Please join us for the next BioCriticism webinar:
The biodiversity of neglected spaces in poetry and art curation
16th of May 2025 at 14-15:30 Central European Time (13-14:30 British Time)
a BioCriticism webinar with Jonathan Skinner, Martin Grünfeld and Simone Cecilie Pedersen
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84523330019?pwd=NDCbZZV8GsF9cCsmjz7gAd0cBl29ll.1
Meeting ID: 845 2333 0019
Passcode: 982651
First speaker: Dr Jonathan Skinner (English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick), “Ruderal Prosodies: Poetry, Plants, World-Ecology”
Contemporary culture (in fiction, film and television, the visual and performing arts) tells us ever more stories about socio-ecological life at abandoned sites of resource extraction, as the pressures of what environmental historians persuasively argue is one world-ecology expose further sites of conflict around the globe. In this combined story of uneven fortunes in the wake of exhausted resource frontiers, where is the poetry? As a genre, poetry itself tends to inhabit the (semi-)peripheries of institutional and creative economies and so might be particularly responsive to forms of life emerging at abandoned sites of primary resource extraction. This talk focuses on a relatively recent ‘phytopoetic’ turn in contemporary writing—in the work of poets such as Peter Larkin, Stephen Collis, Sumana Roy, JJJJJerome Ellis—to explore poetry’s affinities with the plant life, often ruderal, that moves into the spoils of resource extraction and development, ‘rewilding’ its abandoned landscapes with their inventive strategies for flourishing. (The poetry of John Clare reminds us that this recent turn participates in a long history of ecopoetics, as the expanded field of poetic practice within the horizon of a world-ecology in crisis.) As both a speculative practice and an art of memory, poetry comes to life in these “third landscapes,” spaces gardenist Gilles Clément has termed “the elective territory of diversity, and therefore of evolution, [which] favours invention and is opposed to accumulation” (Manifesto of the Third Landscape). Like the social life at their borders, such ecologies might be catastrophically damaged or they might be harboring “gardens in motion”: what prosodies emerge in these precarious spaces of invention, paused between abandonment and remediation, in exchanges between poets and plants seeking out new rhythms of resistance?
Second speakers: Dr Martin Grünfeld (Science Communication, University of Copenhagen) and Simone Cecilie Pedersen (Curator, National Gallery of Denmark), “Towards a metabolic welcoming: Fungal relations troubling hospitality at the museum”
Hospitality has become a key concept in contemporary art and curatorial practice. In this talk, we trouble our curatorial experiment The Living Room at Medical Museion through the concept. In The Living Room we attempted to welcome the absolute others of the museum (such as fungi) and establish more-than-human relations. In this context, the concept of hospitality may appear ill-suited as it is anthropocentric from the outset, most often focusing on social relations and politics. Yet precisely its slippery nature in Derrida’s treatment invites us to develop an expanded sense of hospitality. In the talk, our aim is to deconstruct our curatorial experiment to revisit the ambivalences, tensions and uncertainties involved in hosting fungal relations Through slippery binaries such as inside/outside, host/guest, invited/uninvited, inclusion/exclusion, we consider how the microbes over time destabilize our curatorial experiment calling for us to find ways to respond to those others that do not neatly belong within our curatorial categories. We end the chapter proposing the notion of a metabolic welcoming as a deeply transformative, perhaps even dangerous, welcoming of material and biological processes. A welcoming that embraces microbial agencies as always already present even in an apparently dead space such as the museum and calls for us to acknowledge our limitations as hosts and allow ourselves to be overtaken by the other. Only by giving up the role of hosting and respond to these living non-human organisms, can we truly become the hosts that we cannot be.
Dr Jonathan Skinner is a poet, editor, translator, and critic, known for founding the journal ecopoetics. His poetry collections include The Archive (Gong Farm, 2024), Chip Calls (Little Red Leaves, 2014), Birds of Tifft (BlazeVOX, 2011), Warblers (Albion Books, 2010), and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He has published numerous essays at the intersection of poetry, ecology, activism, landscape and sound studies—most recently on Documentary Environmental Poetics for the Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics (2023) and on Joanne Kyger’s Eco-Dharma for Poet in Place and Time: Critical Essays on Joanne Kyger (Clemson University Press, 2024). He teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
Dr Martin Grünfeld is an assistant professor in science communication at the University of Copenhagen. He holds a PhD in continental philosophy from University College Dublin but often finds himself working in the intersections between disciplines and engaging in transdisciplinary collaborations with artists, communicators and curators involving other organisms. For the past five years, he has worked as a curator and researcher at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen focusing on care, decay, metabolism and more-than-human art-science collaborations through material encounters and exhibition making. Currently, he is developing his research in arts-based science communication focusing on issues around climate change and sustainability through sound art and ecopoetics. This research will lead to the co-authored volume Science Communication as Sustainability to appear in 2025 with Bristol University Press. Previously he has published the monograph Writing and Thinking in Contemporary Academia: The Poetics of Clarity with Routledge and research articles in e.g. Journal of Medical Humanities, Centaurus and Parrhesia.
Simone Cecilie Pedersen is a curator and art interpreter at SMK, The National Gallery of Denmark. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Copenhagen and has been working specifically on the notion of hospitality in relation to art-science collaborations in and visitor experiences with contemporary art in her thesis. Simone is also a member of the editorial board for the Danish art journal Periskop and has previously occupied positions at Arken museum of contemporary art and the Medical Museion.
BioCriticism is organised by Liliane Campos with the support of PRISMES EA4398 and the Institut Universitaire de France. For information and links, please contact liliane.campos@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr or check the BioCriticism website.
