Right of Nature in transformation processes of the Urban Landscape
Saara Ekström, (FI) and Mauricio Corbalan (AR)
Moderator: Rebecka Wigh Abrahamsson, curator Uppsala Art Museum
Event/Panel talk: 17th of September, 17:00-19:00
The Nordic Guest Studio, Malongen, Nytorget 15A
How can rights of nature be granted in today’s transforming urban and political landscape? The Nordic Art Association brings together the artist and filmmaker Saara Ekström from Turku and the architect Mauricio Corbalan from Buenos Aires to learn more about their artistic approaches to the challenges facing society today with regard to climate change and the environment, and a special focus on Human-Animal Relations.
Saara Ekström is invited by Uppsala Art Museum as one of the artists in the exhibition The Non-Human Animal – Negotiating Bio-relations 28.9-24.11 2019. She is artist in residence September 5-22 at Malongen in Stockholm. Saara Ekström works in film, photography, text and installation. Diverse medias are combined to create worlds in which reality and fiction, memories and oblivion entwine. Ekström is drawn to materials, objects and images that embody strong symbolic values, while questioning our conventional ways of classifying and evaluating matter. Chronotopes where time and place densify, nature which nurtures and erodes, the ambivalent desire to both remember and forget are all at the core of Saara Ekström’s art.
Ekström’s work has been shown extensively in Finnish and international group and solo exhibitions in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010.
Mauricio Corbalan is Studio grantholder at Iaspis The Swedish Arts Grants Committee in Stockholm August - October 2019. As an architect he active in the collective m7red. The practice could be sum up in how cities and territories are nowadays reorganized by data, gender and species. These categories are effectively reorganizing cities instead of those that emerged shaped public space during the age of modernism.
“We are currently exploring some of these issues when figuring out the spatial consequences of granting rights to animals or doing forensics of crimes against nature together with affected stakeholders. […] Our practice consists to describe and forecast how these scenarios evolve by means of information philosophy, ethnography and postnormal science.”
Mauricio Corbalan studied Architecture and Urbanism at the FADU-UBA. From 1999 till 2004 he was member of “m777” an architect’s collective and since 2005 he is codirector- together with Pio Torroja- of m7red, an independent research and activist group focused on building tools and methodologies for the description of complex scenarios. From 2009 to 2014, m7red took part in “GarageLab”, a hackerspace delivering open data platforms to tackle Buenos Aires worst environmental issue: the polluted Matanzas Riachuelo river basin. Currently m7red is working, together with Forensic Architecture, on the spatial consequences of the Sandra’s case, the first captive orangutan granted non-human rights at the Buenos Aires Zoo, and in establishing a laboratory for territorial technologies inside an excluded workers union in the Buenos Aires area.
M7red has also developed projects and collaborations with Jeanne van Heeswijk, Raumlabor - Berlin, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Transit Labour, Tomas Saraceno and Forensic Architecture. Its works has been exhibited at the Mercosul Biennale in Porto Alegre, Brazil, The APAP project 2010 in Seoul and the 3d. Design Biennale at Istanbul.
https://www.saaraekstrom.com/
https://www.facebook.com/events/2829202103773912/
http://www.m7red.info/
Image: © Saara Ekström, Body All Eyes, 2018.