Conversations Across Art, Science, Ecology and Everyday Life.
NUS Museum – Friday 1st & Sunday 3rd August
Singapore Botanic Gardens – Saturday 2nd August 2014
Nature as Practice is a six session interdisciplinary symposium collaboration between the School of Art Design and Media (ADM) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum and the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Curated by Lucy Davis and Shabbir Hussain Mustafa in conjunction with the NUS Museum exhibition, “When you get closer to the heart, you may find cracks…” Stories of Wood by the Migrant Ecologies Project.
There are many things that humans do to nature in Southeast Asia. The emphasis in this symposium is upon what nature does to people, about nature as an active partner in human practice, and the modes of human practice that are provoked by encounters with the natural world, as experienced by natural scientists, historians, cultural theorists, artists, writers, architects, ethnomusicologists, ecologists, urban planners and museum curators.
By collating these different activities under a banner of ‘cultural practice’, the objective is to gather together dynamic fragments of culture-nature co-production that both vary across time and context and that also are as resistant to singular storytelling as the diversity of the natural world.
The timing of this conference is opportune, coming prior to opening of the new Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum in Singapore and following a series of films and exhibitions about the human relationships with the natural world in Singapore and elsewhere in our region.
