Dates: January 25-27 (open between 9:30 and 18:00)
Location: VoxPop, Binnengasthuisstraat 9, 1012 ZA Amsterdam
Contributors:Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, Abhay Ghiara + Pink House, Abi Weaver, Nicola Srubati, Daniele Rugo, Steve Tromans, Eoin Ó Maoilearca in collaboration with Every house has a door and Essi Kausalainen

An [Interrupted] Bestiary is a project by the Lector of the Academy of Theatre and Dance, Laura Ó Maoilearca encompassing an artist’s book, an exhibition, a live reading event and the animated film, Done Dying. The work is open to the public as part of the Critical Misanthropy conference hosted by UvA and in association with the research project Climate Imaginaries at Sea. An [Interrupted] Bestiary was undertaken as a process of thinking alongside the US-based performance company, Every house has a door, during their process of creating the performance, Broken Aquarium (2019-2022). Broken Aquarium is one act of the company’s large-scale, multi-year project The Carnival of the Animals: a 14-movement work engaging the titles from Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1885 musical suite for children, but with a concentration on endangered and extinct underwater creatures. Created in the period leading up to and following the death of Laura’s father, the outbreak and unfolding Covid 19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd and the growth of Black Lives Matter movement, An [Interrupted] Bestiary reflects on themes of bewilderment, vulnerability, extinction and grief and the complex entanglement of speciesism and racism. Without simply comparing oppressions, the text points toward the violence of the shared logic of measuring interspecies lives according to a standardized notion of the human as white, rational, European male, alluding to the potential of embodied empathy and imagination in building new futures through a plurivocal poetics.

Let us know if you will be attending by registering through the Eventbrite page.

Find out more about the full conference at the uva website. ​​​​​​​