Resource Hungry: Our Cultured Landscape and its Ecological Impact
January 29–30, 2021
From January 29–30, 2021, the Verbier Art Summit will celebrate its fifth anniversary, launching a new virtual platform and inviting leading artists and thinkers from all over the world to deepen the Resource Hungry discussion started at the 2020 Summit in Verbier, Switzerland.
The 2021 virtual Summit consists of a two-day free digital programme, welcoming all those with a love for art, innovation and ecology to participate. The Summit’s open programme can be explored over the course of the two Summit days at leisure, with three new talks and five international debates by new and former Summit speakers. This is a time of great change and the Summit gladly offers a central role for artists and innovative thinkers to enable transformation and inspire action on the ecological crisis.
Jessica Morgan, the Summit’s 2020 partnering museum director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York, reflects back on the theme Resource Hungry, stating: “It took a virus to halt aspects of our culture that were destroying the environment. Now is the moment to reflect on how we can evolve in response to the questions posed at the 2020 Verbier Art Summit: Can we learn from the light touch and holistic thinking of indigenous cultures that have cared for the land for generations? Can we reassess the spaces, habits, structures, and systems of culture to find new ways to operate and new ways to experience? Can we rethink our values?”
The 2021 Summit speakers are invited by Jean-Paul Felley, the Summit’s Academic Director and Director of the EDHEA (the Valais School of Art) and include the Swiss artist Claudia Comte, Professor Tom Battin and cultural leaders Hedy Graber and Madeleine Schuppli. These interdisciplinary speakers will offer their different perspectives on a resource hungry epoch and reflect on how we can find a new way forward.
The Summit’s Strategic Director Beatrix Ruf conceived the international debate series, moderated by the former partnering museum directors and coming from all over the world: New York, São Paulo, Beijing, and London. The debates include speakers such as the artists Andrea Bowers, Carolina Caycedo, Philippe Rahm, Naine Terena and Clare Twomey, philosopher Djamila Ribeiro, professor Timothy LeCain, director of the EPFL-ECAL Lab Nicolas Henchoz, museum directors Daniel Birnbaum, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Jessica Morgan, Philip Tinari, and Jochen Volz, as well as ecological change-makers such as Alison Tickell, the founder of Julie’s Bicycle, a London based charity that supports the creative community to act on climate change and environmental sustainability. Each debate will be concurrently live-streamed on social media and will include a live Q&A session on the 2021 Summit days: January 29 and 30.
A themed art and ecology section will further encourage Summit participants to take action: “Repair our relationship to the land, by shifting away from endless resource extraction” and “begin to repair our relationships with one another in the process”, as the Canadian author Naomi Klein described so powerfully in her book On Fire. The Burning Case for a Green New Deal (2019).
About the Verbier Art Summit
The Verbier Art Summit is an international platform for discourse in a non-transactional context. The non-profit Summit connects thought leaders to key figures in the art world to generate innovative ideas and drive social change. The annual in-person event in Verbier, Switzerland, will not be held in January 2021 due to current health regulations. All new Summit content will be shared on the virtual platform, bridging artistic and social distances globally.
If you are interested in learning more about the Summit’s theme, the accompanying publication Resource Hungry: Our Cultured Landscape and its Ecological Impact edited by Jessica Morgan and Dorothea von Hantelmann, designed by Irma Boom and distributed by Koenig Books London, is now available to purchase in specialty art book stores, museum shops and online.
Free registration for the 2021 virtual Summit and for more information on the theme, speakers and the virtual platform, please visit verbierartsummit.org or follow the Summit channels:
Instagram @verbierartsummit / Twitter @verbierartnow / Facebook Verbier Art Summit
