Remembrance Day for Lost Species on November 30 is a chance each year to explore the stories of extinct and critically endangered species, cultures, lifeways, and ecological communities. RDLS is a project of the wondrous ONCA gallery.
Whilst emphasising that these losses are rooted in violent and discriminatory governing practices, the day provides an opportunity for participants to make or renew commitments to all who remain, and to develop creative and practical solutions.
To mark ten years of RDLS, the theme for 2021 is interdependence. Focusing on single species as a tool for conservation has proven flawed (as discussed in this brilliant conversation between Sadiah Qureshi, Suzanne Dhaliwal and Audra Mitchell for RDLS 2020), arguably contributing to harms to places and ecological communities and driving human communities from their homes. This year, we invite RDLS participants and organisers to consider and celebrate:
- specific relationships and lives
- particular ecological / bio-cultural collectives and webs
- examples of care, commitment and solidarity
Our contribution to RDLS #10
To wrap up our year-long Borrowed Time series we are offering a number of tie-ins with Remembrance Day for Lost Species which seems to speak to the core of the Borrowed Time theme.
Film screening: The New Corporation – the unfortunately necessary sequel
On November 29 and 30 we are offering (still subject to licensing confirmation) an online screening of The New Corporation: the Unfortunately Necessary Sequel.
This film is directed by Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott (Borrowed Time keynote), filmmakers of the multi-award-winning global hit,The Corporation, comes this hard-hitting and timely sequel.
The New Corporation reveals how the corporate takeover of society is being justified by the sly rebranding of corporations as socially conscious entities. From gatherings of corporate elites in Davos, to climate change and spiralling inequality; the rise of ultra-right leaders to Covid-19 and racial injustice, the film looks at corporations’ devastating power. Countering this is a groundswell of resistance worldwide as people take to the streets in pursuit of justice and the planet’s future.
In the face of increasing wealth disparity, climate change, and the hollowing-out of democracy The New Corporation is a cry for social justice, deeper democracy, and transformative solutions.
This film is unashamedly commercial: hard-hitting and Hollywood-documentary in style. But it still has the power to make you weep, to open our eyes to the extraordinary, unremitting power of the corporations that exist for one reason only: profit. ‘There is no such thing as corporate responsibility’ one of the speakers in the film tells us. Perhaps you already think you know everything about the downsides and harms of capitalism — this film will open your eyes very very wide.
In conversation with… Caroline Hickman
November 30 17.00-18.15
The evening begins with a short sound piece made for Remembrance Day for Lost Species by musician Rob Harrison and artist Amanda Brown, with the borrowed voices of creatures on the critically endangered list. Headphones are recommended for the immersive soundscape. The voice that opens the evening’s sound piece is the last recording of the single male Kauai O-o bird left alive, calling for its mate (see image information below*).
Caroline is in conversation with Mat Osmond (Falmouth University and Co-convenor of Borrowed Time) and Zoe Young, Falmouth University Pagan Chaplain**) about the love, longing and loss we need to feel as we remember lost species. Caroline has been working as a depth psychotherapist with an ecological awareness whilst also researching children & young people’s emotional responses to the climate and biodiversity crisis globally for many years. She will bring these children’s narratives of loss to the conversation and reflect on their awareness of their own vulnerability and that of the others with whom we are living through these troubled times. For some young people they are being born and growing up in the shadow of their own personal and cultural mortality. And for them ‘it is personal, what happens to the animals is happening to me too’.
Caroline’s event will finish at 18.15. Following this, for those interested, our friends at ONCA gallery are marking Remembrance Day for Lost Species with an Interdependence Ritual with Bea Xu that will be streamed shortly after this session, and which you can find out about and register for here. Bea will facilitate a ritual inspired by the theme of ecological entanglement and webs – calling in the networks that exist across the elements of air, fire, water and earth. Participants will be supported to explore the Lost Species Day tenth anniversary theme of Interdependence through the human and more-than-human relationships they weave; visible and invisible, at the planetary and microbial level.Book now