Reflections on Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity in an Era of Climate Change

Speakers

• Saadia Mirza, American University in Paris / University of Chicago 
• Joshi Radin, Chicago-based artist/writer
• Alberto Ortega-Trejo, Chicago-based artist, architect, and researcher

Moderators

• Jessica Landau, UChicago, CEGU (Introduction) 
• Alexander Arroyo, UChicago, CEGU (Moderator)

Individual and collective experiences of climate change are mediated simultaneously by embodied encounters with extreme weather events and by now-familiar abstractions of climate models and satellite imagery. As we grapple with the increasing dissonance between everyday life and epochal climatic and environmental change, how might we hold these intimate and remote forms of sensing in generative tension? How might we learn from the space between what we can touch, smell, see, or hear and what we can observe or study from afar?

This event explores how the prescient work of sculptor Ruth Duckworth might guide us through that space, offering insight and inspiration for ways of knowing climate and its many forms of change through embodied aesthetic practice. In so doing, Duckworth points toward new forms of climate media attuned to the multiple scales of transformation—climatic, environmental, social, bodily—to which we must so urgently attend. 
 
Join us for a conversation with UChicago faculty and distinguished guests. 

FREE. Advanced registration encouraged, as space may be limited. 

Presented by the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization (CEGU) and the Smart Museum of Art’s Feitler Center for Academic Inquiry.

Image: Installation view, Ruth Duckworth: Life as a Unity, Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago. Photo by Bob.