Visitor Talk: Jill Casid

Abstract:

How might we live our dying on a dying planet in a way that contests its terms? Drawing on work from her almost completed book project Necrolandscaping, Casid offers an aesthetic tactics of landscape in the deformative, in which the volatile, strangely resilient powers of the

negative are mined as vital resources for a Necrocene ethics. What Casid calls “care for death” elaborates the practice of transversal vulnerability, extending the book’s thinking with experimental art practice in the art of dying beyond the limits of what is considered grievable death in order to imagine and enact other scenes of care within the Necrocene.

Bio:

Jill H. Casid is a theorist, historian, practicing artist, and professor of visual studies in the Departments of Art History and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she founded and served as the first director of the Center for Visual Cultures. Casid is currently at work on a two-book project titled Form at the Edges of Life. Since the publication of Sowing Empire:

Landscape and Colonization (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), she has continued to write on approaches to landscape while pursuing work on the history and theory of photography, queer and trans art practices, and the materializing effects of imaging.