Of all the planetary meltdowns associated with the anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene-necrocene, man-made extinction is the most dire and consequential, and the least discussed. Modernity has initiated the Sixth Mass Extinction in the planet’s history. Every day, around a hundred species are lost. By the end of this century, two thirds of all species could be gone. And yet, no politician feels obliged to even mention it. What, then, is politics today? The extinction of a single species is a reverberating terminal disaster. A mass extinction event is a radical and irreparable reduction of life and community that alters the course of evolution and reprograms the planetary future. Extinction exposes one of the most deeply held and destructive fantasies of modernity: human supremacism, the belief that humans are superior, exceptional, and destined to dominate all other life on earth. Modernity entails extinction, and capitalism compels all of us to participate in it. The new fascisms have announced their resolve to defend these givens. The endgame is a global scene of death and loneliness, and the very knowledge of it is traumatic. Painfully, disavowal is being confronted, and awareness and resistance are spreading. Species supremacism remains the default position, but today is strongly contested by emerging alliances of Indigenous peoples, activists, scientists and interdisciplinary scholars, who emphasize the interdependence and entanglement of species in ecological communities. Emerging grassroots cultures of food, water and energy sovereignty are pushing beyond modernity, reviving and reworking traditional precepts of species kinship and mutuality. These now converge with anticolonial struggles and struggles for environmental and climate justice, most recently and vividly in Standing Rock, North Dakota. In this dangerous and defining moment, what has art to contribute and do?

Gene Ray, associate professor, has taught Critical Studies at CCC since 2008. He is currently leading the research project The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (TAAG) that is affiliated with the trans-disciplinary research-based study program at the HEAD. The project investigates into the forms of representation in the era of the Anthropocene with particular focus on Geneva. Holder of a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (Philosophy, Art History, Comparative Literature and Film Studies) from the University of Miami (1997), Gene Ray writes on the intersections of art, critical theory and radical politics. He is author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005 & 2010) and co-editor of Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (Mayfly, 2009) and Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’ (Mayfly, 2011). His essays have appeared in Third Text, Historical Materialism, Yale Journal of Criticism, Brumaria and other journals. A former German Chancellor’s Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he has taught at University of Hawaii and New College of Florida and has lectured widely in Europe and North America.

Navigating Turbulences names the Public Seminar 2016/17 that is organised by the Research-Based CCC Master Program, one of three Masters of the Visual Arts Department at HEAD – Genève. More a frame than a theme, Navigating Turbulences proposes to continue to think together about the need for new vocabularies for living in global turbulences by means of contemporary research processes. All sessions emerge from the CCC-Curriculum with its faculty members The Colloquium departs from literally “a speaking together”: from com- “together” + -loquium “speaking”. Such an approach does not propose thinking to be a philosophical method to study a subject matter but departs from a moment under conditions of turbulence when knowledge is in crisis that makes it necessary for us to think, to think differently.