Faculty

KAREN BARAD
EMANUELE COCCIA
AYESHA HAMEED
LAURA TRIPALDI
JUSSI PARIKKA
INSTITUTE FOR QUEER ECOLOGY
BAYO AKOMOLAFE
FILIPA RAMOS
GESYADA SIREGAR
STACY ALAIMO
BRIGITTE BAPTISTE




Invited guests:


Karen Barad
        Karen Barad is a Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC.


Emanuele Coccia
       Emanuele Coccia is an Italian philosopher known worldwide for his thinking on the metaphysics of plants and their centrality in the theory of knowledge. He has been exploring the concept of metamorphosis in fields like zoology, philosophy, biology, linguistics, botany, and literature. The result is a vision in which the human being is the expression of a larger and more interconnected form of life, in a new relationship between humanity and nature. Among his publications, “Metamorphosys” (Einaudi, 2022), “Philosophy of the house” (Einaudi, 2021),”The life of plants. A metaphysics of mixture (Il Mulino, 2018). Since 2011 he has been teaching at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS, Paris). He is also a columnist for “Libération” and collaborates with “Le Monde” and “Repubblica”.


Ayesha Hameed
    Ayesha Hameed (London, UK) makes videos, sound works, textiles, and performances. She is also a creative writer, critical essayist, and poet. She has appeared on the BBC on several occasions as an artist and thinker. Hameed’s work explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Her speculative approach examines the mnemonic power of the media she uses and intermixes: their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. The motifs of water, borders, and displacement, recurrent in her work, offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and, more broadly, on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature.
    Recent commissions include solo exhibitions at Bonniers Konsthall (2022) Kunstinstituut Melly (2022), Indigo Waves at Zeitz MOCCA (2022), as well as contributions to the Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennales (2019 and 2021), Momenta Biennale (2021), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018).  She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (Repeater 2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (Sternberg/MIT 2021). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London and a Kone Foundation Research Fellow (2022-2026).


Jussi Parikka
    Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Digital Aesthetics and Culture at Aarhus University in Denmark where he directs the Digital Aesthetics Research Centre (DARC). He is also visiting professor at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton) and at FAMU at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he leads the project Operational Images and Visual Culture (2019-2023, funded by the Czech Science Foundation). In 2021 he was elected as member of Academia Europaea. His published books include Insect Media (2010), Digital Contagions (2007/2016), A Geology of Media (2015), and A Slow, Contemporary Violence (2016). Recently, he co-edited Photography Off the Scale (2021) and is the co-author of The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies (2022). His book Operational Images was published in May 2023. Parikka’s books have been translated into 11 languages including Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Czech, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. He has also worked as curator, including as part of the curatorial team of transmediale 2023 and Helsinki Biennial 2023, as well as the co-curator of the forthcoming Motores del Clima (Laboral, Gijon, 2023). 


Brigitte Baptiste
    Brigitte Baptiste is a Colombian biologist who graduated from the Pontifical University
Javeriana, with a Master's Degree in Conservation and Tropical Development from the University of Florida. She is an Honoris Causa Doctor in Environmental Management from Unipaz and an Honoris Causa Doctor in Laws from the University of Regina. She was the director for 10 years of the Biological Resources Research Institute Alexander Von Humboldt and since 2019 she has served as rector of Ean University,  a higher education institution focused on sustainable entrepreneurship. She is considered an expert on environmental and biodiversity issues and is an important leader in gender diversity. She has also been a reference in achieving important bridges between politics, academia, and science. She was also part of the global expert panel of the biodiversity platform, IPBES, and one of the co-authors of the Assessment of Biodiversity Values same platform. Currently, she is part of several national and international associated networks.



Filipa Ramos
        Filipa Ramos, born in Lisbon, is a writer, teacher and curator. Her research focuses on the relationships between contemporary art and film, how moving images address environmental and ecological issues and, in particular, the ways in which artists' films foster interspecies relationships between humans, non-humans and machines. She teaches on the MRes Arts at Central Saint Martins (London) and in the MA program at the Institute of Arts, Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Fachhochschule Nordwestschweiz (Basel). Ramos is the founding curator of Vdrome, a program of film screenings by visual artists and filmmakers that she runs with Andrea Lissoni. She is the curator of the symposia series "The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish" with Lucia Pietroiusti for the Serpentine Galleries, London.




Báyò Akómoláfé
     

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia).

In July 2022, Dr. Akomolafe was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics and the Inaugural Special Fellow for the Aspen Institute. He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).

He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and has been Commencement Speaker in two universities convocation events. He is also the recipient of the New Thought Leadership Award 2021 and the Excellence in Ethnocultural Psychotherapy Award by the African Mental Health Summit 2022. In a ceremony in July 2023, the City of Portland (Maine, USA) awarded Dr. Akomolafe with the symbolic ‘Key to the City’ in recognition of his planet-wide work and achievements.

Dr. Akomolafe is a Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow for the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, and an Ambassador for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance.


Laura Tripaldi
    Laura Tripaldi is a writer and researcher working at the intersection of science, technology and contemporary humanities. Her research revolves around the notion of materiality in its cultural and political implications. After obtaining her PhD in Materials Science and Nanotechnology, she has taught courses, seminars, and workshops at several prestigious cultural and academic institutions worldwide. Her book Parallel Minds. Discovering the Intelligence of Materials was first published in 2020 and translated into multiple languages.


Gesyada Siregar
       
Gesyada Siregar is a curator, writer and art organizer. She lives and works in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is the Subject Coordinator for Articulation & Curation at GUDSKUL: Contemporary Art Collectives and Ecosystem Studies, an art educational platform co-founded by Grafis Huru Hara, Serrum and ruangrupa in Jakarta, 2018. She has worked in ruangrupa since 2013, beginning by being selected for the Indonesia Young Curator Workshop organized by the collective and Jakarta Arts Council. She was the co-coordinator of the GUDsel in the BAK (basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht) Fellowship for Situated Practice, and co-organizes Kelas Bareng - a collaborative joint class program between GUDSKUL, Städelschule, Germany, blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Ghana, and Nordland kunst- og filmhøgskole, Norway. She has interests in supporting young artists, rereading Indonesian art writings from the period of 1940 - 1990s, and how she can intertwine them. She likes to explore archives, astrology, experiential storytelling, games, media and public programming as an art pedagogical module. Selected exhibitions, publications, and projects include: documenta fifteen, Kassel, Germany, 2020-2022; GUDSKUL's Articulating FIXER 2021: An Appraisal of Indonesian Art Collectives in the Last Decade (2021); GUDSKUL & Art Gallery of York University, Toronto's Collective as School Workbook (2020), Instrumenta - International Media Arts Festival: Machine/Magic & Sandbox, National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta, 2019 - 2018; Jakarta Arts Council's Paintings Collection: Theoryless Paintings, Galeri Cipta III, Jakarta, 2017; Indonesian Visual Art Heritage Book: Cap Go Meh - S. Sudjojono for Ministry of Education & Culture Republic of Indonesia (2017); and Mode of Liaisons - Japan Foundation's Condition Report ‘What is Southeast Asia?', Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok, Thailand (2017).



Stacy Alaimo
        Stacy Alaimo is a teacher and researcher that addresses environmental humanities, anthropocene feminisms, gender theory, science studies, animal studies, material ecocriticism, critical theory, materialist theory. She especially focuses on developing models of new materialism, material feminisms, environmental justice, and, most recently, the blue (oceanic) humanities. Her work also explores the intersections between literary, artistic, political, and philosophical approaches to environmentalism along with the practices and experiences of everyday life.
        Dr. Alaimo has published more than 60 scholarly articles and chapters, has won numerous teaching and graduate mentoring awards and has also worked to develop campus sustainability and academic programs in environmental studies.  Her concept of “transcorporeality” has been widely taken up in the arts, humanities, and sciences-- featured, for example, as a topic in The Posthuman Glossary.




The Institute of Queer Ecology
       
Lee Pivnik is a Miami-based artist, working predominantly in sculpture, video and social practice. In 2018 he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture and a concentration in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies, and in 2022 he attended the Immersion Program at The School of Architecture (TSOA) at Arcosanti. Nic Baird is a biologist, artist, writer, and dancer living in New York City. Baird served as co-director for the Institute of Queer Ecology since 2017 and is currently working on a doctorate in paleobiology.
        In 2017 Pivnik started the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collaborative organism that works to imagine and realize an equitable multispecies future. He has continued to run the project alongside artist and evolutionary biologist Nicolas Baird. IQECO builds on the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality. Guided by queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking, they work to undo dangerously destructive human-centric hierarchies—or even flip them—to look at the critical importance of things happening invisibly; underground and out of sight.
        To date, the Institute of Queer Ecology has worked with over 120 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating exhibitions and directly producing artworks/projects. IQECO has presented projects with the Guggenheim Museum (New York, NY), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Miami, Florida), the Julia Stoschek Collection (Düsseldorf, Germany), the Medellín Museum of Modern Art (Medellín, Colombia), the Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade (Serbia), ASAKUSA (Tokyo, Japan), the Biennale of Sydney (Australia), Prairie (Chicago, IL), Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami, FL) Gas Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Vox Populi (Philadelphia, PA), among others.



Institute for
Postnatural Studies
faculty members:



Gabriel Alonso
        Based and born in Madrid, Gabriel Alonso is a visual artist and researcher formed between the ETSAM (Madrid), the Technische Universität (Berlin), and Columbia University in New York at the MS-CCCP, where he graduated with honors with his research thesis An Archaeology of Containment. In his works, through various formats such as installation, sculpture, photography or video, he investigates contemporary relationships between fiction and materiality, in order to blur binomials between the natural and the artificial, the human and the non-human, understanding nature as a complex cultural construct. Represented by Pradiauto Gallery (Madrid), his work has been exhibited in different galleries and international exhibitions, such as Nordés Galería (Santiago de Compostela), CaixaForum (Barcelona), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), CA2M (Madrid), Centro-Centro (Madrid), Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona), Matadero (Madrid), John Doe Gallery (New York), IIAF (New York), Poor Media Leuven (Belgium), Mila Gallery (Berlin) among others. He has been assistant professor at Barnard College of the University of Columbia (NYC) and at the Master of Advanced Architecture of the ETSAM, and has given many lectures, talks and workshops in different international institutions, museums and universities. In 2020, he received the Creation Grant from the Madrid City Council, and in 2016 he received the FAD award for his publication Desierto and was awarded one of the prestigious grants from the Graham Foundation for the Fine Arts. In 2020, he founded the Institute for Postnatural Studies. In parallel to his academic experimentation, research and curatorial practice, he develops an editorial practice through the platform Cthulhu books.



Yuri Tuma
        Yuri Tuma is a multidisciplinary Brazilian artist who focuses on the investigation of contemporary narratives related to diverse ecologies through sound art, installation, and performance as a way to address and reevaluate the human/animal binomial imposed by science and Western thinking. More actively, in addition to academic programming and development, he coordinates the Institute's publishing project, Cthulhu Books, to become a showcase for the political potential of imagining new worlds and possible futures for the planet through academic and artistic research. Starting in 2021, in addition to participating in residencies and coordinating workshops around interspecies thinking, Tuma works with educational and mediation programs through sound art and performance at Spanish institutions such as Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Matadero, La Casa Encendida, INLAND, among others.



Clara Benito
        Clara Benito is an independent researcher based in Madrid, currently collaborating with the Institute for Postnatural Studies as a researcher, assistant in workshops and seminars, as well as co-editor, writer and proofreader within the Institute's publishing house of critical thought and ecology Cthulhu Books. With a background in philosophy and visual arts, Clara is currently pursuing the research master's degree rMA Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam and has been part of the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA) since 2018. Her research, interdisciplinary in nature but with a strong influence from philosophy, touches on topics such as posthumanism, animal studies, queer theory and feminist and gender studies, decolonial theory and environmental humanities.







pip@instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org
13:25:32
Monday Oct 31 2022