Margaret Woodward – Keynote speaker
Mineralogical telling
1pm Friday, August 28
To listen in the Anthropocene is an act of acknowledgement of human complicity and responsibility to the more than human world. As poets, artists, writers and publishers how do we make what is overheard; signals of loss and extinction, moments between presence and absence, languages of inanimate and animate – heard?
The collaborative creative practice of Margaret Woodward and Justy Phillips as A Published Event pivots on publishing, the act of making public. Paying attention to the quixotic irreversible moments that have become signals in the register of the Anthropocene, this presentation will focus on the relationship between listening, hearing and ‘being heard’ through publishing. Signals from Anthropocene can be hard to detect, and can in fact be absences. They might register through genocide, gaps in the geological record, habitat extinctions, retreating glaciers, mineral and emotional exhaustion, sensory loss. Recent creative projects by A Published Event, Fall of the Derwent (2016), Lost Rocks (2017-21) and The People’s Library (2018) and collaborations with other artists will be used to frame a discussion in which the concept of ‘over-hearing’ signals from both the human and more than-human world will be developed. Our speculative process of language-ing through publishing as art practice, in which we re-compose with language that ‘rifts’ away its original bedrock will be presented through recent residencies and field work for the project Lost Rocks (2017-21).
- Besides her keynote speech, Margaret will also participate in a panel discussion with Mandy Martin, hosted by Tracy Sorensen, on Friday August 28 at 11.30am.
Margaret Woodward is Adjunct Associate Professor at Charles Sturt University and a member of the Institute of Land, Water and Society.
