When developing our ideas for Alterotopia we came across the highly inspiring website and project Undead Matter. Much like what we aspire for Alterotopia, Undead Matter is an ongoing collective project which has been taking shape organically through its collaborative activities. Innitiated and convened by curator Sophie Williamson, the Undead Matter programme has emerged through collaborations with artists, ecologists, poets, cryomicrobiologists, shamen, paleontologists, musicians and quantum physicists and others encountered along the way.
There are many aspects of this project and its approach that resonate with Alterotopia, and lots of interesting content to explore. We highly recommend taking the time to discover the stories, artworks. To get you started we’d like to highlight a few.
Being Mud – Podcast episode
In this episode Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and curator Sophie J Williamson, consider how time, history and circadian rhythms imprint themselves on our bodies. The episode revolves around Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant essay ‘Being Taken for Granted’, describing a kinship with mud as a body that yields, reacts, imprints and responds.
Marking Silences – Podcast episode
In this episode geographer Kathryn Yusoff speaks with poet Myung Mi Kim about the potencies of past lives, traumas, histories and possibilities that are held in the demarcated silences between the rock strata and between words.
Dissolving Earths – event and exhibition
The fragile permafrost landscape is a thriving ecosystem, teaming with life, mythology, histories and futures, hidden just below the surface. Bringing together diverse scientific, artistic, and indigenous knowledge, Dissolving Earths delves into the entangled pasts, presents and futures of the permafrost.
“Undead Matter considers the universality of death, extinction and ever re-forming matter as phenomena to understand existence: alive with agency, permeating the contemporary and redirecting futures.”