Media Archive – GROUND

Lectures will be recorded with captioning and archived here for future reference.

Material grounds_February 25, 2021

We start this series of conversations with deep consideration of the ground’s physical matter – its underlying geologies, its biotic and abiotic assemblages, its biochemical processes, its material flows – as a means to focus our attention downward to the complex living system beneath our feet. As we contemplate its possible futures within the geologic epoch of the Anthropocene, we additionally mine the histories of extraction, exploitation, and violence that have brought us to this point. Operating across a range of scales, timeframes, and depths, this initial conversation explores the animate, relational, and differentiated articulations of the “ground” as material.

MODERATOR: Aroussiak Gabrielian

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism and Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, USC School of Architecture

SPEAKER: Emily Eliza Scott

Assistant Professor of Art History and Environmental Studies, University of Oregon

SPEAKER: Asmeret Asefaw Berhe

Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of California, Merced

SPEAKER: Jane Hutton

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Waterloo

SPEAKER: Ryan Dewey

Artist

Working grounds_March 11, 2021

This conversation will focus on both the care of the ground as embodied practice, and the conflicted and often violent relationship between labor and land. Ancestral and indigenous knowledge systems will be integral to the former, and practices of enslavement and unfree labor the latter, to generate a fuller understanding of the ground as a space of work and conflict – the work of care and the violence of work.

MODERATOR: ALISON HIRSCH

Associate Professor/Director of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism, USC School of Architecture

SPEAKER: CORRINA GOULD

Co-Founder/Co-Director, Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

SPEAKER: HANNA KIM

Artist, Soros Equality Fellow and non-resident fellow of Hutchins Center for African and African American Research

SPEAKER: ASHANTÉ REESE

Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas at Austin

SPEAKER: MARIO SIFUENTEZ

Associate Professor of History and Director of the Humanities Center, University of California, Merced

ANCESTRAL GROUNDS_MARCH 25, 2021

This conversation will focus on the ground as material medium through which to connect with ancestors, as a manifestation of ancestral presence and care, as a homeplace. It will consider dislocated grounds as a medium through which to explore, shape and express diasporic identities and connections to homeland. It will additionally investigate ancestral grounds as sites of dispossession, expulsion and displacement, and as a political terrain to which claims to rights and access are played out; where communities indigenous to a particular ground can claim the right to self-determination.

MODERATOR: THAISA WAY

Professor of Landscape Architecture, College of Built Environments, University of Washington and Director of Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks

SPEAKER: ABIGAIL DEVILLE

Artist, Site-Specific Immersive Installations

SPEAKER: ANOUSH TAMAR SUNI

Keyman Modern Turkish Studies Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University

SPEAKER: ZOE TODD

Associate Professor, Carleton University, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, The Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures

SPEAKER: SARA ZEWDE

Assistant Professor of Practice, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and Founding Principal of Studio Zewde

archival grounds_APRIL 8, 2021

The ground is a material register. It is an archive of climate events, tectonic action, erosive and sedimentary force in geologic time. It archives biotic presence and extinction. It serves as both witness and material testimony to human deeds and misdeeds that have occurred on very specific grounds (ground zeros) – often deemed hallowed. The ground holds the traces of past presences – memories of hands that worked it and the bodies buried within it. This conversation will feature these multifaceted considerations of the ground as material record.

MODERATOR: SHANNON MATTERN

Professor of Anthropology, The New School for Social Research

SPEAKER: AYANA OMILADE FLEWELLEN

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside

SPEAKER: KATHERINE JENKINS

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Knowlton School and cofounder, Present Practice

SPEAKER: LIZ SEVCENKO

Director, Humanities Action Lab, Rutgers University School of Arts & Sciences-Newark

SPEAKER: AURORA TANG

Program Manager, The Center for Land Use Interpretation; Independent Curator

shaky grounds_APRIL 22, 2021

Contested ground claims, occupancies and appropriations are often played out over the most unstable of grounds – sites of flood, flow, subsidence, slide, as well as ground rendered fugitive through increasing aridity and/or misuse. This conversation is intended to consider the intersection of geo-/spatio- political forces and geophysical instability, including what it means to occupy or be forced to occupy (or flee) risky ground. It additionally aims to imagine how grounds deemed instable have the potential to be sites of possibility, for alternate modes and models of existence.

MODERATOR: DAVI SCHOEN

USC Faculty, Landscape Designer, STOSS

SPEAKER: DILIP DA CUNHA

Adjunct Professor, Columbia University and Principal of Mathur | da Cunha

SPEAKER: DEBJANI DUTTA

Doctoral candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the USC School of Cinematic Arts

SPEAKER: KRISTINA LYONS

Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

SPEAKER: ANURADHA MATHUR

Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania and Principal of Mathur | da Cunha

SPEAKER: JUANITA SUNDBERG

Associate Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia

Othered grounds_May 6, 2021

This conversation will focus particularly on the body and its relationship to the ground, specifically those bodies that negotiate the ground outside what have been deemed “normative” frameworks. It will consider how the ground is structured by dominant systems to which Others must conform. Queer, gendered, disabled, and racialized bodies, as well as non-human bodies are all distinct in their ground negotiations but share their exclusion from hegemonic structures of ground formation. Grouping these categories of variant bodies is not intended to exaggerate the process of Othering, but to discuss ways to mobilize across difference to upend structures of exclusion.

MODERATOR: GAIL DUBROW

Professor, University of Minnesota, School of Architecture

SPEAKER: HEATHER DAVIS

Assistant Professor, Culture and Media, The New School

SPEAKER: AROUSSIAK GABRIELIAN

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism and Director of the Landscape Futures Lab, USC School of Architecture

SPEAKER: JACK HALBERSTAM

Professor of Gender Studies and English, Columbia University

SPEAKER: AIMI HAMRAIE

Associate Professor of Medicine, Health, and Society, Vanderbilt University

Broken grounds_May 20, 2021

This conversation will focus on grounds “broken” by processes of extraction, contamination and disturbance. Rather than discrete sites of large-operation “natural resource” extraction, the emphasis is on systems of capitalism and colonial violence as manifest in the physicality of particular places, as well as in the bodies of those most exposed to toxification and cumulative risk. Finally, this culminating conversation interrogates what it means to live and die on the grounds we (humans) have profoundly altered.

MODERATOR: VITTORIA DI PALMA

Associate Professor, USC School of Architecture