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All Film Installation Lecture Performance | All 2015 2016 | All Artists/speakers Masterclasses News Panel Programme Static pages Two columns Wide page |
Heather Davis: The Queer Futurity of Plastic
Sunday 28 February
10:00 - 11:00
De Brakke Grond
Pinar Yoldas, Ecosystem of Excess (2014)
Plastic is often thought of as a malleable material; its metaphorical connotation, plasticity, implies movement and shape shifting. However, plastic is actually one of the most durable compounds on earth and its presence is reshaping the ecosystems that it proliferates within. For many animals, chemical plasticisers – most infamously Bisphenol A (or BPA) – mimic natural hormones, rendering us less and less fertile. Plastic is also becoming the anthropogenic substrate of a whole new ecology of viruses and bacteria, termed the plastisphere. Plastic, and its associated plasticisers, are among the many anthropogenic compounds that are heralding-in an increasingly infertile future, or a future filled with strange new life forms. While this forecast is certainly horrific, what might queer theory, disability studies, and theoretical approaches to the notion of toxicity teach us? In other words, if instead of running from these toxic and infertile futures, as Mel Chen, Claire Colebrook and others suggest, what might we learn if we began to embrace the nonfilial progeny that plastic, and the plastisphere, might produce?
Heather Davis
Heather Davis is a researcher, writer, and editor from Montreal, who participates in expanded art practices that bring together researchers, activists, and community members to enact social change. A postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, she is currently researching the ethology of plastic and its links to petrocapitalism.