Webinar with Andreas Weber
Monday 17 March 2025, 19.00-20.30 Greek time
The third in a series of five online public conferences, organised by the G&A Mamidakis Foundation in the context of Care Ecologies, an ongoing cooperative project among five partners from Greece, Croatia and Spain. Co-funded by Creative Europe. More information about Care Ecologies here.
ECOSYSTEMS ARE PRACTICES OF CARE
We can understand biological life empirically as a fundamental manifestation of care. Organisms are caregivers; ecological relations can be understood as mutual care. Life is the process of providing life for other beings in the course of caring for the own life. There is a fundamental double-sidedness inscribed into biological processes which on the one hand are about self-construction and lifemaking, and on the other hand can only happen if the components of life itself – the building blocks of an organism’s body – are provided by other organisms. Ecology is breath – where, as in the breath cycle between animals and plants, one organism or group of organisms breathes another one into being. An individual biological agent cares for the life of others through breath – on a level far below any individual choice to do so or not. Biological niches are nodes of life-provision. The Darwinian reading of Natural History has privileged the competitive aspect between organism and overlooked the degree to which life creates a meshwork of reciprocity in which each instance of lifemaking is at the same time life-provisioning for others.
Dr. Andreas Weber is a biologist, philosopher and nature writer. He focuses on a re-evaluation of our understanding of the living. He proposes to view – and treat – all organisms as subjects and hence the biosphere as a meaning-creating and poetic reality. Andreas is Visiting Professor at the UNISG, Pollenzo, Italy and a honorary teacher at the University of the Arts, Berlin. He has published more than fifteen books, in English language most recently Enlivenment. A Poetics for the Anthropocene, MIT Press, 2019 and Sharing Life. The Ecopolitics of Reciprocity, Boell Foundation, 2020.
Online public event organised by the G. & A. Mamidakis Foundation as part of Care Ecologies, a Creative Europe cooperation project with Idensitat, What, How & for Whom / WHW, State of Concept Athens and the Centre for New Media and Feminist Public Practices. Co-funded by Creative Europe.
