Sophie Jung, Lysann König, Thomas Lempertz, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, New Mineral Collective (Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė), Katrin Niedermeier, Heather Phillipson, Mathilde Rosier, Lena Maria Thüring.

In this episode Neha Choksi and Tanya Busse and Emilija Škarnulytė (New Mineral Collective) are introducing their artistic practices and presenting alternative ways of engaging with environmental and social questions.

Artist Neha Choksi lives and works in Los Angeles and Bombay, India. Working in performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, she disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of everything—from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Involving a confluence of disciplines, in various formats, often collaboratively and in unconventional settings, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization.

Artists Tanya Busse (born in Moncton, NB, Canada, lives in Tromsø, Norway) and Emilija Škarnulytė (born in Vilinus, Lithuania, lives in Tromsø, Norway) are New Mineral Collective (NMC), a platform that looks at contemporary landscape politics to better understand the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth’s surface. As an organism, NMC infiltrates the extractive industry with alternative forces such as desire, body mining, and acts of counter prospecting.

This episode has Mark Sadler and Jörg Heiser sharing pearls of wisdom concerning the grammar of painting, architecture of philosophy and notions of freedom. And suddenly, the horizon is opening up wide.

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

The third episode in the series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Elisabeth Bronfen looking at Virginia Woolfe’s ‘Breaking the Waves’ and comparing Woolfe's feeling of ‘walking a tightrope over nothingness’ to Heidegger’s notion of individual existences as 'being thrown' into the world. Also the horizon (see episode two) is returning to the debate.

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

The first episode in a series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Aleksandra Mir imagining an artist and a scientist sitting on a train where a conversation ensues about objective realities, space exploration, negative space and belief.

In spring 1929, just a glimpse before the Great Depression and the Great Crash to come soon, the Cassirer-Heidegger debate takes place in Davos; Ernst Cassirer pulls his arguments for a broader conception of humanity, his counterpart is Martin Heidegger and his relativism. The quest of a universal truth drives a ‘continental divide’ (Peter E. Gordon) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ (Henning Ritter), anticipating major philosophical debates to come. 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we were repeating the question that led the historical debate: What is it to be human?

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

The second episode of the series of chapters from Disputaziuns Susch, an annual conference scheme hosted by Art Stations Foundation CH and Grazyna Kulczyk, has Timotheus Vermeulen analyzing opposing positions: Where Cassirer believes that his point of view projects the horizon; Heidegger believes that we are thrown into a horizon, which means the horizon is there before us or rather, in his terms, with us.

In spring 1929, just a glimpse before the Great Depression and the Great Crash to come soon, the Cassirer-Heidegger debate takes place in Davos; Ernst Cassirer pulls his arguments for a broader conception of humanity, his counterpart is Martin Heidegger and his relativism. The quest of a universal truth drives a ‘continental divide’ (Peter E. Gordon) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ (Henning Ritter), anticipating major philosophical debates to come. 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we were repeating the question that led the historical debate: What is it to be human?

Disputaziuns Susch, from the beginning in 2017, has been a multi-disciplinary annual endeavor, bringing together scholars and artists, philosophers and authors, neuroscientists and historians – thinkers who will be asking questions and counter questions – in its 2019’s editions circling around the possibilities for universal truths versus a relative view of human temporality and finitude, rational thinking and the notion of men as ‘symbolic animals’, creating a universe of symbolic meanings, versus our being-in-the-world, perceiving the world via our relationship to time. Taking the Davos disputation in 1929, between Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, as a starting point, this ‘continental divide’ (as Peter E. Gordon called it) or ‘Weggabelung der Philosophie’ as per Henning Ritter – 90 years ahead, in Susch, 40 minutes away from Davos, once again in times of disorientation, disillusion, with radical movements on the rise, we are repeating the question that led the historical debate: Was ist der Mensch? What is it to be human? This vast theme is broken down into several more specific discourses, concerning especially the relationship of philosophy, politics and art.

Diputanziuns Susch 2019 speakers were: Grażyna Kulczyk (founder and president of the board, Art Stations Foundation CH), Mareike Dittmer (director Art Stations Foundation CH & chair Disputaziuns Susch), Aleksandra Mir (Poland-born artist, Swedish-American citizen based in London), Timotheus Vermeulen (Dutch scholar and critic, associate professor in Media, Culture and Society at the University of Oslo, Norway), Tadeusz Slawek (Polish lyricist, essayist, translator, literary critic and professor), Elisabeth Bronfen (Swiss/German/American literary and cultural critic, professor and chairholder for English literature at the University of Zurich and global distinguished professor at New York University), Marcus Steinweg (French-German philosopher, professor at Kunstakademie Karlsruhe), Mark Sadler (Scottish artist & writer, guest professor at UdK, Berlin), Jörg Heiser (German philosopher and art historian, director Institut für Kunst im Kontext, Berlin)

The two days Symposium “Women in Space” at the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel thematized the roles of scale, space and power in envisioning women in the art system: Space is an issue for everyone, yet, it has specific resonance for those who make exhibitions and run institutions, and for women in general. How we move through space, how we claim it, how we narrate and thematize it, how we fund it, how we labor in it, how we construct and deconstruct it.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Manuela Moscoso, Elena Filipovic, Nikola Dietrich.

The two days Symposium “Women in Space” at the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel thematized the roles of scale, space and power in envisioning women in the art system: Space is an issue for everyone, yet, it has specific resonance for those who make exhibitions and run institutions, and for women in general. How we move through space, how we claim it, how we narrate and thematize it, how we fund it, how we labor in it, how we construct and deconstruct it.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Manuela Moscoso, Nadine Wietlisbach, Fanni Fetzer and Sophie Jung (from the audience).

The two days Symposium “Women in Space” at the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel thematized the roles of scale, space and power in envisioning women in the art system: Space is an issue for everyone, yet, it has specific resonance for those who make exhibitions and run institutions, and for women in general. How we move through space, how we claim it, how we narrate and thematize it, how we fund it, how we labor in it, how we construct and deconstruct it.

In this episode Chus Martinez & Quinn Latimer are in conversation with Raffael Dörig, Fanni Fetzer, Nadine Wietlisbach, Sabine Himmelsbach.