‘Topography of Decay’ is a multi-part programme series comprising of a self-published zine and artist book, a panel discussion, and open library sessions on the themes of queer ecology, geotrauma, and risk capitalism. The programme brings together artist and educator Shuyi Cao, our alumnus Hang Li, the inaugural Curatorial Writing Fellow at Chisenhale Gallery, and our Goldsmiths PhD Scholar Yuhang Zhang. Through drawing, storytelling, artist-book making, ‘Topography of Decay’ conjures up ways in which deadly matters intersect with a world conditioned by capitalism and dark ecology.
Sensing a looming breakdown in the natural, cultural and psychological realms, the programme aims to create space for different modes of sense-making amongst more-than-human beings by thinking with skins, swells, wastes, and residuals in the interlacing areas of metabolism, infiltration, death, and longing. Making multi-medium sculptures as speculative fossils to contemplate prehistoric futurity, Shuyi Cao contemplates ways of world-making that unravel monstrous intimacy and queer kinship across a myriad of networked life forms and incompatible scales. Exploring storytelling as an embodied practice, Hang Li works with trauma and affective intensities as inter-corporeal residuals that seep and bleed across psychological territories of human and non-human beings. Yuhang Zhang fictionally traces a thread to the dark history of universal degradation, decay, and conspiracy. At the core of the project is a fundamental question: in face of the horror of an impending extinction stretching to deep time, how do we situate ourselves in the all-too-human conditions of everyday attachment and struggles?
During two open library sessions, Yuhang Zhang and Hang Li will display and share the myriad writings, diagrams, and research visuals in their zine publication, along with books that inspire their work and reference literature drawn from our library.