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Climate Forum III

The Climate Forum is a series of online meetings hosted by HDK-Valand within L’Internationale’s Museum of the Commons programme. The series builds upon earlier research resulting in the (2022) book Climate: Our Right to Breathe and reaches toward emerging change practices.

Climate Forum III – Towards Change Practices: Poetics and Operations

The Climate Forum is a space of dialogue and exchange in response to climate change and ecological degradation across discursive, artistic, political and operational registers. It asks: How might the speculative and critical insights framed within the registers of the discursive, the affective, and the symbolic infiltrate and be operationalised within everyday working?

Climate Forum III is programmed by Nick Aikens and Nkule Mabaso

Morning (11h-12h CEST): Prologue, Nick Aikens and Nkule Mabaso


Early afternoon (14h-15h30): Poetics and Operations, with Otobong Nkanga and Maya Tounta
The session moves between Nkanga’s studio in Antwerp, the farm co-run with her brother Peter Nkanga and Akwa Ibom, the space she co-founded with Maya Tounta in 2019. Nkanga’s poetry and close readings of images and objects will serve as entry points to dwell on questions of transformation, failure, regeneration, repair and change.

Otobong Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, ecological and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, her research based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter.

Maya Tounta is a curator and writer based in Athens, Greece. She is director of Akwa Ibom, a nonprofit exhibition space, which she co-founded with Otobong Nkanga in 2019. Through Akwa Ibom and together with Radio Athènes and Melas Martinos, she represents the Estate of Christos Tzivelos and the archive of George Tourkovasilis. Together with Tom Engels, she is co-curator of the 15th edition of the Baltic Triennial organised by the Contemporary Art Centre in Lithuania.


Late afternoon (16h-17h30): 'We the Heartbroken', Part II, with G and Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide:
The session, that takes its name from Gargi Bhattacharyya's eponymous publication, extends a series of workshops carried out by G and van der Heide with the Van Abbemeum’s collection department that explores how death figures within heritage institutions. At stake is the possibility to consider the ‘life and death cycle’ of art works, breaking the stranglehold of infinite accumulation and conservation that is at odds with acknowledging climate breakdown, practices of sustainability and care.

G is an artist and death researcher.

Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is senior curator at the Van Abbemuseum. Current research focuses on regenerative time via death life cycles with artist G and studying the un/chrono/logical timeline tool with Another Roadmap Africa Cluster toward the 2026 collection display at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Nick Aikens is the Managing Editor and Responsible for Research, L’Internationale Online

Nkule Mabaso is a researcher based at HdK-Valand, University of Gothenburg

All times are CEST.

Booking a free place

The event is online and participation is free, however, booking is required. Enquiries to contact Dr Nick Aikens, HDK-Valand: nick.aikens@internationaleonline.org.

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