Overview  
Pauline Julier | Naturales Historiae: Multiple Temporalities and Narratives in the Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Pauline Julier’s Naturales Historiae (56 minutes, 2015-2019) is an art project that takes form in a film, a publication, and an exhibition. The film title Naturales Historiae is borrowed from the encyclopedic work by Pliny the Elder of the Roman Empire. Filmed in China, France, and Italy over the span of four years, the work questions the ways of which human think and represent nature. Each chapter explores a situation of human beings grappling with nature and its images, including the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, the prehistoric forest fossils found in Ordos’s coalseam, how Pliny the Elderly died while observing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and Cassini’s suicidal mission to Saturn. Julier’s film reveals our obsessions to nature and shakes up our certainties of taming it. The artist skillfully embraces multi-perspectives of the filmic medium while weaving various forms of narration like document, story-telling and science fiction. For the event, Pauline Julier will show film excerpts and speak how she utilizes the multi-temporalities and muti-perspectives of film to restitute the complexity of a place.

Mia Yu | Gaia has Never Left: Three Journeys to Fushun From 1682 to 2022 

Since 2020, Mia YU has organized a number of field trips to Northeast China, as part of her curatorial project “North x Anthropocene”. One of the key destinations of these field trips was Fushun coal mine, Asia’s earliest fossil fuel base, also the home to the largest open-pit mine. After more than century-long excavation and accumulation, the mine and its vast mine tailings have fully integrated into the city’s morphology. Since mining activities decreased twenty years ago, the tailings, in particular, grew into a state of wilderness. Such unintended rewilding process made multi-species ecologies possible. Currently, Fushun is undergoing massive transformation to renewable energy. Tens of thousands of solar panels are being erected by the government on the tailings. For this talk, Mia YU will talk about her field research in Fushun and her ongoing writing project in which she imagines a female flâneur and storyteller called Gaia who live and wander on the coal refuse hill. Interweaving historical facts and fiction, Gaia tells the story of three historical journeys to Fushun: the 1682 eastern tour of the Kangxi Emperor accompanied by Jesuit missionary Nan Huairen (Ferdinand Verbiest), the 1934 trip of a Japanese cartographer to Fushun, and the 1961 sketching tour of Fu Baoshi, a well-known Chinese ink painter. From the traditional cosmology of fengshui to the Socialist spirit of “man can conquer nature”, how do human perceive and depict landscape through technology and power? How might Gaia’s story offer us new perspectives on multispecies symbiosis?

- Organizer & Speakers -

Mia Yu

Mia Yu is a Beijing-based, globally active art historian and curator. Her research interests include global exhibition histories, Asian geopolitics, infrastructure, decolonization and the Anthropocene in Northeast China. Her recent exhibitions include “Three Contested Sites—The Worldly Fables of the Long 1990s” (co-curated with Nikita Cai), “Resonances of One Hundred Things” (OCAT Biennale 2021), “From Vladivostok to Xishuangbanna” (Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival 2020), “Photoethics: CHINAFRICA” (2020) and “Ni Jun: An Inconvenient Case” (2019). Mia Yu was the winner of theYishu Award for Critical Writing on Contemporary Art in 2018, the recipient of the Tate Asia Research Travel Fellowship in 2017 and the winner of the CCAA Art Critic Award in 2015. She was also nominated for the Curator of the Year Award for the 14th AAC Art Awards in 2019. Mia Yu’s research essays appeared at the book Uncooperative Contemporaries: Art Exhibitions in Shanghai in 2000  published by Afterall Exhibition Research Center and Bard College as well as other art journals. Her video essays have been exhibited at Times Art Center Berlin, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Guangdong Times Museum, Villa Vassilieff Paris and Asia Society Hong Kong. In 2021, Mia Yu initiated the long-term para-curatorial project “North x Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges”.

‍ - Speaker - 

Pauline Julier

Pauline Julier is an artist and filmmaker. She explores the links that humans create with their environment through stories, rituals, knowledge and images. Her films and installations are composed of elements of diverse origins (documentary, theoretical, fictional) to restitute the complexity of our relationship to the world. 

Her installations and films have been screened in contemporary art centers, institutions and festivals around the world, including the Center Pompidou (Paris), Loop (Barcelona), Visions du Réel (Nyon), Tokyo Wonder Site (Tokyo), Museum of Modern Art in Tanzania, Geneva Art Center,  Palazzo Grassi (Venice), New York, Madrid, Berlin, Zagreb, Cinémathèque de Toronto and the Pera Museum in Istanbul. Julier had a solo exhibition at the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris (CCS) in 2017. She completed a year-long residency in Rome in 2020 at the Istituto Svizzero, and her film "Naturales Historiae" has been shown online on Vdrome.org. Her new film, "Way Beyond", premiered in competition at Visions du Reel Festival and will be in theatres  in Switzerland in October 2022. She received the Swiss Art Award 2021 in Basel and had a big installation in the Insitute of Contemporary Art in Villeurbanne (FR- february 2022). MEADOW, his latest artist book has just been published by Roma Publications Amsterdam.

- Discussant -

Wang Huan

Wang Huan is a Beijing-based writer, critic and curator. He is the co-founder and chief editor of GENERAL. He has published a series of art criticisms in various media such as ARTFORUM, LEAP Magazine, Jiazazhi Magazine, HeichiMagazine, CLABO (Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab), IDEAT, Art Monthly, STUDIO VOIVE, UNLIRICE, KINFOLK, Art WorldMagazine, Ocula, as well as Ray Art Center’s Reviews, New Century Art Foundation, and IAAC (International Awards for Art Criticism), etc. 

In 2018, he won the first prize of the 5th International Awards for Art Criticism (IAAC) . In 2019, he won the PSA Emerging Curators Project with the curatorial project “Sunset on a Dead End.” He was a nominated curator of the Jimei × Arles Discovery Award in 2016 and 2019. In 2020, he was elected to Artist-in-Residence Taipei 2020, and he published the book “NOTHING LEFT BUT WORDS '' as the chief editor. He was also the chief editor for Wushu Xiuci, the first volume of Jiazazhi magazine. Recently he’s working on a cross-cultural research project which focuses on secret societies and primitive art. Using contemporary secret folk associations and folk images as field research samples, his project explores the origin and motivation of primitive creativity before the technologized time, as well as the contemporary secrets that flow within the undercurrents of folklore.

 - About the Project - 

“Ecological Entanglements from Northeast China and Beyond” is developed under the collaborative research framework of “North × Anthropocene: Ecological Sensibilities from the Edges” (“Northern × Anthropocene” for short). Initiated by Mia Yu on the platform of WU SPACE, “Northern × Anthropocene” supports co-learning, collective walking, seminars, exhibitions, commissions, publications, etc. and seeks to explore the deep narratives behind the intersection of energy development, mineral extraction, industrial infrastructure, ecological transformation, and personal perceptions from the Northeast. The establishment of coal mines, iron ore mines, hydroelectric power stations, oil bases, and large-scale mechanized farming areas in the early 20th century rendered the Northeast the earliest heavy industrial base in modern China and its natural resources a battleground for large-scale resource exploitation. Infrastructure at a planetary scale witnesses a mix of colonial modernity and socialist industrial modernity and profoundly embodies the legacy of the Cold War. Admittedly, the New China owes its energy security and food security to modern technologies but they also have far-reaching effects on the local geology, landforms, hydrology, vegetation, and climate. “Northern × Anthropocene” situates the ecological transformation of the Northeast’s large-scale infrastructures in a spatio-temporal stack of deep geological time, the flux of 20th century history, personal perceptions, and future imagination. Through co-learning and collaboration, participants will observe the complex entanglements between coal, crude oil, water bodies, crust, soil, plants and animals, and people, develop ecological, cross-species wisdom from first-hand experience in the North, and imagine the future in a new ecological practice led by technologies.

- Supported by -

Pro Helvetia