At a time of ecological breakdown, proliferating crises, and deepening political division, how might art open new ways of perceiving and responding to the world? In an age of “planetary civil war” (Hito Steyerl), this lecture explores how contemporary artists and filmmakers engage extinction through shifts in scale, perspective, and framing. Focusing on works by Werner Herzog, Ursula Biemann, and Pınar Öğrenci, it asks how aesthetic practices move between European contexts as well as other sites of knowledge production, the local and the planetary, the human and the more-than-human, without losing sight of situated histories and lived experience. Tracing such dynamic frame adjustments, the lecture examines how poetic modes in documentary film and contemporary art unsettle rigid oppositions between human and nature and expose entanglements that dominant crisis narratives often obscure. It argues that these practices cultivate forms of attention that invite response, implication, and collaboration by rendering hidden relations newly perceptible. Situated in Transit names a way of seeing that is at once grounded and mobile—one that helps us, in Donna Haraway’s terms, “stay with the trouble” by remaining attentive to the contradictions, interdependencies, and fragilities of life on a damaged planet.

Further information may be found here.