Sep 27 2023

These Seasons | Sketches on Everlasting Plastics with Heather Davis, Gabrielle Printz and Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb

Wed | 7PM

For the sixth installment of These Seasons, please join us for a collective reading and conversation around Sketches on Everlasting Plastics. Sketches explores the infinite ways in which plastic permeates our bodies and our world––offering intimate and political accounts of our fraught relationship with the material that register how plastic is at once life-giving and death-dealing. Grappling with the protracted inheritance (biological, territorial, spatial, geological) of our petrochemical world, the project accounts for the toxic residues, relationships, and beliefs attendant to over-consumption and -production that have and continue to extend and evolve across generations.

Sketches was produced as part of the United States Pavilion’s exhibition Everlasting Plastics at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The project stages an interaction: between institutions, between disciplines, between editorial and curatorial practice, between book and exhibition. Sketches leans into sketching as a methodology for broadening, revising, pushing the discourse on and around the exhibition Everlasting Plastics and our relationship to plastic matter and thought—refusing the exhibition as a static event and rather seeing it as an invitation to evolve the stakes of a shared conversation. In doing so, it also begins to form a working epistemology of plastic.

With introductions by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC) editors Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt, Joanna Joseph, and Meriam Soltan and the 2023 US Pavilion Co-Curators Tizziana Baldenebro, Lauren Leving, and Assistant Curator Paula Volpato, the evening will feature readings from Heather Davis, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, and Gabrielle Printz, followed by a discussion.

Sketches on Everlasting Plastics is the first publication in an ongoing editorial collaboration between CBAC, New York and SPACES, Cleveland.

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.

Heather Davis is an assistant professor of culture and media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Gabrielle Printz is a PhD candidate in architecture history and theory at Yale. She studies correspondences between architecture, capital, labor, and state-making, with a focus on inter/national developments and expatriate work on the Arabian Peninsula. Outside of academia, she works through f-architecture, a research practice and alias shared with Virginia Black and Rosana Elkhatib.

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is associate professor at Dartmouth College and author of Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020 (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Her research focuses on race and racialization in the history of science and the disciplines. She is also a poet, translator, and essayist.

Image: Back and interior from Sketches on Everlasting Plastics, edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and Joanna Joseph in conjunction with the US Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Courtesy of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.