The new “climatic regime” (as Bruno Latour suggested) considers the creative proposals of contemporary artists and activists for ways of life that bring together ecological sustainability, climate justice, and radical democracy, at a time when such creative proposals are needed to rethink our relationship with nature and the whole planet and establish the new bonds with non-human species. Queer ecological and decolonial perspectives propose the new optics for artists while also drawing on Indigenous and non-Western ways of knowing that have long recognized the significance of nonhuman modes of thinking.

Alexander Burenkov´s lecture is based on his curatorial projects and will track how these models of thinking propose to embrace different kinds of intelligence — plant, animal, human, artificial, natural systems — and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. Also, it will address what we can learn from them, and how we can change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics, to live better and more equitably with one another and the non-human world. Burenkov’s curatorial research lies in the realms of education, ecology, environmental policy, post-human studies, and scientific and technological research with an emphasis on the impact of new technologies in the Anthropocene.

In 2021 he created the digital project Yūgen App in the form of an ever-growing collection of exercises and instruction-based projects and daily rituals on reconnecting with nature and the self with contributions from 35 leading international artists. He also curated Raw and Cooked, a group show which took place in the State Ethnographic museum (St. Petersburg) in the context of Komi biennale. Recently, as artistic director of AyarKut foundation, he curated an online festival titled Terrestrial Voices, which explored the reinterpretation of oral traditions and folk rituals of small nations of Arctic by contemporary artists, musicians and video makers.

At AiR 351 he is working on Dub Portals, a series of performative gatherings, rituals, sound activations and poetry readings which join the dots between climate emergency, queer theory, environmental activism, ancestral knowledge and decolonial approach to challenging climate colonialism in queer transformation and creation of the biodiverse eco-utopia. Like a mycelium, which is constituted of the distributed bodies of fungi, the project will be formed as a rhizomatic organ dispersed across many public spaces of Sintra-Cascais natural park and forests, mostly at miradouros (typical Portuguese viewpoints), usually located at the highest points of each hill and even deep in woods.