The Longplayer Conversation 2021
THE LONGPLAYER CONVERSATION 2021
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Timothy Morton
Online, presented in partnership with the British Library
27 October, 19:30 – 20:45
Free event
This year’s edition brought together two of the most important thinkers and cultural activists of our age – Denise Ferreira da Silva and Timothy Morton – for a fascinating conversation, informed by their profound engagement with ecology, race and social justice.
Through the lens of Longplayer, they discussed moving towards global equity in human and non-human relations and how the Black Lives Matter movement is key to a properly green and socially sustainable future.
This online event, free to attend, was introduced by the Chair of the Longplayer Trust, Gareth Evans. There was a live Q&A with the speakers after their conversation.
Denise Ferreira da Silva is an academic and practising artist. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Dívida Impagavel (2019), Unpayable Debt (2021) and co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (2013). Her articles have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals, such as Social Text, Theory, Culture & Society, PhiloSOPHIA, Griffith Law Review, Theory & Event and The Black Scholar. Her artistic works include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the relational art practices Poethical Readings and Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London, MASP (Sāo Paulo), Guggenheim (New York), and MoMa (New York). She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016, Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and feature (essays and interviews) in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, and E-Flux.
Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. Described in the Guardian in 2017 as ‘the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene’, Morton has written extensively at the intersection of culture, ecology and philosophy, including Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human (2021), All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021), Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018), Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (2017), Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010) and Ecology without Nature (2007). Morton has collaborated with numerous artists including on Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges and as author of the libretto for the opera Time Time Time by Jennifer Walshe. Morton’s work has been translated into 11 languages. In 2014 they gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory.
