Monday, 10 June 2024, 2-9 pm, ICI Berlin
Symposium with
Jean-Ulrick Désert | Renan Laru-an | Ruth Ramsden-Karelse | Ted Junior Östervall | Kwame Edwin Otu
– Please note: This event takes place at ICI Berlin, Christinenstraße 18-19, Haus 8. –
The phrase ‘queer waste’ evokes a volley of disparate themes and images, ranging from queerness’ potential anti-reproductivity, to aesthetics that might be understood as trashy or campy, to panics about changes in gender or sex caused by the presence within ecosystems of toxicity and pollutants. More broadly, ‘queer waste’ indexes the entwinement of waste as pollution with the lives of queer people—a relation often coded by the afterlives of industrial colonialism perpetuated by global capital. In this way, ‘queer waste’ suggests a geographical orientation through which both queer bodies and lived environments cast a light on racial and carceral capital. The diverse mechanisms through which this manifests range from the corralling of underprivileged communities into so-called ‘cancer alleys’—areas in which plants emit hazardous chemicals posing heightened risk to residents’ health—to the revaluation and repurposing of electronic waste—rapidly piling-up discarded electric equipment—in certain Global South areas including in India, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire.
This symposium brings together scholars, artists, and members of the public to explore how such entanglements play out and are resisted and reimagined in both theoretical and fictional worlds, via film, the visual arts, literature, and scholarship.
Programme:
14:00 – 15:45
The Queer Ecologies of Waste
Seminar led by Ted Junior Östervall15:45 – 16:15 Coffee Break
16:15 – 18:15
Artist Jean-Ulrick Désert in conversation with Renan Laru-an18:15 – 19:00 Coffee Break
19:00 – 21:00
Death as Queer Possibility: Waste and the Normativity of Life in Postcolonial Ghana
Keynote Lecture by Kwame Edwin Otu
Moderated by Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Event in cooperation with ICI Berlin, co-organised with Mark Anthony Cayanan, Maria Dębińska, Ted Junior Østervall, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, and Ben Woodard.
