Saturday, 9 December 2023, 15:00–17:00 / Casco HQ & Online
Livestream link here
Organized by Reading Sideways Press, KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, and LIR Space in collaboration with Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons
We warmly welcome you for the publication launch of Berita Gunung Berapi: Planetary Politics in a Volcanic Age. We are honored to be part of this important conversation about subterranean spaces of heterogeneous dreams, archives, and planetary futures and we hope you can join us. Berita Gunung Berapi (Bobbette, Asriningtyas & Yuwono, eds) is a contemporary re-imagining of a volcanology journal first published in 1952 in Bandung, Indonesia.
On the publication
In the introduction, Bobbette remarks on how the initial publication was remarkable for its explorations of what volcanology could mean and how it could be used as a means ‘to unite the nation’ in the early years of Independence. Bobbette writes, “nowhere [else] was volcano science situated in the very foundations of a postcolonial state, nor drew from it the same imaginative intensity, as in Indonesia. Postcolonialism, in this vision, was volcanic, and volcanology was the science of postcolonialism. And that meant embracing the tensions that arise with things volcanic: control and chaos, eruptions and reason, unity and dissolution.”
This reimagining of Berita Gunung Berapi critically intervenes in studies of volcanoes and the earth sciences. The liveliness of volcanoes and their capability for earthly disruption and agitation are mobilised for a critical postcolonial inquiry, which stretches and dissolves the limits of geological analysis. The contributors use ethnographic and artistic approaches to explore what volcanology and volcanoes mean in the Anthropocene.
Similar to the 1952 production, this is also a multilingual text. And, most of the contributors are based in Indonesia. The book thus positions the study of volcanoes as a dialogue with; rather than as an exoticizing of a lively, yet inanimate earthly force.
