Kick-off event: School for MultiSpecies Knowledges

The Orangerie | May 14, 2022, 11 – 17h | Part of the Shadow Floriade

The first edition of the School for MultiSpecies Knowledges will take place from May 14 until July 3 2022. A group of participants will engage in weekly meetings and exchanges with guests and develop a public program for the last two weeks of June in which they will take people along in retuning ourselves to other life forms, taking the Orangerie and the outdoors of the Amstelpark as our laboratorium. This is the first event in a public series that invites everyone interested to join conversations and experimentations of the School.

Programme

11:00 Welcome and introduction Irina Shapiro & Alice Smits

11:30-13:00 Mark Shillitoe, Entangled gestures of being-with

In a relational field of participatory gestures, the audience will tune into the space, the others and each other through a series of playful grounding movements and positionings. Mark Shillitoe currently divides his time between that of educational researcher and a classroom teaching practice at International School Delft. As a practice-based researcher he employs a series of arts-based pedagogical tactics to explore the relationship between thinking and making. His work navigates sense-laden, relational modalities and is guided by walking practices, generative mapping methodologies and a participatory practice of community gardening.

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:30 Rolando Vázquez, Decoloniality towards Earth
A cartography workshop and conversation on the intersection between Earth and social justice: “Can we live an ethical life in a world in which our well-being and sense of self is implicated on the suffering of human and non-human others and the extraction of Earth?”

Rolando Vázquez is a teacher and decolonial thinker. He is regularly invited to deliver keynotes on decoloniality at academic and cultural institutions. Vázquez is currently Associate Professor of Sociology and Cluster Chair at the University College Utrecht. Since 2010, he co-directs with Walter Mignolo the annual Maria Lugones Decolonial Summer School , now hosted by the Van Abbemuseum. In 2016, under the direction of Gloria Wekker , he co-authored the report “Let’s do Diversity” of the University of Amsterdam Diversity Commission. He is an Advisor at the Jan van Eyck Academy for 2021/2022.

15.30-15.45 Walking break (lead by Mark Shillitoe)

15.45-17.00 Introduction of the plans of School participants

17.00-17.30 Closure exercise