And What Does the Background Say?
Call for applications
An ecocritical and ecofeminist workshop led by Zsuzsa Selyem and Anna Zilahi
June 18–21
hypha_etc campsite, Câmpu Cetății/Vármező, Mureș county, Romania
Application deadline: June 5, 22:00 EET
Over four days we treat ecocriticism as a way of sensing, thinking, and moving together with a more than human world under capitalism. Language is our main medium, but it is never abstract: we will work with how words have weight, how they mark and police living bodies, and how attention can be trained to stay with the material and political conditions of speaking and writing.
In the middle of a forested landscape, our sessions will be literally situated in the environment rather than just about it. Ecocritical discussions will decenter canonical human protagonists and redirect focus toward the so called background: plants, animals, elements, infrastructures, and terrains that usually only stage the human plot, or are treated as resources, property, or scenery. We will ask what happens to a story when these become agents instead of backdrop, when the setting starts to speak.
Walks and excursions will be spaces for interspecies encounters and experiments in presence that resist touristic consumption of nature. We will listen, touch, taste, and get lost a little, using these experiences as raw material for writing that takes seriously the beings we cross paths with. Transmedial practices – from cyanotypes to sonic experiments – will help us push beyond strictly logocentric, human centered habits and let other forces (silence, noise, movements, emotions, weather, infrastructure) into the work.
The workshop encourages meditative attention, but also plays with deliberate intensity: there will be quiet observational practices, but also moments of being unapologetically loud. Stargazing is non negotiable – both as an exercise in scale and as a reminder that any green we interact with is caught up in wider planetary crises, just as we are.
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And What Does the Background Say? is part of the Classroom project, organized by tranzit.ro/Cluj and hypha_etc at the hypha_etc campsite in Câmpu Cetății/Vármező.
The Classroom project offers a pedagogical platform that removes the barriers hindering knowledge-sharing and facilitates communal learning and research, bringing together students and experts in various fields for short, intensive educational programs. It promotes transdisciplinary understanding and engagement with contemporary issues without being stuck in the exigencies of a narrow actuality.
Zsuzsa Selyem is a novelist and works as Associate Professor of 20th century Hungarian literature and comparative contemporary literature at Babes-Bolyai University Cluj, Romania. She studied mathematics, Hungarian and English literature at the Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj and earned her PhD in Aesthetics at ELTE, Budapest, Hungary. In the last few years, she has studied literature from the point of view of Ecocriticism and Animal Studies.
Anna Zilahi explores ecofeminism and embodied knowledge through poetry and transmedia art, creating text-based and participative works that challenge anthropocentric perspectives. She graduated from the international economics MA programme at Corvinus University Budapest and pursued transmedia art studies at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Currently, she is completing her art PhD-in-practice at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art.
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The workshop is free of charge with accommodation and food – and if the need should arise, travel from Cluj-Napoca or Târgu Mureș on June 17 – guaranteed by the organizers. Since the workshop is designed for a limited number of participants (between 8 and 12), we invite those interested to send your application (a one-page letter of intent detailing who you are and what your interest in the Classroom is) to szilagyi@tranzit.org until June 5, 22:00 EET.
We well let every applicant know the resul
ts of the selection process until June 8, 22:00 EET.
Please direct your questions regarding further details to szilagyi@tranzit.org.
