About

Framework for Resilience is a three-part series of online conversations which bring together activists, artists, researchers and educators to think about the world we are creating, the world we are destroying, the systems which will fall, and those which should prevail.In this second episode of the series, we start from a collection of questions of how we engage with time, land and ownership: What happens if we consider that the very earth and trees, as well as non-sentient beings like AI and stones, have rights? How can we understand time and consequence differently: understanding that indigenous deaths caused climate change in 1600, and prevent the repeating of history? How do we peacefully transform a racialised colonial system which values the very commodities which are destroying lives, bodies, and lands?Episode host Dr. Nicola Triscott (Director/CEO of FACT) and mediator Helen Starr (Curator), and gathered speakers Jack Tan (Artist), Himali Singh Soin (Writer, Artist) and Nabil Ahmed (Artist, Educator), consider how Western principles do not allow for ethical collaboration between beings, focusing rather on exploitation and one-sided gains. They instead explore how indigenous approaches might influence the way we establish ideas of kinship, and open up our sense of community to include other forms of existence, particularly in the future. If we approach the world with a different sense of time, and with empathy for all modes of existence, we might be able to create new forms of collaboration and notions of belonging.The reading list for this conversation can be found here.------ABOUT FRAMEWORK FOR RESILIENCEThis online conversation is part of The Living Planet, FACT’s year-long season which focuses on the non-human, and deals with themes such as climate change, ecology and communication, as well as the violence of ‘othering’. This series will inform our programme for the rest of the year which focuses on systems of knowledge and classification in the formation of identity and the exercise of power. They also form part of Artsformation, a research project which seeks to identify new ways of working, specifically at the intersection between art, society and technology, to overcome current social crises including justice, democracy and climate. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.The title for these sessions is taken from the artwork, PESTS, by Shonagh Short. Commissioned by FACT in 2020 for FACT Together.ABOUT HELEN STARRHelen is an Afro-Carib curator, producer and cultural activist from Trinidad, WI. She began curating exhibitions with artists such as Susan Hillier, Cindy Sherman and Marcel Duchamp in 1995. Helen founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010, to give marginalised artists access to technologies such as Game Engines, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR). Helen has worked with many public institutions such as Wysing Art Centre, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD in Derby.Being Indigenous-American Helen is interested in how digital artforms transform our understanding of reality by world-building narratives through storytelling and counter-storytelling. How, by “naming one’s own reality” we can experience the Other.Helen has commissioned projects from artists such as Rebecca Allen, Danielle Braithewaite-Shirley, Anna Bunting-Branch, Megan Broadmeadow, Aliyah Hussain and Salma Noor. Helen believes that speculative artworks can give a glimpse of a future filled with hope. Helen is on the board of QUAD, Derby and in 2020 she co-founded DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Salma Noor.ABOUT JACK TANJack uses law, social norms and customs as a way of making art. He creates performances, sculpture and participatory projects that highlight the rules that guide human behaviour. Jack trained as a lawyer and worked in civil rights NGOs before becoming an artist. His Ph.D research explored legal aesthetics and performance and he co-edits the Art/Law Journal. Recent projects include Four Legs Good (2018) a revival of the medieval animal trials for Compass Festival Leeds and V&A London; his Singapore Biennale presentation Voices From The Courts examining the vocality of the State Courts of Singapore (2016), Law’s Imagination (2016) a curatorial residency at arebyte exploring legal aesthetics; his solo exhibition How to do things with rules (2015) at the ICA Singapore; and Closure (2012), a year-long residency and exhibition at the UK Department for Health looking at the liquidation of their social work quango. Jack has also taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art and University of Brighton, and politics at Goldsmiths.ABOUT HIMALI SINGH SOINHimali is a writer and artist based between London and Delhi. She uses metaphors from outer space and the natural environment to construct imaginary cosmologies of interferences, entanglements, deep voids, debris, delays, alienation, distance and intimacy. In doing this, she thinks through ecological loss, and the loss of home, seeking shelter somewhere in the radicality of love. Her speculations are performed in audio-visual, immersive environments. Her almanac ‘we are opposite like that’, comprises missing paraphernalia from polar archives, false philosophies, unreliable observations from the ship, love letters, ekphrastic poems, and made-up maps. It marks the culmination of the eponymous interconnected body of work (since 2017) exploring the uninhabited parts of the Arctic and Antarctic circles from the perspective of ice, and its uncanny bearing on the rest of the world.ABOUT NABIL AHMEDNabil Ahmed is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer. He leads INTERPRT, an environmental justice project that investigates and advocates for the criminalisation of ecocide under international law. INTERPRT’s long term research has been exhibited most recently at the Warsaw Biennale/The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Beirut Arts Centre and The Museon museum for science and culture in The Hague. He has written for Third Text, Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge, MIT Press, Routledge, Documenta, Volume magazine, Sternberg Press, Mousse Publishing, Scientific Reports, Archeological and Environmental Forensic Science, among others. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture He has taught and lectured extensively in the UK and internationally.