Shifting Centres — Traversing worlds
(February 2024)
Shared by Ravi Agarwal | Traced by Katarina Dorothea Isaksen
How do we converse between different ways of “knowing” to reconstitute our relationships with the more than-human world? How does it help us think of historic erasures of nature-cultures, and try to recover what has been historically suppressed or lost? Can we address questions of ecological and climate colonialism and justice through such reconstitutions?
In what way can we shift our positionality in the world to receive through deep listening and in effect decenter the human?
These are the kinds of questions this cross course seeks to open up and help think of to help imagine new futures that are just, and sustainable. Ravi and Katarina invite you, informed by their long-standing practices, of working with different communities, evoking other ontological being-nesses, through observing, listening, experiencing, perceiving, and practising, to learn alongside them.
The course will share insights into different knowledge systems that engage with questions of relationships with nature and very local and global issues. The course will include excursions to sites, talks by other knowledge practitioners, and joint exercises.
Ravi Agarwal is one of the conveners of Bergen Assembly 2025. He is an artist, environmental campaigner, writer and curator. He addresses entangled questions through an interrelation of art, research and activism, focusing on the subject of nature and its futures. He has co-curated large public art exhibitions, including the Yamuna-Elbe project (Hamburg and Delhi, 2009) and Embrace our Rivers (Chennai, 2018). Ravi is also the founding director of the environmental NGO Toxics Link and the founder of The Shyama Foundation, which engages with art and ecology practices in India.
Katarina Dorothea Isaksen is a traditional yoiker and multidisciplinary artist. She works as a curator of Jiennagoahti, an artwork dedicated to listening, initiated by artist Elin Már Øyen Vister and architect and artist Joar Nango. Katarina studies the relationship between yoik and art, and often works with traditional world view.