AUTHOR
Hi, my name is Aleksandra Jach. I'm working as a curator and researcher, educator, manager and writer. My interests are centred around climate politics, art and environment, facilitation and other group working methods and approaches. For ten years I was working at the contemporary art museum as a curator. I was in charge of various projects, from exhibitions, publications, workshops, conferences to public program. At the moment, I'm shifting my career development to the field of facilitation and climate politics. I believe that never before we had need raising our awareness on the dynamic of group processes. The Anthropocene, climate crisis and recently - COVID-19 are calling us to finding solutions collectively - both on local and international level - and look for effective tools of communication. I'm personally a big fan of non-violent communication (NVC) as inspiring and helpful strategy of dealing with different points of views and emotions in the group.
My recent projects: Care Report: Carolina Caycedo and Zofia Rydet, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2019); How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions?, co-curator: Antje Majewski, concept: Aleksandra Jach, Antje Majewski, Melanie Roumiguière, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2018); Shapeshifting: Eisenstein as Method, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2018); Superorganism. The Avant-garde and the Experience of Nature, co-curator: Paulina Kurc-Maj, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2017); Antje Majewski et al., Apple. An Introduction. (Over and over again), co-curator: Joanna Sokołowska, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź (2014).
Other projects include: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else, Festival of Literary Translators in Gdańsk (2015); Avant-garde and Socrealism, co-curators: Marta Olejniczak, Piotr Olkusz, New Theatre (Nowy Teatr) (2014).
THE ANTHOPOCENE INDEX
EDIT 2020:
This website is a documentation of a research project which I started in 2015 thanks to the support of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. It is also a book in progress that will develop over time. My main idea is to present various perspectives on cultural practices in the current so called "climate crisis”, which is known under the term of the Anthropocene. The official acknowledgment of the Anthropocene as a geologic epoch is still ahead, but the cultural and political meaning of this concept is already recognized among different disciplines and by artists, activists, journalists and scholars. I believe that the current debates around environmental issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity , ocean acidification, etc. have to be linked with a reflection on serious limitations of capitalist world-system and the values it promotes.
The question is how art, design, architecture and other aesthetic activities can help to understand, represent, problematize and enhance engagement in global ecology? Do they have the power to re-connect humanity with the environment - physically, mentally, symbolically? What are the relations between the organization of knowledge proposed by aesthetics and scientific procedures? What does it mean to invoke the rhetorics of crisis, extinction, apocalypse in the context of the Anthropocene?
Proofreaders: Anna Columbine, Talia Shak.
Anna Columbine - She is a visual artist, primarily interested in exploring and responding to the idea of anxiety and uncertainty, in regards to human relationships with the environment and technology. Her practice is process based, centred around image and object making by means of drawing and installation and photography; working in a mostly analogous way. More: http://www.annacolumbine.com