The Climate Forum II and III

The Climate Forum is an online space of dialogue and exchange responding to climate change and ecological degradation. Hosted by HDK-Valand within L’Internationale’s Museum of the Commons programme, it builds upon earlier research resulting in the publication (2022) Climate: Our Right to Breathe and focuses on change practices. It asks: how might the speculative and critical insights framed within the registers of the discursive, the affective, and the symbolic be operationalised within everyday working?

Climate Forum II: September 27 (times CEST)
Colonial Toxicity, the Climate Movement and Art Institutions

11am–12pm: Prologue, event curators Nick Aikens (Managing Editor and Research Responsible, L’Internationale Online) and Nkule Mabaso (researcher at HdK-Valand)

2–3:30pm: Debt of Settler Colonialism and Climate Catastrophe
Across three cases, in Algeria, Guadeloupe and French Polynesia, the session considers the intersections of archives and poetics shaping environmental justice claims in current/former French colonies. Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez is an interdependent curator, writer, and editor. Since 2021, she manages the Arts and Culture Programme at Cité internationale des arts, Paris. From 2014-17 she was L’Internationale Online’s managing editor. Samia Henni is a historian and exhibition maker of the built, destroyed and imagined environments, and author of Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (2024) and Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017, 2022). Olivier Marboeuf is an author, storyteller, artist, film producer and independent curator from Guadeloupe, and a member of the RAYO inter-Caribbean research programme in art education, and the artistic council of the Akademie der Künste der Welt, Cologne. Marie-Hélène Villierme and Mililani Ganivet are co-directors of the film Nu/clear Stories, 2023, an assembly of voices and stories around the legacy of thirty years (1966-1996) of nuclear testing in French Polynesia.

4–5:30pm: Can the Art World Strike for Climate?
Whilst the art system has thematised climate breakdown, this session focuses on direct action and asks how art institutions might respond to global climate movement demands. Kuba Depczyński is Curator of Public Programs, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, focussing on postartistic practices; relations between technology and art; art and climate crisis; and contemporary ecological thought. He chairs L’Internationale’s Climate Assembly. Kinga Parafiniuk is a student of diplomacy at University of Gdansk and an activist from the Polish Tricity chapter of Fridays for Future. Helen Wahlgren is an activist from the Swedish group Återställ Våtmarke (Restore Wetlands), which began blocking highways in Spring 2022 raising public awareness on urgencies of restoring wetlands.

Climate Forum III: October 18 (times CEST)
Towards Change Practices: Poetics and Operations

11am–12pm: Prologue, Nick Aikens and Nkule Mabaso

2–3:30pm: Poetics and Operations, with Otobong Nkanga
The session moves between Nkanga’s Antwerp studio, the farm co-run with her brother Peter, and Akwa Ibom space co-founded with Maya Tounta, 2019. Nkanga’s poetry and close readings of images and objects offer 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, sensual and surreal approaches, her research based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter.

4–5:30pm: Towards Change Practices, with G and Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide
Building upon a  workshop series by G and van der Heide with Van Abbemeum’s collection department exploring how death figures within heritage institutions, this session considers the “life and death cycle” of art works, breaking the stranglehold of infinite accumulation and conservation that disavow climate breakdown, practices of sustainability and care. G is an artist and death researcher. Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide is senior curator at Van Abbemuseum. Current research focuses on regenerative time via death life cycles with G and studying the un/chrono/logical timeline tool with Another Roadmap Africa Cluster toward the 2026 Van Abbemuseum’s collection display.

Booking
Participation is free, however, booking required. Enquiries: nick.aikens [​at​] internationaleonline.org.