Drifting Curriculum is a multidisciplinary curriculum research platform conducted under the Arts Council of Korea(ARKO) International Arts Joint Fund 『2021-2022 Korea-Netherlands Cooperation Program』. This flexible platform was conceived as an alternative form of learning and new practice, in response to urgent requests for decolonization and decarbonization faced by numerous cultural institutions around the world, including schools, museums, and art galleries.

In 2022, the “Decolonial Curatorial Agenda for the Green New Deal(DCAG)”, art-research collective launched by the Drifting Curriculum, raises questions about the fundamental way the international community and government deal with climate crises, resource depletion, and environmental issues, and organizes critical art circles to control ecological crises. Focusing on 10 board members working in Asia and Europe, studying the discourse of Anthropocene in arts, science, sociology, anthropology, law and philosophy, early team members of around 40 scholars, curators, artists, activists, and lawyers created seven agendas. In order to share their research and art practice on each agenda that has been underway for a year, we are launching the <Decolonial Curatorial Agendas for a Green New Deal: Summit 2022>.

Colin Sterling, a museologist and a professor at the University of Amsterdam, Rodney Harrison, professor at UCL London, Radha D’Souza, a Professor of Law at University of Westminster and a writer, lawyer, critical scholar, Buhm Soon Park a scientific historian and a director of the Center for Anthropocene Studies in KAIST, and so on will be participating in the panel. There will be a two-day program including a lecture performance by the artist group Unmake Lab, a talk by poet/sociologist Bosun Shim and artist Taeyoon Choi, and Disaster Haggyo presentation.

[Day 1] November 15, 2022 (Tuesday) 3pm – 6pm

15:00-16:00 Heritage and museums in more-than-human worlds

16:00-17:00 (As an individual business, as a community, as a moss) What artists should do now

17:00-18:00 Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings #2: Ecology for the Non-future

[Day 2] November 16, 2022 (Wednesday) 3pm – 6pm

15:00-16:00 The Law on Trial: Intergenerational Climate Crimes Act

16:00-17:00 Disaster Haggyo: Experiments on Alternative Educational Models through Multidisciplinary Collaboration

17:00-18:00 Earth, Bird & Fire in the Anthropocene

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[Day 1]

Heritage and museums in more-than-human worlds

Date and time: November 15, 2022 (Tuesday) 3pm – 4pm

Panel: Colin Sterling (Assistant Professor of Memory and Museums, University of Amsterdam) & Rodney Harrison (Professor of Heritage Studies, University College London)

Moderator: Juhyun Cho (Curatorial Director of Drifting Curriculum)

The global pandemic, the climate emergency, and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 all heightened the sense that the effects of environmental, racial and social injustice overlap and intersect. Calls for museums to repatriate cultural objects have coincided with protests targeting colonial monuments and widespread discussion of the need to ‘decolonise’ cultural institutions, whilst parallel protests have called upon museums and the cultural sector to abandon fossil-fuel sponsorship and to rapidly decarbonise. While the potential gains to be made from considering these challenges in their mutual relation have been underscored, conceptual frameworks, fora and initiatives capable of sharing and translating this knowledge into practice, policy and society have not emerged to realise these gains, despite demand for their development.

How might we reimagine the roles of museums and heritage in more-than-human worlds? How can museums support action for climate, just transitions, and anti-racist/anti-colonial agendas when they themselves have been central to the colonial project and to the development of progress narratives that have underpinned models of racial inequality, human exceptionalism and ideas of exploitation and limitless growth? What new ways of understanding heritage emerge from a consideration of less valorized legacies of human pasts such as climate change and waste, and in shifting to planetary, more-than- and post-human frames of reference? We will explore these issues with reference to a range of initiatives and ongoing research projects across a number of countries.  

Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings #2: Ecology for the Non-future

Date and time: November 15, 2022 (Tuesday) 4pm – 5pm 

Artist: Unmake Lab

<Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings> is a showcase that presents research contents of Drifting Curriculum’s joint research project over the past year produced in three scenarios. This research/collaboration project, with keywords of “drift”, “migration”, and “metamorphosis”, explores the relationship between technology and the ecological environment arising in the planetary-level disasters that occurred in various time and space and the countless possibilities of futures.

This scenario, which talks about “non-future ecology” through beings appearing in the form of a unique animal portrait photograph called a trail cam, connects the non-future paths with the “futureless prediction” presented by the Dark Mirror of artificial intelligence. To create this scenario, Unmake Lab collects wildfire-displaced animals, strangely stuffed animals from colonial/modern times, unidentified beings, and synthetic images, all converted into a negative film format that looks like the original image. The datasets collected are created as non-living creatures of new entanglement through artificial intelligence generated neural networks. <Ecology for the Non-Future> is an observation of artificial visual technology about the shared sense of catastrophe and the future that has left human time.

(As an individual business, as a community, as a moss) What artists should do now

Date and time: November 15, 2022 (Tuesday) 5pm – 6pm 

Panel: Bosun Shim (poet/sociologist, professor at Yonsei University Graduate School of Communication), Taeyoon Choi (artist)

Artistic intervention in social issues in the 21st century is taking place in a comprehensive form, especially at the global level and beyond the art world. The way artists, social scientists, engineers, and activists work together to promote and implement such interventions has become very common. A new form of artistic intervention requires a new form of support and administration. In fact, many artists seek new agendas and new practices, but the aspect of this implementation depends on the system of organizational and institutional support. This support system affects the limitations and possibilities of artistic intervention.

In this talk, poet and sociologist Bosun Shim talks with artist Taeyoon Choi to examine the opportunities and difficulties faced by artists intervening in climate change and new social agendas, and further gauge the emergent artistic practice composed of interacting with such environments.

[Day 2]

The Law on Trial : Intergenerational Climate Crimes Act

Date and time: November 16, 2022 (Wednesday) 3pm – 4pm

Panel: Radha D’Souza (lawyer, activist, professor of Westminster University, London), Tae Hyun Park(Professor of the Graduate School of Law at Kangwon National University, Environmental Law, Environmental Litigation/Legal Practice)

The first waves of mass extinctions amongst animals and plant life as well as the human communities and cultures that thrived with them, manifested first during the colonial period. Colonialism turned living worlds into property, into commodities, and was backed by the law in doing so. In this light, the climate crisis is a colonial crisis, that has been ongoing for the past 500 years – aided and abetted by dominant legal systems and imaginaries.

Proposed by a writer, lawyer, and critical scholar Radha D’Souza, the Intergenerational Climate Crimes Act is a new legal imagination that centers on intergenerationality, interdependency and regeneration across the human and non-human world;  – a vision not of the law, but of justice, in which humans, animals and plants gather as comrades to regenerate the world anew.

In this talk, Radha D’Souza will discuss the Intergenerational Climate Crimes Act with Professor Tae Hyun Park(Gangwon University School of Law), author of Earth Jurisprudence  and talk about how the law can be applied in the new global system within a legal and artistic framework.

Disaster Haggyo: Disaster Haggyo: Experiments on Alternative Educational Models through Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Date and time: November 16, 2022 (Wednesday) 4pm – 5pm

Panel: Scott Gabriel Knowles (Professor of Science and Technology Policy at KAIST), Hyun Ah Keum, Hyeonbin Park, Joelle Champaly (KAIST Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy)

Disasters of different types and effects worldwide require new approaches to research, cooperation, and disaster justice. Disaster School is a project led by a team of Scott Gabriel Knowles, Kim Fortune, Buhm Soon Park, and Jacob Remes that aims at various forms of results, including art, sports, and academic research. The core of the alternative education program of disaster schools is collaboration, especially ‘multi-disciplinary’ collaboration. Artists, researchers, and students participating in disaster schools flexibly exchange and communicate, and share each other’s expertise and research tasks beyond the limits of “classroom modules” with clear boundaries between teachers and learners.

In the summer of 2022, scholars from KAIST’s Anthropocene Institute and multinational and multidisciplinary artists and researchers invited by the Drifting Curriculum Curatorial Team learned about the impact of disaster history on the community through close exchanges with local community members such as environmentalists and victim support activists. In this program, Professor Scott Gabriel Knowles, who led the Disaster Haggyo, and students Hyun Ah Keum and Hyeonbin Park (KAIST Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy) introduce the experimental process of alternative educational models through multi-disciplinary collaboration of Disaster Haggyo.

Earth, Bird & Fire in the Anthropocene

Date and time: November 16, 2022 (Wednesday) 5pm – 6pm 

Moderator: Buhm Soon Park(Professor of KAIST Gradate School of Science and Technology Policy, Director of the Center for Anthropocene Studies)

Panel: Professor Myung-Ae Choi, Dr. Soo Hyun Kim, Dr. Hanah Sung, and Junsu Kim (Research Team of KAIST Center for Anthropocene Research)