Woodland Habitats: Sarah Teasley's Presentation and Discussion with an ecologist Rodney Keenan and disaster researcher Kikuko Shoyama

The tactile and immaterial qualities of woodland habitats
Design luminary and social historian, Sarah Teasley on 'Experiencing Woodlands through Science in 1913' followed by a discussion with forest ecologist Rodney Keenan and earth science and disaster resilience researcher Kikuko Shoyama.

In this talk, Sarah Teasley will explore what happened when one local forest in Miyagi Prefecture, northern Japan — with its particular and unique climate, species populations, soil, orientation and location, all with their own material affordances — encountered ideas, technologies and materials from further afield. Working from period experimental reports, contemporary plant biology research and fieldwork, Sarah will suggest that attending to the micro-interactions of wood, water and microbes can illuminate both human power relations and — perhaps as importantly — suggest more ethical and accurate ways to live in the world.

This forum is included in the program for Mutable Ecologies which marks 10 years since the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and 12 years since the Black Saturday bushfires. In this decade Australia and Japan have experienced an increase in extreme environmental events which have impacted our communities and cultures and opened questions about the contributing factors of our human activities. Art and design practices offer us opportunities to unpack and better understand the interconnections between these social and environmental ecologies.

Art in this sense is not an illustrative instrument nor a replacement for 'hard science'. Rather it offers us poetic and affective experiences through which new perception and knowledge can emerge; this includes convergence with political action, new ways of feeling and being in the world and ways of practicing and translating identity and culture. T.J. Demos' understanding of art's critical role to society, culture and politics elevate it from being merely considered as a consumable resource or a functional tool. Instead, art is acknowledged to be a part of the world, a part of our human perception and a part of a re-imagining of interrelations.

The Woodland Habitats series is presented by Asialink Arts and RMIT University, supported by CAST Research Group, RMIT University and the Australian Government through the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Project Partners: Asialink Arts, Musashino Art University, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC].

Tickets via Eventbrite

Image credit: Sarah Teasley, Forested hills at the edge of Tendō City, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan, 2012, Mutable Ecologies.