Four years after Colleex started it is time for the original team of convenors to step down, and for a new team to guide Colleex in its explorations.
The network was launched in 2016. Our Intention was for it to become a space to share and learn about the experimental condition of anthropological practice. The last four years have certainly been exciting for us in the convening team (Eeva Berglund, Adolfo Estalella, Anna Lisa Ramella and Tomás S. Criado) and for the many colleagues who have participated in our workshops, labs and meetings. We have learnt much during this time, more even than we expected to share and learn from Colleex.
We share a review of this for years in a different post and in this one we share some information on the suggested handover and flag us some of our own hopes and ideas for the time ahead.
We have proposed Francisco Martínez, Hermione Spriggs, Francesca de Luca and Kiven Strohm to form a new convening team. They have all been active in Colleex activities and are looking forward to working as a team (See bios below). We hope you – network members and followers – agree to their taking over as convenors, but please write to us at colleexnetwork@gmail.com if you have any reservations.
How did we get here? We invited expressions of interest in November 2020, to which we received a few responses (Many thanks to those who contacted us!). We were initially surprised that not more people put themselves forward, and can only assume that here too, the pandemic has reduced people’s enthusiasm to take on volunteer roles with possibly long-term commitments.
As a result, and also because Colleex is a network that exists thanks to the energies of those who are active, and not a membership organization with a constitution, selecting the new team has progressed informally and without a ballot. And so, we were delighted when two, then three, and later, four active Colleex presented themselves as a team. We are also delighted to hand over the convenorship and look forward to knowing about their plans.
That said, the idea to do distributed nodal activities (subscribers to the list will have received an email including this, still tentative yet tantalizing, information in January 2021) is still part of the plan. We encourage everyone to consider contributing to those as well.
NEW CONVENING TEAM’S BIOS
Hermione Spriggs works at the intersection of art and anthropology to investigate beyond-human forms of knowledge creation. She is currently conducting fieldwork with rural pest control in North Yorkshire (UK) for her PhD research based between the UCL Department of Anthropology and the Slade School of Fine Art. Hermione is curator and editor for the exhibition and publication project “Five Heads: Art, Anthropology and Mongol Futurism” (UCL Anthropology/ Sternberg Press). She is a member of UCL Multimedia Anthropology LAB, the Social Morphologies Research Unit, and the Arts Catalyst Advisory group.
Website: www.hermione-spriggs.com
Kiven Strohm is Assistant Professor in Department of Sociology and Anthropology, National University of Singapore working at the convergence of art/ecology/science and experimental ethnography. His research and writing centre on the emergence of assemblages and their affordances within contemporary colonial situations. His work has appeared on Collaborative Anthropologies, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and American Anthropologist. He is presently completing a book project entitled, Experiments in Living: Art and Politics in a Settler Colony.
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and currently he works as Associate Professor at Tallinn University. Francisco has published several books – including Peripheral Methodologies (Routledge, 2021); Politics of Recuperation in Post-Crisis Portugal (Bloomsbury, 2020), Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019), and Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018). He has also curated different exhibitions – including ‘Objects of Attention’ (Estonian Museum of Applied Art & Design, 2019), and ‘Adapting to Decline’ (Estonian Mining Museum, 2021).
Francesca De Luca is an anthropologist researching biotechnologies, biohacking and genealogies of medical experimentations with a focus on gender, race and spatiality. With EBANO Collective she carries out ethnographic-based artistic research and interventions and is coordinator in Portugal of the European project “Pass the Mic! Decolonizing education through arts” (Creative Europe 2020). She is a fellow researcher in the project “EXCEL. The Pursuit of Excellence. Biotechnologies, Enhancement and Body Capital in Portugal” (ICS – University of Lisbon).
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