The Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions at the University of Maine is scheduled to host the talk “Creative Ecologies and the Aesthetics of Climate Justice” at 3 p.m. Monday, Sept. 12.

The speaker will be T.J. Demos, director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

All talks in the Sustainability Talks series are free and offered both remotely via Zoom and in person at 107 Norman Smith Hall on the UMaine campus in Orono.

This presentation will discuss select projects of the CCE, along with specific art practices, that foreground art’s relation to environmental and climate justice in the age of climate emergency. The CCE provides a place to consider the intersection of culture and environment. The aim is to develop useful interdisciplinary research tools to examine how cultural practitioners — filmmakers, new media strategists, photojournalists, architects, writers, activists and interdisciplinary theorists — critically address and creatively negotiate environmental concerns in the local, regional and global field, according to a news release from UMaine News.

Creative ecologies expand terms like “environment” and “climate” to generative excess, avoiding disciplinary silos and technocratic solutions. They connect ecology-as-relationality as a matrix of power, oppression and liberation operating through such social forces as gender, race and class. Creative ecologies envision multispecies, social and climate justice as its horizon.

Demos’ research focuses on the intersections of contemporary art, radical politics and ecology — particularly where art, activism and visual culture oppose racial, colonial and extractive capitalism, and where they work towards social, economic and environmental justice. He is the author of numerous books, including “Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing” and “Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology.”

Demos also has curated a number of exhibitions and film screening series, including “Beyond the World’s End” at Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History from 2020–21, and “Rights of Nature: Art and Ecology in the Americas” at Nottingham Contemporary in 2015.

This talk, part of the Art & Creative Ecologies Series, is funded by a seed grant from the UMaine Arts Initiative.

Face coverings are required for all persons attending Mitchell Center Sustainability Talks. For the latest UMaine health and safety guidance, see umaine.edu/return.

Registration is required to attend via Zoom. To register and receive connection information, visit the event webpage at umaine.edu.

Updates for this event will be posted to the event webpage. To request a reasonable accommodation, contact Ruth Hallsworth at 207-581-3196 or hallsworth@maine.edu.

 

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