Open Session #14: Hosted by Tania Ximena

Artist Tania Ximena convenes an evening of conversation and contemplation around her film The Stride of Lichen (La Marcha del Liquen) (2024). Her practice emerges from extensive field research in places that contain a multitude of ecological, social, and cultural layers. She connects with the people living in these places, who have been deeply affected by natural and climate-based phenomena, and is currently an artist-in-residence at the Swiss Institute. Joining Ximenia is Leah Aronowsky, a historian of science and an assistant professor at the Columbia Climate School, for a conversation about the various themes and overlaps between their work, thinking through the poetics of very brutal climate realities. 

Tania Ximena (b. Sahagún, Hgo, Mexico, 1985) is a visual artist and filmmaker. In 2022, she became Mexico’s National System of Art Creators fellow. She has held solo and group exhibitions at museums such as Ex Teresa Arte Actual, the Modern Art Museum (Mexico), the Jumex Museum, and the Carrillo Gil Contemporary Art Museum; as well as at art biennials like Bienal Sur (Argentina), the Orleans Architecture Biennale (France), and Bienal SIART (Bolivia), among many others. She has been awarded the National Fund for Culture and the Arts Young Creators Grant three times. She has also received the Mexican Cinema Promotion Grant from IMCINE twice: for screenwriting and for production. Her first feature film, Pobo’Tzu’- White Night, won the Grand Jury Prize Kaleidoscope at DOC NYC and the Critics Award at Ficunam, among others. She was part of the X Colombian Antarctic Expedition, which allowed her to shoot part of her video installation and short film The Stride of Lichen on the White Continent. She is a co-founder of apecs-Mexico. 

Leah Aronowsky is a historian of science and an assistant professor at the Columbia Climate School. She is writing a book about the political histories of climate science and fossil fuels. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The New York Review of Architecture, and MoMA Magazine, among other outlets.