FUTURE ECOLOGIES - Launch events

What are the stories that are shaping our world? Is there agency in storytelling? Histories and visions of the future are often bound to strong storytelling, and as we begin to understand the importance of these stories in shaping our environments, can we make their narratives more strategic? Can fiction become a planning tool?

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The launch event of the North Macedonian iteration of the project “Future Ecologies”, originally developed by the British Council and LUX, is organised by Ana Frangovska, senior curator at the National Gallery of North Macedonia, a webinar entitled “An Ecology of Thought”. 

The webinar will be led by artists and curators from the local visual art scene and will address different ecological issues. Human processes greatly influence the environment and are leading to rapidly changing living conditions: polluted air, soil, seas, melting ice, fires, floods, destroyed ecosystems, migrations, famine, pandemics. How are these conditions reflected or translated into a visual language? And how can this language be used as a powerful tool for raising awareness?

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Toxic Lands ‘It could be poisonous’ will introduce the exhibition and interspecies encounters to be held at different venues in Mostar and across social media from March to July 2021. Toxic Lands aims to start critical discussions and analyse human destruction in a broad sense, exploring the effects of the Anthropocene (the current geological age where humans have been the dominant influence on the environment), military traces, ecology, cosmology, climate change, Western colonial practices, the extractive industries and vulnerable urban futures. 

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In the process of preparing the exhibition Future Ecologies / Future in Debris, within the crisis of the global pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus, we gathered a small team of artists, filmmakers, curators and theorists who will be participating in the exhibition to create a united noise that combines video, sound and different texts resulting from the conversation exchanges about ideas, fears and hopes. 

As it was not possible to travel and record new material in the conditions of the pandemic, we shared existing materials, archival records, sound and text in order to reflect and jointly imagine the possible outcomes of issues opened before us by the Future Ecologies project. All content is created through online communication and exchange. 

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Projects are prophecies, prophecies are projects is a series of four podcast episodes. We’ll hear Stine Deja, Cecile B. Evans, Luca Lo Pinto and Jeanne Graff talk about the future through their own practices. The goal is to understand how different artists and curators approach imagination and creation. Talks are in English and are moderated by Natalija Paunić.

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The Great Smog of 2020 as a title refers to London’s famous smog in 1952 and puts it in parallel to one of the biggest problems of major cities in the Western Balkans, air quality. The top 10 global list of most polluted cities often includes Pristina, Skopje, Sarajevo and Belgrade. They are even compared to major Asian industrial cities like Wuhan, Shenyang and Mumbai, sometimes even surpassing them on the list. One of the reasons for Pristina’s poor air quality is the famous “smoke machine”, the coal power plant in Obiliq (Kastriot), amongst other problems. Still, the government is planning on building another coal plant soon as this is seen as the only viable solution to stabilize electricity production. 

Learn more about this online event and register here.