Lecturer: Vanina Saracino

Futuring Otherwise: Curating in the Anthropocene

Departing from the planetary urgencies of the Anthropocene and the limitations of anthropocentric knowledge systems, this course foregrounds the role of curatorial and artistic research in shaping futures as open-ended processes of imagining, sensing, and co-creating. We will ask: How can art intervene in dominant visions of the future? What kinds of speculative tools, temporalities, and visual languages emerge from ecological and more-than-human worldviews? And what might it mean to think through the Anthropocene not only as a crisis of the present, but as a terrain for designing livable and equitable futures? Focusing on posthumanist and ecocritical approaches across a range of media, we will examine how artists and curators adopt interdisciplinary perspectives (often informed by scientific knowledge) to resist entrenched dualisms (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, organic/inorganic), and instead propose alternative narratives of co-existence, kinship, transformation, and transcendence.

Vanina  Saracino (she/they) is an independent curator, film programmer, writer, and lecturer. Her work focuses on theories and art practices that question anthropocentric and binary worldviews from an intersectional perspective, with an emphasis on lens-based and time-based art. Since 2021, Saracino has been serving as an adjunct professor of Experimental Film and Media Art at Universität der Künste (UdK), Berlin, alongside Prof. Nina Fischer.

Image: Patricia Domínguez, Matrix Vegetal (2022). Installation view at SCB – Screen City Biennial Other Minds, at Archenhold Sternwarte (Berlin, 2022). Photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza.