Summer School as School 2023
The Public Program
August 10, 2023, 20:00

Fire, Animation and the Sun: Thermal Dialectics and the Flux of Social Worlds
Presentation by Esther Leslie

Venue: Boxing Club, Mark Isaku 8, 10000 Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo

Abstract

Drawing on a developing body of artwork and writing, with Melanie Jackson, titled Rouge Flambé, this presentation considers the concept of the pyrocene, in order to explore social relations that develop in and around fire. Examples include the fire of cave dwellers, the fire of medieval imagination and the glazes of the Qing dynasty in China, fire in animation, fake hearths on TVs, and the fire of the sun, making wild fire now on portions of the earth. What can conceptualising fire contribute to a rethinking of social existence? What iniquitous histories can be told through fire?

Biography:

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and the politics of technologies. Her current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence. Recent work on the biopolitical economy of dairy (written in collaboration with Melanie Jackson) includes the publications Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023) and The Inextinguishable for the Limerick Biennial, 2020–21. Leslie’s book on the anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen is forthcoming with Goldsmiths Press, as is a study of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and its impact in Teesside with Palgrave Pivot.