Betts AuditoriumSchool of Architecturewww.princeton.edu/piirs/conflictshorelines

Nabil Ahmed

Subhankar Banerjee

Eduardo Cadava

Kelly Caylor

Tom Cohen

Natalie Jeremijenko

Colin Kelley

Adrian Lahoud

Esperanza Martinez

Anne McClintock

Yates McKee

Bill McKibben

Hannah Meszaros-Martin

Rob Nixon

Spyros Papapetros

Rachel Price

Susan Schuppli

Paulo Tavares

Territorial Agency

Jamon Van Den Hoek

Manuel Vergara

Eyal Weizman

Co-sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Center for Human Values, the Princeton Environmental Institute and its Climate Futures Initiative, the Program in Latin American Studies, the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities, and the Department of English.

Image courtesy of the NASA’s Conceptual Image Laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center.

Conflict Shorelines

History, Politics, and Climate Change

November 12-14, 2015

Nabil Ahmed

Subhankar Banerjee

Eduardo Cadava

Kelly Caylor

Tom Cohen

Natalie Jeremijenko

Colin Kelley

Adrian Lahoud

Esperanza Martinez

Anne McClintock

Yates McKee

Bill McKibben

Hannah Meszaros-Martin

Rob Nixon

Spyros Papapetros

Rachel Price

Susan Schuppli

Paulo Tavares

Territorial Agency

Jamon Van Den Hoek

Manuel Vergara

Eyal Weizman

Thursday, November 12

17:00 Symposium OpeningIntroductory remarks: Eduardo Cadava (Princeton University) and Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London and Princeton University)

17:15 Keynote LectureRob Nixon (Princeton University): “Slow Violence, Environmental Activism and the Arts”Introduction: Bill Gleason (Princeton University)

19:00 Screening (McCosh 10) This Changes Everything (dir. by Avi Lewis, 2015), introduced by Bill McKibben (Middlebury College and Co-Founder of 350.org). This screening is presented in collaboration with the Wilson College Signature Lecture Series.

Friday, November 13

10:00 Tropical ForestsPaulo Tavares (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador): “Over the Ruins of Amazonia: Colonial Violence and De-Colonial Resistance at the Frontiers of Climate Change”Nabil Ahmed (London Metropolitan University): “Fire in the Forest: Geo-History, Conflict, and Environmental Self-Determination in West Papua”Hannah Meszaros-Martin (Goldsmiths, University of London): “The Outlawed Earth”Moderator: Rachel Price (Princeton University)

12:15 The Rights of NatureEsperanza Martínez (President, Acción Ecológica)Manuel Vergara (Fundación Baltasar Garzón)Moderator: Paulo Tavares (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador)

13:15 Lunch Break

14:30 TreesSpyros Papapetros (Princeton University): “Trees, Image-Monuments, and Pre-architecture”Kelly Caylor (Princeton University): “Reading Tree Leaves: How Changing Climate Alters the Structure of Ecosystems.”Natalie Jeremijenko (New York University): “The Museum of Natural Futures”Moderator: Christy Wampole (Princeton University)

16:45 ViolenceTom Cohen (University of Albany): “Black Ops”Anne McClintock (Princeton University): “Oilscapes and Water Wars: The Militarization of Climate Change, Gender Conflict, and Indigenous Activism”Introduction: Melissa Lane (Princeton University)

Saturday, November 14

10:00 The Arctic Yates McKee (CUNY, Queens College): “Flood Wall Street, Flood Everywhere: Climate Justice and the Arts of Decolonization”Susan Schuppli (Goldsmiths, University of London): “Cold Case Files: From Disputed Sunsets to Dark Snow”Territorial Agency (Architectural Association, London): “North anon: almost-, semi-, quasi-, post-, neo-colonial”Moderator: D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University)

12:00 Arctic VoicesSubhankar Banerjee (photographer and writer, Port Townsend, WA)Introduction: Michael Hecht (Princeton University)

13:15 Lunch Break

14:30 DesertsColin P. Kelley (UC, Santa Barbara): “Vulnerability, Climate, and Conflict: The Cases of Syria and Yemen”Adrian Lahoud (Royal College of Art, London): “Floating Bodies”Jamon Van Den Hoek (Oregon State University): “Climate Syntax and the Refugee Archipelago”Moderator: Brooke Holmes (Princeton University)

16:30 Desert BloomEyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London and Princeton University): “The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert”Introduction: Mario Gandelsonas (Princeton University)

17:45 Round Table Rachel Price (Princeton University)Paulo Tavares (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador)Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths, University of London, and Princeton University)Moderator: Eduardo Cadava (Princeton University)

Nabil Ahmed is a researcher, writer and educator. His work explores the politics of environmental violence mainly in South and South East Asia. He has written for Third Text, Volume, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth and for many other publications. More recently, he has participated in the Taipei Biennale (2012), Cuenca Biennale (2014) and has exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), and Shanghai Study Centre at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Hong Kong. He is co-founder and director of Call & Response, a sound arts organization based in London, and he teaches at the School of Architecture, London Metropolitan University. He is currently a fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart.

Subhankar Banjeree is a photographer, writer, and activist. He has been a leading voice on issues of Arctic conservation, indigenous human rights, resource wars, and climate change. He also has done work in the American southwest on desert ecology and forest deaths from climate change. His current research focuses on the intersection of ecocultural activism and environmental humanities. He has received several awards, including a Special Achievement Award from the Sierra Club (2003), an inaugural Cultural Freedom Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation (2003), an inaugural Greenleaf Artist Award from United Nations Environment Programme (2005), and he was named an Arctic Hero by the Alaska Wilderness League in 2010. He is the editor of Arctic Voices: Resistance at the Tipping Point (2012).

Eduardo Cadava is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History, Emerson and the Climates of History, and, with Fazal Sheikh, of Fazal Sheikh: Portraits. He also has co-edited Who Comes After the Subject?, Cities Without Citizens, and The Itinerant Languages of Photography. He recently has introduced and co-translated Nadar’s memoirs, Quand j’étais photographe, which will appear with MIT Press in the fall of 2015. A collection of his essays on photography will appear in Spanish under the title La imagen en ruinas in Chile in the fall of 2015, and his book Paper Graveyards: Essays on Art and Photography is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Kelly Caylor is Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Princeton University and presently the Director of Princeton’s Program in Environmental Studies. Focusing primarily on sub-Saharan Africa, his research seeks to understand the way in which the interaction between land use and climate change affect the dynamics and resilience of global drylands. He is currently working on the development and deployment of low-cost cellular-based environmental sensors for improved monitoring of agriculture and ecosystem function in the developing world. He also is a recipient of an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation, and he was the inaugural recipient of the Early Career Award in Hydrological Sciences given by the American Geophysical Union.

Tom Cohen is Professor of English at the University at Albany, and the founder of the Institute of Critical Climate Change. His work traverses a number of disciplines— including cinema studies, digital thought, biopolitics, and, more recently, the contemporary shift of twenty-first century studies in the era of climate change. His books include Anti-Mimesis: From Plato to Hitchcock (Cambridge, 1994), Ideology and Inscription: “Cultural Studies” After Benjamin, de Man, and Bakhtin (Cambridge, 1998), and a two-volume work on Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies (U of Minnesota, 2005). He is also a contributing editor of Telemorphosis: Essays on Theory in the Era of Climate Change (OHP, 2011).

Natalie Jerejimenko is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at New York University, and is also affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the Program in Environmental Studies. Bringing biochemistry, engineering, neuroscience, and the history and philosophy of science into her artistic practice, she is the recipient of several awards, including the 2014 VIDA Art and Artificial Life International Awards Pioneer Prize, and she has been named one of the 40 most influential designers by I.D. Magazine and one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review. She is the Founder and Director of the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU and her work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, The Whitney Museum, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt.

Colin Kelley is a PACE Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography and member of the Climate Hazards Group at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his PhD at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and his work focuses on the relation between climate change and political conflict. Most recently, combining climate, social, and economic data, he has studied the role and place of the drought that affected Syria from 2006 to 2010 has had in the 2011 Syrian uprising, and has argued that the agricultural collapse and mass migration instigated by the drought contributed to the unrest that exploded in the spring of 2011.

Adrian Lahoud is an architect, researcher and educator. He is presently Head of Architecture at the Royal College of Art London. He has written extensively on questions of climate change, spatial politics and urban conflict, with a focus on the Arab world and Africa. His work has been published in E-Flux, Grain Vapour Ray: Textures of the Anthropocene, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, and Performing Trauma. He exhibits and lectures internationally, most recently at Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of the ongoing Anthropocene Project, Ashkal Alwan Beirut, Columbia University GSAPP, Tate Britain, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin, and Storefront for Art and Architecture New York.

Esperanza Martinez is the co-founder of Acción Ecologica, a non-profit environmental organization based in Quito, Ecuador. She also is the co-founder and international secretariat for OILWATCH, a global network of oil-affected peoples and their allies. She has been instrumental in the campaign to hold Texaco, now Chevron, accountable for the destruction of the Ecuadorian Amazon, influencing the change in the Ecuadorian constitution that recognized the “rights of nature,” and has been a major supporter and proponent of the Yasuni Initiative, the Ecuadorian government’s plan to keep oil in the ground in Yasuni National Park with compensation from world governments.

Anne McClintock is Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University. She has been the recipient of many awards, including two MacArthur-SSRC Fellowships. She is the author of Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest and co-editor of Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. She is presently working on the relation between climate change and militarization and, in particular, the militarization of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill, the melting of Greenland, and the “conflict shoreline” of the long aftermath of Sandy.

Yates Mckee is an art critic and activist working in the post-Occupy milieu of New York City. He has worked in groups including Occupy Theory, Strike Debt, GULF, Flood Wall Street, and Rising Tide, and his writing has appeared in venues such as October, Grey Room, South Atlantic Quarterly, and The Nation. With Meg McLagan, he is co-editor of Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism (Zone 2012), and his book Art After Occupy is forthcoming in Fall 2015 from Verso.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. He is an author and environmentalist who in 2014 was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize, sometimes called the “alternative Nobel.” The author of the 1989 book The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about climate change, he has written several other books, including Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist (2014), Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough Planet (2011), and The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation (2005). He is a founder of 350.org, the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement, and the recipient of several prizes including the 2013 Gandhi Prize and the 2013 Thomas Merton Prize.

Hannah Meszaros-Martin is an artist, writer, and current CHASE funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. She received a BFA from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford (2009), and a MA in Research Architecture (2012). From 2012-2014 she worked for Forensic Architecture, and co-founded the project “Modelling Kivalina,” which was awarded the World Justice Opportunity fund in 2013. The project exhibited at the House of World Cultures (HKW), Berlin, as a part of Forensic Architecture’s exhibition and contributed to the book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014). She has exhibited solo work in Medellín, London, and documenta (13).

Rob Nixon is the inaugural Thomas A. And Currie C. Barron Family Professor in Humanities and the Environment and also Professor of English and the Princeton Environmental Institute at Princeton University. He is the author of London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (1992), Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (1994), Dreambirds: the Natural History of a Fantasy (2001), and the award-winning Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011). His areas of specialization include environmental studies, postcolonial studies, African literature, world literature, and twentieth-century British literature. He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and his writing also has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, Village Voice, The Nation, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Conflict Shorelines

History, Politics, and Climate Change

Participants Bios

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. His work focuses on the historiography of art and architecture, the intersections between architecture and the visual arts, and the relations between architecture and psychoanalysis. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (2012), and the co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (2013). He is presently completing a book under the general title World Ornament on the historiography of architectural ornamentation and bodily adornment from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

Rachel Price is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. Her work focuses on Latin American, circum-Atlantic and particularly Cuban literature and culture, and on media, poetics, empire, and ecocriticism. Her essays have discussed a range of topics, including digital media, slavery, poetics, and visual art. She is the author of The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil and Spain 1868-1968 (2014) and of the forthcoming Planet/Cuba, which centers on contemporary literature and conceptual, digital, and visual art from Cuba that engages questions of environmental crisis, new media, and new forms of labor and leisure.

Susan Schuppli is a media artist and cultural theorist who is currently Acting Director (2013-15) of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her creative projects have been exhibited throughout Canada, the US, Korea, Australia, and in Europe. Recent and upcoming projects include HKW, Casino Luxembourg, Stroom Den Haag, and the Shanghai Biennale. She is on the editorial board of the journal SITE (Stockholm) and her written work has appeared in Cabinet, Photoworks, Architectural Design, Borderlands, Cosmos and History, Memory Studies, and Photographies. She is currently working on the book Material Witness, which was the subject of an experimental documentary.

Paulo Tavares is an architect and urbanist in Quito and São Paulo. He has taught at the Visual Cultures Lab/MA in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths, and he currently teaches design and spatial theory in the School of Architecture, Design, and Arts at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. His work explores architecture, media-based narratives, and writing as interconnected modalities for reading urban, territorial, and ecological conditions. His articles have appeared in many publications worldwide, including Nada, Alfabeta2 and Abitare, Cabinet, and Piseagrama, and his work has been shown in Insert 2014 (New Delhi), Animism (Beirut, 2013), Taipei Biennial (2012), among other international exhibitions. With Ursula Biemann, he is the author of Forest Law / Selva Jurídica (2014).

Territorial Agency / John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog. John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog are architects and urbanists. They have established Territorial Agency, an independent organization based in London that innovatively promotes and works for sustainable territorial transformations. Its works combine contemporary architecture, urbanism, spatial analysis and extended stakeholder networks. They teach at the AA Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, where they run Diploma 4 and are the directors of the AA Territories Think Tank. Their projects include the Anthropocene Observatory, The Coast of Europe, North. Their projects include USE Uncertain states of Europe, Mutations, and Solid Sea. They are both research fellows at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Jamon Van Den Hoek is a geographer, geospatial intelligence leader, and Assistant Professor at Oregon State University. He specializes in the use of remote sensing and geospatial analysis to understand the relationship between large-scale environmental change and violent social conflict. He is currently involved in NASA-funded research on deforestation following the Maoist civil war in Nepal, and has ongoing collaborative projects on conflict ecology in Syria, Gaza, and Nigeria. He received his PhD in geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an NSF IGERT fellow, and was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center from 2012-2015.

Manuel M. Vergara Céspedes is the Director of the Legal Department of the Fundación Internacional Baltasar Garzón. He has conducted meetings with international experts in Puerto Rico, Asunción, The Hague, Spain, Johannesburg, and Buenos Aires in order to promote the universal persecution of economic and environmental crimes. He also has worked as a consultant in the Rule of Law Unit at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Phnom Penh (Cambodia) and as a Legal Consultant at the International Labor Organization in Jakarta (Indonesia). He collaborated in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha (Tanzania) and Kigali (Rwanda).

Eyal Weizman is an architect, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures, and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2014 he also has been a Global Scholar at Princeton University. In 2010 he established the research agency Forensic Architecture (FA), whose work is documented in the exhibition and book FORENSIS (2014). In 2007 he formed, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine, whose work has been presented in the book Architecture after Revolution (2014). In 2013 he designed a permanent folly in Gwangju, South Korea, which was documented in the book The Roundabout Revolution (2015). His other books include The Conflict Shoreline (2015), Mengele’s Skull (2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (2011), Hollow Land (2007), and A Civilian Occupation (2003).