Uriel Orlow, Michael Marder, Lisa Mazza
Cinema Permanente #2 || We Have Already Lived Through Our Future—We Just Don't Remember It (2024)
EVENT
21 November–20 December 2024
FAR - Villa Sucota
21.11
6:30pm
Towards a Vegetal Pedagogy
lecture by Michael Marder
7pm
We Have Already Lived Through Our Future—We Just Don't Remember It by Uriel Orlow
screening
7:30pm
Michael Marder (philosopher), Uriel Orlow (artist) and Lisa Mazza (curator) in conversation
You are invited in Fondazione Antonio Ratti Thursday 21 November at 6:30pm for the second appontment of Cinema Permanente, foreseeing the screening of We Have Already Lived Through Our Future—We Just Don't Remember It (2024), a film by Uriel Orlow, introduced by Towards a Vegetal Pedagogy, a lecture by Michael Marder, and followed by a conversation between Michael Marder, Uriel Orlow and Lisa Mazza.
The film, produced during the 2023 BAU residency in South Tyrol explores the deep time of climate change and our ties to the more-than-human world. Orlow has collaborated with a palaeobotanist and climate scientists, as well as with children from Parcines' Forest Kindergarten, to understand not only climate transformations in a double movement towards the past and the future, but also to imagine new forms of coexistence with nature. We Have Already Lived Through Our Future—We Just Don't Remember It lies at the intersection between the factual, visual documentation of a place and what its history teaches us, and the mise-en-scène based on that other essential historical force, imagination. Imagination is embodied here by children from a forest kindergarten who live in and talk about the forest, imagining it and singing it, describing its own evolution and its relationship with humans and animals. Future actors in our relationship with nature, they are situated in the present, at the fold between the immensely long time span that precedes them and the possibilities of time in the making. In Orlow’s film, the children, in their being in the world still free of the despair that prevents action, represent the force capable of ‘bending the order of time’. Like plants and trees, they are in motion.
Towards a Vegetal Pedagogy by philosopher Michael Marder will introduce the screening by addressing to learning from and living with the forest, survival and futurity through the presentation of an unpublished book on vegetal wisdom for children.
The event is part of Cinema Permanente programmation, and the film will be screened in Capriccio until December 20th.
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013), The Philosopher’s Plant (2014), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020), Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021), Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place (2024).
Uriel Orlow is a Swiss-born artist with a diasporic background who lives and works between Lisbon, London and Zurich. His work has been presented at major international survey exhibitions including at the 54th Venice Biennale, Manifesta 9 and 12 in Genk and Palermo as well as at biennials in Berlin, Dakar, Kochi, Taipei, Sharjah, Moscow, Kathmandu, Guatemala, Dunkerque and many others, as well as in solo exhibitions at Castello di Rivoli, MCBA Lausanne, The Showroom London and many others as well as in museums, galleries, film festivals in London, Lisbon, Zurich, Geneva, St Gallen, Athens, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Madrid, Marseille, Paris, Oslo, Dublin Turin, Cairo, Istanbul, Mexico City, Bejing, New York, Chicago, Toronto, Melbourne and elsewhere and has been part of the South Asia tour of the exhibition Critical Zones conceived by Bruno Latour. Recent publications include Conversing with Leaves (Archive Books), Soil Affinities (Shelter Press) and Theatrum Botanicum (Sternberg Press). Uriel Orlow teaches at University of the Arts, Zurich (ZHdK) and at University of Westminster, London as well as at Maumaus ISP, Lisbon.
Orlow's practice is research-based, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines and people. Projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice and plants as political actors. His multi-media installations focus on specific locations, micro-histories and forms of haunting. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence.
Lisa Mazza is a curator and editor. She was a member of Lungomare cooperative artistic direction team, and directed the Alto Adige team for Manifesta 7. In 2015, she co-founded BAU, an institution for art and ecology that respond to questions of the present, conceiving of nature and culture together and regarding the human with its environment as part of an ecological cycle.