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Frozen in Time: Interrogating Methods of Cold Storage and De-Extinction

 

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The planetary colloquia take place at regular intervals and serve an academic exchange beyond disciplinary boundaries. In the winter term 2024, the colloquium is realized as a collaboration between the Panel's publication fellow, Christian Kosmas Mayer, his colleague Adam Searle, and current Planetary Times Fellow, Charlotte Wrigley. Therefore, it includes an interactive workshop and artistic elements. Anyone interested is warmly welcome to join.

 

26-27. November 2024 - Frozen in Time: Interrogating Methods of Cold Storage and De-Extinciton

All life on Earth is defined by temperature. As soaring temperatures generate the need for artificial cooling measures, ecosystems collapse and species extinctions proliferate. As a response, there has been a rise in the practice of ‘cryo- banking’, in which biotic material is preserved by freezing with the potential to be resurrected in the future. This two-day workshop proposes that the process of frozen preservation is also a question of time: the temporality of the cryobank is a slowed, even suspended one. Buying time in the cryobank acts in opposition to the quickening timescales of the planet, and redefines what life – and death – mean in the Anthropocene. 

Timeframe

26. - 27. Nov 2024

Place

Seminar Room 024, Hermann Hoffmann Academy
Senckenbergstrasse 17, 35390 Gießen

Participation

REGISTRATION

Deadline 20.11.2024, as the number of participants is limited

Further questions:

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Tuesday, 26.11.2024: Research Colloquium on “Shifting Narratives on Extinction and De-Extinction”

09:45 - Introduction

10:00 - Workshop

The Last Bucardo: Making De-Extinction Public

Christian Kosmas Mayer

Artist
Panel on Planetary Thinking

Adam Searle

Human Geographer
University of Nottingham

12:00 - Lunch

13:00 - Lectures

The Rekindling: Fictions and Desirable Future Natures

Sarah Bezan

Literature Scholar
University of Cork/ University of Sheffield

Times of Extinction: Cryopreservation and Its Presents

Veit Braun

Sociologist
Goethe University Frankfurt/Main

15:00 - Visit to Justus Liebig University‘s frozen collections

17:00 - Snacks and Coffee

18:00 - Video Lecture Performance and Live Q&A (Zeughaus Auditorium, Senckenbergstrasse, 3 35390 Giessen)

Future Eaters

Sophie J. Williamson

Artist and Curator
Undead Matter, London

The Lecture Performance is open to all without registration.

Sophie J. Williamson presents a defiant exploration of the intersection between art, science, and planetary temporality. Through a kaleidoscope of voices, she investigates the vast Siberian landscapes—its complex ecosystems, mythologies, and entangled planetary temporalities. This project brings together artists, writers, geographers, indigenous rights activists, scientists, and more, to reflect on the precariousness of permafrost regions and the entangled futures they face. The video, performance, and writing pieces offer a unique, multidisciplinary lens on these frozen spaces.

 

Wednesday, 27.11.2024: Participatory Workshop on “Temporalities of Cold Storage"

09:00 - Workshop

Melting Memories or Frozen Fossils: Ice, Time, and the Arctic Archive

Charlotte Wrigley

Human Geographer
Panel on Planetary Thinking

Alexis Rider

Historian of Science
University of Cambridge

12:00 - Lunch

13:00 - Public Keyonte Lecture

Anticipating and Deferring: Elements of a Politics of Suspension

Thomas Lemke

Sociologist
Goethe University Frankfurt/Main

The Keynote Lecture is open to all without registration.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Lemke brings together two disparate and hitherto largely unconnected strands of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies – the storage of organic material at very low temperatures – and the debate on modes of anticipation. Focusing on wildlife cryobanks and the freezing of human eggs, he argues that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilising a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.

14:00 - Break

15:00 - Group Presentations and Closing Remarks

 

List of Participants

 

...Sarah Bezan

 

Sarah Bezan is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at University College Cork and a founding member of the Radical  Humanities Laboratory. As a literary scholar, her work is broadly focused on the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary settler colonial literatures and digital media/arts. Her work on extinction is featured in her book project on species revivalist representations of extinct species like the dodo, woolly mammoth, and thylacine. In addition, she is at work on another book (under advance contract with Reaktion) that explores the “next natures” of the biotechnologically revived woolly mammoth (or “mammophant”). These projects follow on from Sarah's first scholarly monograph, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture (under advance contract with Manchester University Press).

 

Veit Braun

 

Veit Braun is a research associate in the CRYOSOCIETIES project at the University of Frankfurt, where he studies the role of biobanks and cryopreservation in zoology and wildlife conservation. Veit’s main interest is to understand how biobanks, their media and their infrastructures restructure knowledge practices, ecological processes and the flows of time. A sociologist by training, he works at the intersection of biology, law and the economy. His book At the End of Property: Patents, Plants and the Crisis of Propertization (Bristol University Press) is an exploration of the promises and failures of property in plants.

 

Thomas Lemke

 

Thomas Lemke is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Biotechnologies, Nature and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main in Germany.  In 2018, he received an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a research project on the social and cultural implications of cryobiology. Lemke is also speaker of the Research Training Group "Fixing Futures. Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies" funded by the German Research Foundation.

 

Alexis Rider

 

Alexis Rider is a historian of science and the environment, interested in all things cryos- and geos. Her current book project, A Melting Fossil: Seeing Ice / Making Time, examines how, since the nineteenth century, ice has been deployed by naturalists and scientists as a scientific proxy for the deep past and future of the planet; and how, along the way, it became a cultural proxy for a medley of social and cultural anxieties of the day. Her future projects explore other materials of the geos: wood, plastics, and ceramics. Her second book-length project, focused on the history of wood that is pulverized to make cheap particleboard, is tentatively titled “Flat-Packed Futures: An Environmental History of IKEA.”

 

Sophie J. Williamson

 

Sophie J Williamson is a curator and writer based in London and Margate. She is the initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a commissioning, broadcasting, publishing, socially engaged and research programme focused on the intimacy of dying and its dialogue with the geological. Bringing together voices from art, ecology, activism, sciences, indigenous communities and other fields, Undead Matter has worked with cultural institutions (Tate, BBC radio, TBA21, documenta, MACBA, Nieuwe Instituut, inIva, and many others), universities, research institutions and community-based organizations. She is Associate Curator (Art&Ecology) at the Natural History Museum, London (2024–). From 2013-2021, she was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre, and was previously part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009–13). Her writing appears in ArtMonthly, frieze, Elephant, October, and numerous exhibition publications and journals. And she is currently undertaking her PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London, titled Being-with-Dying: Living with Agency through the Sixth Mass Extinction.

 

Adam Searle

 

Adam Searle is a cultural, historical, and environmental geographer. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham, working in both the School of Geography and the Institute for Science and Society. His research broadly examines how developments in science and technology implicate the lives of humans, other species, and practices of environmental governance within the overlapping crises of climate breakdown and mass extinction. He is a founding member of the Digital Ecologies research group and edits the collection Digital Ecologies: Mediating More-than-human Worlds (Manchester University Press, 2024). He maintains numerous active research collaborations with artists and public institutions and is fundamentally committed to finding alternative, creative, and intersectional ways of dialoguing, imagining, and ultimately intervening in environmental crises.