Frozen in Time: Interrogating Methods of Cold Storage and De-Extinctionhttps://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/planetarythinking/events/eventseries/planetarycolloquium/frozenintimehttps://www.uni-giessen.de/@@site-logo/logo.png
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Frozen in Time: Interrogating Methods of Cold Storage and De-Extinction
The planetary colloquia take place at regular intervals and serve an academic exchange beyond disciplinary boundaries. In the winter term 2024, the colloquium is realized as a collaboration between the Panel's publication fellow, Christian Kosmas Mayer, his colleague Adam Searle, and current Planetary Times Fellow, Charlotte Wrigley. Therefore, it includes an interactive workshop and artistic elements. Anyone interested is warmly welcome to join.
26-27. November 2024 - Frozen in Time: Interrogating Methods of Cold Storage and De-Extinciton
All life on Earth is defined by temperature. As soaring temperatures generate the need for artificial cooling measures, ecosystems collapse and species extinctions proliferate. As a response, there has been a rise in the practice of ‘cryo- banking’, in which biotic material is preserved by freezing with the potential to be resurrected in the future. This two-day workshop proposes that the process of frozen preservation is also a question of time: the temporality of the cryobank is a slowed, even suspended one. Buying time in the cryobank acts in opposition to the quickening timescales of the planet, and redefines what life – and death – mean in the Anthropocene.
Timeframe
26. - 27. Nov 2024
Place
Seminar Room 024, Hermann Hoffmann Academy Senckenbergstrasse 17, 35390 Gießen
The Lecture Performance is open to all without registration.
Wednesday, 27.11.2024: Participatory Workshop on “Temporalities of Cold Storage"
09:00 - Workshop
Melting Memories or Frozen Fossils: Ice, Time, and the Arctic Archive
Charlotte Wrigley
Human Geographer Panel on Planetary Thinking
Alexis Rider
Historian of Science University of Cambridge
12:00 - Lunch
13:00 - Public Keyonte Lecture
Anticipating and Deferring: Elements of a Politics of Suspension
Thomas Lemke
Sociologist Goethe University Frankfurt/Main
The Keynote Lecture is open to all without registration.
14:30 - Break
18:45 - Group Presentations and Closing Remarks
List of Participants
Sarah Bezan
Sarah Bezan is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at University College Cork and a founding member of the Radical Humanities Laboratory. As a literary scholar, her work is broadly focused on the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary settler colonial literatures and digital media/arts. Her work on extinction is featured in her book project on species revivalist representations of extinct species like the dodo, woolly mammoth, and thylacine. In addition, she is at work on another book (under advance contract with Reaktion) that explores the “next natures” of the biotechnologically revived woolly mammoth (or “mammophant”). These projects follow on from Sarah's first scholarly monograph, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture (under advance contract with Manchester University Press).
Veit Braun
Veit Braun is a research associate in the CRYOSOCIETIES project at the University of Frankfurt, where he studies the role of biobanks and cryopreservation in zoology and wildlife conservation. Veit’s main interest is to understand how biobanks, their media and their infrastructures restructure knowledge practices, ecological processes and the flows of time. A sociologist by training, he works at the intersection of biology, law and the economy. His book At the End of Property: Patents, Plants and the Crisis of Propertization (Bristol University Press) is an exploration of the promises and failures of property in plants.
Thomas Lemke
Thomas Lemke is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Biotechnologies, Nature and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main in Germany. In 2018, he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a research project on the social and cultural implications of cryobiology. Lemke is also speaker of the Research Training Group "Fixing Futures. Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies" funded by the German Research Foundation.
Alexis Rider
Alexis Rider is a historian of science and the environment, interested in all things cryos- and geos. Her current book project, A Melting Fossil: Seeing Ice / Making Time, examines how, since the nineteenth century, ice has been deployed by naturalists and scientists as a scientific proxy for the deep past and future of the planet; and how, along the way, it became a cultural proxy for a medley of social and cultural anxieties of the day. Her future projects explore other materials of the geos: wood, plastics, and ceramics. Her second book-length project, focused on the history of wood that is pulverized to make cheap particleboard, is tentatively titled “Flat-Packed Futures: An Environmental History of IKEA.”
Sophie J. Williamson
Sophie J Williamson is a curator and writer based in London and Margate. She is the initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a commissioning, broadcasting, publishing, socially engaged and research programme focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological. Bringing together voices from art, ecology, activism, sciences, indigenous communities and other fields, Undead Matter has worked with cultural institutions (Tate, BBC radio, TBA21, documenta, MACBA, Nieuwe Instituut, inIva, and many others), universities, research institutions and community-based organizations. She is Associate Curator (Art&Ecology) at the Natural History Museum, London (2024–). From 2013-2021, she was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre, and was previously part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009–13). Her writing appears in ArtMonthly, frieze, Elephant, October, and numerous exhibition publications and journals. And she is currently undertaking her PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, titled Being-with-Dying: Living with Agency through the Sixth Mass Extinction.
