Nature's healing

Nature's healing

Speakers

Toni Navarro

 Catia Faria

Typology

Conversation

Year

2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced the idyllic image of a nature that begins to heal and make its way when human activity stops: the dolphins return to the ports, the channels are dawning with crystalline waters, pollution is decreasing... This vision is false and can be answered from xenofeminism. According to its two normative principles, unnaturalism and technomaterialism, nature should not be accepted as something transcendent or sacred but rather as a space of conflict; hence it seeks to strategically implement existing technologies to redesign the world - "if nature is unjust, let's change nature! Following this call, perhaps the response to problems such as anthropogenic climate change should be equally anthropogenic or artificial; this would imply intervening directly on planetary processes through nanotechnology, synthetic biology or geoengineering, turning the most basic natural operations into conscious decisions aimed at repairing the damage caused on the planet.

The terraformation and colonization of space will potentially come as a direct implementation of a xenofeminist ecopolitics. However, first we must be sure that we are spreading the right values in order to decrease the risk of spreading suffering astronomically throughout the universe. To do this, xenofeminism needs to be scaled up to unequivocally include our true 'alien' relatives - the non-humans. At the same time, the project of terraformation must be stripped of any trace of specificity and bionostalgia.

"Nature is Healing: The ultimate dystopia", conversation with Toni Navarro and Catia Faria

Toni Navarro is an independent researcher specializing in gender and technology. He regularly publishes in media such as the CCCB Lab and has presented his work in spaces such as the Gelatine Festival of La Casa Encendida or FEM TEK Bilbao. He has also worked with artistic collectives in various institutions (Sala d'Art Jove, MNAC, La Capella) and has tutored projects in the SAC-FiC Residence Programme. He recently wrote the prologue to the book Xenofeminismo. Tecnologías de género y políticas de reproducción (Caja Negra, 2018) and has translated texts by Sadie Plant, VNS Matrix, Judy Wajcman and Helen Hester for the anthology Ciberfeminismo. From VNS Matrix to Laboria Cuboniks (Holobionte Ediciones, 2019) 

Catia Faria is a postdoctoral researcher at the Foundation for Science and Technology at the Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society at the Universidade do Minho (Portugal) and a member of the scientific council at the Centre for Animal Ethics at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. She works on normative and applied ethics, especially on issues at the intersection of animal ethics, environmental ethics and feminist ethics. She is currently doing research on the impact of our decisions in the remote future, particularly with regard to risks of astronomical suffering. Her work has been published by Routledge, American Behavioral Scientist, The Journal of Medical Ethics and Animal Sentience, among others. She is a feminist anti-speciesist activist. She writes regularly on related topics for Pikara Magazine, Queer Parole and Nietzsche's Horse.

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