Sonic Acts 2020: Dehlia Hannah – Cloud Walking: Meditations on 'A Year Without a Winter'

Sonic Acts Podcast

SONIC ACTS ACADEMY 2020 Dehlia Hannah – Cloud Walking: Meditations on 'A Year Without a Winter' 23 February 2020 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Lauded curator and professor Dehlia Hannah delivers a lecture stemming from her environment-focussed publications and research projects. The meeting point of climate change and art – from the volcanic eruption that led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Paolo Soleri’s utopian architecture in experimental town Arcosanti – is an estuary that for Hannah yields imaginary places, creatures and technologies. In her talk Cloud Walking: Meditations on ​‘A Year Without a Winter’, Hannah enters into the discussion of how, as the world warms and seasonal patterns betray historical records, we are called to rethink key concepts of environments that we inhabit both physically and imaginatively. From regional weather systems to the lived abstraction of a global climate, rising mean temperature, shifting shorelines, disturbed migratory routes and phenological clocks, to new avenues of economic exploitation and militarisation, the boundaries of our environs are open to radical contestation. Published two hundred years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus – which was written amidst a global climate cooling crisis remembered as the ​‘year without a summer’ – Hannah’s book A Year Without a Winter (2018) and associated exhibitions explore the literary and visual aftermaths of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, in parallel with emerging narratives of environmental crisis. In this talk Hannah moves through a series of clouds generated by historical events, literature and visual art – volcanic eruptions, poems, climate models, smoke bombs and burning jungles – in search of a new way of conceptualising climate that is responsive to contemporary atmospheric conditions. Dehlia Hannah is a philosopher of science and curator. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specialisations in philosophy of science, aesthetics and philosophy of nature. Presently, she is Mads Øvlisen Postdoctoral Fellow in Art and Natural Sciences at Aalborg University-Copenhagen and Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Her forthcoming monograph Performative Experiments examines contemporary artworks that take the form of scientific experiments. Her book, A Year Without a Winter (2018), reframes contemporary imaginaries of climate crisis by revisiting the literary and environmental aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Among her recent exhibitions are Emerge: Frankenstein (2017), Control | Experiment (2016) and Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (2015). Her current research examines the role of imaginary places, creatures and technologies in the history of philosophy.