Conference
Sat 18 June + Sun 19 June | Likeminds | 10:30 - 18:00
Meet the makers and thinkers who challenge our perception of reality
The two-day conference is the heart of the festival and offers a dynamic range of performative lectures, interviews, listening sessions, conversations and a revolving ritual installation that expand on the festival's theme of Mutation. Get to know the work of artists, designers, musicians and researchers and how they dream about, and propose adaptive futures. How to reorientate ourselves collectively, and foster new forms of kinship with more-than-human entities, towards post-human worlds?
The programme is divided over two days, with three sessions on both Saturday and Sunday. Each panel digs into a certain topic, for which we invite two speakers per block to tell you everything about their practices and research on the matter.
The sessions are moderated by Shailoh Phillips, Abdelrahman (Abdo) Hassan, Katía Truijen and Jarl Schulp.
Doors open: 10:00
Location: Likeminds
Gedempt Hamerkanaal 203, 1021 KP Amsterdam
The conference is also available on live-stream.
Single Session Tickets
Due to the hot weather coming up, we've decided to alter our available tickets slightly. It is now also possible to purchase a ticket for just one Talk Session at the conference. These tickets are €5 and only available at the door. To attend the full days it's €12 for students and €16 for a regular ticket, available both online and at the door.
Livestream
You can also follow the conference online. Purchase a ticket here. Your ticket tells you the link and password to get access to the stream.
Saturday 18 June
Attuning to Mutating Worlds
The programme on Saturday Attuning to Mutating Worlds will invite artists and thinkers to propose ways to engage with, and direct our attention to, our changing environments, systems and technologies.
Ray (2022), Vibeke Mascini
Session 1: Energy, Electricity
Saturday 18 June | 11:00 - 12:40
Energy, Electricity will look at the ways in which we understand and engage with energy as a resource that is fundamental for life. How have fossil fuels shaped our sense of self? Can we imagine a post-carbon culture without re-imagining what it means to be a person?
Geographer Adam Bobbette (remote) will talk about the deep ways in which fossil fuels have been wrapped up with ideas of selfhood and spirituality in the twentieth century.
Artist Vibeke Mascini proposes a conscious understanding of electric energy as a statement of interconnectedness and entanglement. In her talk she will discuss our intimate relation with electricity, and her ongoing research on improbable sources like stranded whale bodies from which electricity is derived through destruction processes.
Prophetica (2019), Colette Aliman
Session 2: Other Frequencies
Saturday 18 June | 14:00 - 15:40
During Other Frequencies, sound artists and researchers are invited to discuss ways of deep listening and techniques for tuning in with (non)human bodies and environments.
Creative researcher Colette Aliman advocates for the investigation of urban soundscapes through intuitive recalibration. As founder of the Sonic Recalibration Lab, she explores how to redefine what our future sonic practices could be through experimentation with the politics of listening and the intersections of multi-species sonic cultures. During her performative talk and live sound work she will discuss the soundscape of the ‘Mechaphony’, and the integration of bio-logic into technology.
Using modular musical scores, non-western tuning, resonance, and speculative instruments, Andrius Arutiunian is interested in how sound can be used to map out alternate modes of world ordering. In the talk Arutiunian will discuss several examples of peripheral sonic and political knowledges that also appear in his Gharīb series of works.
Photo by Maarten Nauw
Session 3: Realms of Mutation
Saturday 18 June | 16:15 - 18:00
Realms of Mutation will look at how to unfold, read and interact with our entangled energy- and information systems, landscapes, and (non-)human bodies.
Marina Otero Verzier will talk about lithium, and how energy dreams and epistemologies, constructed on cravings for productivity and profit, connect the landscapes of resource extraction and by extension, the technologies, rhythms, and spaces of everyday life.
Yasaman Sheri (remote) is the Principal Investigator of Serpentine Galleries Synthetic Ecologies Lab and an educator and design leader with more than a decade of experience in building platforms and novel interfaces in mixed reality, immersive computing, and life sciences. Yasaman is passionate about sharing her expertise and continues to uplift women-identifying communities of color and folks less represented.
Sunday 19 June
Collective Reorientation
The second day of the conference on Sunday will focus on Collective Reorientation, asking how we can practise communal forms of thinking, experiencing and action.
Photo: moss graffiti, Climate Games
Session 4: Postcapitalist Design
Sunday 19 June | 11:00 - 12:40
Its first session Postcapitalist Design discusses how to design for a postcapitalist world. In response to Western extractivist and capitalist information- and energy systems, researchers, activists, artists are experimenting with alternative modes of governance and post-capitalist design strategies to sustain existing and foster new communities.
Designer, researcher and organizer Selçuk Balamir (remote) will discuss TikTok Climate Propaganda, part of the current New Earth programme at the WdKA: how can artists, designers and cultural workers contribute to repairing and regenerating an unjust, damaged, but not yet broken planet?
Writer, broadcaster, and founding editor of Salvage Richard Seymour will speak about his latest book The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism, fostering ecological consciousness, and formulating a new 'planetary sensibility’ in which we value anew what unconditionally matters.
Metamorphosis (2020), The Institute of Queer Ecology
Session 5: Queer Ecologies and In-Betweenness
Sunday 19 June | 14:00 - 15:40
In Queer Ecologies and In-Betweenness, we ask how to undo destructive human-centric hierarchies, by engaging with queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking, directing our attention to the in-between.
The Institute of Queer Ecology (Nicolas Baird) will discuss mutability and mutualism as foundational themes of Queer Ecology, and how these themes can be embodied as transformative strategies for individual and planetary adaptation.
In response to the theme of mutation, artist Kumbirai Makumbe (remote) will talk about the role of transformation in their work, and how 'prototypes' or mutants can perform new ways of being. They will elaborate on their ongoing research on 'in-betweenness', in terms of gender, translocational belonging, and a constantly changing landscape of identities. How to navigate 'in-betweenness' and how to take ownership of it?
Photo: Juliette Lizotte by Philip Ullman
Session 6: Wxtchcraft
Sunday 19 June | 16:15 - 18:00
The final conversation of FIBER Festival’s conference will revolve around Wxtchcraft, proposing altered ways of learning, thinking and being. Inspired by magical thinking, artists and researchers are revisiting moments before the industrial revolution and past spiritual traditions to explore paths to other futures.
Storyteller and spell casting audiovisual artist Juliette Lizotte aka jujulove (remote) will talk about her project Sisters of the Wind, a story weaving through video, and opening up a world for witches, in which the feminine spirit dominates, and all gender expressions are celebrated.
Visual artist Dayna Casey and curator Erika Sprey will talk about Wxtch Craft (KABK Studium Generale) approaching witchcraft as a contemporary feminist liberatory practice offering tools for storytelling, self and community care and survival appealing to queer, trans folx, gender non-conforming people, and BIPOC.