On Sensitivity Arts, Science and Politics in the New Climatic Regime

all right such a lovely crowd here tonight good evening distinguished guests scholars and artists from performance studies international colleagues and students from the University and members of the public I'm Rachel Fincham and I'm the head of the school of culture and communication here at the University and I'm delighted to serve as your host this evening for what should be a remarkable keynote lecture to inaugurate the performance climates conference we have a few introductions to make which will be followed by Professor Latoya's lecture and we will then open the floor to questions and a final thank you in recognition of the traditional owners of Australia being celebrated particularly this week for NAIDOC National Aboriginal Islander day of observed observance committee it is the custom of the university to pay our respects to the country's indigenous custodians and so it is my very great pleasure to introduce auntie Diane cure an elder of the rendre people of the Kulin nation on whose land this university sets auntie Diane will give the welcome to the country for this contract conference and this lecture so welcome Rd Diane good evening everyone I honor my ancestors and my elders like knowledge everyone here this evening and I pay my respects to your ancestors elders and families and I'm very proud and honored to be here on behalf of my family this is part of our traditional country of my grandmother and mother and ancestors and I always feel very honored to be able to do welcomes on their behalf my family lived along the Bering ma the Yarra River just down behind Flinders Street Station before they are moved to a place called coronary station which is a mission in Healesville and that's where my grandmother was born the MCG is our traditional ceremonial area down the road a lot of you won't know where I'm talking about but it's down that way it is the confluence of the Mary Creek and the Yarra River and that's traditional initiation grounds and the ground between the Children's Hospital and the zoo is the meeting place of the Kulin nations of which were andrea is one of the five tribes and they met their yearly and did all their business and trading and marriages so Melbourne is very important to me and I always feel at home and I'm in my backyard and along here is very spiritual as well and there's lots of scarred trees and and lots of things to be able to see I know that you've all come from different places from all over the world so woman gqo welcome from over the waters and I think you'll find the city very lovely to be in and hopefully it will get a bit better the rain but it's been very very cold these last few weeks so I'm not promising you the Sun maybe but I'd like to ask each and every one of you while you are here and I do this every day for my welcomes because I truly believe we can live in a better world so I'd like to arts each and every one of you to talk to someone that you don't know and share your stories about who you are and where you come from I firmly believe if we can understand each other we can live in harmony we live in harmony we eradicate racism and stigma and it's our children and up-and-coming future leaders that benefit from that they live in peace and they can walk our streets without fear of any harm and all it takes is an open heart and an open hand so I'd like to offer you my friend in my hand in friendship so that we can journey together may bunch of my creators surround you all and keep you safe on country on behalf of my elders I say woman chica Warren Jerry belet huen windy Beck and that means welcome to the home of her andriy country I wish to welcome you from the tops of the trees to the roots in the ground so when we look after each other and we look after country country truly looks after us noon guardian thank you so thank you auntie Diane who because of NAIDOC week has had numbers of commitments today and also tomorrow and throughout the rest of the week so we thank you very much for welcoming us here to this conference on behalf of all members of the organization organizing committee of performance climates here at the University I am thrilled and excited that performance studies international psi has finally made it to Australia for this the 22nd conference in the organization's 20th year it's been a long wait psi is a unique academic organization that recognizes the value of critical and engaged arts practices ranging from theatre to performance art celebrates the role of public events from festivals to political protests and interrogate the social impacts of mediated cultural production psi has also always been a progressive organization that fosters interdisciplinarity cultural diversity and informed debate when I returned to Australia after working in the northern hemisphere for some years I felt the time had come to bring the conference to the global South following a long Inferno like summer in 2013 the primary issue for this country seemed to be the polarized views that were then held on climate and the polarizing experience of droughts and flooding rains to quote from an iconic Australian poem were we facing an ecological crisis or not our scientists were saying yes while our political masters were saying no whose authority were we to believe in arguing for and against the risks that massive changes in temperature seemed to be wreaking on our relatively fragile ecosystem and increasingly fractured society given that the play between truth and illusion the conjuring of atmospheres and the promise and problem of agonistic ideas lie at the heart of performance our conference proposal to performance studies was to come and think here with us about performance climates we felt that the heady mix of activism art science collaborations and the new theater of that aesthetics of performance studies might provide a provocative and imaginative means of interpreting and acting in response to current circumstances as a professor here at this university at Melbourne I'm also proud to say that this university is a very civic university one that participates fully in the intellectual life of the city and encourages its academics to contribute to the political and cultural agendas of the day indeed earlier this year the vice-chancellor professor Glyn Davies himself a political scientist wrote eloquently about and I quote how fortunate we are to be part of a civil community a place for exchange challenge conversation and traffic in knowledge and ideas a key to this civilized culture is a shared respect for competing voice a few points of view end quote professor Davis is an avid champion of the comprehensive University thus as enthusiastic about scientific inquiry and public policy as he is an advocate for community cohesion and the creative potential of the arts and humanities and therefore delighted to introduce the vice-chancellor Glen Davis who will say a few words about the University and provide some context for its commitment to sustainability and creative partnerships welcome Glen Thank You Rachel although we are here to here professor Latour I will be brief it was wonderful to hear from Artie duiker an elder of the run jury people of the Kulin nations and like her it's a great honor to pay respect to Andrey elders past and present to those here this evening tomorrow as part of this program there will be a chance to see some of the vibrancy of indigenous arts when the villains Center through its director Richard Franklin and indeed the entire Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and as well as the Melbourne Conservatorium of music contribute to this great program but to the 300 people who join us for this conference a warm welcome 15 countries you come from in particular a warm welcome to our keynote speaker tonight I look forward to hearing from him and to the organising committee and leadership of this remarkable conference it's a delight to welcome the president of performance studies international market Bleecker from Utrecht University and all of those involved in putting together this conference mayor particularly acknowledge the work of Rachel Fincham just done a wonderful job and of brendan gleeson the director of the melbourne sustainable societies institute whose works are hard to bring this conference here as our international visitors possibly noted we're having an exciting time here in Australia we've decided to follow the remarkable example of Ireland eluding the year which went for memory serves for months without a government Arena we're only in our third day but it's an exciting journey ahead of us so there'll be much to talk about this conference and if the Australian seem unusually distracted it's because we're all half watching the vote count on their phones and wondering where it's going to adduct so I it was an honor to be asked to open this conference I do so with great pleasure I very much look forward to this evening's keynote address thank you and welcome okay one of the key things I think to know about performance studies this is that it's always been interdisciplinary as a result the organisation does not exist to support individual disciplinary hierarchies and careers but rather it's collective interests become focused by the annual conference with each event ensuring new kinds of alliance for its members where the local hosts or international participants in that sense I often consider psi parasitic rather like mistletoe an organism that evolves in response to the different sites that host it and enable it to flourish in Australia mistletoe growing on eucalypts in acacia have a tendency to what biologists call cryptic mimicry and they regard this as an important adaptive example of codependent survival in the vegetation of the southern hemisphere in that sense the performance studies mistletoe needs to find institutions that will support it and partnerships and hosts that will share some of their characteristics while maintaining species diversity at Melbourne in hosting the conference we've been delighted to find a number of different hosts to support us and these include the Victorian College of the Arts and the Melbourne sustainable society institute both within the university as well as Arts House a branch of the Melbourne City Council in North Melbourne who've convened the fabulous performance programme performing climates open to the public and running in parallel with the conference as co-hosts however of this lecture I'm delighted now to introduce professor Brendan Gleeson from the Melbourne sustainable society institute who will now introduce professor Bruno Latour thank you Thank You Rachel I'm very conscious that I'm the last thing or person in the way of what who you really want to hear which is from Professor Latour so I'll I'll be brief of course professor Latour lecture is a highlight of the wonderful performances a performance climates conference which the vice-chancellor is just open and thanks for that indeed the lecture is the opening performance the Melbourne sustainable Society Institute is delighted and honored to support tonight's lecture in the conference more generally and I have to pay particular tribute to the very hard organizational worker which we paid played very little with no role pay tribute to the work of our colleagues in the Faculty of Arts led by Rachel professor Rachel Fincham and their many collaborators within and beyond the university it's really exciting to see how many people outside the university are engaged in the conference and the events that at hosts humanistic discussion of climate change including climate science is something we attach great priority to first to affirm the multidisciplinary response that environmental challenges always necessitate but second to underline the ways in which the sustainability crisis brings to the fore the fundamental not to say existential questions of human sensibility aspiration values yearning and dare I say demotion all of which must inevitably be performed back to the question of interdisciplinarity as Professor Latour makes clear in his preface reno --tz-- for tonight's lecture in the handout we cannot be sensitive to the climate crisis without a wide enlistment of human knowledge --is and practices including science politics and the arts in the language he offers us these form the equipment we need for climate sensitivity take him here to mean a state where we're both fully sensei to and sensible about the climate crisis confronting us now in Australia we maybe in this definition still far from climate sensitive indeed professor litter and a widely cited lecture a few years ago coined quote the Australian strategy describing it quote as voluntary sleep walking toward catastrophe an excruciating but doubtless fair characterization and arguably nothing much has changed in the years since he made that observation sleepers awake as someone once famously said climate sensitivity is indeed a sensitive topic in these regions and we look forward to hearing much more about this from Professor Latour tonight who's justly renowned for his sweeping and disruptive interrogations of human knowledge and of the times that we live in bruno latour is professor at sea on SPO paris professorial fellow at the london school of economics and in the history of science department at harvard university his published 13 books and has received numerous prestigious awards and honors including the 2013 Hallberg Holberg Memorial Prize we're very honored to have this distinguished scholar with us and glad that during his visit to Australia he's already had time to investigate the critical matters of fungi growing and wine production in some of our more pleasant if decidedly temperate regions at this point tonight he will perform the topic on sensitivity art science and politics in the new climate regime professor Latour the floor is yours thank you very much it's a great pleasure to know that I'm a member of an association like performance studies group I didn't know I was a member but I hope I've been made an honorary member and it's very moving to have been introduced by someone who mentioned the soil and we belonging to the soil because this is exactly what I'm going to talk about in some ways and you will see so what I am going to try to do is to speak of a free iced etics in the sands which has been just defined as becoming sensitive to something which is new unusual and very difficult to actually capture I will start from the entrepot seen the entrepot scene and I'm very interested to know you translate entrepot scene in sign language well done the entrepot scene will be my starting point I don't need a supposed to define it in an assembly like yours it is this ID which is disputed by geologists and stratigraphy that the main geological force which has murdered the earth since 1945 or 1789 is actually the human race the human eye as a sort of strange political non-existing body it's a disputed concept but it's usefully shown here in one of his diagram as a sort of summary of the numbers of things with which we now share our land so to speak and that includes also which is interesting in this diagram the deep rock the mining something very important in Australia of course and the upper atmosphere where the climate is being generated and this is of course with the theme of this product although I'm interested in the dispute the geological and scientific dispute among geologists the problem is that we cannot wait for them to decide because they take that time and we are geologists very serious people and it takes them ages to decide on an geological period it took them 40 years to decide if we were in the quaternary or not we are and now they keep delaying the time when we will decide on the entrepot scene this is the latest paper in science in February which for me with a no matter the size decide the question you see here the boundary limit between what they consider and I in quiz here you can see the text which is the notion I'm reading it in case you cannot read it in this sediment core from West Greenland glassy we treat due to climate warming as resulted in an abrupt stratigraphic transition they are stratigraphy from poor glacial sediment to non glacial organic matter effectively demarcating the onset of a entrepot scene but that's a proposition it's not actually decided so I use another term which is thing I'm more useful for political science which is a new climatic regime whatever is the argument about the entrepot scene we are in a new climatic regime and you have to hear climatic in a sort of Montesquieu sense of the word which is the whole range of climates which have been modified I'm for myself coming from a wine family and climate is also whole local ways of culture and soil linked together to produce the best wine in the world this might be disputed of course here but so what I'll doing in this lecture which is the instruction to the conference is to link three aesthetics aesthetics in the original sense of the word that is what when there are sensitive to something which is new and impossible without this new instrumentation the first of course is the instrumentation by science so there is an aesthetics of science not the usual web maybe of defining science but it's clear in this case and not actually coming from very founder fundament old science is not coming from particle physics it's coming to a lot of discipline very humble discipline sometimes like with the science of fuji or the science of natural history and we all come together to give us a sensitivity to a situation which apart from a few farmers wine merchants and cetera we will not have actually felt uncertainty which we never have been assembled as a global phenomenon the second is the aesthetic of politics the problem is that this question of representation which is of course the normal job of political scientists to describe does not very well elude and incorporate the Nanyan which is all of the entity with which we share the planet and we know how difficult it is to represent the document and of course the notion of performance means also how we can represent not even in a political sense for instance in the case of this very disputed term the Anthropocene no one has any idea of what with an tapas we're supposed to be the master of geological forces on earth there is no political representation the third one is the one you are of course most cognizant of which is the aesthetic which is in normal sense of the word we aesthetic of art that is rather of sensitive to phenomena which are new and coming from all over the place now the problem of this third one is that we are sensitive we have been made sensitive for many generation of artists and culture to some phenomena but not to be entreprenuer phenomena coming to us and when we say us it mean also the traditional culture which have an immense array of ways to make them sensitive to situation and non-human and all sort of agencies but the scale at which we are now of which we are now talking this is a different matter altogether so the entanglement of human and non-human is a task for this free type of aesthetics which I will try to link together in the few minutes I have the chance of talking to you now of course you are in performance studies and the full scale performance where all these free aesthetics were linked is a good example of that at least is a cop the party the conference of parties and especially the cop 21st the Paris conference which was in last December I'm sure you have all heard about it and it is a performance in many ways I'm sure lots of you here have studied well scope and synthesis the film of issue of the commit it's interesting to look at at them as a performance of a most interesting aspect for me in this performance is this the end M because it end well which was not absolutely obvious it end well with actually a decision made I mean a sort of quasi decision most exactly made on the 12 of this number and you see everybody is very happy here ban ki-moon and president laun fabulous who was remain negotiator Laurence tribuna whom you would see in a minute and madam figure has all holding man and very big ceremony like the one we will have when I'm finishing this talk and when we go for further now this big ceremony is actually quite interesting because in a moment of enthusiasm president alone who is not known for his philosophical ideas said something like we've got planet not only leave la France and we visited the National unique which is somewhat normal if you are president but you also say we've left a net long leave a planet and it was very intriguing to me because when you say long live a planet whoo-hoo out of a planet it means you are not completely sure the planet will actually continue existing because you you actually celebrate by hoorah and long live things the existence of a continuing exist don't need your support and your precisely your cheering from the bong so cheering to the planet is a very very interesting philosophical novelty and also clearly in vomiting there were a very important diplomatic event which is but just before we decided the absolutely impossible target of 1.5 degree they had actually for the whole two weeks seen that what we're the contribution of every country was actually when you add them up absolutely impossible to sustain so this was in the history of diplomacy the very first time that 189 countries describe to the others this what we want to do in the future in 2030 and 2050 and the intent the contribution had been actually Rick asked by madam tribuna whom you will see in a minute as the way to prepare the cop 21st in pass this was not part of a United Nation project they were asked to provide a view of the future if you want and in providing this view of your future they were clearly seeing that there is not a chance to have a common planet but it was the first time at every country's so that what the other country wanted was impossible nevertheless we decided and on the 13th of December no one talked about it this historical event which was interesting because of course as it was introduced several time already for prime that we have is free aesthetics but make us sensitive to a phenomena for which we are deeply insensitive to which is what I call climate elitism a sort of interesting but on the whole in the France even if we are not committed skeptic we are climate too indifferent or climate Oh sort of silent the reason I think and this is the political science proposition I'm sorry for the vice president is a political scientist which is that there might be a sort of in this sort of climate or skepticism or schematic catism a sense that very something completely wrong and completely different in our political orientation and that's what I want to put together before I give six rulers of thunder of what I think would be climate performances and what is wrong is probably that we confuse the notion of a globe and for global and globalization toward which we were supposed to move in this movement from the land of old for long modernizing process and very hard modernizing process which was leading us to the global in the meantime letting aside something else which is called and I call the earth or more exactly Gaia now what interested me very much is that in all countries of the world simultaneously including here including in England which were brexit and in America etc everyone is feeling that the line of organization of political position between the land of old but his identity politics basically and the question of a globe is actually disputable it's as if we had been asked to move to the globe and we were suddenly told that the globe is no longer there it's not accessible as it was demonstrated in the past conference because there is no planet for that globe it's a very simple very harsh and very radical decision and realization except no one tells us so if we are no globe to go to we look back to the only thing we are told exists which is the old the land of old which is of course also a complete invention or reconstruction as a damn bridge so it inver breaks it well which is by French comment redundant so what happened is that we are slightly like if we were in a plane we were asked to go to the grow and the pyro says I'm sorry but there is no global there's no planet corresponding we cannot land there so we turn around and then the pilot gets on the phone again and this is a pirate again it is and gentlemen I'm sorry to say Val n of old toward which you love to come back with small British Island the small American great the small one nation Australia the small national friend are no longer there either so if you are told that this two direction are no longer there you look at the window that's what we are doing we look at the window where will we land and this is the promise that when we begin to land we realize that we are slightly terrified this is a small piece of dance which was for me very important in the project facing Gaia I let you look at it this was same image on both side she fries she sees and when she sees something else which is coming at her she fled and she fries back again so we are in that sort of situation but is we see that where we were leading to and where which we were trying to escape from is no longer there and we turn to something else which here's the earth but we have no idea what it is but is literally we live on the different planet from the one on which we actually reside as if we were off shore and suddenly we are supposed to be rooted again but rooted we're in the land of old doesn't exist in the globe it doesn't exist there's no planet corresponding to it but on the earth we don't know what it is and for me when I heard that you were doing performance studies and climate this effort was a good idea to try to interest you to how we could possibly give shape to the third attractor which is so important politically so am i this is my rules of thumb for my own expense as an honorary member of your field of performance studies six of them of course collectively you have hundreds of them together and they are not very it's probably very idea Singh Craddock but with our sixth rule which I found useful in communicating with you the first one which i think is part of the numbers of work which you might not consider exactly as performance but which are because there are lots of intermediary so a whole gradient between performance and as plastic as we'll say in French it's a renewed attention to the atmospheric situation and I think the best example is xenos work this is a work form but he did in Milano in 2014 which is on spy on space-time form which is trying to render us sensitive to the fact that the very notion that there is a background which is nature or somewhere there on which we act is actually disappearing with climate transformation so we're actually living in a position we have a very fact of moving on the studied solid land so to speak is being disputable this is my film so it's not very good but you will see the ID I took it myself so it's horrible but it's enough today so people are in three different layers of plastic and we move for it but you cannot move because you cannot stand you have you actually constantly glued as if you were fly on a fly paper we have flypaper here you have flies your flight well you must apply paper so and it so you move only when you roll in these plastic things and the thing is actually pressurized so when the people who are in the bottom they opened the doors it slightly modifies all of the position of the people who are involve it's very daunting to be there and if some of the kids were younger kids at great pleasure I was terrified because it you feel the new situation coming to you that there is no diff every time someone moves you are moved and you cannot actually move without being sensitive to the this medium which is here the plastic medium but sarasu nose built this is again Saracino in an exhibition I did in Toulouse with him and another aspect of his attention to the situation and to the atmospheric condition of course this obsession for envelopes which is a very important features of the art now where are we when we say we are on land it means we are in envelope we are like Peters rhetoric very beautifully shown in sphere and we are always inside inside small sort of place which we have defined to define a difficulty to define sorry and this is also one of the reason why the notion of a globe is so abstract because as Peter saw that occurs when you are supposed to be globe there is no actually immunity there is no envelope you never know where you are and how you are protected and protection is of course one of the necessary condition of being on earth and this is a very interesting things that suhasi know did by gluing together plastic bags from marketplaces and coming from all over the place and the process by which he assembled all these bags and put them together and signed them is very important to the artistic project and it's also a magnificent place to hold meetings in it ok second rule of thumb I think there is a very different attention by artists to the complexity of science there was a time and there's still a time when some artist says that we want to add poetry or add imagination to the science which is supposed to be too harsh or too objective or too boring well I think this is completely different in when you ask performance and climate as two key words because precisely the science is what many of the artists learn to absorb learns to socialize with to slowly come to peace with to but peace with it not by adding sort of poetry or adding some sort of mystery because the science itself is in a state of learning mystery after mystery ambiguity after ambiguity discoveries after discovery so there is a very interesting chance it is not again a performant case but it's an absolutely sensational piece of work by French bday artist graphic designer I think we call them graphic novel graphic novelist graphic novels croisine II and he built these amazing stories which is east own upon't Asajj its own learning of a science of climate and its own disarray trying to learn all of his science not to do not knowing what to do with this medium of graphic novel which is not adapted especially to the notion of climate science and trying to make sense of the difficulty so here is with his wife trying to understand what is this thing about the global but it's not the globe and this image is itself a very complex image and the extraordinary thing is that in this book which remains two years later probably the best book for if you want to familiarize yourself with the science of a climate by a great bay the East is full of talking head which is the only BD I know sorry--but is a French river only graphic novel I know which is made of talking heads here of two of the best French scientists of climate Rahzel and Laura and which are interviewed I mean you would see this is the most boring possibility of doing a graphic novel but it's actually absolutely fascinating because it share with us the difficulty of learning the science and of trying to precisely link the sensitivity of instrument and what scientists say with its own sensitivity and the immense distance but we are between the two and of course to try to see if a very powerful medium of graphic novel is actually adjusted to it so this is I think absolutely typical of a new relation with the science which of course existed before but in a very different sense and I think it's one of important for me at least rule of thumb which I propose for performance and climate the third one is I think and I'm sure many of you here agree a way to get out of the notion that when artist or designer immobilizing this question of performer of people in Viet it's to transfer some sort of message we all know our horrible and devastated is the field of ecological art I mean the catastrophe and you always always almost always see their polar bear on their little ice cream and it's very difficult to get out of the idea that there is a message and that the message has to be transmitted so of course here and I'm biased theater is the most fabulous medium and here I'm thinking amok I'm closer from closer to your performance the list of what you would consider specimens study this is a play we did with a collective which is called Gaia global circus and the first thing which interested us and interest many of a viateur climate theater which I know is to invert the link between background and foreground so the can appear but the kind of P but you see on the top there which is with strand veil which moves because it's suspended to balloons Hallion balloons was actually the main axle of a play and that of course was a way to explore what happens just like insulation was work what happens when you begin to be sensitive to the earth moving under your feet is that you are no longer someone who speaks like I do in an environment you are actually constantly modified by the environment itself and we are masters of work as you know on that question of making the difference between foreground and background disappear now the other thing we were also interested in for which theater is so powerful and there are many talks in for coming days which are talking also about that is that it is the way finally against the notion of message to bring the notion of contradiction and the division in which we are all on stage so the great power of theater is to simultaneously dramatize and D dramatize which is exactly the opposite of what we are able to do when we hear the news of a comet which is simultaneously terrified and important and only theater and performance studies can just reverse we simultaneously dramatize and D dramatize simultaneously and then you get out of this terrible situation of being terrified and important so what was very interesting and here I'm how to say kidding were coy pleading to convert but exist in English you plead to the convert well you already converted to what I'm going to say which is that Theatre is a very fabulous way of course to build a sort of small public around every one of his lived spectacular vivos we say in France and it's very important because then you can produce a lot of every visit one of a one of a thing we did in ztm in Germany and at the end of every the news we could actually begin to build this little assembly which is as you know from the history of theater simultaneously a political assembly and an assembly where the multiplicity of position especially the fact that we were allowed people because of our play were allowed to be divided about the all of these things which we hear around the new climatic regime was made possible on the state and it's a very very important features of theatre which is the discussion after the play so to speak but you all know that very well the fourth point and that might be more unusual to people in this room because that links vers aesthetics of politics with the aesthetic of science and up is the question of representation an onion which is the key problem of political science when we deal with nature in nature with lots of quotation mark refills with natural animated entity is that we don't know how to put them into something like a political representation we know how to do them as an outside as a sort of background but to do it to bring it inside an assembly what I call the Parliament of things is of course a major challenge for performance study people so this is one of few images from a study so it's not the study it was actually a Python study performing Pathan studies which study of death or no it's a performance which is basic research which is Venice performance studies work as well which is a product called make it work I presented the film yesterday to some of you which we did in a viateur and a very famous theater in outskirt of Paris quality art what is amante and in it we we had young students from all over the world 280 delegation they were there at first following what is called the united nation system a procedure in order to prepare the climate conference which was very one which was supposed to be happening in Paris in May in in December that is six months before so it was a pre enactment of a conference but we had added to it a little twist is that instead of having nation state being represented only America etc Canada Australia we also added the non Youmans being represented but is we represented further natural entities like soil atmosphere ocean and they were there five the delegation was always made of five people with tie and shoot exactly the same as user plus what could be called the political interest and especially important where the non-state economic interest oil was there our industry was there mine industry was there as having a territory a form of sovereignty a form of delegation and speaking to the nation-state in the same procedure and according to the same ways of dealing with issues so what we wanted to test with the student in a viateur precisely was the way in which you would modify the notion of sovereignty if when you speak in the name of let's say the United States you are interrupted by the atmosphere and the atmosphere and the president was there you will see her in a minute and say United State two minutes atmosphere two minutes soil two minute because the system is always limited to two minutes and what does it change in what means to play the role of the United States sovereignty when your sovereignty is actually unquote by sovereignty of former natural element if you want so here you one example with ladies where we presently endangered species and soil is where as a delegation of people with a suit and ties speaking exactly in the same way and in the same procedure as the other now what we wanted to also to do it in a viateur and here you see actually the scene on which this was happening it was one week event and the very detailed of the furniture was also designed for the show so it was really a performance in the sense but you study here in the sense that every single detail what stage stage the whole organization was made by the students but behind the organization there was Philip Ken was with the head of a theater and he had transformed the whole theater of Lisa motley in order to suit the students strategies and what you see here which is quite important is that it is what the public was allowed to see from the outside so some members of a public were allowed to see van negotiation not to intervene in the negotiation as if they had been sort of put into the secret and small group of people were allowed to watch and to meet one of a delegate in the simulation so it was a very elaborate system the whole idea was to break away from the notion of united nations sovereignty question because as you know and of course Australia is well placed for that the notion of sovereignty for question of climate means absolutely nothing but we don't know what the other alternative this is why people go back every time to the notion of identity national politics when they realize that the globe is impossible so again the theatre allows the theatres as a simulation allows to do that dramatized and D dramatize to break exactly the opposite of fascination despair and importance which is the way we get renews usually and the whole notion of performance studies for me is precisely for the climate at least is to make this possibility of dramatizing and a dramatized simultaneously now of course theatre and pestilent is also the way to make nonhumans speak I mean no one is surprised on a stage to see people speaking in the name of the ocean because there are plenty of plays and plenty of operas where the ocean speak and where you have event where gods are there so it is the ideal place for kids who have the difficulty and it's a great challenge for them to be they are representing the air of a soil that they can be sort of pushed or helped to do that innovator but I was most interested by another feature which is the link between the aesthetic of science and the aesthetic of performance in art which is the link between simulation I mean game playing if you want and model building as it is done in science because really what we did and of course there are many think we could do further and I hope we will do maybe with some of you which is to pursue the link between model like the climate model you add I don't know the influence of ocean current you see what happened then you add vegetation you see what happened then you add pollution you see what happened and the simulation you add the ocean to the United States Australia you see what happened so there was there is something which is very interesting to further for a thing the link between climate and performance is to explore in which way the science building adding more and more entity and seeing what happened correspond very precisely to what I call many years ago he actually in visual diversity the Parliament of things so that's the way where I think there is a lot of leeway for many other things we are interested in what is called performance study if I understand what performance study is because I'm just an honorary member so I'm not sure so here you will see one very little except from the film the film is accessible on the web on the web it's a bit of a publicity so forgive tone don't you forget this physical I know that the economy organized I founded a small street so can pay the record second front end he liked what I did showed it was pretty serious money because that man and changed yeah wait what but and there was India was going to agree to the agreement I don't understand doing nothing okay we are the generation of climate change we will suffer it we have the responsibility to act not just as delegate not just as functions but also as individuals I don't know what what can we top this you get watch with him and you can do other simulation following this one and we'll be very happy to help and to learn from it because it's a very powerful way of teaching of course but it's a fabulous way of exploring an absolutely basic question of basic research which is how do you play the role of the nanyue man and what sort of political philosophy allows to do that the fifth rule of thumb is of course a very important element which is the link between a mature non-academic and people who are not necessary the artistic skill but which are the one to reach all of his campaign of information and disinformation is actually directed so here's a very simple case but I like the sort of style of many other thing which is done it's in the small except but followed is in French but I you have no difficulty understanding it I think this is interesting because it's a work of one your work with farmers and people in volatile province of France in vanilla mousse on about the climate but it's not necessary people who know anything about the climate which just uncertain about this mass of information which come to them and community organizer and people were musician have work with them and I'm sure many example that you have in in your own portfolio here in this room and here what is interesting is that the guy you see in blue here is a very famous performer of garden I would say which is really ma is one of a best gardener in front invent very extraordinary garden and he's asked by the people who have been trying to figure out where what he says about the earth and the way to do garden questions about how to deal with it and the whole ceremony of integrating him has been staged by the man which is in the middle with the musician drum placebos is a very short yo'ii answer the question v it does say you know what super gross now what is interesting here is that the way people answer question was not staged precisely it's a whole process of how they would react to the question according to the way they would themself learn by going to the different very complex happenings which were being organized in this little village so this is the fifth one the last one is what is most difficult in my view and the one for which I will be very happy to draw help from you which is that if you followed me with this idea that the globe is not there because there is no planet corresponding to it it's too large to be put on what something you know champion and of course that the return to the country the world is a pure utopia then the question is how do you figure how do you give a figure to this earth to Gaia let's say this is a beautiful piece of work by Adam law of a great artist from Madrid in fact whom are they but I want to get one example and this is coming from a short which is now open in Casa which I curated called reset modernity where we try to give a feeling in the whole show that we were actually going back to something which was the soil the earth but the visible in a very different way from the global view in other words the globe and every idea of a globe is always from the view from nowhere but we are not on the globe we aren't something very very very different which I call with some scientists four critical zones and is we see actually and it's very interesting to see the massive work in art now about sediment about soil about earth about the dirt about fungi about all this thing which are very different feel and it's very visually different everything ecology is supposed to be green but the earth is not green it's brown and it's sediment it's not unified color it's actually made of all this thing and here you see a beautiful shot of a show where the curator have organized three different views so to speak a beautiful work by tusita Dean and another one by Sofia Astaire and in the background the work of Museum avoid which I saw in a minute now I hope I hope exhibition are in performance studies because it is a performance at least other people who move through it and which organ is a fix for the curators but it's a very important medium and I was becoming more and more interested in the medium of exhibition as in what we call thought exhibition okay thank our genome to look a little ball pedantic and a Gedanken our staring is a way to make ideas in a very sensitive way and in this show we makes the free aesthetics at least with science and art politics is not so clear now this is sorry I'm I'm trying to you see my difficulty is that how to represent the earth not as a planetary globe so I was in Singapore next last and I was on at the table coffee table and it's exactly that which is we live here see we are not living here this is inside of a planet within nature and the universe we live here it's very thin and it's very difficult to represent because you never see it from above it's not the globe we don't leave we don't leave on the blue planet we live on this critical zone which is a tiny tiny varnish skin through kilometres of few kilometers down where everything including the science and all its instrumentation reside and everything we know about life there and yet when you want to represent the earth you immediately make these great gestures with the hand which I called the pumpkin argument which is okay we are in this pumpkin and this is what you have to have a global view but no one has a global view we live inside this and we have always a side view and we see things which is of that sort this is a very interesting diagram from poll-driven ooh a Belgian ecologist of the 1980s where he tried to represent this little border where it's more than the soil because it includes a canopy and summer climate and it's move and go slightly deeper in the rocks and he tried to make at the time of course it was slightly primitive calculation involved with spheres and cycles of nutrients anymore etc but it's a nice it's a naive but nice representation of a critical zone nonetheless except you see how difficulty how many difficulty they are when you want to measure so there's a instrumentation question an aesthetic question of instrumentation there but also how you render a sensitive to these cycles because none of them is visible the nitrogen cycle is not visible and I think and many and none of the others and the role of funghi is not visible and the role of all this entity which are they are not visible so the question is how you make them visible and how you enter into the loop and especially which was not the case in 1980 when you realize but one among this loop there is a masses of new agents which have a human agent no one knows where to put so to speak so that's a prime of figuration which for me is the most difficult one and here we student of a program I quitted in some poker political art called speed we try this is a very nice attempt by one of a student Aleksandra a hand to try to to give shape to this small sort of she took an example from the trunk of trees and he trying to understand with little surfaces of skin it's very difficulty so they are mythology's if you want sort of Dermatology of the earth which has no public representation but every time we talk about the earth we imagine the globe the blue planet which is supposed to have unified us and united us in the feeling that we are all in the blue planet and which has completely wrong political intent because we are divided on all this question every single issue and you know that in Australia very well but everywhere Nature divides it doesn't unify and yet we have a silly idea of a blue planet which is supposed to be a balloon of goodwill and harmony when we have actually talking about war and of disputed territories which is what the beautiful critical zone is made of so to speak and I will finish before the conclusion with this work again you might not consider it as a as a case of performance but it is because it's a performance for the Axelrod which are in it and the birds this is a work which is in our exhibition by Pierre weak the great French artist we decided to do impressionist painting but not in question is painting in the impressionist tradition of a beginning of 20th century but the impression is painting now and again immediately you see the difference well it doesn't look like a Monet even though it's called an infra transplant but it's actually the the mud form Vivian II which has been brought over the mud is coming from Germany and then we invented a very complex ecosystems it's not quite on but the man's complexity because it requires a fine-tuning it cost a fortune actually to maintain it's not carbon free at all contrary to this university services one of a defect of its work and but it has the quality of being seen from not from above not from 2d but you are there and sometimes you see nothing I choose an image where there was actually something to see but most of the time there is nothing to see because of a pass ET is actually calculated very carefully by the program of a lamp and the special class with which as usual play a wig is a very subtle maker of performance it is a personage in the sense you nobody sees the same thing when we come sometimes we see wizardry nothing and what is nice which i think is very important is that it if you compare with Impressionism and now this work you sort of measure the distance between the beginning of the 20th century beginning of 21st century and the difficulty we we have in rendering as sensitive to a position on the land which is very very different from what it was in the past and in this set in this section of the exhibition there is also a lot of other people especially young sell exhibit one of the important scientist who is in charge of the word on the name of the ultra busine is the head of a committee of the entrepot seen is present in another part behind the envelope but I can't show you show you this amazing show we are doing in Zed care ok now the last part of the show is actually something which could be of interest for you again I may be testing the limit of performance which is a work by John Palmas II know from territory or agency in London which is a clear attempt at showing what is the earth on which we are supposed to land in this case it's 5 you'd aluminium print of a very detailed information of oil management in five region of the earth and here you see behind him Nigeria and he is pointing to things in Texas and visited inside the same exhibition and it's part of a show what is interesting here is that it becomes a performance because it's information very precise information but the size of it and the fact that it's slightly slanted and that it's called a museum of oil makes the visitor actually go for an amazing experience is it what the future will be or what in the future we would see as were present with a sort of feeling that these people were slightly mad to do that to the land so to speak you see what why the notion of museum avoid is very interesting and of course again for me it's a performance since we move in this amazing setup of aluminium plates and you are just seized by the fret not the fret but we think we'll fallen on your face because it's well organized but the threat of that might be not the museum avoid but what the future will be some people have been in the show I see one of them here and he can tell you about what he thinks obviously ok to conclude basically what I call the new climatic regime of course it's slightly discouraging but it's not when you start a conforms of three days to be discouraging so we have actually to feel but it's actually encouraging in the sense that it's exactly the equivalent over this other great discoveries if you want and here I bring two images which are very classical for you on the left side the sort of T map of the time people were making before they started the great discovery with lots of quotation ma and with the map of Australia which we would know unless Logan the slogan of a whole sort of land grabs on which we are all the inheritor which is called Cruz Inca so that was basically the last four centuries right we we were moving suddenly discovering new land and trying to adapt our map and of course we in a sixteenth century our ancestor had not the slightest idea of how to absorb all this news from Terra Australis and all of the others so we are exactly in the same situation now and that's I think is where the interesting is except it's not an earth in extension it's not an earth in addition to the land that we already knew we in Europe it's a land which is under our feet and this is why I think it's very fitting that we were introducing this meeting by an elder telling us about what is Volyn beneath because the great discovery of a great novelty of what thirty years ago again in this university I began to call symmetric anthropology is gaining another meaning of the word symmetric which was completely unexpected which is we now hear or we listen to when people talk about the soil and we land and the earth and the materiality of a dust which before in the intervening century would have been considered archaic or something which is completely contrary completely our contemporary and here's a beautiful example because on Aleksandra event for us with the same student as before from speed actually made a map of the moving animals and humans in a little region of France I was struck by the Aborigines in the etymological sense of the world nature of the map that she tried to invent and that's exactly where we are that is the earth is trembling under our feet whoever culture we belong to and suddenly we realized that the sources of information will the knowledge the skill which are made to map out with sort of trembling territories could again be made to match or if not to match at least to correspond in a way where we have to invent so what I think is really interesting in this sort of similarity between the proofs intra discovery of lands in extension and the land grab and the proofs in the discovery of land in intensity under feet is that we are completely like our produces a very ill prepared except of course people who do performance studies in this come from thank you very much I have one more introduction to do which is to Professor Micah Bleeker who's the president of the conference that is hosted this public lecture and I just like to invite Micah briefly to the stages Thank You Rachel thank you for this kind introduction but of course much more than that thank you and your team for this taking on organizing this conference thank you for all the hard work all the creativity well the the care that you have invested in making this program happen it's an amazing program that you have composed we have just heard a fantastic keynote to begin with and this is only the beginning you did an incredible job you and the entire team I remember that when I was in the early stage of organizing this conference in Utrecht some years ago the then president of psi our dear and esteemed colleague ed Scheer once referred to the conference as the big beast and a big beast it is and it is a beast with an attitude and this is what makes psi conferences stand out organizing a PSI conference is not only a matter of practical issues but of many negotiations and considerations that have very little to do with practical matters and all the more with very impractical things like opinions ideas and values things that are at odds with the neoliberal list and corporate modes of operating that increasingly have come to dominate life and things that are there for all the more important to stand for today so thank you very much for taking this on for making this happen thank youuh bruno latour for this fantastic opening I think you proved to be a true honor a member of performance that is international thank you all thank you all for being here my role here is not only about saying thank you but also has a very practical component we are here now with a mixed group some of us are here only for this lecture and others are here for the conference and the time has come to go separate ways so thank you very much

Channel: The University of Melbourne

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Keywords: University, of, Melbourne

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Length: 72min 4sec (4324 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 11 2016