Flood. A Talk by Salar Mameni (Pembroke Seminar event)

A Pembroke Seminar”Unwriting the Anthropocene” TalkIn this talk Salar Mameni (UC Berkeley) discusses the extreme heat waves, flooding and cyclones that have affected the southern coastal regions of Pakistan, with the most recent flood occurring in summer 2022, through the work of the contemporary Pakistani artist Zahra Malkani. The talk centers Malkani’s soundscapes and visual multi-modal presentations of spiritual, activist, and mourning practices of coastal communities as an entry point into a conversation about climate disasters, extractive economies, aesthetic practices, and indigenous grieving traditions. Through the notion of the “oceanic feeling,” a term Malkani uses for her audio-visual recordings, Mameni discusses the incongruency of the spiritual and the psychoanalytic and how the ocean, and other bodies of water, have come to signify both the depths of the psyche and the ungraspable flows of the sacred.Salar Mameni is the author ofTerracene: A Crude Aesthetics(Duke, 2023) and Assistant Professor of Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an art historian with expertise in artistic practices in the contemporary Arab/Muslim world withfocuson ecological thought. Mameni’s writings have appeared in the journalsCatalyst,Ramus, Signs,Qui Parle,Women and Performance,Al-Raida andResilienceamong others. He has also written for catalogues of exhibitions in Pakistan, Dubai, Sharjah, and Istanbul.Free and open to the public.Event accessibility information: To bypass stairs, visitors may enter via the automatic doors at the rear of the building, where there is a wheelchair-accessible elevator.