Asociatia Galeria Noua in partnership with Asociatia Romana de Arta Contemporana and Universitatea de Vest Timisoara are pleased to invite you to a public lecture by meteorologist Meda Andrei & feminist scientist Katrin Losleben. They will give insights into their respective research, offering an extension to the thematic scope of the exhibition project ”Blue Sun. Conversations on Art, Science & Ecology.

About Meda Andrei’s public lecture

Severe and extreme weather events, which are increasing in frequency and intensity through: melting glaciers, increasingly warm winters, hot summers, longer droughts and hard-to-control forest fires, are the undeniable result of climate change. Climate change, our ‘invisible enemy’ until now, is becoming more visible and directly affecting our lives.

Among the causes contributing to climate change are: burning fossil fuels, agriculture, transport and deforestation. The massive consequences of these activities are being felt in the atmosphere through the ‘greenhouse effect’, which has been present since the industrial age (last 150 years), with temperatures rising faster than at any other time, with estimates of +4°C higher. In the last 10,000 years there has been a temperature rise of 5°C, which today can happen in just a few tens or hundreds of years. At the same time, an extreme temperature phenomenon that in pre-industrial times was observed once every 10 years is now observed about 3 times every 10 years (extreme precipitation – the amount of water has increased by 6.7%). Compared to the Romanian area, hailfalls are increasing. These are just a few of the phenomena that have changed in recent decades and that affect us directly.

In this respect, climate drivers contributing to these phenomena include: fossil fuel burning, agriculture, transport and deforestation. The massive consequences of these activities are felt in the atmosphere through the ‘greenhouse effect’, which has been present since the industrial age (the last 150 years), with temperatures rising faster than at any other time, with estimates of +4°C higher. In the last 10,000 years there has been a temperature rise of 5°C, which today can happen in just a few tens or hundreds of years. At the same time, an extreme temperature phenomenon that in pre-industrial times was observed once every 10 years is now observed about 3 times every 10 years (extreme precipitation – the amount of water has increased by 6.7%). Compared to the Romanian area, hailfalls are increasing. These are just a few of the phenomena that have changed in recent decades and that affect us directly. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere continues to rise alarmingly, with a record high in 2019 of almost 150% higher than in 1750. Climate change poses a threat to food security, health and availability and may lead to more people having to flee affected areas, thus generating an increase in the number of climate refugees.

It is essential that people are aware of the seriousness of the impact of rising global average temperatures and take action to reduce the effects of climate change and help us adapt to it.

About Katrin Losleben’s public lecture

How we deal with environmental crises is not about how we understand how to be human on this planet. It’s about what we know about other earthlings and our relationships with them. Reliance on science and scientific ‘solutions’, closely linked to capitalist, colonialist and imperialist extractivism, has created endless catastrophes in the lives of others (colonised, racist, non-Western, ‘nature’) and has culminated in recent centuries in ecological collapse, tangible in all corners of the planet. Through the Arctic Auditories – Hydrospheres in the High North project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council 2021-25, researchers from five fields are brought together to materialize what listening to human and non-human voices can mean, to imagine alternative conceptualizations and performances of knowledge and consequently sustainability.

A cultural anthropologist of music, a human geographer, a landscape and sound researcher, a feminist musicologist and a literary scholar have taken a lean theory approach (Kosofsky Sedgwick) to listening to the waters of northern Norway. From this example, citing those of Astrida Neimanis, Susan Bickford, AM Kanngieser and Zoe Todd, we can extend the notion of listening to political interactions with non-human beings.

The project is firmly grounded in feminist and queer theory, taking into account the troubled history of listening from a gendered perspective, but moving on to new feminist materialist understandings of trans-corporeality and issues of sound and fluidity.

However, key perspectives come from local communities in and around Tromsø, some of them indigenous. We learn from those whose ancestors have lived in Tromsø for thousands of years, from those who have come here in recent weeks, and from those who come here temporarily. What they all have in common is also triggered by our project, they become more aware of how they understand the area through its sounds, how they are part of the soundscape, how they hear the place differently over time or in comparison to areas they have lived in previously, and how others might hear the same sounds but read them differently. We wonder: What happens when these floating experiences of a place meet? How does listening to the waters disturb common Western epistemologies? What sound knowledge exists that has not been listened to? And how can we enter on this basis into discussions about how to live and make this place in a meaningful way?