Event

June 6, 2024, 6 p.m., SALON TIER
André Krebber, Kassel
Online lecture via Zoom: https: //uni-bremen.zoom-x.de/j/61931657666?pwd=U2tXME1mQ1lJam0vaXB5Ni9sQnd2Zz09

The Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher (2020) seems tailor-made for our times of ongoing destruction of nature and disturbingly instrumental human-animal relationships. It tells the story of filmmaker Craig Foster's journey out of a deep insecurity with the world, mediated by a friendship with a female octopus. As a philosophical-aesthetic meditation, it promises to hold lessons for a better life in the world of the Anthropocene, the epoch of human-geological supremacy, not least through the intimate relationship with a non-human other and her stylization as a teacher. The lecture questions this perspective. Instead of using the encounter with the octopus to show possibilities for a different way of being in the world, Foster and the film never escape the instrumental and colonial relationship to the animal other and traditional understandings of nature and animals. Nevertheless, the film is right to turn to octopuses as the appearance of another world. The lecture will accordingly develop an alternative perspective on how octopuses can teach us to be different in the world.

Prof. Dr. Sandra Swart (Stellenbosch University, ZA)

July 8, 2024 - 6:15 pm

Campus Center, Room 1111/Seminar Room 2

as part of the modern research colloquium

Abstract to follow