Symposion Art & Ecology IV: If the world were your Oyster

“If the World Were Your Oyster” is inspired by the poem “Your Oysters” by the queer Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi. The poem evokes the life span and endurance of oysters: saltwater bivalve molluscs that live in brackish or marine habitats. Oysters offer a multiscalar figure as it operates on different levels. They are living organisms with biological functions, circulated in economic systems and have traces of political and poetic meanings to them. Oysters are commonly known for food delicacy around the world, unsustainably sourced from East Asia and the Pacific Ocean, which accounts for nearly 80% of global production. Most commonly, aquaculture and wild harvesting are the forms of such practices. Driven by export demand, these practices place undue pressure on the seabed and marine food webs, while also affecting chains of human labor from migrant and coastal backgrounds, linked to human rights violations, unsafe practices, and inequalities. Aside from their importance in cuisine, oysters perform a beautiful function: they produce pearls that are organic gems, within the soft tissue of their mantle womb, formed layer upon layer as irritants enter the body and are coated through the secretion of nacre, under unworldly sea conditions. This is a painful and wounding process. It is here that Abdulhadi urges us to think through conditions of human and non-human survival, and their entanglements. “If the World Were Your Oyster” adopts oysters as a conceptual entry point for contemporary art and Symposium Lindabruun. With its history of artists and collectives working across its vast acres of natural space, ecology, and rich biodiversity, Symposium Lindabruun supports contemporary art as an embodied way of making and understanding. As oysters grow in response to their environment, so too does artistic practices through multiple processes, including trials and errors, with and through materials, across research and reflection. In this group exhibition and artist residency, Austria-based and international artists, activists, thinkers and scientists come together through indigenous vernaculars, socio-material contexts, digital tools, queered and feminist politics, and a multitude of decolonial practices. This poem particularly gestures toward Palestinian struggles over human bodies and the natural world which has historically and currently been in states of violence and precarity due to human-induced injustice and exploitation. Centering this, the program welcomes participants to consider how contemporary art is not only marvelled for its beauty and nuance, but could be understood as “an anchor to the shoreline” responding to the conditions of our time. The programme seeks to move through Lindabrunn’s mosaic of relations, where art meets with the natural and hard sciences, technologies, ecocritical and philosophical approaches as intersecting yet distinct ways of reflecting on the world and seeking fertile grounds of solidarity across different degrees and intensities elsewhere.

they say the world is your oyster when they mean the world is your pearl to find, but really: the world is just oysters and you’re here shucking in foul smelling wellingtons and a shrug of the shoulders that says: i hope you like shellfish while trying to remember how lucky you are to put the question to so many oysters with the knife-edge of your lifetime. if the world were your oyster, you’d wish for no pearls, seldom pearls, never any pearls, because pearls are signs of the problem, aren’t they: the heartsharp abrasion against flesh wriggling in hardshells to feel less, to feel only beauty, to layer a pearl against pain. give me instead the salty morsel, twisting muscle in its armor—a spasm of hunger open to the current, a hinged house that anchors the shoreline to itself. – Your Oysters, Rasha Abdulhadi If the World Were Your Oyster