Triple Canopy is pleased to present Speculations (On Nature), the second of two roundtables on climate change and the future, as part of Marfa Dialogues/New York. Following on our summer project at MoMA PS1, Speculations (“The future is ______”), and as part of our upcoming Speculations issue, Triple Canopy is inviting writers, scholars, and artists to discuss pressing issues around climate-change adaptation and mitigation, surveying a range of viewpoints on ecology and nature. The first roundtable, Speculations (On Climate), took place on Saturday, October 26.
Speculations (On Nature) will consider the conflicting ways we conceive of the natural world, and how nature informs our understanding of anthropogenic climate change. How should we adjust our idea of nature to include human influence? How might art and literature portray a new image of nature—one that contends with the frailty of the human species and its possible extinction—and imagine ecological projects for the future?
Participants include Claire Colebrook, Brenda Iijima, Yates McKee, and Sukhdev Sandhu.
Special thanks to Ballroom Marfa, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Public Concern Foundation for their support of this project.
- Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She has written articles on poetry, literary theory, queer theory, and contemporary culture. She is the editor of Extinction, published in 2012, as well as coeditor of the series “Critical Climate Change” and member of the advisory board of the Institute for Critical Climate Change.
- Brenda Iijima is a poet and choreographer of the ecological research movement (Sm[Art]). She is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: Around Sea (2004), Animate, Inanimate Aims (2007), Subsistence Equipment (2008), Revv. You’ll—ution (2009), and If Not Metamorphic (2010). She edited eco language reader (2010), a collection of essays by poets on matters of ecological concern. Her collection Untimely Death is Driven Beyond the Horizon is forthcoming from 1913 Press this winter. She edits books of poetry for Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs in Brooklyn.
- Yates McKee is an art critic and organizer with various Occupy projects including Strike Debt. His work has appeared in venues including October, Grey Room, the Nation, Waging Nonviolence, and Impasses of the Post-Global, a volume in the Critical Climate Change series. He is coeditor of the book Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism (Zone Books), as well as the magazine Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy.
- Sukhdev Sandhu directs the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University and is the author of Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night. He also writes for Bidoun, the Wire, the Guardian, and many other publications.
- Sarah Resnick has published in n+1, Bookforum, Art in America, BOMB, and Triple Canopy, where she was previously an editor. Her writing was selected for 2017’s Best American Essays and for the 2019 Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York.