The event will be held online via Zoom. All are welcome to attend - please send an e-mail to ceh@cas.au.dk by 15 June and you will receive an invitation to the virtual meeting

Abstract: Since the mid-2000’s artists across East Asia have been transforming themselves into farmers as a way of critically engaging and repairing ecological devastation, while simultaneously insisting on territorial belonging and right to life off and with the lands in the first place. Drawing variously on permaculture, natural farming, organic and biodynamic principles, a fairly diverse group of creative practitioners began farming in the countryside of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan to contend with ecological destruction caused by urban expansion, longstanding modernization-processes in agriculture, and a broader critique of dependency on ‘high-tech’ solutions. But, farming artists are furthermore driven by the experience of being perpetually caught in post-, de-, and re-colonial processes. Here, the effort to repair ecologies by cultivating healthy soils, is as much about insisting on rights to long-term belonging of the people, their practices, and ecologies.

Why is it that we find this characteristic form of art-driven farming-collectives invested with ecological and imperial concerns across East Asian geographies in particular, and how do such engagements partake to re-imagine regional (and global) futures? What situated aesthetic, ecological, and cultural-political repertoires do these engagements activate, and how can we theorize these repertoires as aesthetic- political forms shaped by distinctly (if not always ‘uniquely’) East Asian legacies? These are questions I partly grappled with in my PhD research, and will fully explore in my post.doc. which I just started. In this talk I will commence this work, focusing on Japan and Hong Kong.

Line Marie Thorsen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Environmental Humanities and Anthropology Department, Aarhus University. She has an affiliation with Art History, Aesthetics & Culture, and Museology at AU and is an associated researcher at the Department of Anthropology at Osaka University.

Find out more about Line's research here: https://ceh.au.dk/currently/news/nyhed/artikel/ceh-welcomes-postdoc-line-marie-thorsen/