Special Lecture: Dr. Graham Harwood
“Wasted Voyages in the Thames Estuary (art, activism and the more than human)”

Date and Time：18:00-19:30, 3 February (Friday) 2023
Venue：Lecture Room 1, Senju Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts

Speaker: Dr. Graham Harwood (Reader in Media Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London)
Chaired by: Yoshitaka Mori (Professor, Tokyo University of the Arts)

Language: English (Japanese translation is available)

Free, pre-registration is required to attend this lecture
Registration: Google Form

---

During the last few years YoHa have been preoccupied by the genealogical/ ecological/ political complexity of the Thames estuary. Working with it’s peoples we have made museums of waste, smoked and eaten many of the cultured flowers of the Thames, waded in the oxygen breathing mud and hunted for disappearing species in order to inscribe them inside a refloated wreck of a ship called the Souvenir.  We have made soya source from human hair and made Sashimi from locally caught fish. The context to these activities is that highly toxic landfill sites on the banks of the Thames river are also it’s defence against rising sea levels. Other sites have been successfully returned to a particular construction of nature parks, even as YoHa acknowledge that at another scale nature never left in the first place. For the last hundred years the chaos of an unordered nature has become identified as both disposal site and purifier of wastefulness. This talk will explore the voyages of YoHa’s thinking with the future of waste.  

Dr Graham Harwood is Reader in Media Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes MA Digital Media, Data Visualisation and modules on Digital Culture, Critical Theory.

Graham Harwood with his partner Matsuko Yokokoji (YoHa English translation ‘aftermath’) have lived and worked together since 1994. First as an art group Mongrel, a free media space Mediashed, another an art group Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji, then as YoHa since around 2010. Their work involves the use of art as a mode of enquiry into technical objects most recently within the fields of health, war, oceans and death. YoHa’s inquiry is usually populated by an interconnection of technical objects and other kinds of bodies as in a clinic, hospital, battlefield or at sea. The focus of our enquiry is where the flows of power can be reconfigured by the ambiguity of art, not necessarily to make art but to make use of it within a wider enquiry.

Their work has been internationally awarded and part of collections at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Tate Britain, London and ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, Manifesta, Italy.

Organized by: Mori Yoshitaka lab, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts, Post-Media Research Network (PMRN) Free (pre-registration is required to attend this lecture

Inquiry: info-ga(a)ml.geidai.ac.jp