Mutable Ecologies: Woodlands Session III

Wednesday 3 November 2021

1–2PM

Online

Woodland Habitats: Artist Polly Stanton on 'Elegy for an Occupied Forest' followed by a conversation with Kohei Fujito and Ruth Langford

The tactile and immaterial qualities of woodland habitats
Filmmaker and artist Polly Stanton presents Elegy for an Occupied Forest discussing how pine plantations present eerie life worlds profoundly shaped and recomposed by the productions of capital. They are vibrant sites that remake the forest into a strange and occupied landscape of human-made modification and disturbance. Following her short talk is a discussion with Ainu artist Kohei Fujito and Song Woman and Story Teller, Yorta Yorta woman Ruth Langford.

Polly Stanton explores these complex forest assemblages through the moving image work Indefinite Terrains (2019), which traces the delicate ecologies and entanglements of the Moonlight Flat Pine Plantation in Dja Dja Wurrung country (Central Victoria, Australia). By recounting the process of working with these spaces, as well as thinking alongside a number of writers and theorists, Polly considers the plantation as an ecotone of submerged histories and indeterminate futures.

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: Polly Stanton, Skulls, 2018, Mutable Ecologies.