The Feminist Lecture Program is excited to announce a brand new collaboration with the Vagina Museum! The same amazing online weekly feminist content you expect from us, now hosted by the worlds only bricks and mortar Vagina Museum!
CLASS DESCRIPTION
UNEDITED: This talk draws on a richly textured landscape of Black feminist; queer and Native theory; visual cultures; postnatural studies and decolonial environmental humanities. Participants will be invited to re-think binary subject positions such as ""the human"" and ""nature"" in a speculative rehearsal of liberatory interspecies futures where, as adrienne maree brown has called for: the pleasure of the most oppressed is centred. In such an un/world, I argue, we can all thrive.
This session offers an introduction to speculative writer, artist and scholar Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone's research and practice: Intimate Ecologies.
Intimate ecologies is a praxis, a way of reading, a methodology for those haunted and heavy with the weight of ancestors, a point of departure from which to speculate. The concept arose out of my need to keep thinking with and working in resistance to climate colonialism, when the threat of despair, of overwhelming and crushing melancholia dragged me under. I needed to queer colonial presentations of human-to-more-than-human relations. I needed to keep thinking and speaking about pleasure, possibility, intimacy, and spirit, the speculative and the still-to-be-imagined futures in which Blackness and the more-than-human are becoming; utilizing what photographer and activist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, in his 1988 text for TEN.8, called a technique of ecstasy."
EDITED: Welcome to the un/world - a speculative rehearsal of interspecies futures where, as adrienne maree brown has called for: the pleasure of the most oppressed is centred. In such an un/world, we can all thrive.
Traversing a richly textured landscape, this talk emerges from various localities
Black Feminist Theory
Queer Theory
Native Theory
Visual Cultures
Postnatural Studies
Decolonial Environmental Humanities
creating a site where participants are invited to rethink binary subject positions such as "the human" and "nature towards speculative futures.
This talk will also offer an introduction to Amas own practice as a
speculative writer, artist and scholar, collecting under the title Intimate
Ecologies.
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone on Intimate Ecologies:
Intimate Ecologies is a praxis, a way of reading, a methodology for those haunted and heavy with the weight of ancestors, a point of departure from which to speculate. The concept arose out of my need to keep thinking with and working in resistance to climate colonialism, when the threat of despair, of overwhelming and crushing melancholia dragged me under. I needed to queer colonial presentations of human-to-more-than-human relations. I needed to keep thinking and speaking about pleasure, possibility, intimacy, and spirit, the speculative and the still-to-be-imagined futures in which Blackness and the more-than-human are becoming; utilising what photographer and activist Rotimi Fani-Kayode, in his 1988 text for TEN.8, called a technique of ecstasy..
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Ama Josephine Budge is a Speculative Writer, Artist, Curator and Pleasure Activist whose interdisciplinary practice navigates intimate explorations of race, art, ecology and Blackness. Amas fiction, art writing and essays has been both commissioned and published internationally including by Anathema Spec from the Margins, The Architectural Review, Black Discourse, The Feminist Review, The Independent, Autograph ABP, Consented Magazine and more. She is working on her first speculative novella...
Ama is the 2020-21 recipient of both the Kieth Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism with Bard College (New York) and the Local, International and Planetary Fictions Fellowship with Curatorial Frame (Helsinki) and EVA International (Limerick). Her research for this latter fellowship: Pleasurable Ecologies Formations of Care: Curation as Future-building is an in-depth exploration of decolonial and intersectional curatorial care practices. The research acknowledges the entire ecosystem of socio-historical politics involved in curating contemporary art and cultural production. Ama is also a member of Queer Ecologies collective - currently Artists in Residence at Tower Hamlet Cemetery Park; and initiator of the Apocalypse Reading Room project - new installation opening July - Sept 2021 at Artsadmin (Tonynbee Studios).
Ama's artworks have been commissioned / exhibited by Jupiter Artland (Edinburgh), Casco Art Institute (Utrecht), Ankur Arts (Glasgow) and Other Futures Festival (Amsterdam). Ama is the co-founder of The Batty Mama queer black club & performance night, and initiator of Self Love and Ecstasy pleasure collective (aka SLAE). SLAE works to invoke power, pleasure, and healing with breath, touch and trust for self, community and planet. SLAE manifests predominantly with and for QTIABPOC (queer, trans, intersex, a-gender, Black, people of colour).
In 2022 Ama was welcomed as a new member of the Board of Trustees at ArtsAdmin.
Instagram: @amajosephine
Website: https://www.amajosephine.me/
UPCOMING SESSIONS WITH THE FEMINIST LECTURE PROGRAM
Monday 4th March
Kamin Mohammadi
Irans Ancient Feminist History
Monday 11th March
Ruth Charnock and Karen Schaller
Witching the Institution: Academia and Feminist Witchcraft
Monday 18th March
Lucy Cade
Female Creatives and Spirit Photography in the 19th Century
Monday 25th March
Dr. Sheree Mack
The Women of the Black British Art Movement
Monday 1st April
Nina-Sophia Miralles
Vogue Magazine: Invention, Erasure, Perversity & Power
Monday 8th April
Camilla Baier, Lauren Clarke and Rachel Pronger
The Animation of Mary Blair: A Feminist Guide to Disney
Monday 15th April
Lauren Peters
Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry
Monday 22nd April
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone
Intimate Ecologies: a Black feminist erotics for interspecies un/worlding
Monday 29th April
Joanna Ebenstein
The Anatomical Venus
Monday 6th May
Amina Nugumanova and Elmira Ismukhamedova
Women in Central Asian art: Preservation of Collective Heritage and Decolonisation
Stay tuned in to be the first to hear about our Summer term!
RECORDING
A recording of the lecture will be sent out by The Feminist Lecture Program after the event finishes, within 2 hours of the end of the class. This email will also contain any resources/reading list the lecturer shares.
Please add [email protected] to your email contacts to ensure you receive the recording as expected.
Please note that the recording will expire 7 days after sending.
PAY WHAT YOU CAN
Everyone is welcome to join this Pay-What-You-Can class. We suggest a donation of 20, however, we understand that may not be possible for everybody. Please be honest and pay what you can afford so that we can continue to offer our sessions on a donation basis.
MORE FLP
Cant get enough? The Feminist Lecture Program has our very own digital archive, where you can find some of the best past lectures from our back catalogue to rent and watch ON DEMAND. Check out our ever growing collection here: https://thefeministlectureprogram.vhx.tv/
Follow us on Instagram @thefeministlectureprogram
And check out our sustainable merch from FLP Studio at https://feministlectureprogram.com/shop
& @flp__studio
And that's it!
We're really looking forward to you joining us.
