Terraforming Terra, University of Stavanger, Université de Liège and University of Cambridge. 2022.

Starting from the silent moments of intimacy between two breathing, vulnerable contemporary bodies facing their inevitable mortality, this new performance lecture will follow empathetic relationships outwards over expanded timeframes: backwards into geological time, forwards into the deep future, out into the celestial expanse and turning inwardly through infinite possibility of fluctuating matter.

It will probe the fundamental taxonomies that structure our current cultural assumptions of the boundaries between life and death; consciousness and non-sentience; organic and mineral. The ever-transforming matter of our planet–its environments, landscapes and the geologies below–is alive with poiesis, both dependent and independent from its past, yet binding all beings and matter together through its agency.

With readings from Afro- and Indigenous-Futurisms, video clips of artworks, poetry, field recordings, and eating shared sourdough bread made with the 85m-year-old sea urchin fossils that litter the beach underfoot on my daily walks, this performance lecture will seek to reveal the intimate kinship we have with the lands from which we are borne and question the blurry edges of bodies existing in differing yet interwoven temporalities–human and geological.