intimate infrastructures
A radical⇌matter public lecture by Jennifer Teets
Monday 17 April 2023, 6 pm
University of applied arts Vienna
Vordere Zollamtsstraße 7, 1030
2nd floor, FLUX II - Room 246
How is earth consumption embedded in various levels of cultural forces both of the past and of today? How do forgotten earth trade stories challenge us to explore the circulation and entanglement between peoples, substances and places? This talk delivered by American Paris-based curator and author Jennifer Teets surveys clay and minerals in human health as well as infrastructures that claim intimacy.
Featuring material from the author’s long term inquiry Elusive Earths (w/Lorenzo Cirrincione) on clay consumption, and Intimate confession is a project, a forthcoming exhibition on intimacy and infrastructures – this talk features two bodies of work that conjure material history. In particular, how materials inform the relational infrastructures of cultural material, including notions of transmission, intergenerational life, and cultural inheritance through the prism of intimacy and infrastructure.
In her work, American curator and writer Jennifer Teets integrates ecofeminism, material studies, and science and technology studies, making visible and material a largely invisible set of social and biological stresses. She is editor of Electric Brine published by Archive Books in 2021. Currently she convenes Matter in Flux, a 15 member cohort dedicated to artistic inquiry, critical epistemological subjects, social justice, and new understandings of the body and political subjectivity with presentations by leading authors and theorists. www.matterinflux.org
Find the recording of the lecture here: https://vimeo.com/818455917/dce456a533
Jennifer Teets (b. 1978, Houston, Texas) is an American curator and writer based in Paris working at the intersection of science studies, literature, and performance. She is currently Visiting Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston organizing Intimate confession is a project to open in the fall of 2023, one in a series of exhibitions taking place in Texas based museums and arts organizations on the intersection of cultural inheritance and infrastructure. It includes a forthcoming publication by Inventory Press in 2024. She recently curated Carbonate of Copper, at Artpace, San Antonio in 2022. Together with artist/philosopher Lorenzo Cirrincione (2014-onwards), she curates Elusive Earths with a forthcoming title by Spector Books in 2024.
Aside from curating, she convenes and directs Matter in Flux (MiF), a mentorship circle tied to themes concerned with artistic inquiry, philosophy of science, and ecology. MiF emerged as an activity connected to the late, self-led initiative The World in Which We Occur (TWWWO) that Teets co-directed between 2014-2019 with Margarida Mendes. She is a correspondent for Artforum. Teets’ scholarly contributions to books, academic journals, art magazines, and catalogs include writings on artists Nina Canell, Otobong Nkanga, Tania Pérez Córdova, Kate Newby, Na Mira as well as leading theorists and thinkers such as Kim Tallbear, Barbara Orland, and Stacy Alaimo. She is editor of Electric Brine, published by Archive Books in 2021 with essays and poetry by Dionne Brand, Barbara Orland, Sophie Lewis, Esther Leslie, Hannah Landecker, and Lisa Robertson. Teets is a graduate of SPEAP (SciencesPo Experimentation in Arts and Politics, directed by Bruno Latour), SciencesPo Paris, 2014.
