Art & Sustainability Research Lab: Staying with Silt in the Dark

On Monday the 2nd of November, the Art & Sustainability Professorship organises a Research Lab, a platform for sharing, experimenting, developing, or deepening research practices within or related to the Professorship. Each edition is hosted by a different guest researcher and/or artist. For this edition, we've invited Laura Hofman.

Photo: Simone Viola

Are you a fellow researcher, artist, or simply a curious being with an interest in arts and sustainability? Feel welcome to join us from 13.00 to 15.30 for 'Staying with Silt in the Dark. Queer Ecologies of the Wadden Sea', a performative workshop and collective ritual with silt and their aquatic ecologies, hosted by researcher and artist Laura Hofman.

While the artistic research project Slibfluisteraars has engaged with silt in many intriguing ways, you are invited to stay with the trouble of silt, and the tales of the Wadden Sea, just a little longer.

The Wadden region is under increasing pressure, a crisis that is also entangled with how we relate to this shifting landscape: how we feel, name, envision and orient ourselves within it. The languages of silt, in particular, are full of contradictions, leaking into one another and forming a muddy whirlpool in which neat binaries begin to collapse. From venijnig slib to het zwarte goud, the ways we speak about silt reveal different desires and fears of relating to this aquatic world.

What might these contradictory stories reveal about our own thirst to know and orient ourselves? And what happens when knowing about silt and the region is no longer enough to orient us? 

Without giving away too much beforehand, you are invited to come listen with Laura in the dark. 

About Laura Hofman 
Drawing on her background in Applied Psychology and developing artistic research, Laura questions and rewrites stories of the “psyche” within ecological dystopian worlds. Through a hydrofeminist lens, and with a fascination for radio, folklore, death and ecological grief, she tunes into strange frequencies that make humanness crumble. Listening-with the more-than-human, her artistic research follows watery ways of thinking that leak into the territorial mind, unsettling the ground beneath our feet. Along the way, monstrous creatures creep into her work, stirring up questions of who or what gets to decide what it means to be human. 

Practical information 
Date: Monday 2 November 
Time: 13:00 – 15:30 
Free entrance 
Location: A1.07, Minerva Praediniussingel 59, Groningen
We kindly ask you to be on time and to commit to attending the full session 

Readings (optional)
Mehrabi, Tara. "Queer ecologies of death in the lab: Rethinking waste, decomposition and death through a queerfeminist lens." Australian Feminist Studies 35.104 (2020), pp.138-154 (visit this page for PDF)

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3-25. http://site.ebrary.com/id/10151042. Suggested sections: "Thesis III: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis" (pp. 6-7),  "Thesis VI: Fear of the Monster is Really a Kind of Desire." (pp. 16-20), "Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold of Becoming" (p.20).

Puig de la Bellacasa, María. “Thinking with Care.” Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 69–93.

Hope to see you there!