The Future of Survival Public Event: "Listening to Ice"

The conference "The Future of Survival Public event: 'Listening to Ice,'" scheduled for Thursday, August 15 at 5:30 p.m. at the Hotel Belvedere in Locarno, is the third and final event open to the public as part of the USI Cinema and Audiovisual Futures Conference 2024. 

It will feature Susan Schuppli as the main guest, in conversation with Doreen Mende of the Harun Farocki Institut.

Susan Schuppli is a researcher and artist based in the UK whose work examines material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters and climate change. Current work is focused on learning from ice and the politics of cold. In her keynote, she will examine how environmental systems and the transformations brought about by global warming are generating new forms of evidence; creating, in effect, a planetary archive of material witnesses. This concept, introduced by Schuppli in her book of the same title (published by MIT Press in 2022), encompasses an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events and exposing the practices and procedures that enable matter to bear witness. She will share her most recent work focused on “listening to ice” as material witness and connect this work to that explored by Forensic Architecture, a research agency dedicated to the development, employment, and dissemination of new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence.

How can digital tools be employed by artists today in order to pay attention to and learn from material witnesses, and in particular, how do these tools create new forms of evidence in both image and sound? What is the role of the audiovisual in ensuring and creating environmental sustainability and how can cinematic practices allow us to see and hear wounds of environmental and social injustice present in the materials and spaces around us? Susan Schuppli, through her lecture, will try to provide an answer to these questions.

The scheduled start time of the event is not final and may still be subject to change.