Terra Critica X

Thiele, K. (Organiser)
Kaiser, B. (Organiser)

Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Workshop, seminar, course › Academic

Period	14 Jun 2023 → 17 Jun 2023
Event type	Workshop
Location	Utrecht, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International

Documents & Links

Since 2012, Terra Critica has been examining the methodological stakes of critique and working toward critical modes that take entanglement – messy and ongoing – as critique’s foundational condition today. At our last gathering in 2022, barely post-pandemic, we entered a new decade as Terra Critica, asking how to go on as critical scholars in a world altered by the pandemic, an accelerating climate catastrophe and the continued realities of war, but also a world in which critique is back as a core term and concern in contemporary debates. This return of critique has been paralleled by a return (or revenge) of the rural and a perceived intensification of rural-urban economic, cultural and political divides across the globe. Where we have previously looked into “the capitals of critique,” which can be read as a notion of critique predominantly coming from capital centers or cities, we now want to shift terrains to think about other sites of critique from which “calling into question the urbanist teleology of the European tradition” becomes possible (Spivak, “What’s Left of Theory?,” 210-211). What critiques are emerging from the rural, from the wilderness, from the land of indigenous traditions that is not thought as bounded property, and from the earth (the terra in Terra Critica)? What is the critical potential of so-called peripheral places often conceived as extractive hinterlands or of the more-than-human lives they harbor? If critique, as Latour suggested recently, needs to come “down to Earth” (Latour 2018), what does this mean? Which entanglements – including material ones of soil, water, weather – does a turn to terra involve us (in)? And how can we critically distinguish modes of returning to these peripheralized places? Bringing together Terra Critica with the ERC-funded Rural Imaginations project (2018-2023) – https://www.ruralimaginations.com/ – in a rural space in the Netherlands, Veenhuizen, which has functioned, successively, as an agrarian pauper colony, prison, refugee center, museum and UNESCO world heritage site, allows us to begin to address these and related questions.