This is the definition of a mental illness. You lost 20 pounds because you fasted. Now you want to gain those pounds back. Why? Oh, right, guys. Welcome back to the channel. If you're new, my name is Bobby. Guys, you wanted me to react to Be Thyself with his video, What I Eat in a Week After a 30 Day Fast. Let's have a look. Peace, you're now rocking with me from Be Thyself. I'd like to welcome you back to the channel. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in. First red flag, he's wearing a becoming God shirt. This is not really a surprise to me. Fasting, raw veganism, false spirituality, go hand in hand. Let's see what he has to say. For tuning in. Oftentimes here on the channel, I share the benefits of fasting. I have to interrupt it again so we can read here, search becoming God tier fast Dr. Sabi inspired. Shocker. Blacks in America have been absolutely duped by the false teachings of Dr. Sabi. Dr. Sabi was a quack that preached an alkyline quote unquote diet that ultimately leads to your own deterioration. But not as often do I share how I break my fast. I feel how you break your fast is just as important, if not more than the fast itself. Why is a fast important? Can you explain that? It's as if I'm being reborn into this world.  The buildup with the foods that they eat, they start with breast milk. And then from there it may be fruit puree. Then they build up. So as a raw vegan, you conveniently skip the part of drinking milk and you go straight to the fruit puree. I have a son, he's seven months old. He's breastfeeding and he absolutely hates fruits. I tried giving him some banana at first it worked, but now he's eating only meat. He absolutely loves it. Chicken, thighs, steak, tartare and whatnot. Kids love meat. Solid foods. We do that so babies can avoid constipation, bloating. It can be very painful for them to get that waist out. Yes. And now tell me what constipates you. Not the fiber. Same ideology when I complete a fast. I mean. You breastfeed after the fast. It could be very detrimental to you. It could even be possible to lose your life if you go on a long extended fast and go straight to solid foods. It's as if you gave your digestive system a month's worth of vacation and then you just slap the power work for it to do. Don't do that. Why would you do that in the first place? Honestly, think about it. Why would you get rid of your microbiome? It is absolute self-destruction and it follows veganism. The first step is to cut out all the nourishing animal foods. Next step is to cut out even more plants to go raw vegan. Then the next step is fruitarian. Then fasting, so on and so forth. The origin is veganism. Veganism is the doctrine of the devils. Look it up. The truth of the matter is after the fast, you're still fasting. With that being said, I wanted to share my process in a week upon breaking a long extended fast. For myself, days one through three, I focus primarily on smoothies and fruit juices with a high-fiber content. I made a berry smoothie, which consists of strawberries, blackberries, wild blueberries, and a base of pear and ginger juice. So essentially, you just have sugar and vitamin C. How will you nourish your body with this? You won't. This is why you're terribly skinny. Anybody can see that. Wow. Super fire. If you haven't tried it, you have to. To make my own pear juice, I use the Kuving juicer. It does a great job that extracting the juice and excluding the pulp. I'll have an affiliate link in the description box if you are interested. All the plants are man-made. Those strawberries, those blueberries, everything that you're eating there is manufactured. Most of them are seedless. They are seedless sterile clones. So you take that fruit, you put it in a blender, you put it in a juicer, and you extract the sugar. Why? I'm in the Kuving's juicer. If I'm able to splurge, I got a little bit of cash flow on the hunt for some sour-soap, mate, a nice sour-soap juice. This isn't milk. I'm thinking, oh, that explains why. Is this sour-soap? What? Tamar juice is also in a lineup for days one through three. What's great about all these juices is that it has a nice amount of fiber and it's like a wake-up call for your digestive.  You don't know what you're talking about. You just extracted all the fiber. Those juices have almost no fiber. If you really wanted the fiber, you would eat the whole fruit. What's the point, man? The system is saying it's about that time to get back to work. Days four through six, I'm in my raw foods-only mindset, but the focus for me is fruits and vegetables with a hot water content. Hot water content foods are easier to digest and still providing the proper hydration that your body may have been used to while fasting. A focus on the berries, those you can typically find all year-round. Canola. As said already, man, the black people have been doped by Dr. Sebi but by other movements as well. You can see the product here. Those people really believe that the white men tricked them into eating meat. Men really look into your ancestors, look into healthy Africans. What do they eat? They eat raw meat, they drink blood. You're malnourishing yourself with modified Western fruit. Do you get this? I find a great option. Take it from me. I've lost nearly 20 pounds of fasting. Avocado's gonna help put back on some of that weight. This is the definition of a mental illness. You lost 20 pounds because you fasted. Now you wanna gain those pounds back. Why? Why do you play this back and forth your game? Why? Avocado won't put on anything because avocado has no protein. It is impossible to build any muscle with avocado. So what will you put on? It's gonna be healthy weight, you know? It's gonna look mean. Ba, ba, once you start working out, it's gonna look good. The nutrients and fat also. Yeah, it's looking real good. Ba, ba, once you start working out, it's gonna look good. The nutrients and fat also is a great support for the brain. I see.  However, in avocado, you have plant oils and you have no fat soluble vitamins in that avocado. Do you think you're gonna find vitamin A, vitamin D3? Keep looking. For foods that are in season and grown locally, but here in Pittsburgh around October, November, you know, you get into those colder months. It's more difficult to do. Day six, I'm gonna focus on the leafy greens. By this time, my digestive system should be more than ready to break down tougher foods. Watercress, mustard greens, romaine lettuce. So you do understand that those foods are tougher to digest. Why don't you try raw meat and see how that digests? You know, the dev, different varieties, green leaf, red leaf, lettuce, the cucumbers, the zucchini. You can eat them individually, but what I like to do is make a fire salad and of course I got the MC. Fire for your butthole. Check that out if you haven't because it's amazing. At least I think so. Day seven, I go to go back to cook foods if I so please. And when I do lean towards cook foods, I focus on smaller grains. Farnio, really great. My favorite grain. You know, my family doesn't like it as much as I do, but do you understand that grains are absolute slave food? Look into it. Look who really ate the grains. Do you think kings and conquerors, emperors were eating grains? Look into it. For me, quinoa, it's still a great option. Teff is probably my second favorite grain. All of these grains are very tiny, but they have a lot of nutrients, a lot of mineral ratio within them. I also introduce nuts and seeds as well. Hemp seeds, walnuts, Brazil nuts. It's very important that when you do. Man, if you're really looking for nutrients, why wouldn't you eat liver? Tell me. Work with nuts, grains. You're already juicing, so you want to get rid of the fiber. Liver has no fiber. You want to have more nutrients. Liver has the most nutrients on the planet. Why not eat it? Beans, that you add them to soak in water for some time. You know, me personally, I soak them anywhere from four hours or more, depending on what grain it is. It's great to do so not only for digestion, but studies say that it also helps to release its nutrients that it has for you to be able to absorb it. Yeah, it releases the nutrients. It releases anti-nutrients. It releases nutrients. It gets rid of everything that is in it. Do you understand that? It has even less nutritional content. Properly. And it's back to schedule programming. You see, when I first started fasting, I didn't think much about how to break it. So there were times where I didn't break it properly. You know, after completing like a seven day, 10 day, 30 day fast, I would go straight to grains, cooked foods. It could be very painful if you're doing a number two. I'm talking on the floor, holding your stomach. Those are what lessons learned. How you break your fast is very important. So make sure you put that in your outline as well. Yeah. It's a huge part of your outline for successful fasting. So that's all we have for today's video. All right. All right. And this is it for today's video. Let me elaborate quickly. I was a vegan myself for four years. I was a raw vegan as well. And I did the fasting too. So I'm not mocking you here. I come from a place of experience myself. Ultimately, I wrecked my health. And this is why I run this channel to help people avoid the same mistakes, to not go down the same path of destroying their own body. And in the end, being left with no purpose and no physical health. This is where I see you headed.  You're actualizing yourself and you figured out this matrix, you know how to navigate. But in reality, you're completely misled. Even if you wouldn't believe in God and you would simply believe in evolution, then at least you might be able to figure out what we are supposed to eat if you look into the nutritional digestive track of a human being that is. I'm sure that you know that the body and mind are connected. When you're malnourishing your body, when you're weakening your body, you suffer spiritually as well. And this is what we see here. The physical degradation has led to spiritual delusion. You are your own God. You call yourself, be thyself. This is obviously a biblical reference. But look into the Bible and see what the real sin is. What is the first commandment? You shouldn't have any gods before me. This is the greatest sin of them all, to play God. But the beauty is God will let you do it. Now you are your own God. You have your destiny in your hands. Good luck. All right, guys, in this sit, if you liked the video, leave it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. If you want to support this channel, all the links are in the description box. Thank you so much for your support. And as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.


Welcome back to the breakfast is time for of the press. We take you through the pages of a national dailies and as usual on Thursdays We have Ezekiel. Yeah, I took good morning. Ezekiel. Yeah, I took and thank you for joining us Pleasure as well. Okay, so let's start off with the daily Trust I beg your pardon daily independent newspaper this morning Let's find out what's making it. What big stories we have on the daily independent Now on the daily independent newspaper the banner caption reads the federal government to tow Legas Ibadon abuja Kanu roads and second Niger bridge That's about caption on the daily independent Hashtag and says protests federal executive council Raises please salary by 20% Okay's new federal civil service framework It's underneath the boat caption for That particular one APC has taken Niger 20 years backward says River states governor. Yes, I'm wiki. That's what you have Justice orderly's house invasion federal government arrange 15 suspects Bandits kill Kaduna lawmaker very sad inflation rate drops to 15.40% in November Senate approves Buhari's fresh 5.8 billion dollars loan requests and that's also Not interesting caption But for Buhari terrorists would have declared Islamic State Ministers quoted says president living and daring legacy of security and social cohesion That's also on the net not entirely below the paper this morning and you also have we are aware Bandit's tax villagers Niger government or government state government is quoted To say that and I met once of impending poor Visibility this is some of the headlines on the daily independent newspaper this morning Away from the daily independent our next part of call is the leadership newspaper The banner headline for this morning a bandit's collect levis in Niger state government confirms with some writers there Says a farmer spade terrorists to harvest bandits kill Kaduna assembly member and Surgency terrorism won't disappear overnight. That's attributed to the federal government insists a government is working hard to tackle Antiquity About that one just below the must head 2021 how CBN disbursed two trillion nine two six zones That's just below the must head of the leadership newspaper All right on the left strip there Federal government to tall legas a bad non-canal abouja roads Lassa fever kills two medical consultants in Nassarawa Jacob Zuma back to jail for corruption charges only 6000 out of 30,000 primary healthcare centers are functional according to reps election costs 400 billion narrow census fund delay passage of the 2022 budget North Central reject a PC chairmanship position eyes Presidency those are all of the stories you can find on the leadership newspaper. There's first day money All right, let's move away from the leadership newspaper and check out the punch now the board caption hashtag North is bleeding protests Federal government on the attack as DSS, please disperse arrest Demonstrators as a boat caption you find underneath that boat caption. You also have several riders The first says protest organizers arrested in Sokoto Kaduna Kanu Amnesty International is quoted and UN says 2.9 million people displaced in North states petition signed by 28,000 No president has funded security agencies like Buhari says lie Mohammed That's the minister of information cultural. You also have case rise 107 inbound passengers test positive for COVID-19 in one week You that's according to the minister of health You find that also and federal government debt servicing gobs 2.49 trillion narrow in nine months according to the Department of debt management National Assembly members fear and for DSS over you tight kidnapped warning okay You also have another caption here Assumments Saturday and decides on planned strike over of a field agreement and Let's see if we can take one or two just before we move away from The pouch newspaper this morning heavy security is federal government Arranged 15 suspect over orderly's home raid might just be dominating all of the papers this morning and reps or the probe of Navies eight 195.3 million dollars equipments contract to foreign firm Assembly laments has bandit killed lawmakers or lawmaker on Kaduna Highway and Woman jailed seven years for stealing and selling baby for 300,000 Accomplice remanded now. This is some of the headlines on the punch newspaper and finally I will move on next to the nation The main headline for this morning Presidency knocks or bus on your orders over attacks on Buhari critics over heat and polity says minister One trillion narrow CBN a FC NSIA fund for Lagos Ibadon Road and Others above the must hand of the nation newspaper 15 suspect a rain of a siege to orderly's home 98 million dollars Islamic Bank loan for education in Oshun eight others Gunmen impose ransom on farmers harvesting crops Lagos begins prosecution of COVID-19 rose the photos answers protests requests police salary goes up by 30% Those are the stories you can find on the nation newspaper this morning All right, let's have a Zika. Yeah, I took join the conversation this morning. Thank you for joining us. We do appreciate your time Zika There's always thanks for having me ever my pleasure Okay, so let's go straight to the crux of the matter now. Let's start off with Start off with the daily independent newspaper federal government to tow Lagos Ibadon Abuja Kano roads and second Niger bridge Yeah, I Think that this government should get Away, I don't want to say get out as fast as possible So that we can start to have proper governance This government needs to leave as soon as possible and Nigerians need to wake up so that They can be properly informed on management of expectation a Reasonable father will tell the family Exactly what his income is Relative to the priorities of the family Then the child will see reason why he or she can only eat egg once a week and Not every day All it needs is for the father to be trustworthy The father to make food disclosure and the children are not unreasonable. I don't know what to do Nigeria is taking on what they honestly sincerely can't afford and They are giving Nigerians the impression that we don't have a problem as a result Expectations are this high and they cannot manage the expectation as a result. We're just in a state of confusion There's this paradigm that makes it difficult for us to understand if we are rich or if we are poor later On one hand, we say you don't have money to pay minimum wage and things like that On the other hand the flamboyance of the civil servant is actually not sitting Not civil servants, particularly our brothers a public servant It seems my video is frozen. I wonder why this is can you hear me? Okay, good, good, you know is the public servant is not sitting Let me relate it to the pole to the tones If Nigerians know that we need good words They know that the government can't afford to maintain the roads They know that if this road have a PPP sort of arrangement That the road will be in good shape at all times All it needs is for us to put up a little bit of a payment a toll here and there Nigerians will very very very I won't say nicely, but they will understand and take it But when you go into tolling the roads and we look at the budget We don't see the subhead on income that shows the tolls We look at the management of the tolling and we cannot see the transparency the Nigerians do not accept Then I look forward to a new government We hear the people will be Respected the people will be trusted as the people that are interested with power will be trusted so that when they say we can't afford to have Electricity without a cost-reflective tariff we need to have a cost-reflective tariff so that we will have Investors who are not going to be for that Christmas the businessman But we are going to regulate it such that the emerging is not is not excruciating on the people Nigerians will pay for that power at the cost-reflective tariff Then we now go into fuel we tell them we really can't afford this one 1 trillion or no this humongous amount that they are calling every month So please can we we start to you know we Nigerians need to come to a point when when they are leaving their house the switch of all the lights Many of us have lived abroad and we know that they are sitting in luxury that we can afford Even the heater you know the time to turn it on the time to turn it off All the appliances know when to turn it on turn it off But everything is free in Nigeria in a country that they cannot afford I think it has to do with mentality to governance and the fact that we that call ourselves the helis the time has come when we must really wake up and Inform the people properly I think that's my take on the tolling It is necessary if we need it we need it all we need is a Government that will not will not collect money from the people Pocket the money and we're back to status quo. We need a government that we can trust So maybe they should just cool down we can manage the way we are managing until the last two years because you know So they will now con con session these roads to the occurrence collect money for election This will not have the capacity to perform which is what happened to us with the privatisation of electric electricity And at the end of the day with the back to status quo would have lost our money and gained nothing So maybe they should just leave us the way we are when a government that makes sense in my opinion comes They will be able to take these decisions looking at the best people that can run this infrastructure Concession them and we'll have it better in an infrastructure All right, we slide on to the leadership and newspaper and they have security as the lead story They captioned it this way and meet security concerns bandits collect levels in Niger state and government is confirming What's what's your position? Mr? You see when you have a government that believes more in politics than in governance. That's what you have You have a problem in South is the solution to the problem in South is can come You know, there's one of the people that say that the solution will not come overnight. What a lie from the pit of hell I am telling you on good authority and on my honor that Problem in South is can be solved within one month Within one month and I say this with every sense of responsibility It's very easy to do But do they have the political will so that the soldiers are removed from the southeast You spread the soldier you you kind of, you know, it's like you you deliberately plant things in every part of the state You spread the soldiers in and in a country like the federal republic of Nigeria A rioted army Can see certain territories and you tell me that the problem cannot go overnight. It's a lie It's an absolute lie It's because you know, when you see the same when you see a guy dancing He should look well that there's something playing the drums for that for that for that dancer, you know What am I trying to say? Have we sat down to to profile what is emboldening this This bandit Have we really sat down all we hear? Oh, there are moles in the in the military We've been infiltrated that sounds so pedestrian. They sound so so illogical. They sound so uninteresting You're telling me that at the Nigerian army does not have the intelligence They will always be, you know, espionage will always be moles But not to the extent where you nationally accept that we have a problem It's like we're helpless who's gonna help us I the day that we want banditry to stop in Nigeria within ascending limits It will not take a long time. I believe that clearly because all we need is Someone who comes in and these guys know that their time is up Once they know that your time is up. They will leave They will leave it happens You go to an ascending state where it's like the the the the the band is not bandits. The robbers Are taking hold of that state And all he takes is one commissioner of police That is brought to that state and all of a sudden guys say, oh boy, this is gonna hurt. So this man will take nonsense We better relocate they relocate So all we need is is is is a security chief With with with the principal who is the head of state always is a mr. President the commander in chief Calling them and giving them a matching order and saying a private meeting that mr. President has with the service chiefs And it gives them a mandate and say guys look between now and the next six months This is my target. Can you take it? Can you deliver? Can you not? What do you want? What don't you want? If not so Nicely give me your your resignation later I want this thing done enough is enough. I don't want it anymore Six months or you give me your resignation letter and let me see if this will not work What do you need? Realistically I've been in a soldier being a general of commanded things. I know how things work. What are the problems? That that meaning that meeting that should not last more than one hour Where you like they know what they are coming for they they have a brief brief and they are coming and just talk to me It's so precise. It's so on point within months You start to see a complete deep in fact right from the intel those those those those that are infiltrated them We'll go back to the field and say what will I sell that don't change mine though This is not the walk again. No before they come and snuck us out. We better just leave Don't tell me that this insecurity will not leave overnight. I think that's the worst thing you can tell Nigerians and from a government It's an apology Okay Let's also go back to the daily independent newspaper this morning If you look at there's a pictorial representation of the protests that took place In a bouja where you have the banner you could see the caption Northern Nigeria is bleeding. Buhari is sleeping. Hashtag north is bleeding Now underneath you also have but for Buhari terrorists would have declared islamic states. That's according to the minister You know for information right there What are your thoughts on this one? My biggest problem is actually the honest mindset of the minister of information I'll sat down on several occasions and try to like leave my you know My prejudices if I may use that expression and really like just try to imagine What on the mind of this man If he sincerely means the things he says And how well he sleeps at night I just want to know he is honest with himself the minister of information Seems to think that he is Maybe the press secretary Or the personnel media person of mr. President or that he took the oath of allegiance To be mr. President's private staff Or to defend the government In my opinion That is the worst position that a minister of information can take Because at the end of the day you alienate the people And you are called minister of information because we are expected to inform the people To the end that A a a rapprochement a rapport is created between the people and the government I would like mr. Minister to do me a little favor Get an independent person To give you an independent assessment of the mindset of the people towards him and then the government And I've said this thing before on this program and I repeated one of my friends He said that his father gave him Not that he would never forget he says May the man who is always trusted Never lie against you May the man who is always trusted Never lie against you And I want to flip it and tell the government May the man who is never trusted Never be your spokesperson Okay, is it uh, is it coming I took just before you know We coasted down because we're out of time. I'd like you to I totally understand where you're coming from Uh, you know the person of uh, the minister for information line mohammed No, I I understand but let's look at you know, what he has actually said I mean that statement saying that but not for the president, you know Probably there should have been a sub declaration of Islamic state How can you make such a statement in Nigeria? But for the president doing what But for the president doing what Do you know the hurting families? Do you know the pains that people are going through? What is it? What what is the honest thought of an average Nigerian toward mr. President leading from the front? And you come to tell me that but for the president Nigeria would have been an Islamic state by now Let him wait all he needs is to give us Six months into the new administration and then let him come and repeat how Nigeria would have become an Islamic state I think that if we had a common commander in chief that was leading from the front We would not be going through these pains that we are going through I think what this man ought to do is to apologize to Nigerians on a daily basis for the pains that you are going through Apologize to Nigerians on a daily basis Then nothing else in particular who are being killed like chicken who are being displaced like they're not humans This is what this man should be doing I'm telling you don't tell us oh, if not that for the man doing working so hard We would have been an Islamic state by now Absolutely, my opinion. All of that doesn't hold any water. All right. We must say a very big thank you to you We have been joined by Ezekiel Nyairdok and we Have indeed been looking at them the front pages of the daily server. Thank you so much mr. Nyairdok Thanks for having me You're welcome. God bless you too. In a moment today in history December 16 1969 MPs voted to abolish death penalty. Let's see that


I think we'll start. Welcome, everyone, very much to this session that's part of the British Art and Natural Forces, the State of the Field Research Programme, that here at the PMC we've been running right through this autumn and into the winter. My name is Mark Hallett. I'm the Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre. I'm really pleased to be chairing and hosting this Zoom webinar. As you know, it's called Curating the Siege, and it's with a subtitle that's really interesting, one of Oceanic Exhibition Making at a Time of Ecological Crisis. I'll just say a word or two about the programme that this particular session is part of. This year, we at the PMC are celebrating our 50th anniversary, and we're an institution dedicated to the study of Buddhist art and architecture. We've been doing that for, as I said, 50 years now. But this year, of course, it's been a year in which artistic practice and the practice of art history itself have met with the unprecedented force of a global pandemic. And so this really made us and forced us to think afresh about our programme for this autumn. And this multi-part programme does indeed focus on the encounter between artistic and historical practice on the one hand and the force of the natural world. And it places such encounters in both contemporary and historical perspectives. If you've not had a chance already to engage with the events that have taken place, and there have been a number of them now, as part of this programme, please visit our website. We have recordings of the events that have taken place already, and Pat was really fascinating with talks and discussions. But this is a special event today, because it not only offers us a chance for us to engage with a really interesting panel discussion, but it also marks the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies on the topic of creating the sea of oceanic exhibition making at a time of ecological crisis. And as has been said in the introduction to this talk on our website, the past decade has witnessed a proliferation of ocean themed exhibitions. And these exhibitions have developed from oceanic and theme to exploring oceanic curatorial methods in themselves. And so on the occasion of this special publication of Journal of Curatorial Studies, this panel will offer perspectives on recent recent examples of and future directions for what we might call the exhibition re oceanic, which is a lovely phrase. We've got some wonderful speakers for you. And this is how the format of the event will take place. We've got an hour and a half. And we'll be hearing. We've got plenty of time for discussion, but I'll just introduce very quickly, the fact that we've got four speakers, and then we'll have a chance for discussion at the end of the session. But before I introduce the speakers individually, I just wanted to go through the housekeeping that's now of course part of such zoom events. So all of you will be automatically muted when you join the webinar and can only communicate verbally if the host unmute you. We've got three talks and we've got three talks, one of which is a joint talk will last 15 minutes. We've scheduled plenty of time for discussion after the three talks, when we'll invite you to ask questions. So please use the Q&A box to ask or write your questions, and then we can pass those on to the, to the speakers. You can also make use of the virtual raise hand button. If you have a question or a comment that you'd like to make verbally, rather than in written form. Please use the Q&A box to make comments or to let us know if you're experiencing technical difficulties. The session will be recorded, but no photographs should be taken, please. And of course it goes without saying that any offensive behavior will not be tolerated, and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. So that's really the housekeeping that I wanted to mention to you. Now we can focus down on the papers and the panel itself. And what we're going to do, we decided to do is to run them one after the other, and then open up the floor as it were to questions afterwards. Our first talk will be by Sarah Wade, who's a lecturer in museum studies at the University of East Anglia, and Pandora Siparek, who's a research associate at Loughborough University. And the next talk will be entitled curating the oceanic exhibition making at a time of ecological crisis. So they very much focus on this particular topic. And then following Sarah and Pandora's paper, we'll have a paper from Stephanie Hessler, who's the director of the Kunstholz Tram time with a wonderful, another wonderful title, Tidalectic curating. I think all of us are very excited by that thought of what that precisely the term and its possibilities. And then finally, Miranda Lowe, who's the principal curator of the Natural History Museum, will be giving her talk, which is called Through the Curatorial Looking Glass. So I think I'll begin right away. We haven't got much time in terms of introduction, so I'll be very, very brief, but that gives us more time to listen to the speaker. So can I turn over now to Sarah and to Pandora. Thanks, Mark. Thanks so much for joining us for the launch of our special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies on Curating the Sea, guest edited by myself and Pandora. And thanks to you for the Paul Mellon Centre for hosting us, especially Mark, Anna, Ella and Danny for hosting us today and for their careful planning of this event. We're really pleased to be included in this rich and important program. For our presentation today, we're going to give you a bit of the background to the project and introduce some of the conclusions we drew from developing the special issue. And we'll also talk about the shifting concerns and future directions of the oceanic Anthropocene in exhibition making. And I should just say that we're really grateful to Stephanie and Miranda for joining us today. We have two collaborators on this project. Stephanie has an article in the special issue and Miranda worked with us with another curator at the Natural History Museum Richard Saban on an in conversation piece that was published in Science Museum Group Journal last year. And so we hope that by including Stephanie and Miranda in the discussions today, that we'll be able to explore curatorial practice from different institutional perspectives, and really consider the crossovers of art and science that the project made apparent are so integral to a curating sea. Our project started in 2017 in recognition of the wave of ocean themed exhibitions that had emerged in international and interdisciplinary contexts. This was the year that the Natural History Museum in London replaced their famous and much loved central Hall specimen Dippy the Diplodocus with Hope the Blue Whale, signalling a new paradigm of scientific display that placed an anthropogenic extinction narrative centre stage in a world renowned museum. This is from this image that hope has already become an iconic reference point for this subject with extinction rebellion enacting a dying beneath specimen in 2019. Ocean ecology was figuring in exhibitions of contemporary art at this time as well. The same year that hope was installed, the exhibition offshore artists explore the sea opened in the port city of Hull, as it celebrated its turn as cultural culture. The show presented historical and contemporary art alongside oceanic visual and material culture in the dual sites of Farron's art gallery and Hull Maritime Museum, an interdisciplinary method that was furthered through the curatorial collective invisible dust commissions of artworks produced in collaboration with scientists. For example, for Kajam Olga's coral love story, getting acquainted, the artist worked with the company Electronudes and in consultation with marine scientists to create a wearable which scans the data produced by the great barrier reef marine stations and translates the experiences of coral under threat from climate change into sensations palpable to a dancer's body. The historical and transdisciplinary approach to curating the sea and offshore was precedented by aquatopia, the imaginary of the ocean deep, which traveled between Nottingham contemporary and Tates and eyes across 2013 2014. This large group show brought together a diverse assemblage of objects, juxtaposing scientific models and illustrations, Scrimshaw, Japanese woodcut prints, historical maritime paintings and contemporary art to explore the wonder of the sea in natural and cultural history in an exhibition that traverse disciplines, eras and geographies. Numerous exhibitions since have explored more thematically specific and ecologically explicit narratives of the sea. In 2018, we organized the symposium curating the sea ecological vulnerability and the oceans in contemporary exhibitions to explore this turn to the sea in recent exhibition making. We were driven by the conviction that curatorial practice could offer a unique perspective on the current ecological state of the oceans and that visual and material culture could make an important contribution to the blue humanities. It was already clear to us that interdisciplinarity and transhistorical approaches to exhibition making were key aspects of curating the sea, but we wanted to consider in more depth exactly why. The special issue of the Journal of Curatorial Studies developed out of this original symposium, and it contains five essays which offer reflections on different approaches to curating the sea. Selina Jeffrey examines her multi-sided exhibition project at Femeral Coast, which began in 2015 and focuses on the political and ecological sensitivities of the literal zone through localized, collaborative and situated curatorial research that responds to the changing shoreline in the wake of colonization and climate crisis. Following the exhibition Coral something rich and strange which she curated at Manchester Museum in 2013 2014, Marion and Jones considers the recent proliferation of exhibitions about coral, arguing that curatorial methods heightening visitors sense of effect can induce wonder and care towards these marine life forms who have relatively recently emerged as new flagship species to raise awareness about ocean ecology. Stephanie Hesla, who we're going to hear from later, discusses an oceanic mode of curating that she developed from the poet camel breath weights conception of tidalectics, which takes its cue from the natural processes of the sea in a challenge to post enlightenment and ecological conventions. And then Pandora and I offer a museological take on curating the sea. Pandora, his PhD was on the displays at the Natural History Museum at its time of its foundation, returned to examine the new installation of hope, investigating the historical legacy of the museum's central hall and its spectacular specimens towards making a case for an oceanic physiology. And my own essay considers how exhibitions not only focus on ecological issues, but work in ecological ways at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, whose founding premise of housing objects of both art and science was reaffirmed through the creation of a contemporary art program, which I examined through Mark Diane's winter camera installation Oceania mania, which is the front cover image of the special issue, and the shark exhibition program that run at the museum between 2013 and 2015. Alternatively, these essays demonstrate that curating as a spatial and material practice that can mediate between different disciplines, including across the arts and sciences is uniquely placed to bring various oceanic fragments together from different eras and locations in new and unexpected ways, offering generative ways for thinking through the threats facing the oceans and ocean life now and in the future. The territorial approaches discussed in this special issue offer ways to diversify the monolithic Anthropocene Ocean by embracing multiple perspectives and adopting methodologies that deviate from dominant Western models of representation and a piece of technology, providing alternatives to so called rational taxonomies and linear exhibition narratives by using methods that are process based site specific or influx and by placing importance on modes of knowledge which might be embodied or effective. These articles and the case studies they explore show that curating the sea harbours fluid exhibition possibilities that are necessarily transdisciplinary trans historical trans geographical and even trans species, facilitating links across temporalities geographies and life forms in ways that can foster an ethics of care by highlighting interconnections and the shared significance of the ecological importance of the sea. Thank you to Pandora now. Hey, thank you Sarah. Hi everyone. I'm going to give a reflection now on the increasingly sophisticated understandings of ocean ecology within recent exhibitions, including attention to more alien life forms and their symbiotic relationships, sometimes mounting to sort of queering the sea. There is a colonial and critical race theory, and increasingly experimental modes of curatorial activity responding to these issues. So let me just share with you now. Okay, so throughout the project Sarah and I have been aware of the intersections within broader popular culture, as well as within academia. One of these exhibitions coincided with the filming of Blue Planet to which the Natural History Museum curators suggested was on their radar when the new central hall is being planned. If our project launched in light of the so called Blue Planet effect, it wraps up in the age of my octopus teacher. The Blue Planet to was explicit about the impact of climate change and ocean plastics. This recent Netflix film does into human animal relations, significantly focusing on one of the seas more alien creatures. And the philosopher Sophie Lewis tweeted an excellent critique of the erotics of the human octopus encounter and its intrinsic queerness.  Increasingly contemporary art and exhibitions have responded to this call to consider the non human otherness of the sea, and its interspecies encounters and in the special issue both Marionette Jones text on coral, and my own on alternatives to the blue whale and the ecological potential of less charismatic or anthropomorphic species and their symbiosis. In exhibitions, this is at times involved turning to historical artifacts, such as the blast blast glass models of marine invertebrates, which held in museum storage for more than a century have recently resurfaced in exhibitions of both contemporary art such as and natural history alike. And I think Miranda might be speaking more on these. A similar revival has taken place with the films of Jean-Pain Levé and both signal the queer sea creature predecessors in Victorian and surrealist visual culture. More recently in weather report forecasting future in the Nordic pavilion at last year's Venice Biennale. Artists explored interweaving microscopic bacterial botanical and human agencies, as in Ingella Irmins, a great seaweed day. More and more in exhibitions and surrounding discourse is evident that it is impossible to separate the entangled realities of social inequality from ecological breakdown. Also at in Venice last year, the Golden Lion winning Lithuanian pavilion exhibited the privilege behind oceanic devastation with its thoughtful holiday makers on an artificial beach, who came to perform an opera about climate change and ocean pollution. And ironically, before the Biennale was over, Venice was flooded due in large part to climate change. And on the flip side, the 2018 exhibition Oceania at the Royal Academy paid little attention to the effects of climate change on Pacific Islanders, instead focusing on colonialism's other legacies with a much criticized tone of apologism and ignoring the extractive paradigms continued damage to these communities. And this is despite the first work encountered within the exhibition being a contemporary artwork by the Mata Ajo Collective titled Kiko Moana, which envisions the mythological creature Tanifa, if it had to combat poor water quality. The 18 marine scientist Max Libreau's forthcoming book title suggests pollution is colonialism. Erica Balsam's 2018 X blind feeling of oneness between the individual with the universe explored the anthropocene ocean as a multivalent signifier. These included focused on migration, ocean heating, shipping industrialized fishing, and in the odd list groups 2010 film hydrodecapita, the black Atlantis, a mythical underwater land populated by the descendants of pregnant women thrown overboard during the middle Walker's 2019 Commission for Tape Modern's Turbine Hall of Ponds Americanis formed a monument to the African diaspora and its roots in the transatlantic slave trade. Though Morgan Quaintance criticized museums has criticized museums as virtue signaling with such works whilst ignoring the ongoing contemporary realities of systemic racism. Currently the colonial and racial politics underlying natural history collections are similarly being examined within these institutions and this is why we're very happy to have Miranda Lau here today, who is a founding member of the BAME Museum and Heritage Workers Network Museum Detox offers black history tours on the natural history of the Natural History Museum, and in 2018 co-authored an important article in its historical foundations. The collections within these collections are often generatively realized through collaboration with artists such as the Museum for Nature Coons program Art Nature, which included a project by Elizabeth Price responding to the archival history, curated by Birkitt Arons to spoke in our original curating the sea symposium, and also in a panel as part of the natural forces program last week. Meanwhile the dismantling of traditional curatorial methods move towards multi-platform models, mobilizing a response to some of these issues. For example, TBA 21 academies programs in which Stephanie Hessler is with us today played an important role as curator, explore the Anthropocene Ocean through expeditions, fellowships and wide ranging forms of exhibition based on the principle of collaboration between artists, scientists and other thinkers. Recently the collaboration with Institute Coons, headed by Shoes Martinez, offers an online platform featuring podcasts, texts and films on intersections of art and ocean ecology during the pandemic. As the zoonotic coronavirus makes clear both the ramifications of the unsustainable exploitation of wildlife and the need for alternative methods of engagement and expanded curatorial practice moving towards greater accessibility and channels of discourse becomes ever more necessary. Thanks, along with the contributions to the special issue, connect to the sea, not only in steam, but also inform as they echo philosopher Astrid and Amenes' sentiment that water is not only fluid but also ruptures, leaks and sieves. Thank you. So, Mark, your mute. Thank you very much indeed Pandora and Sarah for a really great start to our discussion. I think we'll turn over straight away to Stephanie, who will be talking on tidaletic curating a tiny glimpse of which we had in our first talk. So, over to you, Stephanie. Thank you, Mark. And thank you, Sarah and Pandora for organizing this and I'm really excited to be here with everyone today looking forward also to hearing Miranda speak in a little moment. I'm going to share my screen. All right. The ocean is always outside until it floods your home or exhibition space. The current climate catastrophe does not halt at any boundaries established during the hollow scene and promote and promote it in Western modernity. Temperatures do not stay relatively stable sea levels rise and overflow overflow countless demarcations of land, while other areas perish and drought. Feet get wet, sparing neither Kiribati nor Miami nor Venice. Termal nature cultures as Donna Haraway calls the entangled and inseparable synthesis of nature and culture model any attempts at expelling nature as a supposed outside which can simply be shut out, and its effects ignored. The realization that an outside, which can simply be shut out and it's as a, you know, sorry, realization that an outside does not exist also seeps into the global north attempts at separating humanity from nature are becoming ever more fragile. Those who can afforded segregate themselves as usual, while others literally have to flee for survival. The oceanic Anthropocene or a capital is seen or still is seen is unevenly distributed caused by some parts of humanity, more than others, and affecting some humans and non humans than others. Pointedly the Metis scholar Zoe Todd highlights the necessity to go beyond the current framework of the Anthropocene as it and I quote Todd here, blunts the distinctions between the people nations and collectives who drive the fossil fuel economy and those who do not. An uneven, uncontainable climate crisis obligates curators to rethink ways of working exhibition making in times of ecological disaster. And with the effects of ongoing colonial capitalism palpable on a planetary scale needs to differ differ from previous curatorial modes. And this is increasingly accessed not only by its ability to create a convincing argument to support artists, but to revisit art history but also by the way that it addresses and responds to the structures in which it is embedded. I'm showing you in the background, some slides of exhibitions that I will come to and speak about more in a moment. In the article in the Journal of Curatorial Studies, I write about some examples of exhibitions applying critical attention to the system in which they operate, for instance, security or way in ways of post colonialist documentary to 11 and 2002, as well as several ocean related shows such as call your course streamlines at Deistohal in Hamburg in 2015. I also write about aquatopia and the ocean after nature that were briefly mentioned previously. In recent years, more direct forms of activism have emerged in the art world as a reaction to oppressive political context and pressing social and environmental issues. Climate activists working in that work such as culture declares emergency have stage protested institutions like the British Museum in London on the 8th of February 2020 to hold the organization accountable for its carbon emissions, as well as company sponsorship from British Similarly demands for decolonization by collectives such as the colonized this place are putting increasing pressure on institutions scrutinizing their ethics and fighting for migrant and climate justice. I argue in my article and in the talk today that if tended to diligently the public and discursive space of exhibitions provides a productive forum to respond to this moment and to support these causes. Indeed an oceanic curatorial practice can constitute a useful tool curating in an oceanic way is neither limited to nor defined by exhibitions addressing the oceans, but it is composed of methodologies that are hybrid, transdisciplinary, generative, fluid, uncertain and transformative, working at different temporal and spatial scales and involving various forms of knowledge both human and non human. The ocean provides a model to accommodate change and unpredictability to swear back and forth between and ultimately to transcend numerous disciplines and invoke performativity both in the exhibition making process and in the audience experience. In my article I analyze how exhibitions proceeding from oceanic curating can provide for it to inspire new ways of thinking and feeling. Specifically I suggested tight electives a term and concept coined by the historian and poet Kamau Brathwhite, who sadly passed away earlier this year where I was working on my text can provide precious guidance for an oceanic curatorial project. So some of the images I'm showing you here are of an exhibition title tight electives taking cues from Brathwhite that I curated at TBA 21 Aougarten in Vienna in 2017, which traveled onwards to Le Frinois in France the Museum of Modern Art in Dubrovnik and 1483 former monastery on Lopot and you can see the list of artists on the slide I'm showing you right now. This is a play on words proposing the tides as an alternative to the dialectics that Brathwhite wrote define much of Western thinking. We're socially engaged in interdisciplinary curatorial practices emerged in the 20th century title electric curating as I have developed a concept and methodology in the past years is unique in taking its primary inspiration from a natural system in a performatively engaging with the social and ecological structures of the system in which it operates. Brathwhite introduced tight electives in his poetry not merely by outlining it, but by, but by performing it. He deploys palimpsest unusual syncopations and omitted syllables to invoke the incessant irregular generative movement of the waves. That English the language of the colonizers in this native in this native Barbados is not appropriate for the Caribbean colonial and diasporic experience. He writes and I quote him here, the hurricane does not roar in pentameters. And yet, Brathwhite's writing elicits how the Caribbean context cannot be unthought from colonialism and its trajectory across the Atlantic. The colonizers arriving to the islands and slaves who were abducted and exploited on sugarcane plantations. I would like to read your passage here by Brathwhite. It takes me back and drags me title electric into this tangled urgent meaning to and fro like foam, thoughtless at the bottom as from the bottom of the sea. This means meaning our morning song from color bar along the sea floor, sea floor with pebble sound and conch and wound and sea sound moon. And you can see in the site here also the spellings and the punctuation which I think are particularly important to Brathwhite's writing. In this passage, the movement of water and bodies towards and from the shore is tangled and it cannot be thought apart or separated from the middle passage. Brathwhite evokes a form of being and thinking emerging performatively from his political postcolonial context and I use the word performative in the sense of what the gender studies scholar Eve Kosovsky set recalls a strategy for the production of meaning and being relating to effect. In Brathwhite's writing, the body's water and meaning are intertwined and moved together. When carefully transferred to the curatorial context while acknowledging its specificity and roots within postcolonial Caribbean experience, title electric is particularly productive for approaching climate change, as it dissolves ostensible certainties. In Brathwhite's writing, uncertainty does not equate to a frightening realization, undoing a privileged sense of self as climate change often does for the global north, but to a point of departure. Brathwhite reminds readers that hybridization is a ubiquitous process promoted by the oceans and that maritime spaces connect rather than divide. Title Electrics if breathed into curatorial work helps sustain fluidity as well as encounters between the known and the unknown. The unknown then is not merely integrated into an established framework, but along with the known creates a third space or a hybrid collective and mutual becoming that things and makes together with other species and with their surroundings and I'm inspired by her away in this in this thinking of course. Title Electrics allows for seeing things in a more holistic of always partial situated way. Similarly, ecological issues need to be seen in connection with their wider ramifications and reverberations. Pollution turns water toxic and higher temperatures cause algae to bloom, blocking out sunlight and making whole areas of ocean unlivable for fish, and as a consequence affecting the livelihoods of humans. The dangers and care helps the oceans to thrive in ecology as well as in politics, art making and curatorial practice more nuanced understandings of these holistic relations are needed. Such nuance does not need to dampen urgency, but it is necessary in order to connect details to a larger always tentative whole. Life breaks differently and with the different forms each wave affects neighboring waters in a specific way. As breath white points out human and non human histories are shaped by these waves and by their specificity. I'm showing you here the cover of a book that I edited, which was published a couple of years back titled title tactics also. I would like to introduce two examples for title after curatorial methodology, and I'm going on to the next exhibition because I've been showing you or to the images of the next exhibition because I've been showing you the title tactics photographs as I was talking. In the exhibition title tactics in 2017 that I mentioned, I set out to explore a fluid curatorial framework in which not only that each iteration of the traveling exhibition change, but also within each iteration there was variation to the extent that visitors experience different shows on different days. The first version in Vienna, the artist Jana Winderin exhibited her hydrophone recorded sound installation barra. And the installation was only audible during those times of the day when the tide in Trieste the closest coast to the exhibition venue was at the highest and respectively lowest point each day. The installation acted as a way to account for the ever changing tides and to go beyond the rigidity of temporal and spatial scales that are common in exhibition context and also as breadth wide would say, in much of the western world. The curatorial decision necessitated that other works that included sound such as video installations by Eduardo Navarro and Susana winterling, and an immersive scalpel, sculptural installation including sound by a young guy, we turn off to allow listeners to focus on Winderin's audio piece. Similarly, Cecil told us a smell molecules of different coasts in the Caribbean in Costa Rica were distributed in the exhibition during specific times. So the curatorial methodology of the exhibition was tight elected because it was not fixed and responded, and it responded to a naturally occurring phenomenon the tide. Whether it was relational and responsive or in the words of Haraway attempting to be responsible and abling shared and mutually affecting responses to bring about new capacities of agency and ethics. My second example of which I'm showing you images here is more direct responding through action to the holistic perspective that breath wide urges us to see. In this year, I curated the ocean part of the exhibition down to earth as part of the Berlin Festspieler performing arts festival at the Gropius power. The show took inspiration from the sociologist Bruno Latour's 2017 publication of the same title down to earth, engaging in that towards words, the earth with its 1000 folds. Another works by Miriam Simone, Simran Gill, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tapasers, the Sultanas and others highlighting different aspects of the ocean from the black Atlantic to contemporary migration and submarine cables. Concretely, the exhibition worked without any use of electricity. No air conditioning, no artificial light only daylight, no video works. The photo for the install was reduced as much as possible and mostly occurred only by train performance played only unplugged and many artists reconceived their pieces for the show to adjust them to the circumstances and the consequential ecological requirements. It's public, it's carbon emissions in the accompanying guidebook. And I won't go into further detail here, but I'd be very happy to discuss more in the Q&A. And I also would like to say that in the future I believe that models such as this remain to be further tested and researched to conclude. As the Anthropocene and Moore's apparent certainties, Western epistemologies based on a separation of knowing and the known are becoming increasingly untenable. The oceans flood not only homes in exhibition spaces but also dissolve divides between inside and outside calling for curatorial responses to address this. Such responses are urgently needed, not least because the current moment invokes anxiety and requires new imaginaries. Tidalectics envisions responsible forms of curating that reimagine models of exhibition making originating from the hollow scene. Tidalectic curating goes beyond the art field to intersect with other disciplines, be it sociology or marine biology. It takes its cue from natural processes such as the ebb and flow of the tides. It remembers as much as it dissolves incomplete repositories of knowledge, which was thought by a street or name and as those who has mentioned earlier as well. Tidalectic curating enables processes without knowing where they might lead. It makes room for non-western practices of knowing to change paradigms and structures. It listens to expertise from ocean users and ocean dwellers both human and non-human and their embodied experiences. And I really liked the term ocean users, which is coined by Leah Gibson, Andrew Warren. Tidalectic curating swims with non-humans, both organic and inorganic, and it considers itself as part of the echo tone from which it arises. Tidalectic curating drips and splashes, dives and emerges. It comes with wet feet and leaves with wet hair. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Stephanie. I'm sure there'll be people wanting to ask questions in response to that talk too. So finally we can now turn over to Miranda Lowe, Principal Curator at the National History Museum. So Miranda, over to you. Thank you. Humans can at any point in time. I'm just hoping, can you all see this? Humans at any point in time can be both connected and disconnected from and by the sea. As a natural history curator, humans can at any point in time be both connected and disconnected from and by the sea. As a natural history curator and scientist, I often create curate the sea every day from looking down a microscope to discover the undiscovered finer details. I think Miranda, you might just need to share the screen again. Yeah. That's great. Can you all see this meeting now? That's great. Sorry everyone, apologies. Humans can at any point in time be both connected and disconnected from and by, from and by the sea. As a natural history curator and scientist, I curate the sea every day. I curate the sea every day from looking down a microscope to discover the undiscovered finer details of an animal to caring for the beautiful Blashka glass models. They are such as such forming representations of creatures of the sea. Glasses both the strength and the fragility in my world. Strong borosilicate glass, jars, how the fragile jellyfish poised on the wooden shelf tucked inside metal cabinetry within the natural history museum in London. They were sculptured by the glass artists father and son team lead Leopold and Rudolph Blashka, as you can see here. We're part of popular museum exhibits worldwide in the mid to late 1800s, connecting the public to the hidden world of the ocean wonders. They are some of the oldest models within the museum's natural science collections. In correspondence, I know that the Blashkas were in contact with with and new the scientists of the time, such as the famous evolutionary biologist Ernest Heckel or Heckel, some might say, the well known author of art formed in nature, who lent them books from his library. Often they use major scientific works as a basis for their model. For example, Philip Henry Goss is acting and Britannica published in 1960. Although spirit collections cannot reliably preserve some features. We know that they also made observations from real life specimens that they purchased, such as animals, the sea and enemies from a Mr Smith in Wayman. Rudolph also visited the North, the Northern Italy in 1879, and they had a saltwater aquarium in their studio in Dresden. Earlier in 1853 Leopold was able to observe and sketch jellyfishes when he was marooned in the Azores, and this presumably stimulated his interest in natural history. The models themselves continue to represent the life like marine invertebrate forms, better than spirit collections of the same taxa, and can be used to teach, for example, the anatomical differences between an octopus, a squid, or the biology of a radio laryon and the jellyfish as we see representation here in the screen. Most recently, American marine biologists have been searching the oceans for the same species of the live animals from the Blaschke model species to see if these animals still exist in the world's oceans today. This kind of comparative scientific work can connect the biodiversity of the ocean in the 1860s to the present day to indicate any environmental changes. This brings the worlds of science and art together. We know that from displayed items that that displayed items encouraged other museums to purchase Blaschke items, for example, a trip to the British Museum in 1865 inspired the director of the National Museum of Scotland to purchase a set of enemies for his own museum. We know that many of the major museums in Europe and North America had Blaschke items on display, and these could easily have inspired marine scientists of the time. But these are not the only hidden stories I have told over the last decade. In light of Black Lives Matter, in light of the Black Lives Matter movement of the summer of summer 2020, many museums and galleries have moved towards acknowledging colonial histories of their founding collection and the context in which they were acquired. In my 2018 co-authored paper entitled Nature Red in Black and White, Decolonial Approaches to Interpreting Natural History Collections, I examined what it is to have a decolonial approach when working with natural history collections and who is missing, unacknowledged for their contributions to science and was unable to tell their own story. But Charles Darwin, as you can see a young Charles Darwin in this image here, is best known to the world for being a self-taught zoologist, his oceanographic expedition on HMS Beagle, and for his work in the 1859 book on the origin of species. So much is known about John Edmundston, you can see on your right, of John Edmundston, a Guineas man who inspired Darwin to pursue a career in the field of natural history and zoology. He and Charles Darwin arrived in Edinburgh to study medicine, but little did he know he would come across someone who was to have an impact on his life right up until Darwin's autobiography, for which the text was finally published five years after Darwin's death. Edmundston was indeed the man in question, who was to make his mark on the teenage Darwin. Born into slavery in Guyana around 1790, John was owned by Charles Edmundston, who had a woodcutting establishment in Warrows Place, Marie B Creek in British Guyana. John was later freed by his owner, who had arrived back in Scotland with John moving to Glasgow, then Edinburgh in 1817. John had learned taxidermy from his owner, from his owner's Charles Edmundston son-in-law Charles Waterton, a naturalist and traveller who from 1816 to 1824 explored the tropical forests of both South and North America and the West Indie. Although Waterton was not initially very complimentary of John's skills as a taxidermist, John went on to successfully earn a living teaching students at the University of Edinburgh on how to do taxidermy, the art of stuffing dead birds. Upon Darwin's arrival in Edinburgh, he lodged with his brother on John, who was to become Darwin's teacher of taxidermy, lived nearby. Arriving at the university to study medicine, Darwin had a dislike for lectures and dissections, plus lacked confidence in known drawing ability. However, he had attended the lectures of Dr Duncan, who John was once a servant to. This is how Darwin most likely became aware of him, and this relationship with John, between Darwin and John, resulted in over 40 hours worth of lessons in taxidermy every day over two months. In fact, in January 1826, Darwin wrote to his sister Susan, where he mentioned that he was having taxidermy lessons cheaper for cost, a lesson cost him one guinea for an hour. What more fitting tribute to acknowledge the skilled taxidermist, John Edmundston, is through the words of John Agard, a poet and children's writer of Guyanese heritage living in Britain. In the 2012 poem, The Ascent of John Edmundston, the poem reminds us that Charles Darwin was taught by a black man who began his life as a slave on a Guyanese plantation and who most importantly would have encouraged his student, Darwin, to continue his scientific studies on hearing about the plants and animals of South America in the hope that one day Darwin would himself would visit and gather knowledge and understanding of its natural history and its people. In 1831, at the age of 22, Darwin did indeed board the ship HMS Beagle, undertaking a historic voyage of scientific study and natural history. John became one of the very early mentors to Darwin, and with such knowledge transfer, it has, it helped, it has been helped to inform the western scientific mainstream thinking, while largely remaining an unrecognised story until now. In Darwin's own autobiography, he calls John a very pleasant and intelligent man. By telling this story, it is giving John a voice that makes sure his narrative is not erased from history, honouring him with the recognition and acknowledgement for his contributions to science. John Edmundston, the man who taught Darwin taxidermy. As you can see, I work within the intersections of art, culture and science. I'm one of the co-founders of the network called Museum Detox. I've got a picture of some of this here in front of a large coral specimen at the museum. This organisation with protest, activism and interest is a network of members that strive for inclusive cultural rights and cultural democracy. Before I finish, I'd just like to leave you with a few words from the recently published Museums Association Learning and Engagement Manifesto. Access to and participation in culture is a basic human right. Everyone has a right to representation and agency in museums and galleries, and communities should have the power to decide how they engage and contribute to culture to the wider society. The most significant function of museums, galleries, libraries and archives and universities are centres for cultural democracy where children, young people and adults learn through practical experience that we all have cultural rights. Having the opportunity to create and to give to others may be one of our greatest sources of fulfilment. Culture is everywhere and is created by everyone. Thank you for listening. Thanks very much indeed Miranda and thanks for that final discussion too. Right, I think what we're going to do now everyone is that we're going to briefly welcome the editors of the journal Curatorial Studies, Dr Jennifer Fisher and Dr Jim Drobnik, who I think will say a few words about this special issue before we then turn to the discussion that will follow those papers. So if I can, I think we can hopefully find Jim and Jennifer, and if you can unmute yourselves or be unmuted maybe you can speak to the collective Jim and Jennifer if you're there. If it's possible, could Jennifer and Jim please virtually raise their hands. So Jennifer I think you can speak now and we should be able to hear you. If you unmute yourself. Can you hear me now. Yes, we can't see you if you can show yourself to it would be great if you can show your face. How do I show my face. I don't think that's an option I'm afraid. It's not like we're on Zoom. Yeah, well, well hello, hello Pandora hello Sarah it's so lovely to see you this morning it's a very early morning here in Toronto for us. And lovely to see Stephanie and Miranda's presentation and to see you mark. Yeah, just briefly we just wanted to thank you so much for your incredible efforts to create such a beautiful issue. And it's, it's a really important topic of the sea and of the epistemological models that have you've drawn from it and applied so beautifully in your essays. Yeah, I, I, it was, it was a great experience and and I were really pleased and proud with the issue so congratulations to you and without further ado I think we're just going to continue Jim had to step out for a minute. So I think we'll just maybe continue with your questions I don't want to hold you up. Thanks so much Jennifer and yeah I can imagine that you're very very excited by this by this issue just from what we've been hearing it's clearly such a rich area of contemporary curatorial thinking and debate and what I'd like to do is to urge everyone to either put their questions in the Q&A box. If you'd like questions to ask to any of our speakers. So please go ahead and do that if you'd like to write a question. Otherwise if you nominate yourselves to, as it were raise a hand, we'll be able to call upon you to an unmute you and ask your questions verbally. So if you'd like to raise a hand, we should then be able to unmute you and you'll be able to ask a question to any of our speakers. Yes, but I cannot if I can take chairs prerogative here, maybe Stephanie just to get back to you first of all I'd love to ask about the kind of aesthetic aesthetics of the kind of titleactic curations and exhibitions that you've been participating in and shaping yourself about the role of what as an aesthetic experience, the kind of exhibitions you've been creating curating and been looking at how what's the interplay between aesthetics and the titleactic to your eyes. Thank you. That's a great question. I've been quite interested in sensing and sense making through other than only the visual, particularly because of the history of vision also in Western colonialism. So actually in the book that I didn't mention but I'm prospecting ocean it's a book I wrote which was published last year I make a larger argument for other forms of knowing or other forms of of being that are more embodied, coming also from a feminist perspective I'm questioning basically the paradigm of vision which was shaped by invention such as the telescope, the microscope in fact to in a way that the Western subject or scientists would see themselves as outside of the paradigms they were studying so how do we consider ourselves as as immersed in the part of the nature cultures we study. So, in exhibitions in that very often plays out by including other forms of art that are not only visual, such as for example smell that I mentioned very briefly. And I actually to think about something that Miranda was saying to with, you know, how people were looking at blush gun models to go back and see whether certain species to exist and actually, this is what I find particularly interesting how art can be both an aesthetic experience in this, and also give us access to forms of knowing or you know archiving so in the case of sister told us the smells for instance, they allow you to engage on a sensory level. smell is important to me because it connects to the parts in the brain where memory is processed and emotions are activated. But it also allows you to analyze the molecules that sister collects and then to go back and see whether and how the composition of molecules has changed over several years so it is both a visceral experience and an archive that allows you to revisit ecologies in the future. Thank you. I think we have some. We have some people who want to ask their questions verbally. So, Alberta is that I think you can have a chance to ask a question is that right. I don't know whether we have also Alicia Weisberg Roberts is that are you able to ask a question verbally. I didn't ask a question if possible. Well, while they're, while they're, whether there's a moment and I was hoping to ask Stephanie. It's Anna Reid talking by the way, and I was hoping to ask Stephanie I was really interested to hear you talk about and the idea that we need more nuanced understandings when you talked about the way that nuance and something's changed and that there is that's not to negate urgency. And I wondered whether you thought that urgency and the kind of ethos of urgency has actually in some sense gotten the way of of the nuance that's that's required and the kind of strategies that are required for transformation of curatorial processes. Thank you, Anna. No, I think there need to be different layers involved. I think Anna sings writing on different scales, for instance, and how we approach the Anthropocene and can see connections between different elements is particularly productive in this, in the sense I believe that, you know, strategic essentialism in the words of speed work can be incredibly important and powerful. But it depends on where it is applied and I believe that there's not this is not to say that you know political movements are incredibly important and that they need to speak with as much force and power as they possibly can. I think we need to understand the different relations, for example, the intersections of domination that are at play in the ocean and its colonial history and presence right so that which has to do with ecology but also environmental and racial and social justice right. So I think that this is important also for exhibition making and what I am interested in in tide electrics is, how can we get away from making large grand kind of statements or arguments without losing the urgency or without losing the capacity to communicate basically. And I guess a counter model, or maybe a counter model to tide electrics would be Frederick Jameson's cognitive mapping which I always thought was incredibly fascinating, you know, and also early cybernetics because of experiments like the Chilean cybersyn system that tried to model the country's economy and try to predict everything that happens. If you introduce one change in the system like you raise the taxes for example lower than what happens. But you know all of these models are clearly not adequate for explaining entirely complex systems, which of which I also consider social systems to be a part. So how to be fluid and adaptive and I guess tide electric, but without giving up the possibility to make claims especially political very needed claims. I don't know if that's a question that both Sarah and Pandora might also want to respond to and Miranda to just thinking about, again, that the relationship between urgency and nuance in a, in a place like the Natural History Museum or in the different exhibitions at Sarah and Pandora you both know about so well. I kind of go first really because I was just thinking about Miranda's talk last week at the National Science Collections Association conference and talking about how these sort of practices need time. And when you're talking about sort of decolonizing projects, there were some questions that came up then about how you can do it sort of quickly and how you can do it without budget and it's a case of making a start somewhere and having to have time to think things through properly I think is what you're alluding to Miranda and your answers. And so I don't know if you agree that there's a kind of, you know, things need time to happen. I agree with you Sarah and yes that that was the point that I was making because in terms of curators within museums where often, you know, again, time and time is against us and the other roles that we have in documenting are not the artifacts and specimens that we have, but for any, while I feel personally for any kind of decolonial curatorial practice to be meaningful and to embed itself properly as a process within the exhibition process. And, you know, other types of curatorial practice, it will take time and we do need to allow ourselves time to do that work and not to, as a curator myself not to do it in isolation, it's like working with artists and, and many other people to give a holistic perspective on that practice. So the question that I'd like that I'd like to put to the panelists from Faith Weddle is one of the who's written in the Q&A box. And the question is, do the panelists find a contemporary methods of display perhaps more compelling in creating a sense of compassion and care in the audience and say older modes like the cabinet curiosity. I feel like I should maybe answer this since my essay and the special issue is about that very topic. So I think it's really interesting to think through the cabinet of curiosities which as you recognize, and it is a historical mode of display but also one that has seen a resurgence in contemporary art and curatorial practice, which is sometimes not always deployed in the most critical way that perhaps it should be given in the colonial histories it's tied to and the exploitation that's involved in some of the collecting practices that inform that. But I think what I argue in my essay is for returning to this kind of mode of display, you open the possibility for creating new narratives and developing different sorts of knowledge by these non linear non hierarchical display models to place the kinds of owners if you like on the museum visitor or the viewer of the artwork to make their own relationships and have this kind of relational encounter with what it is unfolding in front of them. And so I think I sort of lost the track of your actual question there but you sort of make a differentiation between historical and contemporary modes of display that I think are actually quite entangled in really interesting and complicated ways. So yeah, I don't know whether anyone else wants to come in on that point. I just want to add something to that, which I mean from my perspective, and I think this comes through in your article Sarah. There's also varying levels of historical awareness that different exhibitions and museums mobilized these more historical modes of display. So I think that the main example you're looking at with them, Mark Dion's oceanomanias obviously very self self reflective of the museum's own collection and history, whereas I think in other instances. There's a number of natural history museums, for example, that is not necessarily looking at the historical problematics that underlie those histories. Connect to something I was thinking about Miranda's talk which is really interesting was this idea about John, John Edmondston's influence on Darwin's thought. I think Miranda said influence on the sort of accepted hegemonic Western epistemology. You know, showing how much that you know so called Western epistemology is not only going against these alternative knowledge systems but also often appropriating so that it's it becomes a very sort of entangled non linear epistemological epistemological stoop that's coming through in these institutions and their histories. There's a question that I have that's again in the Q&A box and again for anyone watching and listening and thinking your questions please submit your questions into the Q&A box and I can pass them on to the panelist. And this is from Natalie Kiefer and it's from all the panelists. And the question is this the important collaboration of art and science was mentioned several times in the talks, scientific exploration of the ocean has however often led to the exploitation of the ocean. How can further exploration not lead to more exploitation. So what are the symptoms of this within the curatorial practices you discussed in that part of. I'll just say a bit about this. It can lead to less exploitation. So within museums, there is still a lot of material to be discovered, unopened from the time of collection. But it's, it's not seen as, as glamorous as get to get. It is always a lot more exciting and fundable if you're going to explore and find something new than to look at the backlog of collections. Unidentified specimens that potentially new for science I mean there's been papers written on this that it could on average it takes over 100 years or 150 years to discover something new that's actually sitting in an unopened jar in the collection new species to science. So that's one way we can have less exploitation on the world's oceans. For instance, I have part of all of the collections I look after 27,000 jars, lots of jars, unopened for a sense that the time of collection from. Well, well these are not the 1800s but from 1927 to the 1950s. And so I spend a lot of my time and being an advocate for those historical collections to be used to inform, you know, conservation policy. Currently, and as increasingly, you know, certain parts of the world oceans become, you know, of scientific importance and no take zone so that's how there could be less exploitation to actually look and exploit what we have within the museum. And the other panelists responding to that question Stephanie. Yeah, I think, you know, I've worked quite a bit with artists on commissions where we collaborate with people from other disciplines be that scientists or you know, other disciplines but I think it is a question that we're very aware of when working with artists. And usually the scientists who are willing to collaborate are also very aware of that. So, you know, it's, but I do think that through these cross disciplinary conversations one can find new perspectives and also contribute to communicating issues of urgency. Sarah Pandora did you want to talk about this issue about this relationship between scientific exploration and exploitation. I mean, I guess just the question of exploitation, as we were discussing is not only of the supernatural non human resources but it also affects different ocean living communities or non ocean living communities as well. And, you know, as we all know unequally. And I mean I think this comes down to much larger questions about what I mean I can't speak directly to scientific exploration, but within exhibitions and institutions is it about creating awareness is it about, you know, cause it creating reflection. And I have a few questions off the back of this actually, which is, I think Stephanie mentioned culture declares emergency, which is this initiative, bringing artists, people working in the cultural sector, different institutions together to declare an ecological emergency. And I guess I'm just wondering about this type of activist work. So I'm sort of going in a very different direction now, but I just want to ask about how, how much, maybe Stephanie might be able to speak to this, how much you think this type of action is sort of drawing on some of the the tide electric methods or is it for its theme or is it responding to. I don't know, sorry I've sort of lost my train of thought but I'm just thinking about more more specifically activist realms because we've been looking at exhibitions within institutions but I don't know if you want to speak a bit about about this type of cultural activism. Yeah, I think we see more and more of that. I think it is also not, you know, not everybody's medium or form of communicating I mean as many artists who work beautifully through poetry and through other forms of of work that can be very beneficial and also can feed into direct activism without being that itself necessarily, but I do think that there's more awareness of the art world and our own contribution to these issues and you know that's what I was talking about a bit earlier about thinking about you know whether we think of ourselves as outside of the system that we're analyzing or criticizing or if we're actually a part of it. And so I think that more awareness of our very own, you know, footprint, for instance, or also the way that, you know, as with anything, as soon as you make it visible, it can also be exploited like. It's also very specific and requires consideration regarding each context and situation. But I do think that it's very exciting that it is more accepted and you know becoming more mainstream to consider ecology in institutions and to consider activism as part of the tools of an institution. I have a question from an anonymous attendee here, and this is a very interesting question, almost the mirror image of that engagement activism that you just been talking about Stephanie Pandora is this is the question. How do you navigate interactions with curators or museum audiences who are uninterested or apathetic to issues such as historical exploitation and colonialism, as they relate to museum objects. That's the question that I've been sent in, that we've been sent in. It's interesting to get your responses to that. And can I just refer back to our in conversation piece that we did with Miranda and Richard because I'm just thinking about what you said about the coral exhibition Miranda, and how it ends with the aquarium in a way to kind of lift the mood. What that coral exhibition I don't know if anyone in the audience went to it, but I mean it was a really really beautifully designed exhibition and it was kind of aesthetically really engaging and really wonderful to wander around. So I guess there's that sort of visual level that people can relate to these things with. And I think I mean Randy probably want to speak to this more than me but a lot of the corals were sort of, you know, beige, they didn't have any color. And so the exhibition was enlivened by the live corals at the end to sort of lift the mood but also add a more colorful dimension into these kinds of things, which I think is interesting to think about. You know, given that when people engage with things maybe they want to find out more about them and that can maybe introduce people to the ecological issues that are sort of surrounding these displays or whatever. I agree with what you say Sarah that that was a talking point continuously throughout the exhibition, when we were selecting the corals to display because every one you know that they're dead animals, you know that's the skeleton that you're seeing essentially. But from another perspective there is beauty in those structures of those pieces of coral but that's why we wanted the, as you mentioned the aquarium at the end because also for people to connect and to make that association, because a dead coral can look completely different. In terms of obviously the colors that are portrayed deep within the ocean on a coral reef to when it dies off and it's bleached to have that connection and the uplift at the end and then there was a video I think on was it the island or Bermuda at the end of what so in terms of hope with the coral reefs and what is happening in those communities that you know surrounded by the ocean and how they live on the ocean and study as well and creating that awareness on those particular islands of those issues to around them. Yeah. Any other responses that question about how you engage with audiences and even curators who don't don't are not sympathetic to your, I guess, or not interested especially in what what might seem a particular perspective. But it's a very good question and I think one of the, one of the most difficult questions, especially in the arts world I feel we're very often considering that, you know, people are mostly, you know, aware of these issues and why they're important. But, but yeah I think it's mainly about insistence and you know doing the work, regardless, because I think the presence is important and for the work to also enter history and history writing for it to not be as easily erased.  But I think the question I don't have the answer for this is how do you get institutions to commit to ongoing action because I think a lot of exhibitions, you know, there've been a number of sort of blockbuster ecological exhibitions it's a new phenomenon. And institutions will deploy the sort of sustainable methods of curation and exhibition design for that exhibition, but, you know, are they going to commit to these measures in an ongoing fashion, or is it sort of lip service to the cause sort of like Morgan Quaintance's criticism of the Tate Turbine in the Kera Walker installation. You know, sort of meant to tick a box. And yeah, I mean to me that's that's the real question that needs to be considered. I think that to this idea that all of these things have to be really embedded and what institutions are doing, you know, all of these sort of discussion points that we're rehearsing throughout this panel are obviously really, really significant but it needs to be embedded in all of the practices and processes behind the work as well, like you say on a more ongoing way, whereas exhibitions are sort of transient, I guess the institutional structure and the organizational structure and the kind of practicalities of putting exhibitions on in sustainable ways needs to be embedded, I guess, deeply in the institution. But a final question maybe and it might be the last because of time is running out about a question from Bronwyn Bailey Charteris who's asking about she said thanks for the great presentations, and that she's working with watery thinking and curatorial practice. She'd like to, she'd like you to say more about why the ocean in the scene particular was the focus of this publication and your own research. She's also asking about how you think about other kinds of watery states, such as mist or puddles were her examples and the curatorial. So that's the question from Bronwyn Bailey Charteris. I don't know if anyone would like to respond to that one. I'd like to respond to that, just by saying that the project started really as a response to just this proliferation of ocean themed exhibitions and these were increasingly becoming more explicitly ecological and I'm Sarah and I showed a bunch of different examples but we could have dozens more really. It's really been a real phenomenon over the past several years and definitely within the past decade. But I think the sort of more watery thinking has really been coming through in a lot of cultural theory during this time. Sarah do you want to say anything. Well, I guess, you know when you're talking about watery thinking there's projects on rivers as well that I've sort of seen come up so sort of different bodies of water to refer to a student master's book again, quite literally have been the sort of origins of thinking about exhibitions in ways. I mean, I guess water is sort of fascinating to people because it's something that sort of divides and connects. And these issues are things that are kind of coming up time and time again in the discussions that we're having and the exhibitions that we're talking about as well I guess there is something about water that sort of attracts people but as Pandora said it was the sea specifically that we were drawn to simply because of this what we recognize as a sort of trend or pattern in exhibition making more than anything else. And I think that did correspond to larger discourse around ecology and the sort of move from, you know, charismatic land animals in untouched nature that that sort of image of ecology you know the WWF Panda bear, you know, moving to the stranded polar bear on the iceberg and then more recently looking at more diverse life forms and their interactions with with humans and human activity. Great, well look, I'm just looking at the clock and I realize that we're coming to the end of our session now so we've had a fantastic turn out more than 100 people have signed in to watch proceedings and to engage in this panel and they've been rewarded by really, really, not only a great set of papers but a really great question so thanks to Stephanie to Miranda to Sarah and to Bandora. Thanks to Jim and Jennifer for editing such a great journal issue and it sounds like one that really will be read and pondered over for in very serious ways over the over the months to come because it's clearly touched upon a really crucial issue of our time so thanks very much and I just like to urge everyone to keep on attending our events and to become part and to remain part of the British art and natural forces program. Thanks very much speak to all our speakers for a really great panel, and I hope that felt like a properly celebratory and thoughtful way to launch what is clearly a special issue of this journal. Thank you all very much indeed.