THE SESSIONS

How can attuning to the form of something—the shape of a root tip, the structure of a Bach fugue, or the smooth underwater surfaces of an offshore rig—teach us how to think with the world?
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Anna Tsing will show us how learning to attend to form has shaped her conceptual commitments and her sense of possibility for a transdisciplinary arts of noticing in the Anthropocene. 
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Anna is an acclaimed anthropologist, known for ground-breaking works including Friction and The Mushroom at the End of the World, along with the creative collaborations Feral Atlas, and Golden Snail Opera. In 2021 she was the second most influential person in the art world, according the ArtReview’s Power100. 
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Her unique combination of playfulness and critical thinking reaches beyond the discipline, and the academy, to show us how anthropology can matter anew.

In ‘Postcards for Mia: An ethnographic excursion of the adult’s imagination of the child’s imagination and vice versa’, Michael Taussig will ruminate on how making postcards extends his long-held ethnographic practice of paying attention to pictures and sketching ideas through them. 
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Michael is known for his provocative and shape- shifting 'ficto-critical’ writings, a life-long engagement with the work of Walter Benjamin and the examination of commodity fetishism in many forms.
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A writer, performance-maker, anthropologist and imaginative mover through the unseen of complex worlds, he has written extensively about the violences of colonisation, the state and late capitalism in Latin America—especially in Colombia where he has researched since the 1960s. His books have threaded and unravelled knotted historical and philosophical histories of colour, magic, drawing as they take shape in lives lived on the hell edges of late liberalism. In the past decade he turned his attention to the ruins of palm oil monocultures and most recently to what he calls ‘the mastery of non-mastery’ in ‘the age of global meltdown’.
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In this Session, Michael will talk about his postcards and the special mimetic role of drawing and painting pictures in fieldwork diaries and note-books.

In ‘Cheeky interventions: Curation, custodianship, and the expressive force of Country’, Jilda Andrews will explain how, rather than feeling helpless in the face of unfolding environmental crises, she finds herself energised by the convergence of new possibilities for renegotiating of our relationships with ‘an expressive continent gaining strength in its own voice.’
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Jilda is an Indigenous cultural practitioner and museum anthropologist based in Canberra, Australia. Currently a Research Fellow with the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia, Jilda draws from her Yuwaalaraay heritage to investigate the connectedness of land, story and culture in museum collections. 
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Jilda is interested in the dialogue between historical ethnography and contemporary cultural expression, and how these conversations can shine new light on contemporary museum work.  Jilda’s approach seeks to push the definition of custodianship, from one which is focused on the collection and preservation of objects, to one which strives to maintain connections between objects and the systems which produce them.

In ‘Research as composition’, Steven Feld will explore what he means when he says, ‘my practice is research as composition, and it begins with listening and recording. Recording both amplifies listening and from it creates a new material, a basis for composition, but also a basis for further research.’ In this discussion we riff on all the ways that, for Steve, ‘research is a book with no back cover.’
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Steven Feld is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology Emeritus, University of New Mexico. He is also the Senior Scholar at the School for Advanced Research, Santa Fé, and founder of VoxLox.org

Steven’s 40 years of fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, Greece, and Ghana, working with, through and about sound, listening and voice has given us a reflective, reflexive and creative audition that he calls ‘acoustemology’.
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This special edition of The Sessions marks the 5th anniversary of Steve’s 7.1 Dolby installation of ‘Voices of the Rainforest’ and his accompanying keynote at the special Acoustic Ecology and Acoustemology Day of the AAS conference in Adelaide (2017) curated by Curatorium’s Lisa Stefanoff.