Traumatized places on an injured planet: a conversation between Alice Miceli and Michael Marder
Both Alice Miceli and Michael Marder were born in 1980, but at different ends of the globe: Rio de Janeiro and Moscow, respectively. Although geographically and culturally apart, there is something else connecting them beyond the same year on their birth certificates: whether in art or philosophy, through images or words, they are keen to explore the present and future of the world based on the traumas inflicted on social and natural landscapes. In November 2023, during a visit to the AiR 351 studio, the convergence of paths and oddities between Miceli’s work – at the time a PLMJ / AiR 351 scholarship artist – and Marder’s became obvious, a conceptual debate that is now being extended and expanded with the institution’s call for an open debate with the visual artist and the philosopher, on January 29 (Monday), at 6:30 pm, at the Goethe-Institut Lisbon.
Using her photographic lens, Alice Miceli reimagines – and brings back to life – the memory of certain places or communities which have been emptied, mischaracterised or violated. By probing the unrepresentable, challenging its limits and possibilities, she places herself at the heart of human and more-than-human conflict areas, challenging the body and gaze to move through places such as the S21 Prison in Cambodia, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone or abandoned landmines in ex-war zones. Her stance as a photographer here is also, and more importantly, a matter of life and death. Nothing is more challenging and complex than taking a point of view, be it historic, spatial or image-based. The recipient of the 13th Grants & Commissions Programme by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), USA, in 2015 and the 5th PIPA Prize, Brazil, in 2014, the artist is featured in the collections of several institutions, spanning from São Paulo to Moscow, from Miami to Rio de Janeiro.
Michael Marder is a leading voice in what has come to be called the field of environmental humanities, drawing on reflections on how important the plant world is to human thought and existence, as well as the looming challenge of decarbonisation and the role that philosophy can play nowadays. As perhaps in Miceli, the starting point for his research is a focus on the concreteness and inhabitation of place, as a way of locating ourselves on the ground with care and responsibility. By offering plant-based ways of being and thinking, Marder follows the trail of professors and authors who have criticised the project towards an abstract universality, the founding basis of Western philosophy. His publications include The Chernobyl Herbarium (2016), Plant-Thinking: a Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013), Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St Hildegard of Bingen (2021) and, more recently, The Phoenix Complex: A Philosophy of Nature (2023).
The conversation between Alice Miceli and Michael Marder, entitled Traumatized places on an injured planet and held in English, is an event hosted by AiR 351, supported by the Goethe-Institut and in collaboration with Umbigo. Admission is free.