Maria Mies - A Call to Recall
UBINIG || Monday 31 July 2023 ||
Maria Mies, a thinker, a scholar, a feminist, a sociologist, a philosopher, an ecologist, a friend, a comrade, a commoner, an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist organizer and activist.
She fought to break through all these divisions to reaffirm and help redefine what it could mean the notion of an organic intellectual, what could mean a life of acting and thinking together, developing a praxis that at one turn would realize and another speculate and theorize, in tandem, without ever succumbing to academicism or to a form of actionism devoid of a deeper experimentation and inquiry into what it is to live, to live together, to live a good life. She will remain one of the twentieth and twenty first century's most thorough critics of capitalist modernity and its intimate connections to patriarchy and continuous forms of colonization.
In Memoriam
This Sunday June 4th together with Farida Akhter, Silvia Federici, and Vandana Shiva we would like to invite you to join us in remembering, celebrating, and marking together the passing of a friend and comrade Maria Mies.
We hope to use this occasion to collectively recall, be present to and reflect upon this immense loss. And at the same time, we would like to use this opportunity to invoke the abundance of gifts Maria leaves behind for us to continue to use, play with, imagine, analyze, critique and struggle not only against ... ongoing forms of patriarchal, racial, colonial, capitalist violence but also toward ... reclaiming the very forms of life which such processes of exploitation, expropriation, enclosure and extraction have sought and continue to seek to objectify, devalue and destroy.
In addition to Farida, Silvia and Vandana
... we are very grateful to be joined by some of Maria's closest friends, collaborators, co-actions-researchers from the last decades including:
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Mira Shiva, Rhoda Reddock,
Vibhuti Patel, Renate Klein, Susan Hawthorne
Jyotsna Gupta, Ireen Dubel, Chhaya Datar
&
Maria's lifelong companion
Saral Sarkar
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MARIA MIES: A CALL TO RECALL
We are including the video from the ceremony below.
This video begins with a walk taken in 2011 in the surrounds of her village. It concludes with Saral and Maria in the outskirts of Cologne, inventing and singing songs on May Day 2022.