“We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response.” (Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 2016, p. 1)
In 2022, Donna Haraway’s statement about the troubling state of living on planet earth and the consequent challenges seems to have gained even more urgency. Without question, this also applies to the production and consumption of music. Insofar as popularity implies that many are currently being addressed, questions arise about our precarious relationship to nature, especially in relation to popular music.
The seminar traces activist and reflexive positioning, but also deals with nostalgic and essentialist references to nature in popular music of diverse provenance. Questions of the artistic representation of nature as well as the performative and discursive production of the supposedly natural (gender, race, sexuality) will be discussed. Last but not least, it is about the question of cultural negotiations of the relationships between humans, technologies and other living beings on this planet.
- Dozent/in: Florian Heesch