Publication_Information
A Topographical Summit
October 01, 2025 - October 06, 2025
A Topographical Summit is a gathering of artists, designers, filmmakers, scientists and scholars hosted by the University of Saskatchewan Art Galleries and Collections and The School for the Arts. Participants:
Sepideh Behrouzian (IR/CA), Andrew Denton (NZ/CA), Michaela Grill (AT), Office for a Human Theatre (Filippo Andreatta (IT) and Sarah Messerschmidt (DE)), Parsons & Charlesworth (UK/US), Dawit L. Petros (CA), Paul Suchan (CA), and Arielle Walker (NZ), amongst others.
Image credit: film still from The Great Thaw, Michaela Grill and Karl Lemieux, AT/CAN, 2024, 46 min.
About A Topographical Summit
A Topographical Summit (ATS) brings together an ecology of practices in performance, visual arts, moving images, and natural sciences that are invested in the capacity for social change through artist-led activity. Using topography as an anchoring concept, contributors will engage in discourse that conceives of ecological crisis as a product of the Western colonial modernist project and, therefore, as a condition that must be addressed through worldviews and epistemologies that are antithetical to the project’s manifestations. The contributors’ practices mark distinct turns away from techno-liberalism and individuation, providing examples of how we might lessen our compulsion to act like modern individuals, in favour of an ethics of inter-existence. They engage multiple modalities and speculative fictions in critique of the techno-rational approach to ecological crisis and show how art might provide the affective frameworks for reconfiguring our response to the complex after-effects of the modernist project.
The project was developed in response to the exceptional applications the galleries received to The Structurist Creative Research Fellowship (SCRF) competition in 2024. THE SCRF was established to carry forward the critical intentions of The Structurist: an international, interdisciplinary journal founded in 1960 by Eli Bornstein that addresses art, architecture, ecology, culture, and communication. From its inaugural issue, the journal became increasingly concerned with the relationship between art and ecology, and the ways in which creative practices are required and necessary in preserving and protecting our threatened ecospheres.
With the Summit we are both extending that legacy and asserting the current urgency to look to creative practices for more ethical, socially engaged, and long-term solutions to our planetary poly-crises.
Alongside A Topogrpahical Summit, The Pines (2025) by Joshua Bonnetta will be included as an ongoing screening in Rounding: moving towards collection, September 5th, 2025 - April 17th, 2026.
Schedule of Public Events
All listed events are free and open to the public.
Wednesday, October 1: Public Launch of A Topographical Summit
| 7 PM: |
Film Screening: Crude (2018) and Flight (2018) by Andrew Denton This first program of ATS will feature a screening of Crude (2018). |
Thursday, October 2: Short Film Series and Artist Workshops
|
9:00 - |
Webinar: Knowledge Synthesis Grants, The Arts Transformed These grants aim to mobilize, examine and synthesize social sciences and humanities research on The Arts Transformed with the objective to identify the roles the academic, public, private and not-for-profit sectors could play in promoting more inclusive and equitable societies. For more information and webinar details, please visit SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grants. |
| 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM: |
Short Film Series: The Sea In Its Thirst is Trembling (2019) by Dawit L. Petros, and Portrait or Landscape, Anahita? by Sepideh Behrouzian |
| 2 - 4 PM: |
Artist Workshop: Parsons & Charlesworth |
|
6:30 - |
Artist Workshop: Office for a Human Theatre (Filippo Andreatta and Sarah Messerschmidt) Artists Filippo Andreatta and Sarah Messerschmidt invite participants to bring a book, a poem, an essay, or any other recent or beloved reading you might have for a fireside reading. |
Friday, October 3: Artist Workshops and River Walk
| 9 - 11 AM: |
Artist Workshop: Dawit L. Petros |
| 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM: |
Bagged Lunch River Walk |
| 2 - 4 PM: |
Artist Workshop: Sepideh Behrouzian |
Saturday, October 4: Artist Presentations and Public Charette
| 10 AM - 11 AM: |
Artist Presentation: Arielle Walker |
| 11 AM - 12 PM: |
Artist Presentation: Paul Suchan |
| 12:30 - 1:30 PM: |
Curatorial Tour: Dawit L. Petros, From the Edge of the Horizon II with Leah Taylor University of Saskatchewan, College Art Galleries Lunch and refreshments will be provided in Convocation Hall |
| 1:30 - 4:30 PM: |
Public Charette: Introductions and Open Dialogue with Participating Artists |
Sunday, October 5
| 11 AM - 12 PM: |
Curatorial Tour: Dawit L. Petros, From the Edge of the Horizon I with Michelle Jacques |
| 1 PM: |
Film screening: The Great Thaw (2024) by Michaela Grill and Karl Lemieux |
