De Vrijstaat | Lecture Lisa Doeland

Apocalypsofie | Lecture by Lisa Doeland at Witte Rook

On Friday 26 September at 3 p.m., philosopher Lisa Doeland will give a lecture during the exhibition De Vrijstaat – land van 49m²

For her PhD, Lisa Doeland researched how we deal with waste; what does our handling of the mess we leave behind teach us about ourselves? While the climate crisis is in full swing, we appease our conscience with the idea that everything can be circular and our waste a valuable raw material. But no matter how you look at it, waste always ends up somewhere. She turned her thesis into the book ‘Apocalypsofie: over recycling, groene groei en andere gevaarlijke fantasieën’ (Apocalypsofie: on recycling, green growth and other dangerous fantasies) (2024).

In her lecture, Lisa delves deeper into the concept of ‘no man’s land’, land without an owner but belongs to itself and therefore can be used by everyone. Such places could be found all over the world, for example among the Sami in Scandinavia, Native Americans and even the ‘common land’ in our own country. On the surface, they seemed to be somewhat neglected in their natural state. Early capitalism put a rigorous end to this by expropriating these lands in order to appropriate them, which was legitimised by the argument that the original population did not cultivate or produce anything and therefore did not add any value. However, the multifaceted nature of value cannot be captured in the narrow definition of ownership, and how misuse of this ‘wasteland’ leads to ‘wasted land’ for all life forms.

Lisa Doeland works at Radboud University Nijmegen and the University of Amsterdam, among others. She regularly gives lectures and writes columns for NRC, among other publications.

The lecture will be in Dutch.

De Vrijstaat – land van 49m² — The exhibition De Vrijstaat - land van 49m² presents the work of eleven artists who explore how freedom relates to space, regulation and ecology.