Jun 12 2024

These Seasons | ECO-POIESIS BEYOND EMPIRE with Omar Berrada and Sarah Cervenak

Wed | 7PM

For the next installment of These Seasons, SI brings together curator and writer Omar Berrada and scholar Sarah Cervenak to present on their intersectional explorations of ecology, migration, gender, race, and coloniality. Cervenak will draw on excerpts from her two recent monographs, which attend to how Black women artists have taken up questions of wandering and gathering as ecological desire in their visual practices. This will be followed by Berrada’s reading of a suite of poems that offer up landscape and exilic distance to grapple with the politics of translation and the phenomenology of imperialism. Together, these presentations center the force of the poetic imagination in figuring alternative environmental possibilities.

These Seasons is an ongoing transdisciplinary public program that invites artists, scholars and writers to explore theories of nature, landscape, ecology, human and non-human life forms and climate action.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Omar Berrada is a writer and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. He is the author of the poetry collection Clonal Hum (2020), and the editor or co-editor of several books, most recently La Septième Porte, a posthumously published history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani (2020); and Another Room to Live In: 15 Contemporary Arab Poets (2024). He is currently studying racial dynamics in North Africa while living in New York.

Sarah Jane Cervenak is a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of African American and African Diaspora Studies at the UNC-Greensboro. She is the author of two books Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life and Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, both published by Duke University Press.  Along with Dr. J. Kameron Carter, she co-edits the Duke University Press book series, Black Outdoors: Innovations in the Poetics of Study.  She is currently working on a project tentatively called Lines, Light and Blur:  Black Women Artists Undoing the Wor(l)d which considers how 21st century Black women writers have defamiliarized writing to reimagine livable relation on, in and with the word and world.

Image: Matthew Schrader, Ailanthus, 2022