Climate change is inextricably connected with the concept of death as more and more places become uninhabitable, and a lot of species are threatened with extinction. Due to the carbon-intensive infrastructure of human’s activity on the planet, landscapes are under constant transformations; glaciers are melting, oceans are rising, fertile lands are turned into deserts, food systems and species interactions are disrupted. Survival is under threat and the exploitative human’s behavior towards nature accelerates hunger, violence, mass migration, and produces inequalities and diseases.

The planet faces countless, unstoppable losses of species, ecosystems, and landscapes. A loss always contains stress, sadness, and fear of the unknown after the separation but it is also a dynamic point, a crossing, to discover something new, to resurrect. People with the technology they create, can control all aspects of life. They seek to fight decay and death and they manage the production of life, yet they seem incapable of abandoning their extractive, consumerist habits and reconnect with the soil. Life starts and ends from the soil. Society today tends to neglect this vital connection and avoid death as a marginal procedure while hoping for immortality. However, death as a reminder of our fragility gives us the chance to practice life at its finest.

In many funeral rituals, traditional practices include mourning the deceased, celebrating their life and offering compression and support. They are opportunities for self- reflection and critical approach towards the values that people live. In the wake of the world’s ecological destruction, how can we reimagine the human we want to preserve in the future to recreate the world?

Funeral Party is a series of curated events, conversations over art, tea or dinner that bring together people from the arts, architecture, science and policy to explore environmental degradation through the lens of materiality and decomposition, reuse and recycle, extractivism, climate disasters, environmental justice, digital remains and afterlife. In each party people from different disciplines are invited to have a conversation around a wider audience, testing the possibilities of imagination that gatherings of people in an artistic setting provide.

The first Funeral Party: Regenerative Bodies will be held at The Opening Gallery in the form of a dinner party and will explore the power of the bodies to resist climate change. Food, as a connector of people and culture will be prepared by the team.

The conversations will be audio recorded to create a collection of memories and thoughts, a guidebook for a more resilient and caring way of living.

Eva Lavranou

Eva Lavranou is an architect and curator. She holds a Master in Design Studies: Art, Design and the Public Domain at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2022) with Distinction. She has previously studied architecture at the University of Thessaly (2018) and at the Politecnico di Milano (2014-15). Her work focuses on design research, curation, activism, and public space interventions that promote social change with a particular interest in the body’s agency in the era of ecological, political, and technological unrest.

While at Harvard she was the teaching assistant for many interdisciplinary design classes, curatorial assistant for the Department of Exhibitions and curator at the GSD Kirkland Gallery. She participated also in the Venice Biennale 2021. Her thesis, “Bodies of Earth: Abduction-Death-Grief- Rebirth” (2022), explores the body’s agency in establishing a partnership with Earth in the era of climate destruction by recognizing human kinship with plants, animals, and machines and establishing an ethics of eco-responsibility.

Last year she joined the Ambasz Institute at the Architecture and Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where she organizes exhibitions, events and publications and researches the history of ecological design.

Sofia Sofianou

Sofia Sofianou is an architect from Athens (Greece) holding a graduate degree from Harvard Graduate School of De- sign, Master in Architecture II (2021) and University of Patras, Greece (2018).

She is currently working as a designer at Gensler in Boston (since 2021). Having worked in Copenhagen at Bjarke Ingels Group, and in architectural offices in Athens, she partici- pated in international competitions and projects mainly in Greece, Denmark, and USA. She was involved in workshops around Greece and Europe, as well as in the exhibition of the Greek Pavilion of the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016.

Her research interest focuses on investigating the need for urban structures that explore self-sufficiency in glob- al cities. Her research thesis, “The Entelecheia of Urban Form” (2018), analyzes ways of managing population densities and infrastructural networks in cities that function in multiple scales simultaneously.

Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s took place at the Queens Museum in 1999 curated by Queens Museum Director of Exhibitions Jane Farver, the artist Luis Camnitzer and Rachel Weiss Professor at the New School. It contained over 200 works by artists all over the world with the purpose to understand conceptual art in its broader context. As it states on the Queens Museum website, the show was meant to “question the hegemony of the object over ideas in art, critique the way art is institutionalized both in museums and in modern economies, and find a new role for art and the artist in society by involving art in social and political protest.”  Wet conceptualism shares many of these concerns but recontextualizes them in the context of cognitive capitalism in which the brain and mind are the new factories of the 20^th century and the importance of immaterial labor subsumes the importance of the dematerialized object. Today we are overwhelmed and suffocated by immateriality and a material rebuttal is necessary as a form of dissensus. Our generalized intelligence has been reconfigured in our world of deep learning neural networks, robotics and wet ware.  Wet conceptualisms interest in ecologies of knowledge is the starting point to engage with Global Conceptualism through the experience of our two guest artists from the global South in an attempt to relinquish the aporias of Dry Conceptual art.

Dr Sozita Goudouna is a curator and professor. She is visiting professor at Goldsmiths where she teaches the MA on Breath Studies: Breath in the Performing and Visual Arts. In 2015 she was selected by RoseLee Goldberg as the inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Curator at Performa Biennial. Over the course of a 20-year career, she joined Raymond Pettibon Studio in 2019 as director, working closely with David Zwirner and Regen Projects, and Sadie Coles and to curate a production for Performa Biennial at the New Museum. Her internationally exhibited projects include solo exhibitions by Arthur Jafa, John Akomfrah, Jake Chapman, Martin Creed, Lynda Benglis, Andres Serrano, Santiago Sierra, Karen Finley and Marina Abramovic and participations at Documenta 14, Onassis Foundation New York, French Consulate NYC,EMST Contemporary Art Museum and MET Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2022 she was the winner of the British Council Culture and Creativity UK Study Award. She holds a PhD in American high-Modernism (University of London), an MA (King’s/RADA) and a BA in Philosophy and Theatre Studies (LondonMet). She taught at CUNY as adjunct professor, the New School, SUNY, Roger Williams, University of the Peloponnese, Pace, and NYU. She is the author of 'Beckett’s Breath: Anti-theatricality and the Visual Arts' (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism/OUP) and co-authored 'Mourning the Ends: Collaborative Writing, and Performance’ at Punctum Press 2024. She is the editor of Performance Research Journal forthcoming Issue “On Breath” and has published in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, GPS Global Performance Studies, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, Theater Topics, Seismopolite Art & Politics Journal, BST Body Space & Technology Journal among others. She served as treasurer of the board of directors of AICA Hellas International Art Critics Association and as a member of the board of directors at ITI International Theatre Association UNESCO.

Carlos Huffmann is an artist and director of the Art Department of the Torcuato Di Tella University. He served as the main professor of the Work Analysis Seminar within the Artists Program during 2017, 2021, and 2022, and regularly teaches classes both in the Artists Program and in undergraduate courses at Torcuato Di Tella University. He graduated with a Bachelor of Business Economics from UTDT (2001) and the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts)-Master of Fine Arts, School of Art (2005). He was the editor of the art section of the online magazine Otra Parte Semanal. He regularly publishes texts about art in various media, such as Otra Parte, the Radar supplement of Página 12, artists’ books, and various blogs, among others. In 2020, the first monographic book on his work was published: Strange Ruler for a Heart. His main individual exhibitions are “Compostasmas” (2022, Ruth Benzacar Gallery, Buenos Aires), “Hito de Frontera” (2019, Art Week, BA), “Recursiva” (2018, Constitución Gallery, BA), among others.

Dr. Syd Krochmalny is an artist, curator, writer, researcher, musician, and Professor of Arts, Literature and Social Sciences. His multimedia work has been exhibited at the Reina Sofia Museum, Harvard University, David Rockefeller Center, the Malba, the Americas Society, Cultural Center of Memory Haroldo Conti, Remembrance Park, University of Oslo, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, MAC de Niteroi, Pinacoteca San Pablo, The University of Edinburgh, Museum of Contemporary Art in Buenos Aires, and the Guggenheim, among others. Syd has published Diarios del Odio (Journals of Hate, 2016), Débil (Weak, 2017), Los Sueños (The Dreams, 2018), El Tamaño de mi mundo (The Size of My World, 2021), Ramona, debates en el arte al filo del Milenio (Ramona, Debates in the Art on the Edge of the Millennium, 2021), and he wrote a prologue for Crypto Currency and Sovereignty (2022), among others. Syd was a part of several magazine projects, including editor of the magazine and subsequent book, ramona, co-founder and editor of the magazine, Jennifer, and co-founder and editor of the CIA magazine for the Center for Artistic Research (CIA), an Artist Program and a Masters Program on Latin American Art in Buenos Aires where Syd Krochmalny was Professor, the Pedagogical Director, and International Relations. Syd was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University. Syd is the Director of Barro in New York

Warren Neidich is an artist, theorist and curator who works between New York City and Berlin. He is founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art which will concern Apparatus, Apparatus, Apparatus in collaboration with the Brooklyn Rail. His work,The Statisticon Neon, is on view in the exhibition Singing in Unison curated by Phong Bui and From the Society of the Spectacle to the Consciousness Industry at the Taipei Digital Arts Festival, Taipei, Taiwan. Neidich’s An Activist Neuroaesthetic Reader was just published by Archive Press, Berlin.

Recent review about Wet Conceptualism in the Brooklyn Rail.

https://brooklynrail.org/2023/02/artseen/Wet-Conceptualism