Repair and Remediation; presentations by wild.NG and Asad Raza, chaired by Theo Reeves-Evison
After Growth is a symposium, a gathering of bodies and minds, but it is also an invitation to construct another future. At its core is the belief that prosperity does not depend on economic growth, and that – in the face of ongoing climate catastrophe – there is an urgent need to find new ways of living within planetary boundaries.
The concept of ‘degrowth’ emerges from the confluence of activism, ecology and economics, though it also sits within a larger cultural field of creative and artistic practice. Rather than producing blueprints of utopian visions, many of the contributors to this symposium work towards the creation of spaces where post-capitalist forms of life can be incubated.
This is an edited recording from Day 2 of the symposium, hosted at Nottingham Contemporary on Sunday 20 March 2022.
wild.NG is a project founded by residents living in the Carrington, Sherwood, Basford and Mapperley areas of Nottingham City who are passionate about the importance of connecting nature and connecting communities ‘street by street’. With the aim of aiding nature’s recovery and growing a wilder urban future across neighbourhoods, wild.NG, together with communities and affiliated advisors, programmes inspiring events, leading on creative campaigns and scientific research to influence positive action.
Asad Raza (born Buffalo, USA) creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Absorption, in which cultivators create artificial soil, was the 34th Kaldor Public Art Project in Sydney (2019), shown at the Gropius Bau, Berlin (2020) and Ruhrtriennale (2021). In Untitled (plot for dialogue) (2017), visitors played tennis in a sixteenth-century church in Milan. Root sequence. Mother tongue, at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, combines twenty-six trees, caretakers and objects. Schema for a school was an experimental school at the 2015 Ljubljana Graphic Art Biennial. Raza premiered Minor History, a dialogue with his 91 year old uncle, at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2019.
Raza’s works often inhabit intimate settings such as The Bedroom, at the 2018 Lahore Biennale. For home show (2015), which took place at his apartment in New York, Raza asked artists and friends to intervene in his life, while Life to come (2019) at Metro Pictures featured participatory works and Shaker dance. Raza was artistic director of the Villa Empain in Brussels in 2016-7. With Hans Ulrich Obrist, he curates a series of exhibitions inspired by Édouard Glissant, including Mondialité, Trembling Thinking at the Americas Society in New York and Where the Oceans Meet at MDC Museum of Art and Design, Miami. Of Pakistani background, Raza studied literature and filmmaking at Johns Hopkins and NYU, where he helped organise a labor strike.