27 Oct: Regenerative Energy and Queer Geochemistries keynote

Team member Helen Pritchard will be giving a keynote on regenerative energy and queer geochemistries for the Counterparts: Exploring Design Beyond the Human conference! Abstract below and more details on the conference website here: https://counterparts.ch/keynotes

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Helen Pritchard, Regenerative Energy and Queer Geochemistries

As a response to the felt endings of carbon-based energy there has been a proliferation of technoutopian design solutions for resilient energy communities. From micro-tracking devices for measuring energy to workshops for off-grid living, the technical and social imaginaries of community energy are of survival, repair and resilience. Despite the ways in which the end of carbon-based energy demands the recognition of human-earth relations, emerging imaginations and politics of energy transition remain powerfully attached to the individual and the image of the "smooth life". Instead, in this keynote I discuss our project Regenerative Energy Communities, in which artists, designers and farmers work on queer and feminist practices together for regenerative imaginaries to build and support ties across soils, and damage colonial narratives of the smooth continuity of energy. Exploring practices that arise out of small scale, unstable forms of sustainable energy provision we propose we might take up queer geochemistries to work with materials of deep, ongoing damages. I describe our speculative attempts and crossings that emerge as a queer, open-ended set of collectively made regenerative prototypes loitering in between spaces of a seemingly fixed and sealed present, deeptime past and future possibility.