The swamp is a denigrated place: a place known mainly as ugly wasteland: pestilent, useless, and fit only for draining. Might a “celebration of spring” instead take us to the pleasures and possibilities of swamp living? Draining swamps has been a signature move of the capitalist modernity that has squashed the spring. If we mean to revalue nature for its life-giving characteristics, a good place to start is the swamp.
Modern authorities have been so obsessed with draining swamps that even scholars have forgotten to consider multispecies livelihoods in the swamp. Even scholarly celebrations of refugees living hidden in swamps, from maroons to guerrillas, tend to suggest that swamp life is miserable even when it is politically important as a site of resistance. Most accounts suggest that everything important for survival must be brought in from outside. This talk instead considers the richness of swamp living—especially in areas where the quintessential swamp plant, sago, flourishes. Besides sago, swamp infauna, especially mollusks, can be diverse, nutritious, and easy to obtain without complex technologies—as long as foragers are willing to get muddy.  Offering material from in-process ethnographic research on the west coast of Papua and adjoining islands, this talk explores what it means to live with swamps, and even, perhaps, to encourage and spread them.

In an era of various social crises, including the climate crisis, are intensifying, transitioning the social system requires thematizing the desire for a better life beyond bare survival. This presentation examines the political implications of ecofeminist hedonism. Desire as the “power to connect” becomes the basis of new inter-species relationships and social relationships—this is at the foundation of ecofeminist hedonism.

For the past nine years, terra0 has been exploring critical questions around land ownership, ecosystems, and the conception of nature. Our work focuses on how legal concepts such as personhood, property and subject influence the human-nature relationship, and how new forms of interaction could emerge through decentralized, democratic land management. While blockchain technology plays a significant role in organizing collectives, its true transformative potential is still under investigation. In this talk, we will showcase some of terra0's key projects and link them to our current initiatives.

“Together with Beot” aims to explore the concept of companion (beot) through the works of ikkibawiKrrr, such as Tropical Story (2022), Seaweed Story (2022), and Diving Is with Companion (2021, in collaboration with Jeju Dance Arts Centre and Hadori Village Association). The divers (haenyeo) sow, cultivate, and harvest in the sea. Their work in the sea is not hunting, but farming. The divers consider each other as a companion, and they can survive in the sea because they are connected. This is what it means to dive with a companion.
 

The new climate consensus is emphatic and clear: the climate crisis is going to kill us, unless… we bend the knee to the masters of the universe: the billionaires and their professional cadres. The recent amplification and proliferation of “existential threat” rhetoric – a staple of the Environmentalism of the Rich since the 1950s – is a precious clue to the coming century’s ideological struggles and class wars. Weaving together the promotion of a mass politics of fear with promises of a climate fix, we’re told there’s “no time” for democratic solutions. We live in a “climate emergency.” The marriage of virtuous Environmentalism, Good Science, and anti-democratic politics was at the core of early Malthusian ideology. The bottles may have changed, but not the wine. The two moments, the fear and the fix, are deeply rooted in capitalism’s Civilizing Projects, its managerial dualism of Man and Nature, and Environmentalism’s contempt for democracy and the producing classes. Its fantasy, underwritten by fearmongering to replace positive vistas of capitalist development, is a political program of technocratic and techno-scientific dystopia – a Brave New World for the super-rich and their urban-professional cadres; a 1984 for everyone else. If most of the academic left rejects the fix, they have accepted the fear – and so have the movements. Enabled by its flight from history, the fantasy obscures the real grounds for optimism in the present conjuncture: climate crises, for the past two millennia, have been bad for ruling classes. They are moments of political possibility for the popular classes.
 

The climate crisis is a crisis on a planetary level. However, the Earth is also the terrain where world history unfolds. Modern world history is a history of colonial violence, plunder, and exploitation, as well as uneven development. We look at the distressing history of Asia where carbon colonialism unfolded. During the Pacific War, Japan invoked “Asia(nism)” to navigate the precarious antinomy of decolonization and colonization while attempting to build an oil empire. We seek to tackle this relationship between the climate crisis and Asia.

From the perspective of traditional philosophical thinking, survival has been criticized as the pursuit of the bare life (zoe) by private individuals. The advent of the Anthropocene and new perceptions of Gaia inevitably bring new perspectives to the issue of survival. In this presentation, I explore the semantics of new survival from two perspectives, namely the possibility of Anthropocene survivalism. My first thesis is that survival is not private, but public. This will be examined through Kant’s “public” and Mizoguchi Yuzo’s concept of “living people” (生民). Second thesis is that survival is not conatus, but kenosis. Survival can no longer be achieved through the expansion of the organism’s existence or the exclusion of others, but rather through self-emptying.

Through the proposition of art or primordial silence, I will question the meaning of art as it appears in Eastern philosophical thought. In particular, I will examine the aesthetic theories of Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzŭ, 莊子) and Shitao (石濤). I will use this opportunity to reflect on how traditional Eastern philosophical thought in Asia finds similarities to some of the contemporary movements in Western theory emerging on the western continent.

The 1998 crisis in Indonesia led to the rise of collectives like ruangrupa, founded in 2000, transforming contemporary art with a collaborative, market-resistant ethos. Their direction of Documenta 15 spotlighted the "Lumbung" approach—communal, inclusive, and resource-sharing. This presentation delves into ruangrupa's strategies and the potential of collaboration through care principles and collective artistry.