Underground / Ecology with Timothy Morton and Federico Campagna

Underground / Ecology / Politics / Mythology was a series of three multimedia events hosted between The Showroom and Goldsmiths, University of London organised by Teodora Pasquinelli. This first event invited Timothy Morton and Federico Campagna to explore the meaning of ecology, understood as the ontological terrain underlying all human and non-human forces. By redefining ecological thinking through the philosophical models of Dark Ecology and Magic, this session focused on the fundamental reality-systems that constitute the true underground of the world, ultimately shaping our visible and invisible environment.

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Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in Theory in 2014 and has collaborated with Björk, Haim Steinbach and Olafur Eliasson. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (2016), Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (2015), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology,Causality (2013), The Ecological Thought (2010), Ecology without Nature (2007), eight other books and 160 essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food.

Federico Campagna is a Sicilian philosopher based in London. His current work revolves around the ontological and ethical challenges posed by contemporary nihilism, and the possibility of a fundamental philosophical architecture of emancipation. His latest book is The Last Night: antiwork, atheism, adventure (Zero, 2013). He is co-editing with Prof. Saul Newman a series of forgotten classics of non-Anglophone heterodox political theory, Xenopolitics (Zed, 2017). He has discussed his work at institutions such as dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel), MACBA (Barcelona), Fabbrica del Vapore (Milan), SAAS FEE Summer Institute of Art (Berlin), ICA (London) and Goldsmiths (London). He works as rights manager at Verso Books.

Teodora Pasquinelli is a writer and event organiser with a background in Fine Arts and she is interested in looking at the morphology of the current age, through the relationship between art and fundamental philosophy. She is a contributor for art magazines Arte e Critica and Juliet. Having worked in several art institutions in London, she is currently working as a production assistant for the Greek documentary TV series Apo Agathi Rodo broadcasted by the national TV channel ERT2.