Embodying and Enacting Repressed Urban Ecologies

Description

Panel description: Embodying and enacting repressed urban ecologies

This panel brings together artists, performers, curators and researchers in a joint effort across sites and institutions to explore how art can mobilize urban communities by embodying and enacting urban ecologies. Across different projects and collaboration we see a potential of art to create transformative spaces that both explore repressed urban ecologies in the past and bring life to regenerative and healing ideas about urban futures. In our practice we share a common interest in the role of art in empowering marginalized voices and more-than human subjects in the city. We have in different ways explored the capacity of the performing body to both map and expand forgotten memories, colonial past and debris of the Anthropocene. Through embodying and enacting both alliances and disruptions with urban pasts, we see the performing body contesting and negotiating urban hegemony, and continuity. We argue how urban ecologies and memories though artistic processes can reemerge to create and regenerate futures for citizens and more-than human bodies alike.

The panel consists of following three presentations, drawing on empirical and arts-based material

Kristine Samson: Performative Urbanism - embodied forms of memory work, imagining regenerative futures?
In recent art and performance practices we have seen an interest in embodied forms engaging with places, their cultural heritage and their environmental history. Taking the point of departure in the practice of Performative Urbanism Lab (DK) mappings of urban urban natures in Copenhagen, the presentation will ask to what extent the embodied forms of knowledge creation and memory work can mobilize communities and foster inclusive ecological consciousness. Bringing in diverse examples from performative walks undertaken by artist-activists in urban natures, we ask what ecologies and memories emerge in the encounters between participants and the diverse, found scenographies? The presentation will argue that such embodied forms of mapping and creating knowledge together around urban pasts can shape transformative spaces for future imaginings working with complex and entangled ideas of time-spaces. Finally, I will discuss to what extent such embodied forms of knowledge creation can inform alternate forms of urban futures contesting the hegemonies in much urban development and planning today.

Lasse Mouritzen: Envisioning futures with a haunted landscape. In the Southern district of Copenhagen, a landscape that was once a landfill is now also a thriving urban-nature ecosystem and home to thousands of people living in garden communities. Since the 1960s, it has been subject to plans for urban development which have fueled a strong mobilization of art and activism, raising awareness of cultural heritage and both human and more-than-human memory. In the tension between urban growth, ecological preservation, and the remnants of the past, emerging performing and eco-art practices operate not just as an aesthetic intervention or an act of political resistance, but as a gesture contemplating the "ghosts" of past ecological and urban destruction. By allowing agency to more-than-human actors and forces within the Anthropocene landscape, concepts of progress, hegemony, and continuity are challenged, envisioning new alliances and regenerative futures.

Rodrigo Andreolli & Louise Lassen Iversen: Mirroring Places: social and environmental justice through performance art?
“Mirroring Places: An archeology of Memories” is a collaboration between the curatorial platform Tilvægs (DK), Teatro Oficina in Bixiga Sao Paulo (BR) and Performative Urbanism Lab (DK). Through transdisciplinary, site responsive performances and exhibitions bringing artists, citizens, activists and researchers together the project intends to frame discussions on climate justice, social ecologies, art and activism. The presentation asks how art can help bring collective memories of water, cultural heritage and site sensibilities together. By comparing performances and exhibitions across the two sites, the presentation will ask how the body can bring forth repressed and forgotten memories, and what pluriversal publics are emerging from the political and cultural ecologies of Bixiga with its colonial past and present, and what role performance can play in enacting alternate urban futures for citizens and more-than human bodies in the area?

Period	6 Jun 2025
Event type	Lecture
Location	Nice, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International