 Hello and welcome to the Arts Link Assembly 2021, Future Fellows. We're speaking to you directly from Lenapehokin, which is the unceded land of the Lenape people. And we wish to pay our respects to the elders of the indigenous population, both past, present and future, on whose land we are now occupying. As you know, the Arts Link Assembly is our annual meeting of transnational artists, curators and arts workers. And for this session, we're delighted to partner with the Virilis Centre for Art and Politics. And Karin Kourni, the director of the Virilis Centre, will introduce this session in an extended format. So, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much, Simon. And thank you all very much for joining us. I do want to take a few minutes and just give you a bit of background about the Virilis Centre. The Boris Laurie Foundation Fellows and the program this afternoon. But I do want to start by thanking Simon and CEC Arts Link very much for the partnership. It's also been lovely and delightful to partner with the team at CEC Arts Link, in particular Maxine Tumanev, the program's manager. As we know in these times, it's both been challenging and also incredibly necessary to develop and deepen the partnership collaborations that we are able to celebrate with this particular program this afternoon. And it's been wonderful and rewarding to partner with CEC Arts Link and us, the Virilis Centre for Art and Politics, a platform for public scholarship at the new school on this program this afternoon. We've partnered with CEC Arts Link before. We were lucky to host one of the Fellows, Fatim Farhad, about two years ago. And this afternoon, we are really delighted to present to you, etc., the Virilis Centre's Boris Laurie Fellows, who will follow the distinguished cohort of the Arts Link's future Fellows. And I suspect we'll add a note of exuberance to proceedings that are both very serious and very urgent. Before they present responsibility and manifesto on equal side, let me share a word about the Boris Laurie Fellowship, because I think it matters the discussions that we've had over the last few days here, and I will then introduce all the speakers. The Boris Laurie Fellowship supports an artist or a group of artists whose approach to art making is distinct because they are fearless and bold, they are internationally committed and globally engaged, they situate themselves independently of the for-profit art world, and they have overcome political hardship. These were all qualities that distinguished the work of Boris Laurie, who passed away in 2008, was a Holocaust survivor and the founder of the No Art Movement in New York City. They are also qualities that we've witnessed in many of the Arts Link future Fellows. But a Fellowship that is named in honour of another artist also speaks of a historical lineage of artists or four artists, and that work is building on, and it acknowledges the work that we do, the fact that we are building on foundations that were laid by others before us. That kind of historical awareness that recognizes ancestors in order to break away from them distinguishes again many of the artists we've heard from earlier, but perhaps none more so than, etc., the inaugural Boris Laurie Fellows at the various centre. A word on, etc., the group was formed in 1997 in Buenos Aires. It is a multidisciplinary collective composed of visual artists, poets and performance artists, and it has been led since 2007 by co-founders Loretto Garingus Mann and Federico Zuckerfeld, and we'll hear from them in a moment. In 2005, there were also co-founders of the International Everest Movement, a global organization that proclaims error as a philosophy of life, and we'll return to that as well. They have participated in numerous exhibitions and biennials throughout the world, such as the biennial of Jakarta, Sao Paulo, Athens, Istanbul, and Taipei, and their work has been recognized among others by the Prince Claus Fund for its denouncement of human rights and environmental abuses through theatrical and poetic actions often exercised at great political and personal risk. Under the heading Neo-Extractivism, Protocols of Buen Vivir, Loretto Guesmann and Federico Zuckerfeld divided their four semester Boris Laurie Fellowship into four chapters, and we're thrilled to present you now chapter two entitled, Responsibility a Manifesto on Ecoside. Like the previous chapters, it is based on the indigenous concept of Buen Vivir, collecting existing and creating new protocols to protect the environment today, this afternoon with a particular focus on the notion of Ecoside. Ecoside, as you may know, refers to the mass damage and destruction of entire ecosystems. We will begin this afternoon with a presentation by J Bernstein, the university distinguished professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research, who has in recent years focused some of his scholarship on Ecoside and is actually about to finish a manuscript for a new book entitled, of Ecoside and Human Rights. Bernstein is an expert in continental philosophy and the leading interpreter of the philosophy of Adorno. He's a co-editor of the journal Critical Horizon and has published numerous books, leading up to the one I just mentioned, among them the philosophy of the novel, Lucache Marxism and the dialectics of form, recovering ethical life, Jürgen Habermas and the future of critical theory, and the fate of art, aesthetic alienation from Kant to Derrida to Adorno. And I'm just quoting or reading a very brief excerpt from Professor Bernstein's faculty page on the New School website where he says, quote, philosophy for me means interrogating the foundations of our life together, how we make sense of the world and how we fail, how philosophy profiles the human as upright and as failing, as knowing and as blinded, as world making and as suffering, as flourishing and as dying, and how those competing images are bound together in our morals, politics, ordinary life and art, end of quote. After Professor Bernstein's expose, we'll hear from etc. in an exchange with performance artist and scholar Larry Bogat, who specializes in humor, imagination and theatrics in progressive movement activism. A professor of political performance at the University of California Davis and the co-founder of the clandestine insurgent rebel clown army, Professor Bogat also is the author of several books, and among them are Electoral Guerrilla Theater, Radical Ridicule and Social Movements, Tactical Performance, The Theory and Practice of Serious Play, and Performing Truth, Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia. Professor Bogat is the recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He was also the Art and Controversy Fellow at Carnegie Mellon, as well as the Humanities and Political Conflict Fellow at Arizona State University and has performed and led workshops in mischievous activist pranks internationally, most recently in Brazil, Chile, Latvia, Spain and of course Argentina. I'd like to thank the founders for the Boris Lurie Fellowship, they are the Boris Lurie Art Foundation, as well as the Schena and Josefina Lurie Memorial Foundation. Our work at the Verlis Center is also made possible by the Borla Verlis Center and the New School, as well as by our tremendously resourceful and accomplished staff and I'd like to single out Cure the Areola Pira, who has really been instrumental in organizing this event this afternoon. But our indebtedness goes further. At this point I'd also like to acknowledge, following Simon's lead, that in New York in this lovely room, floating high above Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, we are in fact leading on land, that is not ours, but unceded territory of the Lenape people and other indigenous peoples. Bearing this debt in mind, I think will be helpful as we now listen to etc. and their proposals for when they'll be here. First however, I welcome Jay Bernstein and look forward to his talk. Thank you Karen, thank you for inviting me. I am more than honored to be performing with etc. They share my passion for the problem of ecocide and the need for us to think together about it. So what I want to do in my small talk is introduce you to the concept of ecocide. Some of the background, some of the ways in which it has been formed. Ecocide is mass damage and destruction of ecosystems, severe harm to nature which is widespread or long term. Now rather remarkably and fitting for this occasion, in June of this year, a panel of 12 lawyers from around the world, sponsored by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, proposed a new definition of ecocide as a fifth crime against peace. We should think of this proposal as a response to what has happened at the Glasgow Climate Summit. Nothing. I want to quote and quote accurately Greta Thunberg. What has happened is blah, blah, blah. You recall of course after documenting that carbon emissions are on the track to rise by 16% by 2030, according to the UN, and rather than fall by half, which is the cut needed to keep global heating, under the international agreed limit of 1.5 degrees centigrade, Thunberg said, build back better, blah, blah, blah. We need economy, blah, blah, blah. Net zero by 2050, blah, blah, blah. She said all this in Milan about a month ago. This is all she said we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great, but so far have not led to action. Words and ambitions drown in their empty promises. The notion of ecocide is meant to be action rather than the promises of statesmen. The idea of adding it to the crimes against peace would be to say that it would become one of the core international crimes. They now are genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, the crime of aggression. Those crimes are ones dealt with by the International Criminal Court, and you should know by the way that the criminal court has only been functioning since 2002, which is to say the very idea of international crime of a serious kind is still new, still being born. Here, and I want its only 168 words, is the new proposal and we deserve to hear it in its full. For the purpose of this statute, ecocide means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts. And because these are lawyers talking to other lawyers and judges, they go ahead and define all their terms. For our purposes, just the first two will do. It is rare that one hears the word wanton in a legal setting, but wanton is what's at stake here. Wanton means with reckless disregard for damage, which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated. That means we're talking about anticipation, proportion. What's happening to the earth is out of all proportion. And severe means damage which involves very serious adverse changes, disruption or harm to any element of the environment, including grave impacts on human life or natural cultural or economic resources. Where did this concept come from? Where did the idea of ecocide come from? In fact, it emerged out of the war in Vietnam. The United States was trying to get rid of the Viet Cong and they could not find them. They were hiding in the forests and jungles. So what did the United States do? Blew away the jungles, flattened them. Ecocide was a military tactic using Agent Orange and Blanket Bombing. More than 12% of Vietnam's land area was decimated. In response to this horror, a group of scientists at Yale, led by Arthur Goldspin, proposed a new idea. The idea of ecocide. And as far as we know, Goldspin coined the term. This is his words as he was announcing this at a meeting. After the end of World War II and as a result of the Nuremberg trials, we justly condemned willful destruction of an entire people and its culture, calling this crime against humanity genocide. So genocide is the model. It seems to me that the willful and permanent destruction of environment which a people can live in a manner of their own choosing, ought similarly to be considered as a crime against humanity. To be designated by the term, ecocide. I believe this is still Goldspin, 1970, that the most highly developed nations have already committed autoecocide. I'll come back to that in a moment. Over large parts of their own countries, at the present time, the United States stands alone as possibly having committed ecocide against another country, Vietnam, through its massive use of chemical defolians and herbicides. The United Nations would appear to be an appropriate body for the formulation of a proposal against ecocide. In referring to autoecocide, Goldspin was in fact referring to Rachel Carson's claim that the use of pesticides in the United States should be called biocide. The killing of life. What Goldspin did not anticipate. He thought there was a military reason for banning ecocide. What he did not know at the time was that there would be ever new forms of autoecocide of what, etc., uses as the term, terroricide that have become industrial capitalist form of life over the last 50 years. So I want to make a proposal about the nature of why there should be an ecocide convention now. And here is the almost irresistible hypothesis. Liberal capitalism has become an ecocidal, a terracidal form of life. Now that's a huge claim. It's a huge claim to claim that our form of life is ecocidal. And in order to give you some sense of how this comes about, why I am making this immense claim that there should not be narrow law, that this is a critique of a form of life, we need, as we often do in understanding things, to put in some background. And indeed, we need to say that there is a tale that like all good stories begins a long, long time ago. And like all good stories, it begins once upon a time. Well, once upon a time, and I can actually give you a date, 11,700 years ago, a new geological epoch arrived. The hollow scene, the new hole. And the hollow scene was remarkable because before the Pleistocene, it was disaster for everyone. Ice ages and then warming and then ice ages. Nothing good could happen in the Pleistocene. But suddenly, the hollow scene brought a temperate climate, a moderately warm and relatively stable set of climate conditions that enabled the biosphere, enabled living nature and its ecosystems to develop these resilient forms of flourishing. And when this happened, suddenly human beings thought, hey, we don't have to chase the animals, we don't have to chase the weather, we can sit still. We can farm. So the hollow scene's moderate conditions enabled human living to be transformed from hunting and gathering to agriculture. And agriculture, this is kind of surprising, but it begins only about 8,000 years ago. It's really relatively recent that we settled down. And of course, this involved a domestication of plants and animals, and it really takes off. Agriculture leads to the emergence of cities. Suddenly you can feed people who don't have to raise their own food. And all the accomplishments of civilization. So here's the first thing I want to underline, that all of human civilization is or has been hollow scene civilization, that it's the hollow scene that made it possible. So that we misunderstand everything that is deep and important about human civilization. If we do not understand how it has been dependent on this bounteous munificence of nature, nature's continual power of procreation that we in the global north have taken for granted, we misunderstand everything if we think that's what nature is. It's not what nature is. It's a small time slice of nature. A little bit of nature that began just a few thousand years ago. 11,700 if you're counting. Which is to say everything we have taken for granted is about historical nature. Nature is not eternal. It's historical. Historical, historical nature is the hollow scene. And that is what we have destroyed. The cost of progress has been immense. And we see it beginning in the industrial age. That's a picture of Manchester already invisible in the mist. And then things really change at the moment. And again, we give a date to it. This is the date of the beginning of the Anthropocene. It's 1950. And if you look at this series of charts, they have what is called the shape of a hockey stick. That is level for a long time and then it zips up. And everything arises at the same moment in 1950. So what happens in 1950 is that world population grows. But so does industry, paper production, water use, energy use. And then all the bad things happen too. CO2 in the atmosphere. The oceans acidifying. The surface temperature rising. The ozone growing. The methane growing in the atmosphere. The more land is taken over. The forests are destroyed. All that begins just 70 years ago. What began 70 years ago was what we now call the Anthropocene. So industrial capitalism has been ecological in the literal sense. It has destroyed the natural bounty of Holocene nature. So the Anthropocene arrives with fossil fuels and coal and oil burning, which has led to CO2 rising from pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million to now 420 parts per million, which is the highest for 11 million years. This, of course, is what generates global warming, because CO2 prevents the heat going back into the atmosphere. The density of particles stops the heat exiting. And of course with that, we get fires. We get ecocidal flooding. We get the Anthropocene ecocide. We get the current rate of extinction of species which is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than the natural background extinction rates. We are in the midst of a sixth mass extinction. I mourn the Costa Rican golden frog gone forever. I mourn the other species that we will never know. But it's ecocide. It's deforestation, air pollution. It's oil spill pollution. This is pictures from the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It's plastic pollution that is destroying our oceans. The United Nations Ocean Conference has estimated that the oceans might contain more weight in plastics than fish by the year 2050, and that might not be reversible. Ecocide produces eutrophication. This is too much nutrient spill-offs from fertilizer in the water and what happens is the dying off of fish. Ecocide includes mining and mountaintop removal. Citizens who have undergone these things have said it's like living in a war zone. But look at the pictures. A world without life. A world without life. Ecocide generates industrial agriculture which destroys the soil, destroys the animals, and destroys every bit of nature as we know it. So my thought is simply this. Here's my hypothesis. Is there really any doubt that industrial capitalism has been ecocidal? We are now facing a triple planetary crisis. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and waste. All leading to the destruction of viable habitats everywhere and as the Glasgow climate summit showed. Blah, blah. What is necessary now, what all sane people on the earth know is we need an ecocide convention. We need the idea of ecocide to be on everyone's lips. We need a message that can say you are killing the earth. This is not a matter of managing some bad practices. This is a stopping of a continuous killing of living nature. And to make it a convention with trying to send a message to corporations and states, enough, enough, enough. Now, law is a powerful, powerful tool. But law is only as good as the politics that support it. It is only as good as the politics that demand it. And it is only through activist radical politics of protest against ecocide that we'll let a truly earth conscience arise. A conscience of and for living nature that would make ecocide become visible as the crime it is. It is this that, etc., fights for. And it is this you will see majestically in the video you are about to witness. Thank you. My name is Yampingen. I am from Inche. I am from the Piliamahuista. I come from Puell-Wilimapu. I come from Puell-Wilimapu, which is what is called Patagonia Argentina. From the south center of Patagonia Argentina, I am from the Piliamahuista Mapuche. And also founder and member of the movement of indigenous women for the good of living in Argentina. I came from a walk that I started doing in 2013. I was traveling all over the country, literally walking. Sometimes I knew. I came to different territories in conflict and I met with women. I wanted to be able to generate the first march of indigenous women for the good of living. I never thought that I would derive this in a great movement. I only thought that we would make a march that would bring visibility to our existence and to our demands that were secular in relation to the men of our people. So we organized 36 nations and we went out to march. The walk was against terrorism. We had a consensus that while we did not have justice for them, there would be no peace. They are generating terrorism. This word, terrorism, had emerged from a meeting of all of us, the sisters. We talked about sisters because we said that we were human, that we came out of the same uterus. So there is a brotherhood. The word companion does not identify us, but sisters. And they reflected in all those stories of pain, many elements that are directly linked to the colonization. So we say that not only is it perpetrated in the way of killing the ecosystems, not only is there feminicide or feminicide, there is also the murder of a way of understanding life differently, that epistemicity. We are fighting to preserve our spirituality. We find this word that synthesizes terrorism. It is the synthesis of the ways in which the system has built hostilities for death. Obviously we want to treat that the totality of the populations, the people of the world can accompany the demand that terrorism be considered a crime of that nature. But at the same time we are aware that the national states are the protagonists of terrorism. And above all we ask that terrorism be applied to the governments, the government of terrorism, as well as the terrorist companies can be judged and condemned. We believe that this will not happen easily, because both the states and the transnational states, that in the end the governments in the world respond to that multinational corporacy that operates in the territories, will not allow it to be approved by a legal instrument that condemns them, that limits them, that allows the people of the world to observe, judge and condemn. So we believe that on the one hand we have to implement it as an agenda and also to walk in other alternative ways of justice from the people for a truly emancipatory path. So we would say a strategy of visibility, of recovery, also of our right to decide what are crimes and what not and also to explore our propositive capacity to build alternative or not only legal tools but also of social condemnation. For example, in the case of companies, they are enabled in a definitive way to operate in the territories, that is to say that once such a company has been bought, it has caused ecocide, it has also caused, because it is related, because the most important thing about terrorism is the ensemble of life that the terrorism is exposed to, the ecocides, the epistemicides, everything, everything is part of a mega-great project that is the extractivism. Let's do a little more context of how it's structured this way. Now, first of all, I would say thanks for Meravis Foundation, for all the people that is organizing this event, for CEC, it's like that, Erling's, also to bring us here. I want to thank also Moira Mian, who was super kind to give us that fantastic interview that we are showing in a little version. And to you two to come here, and now Federico can answer the first question. Thank you. And to all of you for being here inside doors. Well, thank you, Larry, thank you very much. Yes, it's a pleasure to share this moment with you, since we know each other for a long time, and doing it here in New York City, you know, finally. So, well, yes, I mean, to introduce a little bit the program, the concept, the general concept of this program, when we started, I mean, to imagine this proposal for the Boring Glory, Verali Center Fellowship. The first idea was to try to establish a global dialogue, but especially from the south to the north, and vice versa. And in order to analyze and to try to understand how this question, this topic, this ocean questions are affecting the entire world, and not only our southern societies. Even if we come from Argentina, she's from Chile, I'm from Argentina, one of the epicenters of Ecoside. For us, it was important to divide the project, the research in different chapters, to go through the topics, the most important topic we found for this, which are the neo-extractivist model, extractivism, not extra-activism, but extractivism, the policies of extraction, which include not only the mining, but as well the uses of GMO, and well, all but she detailed it very well in the fantastic presentation he did. So, basically we're coming from a background of making art not only in the institutions, but in the street, in the protest, related to the social movements, and for a long time we were close to movement of human rights. So, time ago we started a kind of shortening from the human right to the rights of the nature and other species. So, just two or three or four topics. And I mean, you have, like, this is chapter two, and there's different, what are the other chapters? Like, how is this going, what's the shape of this now? Yes, the first chapter, it was about a viewer to understand what is the term of neo-extractivism, which is a new term that was developed in the south of South America, because we know, everybody knows what is coming, this extractivist term, even all the colonization of South America and Africa, is coming because extractivist reasons and capitalist system is coming from extractivists, from miners in Potosi, in Boliviano. So, but we really wanted to understand how was this new process of extractivism that arrived 10 years or more than 10 years ago, again, to the south, to the southern countries. We wanted to understand also which companies were part of this new process of extraction and which countries or states are also part of this new way of extraction and why in our territories it's so easy to go and start to exploit. Things that in several countries, like European countries, are impossible to exploit, like fracking or certain kind of mining and things like that. So, we did a long-term research before the Betalist Fellowship about the extractivist model, but we wanted to introduce our research in Betalist starting with this term of neo-stractivism. So, we invite Eduardo Budinas, which is an Uruguayan theorist, environmentalist too, and he's one of the, there are a lot of other South American theories that introduce this term, which is very interesting because it's a concept that involves policies of extractivism, but not only thinking in this kind of right-wing capitalist government, it's also involved in this new progressist government that needs to be involved in these extraction policies because the deep crisis economic crisis is had and deaths with FMI and international banks and things like that. So, we create the first chapter about neo-stractivist, the second chapter is Ecoside, and the third chapter is about when we build, which is a concept that for us it was important to introduce because it's a long-term discussion in our countries about which kind of system could exist after capitalist system or after this hyper-developed societies exist in our country and how we can create some kind of balance, how humanity can live in balance with other beings and also how humanity can be in balance, live in balance, or the societies can build economically and culturally in balance with the nature. So, basically there are the three chapters and the final chapter will be the next year, around May and we expect to finish this process with some kind of final result of everything in different forms like intervention, exhibition, performance, so the three chapters are the first, neo-stractivism, second, Ecoside, which are the consequence and when we build as a kind of potential solution. I do because we really wanted to talk about the use of the body in this resistance because of course we are coming from the performative art and what we realize why we also engage as an artist was not only because we feel really told by the history of the mothers of Baruito Sango who were resisting Monsanto in Argentina in a time, but for us it was how this resistance against Ecoside, against extractivism, it's really a resistance that needs to have the body in the territories. To resist Monsanto plans, the people have to be there in the body and we really discovered that it was huge social, environmental imagination growing in these struggles that are in different points in Latin America, but also here in America too. So, we invite you because we know that you were involved in... in the heart of the empire, where it's an interesting relationship as we have a dialogue between north and south. These questions is of course the climate disaster doesn't have boundaries. It's for everybody to enjoy the destruction. And then here we are in the heart of the empire where a lot of these headquarters of these corporations are. So, it's a problem and it's an opportunity to go to their headquarters and do creative things. And I think that's been interesting. Taking leads, I think the social movements have been inspired by the south and by your work and other people's work here in the north for years and decades have taken the inspiration, the lead from the south and then said, oh wow, we better catch up and start doing things. And here of course there's incredible performances happening based in the north. And I refer in this case to the performance of corporations to infuse the conversation around climate disaster or climate science or the reality that we can feel on our own skin as the climate becomes more unstable. They're still sowing seeds of doubt with cultural work. I would call it cultural work that the corporations do. So maybe you can tell us and to the audience which kind of experiments or strategies or tactics you will find interesting in order to fight this. I mean, it's similar to work done around the world, but here it's an attempt to use what I would refer to as tactical performance. And so this can include blockades, but creative blockades, creative campaigns that are sort of mediogenic pranks or actions. And I have an example that's very high tech here. You know, like this is an action that I participated in outside of the world headquarters of Wells Fargo. And of course Wells Fargo is a major investment bank and they're invested very much in fossil fuels, etc. I have to watch when I say etc. because I'm referring to you now. But this is an example. So I've worked with people blockading the headquarters. And of course you want to fairly represent the perspective of the CEO of the company if he's not nice enough to come to your protest to talk. And he didn't come. So I spoke up and if we can get a little close up of here, I showed up at the protest with something that looked more or less like this. This is an explanation speaking on behalf of Wells Fargo at the demonstration. And as you can see their fossil fuels plan, they're tracking how fires are going up. This is a very sophisticated chart. Of course floods are going up. We can see that profits are going up. There's a problem. Popular rebellions are also going up. So what is the plan? Of course is your question. You've got our money. It's driving profits. All of these things are happening. But what's the long-term investment plan for this corporation? You'd want to know. And I'm glad you asked because we have an answer here. And of course there's a very large spaceship that the CEOs are going to go on fueled by the money. And it's the ship is going to planet B. A lot of people say there is no planet B, but no, there is one. And the CEO is planning to go there. And we understand that the sort of the sun sets on the beaches on the methane oceans are just spectacular. So we're looking forward to that. But of course your question will be what happens to you, the regular person. And that's a fair question. And of course this is a paper point presentation, by the way. This is very high tech, high budget sponsored by Wells Fargo. And of course the answer is for you, you have a choice to just be here on fire or underwater because we do believe in customer choice and consumer choice. You can choose between those two fates. This is the kind of presentation you would do at a demonstration to entertain people who are blocking the door in the cold for hours and hours. You want to make them laugh a little bit, obviously. Make a point, maybe passersby get an idea what's happening. Maybe it's a little bit menogetic. You earn a little media. Do you mind if I do this one more real quick? This is fascinating. This was, so my first day, I go by El Embo Gad for whatever reason of my life. But, you know, I go by Larry Thunberg. And this is the kind of thing I'm doing in my Guggenheim Fellowship, by the way. So the project I'm doing is called Disastrous Theatrics, Cultural Conflict and Climate Change. And so this is another example of very dignified work. BlackRock has a wonderful headquarters here in New York. And during their annual shareholder meeting a few years ago, you know, that CEO's name is Larry. You can look that up and mine is too. So I just stood outside in a nicer suit than what I'm wearing now. As Larry, not lying technically. And me and my besuited colleagues were giving out an improved version of the shareholder statement. As Larry giving it to people saying, ask questions inside. I just had a brainstorm. This is the actual text of the thing they were getting. We gave it to all the shareholders as if we were really them. But what if he suddenly realized, you know, wow, fossil fuels, climate disaster, mass extinction, bad for profits? Do you know what I mean? Like this is, he's just thinking about it rationally. And we gave this out to everyone going in and said, please ask questions inside. But inspired by examples of work like yours, of course, we had indigenous activists in the shareholders meeting using shareholders proxies that they legally had to ask the serious questions. We disrupted with this kind of playful intervention and then opened it up for the, I would say, the smart people inside to cause the serious trouble inside. So this is the kind of action we're trying to do to leverage. It's almost like the performance is a crowbar. We don't have that much force to change policy. So we try to use this kind of action as a little bit of a conceptual crowbar to force an opening, you know, that kind of thing. So which actually leads me to ask you all a question because I watched the videos before and I watched them. Matt, I really love the work you're doing. And I saw your, and I just think this is interesting. I know of your work in human rights, of course, and after the repression in South America. And I followed that. And then I'm seeing you dressed as a corn, which I think is really interesting. And speaking to the Mapuche woman activist, and we talked a little bit about your shift there to environmental concerns. And I'm wondering, is there any, you were starting to talk about that evolution. And I don't know if you had anything else to say about that evolution. You were beginning to talk about it. It was a counter-revolution. No. Well, yes, I don't know. You want to go first? No, I'm not going to go first. Well, I mean, we can choose carrots, potatoes, but corn. Right. Argentina is a big exporter of corn. It's, I mean, but of course when, I mean, the first time we started to, we discovered how to feel, how to be a corn. It was a strange, strange sensation. Because, well, at the early beginning, we understood that, of course, transgenic food in Argentina was growing a lot. And as you saw in the video, the power of Monsanto, today buyer, no, buyer company was so big. And then, well, it was a time when, when we were traveling around the world like we did before COVID. And in a big exhibition in Germany, look at them by chance, we met two persons from Argentina, two women. And, okay, we were in a talk about farming and farmers and agriculture and so on. And they say, okay, are you from Argentina? We are from Argentina. What we are doing here in Germany, in Castle, in Documenta, we are artists. They are not. But they say, okay, we are here. So when they start to tell us about the disaster, I mean, we felt very ignorant. It's our own country, the province of Córdoba, not so far away from Buenos Aires. But we are in the town, in the city, and at that time we didn't got that the Monsanto spying of glyphosate, I mean, the combination, which is called random, random technology, is the seed plus the poison. So this is a full package, they send you everything. And you have to renew, you have to pay every single year to have the seeds, no? You cannot distribute like before. So that was something we know from the political and economical point of view. But we never expect such damage in the health and nature. For example, Sofia Gatica, one of those women, she told us that, of course, she had problems in the family because the spying was through the water and the air and everything and the family started to get sick, the sun and then the ice and so on. So then we understood that it's a problem of human rights, no? Because it's a violation of the right of the people to exist and to live. But with the pretext or the reason of the economically make increasing the economy of the country, no? Save the problems of the country, the debt, no? How? By producing more transgenic food and commodities. The best exportation. It's not to feed our people. No, it's to export. So then magically we become... No, then we... It's possible, everything. We were talking to them and said, okay, when you go to Buenos Aires, when you're all there, we should make an appointment and come to Córdoba, don't stay in Buenos Aires, come to see with your eyes and maybe you can help us. But in that time we were human beings, did not come. But then, of course, we asked them, what can we do? We are running a festival which is Primavera sin Monsanto, Spring Time Without Monsanto. Just to... In order to make Monsanto factory, was one of the first factories producing transgenic seeds, go out from Argentina. For that was very ambitious. Like, sounds like impossible, but it happens at the end. So they start to make blockades and protest in front of the company. The company didn't pay attention, but they streamed the methodology of making, putting the body directly in the highway and cutting the highway and so on. Had problems with the police and was a little bit criminalized also by the mass media because in the mainstream media they say, the only way to recover the economy of Argentina is produce and sell our commodities. So, why do you want Monsanto to go out? It's the logic of neoliberal. And the people from the old town, when we went to the protest, many people was against the protest because they said, I need to keep my shop. Can you imagine what? So then they say, okay, but you are an artist, so maybe you can help us with the children's. I don't know why they say that, because we have a lot of children from their family and during the festival we need to do something with them. So keep them, make some entertainment, entertaining, you know, another industry. Specifically contemporary art. So then we say how we can keep the kids playing or doing something where we make demonstrations and so on. So that was the moment when we decided to make the costumes and the first experiment was not with ourselves, it was with the kids. Very nice. Infantry, the army is composed of infantry. So always in the first line, we made some kind of competition place for the kids. So someone will dress in this white stuff throwing poison in and the other one will be the corn poisoning. So it was very funny because in the beginning when we asked the kids, okay, which kind of costume do you want to use? Like which team do you want to use? All of them, they want to be the poison. They want to be the background. Then it was one of them without dress because it was more kids than the costume. So he had to be the corn and he arrived there and he saw Federico dresses as corn with very nice sunglasses, like ribbons and sunglasses. And he was like, he's cool. I will be the only corn. And then all the kids, because he said I will be the only corn, become corn. And nobody want to be the Fusato stuff. So it was very funny. It was a very nice experience. Then he was to teach or to be... How do you say this? Didactical. Didactic. But at the end we... It was easier than we expected because at the beginning no one wanted to be corn and at the end... Corn was cool. Corn is cool but the problem is it's a transient corn or not. We don't know that yet. But what we really understood with the corn costumes is that for example now there is a big movement of farmers that they are doing amazing since they are in Argentina it's a huge movement of farmers that are changing completely the culture in a very good way and also they are really changing the structure in urban cities. We eat organic food because they are really teaching also this industry of organic and bio because they are saying to be bio and to have organic food you don't need to be expensive. So they are doing it in a very social and popular way, in a super good way. So they intervene sometimes the big main train stations where the worker class go into the city and they give in a very, very cheap prices this organic amazing food they are doing and they are doing also medicine, something like that. So they asked us, they saw us we interviewed them for the first chapter and they saw the corn dresses and they asked, okay can we have two of these dresses? We said of course we give our corn costumes and they started to use in their demonstration. So now they call us, can we have more? And one of the things that we realize in this relation between how to develop change also in a symbolical way I don't know if you saw in the interview of Moira Millan she talk about this terricide as also as a kind of way of killing other ways of thinking to talk about epistemicidio epistemicidio epistemicide epistemicide So what we are discovering with these dresses of corn which are very funny and very bad done very bad done is that when you use that you immediately became a corn and the people love you especially in South America imagine also in other countries like Turkey it will be the same because the corn is so important for our culture and even it's so important for the people that came from native nations because the corn in the big part of the history of South America and I think North America too it was the beginning of the humanity it's not like actually to come from corn and we discovered that dresses are amazing and they are super cool super cool it's very trendy now don't call them but maybe they will appear that's right they might very well don't call them because maybe is that foreshadowing and I want to ask you something about that I like a lot but I want you to kind of get into it I've heard you refer to John Cage and this idea of responsibility as was the responsibility responsibility and then I'm like well why are you so interested in this like postmodern artist composer how does that connect with your ideas of resistance and creative resistance well at the early beginning we were trying to keep in silent for 4 minutes 33 seconds as a quotation of John Cage but we will make the people so boring and this is like streaming and people is in 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence so then we understood that in by the way it's also really hard for us to say quiet for that long I don't think we can do it no well we I mean the need of be able to respond the responsibility we have to play in that way and when we saw that John Cage used this concept time ago it's also really important in contemporary art to quote a bit the fetish of the footnote in 1957 he chose to use this word shifting the emphasis from an ethic of accountability to an aesthetic of engagement that is the full quotation and we understood that yes what's mean an aesthetic of engagement perhaps is what we are doing I think of accountability what we described it before so we thought that perhaps the only way to make this manifesto alive is talking about who have the responsibility and who is able to respond I think that's great because there's such a talk about how we're individually responsible and that's a game that's the game that the corporations are playing I think we can go over and be responsible if I can you're going to have a little moment now as change occurs you all look fine here tonight that was a great presentation thank you sir who is responsible if we all recycle every day that's fabulous and of course the US military is the biggest polluter in the world if we don't change that we can recycle all we want I mean recycle I'm not trying to be obnoxious I'm also vamping for time for the transformation that's occurring thank you thank you flanked by corn oh yes you tell us how we look composition some question from the audience there around the world manifesto sobre el ecosidio the responsibility eco side manifesto 1 el ecosidio es un crimen contra la naturaleza de la tierra perpetuado por un grupo de humanos pero no por toda la humanidad eco side is a crime against the earth committed by certain specific humans and not by all of human kind produced by multinationals we individual people on the earth do not expect responsibility for the socio environmental damage caused by the multinational corporations 3 to counteract colonial violence of neo extractivism actions will emerge with response ability and socio environmental imagination our collective seeds will germinate buen vivir the right way of living sustainable living our bodies will be the stones through which water is filtered nature is not wrong it defends itself and transforms itself 7 we can start now by saying the specific names of the specific perpetrators Basf Bayer Monsanto Unilever Gazprom National Iranian Oil Total Petro Brass Abu Dhabi Oil Petro China Saudi Armaco Pemex Chevron Tex Petroil Pine American Energy Halliburton BBB Shell Baker Hughes and Slobberberg Barry Gold Pan American Silver Shell Monsanto the concluding event of the CC Arts Link Assembly the concluding event of the CC Arts Link Assembly it might be lovely just to reflect for a few minutes and then we must bid you goodbye on these different kinds of discourses that we witness just now and I thought it was really, really poignant how every presenter this afternoon was so efficient and so effective and had so much to say in their own voice and their own language and starting with UJ, it was an absolutely superb manifesto in itself, you know, for what needs to be done, and then this soft transition thanks to you, Larry, from one professor to the next, and then to the artist. So I'd like to hear from you maybe even just close the remarks. What does it feel like for you to come at the end of any of presentations as we've witnessed and be the artists, you know, who dress up in corn, a costume that, you know, first the kids modeled, and have the last word and see the scale of the problem and the interventions assuming such different roles, you know, from a scholarly, academic exposé that leads to an entire book to this performance in a conference room for, you know, a small-life audience and a vast audience online, maybe could you share a little bit of your experience with us? I mean, we're still on the experience, yeah, we are most, but... But you're human again. Yes, half human, but now I've become a little less human. No, post-human, no, post-human. Well, so they did promise the next time we're together that I shall be corn too. Yes, as is important. Yes, thank you. It matters to me and I think to my friends that there not be a gap between the academic and the performance. To imagine that is to take us back to a time before there was ecocide, before we were all placed together in a condition we did not make, but will make us and our children and our children's children, right? So we are responding to the same level of threat of terror, but also, and this seems to me what we tried to rehearse together, as you notice we all dressed together, organized, very important. You know, it creates a collective that the difficulty creates our being together and creates the possibility and the necessity of conversation so that we learn the necessity of sharing good living together. I think also what you just said about being together, and it speaks to what you said earlier that we enact these roles and you describe it so beautifully what happens when you put on this, forgive me this ridiculous costume, but you do it. We do it. We do it. We do it. We do it. To some extent. So the need to have the individual body commit to the fight is important shared by all of you. I said we are coming from very long tradition. I think in Argentina it's a very long tradition. And I think here everywhere, like the social movements and even the anti-global social movement, more than 20 years ago, we shared something in common that it was like this idea of, of course, if we have to imagine another society, which is not this, we have to make an effort together of change, of think about what is imagination, what is a social imagination, what is next. Because to imagine another society, you need to make a big effort like the artists do, even with lawyers, we have many good friends, lawyers that they said we are like you. We have to invent several things to win a human rights trial. Because sometimes you have to invent, for example, if you are a lawyer and you have to put in a trial, for example, the condition of being disappeared by a drone without any person responsible. You have to invent something. And we, the artists, I think all the artists, especially the artists who have been part of the social movements as one more of the social movements, we often talk with people which is coming from biologists, scientists, lawyers, farmers. You have people, different people, because as you said, we are part of a collective at the end because we wanted to change something. And in that sense, it's always a collective exercise. And I think for us, of course, we always, from the beginning, as I said, from 1997, we used to play a lot of humor, grotesque, and even the surrealist way of doing it because we also felt that the system we want to change, the one we are struggling, it's a system that plays in a very sophisticated way, like, for example, advertising. And even for us, we always said, like Federico, I love when Federico presents himself in some kind of seminars when he said, like, I'm a theater performer playing as a visual artist. So it's very nice when you can change that condition as a stereotype. So I think for me, the con for us, it was the only way to enter into such a movement that we were not part, for example, we were not ecological people. We come from social movement, and then we understand how important it was to keep this environmental... To talk about serious issues, sometimes you have to do funny or humorous things. I would even say sometimes you have to take a situation seriously enough to be ridiculous, and it's not trivializing if you're working hard at it, it's actually hard work and it's dire. And it's functioning because even when you want to be attractive or you want to be as a social movement, you need to have something which is not... Because politics is very serious. Of course, we are talking about something super serious when you are involved in political struggles, but you need to have something that the people will join you. Inviting, as we say. And also, and I think it's a very important aspect of your work now, is you have to, as a social movement, show what you're for. Of course you have to show what you're against, but a lot of people know. They know people aren't completely lost. They know, but then it's like, well, now what? And to be able, as you're doing, to provide, okay, well, let's move towards WNVD or something that's... But at the end of your presentation, what I really... I really appreciate it that there is an exit, there is a place to go. I mean, fighting, protesting and so on. It's not like describing a description of the problem and that's all, no. That's all for that. And every single moment is important. Create consciousness and push. No? Not only that, but to underline what you said so beautifully, it's a moment of invention. The very concept of ecocide is an invention. And unless we understand that even law has to invent, even politics has to invent. So it's not as if the business of invention is done in the artist's studio and the rest of us can carry on. Invention is the necessity of inhabiting the present. Which ties us back very, very lovely to the subject of this entire assembly, which is dedicated to future fellows. And of course, you are really enacting and embodying a future for all of us. So maybe with that, I just want to thank you all for coming and I want to thank you for your incredibly important work. Thank you very much.