Melbourne University’s “Hacking the Anthropocene” was not just a Convent seminar but a series of workshops and events over months of “challenging the toxic and corrosive logics of racial and extractive capitalism.”
Our irreverent correspondent Tony Thomas reports:
This Do-It-Together symposium was booked out by eager academics and their students, some fretting on the waitlist. It was at the Abbotsford ex-Convent, with vegan morning tea and lunch and gender-neutral toilets. At least the morning tea wasn’t drunk from jam jars.
In each of three sessions, master Anthropocene Hackers described their hacks (example: “Rupturing the colonial Anthropocene”), and the audience got to “hack back”, a hip term for discussion. Some participants were “theys” rather than he or she.
The revelations were interleaved with “walkshops” where attendees “weathered with what-ever mid-Winter provides”, offset by raincoats and fleecy underwear. Those walkshops were about ‘Un-earthing. Wild concrete on living soil’, curated by visual ecologist Aviva Reed and celebrating “the sedimentation of our imaginations.” Her walk notes are in need of Google Translate, but here goes:
Description: An ethereal moment of material molecular immersion into the living grounds we walk upon. Through this process we will unearth our obligations and responsibilities to care for the soil that cares for us … This walkshop engages critically and sensually with what is beneath our feet, honouring both the ingredients that make up the concrete pathways that hold us and the soil beneath … We name and acknowledge the sand, lime, silt and clay and through an immersive process will explore the deep time … asking what is our responsibility to honour the concrete for both its utilitarian and multi-specied complexity and our obligation to unearth the negations of this concrete for the soil beneath.
Celebrity guest was multi-tattooed and ripped Professor of Gender Studies Jack Halberstam of Columbia University, whose “work considers wild, queer, decolonial possibilities for protest culture, anarchy and performance.” Accidentally anticipating the Wuhan Flu, he spoke on “Strategies of Wildness – Why We Must Unbuild the World!”
Oh Tony, you ARE awful!
(But we LIKE you.) - Ed.
You can read Tony Thomas’ full article in Quadrant:
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/04/sex-academia-style-lets-all-have-a-tree-some/