The Promise of Multispecies Justice
December 2022, Mexico
4S/ESOCITE 2022 Cholula
Gallery hours: 9am-6:30pm, December 7 – 10, 2022
Universidad Iberoamericana Puebla
Building F (F008) & Building G (G007)
Blvrd del Niño Poblano 2901
Cholula, Mexico
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La Promesa de la Justicia Mutiespecie
15 y 16 de Diciembre
En la cancha deportiva
de la comunidad Miguel Hidalgo
Chipas, Mexico
#multispeciesjustice
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Justice at the Ends of Worlds by Feifei Zhou (2021)
The Multispecies Justice Collaborative formed in a Zoom room, during the long months of the pandemic lockdown. Anthropologists, poets, science fiction authors, philosophers, geographers, and visual artists gathered to speculate about the possibilities of justice in more-than-human worlds. The Collaborative is thrilled to present The Promise of Multispecies Justice, a book, poster campaign, and event series.
Small justices are emerging in Tanzanian markets, near banana plantations in the Philippines, and in abandoned buildings of Azerbaijan as people navigate relations with feral dogs, weeds, rats, and pesticides. Conflicts over rights of nature are intensifying in Colombia’s Amazon. Specters of justice are emerging in India, while children in Micronesia memorialize extinct bird species. Indigenous peoples and prisoners are decolonizing multispecies relations in unceded territory and carceral landscapes of the Americas. Engaging with ideas about environmental justice, restorative justice, and other species of justice, The Promise of Multispecies Justice holds open the possibility of flourishing in multispecies worlds, present and to come.
We are presenting a poster campaign designed by Julieta Aranda, that animates various “species of justice” through a glossary. Ideas and images about transformative justice, patches of justice, and social justice will inhabit spaces that are haunted by spectres from multispecies worlds. The installation features reproductions of artworks, sound installations, videos, and sculptures. Our list of artworks, and their layout in the space, is an argument in relation to the intersectional possibilities of multispecies justice.
Reading as Poaching
Our events in Cholula will involve the practice of poaching. Michel de Certeau classically described “reading as poaching.” Freshly published essays, in The Promise of Multispecies Justice, will be poached in a series of Author Meets Critics sessions in English and Spanish. The papers will be poached in a way that is similar to poached pears, where red wine and honey is used to intensify and transform the flavor of the fruit. Participants in the 4S/ESOCITE conference are invited to our Poaching Panels (Room F008): 10 December, 11am till 1pm (English), 2-4pm (Spanish).
After our opening in Cholula elements of the installation will become deterritorialized—travelling to a village in the highlands of Chiapas and beyond. Audience members will be invited to take the posters away from the gallery, to help spread the images and ideas to new locations.
Chiapas Events:
The events in Miguel Hidalgo on 15 & 16 December will be restricted to community members in Chiapas and members of the Multispecies Justice Collaborative.
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The Multispecies Justice Collaborative includes Karin Bolender (the Rural Alchemy Workshop), Sophie Chao (University of Sydney), M. L. Clark (Medellín, Colombia), Radhika Govindrajan (University of Washington), Zsuzsanna Ihar (University of Cambridge), Noriko Ishiyama (Meiji University), Eben Kirksey (University of Oxford), Elizabeth Lara (Deakin University), Jia Hui Lee (Haverford College), Kristina Lyons (University of Pennsylvania), Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country), Alyssa Paredes (University of Michigan), Craig Santos Perez (University of Hawai’i), and Kim TallBear (University of Alberta).
The exhibition was co-produced by Proyecto Concentrarte in collaboration with the Alfred Deakin Institute of Deakin University in Victoria, Australia. The initiative was funded by the Australian Research Council through a Discovery Grant to Eben Kirksey and Sophie Chao on “The Promise of Justice” (DP200102763).
