At 12pm (EST) on December 3, 2024 | February 11, 2025 | April 8, 2025 | June 10, 25
Join Kristine Roome, Andreas Bandak, and Daniel M. Knight as we follow the development of a public artwork that focuses on listening to the ecosystem! Last year on EcoArts Asad Raza revealed he has been commissioned to create a permanent art installation on the River Granta in Cambridgeshire. The Granta is a rare chalk stream sustaining the habitats for a range of wildlife. Well known for his collaborative approach to projects the artist is partnering with ecologists, microbiologists and architects and now us here at the EDC. This is a unique opportunity to be part of an ongoing conversation while the artist is in the process of creation. The project was developed with Contemporary Art Society Consultancy with BioMed Realty for Granta Park, one of the UK’s foremost life sciences development centres.
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Asad Raza creates dialogues and rejects disciplinary boundaries in his work, which conceives of art as a metabolic, active encounter within and beyond the exhibition setting. Raza’s practice often takes planetary ecologies as a focus, with a strong emphasis on the participatory and the performative aspects of art, as well as an engagement with all of the senses. His projects have been realized by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Portikus, Frankfurt; Ruhrtriennale, Essen; the Lahore Biennale; Museion, Bolzano; and Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
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Kristine Roome has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University. She has served on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University and The New School University and elsewhere and has curated and consulted on numerous contemporary art exhibitions. She was on the board of Black Rock Forest Consortium, The Maryland Historic Trust and helped found the Center for Sustainable Futures. She currently works at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. and is author of the forthcoming book The Human Feather: Conversations Beyond Art & Science.
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Andreas Bandak is Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Comparative Culture Studies in the Department for Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. He specializes in the themes of temporality and exemplarity and in anthropological studies of Syrian pasts and futures. He is the author of Exemplary Life: Modelling Sainthood in Christian Syria (Toronto, 2022) and has edited several volumes, including Ethnographies of Waiting: Doubt, Hope and Uncertainty (Bloomsbury, 2018), and most recently Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres (Duke, 2024). He has conducted research in Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
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Daniel M. Knight is Reader in the Department of Social Anthropology and Director of the Centre for Cosmopolitan Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. He has written extensively on time and crisis, philosophical and historical anthropology, and renewable energy as new extractive economy, primarily in the context of Greece. Daniel is author and editor of six books, most recently Energy Talk: Green Knowledge from Greece’s Silicon Plains (Cornell University Press, 2025), Porous Becomings: Anthropological Engagements with Michel Serres (Duke University Press, 2024, with Andreas Bandak) and Vertiginous Life: An Anthropology of Time and the Unforeseen (Berghahn, 2021). He co-edits History & Anthropology journal and convenes the ASA’s Anthropology of Time Network.
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