Natalie Loveless: Situated Practices in Precarious Times (12.05.2021)
Abstract
In this lecture Loveless explores the role art can play in attuning us differently within the convergence of crises that govern this time. Grounded in a return to Haraway’s germinal 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Femimism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” this talk will examine feminist, ecologial performance art as a modality that prioritizes aesthetic and affective spaces within which we not only reflect on what is so, but imagine and model things otherwise. Highlighting the importance of a multi-sensorial and multi-species understanding of ecological ethics, Loveless argues for the value of artistic practices that denaturalize the relationalities that govern our current extractivist systems of exploitation and power, seeding the critical and speculative imaginations needed to trouble our current ways of living and dying.
Info
Natalie S. Loveless is an artist and academic located at the University of Alberta’s Department of Art and Design (Canada), where she teaches in the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture, directs the Research-Creation and Social Justice CoLABoratory, and co-leads the Faculty’s Signature Area in Research-Creation. Loveless is author of How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation (Duke UP 2019), editor of Knowings and Knots: Methodologies and Ecologies in Research-Creation (University of Alberta Press 2019), and co-editor of Responding to Site: The Performance Work of Marilyn Arsem (Intellect Press 2020). She is currently working on Speculative Energy Futures, a collaborative interdisciplinary curatorial project on energy transition. Loveless has held fellowships and visiting positions in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture (CISSC) at Concordia University in Montreal, the Center for the Humanities at the University of Utrecht, and Western University, London Ontario. In 2020 Loveless was elected to the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists) for her scholarship at the intersection of research-creation and social and ecological justice.