Abstract:
Words often fail when justice enters multispecies realms. This is why we seek artists and scientists, teachers and children, makers and doers of all kinds to collaborate with us in the work of sympathetic imagining across gulfs of species difference. Multispecies justice demands political and aesthetic innovations. Somehow it is easier to notice injustice (the lack of something), than recognize justice. Building on the archive of writing about ugly injustices and the supposed perfection of justice, Naisargi Dave asks: “Why is the ugly more palpable than the beautiful?” In exploring the aesthetic possibilities of multispecies justice we intend to exhibit the ugly alongside the beautiful, the grotesque alongside the surreal. Our exhibit will build on the long legacy of the environmental justice movement—we seek new proposals for distributive justice that are concerned with the equitable sharing of resources as well as renderings of new infrastructures that might protect vulnerable communities from toxic exposures. We will open up the idea of “the environment” with artworks oriented to other creatures who are recognized as dignity-bearing subjects and world-makers with their own relational aesthetic sensibilities.
Areas of STS Scholarship: University-Society relations, Food and Agriculture, Environmental/Multispecies Studies
Authors/Participants: Eben Kirksey, Deakin University
Sophie Marie Helene Chao, The University of Sydney
Francisco Vergara-Silva, Instituto de Biología, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Julieta Aranda, e-flux
Liliana Riva Palacio, Proyecto Concentrarte
