About the Between Us and Nature: Over the last 2 years, our monthly gathering is organically growing. ‘Between Us and Nature – A Reading Club’ becomes both a live performance event enfolding while happening and a collective practice of transdisciplinary learning co-shaped by each participant.
Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky, artist, and Sina Ribak, researcher for ecologies and the arts, co-founders and hosts, pushed each others boundaries inherited from our original disciplines, investigating art and ecology in a sympoietic practice.
The Reading Club itself becomes a garden. A dynamic ecosystem nurtured by our collective urge to read and investigate as a group. Our nerdy explorations involve natural sciences, art activism, anthropology, postcolonialism, (post)anthropocene, from a female perspective. Looking beyond disciplines we learn from seeds, mushrooms, soil, multinaturalist narratives and the genomic revolution.
With ‘Between Us and Nature’ we host a space of empowerment – creating hope and change.
“Forest trees and garden plants do not grow all by themselves, as white people think. Our forest is vast and beautiful. But it is not like this without reason. Its value of growth makes it so. This is what we call në rope. Nothing would grow there without it. It comes and goes like a visitor, making plants grow everywhere on its path.” Kopenawa & Albert, 2013
How do forests and plants live and think according to alternate cosmovisions? Through the ongoing dialogue between Davi Kopenawa, Shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami of the Brazilian Amazon, and anthropologist Bruce Albert, the collaborative book „The Falling Sky – Words of a Yanomami Shaman“ came to life.
This is an invitation to gather with an open mind and read together out loud. Collectively we will read passages from the book „The Falling Sky“. We will learn from Yanomami culture, their spirits and ideas around the ‘value of growth of the forest’ (urihi a në rope).
Those who would like to attend the reading session, please rsvp via email to betweenusnature@gmail.com
