Book Launch: A Year Without a Winter
with Dehlia Hannah, Tobias S. Buckell, James Graham, and Nadim Samman; moderated by Emily Eliza Scott

 

Join us at e-flux to mark the launch of A Year Without a Winter, edited by Dehlia Hannah and published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (2018).

The evening moderated by Emily Eliza Scott will feature an introduction to the book from Dehlia Hannah, a fiction reading by Tobias S. Buckell, screenings of films by Julian Charrière and Charles Stankievech as well as contributions by Nadim Samman and James Graham.

As the world warms and seasonal patterns betray historical records, we are called to rethink the organizing logics of the environments that we inhabit physically and imaginatively. From regional life-worlds to the abstraction of a global climate whose mean temperature is steadily rising, the boundaries of our environs are open to radical contestation—shifting shorelines, disturbed migratory routes and phenological clocks, and new avenues of economic exploitation and militarization. How are contemporary curators, artists, and theorists intervening in these consequential matters?Inspired by the literary ‘dare’ that would give birth to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein amidst the aftermath of a massive volcanic eruption, and today, by the utopian architecture of Paolo Soleri and the Arizona desert, expeditions to Antarctica and Indonesia, this collection reframes the relationship among climate, crisis, and creation. The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, enveloped the globe in a cloud of ash, causing a climate crisis. By 1816, remembered as the ‘year without a summer’, the northern hemisphere was plunged into cold and darkness. Amidst unseasonal frosts, violent thunderstorms, and a general atmosphere of horror, Shelley began a work of science fiction that continues to shape attitudes to emerging science, technology, and environmental futures. Two hundred years later, in 2016, the hottest year on historical record, four renowned science fiction authors were invited to the experimental town of Arcosanti, Paolo Soleri’s prototype for arcology, to respond to our present crisis. A Year Without a Winter presents their stories alongside critical essays, extracts from Shelley’s masterpiece, and dispatches from expeditions to extreme geographies. Broad and ambitious in scope, this book is a collective thought experiment retracing an inverted path through narrative extremes.
 

Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work. His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. 

James Graham is an architect and historian who teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He is also the director of Columbia Books on Architecture and the City and was founding editor of the Avery Review, a digital journal of critical essays on architecture. 

Dehlia Hannah is a Mads ØvlisenPostdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Chemistry and Biosciences at Aalborg University-Copenhagen; an affiliate of the Laboratory for Past Disaster Science at Aarhus Univerisity; and the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia University, with specializations in aesthetics and philosophy of science.  She deploys her philosophical training to curate transdisciplinary research projects and exhibitions including Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene (2015), Atmosphere and Place (2015-17), and An Imaginary Museum of Philosophical Monsters (2018-20).  

Nadim Samman is a curator and art historian. He read Philosophy at University College London before receiving his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He co-founded the 1st Antarctic Biennale (2017) and the Antarctic Pavilion, Venice (2015-). In 2016 he curated the 5th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art and in 2012 the 4th Marrakech Biennale. Other major projects include Treasure of Lima: A Buried Exhibition a unique site-specific exhibition on the remote Pacific island of Isla del Coco, and Rare Earth at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. In 2014 Foreign Policy Magazine named him among the ‘100 Leading Global Thinkers’.

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and former park ranger focused on contemporary art and design practices that engage pressing ecological issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. Currently a joint professor in the History of Art and Architecture and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, she was formerly a postdoc at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich and holds a PhD in contemporary (post-1945) art history from UCLA. Her writings have appeared in Art Journal, Art Journal Open, American Art, Third Text, The Avery Review, Field, and Cultural Geographies as well as multiple edited volumes and online journals; her first book, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, co-edited with Kirsten Swenson, was published by the University of California Press (2015). At present, she is developing a monograph on contemporary art and geological imaginaries; a co-edited volume on art, visual culture, and climate change; and new courses on land art, Anthropocene debates, and “unnatural disasters.” She is also a core participant in two long-term, collaborative art projects: the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004-), and World of Matter (2011-).

Dehlia Hannah (Ed.)
A Year Without a Winter
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, December 2018

Language: English
ISBN: 9781941332382
Paperback, 284pp

Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event. 

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.