&Now 2019 Conference

**In case of rain, this durational writing performance will take place in UW1-050**

Jennifer Calkins is a writer, an evolutionary biologist, and an attorney. Anne de Marcken is an interdisciplinary artist, a writer, and founder of The 3rd Thing Press. They each work across disciplines, occupying the haunted institutional and intimate spaces at the intersection of environmental and social justice.

This durational performance takes up our climate crisis and its attendant pretraumatic (thank you Julie Carr) and posttraumatic stress disorders. It is conceived as a disruption of fixed ideas about the role of art and artists, science and scientists, the law and lawyers, grief and grievers, spectacle and spectators, the end of the world and what it feels like to be alive to see it.

During the space of one day of the &Now Convergence, Calkins and de Marcken will conduct a process-based rewrite of the text of “Paris When it Sizzles,” Calkins’s 2018 article about the Paris Climate Agreement published in the UW’s Washington International Law Journal. In an attempt to imagine a redemptive potential in lyricism and in work itself, Calkins and de Marcken will use conceptual and material constraints to discombobulate the syntax and sense-making conventions of legal/political/social discourse. Constraints will derive from the processes and forms of climatology, grammar, poetics and grief.

The installation will invite and incorporate the participation of conference-goers as artifacts, glitches, ghosts in the finished work. Ultimately Calkins and de Marcken will produce a hybrid text artifact of their performance.

Please note: Calkins and de Marcken will reflect on their process and invite discussion about interdisciplinary responses to social and environmental crises in a roundtable from 3:00pm-4:15pm.