Lise Autogena exhibiting at "Anthropocene Monument" symposium-performance and exhibition in Toulouse, France

Lise Autogena, Professor of Cross-disciplinary Art, is taking part in the exhibition and symposium-performance "Anthropocene Monument" at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse during October.

In 2000 Eugene F. Stoermer and Paul Crutzen proposed that we are now not in the Holocene but the 'Anthropocene', a new geological epoch in which human beings are the determining geological force. The Anthropocene Working Group is gathering evidence that will enable the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) to determine whether the Anthropocene should become a formal unit of geological time. In the meantime, the idea of the Anthropocene is escaping the confines of the Earth sciences into wider public discourse. It is increasingly explored by scholars in the social sciences and humanities, and by artists, who see it as unsettling conventional distinctions between nature and culture, redistributing agency between humans and non humans, and requiring a radical rethink of the place of the human in earth systems and 'deep time'.

The symposium-performance event (10-12th October) will combine academic lectures, performances, conversations and guided tours in the exhibition, with participants drawn from the natural and social sciences, humanities and arts: Frédérique Ait Touati (historian of literature, theatre director), Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway (artists), Christophe Bonneuil (historian of science), Jerry Brotton (historian), Pierre Chabard (architect and historian), Fabien Giraud (artist), Nigel Clark (geographer and geophilosopher), Claire Colebrook (cultural theorist), Emilie Hache (philosopher), Catherine Jeandel (marine geochemist), Bruno Latour (sociologist and philosopher of science), Armin Linke (artist), Adam Lowe (artist), John and Ann-Sofi Palmesino Rönnskog (architects and urbanists), Alain Podaire (oceanographer), Tomás Saraceno (artist), Bronislaw Szerszynski (sociologist and philosopher), Yesenia Thibault-Picazo (artist) and Jan Zalasiewicz (geologist and chair of ICS Anthropocene Working Group). It will conclude with a simulation of the decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), deliberating on the status of the Anthropocene and the form that a Monument should take. The event will be conducted in French and English, with simultaneous translation.

The exhibition will be shown at les Abattoirs from 3 October 2014 to 4 January 2015.

Contributing artists: Lara Almarcegui, Lise Autogena & Joshua Portway, Amy Balkin, Robert Barry, Iain Baxter, Etienne Chambaud, David Claerbout, Mark Dion, Jimmie Durham, Fabien Giraud, Sheela Gowda, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Huang Yong Ping, Adam Lowe, Nicholas Mangan, Gustav Metzger, Fujko Nakaya, Tomás Saraceno, Pascale Marthine Tayou and Yesenia Thibault-Picazo.

www.fete-connaissance.fr/anthropocene-monument-un-colloque-performance
www.lesabattoirs.org/expositions/anthropocene-monument